The US does have (one of) the highest tax rates on the books. But when it actually gets applied (i.e.: the real world), there are so many exemptions that the *actuall* coroprate tax rate winds up to be one of the lowest among devloped nations. That is what is proved in the link from the poster you were responding to. That might not fit the viewpoint that the politicions you listen to espose, but it is the truth. Saying that US corprations are being held back by taxes is an absolute lie. And the games that large coporations play with international funding for tax reasons are all about exploiting combinations of tax loopholes in various countries.
The offshoring bit is not about taxes, it is about wages and environmental costs. And now that we have done it for a few generations now, it is also about the supply chains that we have constructed in Asia that are going to be hard to beat (screw factory next to the glass factory next to assembly line).
I support the congresswoman's response. That question deserved no response for a couple of reasons:
1) In the very pramble the national government is esablished to "promote the general Welfare". While that particular phase is very open to interpretaion, it is hard to see that a publically avalible hospital is not in the direction of "the general Welfare".
2) Section 8 of the Constitution once again allows specifically for taxation "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States". One could agure that this only means the general welfare of the Unites States as a body and not the individual of it. But that seems contrary to the general spirit of the document, and would have to be decided by the US Supreme Court. Since they have specifically not said so, the overwhelming presumption must be that it is in keeping with the law.
3) Presumably the question was grounded out of something like "why should the government be allowed to complete (unfairly) with private business". But this is a common misconception about corporations and the Constitution. At the founding of the US Constitution corprations were only founded by express will of the goverment, and they were founded to a specific purpose (not profits). The profits were only a sweetener that was allowed to get the job done. Coporartions charters were often specific about the lifetime of the corporation and there were a list of clauses that would end the Coporation if it was found to not be living up to its charter. The modern idea of the corporation as a profit-driven mostly-imortal quasi-person did not start to take hold untill the mid-1800s. For reference I will direct people to the Mercantilism section of the Corporation article in Wikipedia:
So if you are a "fundamentalist" about the US Constitution you should expect that the govenement should be the one behind large institutions such as hospitals. It is just that many "Conservatives" have the dream of a golden age in their heads and have proven very willing to not let the truth get in their way.
I for one would like to see a move more in that direction, at least in the requring of Public Coporations to have a charter (I don't see the need for expiry), and to the practice exercise the death penalty on them when they violate it.
You are very misinformed in using the word "stole". Apple clearly paid Xerox for everything it got from the tours there (except maybe for the engineers that it hired away):
A choice quote (for those too lazy to click over):
Apple obtained permission ahead of the Xerox PARC visit. In addition, Apple provided compensation in exchange for the various Xerox PARC ideas such as the GUI.
How exactly is eugenics (as a science) a bad thing? As a science all it is is the observation that we humans have changed the evoluionary pressures on our own species, with the exensino that it is in ways that most likely will favor mutations that we don't really want. For example poor eyesight is no longer a negative evelutioary pressure so you can expect it to grow in the general population.
That is the science bit, what you are probably objecting to are the mass steriliztions in the US (if you are aware of them) or the influence those same ideas had on some of the Nazi justifications for the death camps. But the science is reposnible for neither, just as you can't blame the mass killings of the Khmer Rouge on the philophy of equality.
And if you think that eugenics (the science) has in any way been proven false, then you are completely mistaken.
I went to school in Austria (Alps, not kangaroos) for a year after having grown up in the US school system (Wisconsin, so a good part of it), and I have to say I disagree with your assertion that the US is more about rote learning than Europe. And my wife (Hungarian) was amazed at how much better the university experience (grad school) than anything she saw at home. And her limited experience with grade schools really amazed her at how interactive the classes were.
It is not that we here in the US fall back on rote learning that is causing us to suffer so badly in math/science education, but rather I think it is the following things:
1) Those test scores are not always as comparable as you might think. One big problem in comparing test scores between the US and Germany/Austria is that in the US everyone takes those tests, while in Germany/Austria only the "Gymnasium" (college bound) students do. Sometimes the tests can adjust for this, but I have seen may that don't.
2) We in the US look down on teachers with phrases like "those who can do, those who can't teach", and channel all of our best students away from teaching. That we have so many great teachers willing to take the small salaries that they get, the total lack of support from the communities (in some cases), and the political abuse that the Republican party has been hurling at them for a generation now just shows how dedicated those people are.
3) The amount of time and effort that parents put into making sure that their students do well in school has bottomed out in the US. Since the parents don't care (or don't have the time to care working two jobs) their children learn that it is not important to do well. Compare this to the Asian stereotype (which has some truth behind it), and you can realize how much an up-hill battle many teachers are facing.
4) Teachers Colleges are badly organized, and heavily weighed towards liberal arts. So of course their graduates tend to have less skills in math/science. There are a lot of people in those organizations who want to do better, but the spark still has not been lit of a renaissance there.
5) There has been a cultural war waged by social conservatives to undermine science because they dislike evolution. You can't teach the scientific method effectively when the student's parents then dismiss the science out-of hand. A similar argument is just as valid in the global warming conversation.
6) Our popular media has been portraying scientists, and smart people in general, in a negative light for a long time now. Part of this is because most of the people who write for the popular media probably identify themselves as "liberal arts" people (they are writers after all), and so re-enforece the hierarchy that has them above the "nertds". So of course they are going to tend to portray their heroes as people like they envision themselves.
We (American and European consumers) have all been implicitly responsible for this sort of thing for a couple of generations now. Nearly all (95+) of the clothing people wear in the developed world comes from labor practices worse than what Apple's suppliers use. The more high-end the brand, the more likely it is made that way. And if you think that Apple marks things up too much, then you should examine those markups. Most of the cacao beans (so chocolate) are produced using child labor. There is little you can find in stores today that does not have a similar story, but without the oversight that Apple provides (look it up). This has been readily avalible information for at least a generation, but we as a society have repeatedly demonstrated that we don't care to know it.
I remember durring the debates about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that all of this came up, was hashed through, and then promptly forgotton on the way to the mall. This latest round, comming just after Apple has stepped up to provide more information than they have in the past, focusing on Apple to the near-exclusion of any other brands, smacks of an agenda and a total lack of morals. This isn't about the workers, this is about an axe to grind.
While I do think that the ethos of Henry Ford is completely lost on most people today (and a good number would scream "socialist" as if it were an epitaph), I don't think that it is very applicable in the case of the simple assembly jobs that we are talking about.
Henry Ford needed skilled metalworkers to turn fairly raw materials into fully formed cars. Many had to understand about metalworking, forging, etc The skills needed to be learned over years of apprenticeship, and the difference between a master of his trade and a junior was clear. Henry Ford decided to make sure that he had the best people around, and saw that he could get more than double productivity from paying double wages. He was right as a capitalist, as a humanitarian, and as a social engineer.
However, the assembly jobs that we are now talking about are some of the worst sort in production lines (which we have now developed to such a degree that Henry Ford would scarecely recognize them). The work is inhuman, and each position can be taught to someone in hours if not minutes. The difference between an expereinced person and someone new in from the door is probably only that the expereinced person is worn out. The only reason most of these positions are not filled by robots is that the robots cost more to maintain than people (FoxCon has already talked about that changing).
I agree with you on most of your points, but I think that you have one major onw wrong: marrige is not a creation of religion. It is a social structure that in many cases relgion has layered istelf on top of. I know everyone talkes about the wedding ceremony as the point when they are married, but that is not the case. You are married when the marrige license is signed and whitnessed, the part with the priest in front of everyone is just for show, the real bit is in the paperwork.
Now don't get me wrong, there is a lot of social value in the ceremony announcing your commitment before others (and before your god), but the govenment part is what is really at debate at this point (despite the gnashing of teeth from some parties).
Oh and be carefull about equating civil unions with marrige. While sometimes they can be truely interchangeable words (seperating the religios from the secular), in many states in the US they are legaly defined very differently, with civil unions having few of the legal rights and responsibilites of marriges (insurance, hospital visitation rights, gaurdianship of children, etc). So it has become a political trick to argue that people pushing for full rights are just trying to force the relgious part.
I don't know anything about the service in Italy, but you seem to be rather ignorant of what Apple does offer: - The OS reinstall disk has a hardware test routine. If you have a newer computer without a reinstall disk then it is built into the computer. - Trying an OS reinstall is much quicker (for you) than sending something out for repair. Sometimes it is useless, but looking a the overall cost/benifit ratio it is not a bad idea in many cases. - If you have a desktop you can ask for a technician to come to your house. That is part of the warrantee. - If you have a laptop Apple will send you a pre-paid shipping box. Most of their laptop repairs do not happen in AppleStores but get sent to the same repair centers. So you can cut out the middle man. Note that this is mostly what Dell does as well.
And if you look at consumer satifiaction with AppleCare vs. their competitors, well Apple has been #1 for a very long time.
And if you think that Dell's folks don't walk you through needless stuff, then you have never been on the phone with Dell techinal support. I even got to use their special line for enterprise support and they made me go thorugh uselss gyrations. This is unfotunetely a result of having to make training programs for non-techical people (the support staff) that can cover working with non-techinal end users. Since the majority of both of those groups are non-technical people, it winds up making life more difficult for people who read slashdot. Since we are the small minority that is a logical and reasonalble aproach.
And remember brilian techinal folks are not going to last long at call centers for two reasons: a) the can get more money elsewhere, and b) it is going to bore them to tears.
It may well be that many of those who call themselves Tea Part members may believe that. It might even be that oranizers at the local level belive that. But it is quite clear that the organizors at the state and national levels, and the elected politicians who are beholden to those people, have no interest in that sort of thing at all. In fact they have consistently rejected anything like those ideas in legislation.
Of course part of this disconect is that there is so much marketing going on by people paid by large groups (the Koch bothers come imedialy to mind, but they are far from the only ones) who can afford to buy saturation advertising with carefully crafted emotional messages that stop any rational debate and obscure/obliterate any real thinking. The-powers-that-be in the (large scale) Tea Party are absolutely against at least part of the message you feel is comming from the Tea Party rank-and-file. And I really do fear that in order to have any real chance as a orgainzation the Occupy movement will wind up in the same situation.
Many people who have once ready Rand's books often feel so, but if you actually read her books (I have ready most of them a couple of times each) then you realize that most all of the bad guys in her books are CEOs. She is not arguing for businessmen, she is arguing for creator-owners, largely in direct opposition to traditional businessmen. It is an appealing argument, but adults should realize that it is an idealized vision and misses most of the complexity of real life.
That annoys me almost as much as people who mis-use the phrase "ugly American" to label semi-colonalist behaviors, when the "ugly American" from the book was a wonderful and selfless person dedicated to the self-sufficiency in the local people he helped, one who happened to be physically ugly. In both cases people who don't understand the book wind up talking about it to people who have not and distorting the public idea of it.
That only makes sense on dividends or sales of companies... and even then from a twisted perspective. For the vast majority of capital gains (e.g.: stock market gains) that argument is pure hogwash.
No, that would indicate that the dollar amount that Warren Buffet pays is less than his secretary, which I have never seem him as quoted as saying. What he has said is that his tax rate (so a percentage) is much smaller than that of his secretary. And since his income undoubtedly comes overwhelmingly from investments, that would almost be hard for him to do otherwise. But I am sure that the total dollar amount that he pays is much larger. But he has repeatedly gone on the record to say that he feels that this is a miscarriage of (social) justice, that those making the most income can (by definition) afford to pay a higher percentage, and that it is only fair that they do. It is hard to make a straight-faced argument that he is wrong.
Oh... and the top federal income tax rate is only 35% on your income over $379,150 (single payer). You pay a smaller percentage on all of the money you earn before that. This is what is called a "marginal" system, and guarantees that you are never penalized for making more money (in federal income taxes at least, despite what some people in politics argue).
Getting stuff down is not going to be a real problem. If we are talking about mining metals then you could go ultra-simple and just make a big ingot and then carefully shoot it at a desolate area (like the Mongolian steps). Shoot a number of (refined in space and uniformly finished) chunks at an area, then wait until they have cooled enough and go and get them. You would lose some of the materials from the re-entry heating, but that probably would wind up as a rounding error on a balance sheet.
You could even setup manufacturing cheap one-use de-orbiters from the materials in the asteroid for more valuable (or less durable) cargo. Ship up a few specialty parts (electronics and maybe thrusters) and build the rest in-orbit (does require a lot of technology we don't yet have for manufacturing in space).
Of course this would mean that you would have created an orbital bombardment cannon, and opens a large can of worms both from a strategic balance standpoint and a potential terrorist weapon.
Why do they make you turn off your random electronics during takeoff and landing? Well, because a slightly worn piece of electronics, especially ones with a nice wire acting as an antenna (you know, like the wire to your headphones) can suddenly become a transmitter, and since that transmitter is nearer to the plane's sensitive navigational instrumentation by a good deal, and wireless signals drop off on a cubic curve, that makes your accidental transmitter easily thousands of times louder to the instrumentation than the signal they need to lock onto. Does that explain anything to you?
Now in this case I would bet that the iPads will be stored in specially certified cases, both to prevent problems from being dropped (this is a piece of safety equipment after all), and to prevent any chance of RF interference going out from it, even if something goes absolutely wrong with the iPad.
And really... is playing Angry Birds for 20 minutes more really worth risking everyone's life for? Really? Are you going to be sure that you are not doing that?
I think that those numbers are all the playthings of accountants, and are likely not reflective of anything.
1) Since neither Microsoft nor Google have large hardware divisions (at least not in those numbers), they are not compareable to Apple. Once hardware goes to manufacturing nothing in that line can be counted as R&D. Cisco does have a large hardware division, so I don't know about that number. None of the costs of hardware production for sale can be counted as R&D.
2) None of those companies have the large retail presence that Apple does. None of that can ever be called R&D.
3) Apple tends to make a product then iterate on its products. Only new product development counts twords R&D expenditures. So it may well be that none of the MacOS X development costs since 10.0.0 have counted as R&D expenditures. Note that it might be that Apple accounts for things this way, and other companies account for new product models (something Apple glosses over most of the time) as new products, and thus count the development costs as R&D.
The problem with your argument is that if a school authority leads a religious expression there are some real ethical vilations here:
1) They are clearly favoring a single religion. As an example if the prayer is not heald facing Mecca, then you are clearly excluding Muslims (even in a silent prayer). If you are facing Mecca, then you are clearly favoring Muslims. You can't win here, so should not be playing the game. People who argue the religious side of this clearly think that it is their religion that is going to get pushed, and don't look at the other side of the coin... which was exactly what the clearly-religous founders of this nation were clearly worried about.
2) If an authority figure says that eveyone must do this, then they are clearly using their authority (granted by the state) to push religion (and a single relgion as we have seen from above), and that is clearly unconsitituional.
3) Even if you give people the option of opting-out of the religous experssion (e.g.: "moment of silent prayer"), then you are creating at least the appearance of preassure from authority, and an enormous opportunity for peers who are religious to pressure those who don't share in the marjority religion. If you don't think that either of these situations are not pervasive in situations like this, then you have never been on the minority side, and I will have to ask you to belive me that this is a function of human nature.
The court is not hostile to religion. To my knowledge there has never been a case where peer-organized (seperate form school sanctioned) expression of religion has been prevented by the courts. There have been cases where school officials do not understand the details and have prevented peer-organized events, but that is a seperate injustice, and not court-driven.
Public Schools are controlled and funded by the local government (largely from propery taxes), with parts of that funding comming from State and National government as well. Additionally there is a host of regulations about curriculum (but not curriculum material) from all three levels. So Public Schools (where the vast majority of sudents attend nation-wide) are subject to many of the same rules that other govenment bodies are subject to. Although the (National) Supreme Court has ruled in the past that students do not have many free speach rights while in the classroom or school.
Lets be clear about this: FinalCut Pro 7 and FinalCut Pro X can live side-by-side on the same machine. If you have work you did last year you can still use FinalCut Pro 7 (since you did it there) to re-work those projects. That idea there negates your first two scenarios.
The third is really fuzzy thinking: it does not matter which version you have on your computer if it is the raw footage the TV channel wants to work on. You just take the raw footage and import it into whatever system you have decided to work on this new project on. And since FinalCut Pro X is much faster at importing, and even better lets you work while you are still importing clips, it is a better soltion there. If you had talked about the lack of FinalCut Server, then that might have an impact since it is going to become increasingly difficult to find copies of FinalCut Pro 7 to add new workstations with, but that is a problem down the road.
And if you are in film school and people want to see the work you have done recentely, they want to see the final render, not the production files. Are you saying you deleted those? That is the worst example in your bunch.
There are legitimate reasons why professionals may want to avoid FinalCut Pro X, at least untill they get the kinks worked out for the really high-end needs. But most of the gripes there have already been accnoledged by the FinalCut Pro project managers and they have already said that they will be comming in future updates. Importing old work does not seem to be one of those points, but old work still can be done by the software you already have. Apple is obviously aiming this software at future work.
To clarify a bit, the tax reduction only applied to a single company (the East India Trading Company), and was largely put into place because of the deep interconnections between the British Royal Family, the British Parliament, and that company. The tea that the East India Company had bought was not selling well in the UK, so they wanted to dump it (figuratively) on the colonies.
The colonialists, largely led by the American colony based tea merchants (who's market was being undercut) objected to this both with words and, at times violent, action (the Boston Tea Party was relatively tame... some British tax collectors were tarred and feathered). They were objecting entirely to the unfairness of the tax exemption for one company, and explicitly (in their pamphlets at least) did not object to the tax itself.
I always find it funny that the current "Tea Party" so often references those times so incorrectly in their stump speeches.
For the desktop machines you can generally get on-site service from Applen under regular AppleCare, as long as you ask. I don't know about England, but I have been getting it for years in the US. They don't send an Apple employee, but rather a technician from whatever company they have on contract in the area. That does lead to a bit of unevenness in the service, but for my calls it has never taken more than a couple of days before they are there, and often I have gotten a touch-base call within a couple of hours of filing my ticket.
For laptops I have usually gone with the "send me a box" option, and the longest I have ever waited from my initial call to getting the reparied laptop back is about a week-and-a-half. More commonly it was within a week.
Just to respond to one small point that most people miss, but it is never a penalty to move up a U.S. tax bracket (well... excluding some deductions). Assuming the same deductions if you start out with more money, then you always end up with more money. Yes, always, every time. You might pay a slightly larger overall percent, but you never wind up with less money.
The way this works is that you start at the bottom tax bracket and pay taxes on the money you made in that bracket at that percentage. Then you set asside that money and move up to the next tax bracket and pay in that. It is probably clearer in a made-up example:
With the following hypothetical tax bracket system: 0 - 10,000: 2% 10,001 - 30,000: 5% 30,001 - 85,000: 10% 85,000+: 15%
If you have an (adjusted) income of $30,001 then you pay: 10,000 *.02 = $200 20,000 *.05 = $1,000 1 *.1 = $0.1
So if we compare a $30,000 vs. a $30,001 income, the tax difference is 10 cents, leaving you with 90 cents more than you would have had. While my hypothetical numbers are way off... the principal holds. Oh... and for the math pendants, all brackets are inclusive and rounded.
I know that media orgainizations that describe themselves as "conservaive" love to paint everyone else as "liberal" or "left", but that is just not the case, and it seems you have fallen into their trap of viewig life as polar ("liberal" vs. "conservative"). That polarized view is nearly antithtical to the ideal of democracy, especially democracy as espoused by the framers of our Constitution. To quote Tommas Jefferson:
". . . whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right."
The "main stream" media has been deliberately neutral for a very long time (despite having overwhelming "conservative" ownership). We have not had truely polarized mainstream media since William Randolph Hurst was alive and in control of a lot of the media. Note that this stands in stark contrast to the media in Europe, where party affiliation is usually blatantly obvious to all concerned (see Silvio Berlusconi's massive ownership in the Italian new media).
Both durring Hurst's lifetime, as well as in Europe today you see poitics played as a "old boys club" (see the current German Wutbürger movements) with people falling into parties with wide political moats between them. The US system in contrast has historically had two main partites that mostly share the same political ideology, and work very hard to demonstrate their differences on a limited number of areas, with many of their party members holding some views (and voting for those views) in direct contradition to their partie's political planks. To me the latter is a healthy democracy that has had time to come to a gerneral concensus about things.
Fox News and "talk radio" (both sides, but talk radio is dominated by "conservatives") seem to want to take us back to the "bad old days" where facts don't matter. As an example Fox News viewers have been repeatedly found to think that weapons of mass destruction were found durring the Iraq invation thus justifying the invation. 33% of regular Fox viewers reported this as fact. And then we have the underhanded "we don't know" reporting about Predident Obama's place of birth. We were long past the point where there was legitmate cause for discussion on that issue long before the election took place. Yet the Fox "News" channel kept that flame burning. This blatent focus on patizenship at the expense of truely informing their viewership is underhanded, shamefull, and toally destructive to a working democracy.
Don't ask news organizations to present "news and information that represents my views", because that is propoganda. Ask them to diligently and ernestly report news as factually and hosnestly as they can. Those two requests are diametriaclly opposed. It is sad to see a political movement who couches their idology so much on the ideas of the founders of this country (the Tea Party), so massivly get the basic ideas of those same men so wrong.
What you are missing is the absolute flood of people that open immigration would result in. It would very quickly distort both the economy and social structure.
I am completely in favor of this lottery for many reasons. Chief among those reasons has to be that my wife came to the US under the program, but I am also in favor of it for purely ideological reasons: we are a nation of immigrants, many of whom fit any resonable definition of "your tired, your poor", and who made a productive life for themselves on these shores. While we can't take the huge tidal wave of people an open policy would bring, we still owe it to those who came before us and let (most of) our ancestors in to again "pay it forward".
Slashdot Mirror
The US does have (one of) the highest tax rates on the books. But when it actually gets applied (i.e.: the real world), there are so many exemptions that the *actuall* coroprate tax rate winds up to be one of the lowest among devloped nations. That is what is proved in the link from the poster you were responding to. That might not fit the viewpoint that the politicions you listen to espose, but it is the truth. Saying that US corprations are being held back by taxes is an absolute lie. And the games that large coporations play with international funding for tax reasons are all about exploiting combinations of tax loopholes in various countries.
The offshoring bit is not about taxes, it is about wages and environmental costs. And now that we have done it for a few generations now, it is also about the supply chains that we have constructed in Asia that are going to be hard to beat (screw factory next to the glass factory next to assembly line).
I agree with the idea, but the Tax Software companies spend a lot of money to make sure this never happens:
http://www.consumercal.org/article.php?id=127
I have seen other examples, but that was the first one a little bit of googling turned up.
I support the congresswoman's response. That question deserved no response for a couple of reasons:
1) In the very pramble the national government is esablished to "promote the general Welfare". While that particular phase is very open to interpretaion, it is hard to see that a publically avalible hospital is not in the direction of "the general Welfare".
2) Section 8 of the Constitution once again allows specifically for taxation "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States". One could agure that this only means the general welfare of the Unites States as a body and not the individual of it. But that seems contrary to the general spirit of the document, and would have to be decided by the US Supreme Court. Since they have specifically not said so, the overwhelming presumption must be that it is in keeping with the law.
3) Presumably the question was grounded out of something like "why should the government be allowed to complete (unfairly) with private business". But this is a common misconception about corporations and the Constitution. At the founding of the US Constitution corprations were only founded by express will of the goverment, and they were founded to a specific purpose (not profits). The profits were only a sweetener that was allowed to get the job done. Coporartions charters were often specific about the lifetime of the corporation and there were a list of clauses that would end the Coporation if it was found to not be living up to its charter. The modern idea of the corporation as a profit-driven mostly-imortal quasi-person did not start to take hold untill the mid-1800s. For reference I will direct people to the Mercantilism section of the Corporation article in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#Mercantilism
So if you are a "fundamentalist" about the US Constitution you should expect that the govenement should be the one behind large institutions such as hospitals. It is just that many "Conservatives" have the dream of a golden age in their heads and have proven very willing to not let the truth get in their way.
I for one would like to see a move more in that direction, at least in the requring of Public Coporations to have a charter (I don't see the need for expiry), and to the practice exercise the death penalty on them when they violate it.
You are very misinformed in using the word "stole". Apple clearly paid Xerox for everything it got from the tours there (except maybe for the engineers that it hired away):
http://obamapacman.com/2010/03/myth-copyright-theft-apple-stole-gui-from-xerox-parc-alto/
A choice quote (for those too lazy to click over):
Apple obtained permission ahead of the Xerox PARC visit. In addition, Apple provided compensation in exchange for the various Xerox PARC ideas such as the GUI.
How exactly is eugenics (as a science) a bad thing? As a science all it is is the observation that we humans have changed the evoluionary pressures on our own species, with the exensino that it is in ways that most likely will favor mutations that we don't really want. For example poor eyesight is no longer a negative evelutioary pressure so you can expect it to grow in the general population.
That is the science bit, what you are probably objecting to are the mass steriliztions in the US (if you are aware of them) or the influence those same ideas had on some of the Nazi justifications for the death camps. But the science is reposnible for neither, just as you can't blame the mass killings of the Khmer Rouge on the philophy of equality.
And if you think that eugenics (the science) has in any way been proven false, then you are completely mistaken.
I went to school in Austria (Alps, not kangaroos) for a year after having grown up in the US school system (Wisconsin, so a good part of it), and I have to say I disagree with your assertion that the US is more about rote learning than Europe. And my wife (Hungarian) was amazed at how much better the university experience (grad school) than anything she saw at home. And her limited experience with grade schools really amazed her at how interactive the classes were.
It is not that we here in the US fall back on rote learning that is causing us to suffer so badly in math/science education, but rather I think it is the following things:
1) Those test scores are not always as comparable as you might think. One big problem in comparing test scores between the US and Germany/Austria is that in the US everyone takes those tests, while in Germany/Austria only the "Gymnasium" (college bound) students do. Sometimes the tests can adjust for this, but I have seen may that don't.
2) We in the US look down on teachers with phrases like "those who can do, those who can't teach", and channel all of our best students away from teaching. That we have so many great teachers willing to take the small salaries that they get, the total lack of support from the communities (in some cases), and the political abuse that the Republican party has been hurling at them for a generation now just shows how dedicated those people are.
3) The amount of time and effort that parents put into making sure that their students do well in school has bottomed out in the US. Since the parents don't care (or don't have the time to care working two jobs) their children learn that it is not important to do well. Compare this to the Asian stereotype (which has some truth behind it), and you can realize how much an up-hill battle many teachers are facing.
4) Teachers Colleges are badly organized, and heavily weighed towards liberal arts. So of course their graduates tend to have less skills in math/science. There are a lot of people in those organizations who want to do better, but the spark still has not been lit of a renaissance there.
5) There has been a cultural war waged by social conservatives to undermine science because they dislike evolution. You can't teach the scientific method effectively when the student's parents then dismiss the science out-of hand. A similar argument is just as valid in the global warming conversation.
6) Our popular media has been portraying scientists, and smart people in general, in a negative light for a long time now. Part of this is because most of the people who write for the popular media probably identify themselves as "liberal arts" people (they are writers after all), and so re-enforece the hierarchy that has them above the "nertds". So of course they are going to tend to portray their heroes as people like they envision themselves.
We (American and European consumers) have all been implicitly responsible for this sort of thing for a couple of generations now. Nearly all (95+) of the clothing people wear in the developed world comes from labor practices worse than what Apple's suppliers use. The more high-end the brand, the more likely it is made that way. And if you think that Apple marks things up too much, then you should examine those markups. Most of the cacao beans (so chocolate) are produced using child labor. There is little you can find in stores today that does not have a similar story, but without the oversight that Apple provides (look it up). This has been readily avalible information for at least a generation, but we as a society have repeatedly demonstrated that we don't care to know it.
I remember durring the debates about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that all of this came up, was hashed through, and then promptly forgotton on the way to the mall. This latest round, comming just after Apple has stepped up to provide more information than they have in the past, focusing on Apple to the near-exclusion of any other brands, smacks of an agenda and a total lack of morals. This isn't about the workers, this is about an axe to grind.
While I do think that the ethos of Henry Ford is completely lost on most people today (and a good number would scream "socialist" as if it were an epitaph), I don't think that it is very applicable in the case of the simple assembly jobs that we are talking about.
Henry Ford needed skilled metalworkers to turn fairly raw materials into fully formed cars. Many had to understand about metalworking, forging, etc The skills needed to be learned over years of apprenticeship, and the difference between a master of his trade and a junior was clear. Henry Ford decided to make sure that he had the best people around, and saw that he could get more than double productivity from paying double wages. He was right as a capitalist, as a humanitarian, and as a social engineer.
However, the assembly jobs that we are now talking about are some of the worst sort in production lines (which we have now developed to such a degree that Henry Ford would scarecely recognize them). The work is inhuman, and each position can be taught to someone in hours if not minutes. The difference between an expereinced person and someone new in from the door is probably only that the expereinced person is worn out. The only reason most of these positions are not filled by robots is that the robots cost more to maintain than people (FoxCon has already talked about that changing).
I agree with you on most of your points, but I think that you have one major onw wrong: marrige is not a creation of religion. It is a social structure that in many cases relgion has layered istelf on top of. I know everyone talkes about the wedding ceremony as the point when they are married, but that is not the case. You are married when the marrige license is signed and whitnessed, the part with the priest in front of everyone is just for show, the real bit is in the paperwork.
Now don't get me wrong, there is a lot of social value in the ceremony announcing your commitment before others (and before your god), but the govenment part is what is really at debate at this point (despite the gnashing of teeth from some parties).
Oh and be carefull about equating civil unions with marrige. While sometimes they can be truely interchangeable words (seperating the religios from the secular), in many states in the US they are legaly defined very differently, with civil unions having few of the legal rights and responsibilites of marriges (insurance, hospital visitation rights, gaurdianship of children, etc). So it has become a political trick to argue that people pushing for full rights are just trying to force the relgious part.
I don't know anything about the service in Italy, but you seem to be rather ignorant of what Apple does offer:
- The OS reinstall disk has a hardware test routine. If you have a newer computer without a reinstall disk then it is built into the computer.
- Trying an OS reinstall is much quicker (for you) than sending something out for repair. Sometimes it is useless, but looking a the overall cost/benifit ratio it is not a bad idea in many cases.
- If you have a desktop you can ask for a technician to come to your house. That is part of the warrantee.
- If you have a laptop Apple will send you a pre-paid shipping box. Most of their laptop repairs do not happen in AppleStores but get sent to the same repair centers. So you can cut out the middle man. Note that this is mostly what Dell does as well.
And if you look at consumer satifiaction with AppleCare vs. their competitors, well Apple has been #1 for a very long time.
And if you think that Dell's folks don't walk you through needless stuff, then you have never been on the phone with Dell techinal support. I even got to use their special line for enterprise support and they made me go thorugh uselss gyrations. This is unfotunetely a result of having to make training programs for non-techical people (the support staff) that can cover working with non-techinal end users. Since the majority of both of those groups are non-technical people, it winds up making life more difficult for people who read slashdot. Since we are the small minority that is a logical and reasonalble aproach.
And remember brilian techinal folks are not going to last long at call centers for two reasons: a) the can get more money elsewhere, and b) it is going to bore them to tears.
It may well be that many of those who call themselves Tea Part members may believe that. It might even be that oranizers at the local level belive that. But it is quite clear that the organizors at the state and national levels, and the elected politicians who are beholden to those people, have no interest in that sort of thing at all. In fact they have consistently rejected anything like those ideas in legislation.
Of course part of this disconect is that there is so much marketing going on by people paid by large groups (the Koch bothers come imedialy to mind, but they are far from the only ones) who can afford to buy saturation advertising with carefully crafted emotional messages that stop any rational debate and obscure/obliterate any real thinking. The-powers-that-be in the (large scale) Tea Party are absolutely against at least part of the message you feel is comming from the Tea Party rank-and-file. And I really do fear that in order to have any real chance as a orgainzation the Occupy movement will wind up in the same situation.
Many people who have once ready Rand's books often feel so, but if you actually read her books (I have ready most of them a couple of times each) then you realize that most all of the bad guys in her books are CEOs. She is not arguing for businessmen, she is arguing for creator-owners, largely in direct opposition to traditional businessmen. It is an appealing argument, but adults should realize that it is an idealized vision and misses most of the complexity of real life.
That annoys me almost as much as people who mis-use the phrase "ugly American" to label semi-colonalist behaviors, when the "ugly American" from the book was a wonderful and selfless person dedicated to the self-sufficiency in the local people he helped, one who happened to be physically ugly. In both cases people who don't understand the book wind up talking about it to people who have not and distorting the public idea of it.
That only makes sense on dividends or sales of companies... and even then from a twisted perspective. For the vast majority of capital gains (e.g.: stock market gains) that argument is pure hogwash.
No, that would indicate that the dollar amount that Warren Buffet pays is less than his secretary, which I have never seem him as quoted as saying. What he has said is that his tax rate (so a percentage) is much smaller than that of his secretary. And since his income undoubtedly comes overwhelmingly from investments, that would almost be hard for him to do otherwise. But I am sure that the total dollar amount that he pays is much larger. But he has repeatedly gone on the record to say that he feels that this is a miscarriage of (social) justice, that those making the most income can (by definition) afford to pay a higher percentage, and that it is only fair that they do. It is hard to make a straight-faced argument that he is wrong.
Oh... and the top federal income tax rate is only 35% on your income over $379,150 (single payer). You pay a smaller percentage on all of the money you earn before that. This is what is called a "marginal" system, and guarantees that you are never penalized for making more money (in federal income taxes at least, despite what some people in politics argue).
Getting stuff down is not going to be a real problem. If we are talking about mining metals then you could go ultra-simple and just make a big ingot and then carefully shoot it at a desolate area (like the Mongolian steps). Shoot a number of (refined in space and uniformly finished) chunks at an area, then wait until they have cooled enough and go and get them. You would lose some of the materials from the re-entry heating, but that probably would wind up as a rounding error on a balance sheet.
You could even setup manufacturing cheap one-use de-orbiters from the materials in the asteroid for more valuable (or less durable) cargo. Ship up a few specialty parts (electronics and maybe thrusters) and build the rest in-orbit (does require a lot of technology we don't yet have for manufacturing in space).
Of course this would mean that you would have created an orbital bombardment cannon, and opens a large can of worms both from a strategic balance standpoint and a potential terrorist weapon.
Why do they make you turn off your random electronics during takeoff and landing? Well, because a slightly worn piece of electronics, especially ones with a nice wire acting as an antenna (you know, like the wire to your headphones) can suddenly become a transmitter, and since that transmitter is nearer to the plane's sensitive navigational instrumentation by a good deal, and wireless signals drop off on a cubic curve, that makes your accidental transmitter easily thousands of times louder to the instrumentation than the signal they need to lock onto. Does that explain anything to you?
Now in this case I would bet that the iPads will be stored in specially certified cases, both to prevent problems from being dropped (this is a piece of safety equipment after all), and to prevent any chance of RF interference going out from it, even if something goes absolutely wrong with the iPad.
And really... is playing Angry Birds for 20 minutes more really worth risking everyone's life for? Really? Are you going to be sure that you are not doing that?
I think that those numbers are all the playthings of accountants, and are likely not reflective of anything.
1) Since neither Microsoft nor Google have large hardware divisions (at least not in those numbers), they are not compareable to Apple. Once hardware goes to manufacturing nothing in that line can be counted as R&D. Cisco does have a large hardware division, so I don't know about that number. None of the costs of hardware production for sale can be counted as R&D.
2) None of those companies have the large retail presence that Apple does. None of that can ever be called R&D.
3) Apple tends to make a product then iterate on its products. Only new product development counts twords R&D expenditures. So it may well be that none of the MacOS X development costs since 10.0.0 have counted as R&D expenditures. Note that it might be that Apple accounts for things this way, and other companies account for new product models (something Apple glosses over most of the time) as new products, and thus count the development costs as R&D.
The problem with your argument is that if a school authority leads a religious expression there are some real ethical vilations here:
1) They are clearly favoring a single religion. As an example if the prayer is not heald facing Mecca, then you are clearly excluding Muslims (even in a silent prayer). If you are facing Mecca, then you are clearly favoring Muslims. You can't win here, so should not be playing the game. People who argue the religious side of this clearly think that it is their religion that is going to get pushed, and don't look at the other side of the coin... which was exactly what the clearly-religous founders of this nation were clearly worried about.
2) If an authority figure says that eveyone must do this, then they are clearly using their authority (granted by the state) to push religion (and a single relgion as we have seen from above), and that is clearly unconsitituional.
3) Even if you give people the option of opting-out of the religous experssion (e.g.: "moment of silent prayer"), then you are creating at least the appearance of preassure from authority, and an enormous opportunity for peers who are religious to pressure those who don't share in the marjority religion. If you don't think that either of these situations are not pervasive in situations like this, then you have never been on the minority side, and I will have to ask you to belive me that this is a function of human nature.
The court is not hostile to religion. To my knowledge there has never been a case where peer-organized (seperate form school sanctioned) expression of religion has been prevented by the courts. There have been cases where school officials do not understand the details and have prevented peer-organized events, but that is a seperate injustice, and not court-driven.
Public Schools are controlled and funded by the local government (largely from propery taxes), with parts of that funding comming from State and National government as well. Additionally there is a host of regulations about curriculum (but not curriculum material) from all three levels. So Public Schools (where the vast majority of sudents attend nation-wide) are subject to many of the same rules that other govenment bodies are subject to. Although the (National) Supreme Court has ruled in the past that students do not have many free speach rights while in the classroom or school.
Lets be clear about this: FinalCut Pro 7 and FinalCut Pro X can live side-by-side on the same machine. If you have work you did last year you can still use FinalCut Pro 7 (since you did it there) to re-work those projects. That idea there negates your first two scenarios.
The third is really fuzzy thinking: it does not matter which version you have on your computer if it is the raw footage the TV channel wants to work on. You just take the raw footage and import it into whatever system you have decided to work on this new project on. And since FinalCut Pro X is much faster at importing, and even better lets you work while you are still importing clips, it is a better soltion there. If you had talked about the lack of FinalCut Server, then that might have an impact since it is going to become increasingly difficult to find copies of FinalCut Pro 7 to add new workstations with, but that is a problem down the road.
And if you are in film school and people want to see the work you have done recentely, they want to see the final render, not the production files. Are you saying you deleted those? That is the worst example in your bunch.
There are legitimate reasons why professionals may want to avoid FinalCut Pro X, at least untill they get the kinks worked out for the really high-end needs. But most of the gripes there have already been accnoledged by the FinalCut Pro project managers and they have already said that they will be comming in future updates. Importing old work does not seem to be one of those points, but old work still can be done by the software you already have. Apple is obviously aiming this software at future work.
To clarify a bit, the tax reduction only applied to a single company (the East India Trading Company), and was largely put into place because of the deep interconnections between the British Royal Family, the British Parliament, and that company. The tea that the East India Company had bought was not selling well in the UK, so they wanted to dump it (figuratively) on the colonies.
The colonialists, largely led by the American colony based tea merchants (who's market was being undercut) objected to this both with words and, at times violent, action (the Boston Tea Party was relatively tame... some British tax collectors were tarred and feathered). They were objecting entirely to the unfairness of the tax exemption for one company, and explicitly (in their pamphlets at least) did not object to the tax itself.
I always find it funny that the current "Tea Party" so often references those times so incorrectly in their stump speeches.
For the desktop machines you can generally get on-site service from Applen under regular AppleCare, as long as you ask. I don't know about England, but I have been getting it for years in the US. They don't send an Apple employee, but rather a technician from whatever company they have on contract in the area. That does lead to a bit of unevenness in the service, but for my calls it has never taken more than a couple of days before they are there, and often I have gotten a touch-base call within a couple of hours of filing my ticket.
For laptops I have usually gone with the "send me a box" option, and the longest I have ever waited from my initial call to getting the reparied laptop back is about a week-and-a-half. More commonly it was within a week.
Just to respond to one small point that most people miss, but it is never a penalty to move up a U.S. tax bracket (well... excluding some deductions). Assuming the same deductions if you start out with more money, then you always end up with more money. Yes, always, every time. You might pay a slightly larger overall percent, but you never wind up with less money.
The way this works is that you start at the bottom tax bracket and pay taxes on the money you made in that bracket at that percentage. Then you set asside that money and move up to the next tax bracket and pay in that. It is probably clearer in a made-up example:
With the following hypothetical tax bracket system:
0 - 10,000: 2%
10,001 - 30,000: 5%
30,001 - 85,000: 10%
85,000+: 15%
If you have an (adjusted) income of $30,001 then you pay: .02 = $200 .05 = $1,000 .1 = $0.1
10,000 *
20,000 *
1 *
So if we compare a $30,000 vs. a $30,001 income, the tax difference is 10 cents, leaving you with 90 cents more than you would have had. While my hypothetical numbers are way off... the principal holds. Oh... and for the math pendants, all brackets are inclusive and rounded.
I know that media orgainizations that describe themselves as "conservaive" love to paint everyone else as "liberal" or "left", but that is just not the case, and it seems you have fallen into their trap of viewig life as polar ("liberal" vs. "conservative"). That polarized view is nearly antithtical to the ideal of democracy, especially democracy as espoused by the framers of our Constitution. To quote Tommas Jefferson:
". . . whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right."
The "main stream" media has been deliberately neutral for a very long time (despite having overwhelming "conservative" ownership). We have not had truely polarized mainstream media since William Randolph Hurst was alive and in control of a lot of the media. Note that this stands in stark contrast to the media in Europe, where party affiliation is usually blatantly obvious to all concerned (see Silvio Berlusconi's massive ownership in the Italian new media).
Both durring Hurst's lifetime, as well as in Europe today you see poitics played as a "old boys club" (see the current German Wutbürger movements) with people falling into parties with wide political moats between them. The US system in contrast has historically had two main partites that mostly share the same political ideology, and work very hard to demonstrate their differences on a limited number of areas, with many of their party members holding some views (and voting for those views) in direct contradition to their partie's political planks. To me the latter is a healthy democracy that has had time to come to a gerneral concensus about things.
Fox News and "talk radio" (both sides, but talk radio is dominated by "conservatives") seem to want to take us back to the "bad old days" where facts don't matter. As an example Fox News viewers have been repeatedly found to think that weapons of mass destruction were found durring the Iraq invation thus justifying the invation. 33% of regular Fox viewers reported this as fact. And then we have the underhanded "we don't know" reporting about Predident Obama's place of birth. We were long past the point where there was legitmate cause for discussion on that issue long before the election took place. Yet the Fox "News" channel kept that flame burning. This blatent focus on patizenship at the expense of truely informing their viewership is underhanded, shamefull, and toally destructive to a working democracy.
Don't ask news organizations to present "news and information that represents my views", because that is propoganda. Ask them to diligently and ernestly report news as factually and hosnestly as they can. Those two requests are diametriaclly opposed. It is sad to see a political movement who couches their idology so much on the ideas of the founders of this country (the Tea Party), so massivly get the basic ideas of those same men so wrong.
What you are missing is the absolute flood of people that open immigration would result in. It would very quickly distort both the economy and social structure.
I am completely in favor of this lottery for many reasons. Chief among those reasons has to be that my wife came to the US under the program, but I am also in favor of it for purely ideological reasons: we are a nation of immigrants, many of whom fit any resonable definition of "your tired, your poor", and who made a productive life for themselves on these shores. While we can't take the huge tidal wave of people an open policy would bring, we still owe it to those who came before us and let (most of) our ancestors in to again "pay it forward".