Talking out of both sides of their asses at the same time.
False dichotomy. You're pretending that he can't be talking about stuff he does know about and had some access to and swore (under penalty of criminal prosecution) he wouldn't talk about, while also while not also being an Assange-like attention whore who is laying on a bunch of BS. He can be a reckless violator of his clearance and a delusional or fabricating BS-er at the same time. Which is looking more and more likely.
And if you think the middle class is "rich", then you must be a very poor person indeed.
I didn't say the middle class was rich. I said that rich people pay most of the income tax.
Only about 53% percent of the public pays income taxes. Out of the rest, 17% are elderly or make almost no income, and the rest are let off the tax hook... and 30% of those pay negative income taxes (which is so say, they get a check instead of paying taxes on their income, because of the EITC).
So let's pay attention to those 53% who actually pay income taxes: The top 10% of all earners pay over 70% of the income taxes. Would you call the top 10% middle class? How about the top 25% percent... would you call those, what, the rich and the upper-upper-middle class? That top 25% pays over 87% of the income taxes. Which means that 75% of people with income pay only 13% of the income taxes, and half of the country is exempt from that, or actually get a check instead of paying.
No, I'm talking about people who file every year with the IRS, but who owe no income tax (or, typically, end up getting a check from the IRS instead - paying negative income taxes). Half of the people in the US who make money pay no federal income taxes on it.
Except, they pay almost all of the income taxes. You do understand that, right? Half the "taxpayers" pay no income taxes at all. Of the other half, a very small minority of them (the richest ones) pay almost all of it.
the minority you appear to berate aren't the majority of tax payers
What? I'm not berating the minority of people who pay most of the income taxes. I'm simply pointing out that it's a minority of people who do pay the vast majority of the income taxes.
The middle class is taxed at twice the rate of someone whose income is from gambling on the stock market.
And they're gambling with money that has already been taxed at least once, and they have no tax recourse if they lose money on bad gambles. The idea is to get people to put money to work growing companies and the jobs and economic activity that comes with that.. which in turn generates way more tax revenue across the spectrum (locally, federally, etc).
So this isn't about the Greek people wanting the government to fix prices - this would obviously not work.
But the Greek people have - for a long time - been demanding all sorts of things that obviously don't (and can't) work, and that's why they're in such a mess. Endless entitlement-minded demands from the Nanny State are self destructive, and... Greece has indeed self destructed.
Yes, because when you shrink your economy, everybody pays less taxes.
No, a lot of the people already paying little or no income tax (like roughly half of the people in the US) will continue to pay little or no income taxes, while the minority of the people who pay essentially all of the taxes are told to pay even more, and hated for being the people who do so.
So, please, let's hear an argument about why revealing this program is harmful. I'd be interested to hear a good one; because so far I haven't even heard bad ones.
Mostly because it's harmful for people working in compartmentalized roles in such areas to assume they can (never mind should) make a judgement about what should or shouldn't be considered sensitive. There's harm is in making it fashionable to ignore the obligations one takes on when working in a role that can involve the lives of others who work in dangerous settings. The next guy might also be in the "information wants to be free" mode, too, and think that dishing out private keys or credentials or whatever else is just as freedom-loving as dishing out hundreds of thousands of documents you haven't even bothered to read.
So it's not as much about some guy's anecdote or PowerPoint file shedding marginally more light on telco business record archiving - it's about what it means to take a paycheck from an agency as you promise not to make those kinds of calls on your own, ever.
It's interesting how rampant gun fan's paranoia is.
I think it's more interesting how people who don't think they have a vested interest in this sort of liberty reduction by the government also don't read or pay attention to exactly the sort of calls for the mandatory use of this (non-existent, fundamentally flawed) mechanism. The lefty legislators in my state have proposed this several times, now, and keep running into reality.
This suggests that even if you are correct and guns do prevent a lot of violent crime the amount that they create still far outweighs any benefit.
You are making the fundamental mistake of presuming that guns cause any violent crime whatsoever. They do not. People deciding to do violent things are the cause. If the guns could magically cause violent crime, than the many millions of people who own lots of them in the US (and who never commit any violent crime whatsoever) would surely be making quite a mess. But they're not. Because guns don't have that magical power.
My point is just that overall widespread gun ownership doesn't seem to have had the effect you think it has.
Gun ownership has gone way up, and violent crime has been going steadily down for decades (plenty of stats to read, if you'd like). Murder (of all kinds, but also by people using guns) is down by over 25% since the late 1980's, even as gun ownership has gone way up.
Or, an iCar that belongs to your pregnant wife - whose water just broke - and that won't let you drive it until you connect to the iCloud and enable your access to it using a mobile app. Damn, no internet access just this moment, at the picnic grounds or in this snowstorm. Sorry, honey! Just breathe! Push!
I genuinely believe that weapons should be "locked" to their owner.
And that the owner must be required to wear special jewelry, have on no gloves, and have a perfectly clean gun (and fingers!) in order to defend himself, right? And if the owner is out of town and his wife wants to use the gun to save her life? Hold on, Mr. Home Invasion Rapist Guy, I have to get my husband on the phone so he can use his iPhone app remotely to help me re-program this gun I'll be using to keep you from assaulting me.
I want to be able to toss one of my guns to someone to whom it's not "locked" if I need help dealing with, say, three pit bulls in a mauling mood. Just fer instance.
How do you feel about locking baseball bats and pipes? Those are used every year to murder far, far more people than are all types of rifles (including ones that have black plastic on them, thus making them "assault" weapons) combined.
I'd also like the ability to hand one of my handguns or rifles to a friend and allow them to use it. I don't, for example, like the idea of having swap magic RFID bracelets, or program in new fingerprint scans (or take off gloves!) in the middle of an emergency. Honestly, the people who think this stuff up (in terms of requiring all gun owners to have such) have obviously never actually imagined a gun-handling situation outside of a press conference.
We're already there. Firearms are used hundreds of thousands of times per year to prevent or end assaults and other criminal acts. Let's assume that often-studied range of numbers is off by an order of magnitude. It still exceeds the number of murders, substantially. Happily, the only time I've ever had to point a gun at a person, it was to stop him from assaulting my wife and I in the middle of the night. And no need to actually shoot the idiot. I have, though, shot many, many dinners, but some badly injured animals out of their suffering, and enjoyed hundreds of hours of pleasant clay pigeon and target shooting. No gun deaths involved, and possibly one or two negative deaths for your stats.
Society needs to be restructured so as to make sure that inequality doesn't get out of control.
Meaning, all those people replaced by robots still won't have a job or be spending money, but you want to be sure that the people running the companies that actually produce stuff are also kept poor so nobody resents them. Yes! That will definitely be an incentive for them to keep bothering.
The case of Argentina is peculiar. I this case, corruption is not an unintentional consequence... it is pretty intentional.
But it's intentional here (in the US) too. The people who want more and bigger and more intrusive and more involved-in-everything government want it because they're fans of having the people who fill in that growth to have more power and personal influence. The people who most push the expansion of the government in size are those who consider being part of that vast middle-man organization to be a natural fit for their instincts and disposition. There are people who really don't aspire to create or produce anything, but rather to be the career gatekeepers who take it from one place, and dole it out to another. They really do think that's a good thing to do, and they're the ones to do it and make the judgement calls surrounding it, and to grow in their power throughout a career of lording over it.
plenty of hardcore measures that everybody knew would not work, implemented time and again
Just like in the US. We're about to watch yet another giant tax/spend social engineering program come swinging in to cause more dependency and more economic wreckage. It's never "worked" before - here or anywhere else - and yet here it is again, about to ratchet up taxes and mammoth new piles of debt. All while tens of thousands of new IRS employees are being hired specifically to assess the legal standing of every person and company in the country, every year, as it relates to whether they're compliant with an inscrutable new healthcare law - and thus whether they need to be fined or have their wages garnished (or worse) based on an agent's rather subjective take on each person's relationship with still undefined massive new bureaucracies at the state, local, and business level. And what, right now, how we see the mid-level, ass-covering micro-power-players in that agency twist and turn trying to explain away exactly the sort of corruption that isn't - at all - peculiar to Argentina.
This sort of thing always happens when voters who want free stuff vote for the people who promise they'll take it from someone else and give it to them.
Yay for protectionist, isolationist, centrally-managed, paternalistic government-crawling-up-your-pant-legs regulatory over-reach! So stimulating to the economy.
And imagine the opportunities for bureaucratic mischief as more and more layers are added in between someone who has something to sell, and someone who wants to pay for it.
When people complain about "big government," it's exactly this sort of (somewhat) unintended consequence and life-squashing administrative death by a thousand cuts that is really the concern. Too many byzantine rules and hoops to jump through, with too many low-level, unaccountable functionaries being gatekeepers in their own little fiefdoms. In the US, it looks like the IRS's increasing ugliness (to say nothing of what it will look like when they're policing everyone's individual compliance with ObamaCare requirements).
Domestically, this is what's being referred to as the rise of the Fourth Branch. And it's deadly.
Backwards. The party with a vested interest in keeping people dependent on professionals who dole things out to them is the Democrats. That's the backbone of their entire constituency and the framework within which they describe everybody: needing a handout, or needing to be used to pay for handouts. Without playing middlemen to that one-way street, there would be almost not power in that camp. And so they seek to preserve it at every turn.
Does this mean I will have to buy special gloves that have my fingerprints on them?
And does this mean that if my wife wants (or, more importantly, needs) to grab and use "my" gun that she'll also need gloves with my fingerprints on them, and I'll need a way to emulate her fingerprints?
This is all entirely nonsense. The bill is a stealth approach to making guns cost more, akin to those feckless plans to tax ammo at 1000% in order to attempt to change human behavior among psychopaths and dedicated criminals.
I am entirely for gun manufacturers making and offering such guns to those who want them if they think there's a market and they want to serve that market. Requiring such is complete BS.
Slashdot Mirror
Talking out of both sides of their asses at the same time.
False dichotomy. You're pretending that he can't be talking about stuff he does know about and had some access to and swore (under penalty of criminal prosecution) he wouldn't talk about, while also while not also being an Assange-like attention whore who is laying on a bunch of BS. He can be a reckless violator of his clearance and a delusional or fabricating BS-er at the same time. Which is looking more and more likely.
And if you think the middle class is "rich", then you must be a very poor person indeed.
I didn't say the middle class was rich. I said that rich people pay most of the income tax.
... and 30% of those pay negative income taxes (which is so say, they get a check instead of paying taxes on their income, because of the EITC).
... would you call those, what, the rich and the upper-upper-middle class? That top 25% pays over 87% of the income taxes. Which means that 75% of people with income pay only 13% of the income taxes, and half of the country is exempt from that, or actually get a check instead of paying.
Only about 53% percent of the public pays income taxes. Out of the rest, 17% are elderly or make almost no income, and the rest are let off the tax hook
So let's pay attention to those 53% who actually pay income taxes: The top 10% of all earners pay over 70% of the income taxes. Would you call the top 10% middle class? How about the top 25% percent
No, I'm talking about people who file every year with the IRS, but who owe no income tax (or, typically, end up getting a check from the IRS instead - paying negative income taxes). Half of the people in the US who make money pay no federal income taxes on it.
rich people are very good at not paying much tax
Except, they pay almost all of the income taxes. You do understand that, right? Half the "taxpayers" pay no income taxes at all. Of the other half, a very small minority of them (the richest ones) pay almost all of it.
the minority you appear to berate aren't the majority of tax payers
What? I'm not berating the minority of people who pay most of the income taxes. I'm simply pointing out that it's a minority of people who do pay the vast majority of the income taxes.
The middle class is taxed at twice the rate of someone whose income is from gambling on the stock market.
And they're gambling with money that has already been taxed at least once, and they have no tax recourse if they lose money on bad gambles. The idea is to get people to put money to work growing companies and the jobs and economic activity that comes with that .. which in turn generates way more tax revenue across the spectrum (locally, federally, etc).
So this isn't about the Greek people wanting the government to fix prices - this would obviously not work.
But the Greek people have - for a long time - been demanding all sorts of things that obviously don't (and can't) work, and that's why they're in such a mess. Endless entitlement-minded demands from the Nanny State are self destructive, and ... Greece has indeed self destructed.
Middle class working folk pay almost all the tax.
This isn't even close to correct.
The top 10% of earners pay over 70% of the income taxes.
The lower-earning entire HALF of the country pays just over 2%.
The top 25% percent pay close to 90% of the taxes. Are you saying that the middle class is actually just a few percent of the country?
Yes, because when you shrink your economy, everybody pays less taxes.
No, a lot of the people already paying little or no income tax (like roughly half of the people in the US) will continue to pay little or no income taxes, while the minority of the people who pay essentially all of the taxes are told to pay even more, and hated for being the people who do so.
The problem in Greece is mainly due to lack of involvement of the government and too much uncontrolled capitalism.
No, that is not the problem. Have you ever been to Greece?
So, please, let's hear an argument about why revealing this program is harmful. I'd be interested to hear a good one; because so far I haven't even heard bad ones.
Mostly because it's harmful for people working in compartmentalized roles in such areas to assume they can (never mind should) make a judgement about what should or shouldn't be considered sensitive. There's harm is in making it fashionable to ignore the obligations one takes on when working in a role that can involve the lives of others who work in dangerous settings. The next guy might also be in the "information wants to be free" mode, too, and think that dishing out private keys or credentials or whatever else is just as freedom-loving as dishing out hundreds of thousands of documents you haven't even bothered to read.
So it's not as much about some guy's anecdote or PowerPoint file shedding marginally more light on telco business record archiving - it's about what it means to take a paycheck from an agency as you promise not to make those kinds of calls on your own, ever.
95% of people with schizophrenia are not violent.
But more than 95% of everyone else are not violent. See?
Lets also assume that 99.9999% of the "other criminal acts"
Why assume? Go read Kleck so you don't sound like such an idiot.
It's interesting how rampant gun fan's paranoia is.
I think it's more interesting how people who don't think they have a vested interest in this sort of liberty reduction by the government also don't read or pay attention to exactly the sort of calls for the mandatory use of this (non-existent, fundamentally flawed) mechanism. The lefty legislators in my state have proposed this several times, now, and keep running into reality.
This suggests that even if you are correct and guns do prevent a lot of violent crime the amount that they create still far outweighs any benefit.
You are making the fundamental mistake of presuming that guns cause any violent crime whatsoever. They do not. People deciding to do violent things are the cause. If the guns could magically cause violent crime, than the many millions of people who own lots of them in the US (and who never commit any violent crime whatsoever) would surely be making quite a mess. But they're not. Because guns don't have that magical power.
My point is just that overall widespread gun ownership doesn't seem to have had the effect you think it has.
Gun ownership has gone way up, and violent crime has been going steadily down for decades (plenty of stats to read, if you'd like). Murder (of all kinds, but also by people using guns) is down by over 25% since the late 1980's, even as gun ownership has gone way up.
Or, an iCar that belongs to your pregnant wife - whose water just broke - and that won't let you drive it until you connect to the iCloud and enable your access to it using a mobile app. Damn, no internet access just this moment, at the picnic grounds or in this snowstorm. Sorry, honey! Just breathe! Push!
I genuinely believe that weapons should be "locked" to their owner.
And that the owner must be required to wear special jewelry, have on no gloves, and have a perfectly clean gun (and fingers!) in order to defend himself, right? And if the owner is out of town and his wife wants to use the gun to save her life? Hold on, Mr. Home Invasion Rapist Guy, I have to get my husband on the phone so he can use his iPhone app remotely to help me re-program this gun I'll be using to keep you from assaulting me.
I want to be able to toss one of my guns to someone to whom it's not "locked" if I need help dealing with, say, three pit bulls in a mauling mood. Just fer instance.
How do you feel about locking baseball bats and pipes? Those are used every year to murder far, far more people than are all types of rifles (including ones that have black plastic on them, thus making them "assault" weapons) combined.
I'd also like the ability to hand one of my handguns or rifles to a friend and allow them to use it. I don't, for example, like the idea of having swap magic RFID bracelets, or program in new fingerprint scans (or take off gloves!) in the middle of an emergency. Honestly, the people who think this stuff up (in terms of requiring all gun owners to have such) have obviously never actually imagined a gun-handling situation outside of a press conference.
Can we get to negative numbers of gun deaths?
We're already there. Firearms are used hundreds of thousands of times per year to prevent or end assaults and other criminal acts. Let's assume that often-studied range of numbers is off by an order of magnitude. It still exceeds the number of murders, substantially. Happily, the only time I've ever had to point a gun at a person, it was to stop him from assaulting my wife and I in the middle of the night. And no need to actually shoot the idiot. I have, though, shot many, many dinners, but some badly injured animals out of their suffering, and enjoyed hundreds of hours of pleasant clay pigeon and target shooting. No gun deaths involved, and possibly one or two negative deaths for your stats.
There's no reason for any civilian to have more than 9 rounds in a firearm.
Not 8, not 10, but nine, right? Please explain how you've arrived at that number. Be specific.
Society needs to be restructured so as to make sure that inequality doesn't get out of control.
Meaning, all those people replaced by robots still won't have a job or be spending money, but you want to be sure that the people running the companies that actually produce stuff are also kept poor so nobody resents them. Yes! That will definitely be an incentive for them to keep bothering.
The case of Argentina is peculiar. I this case, corruption is not an unintentional consequence... it is pretty intentional.
But it's intentional here (in the US) too. The people who want more and bigger and more intrusive and more involved-in-everything government want it because they're fans of having the people who fill in that growth to have more power and personal influence. The people who most push the expansion of the government in size are those who consider being part of that vast middle-man organization to be a natural fit for their instincts and disposition. There are people who really don't aspire to create or produce anything, but rather to be the career gatekeepers who take it from one place, and dole it out to another. They really do think that's a good thing to do, and they're the ones to do it and make the judgement calls surrounding it, and to grow in their power throughout a career of lording over it.
plenty of hardcore measures that everybody knew would not work, implemented time and again
Just like in the US. We're about to watch yet another giant tax/spend social engineering program come swinging in to cause more dependency and more economic wreckage. It's never "worked" before - here or anywhere else - and yet here it is again, about to ratchet up taxes and mammoth new piles of debt. All while tens of thousands of new IRS employees are being hired specifically to assess the legal standing of every person and company in the country, every year, as it relates to whether they're compliant with an inscrutable new healthcare law - and thus whether they need to be fined or have their wages garnished (or worse) based on an agent's rather subjective take on each person's relationship with still undefined massive new bureaucracies at the state, local, and business level. And what, right now, how we see the mid-level, ass-covering micro-power-players in that agency twist and turn trying to explain away exactly the sort of corruption that isn't - at all - peculiar to Argentina.
This sort of thing always happens when voters who want free stuff vote for the people who promise they'll take it from someone else and give it to them.
Yay for protectionist, isolationist, centrally-managed, paternalistic government-crawling-up-your-pant-legs regulatory over-reach! So stimulating to the economy.
And imagine the opportunities for bureaucratic mischief as more and more layers are added in between someone who has something to sell, and someone who wants to pay for it.
When people complain about "big government," it's exactly this sort of (somewhat) unintended consequence and life-squashing administrative death by a thousand cuts that is really the concern. Too many byzantine rules and hoops to jump through, with too many low-level, unaccountable functionaries being gatekeepers in their own little fiefdoms. In the US, it looks like the IRS's increasing ugliness (to say nothing of what it will look like when they're policing everyone's individual compliance with ObamaCare requirements).
Domestically, this is what's being referred to as the rise of the Fourth Branch. And it's deadly.
So you're saying she was a Republican?
Backwards. The party with a vested interest in keeping people dependent on professionals who dole things out to them is the Democrats. That's the backbone of their entire constituency and the framework within which they describe everybody: needing a handout, or needing to be used to pay for handouts. Without playing middlemen to that one-way street, there would be almost not power in that camp. And so they seek to preserve it at every turn.
Does this mean I will have to buy special gloves that have my fingerprints on them?
And does this mean that if my wife wants (or, more importantly, needs) to grab and use "my" gun that she'll also need gloves with my fingerprints on them, and I'll need a way to emulate her fingerprints?
This is all entirely nonsense. The bill is a stealth approach to making guns cost more, akin to those feckless plans to tax ammo at 1000% in order to attempt to change human behavior among psychopaths and dedicated criminals.
I am entirely for gun manufacturers making and offering such guns to those who want them if they think there's a market and they want to serve that market. Requiring such is complete BS.