And yet General Relativity isn't even as well established a theory as Newtonian mechanics was (which had a century of observational evidence backing it up), or for that matter geocentric theory, which had millennia of observations backing it up
Bzzt. "A century" is not a meaningful measure of how much evidence; there are orders of magnitude more scientists working nowadays, and they can perform many more experiments vastly more quickly with modern technology. GR is far better established than Newtonian gravity (even leaving aside that every observation of Newtonian gravity at non-relativistic speeds qualifies as an observation of GR)
Both of them were overturned by more careful observations, in ways and of things we couldn't or hadn't observed before. We already know General Relativity has issues (specifically, with quantum mechanics), and while its predictions fit well with our observations so far, it hasn't actually been proven definitively. It is entirely possible that it is very accurate, but not precisely true. In fact, judging from the history of scientific theory, that is by far the most likely possibility.
It's very likely that there is some violation of GR. But this specific violation is still enormously unlikely; violation of causality is a lot more implausible than simple violation of GR.
Six sigma is used as a threshold for something simple and expected like discovering a new particle. I think it's entirely appropriate to require more stringent thresholds for a discovery as world-changing as this.
How is this any safe than having a normal user be able to "su" anyway?
It means you need a username to attack, which means the mindless robot scripts won't break in. Seriously, look at the ssh logs of any internet-facing machine; you'll see two or three attempts per second to log in as root, all from thoroughly mindless automated attacks. So you might as well make sure there's zero chance of those succeeding (sure, they shouldn't threaten any remotely decent passphrase, but even so).
Is the ipad not up to watching videos? I stream episodes on my eee transformer all the time; it somehow feels nicer than just watching them on a monitor or even a laptop. Maybe it's just the novelty of it.
That the language exposes native datatypes (and doesn't define them strictly) is a big part of the problem. Probably bigger is the system API though; different systems provide different APIs, and POSIX is nowhere near detailed or extensive enough to let you write programs. Another problem is that the language was never really written with its behaviour fully specified. If you look at the JVM it does an astonishing amount of work to provide a consistent memory model across all platforms. Also you'll know that e.g. the Java filesystem API (at least pre-v7) is quite weak, because that's the only way to get something that can be implemented consistently cross-platform - and even then it's easy to make java filesystem access non-portable.
As for performance, for modern-sized programs a garbage-collected language will probably perform better than native code..net will let you compile to native code if you want, and if you're really that worried about garbage collection overhead then use a modern functional language like OCaml or Haskell, where referential transparency makes garbage collection easy. (The modern telephone system is basically written in Erlang; real-time performance and garbage collection are not incompatible). If you want a native language in the sense of having native datatypes then by definition that's going to be nonportable.
That'd be the Hercules IBM Mainframe Emulator that already runs on three different architectures (and five different OSes), yes? As I said, once you've ported to a few different systems the problems mostly stop showing up.
You don't want a physically Dvorak keyboard, all that will do is encourage bad habits. (And you don't want it for the sake of guests using your computer either, because what they will do is say "oh, I can touch-type qwerty, switch it to qwerty in software" and then you do that and it turns out they can't actually touch-type qwerty). Just switch the layout to Dvorak in software, pull up a picture of what it looks like on screen to start with (maybe set it as your desktop background, though I never needed to), and get going.
ARM is admittedly easier than many things - you're still 32-bit and usually don't have endianess issues. So the main problems are sizes/alignment of system data structures - things like (network) host information, or even something as simple as date/time vary. Of course you should be using the types opaquely, but it's very easy to accidentally stuff a time_t into an int, and even if you are being careful you can miss implicit assumptions you're making (one of the problems I saw was code not dealing with an array in the network host data structure being of length 0). In this particular case the biggest source of problems was multibyte character handling differences (it was a Japanese game). When porting old code away from x86 you can also get a whole slew of floating-point related bugs, because double on x86 is really x87 extended double (I only encountered one minor problem in this case, it didn't do much floating point, but for other software it would be a bigger issue). Also see the recent glibc memcpy vs memmove issues for something that can come up even on x86-64 vs x86-64.
Once code's been ported to two or three architectures these problems don't tend to come up any more (because the first couple of changes reveal all your implicit assumptions that could be broken), and that's true of a lot of open source projects. But any code that's only ever run on one platform will have portability issues. You don't have to take my word for it - try it yourself, pick a random project that doesn't release non-x86 builds off sourceforge and try and build it for arm.
If cheap is what you want you'll get it from x86 rather than ARM. Look at some of the fanless VIA systems; they'll draw more power than their ARM equivalents, but they're cheaper, more powerful, and just as cool. (Ok technically if they're drawing more power they'll be warmer, but they're in the same category of "I don't have to worry about how hot it is").
This is a bizarre claim, considering the majority of code out there is in C or in higher level languages like Java, Cobol, C# and so on, so technically the processor architecture is irrelevant for most code.
Speaking as someone who has ported an actually quite well written (relatively) game interpreter from x86 to arm: bwahahaha. For java/C# it's feasible (although even then, four out of five programs will require at least some superficial code changes), but porting anything written in C is going to be a headache at best, and more likely a complete nightmare - and that goes doubly for C++ actually, at least the way it's commonly written.
You can't decelerate continuously across the speed of light - the only way you can ever be travelling at exactly the speed of light is if you're massless, and then it's impossible to accelerate or decelerate you, at least according to our current understanding of physics.
There's a social pressure element. My mum(*) knows better than to call me every half-hour to say something inane, but that knowledge doesn't seem to have crossed over into Facebook. But for social reasons it wouldn't do to "unfriend" her.
I got a "we have new recommendations for you" email from them about a month ago - first time I'd got anything unsolicited, it surprised me quite a bit as I hadn't changed anything.
I was about to plonk it in spam but then saw the first recommendation was actually something I wanted at a good price. So perhaps this is something they only start doing once they feel confident enough in their recommendations to you?
Yeah, not being able to install an OS further up the hard disk is a good thing. Taking 45 seconds to reach the boot loader is a good thing. Nope, sorry. There are many many things wrong with EFI, but we're past the point where BIOS was still tolerable.
One goal of UEFI is so that the hardware vendors (Intel) will not have to publish detailed specs. You will only be able to access your hardware as they want.
You can already only access your hardware as they want. The difference is there'll be a single, publicly available spec, rather than random half-documented vendor-specific interfaces, where the only thing they actually tested was their equally shoddy windows driver. The OS signing is a real concern, but unified, standardized hardware interfaces are a major plus
Any money given to the gov't makes the economy worse, that's what I am saying, because it causes larger spending, which in return causes more gov't debt
Let me get this straight: giving the government money increases government debt, and taking money away from the government decreases government debt?
this money will go to OTHER COUNTRIES,
What, and investment money always stays in the US?
When I say CHARITY by the RICH is them working, what I mean is they do NOT have to work. They are NOT doing this out of any goodness, they are doing this because they like doing it.
Which makes it not work. Anyone can do things that are enjoyable, but only the poor do things that are unpleasant but desirable for the economy.
Because you are proposing forceful coercion, by which those who produce must subsidize those who do not produce but are more than willing to consume the produced goods.
Yeah, I know. That doesn't mean it isn't in the interests of the economy, or society.
Also if the dollar is taken away by force from a producer and given to somebody who does not produce, this is the dollar that is NOT used to grow the economy, this is the dollar that is NOT used as investment capital, this is a destructive dollar, where a transaction is performed, but one side produced something (like your can of cola case) and the other side produced nothing.
"destructive dollar", I like it. Seriously though, no, every dollar is the same as every other dollar, that is the dollar's whole raison d'entre. Someone still worked to produce it (whether it was me or someone else it was taxed from), so there's no more or less production. Whether it's used for spending or investment is indeed a difference, but my whole point is that in present economic circumstances spending is more useful to the economy. You can see this on the basis of available production capacity, or you can measure it more directly by looking at prices: interest rates for investors are low, because there's little demand for investment and plenty of supply; purchasable goods are cheap, i.e. spendable money is expensive, because there's plenty of "demand for spending" and little supply.
without minimum wage laws at all, they could be hired for nominal fees and actually become apprentices, and learn at work to do something useful
Staggering naivete. The overwhelming majority of minimum-wage jobs are dead-end jobs, and that would only be more true for jobs that paid less.
maybe he isn't paying the taxes by using all the tricks available in accounting, then he shouldn't be in a position to preach about taxes, should he?
Sure he should, because he's doing what all the other rich people do; if we're not taxing him we're not taxing them either.
In any case, giving any money to government is destructive to the US economy in the long run. There is no difference if the money is coming from China or taxes, at this point it worsens the situation by causing greater debt
What are you saying, that taxation increases personal debt? Because what I'm arguing for is the opposite of that - take tax money and either give it directly to, or use it to supply services to, the poor, thus helping get them out of debt.
Government confiscating earned money is surely destroying the wealth, because that's the money that is actually was produced for, earned, and it could be invested with by the people who earned it.
So money is wealth as long as it belongs to the person who earned it, but as soon as you take it from them and give it to someone else it magically stops being?
I think you believe it's good to take 45% of income away from people based on the fact that they are in your eyes 'rich'. However you are again, not paying attention AT ALL to my point - USSR has done this. The money was taken away from the richest, but the gov't can't create wealth, they spent it.
USSR has taxed at 100%, which breaks things. Britain has taxed the rich 95%, and not only did the country not collapse, it was one of the most glorious periods in its history. Even in the US, right now tax rates on the rich are at historic lows.
The rich person working is really a charity basically at that point, because the rich person does not HAVE to work. He can just spend, be a consumer, have a good time.
Oh please. The rich are all doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, because they're rich so they must be good. Poor people couldn't possibly do any good, because they're poor, so must be evil.
If that was the case, then Zimbabwe would have the best economy in the world.
So there's more than one way to ruin an economy, that proves nothing. I can dig up an example of a country with zero income tax going to hell in a handbasket if that's what you want.
The only people who can legitimately consume, are those who legitimately produce. Until you get this little detail, the further discussion will simply be regurgitation of what was said previously multiple times.
You have indeed identified the core of our disagreement. What does "legitimacy" matter for anything? If you claim that investment is better for the economy than consumption and money is best off in the hands of the rich, surely you should support taxing the poor and distributing the money so collected to the rich, who'd make better use of it (that would just as much be taking away what someone had produced). A dollar is a dollar is a dollar, whether earned or given; if I buy a soda the impact on the economy is the same whether it's my dollar or someone else's.
Take care and good luck in your new Marxist utopia, you didn't address my question of-course, do you think a person who lived in one utopia of that type is an idiot for never ever wanting to experience it again?
I think you're an idiot for deciding that since 100% taxation is bad, lowest taxation is the best. That's like living in the Sahara for a while, finding it uncomfortable and deciding that
Factory floors require rental payments/tax payments, if you are in a business of making money, then you won't be paying without producing something. What you do is, you quickly shift production somewhere else, move the tools, move your investment.
Long-term, sure. But there are costs associated with moving, particularly in an economy where no-one else needs any new production capacity right now either. If you're running your factory at 75% capacity and expecting the economy to pick up eventually it's probably cheaper to keep doing so than to tear it down and build a smaller one.
But you know who HAS been supporting these people, you call "babies"? Those who still pay taxes AND the foreigners who are accumulating worthless US debt. They need to understand that it's not "babies" they are subsidizing. These are grown individuals, who are happy as a voting block to live on hand outs and not have to produce anything.
The babies line was about the absurdity of your position, not what I think of such people. A minimum-wage job is not a worthwhile use of anyone's time, it's in society's best interests that people spend their time looking for something more productive. And if they really are just lazy and workshy (which is pretty rare), they'd only damage any company they did work for, so again it's better for society that they simply remain unemployed. The tax burden that they place on the rest of us by so doing is by no means unbearable.
You'll have to open your borders to foreign national companies to mine your natural resources, because you won't have the capital/tools to do so yourself. You'll be paying with terrible standard of living in the future by spending now and not producing. BUT you are right - you are selling your future to the Chinese, they are buying it for worthless money. Enjoy it.
So wait, is the money worthless or isn't it?
People with high pay, pay most of the taxes. Warren Buffet is an old liar when he says he pays less than his secretary. His company pays 35% federal corporate income tax, that's HIS money, he is the largest shareholder.
If he's not cycling his profits through Ireland and paying less than 10% at the company level then he's a rarity. But in any case, those taxes apply to any investor, rich and poor alike.
you CANNOT redistribute wealth. By "redistributing" money via taxes, you are only redistributing MONEY, but wealth is PRODUCTION CAPACITY. It's funny how simple misunderstanding of nomenclature makes such a huge difference. You CAN destroy wealth by taking away all of the investment capital and obviously you will cause more capital flight out of the country, but you can't redistribute wealth.
Again, which is it? If the money is worthless then surely it makes no difference how it is distributed. The rich care about their money precisely because it is wealth, or equivalent to it.
So what did the country end up with? Nothing. Couldn't even FEED itself, had to sell oil and gas for freaking WHEAT. Russia? Ukraine? Couldn't grow enough wheat? Well obviously not, it's because government cannot do actual wealth production. You can confiscate the money and even the TOOLS of production, and with government in charge you will only end up with theft of resources, by those close to it, but there will be no wealth production at all.
Sure, if you confiscate everything then the incentives go wrong, you end up with massive corruption and inefficiency and all the rest of it. But just because 100% taxation is absurd doesn't mean 0% isn't.
Which is exactly what an economy needs - investment capital. Investment capital in the hands of people who will actually use it to increase production capacity, which is what economy needs. Investment capital - the money that does NOT benefit the 'rich', it makes them work.
that's not production capacity they have, that's them using the free money to buy back something that at least is better than the currency
No, it's production capacity they have. I'm talking things like factories running below capacity because it would be a waste of money to hire the workers to run them at full capacity, because the product wouldn't sell. A company in that position doesn't benefit from the money of rich people (who invest), because investment isn't what they need. They, and the economy as a whole, benefit from more money being in the hands of poor people (who spend).
"Putting money into hands" is a worthless exercise, if those hands don't produce anything.
So you'd never feed a baby? Call it a Keynesian stimulus if you like; it's worth providing goods those who are currently unproductive, if by doing so we can boost the economy in a way that ultimately makes everyone more productive.
Say we have three people, each of whom is producing something the other two wants. In a healthy economy all of them would be producing at full capacity and trading with each other. But if all of them have no money, each of them buys less, and as a result none of them can sell their full production capability. So they work at below capacity, and everyone ends up with less stuff. That's the situation we're in right now.
If you are stuck in a weird one sided trade, where you build car engines all day long, but when you sell it, you get back pieces of paper but you can buy NOTHING with them, then why the hell did you even bother?
That's a fair question to ask the Chinese. But we're the guys who are getting the car engines and giving them pieces of paper, so why wouldn't we keep doing that as long as we can?
Do you know that USA imports 90% of its sea food? USA is SURROUNDED with oceans, why is it importing 90% of sea food? It's because there is enough demand, but there is no production.
Nope, it's because domestic companies either can't supply what people want, or are uncompetitive. If there was a production problem, i.e. a shortage of investment, US companies would be running their factories flat out and complaining that they couldn't hire enough staff or get the investment to build bigger factories.
when you say: "put money into hands of people", what do you mean exactly?
I mean progressive taxation, i.e. wealth redistribution, i.e. using governmental authority to take money away from the rich (in whose hands it is not benefiting the economy, because all it provides there is investment capital, and we have much more of that than we need right now), and give it to the poor, who will use it to buy more stuff, which leads to increased economic growth - more trade, higher employment, all the things we want from the economy.
Do you think the people should be able NOT to reduce the trade deficit, but still have the money to buy goods from producing nations?
I thought we were talking about rich vs poor here, so I don't really see the relevance of the trade deficit. My point is simply that it is in the interests of the economic wellbeing of the country for wealth to be spread around equitably, rather than concentrated in the hands of the few - and I approve of the use of governmental authority towards this end.
In fact, I'd say that the OSS drivers have (or at least had 8 months ago when I still struggled with fglrx) better 2D performance, If you have a 4096x1536 desktop you could actually count the seconds it took to move a window.
I'm still in that position, so I'm guessing your card is better supported than mine or something. (This is on my work machine; on my home machine with an nvidia card running freebsd everything moves instantly. So I'm in a position to compare)
Slashdot Mirror
Try Dice Player. It's handled everything I've thrown at it, even hi10p (which actually puts it ahead of my desktop machine)
And yet General Relativity isn't even as well established a theory as Newtonian mechanics was (which had a century of observational evidence backing it up), or for that matter geocentric theory, which had millennia of observations backing it up
Bzzt. "A century" is not a meaningful measure of how much evidence; there are orders of magnitude more scientists working nowadays, and they can perform many more experiments vastly more quickly with modern technology. GR is far better established than Newtonian gravity (even leaving aside that every observation of Newtonian gravity at non-relativistic speeds qualifies as an observation of GR)
Both of them were overturned by more careful observations, in ways and of things we couldn't or hadn't observed before. We already know General Relativity has issues (specifically, with quantum mechanics), and while its predictions fit well with our observations so far, it hasn't actually been proven definitively. It is entirely possible that it is very accurate, but not precisely true. In fact, judging from the history of scientific theory, that is by far the most likely possibility.
It's very likely that there is some violation of GR. But this specific violation is still enormously unlikely; violation of causality is a lot more implausible than simple violation of GR.
Six sigma is used as a threshold for something simple and expected like discovering a new particle. I think it's entirely appropriate to require more stringent thresholds for a discovery as world-changing as this.
How is this any safe than having a normal user be able to "su" anyway?
It means you need a username to attack, which means the mindless robot scripts won't break in. Seriously, look at the ssh logs of any internet-facing machine; you'll see two or three attempts per second to log in as root, all from thoroughly mindless automated attacks. So you might as well make sure there's zero chance of those succeeding (sure, they shouldn't threaten any remotely decent passphrase, but even so).
Is the ipad not up to watching videos? I stream episodes on my eee transformer all the time; it somehow feels nicer than just watching them on a monitor or even a laptop. Maybe it's just the novelty of it.
As for performance, for modern-sized programs a garbage-collected language will probably perform better than native code. .net will let you compile to native code if you want, and if you're really that worried about garbage collection overhead then use a modern functional language like OCaml or Haskell, where referential transparency makes garbage collection easy. (The modern telephone system is basically written in Erlang; real-time performance and garbage collection are not incompatible). If you want a native language in the sense of having native datatypes then by definition that's going to be nonportable.
That'd be the Hercules IBM Mainframe Emulator that already runs on three different architectures (and five different OSes), yes? As I said, once you've ported to a few different systems the problems mostly stop showing up.
You don't want a physically Dvorak keyboard, all that will do is encourage bad habits. (And you don't want it for the sake of guests using your computer either, because what they will do is say "oh, I can touch-type qwerty, switch it to qwerty in software" and then you do that and it turns out they can't actually touch-type qwerty). Just switch the layout to Dvorak in software, pull up a picture of what it looks like on screen to start with (maybe set it as your desktop background, though I never needed to), and get going.
I'd say a web browser gets used much the same way as Steam does. It certainly ends up with more advertising in.
Once code's been ported to two or three architectures these problems don't tend to come up any more (because the first couple of changes reveal all your implicit assumptions that could be broken), and that's true of a lot of open source projects. But any code that's only ever run on one platform will have portability issues. You don't have to take my word for it - try it yourself, pick a random project that doesn't release non-x86 builds off sourceforge and try and build it for arm.
If cheap is what you want you'll get it from x86 rather than ARM. Look at some of the fanless VIA systems; they'll draw more power than their ARM equivalents, but they're cheaper, more powerful, and just as cool. (Ok technically if they're drawing more power they'll be warmer, but they're in the same category of "I don't have to worry about how hot it is").
This is a bizarre claim, considering the majority of code out there is in C or in higher level languages like Java, Cobol, C# and so on, so technically the processor architecture is irrelevant for most code.
Speaking as someone who has ported an actually quite well written (relatively) game interpreter from x86 to arm: bwahahaha. For java/C# it's feasible (although even then, four out of five programs will require at least some superficial code changes), but porting anything written in C is going to be a headache at best, and more likely a complete nightmare - and that goes doubly for C++ actually, at least the way it's commonly written.
Educated reasoning, not gut feeling. His famous thought experiments are very rigorously thought out - which is why they work.
You can't decelerate continuously across the speed of light - the only way you can ever be travelling at exactly the speed of light is if you're massless, and then it's impossible to accelerate or decelerate you, at least according to our current understanding of physics.
(*)This example is not actually true
It's odd though, given that QM seems to bend over backwards to preserve causality even with its non-local effects.
You may not know the term, but you'd know better than to do it.
I was about to plonk it in spam but then saw the first recommendation was actually something I wanted at a good price. So perhaps this is something they only start doing once they feel confident enough in their recommendations to you?
Yeah, not being able to install an OS further up the hard disk is a good thing. Taking 45 seconds to reach the boot loader is a good thing. Nope, sorry. There are many many things wrong with EFI, but we're past the point where BIOS was still tolerable.
One goal of UEFI is so that the hardware vendors (Intel) will not have to publish detailed specs. You will only be able to access your hardware as they want.
You can already only access your hardware as they want. The difference is there'll be a single, publicly available spec, rather than random half-documented vendor-specific interfaces, where the only thing they actually tested was their equally shoddy windows driver. The OS signing is a real concern, but unified, standardized hardware interfaces are a major plus
Any money given to the gov't makes the economy worse, that's what I am saying, because it causes larger spending, which in return causes more gov't debt
Let me get this straight: giving the government money increases government debt, and taking money away from the government decreases government debt?
this money will go to OTHER COUNTRIES,
What, and investment money always stays in the US?
When I say CHARITY by the RICH is them working, what I mean is they do NOT have to work. They are NOT doing this out of any goodness, they are doing this because they like doing it.
Which makes it not work. Anyone can do things that are enjoyable, but only the poor do things that are unpleasant but desirable for the economy.
Because you are proposing forceful coercion, by which those who produce must subsidize those who do not produce but are more than willing to consume the produced goods.
Yeah, I know. That doesn't mean it isn't in the interests of the economy, or society.
Also if the dollar is taken away by force from a producer and given to somebody who does not produce, this is the dollar that is NOT used to grow the economy, this is the dollar that is NOT used as investment capital, this is a destructive dollar, where a transaction is performed, but one side produced something (like your can of cola case) and the other side produced nothing.
"destructive dollar", I like it. Seriously though, no, every dollar is the same as every other dollar, that is the dollar's whole raison d'entre. Someone still worked to produce it (whether it was me or someone else it was taxed from), so there's no more or less production. Whether it's used for spending or investment is indeed a difference, but my whole point is that in present economic circumstances spending is more useful to the economy. You can see this on the basis of available production capacity, or you can measure it more directly by looking at prices: interest rates for investors are low, because there's little demand for investment and plenty of supply; purchasable goods are cheap, i.e. spendable money is expensive, because there's plenty of "demand for spending" and little supply.
Sure it's not cash, but it wouldn't be cash for a website, either.
without minimum wage laws at all, they could be hired for nominal fees and actually become apprentices, and learn at work to do something useful
Staggering naivete. The overwhelming majority of minimum-wage jobs are dead-end jobs, and that would only be more true for jobs that paid less.
maybe he isn't paying the taxes by using all the tricks available in accounting, then he shouldn't be in a position to preach about taxes, should he?
Sure he should, because he's doing what all the other rich people do; if we're not taxing him we're not taxing them either.
In any case, giving any money to government is destructive to the US economy in the long run. There is no difference if the money is coming from China or taxes, at this point it worsens the situation by causing greater debt
What are you saying, that taxation increases personal debt? Because what I'm arguing for is the opposite of that - take tax money and either give it directly to, or use it to supply services to, the poor, thus helping get them out of debt.
Government confiscating earned money is surely destroying the wealth, because that's the money that is actually was produced for, earned, and it could be invested with by the people who earned it.
So money is wealth as long as it belongs to the person who earned it, but as soon as you take it from them and give it to someone else it magically stops being?
I think you believe it's good to take 45% of income away from people based on the fact that they are in your eyes 'rich'. However you are again, not paying attention AT ALL to my point - USSR has done this. The money was taken away from the richest, but the gov't can't create wealth, they spent it.
USSR has taxed at 100%, which breaks things. Britain has taxed the rich 95%, and not only did the country not collapse, it was one of the most glorious periods in its history. Even in the US, right now tax rates on the rich are at historic lows.
The rich person working is really a charity basically at that point, because the rich person does not HAVE to work. He can just spend, be a consumer, have a good time.
Oh please. The rich are all doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, because they're rich so they must be good. Poor people couldn't possibly do any good, because they're poor, so must be evil.
If that was the case, then Zimbabwe would have the best economy in the world.
So there's more than one way to ruin an economy, that proves nothing. I can dig up an example of a country with zero income tax going to hell in a handbasket if that's what you want.
The only people who can legitimately consume, are those who legitimately produce. Until you get this little detail, the further discussion will simply be regurgitation of what was said previously multiple times.
You have indeed identified the core of our disagreement. What does "legitimacy" matter for anything? If you claim that investment is better for the economy than consumption and money is best off in the hands of the rich, surely you should support taxing the poor and distributing the money so collected to the rich, who'd make better use of it (that would just as much be taking away what someone had produced). A dollar is a dollar is a dollar, whether earned or given; if I buy a soda the impact on the economy is the same whether it's my dollar or someone else's.
Take care and good luck in your new Marxist utopia, you didn't address my question of-course, do you think a person who lived in one utopia of that type is an idiot for never ever wanting to experience it again?
I think you're an idiot for deciding that since 100% taxation is bad, lowest taxation is the best. That's like living in the Sahara for a while, finding it uncomfortable and deciding that
Factory floors require rental payments/tax payments, if you are in a business of making money, then you won't be paying without producing something. What you do is, you quickly shift production somewhere else, move the tools, move your investment.
Long-term, sure. But there are costs associated with moving, particularly in an economy where no-one else needs any new production capacity right now either. If you're running your factory at 75% capacity and expecting the economy to pick up eventually it's probably cheaper to keep doing so than to tear it down and build a smaller one.
But you know who HAS been supporting these people, you call "babies"? Those who still pay taxes AND the foreigners who are accumulating worthless US debt. They need to understand that it's not "babies" they are subsidizing. These are grown individuals, who are happy as a voting block to live on hand outs and not have to produce anything.
The babies line was about the absurdity of your position, not what I think of such people. A minimum-wage job is not a worthwhile use of anyone's time, it's in society's best interests that people spend their time looking for something more productive. And if they really are just lazy and workshy (which is pretty rare), they'd only damage any company they did work for, so again it's better for society that they simply remain unemployed. The tax burden that they place on the rest of us by so doing is by no means unbearable.
You'll have to open your borders to foreign national companies to mine your natural resources, because you won't have the capital/tools to do so yourself. You'll be paying with terrible standard of living in the future by spending now and not producing. BUT you are right - you are selling your future to the Chinese, they are buying it for worthless money. Enjoy it.
So wait, is the money worthless or isn't it?
People with high pay, pay most of the taxes. Warren Buffet is an old liar when he says he pays less than his secretary. His company pays 35% federal corporate income tax, that's HIS money, he is the largest shareholder.
If he's not cycling his profits through Ireland and paying less than 10% at the company level then he's a rarity. But in any case, those taxes apply to any investor, rich and poor alike.
you CANNOT redistribute wealth. By "redistributing" money via taxes, you are only redistributing MONEY, but wealth is PRODUCTION CAPACITY. It's funny how simple misunderstanding of nomenclature makes such a huge difference. You CAN destroy wealth by taking away all of the investment capital and obviously you will cause more capital flight out of the country, but you can't redistribute wealth.
Again, which is it? If the money is worthless then surely it makes no difference how it is distributed. The rich care about their money precisely because it is wealth, or equivalent to it.
So what did the country end up with? Nothing. Couldn't even FEED itself, had to sell oil and gas for freaking WHEAT. Russia? Ukraine? Couldn't grow enough wheat? Well obviously not, it's because government cannot do actual wealth production. You can confiscate the money and even the TOOLS of production, and with government in charge you will only end up with theft of resources, by those close to it, but there will be no wealth production at all.
Sure, if you confiscate everything then the incentives go wrong, you end up with massive corruption and inefficiency and all the rest of it. But just because 100% taxation is absurd doesn't mean 0% isn't.
Which is exactly what an economy needs - investment capital. Investment capital in the hands of people who will actually use it to increase production capacity, which is what economy needs. Investment capital - the money that does NOT benefit the 'rich', it makes them work.
Of course it benefits the ri
that's not production capacity they have, that's them using the free money to buy back something that at least is better than the currency
No, it's production capacity they have. I'm talking things like factories running below capacity because it would be a waste of money to hire the workers to run them at full capacity, because the product wouldn't sell. A company in that position doesn't benefit from the money of rich people (who invest), because investment isn't what they need. They, and the economy as a whole, benefit from more money being in the hands of poor people (who spend).
"Putting money into hands" is a worthless exercise, if those hands don't produce anything.
So you'd never feed a baby? Call it a Keynesian stimulus if you like; it's worth providing goods those who are currently unproductive, if by doing so we can boost the economy in a way that ultimately makes everyone more productive.
Say we have three people, each of whom is producing something the other two wants. In a healthy economy all of them would be producing at full capacity and trading with each other. But if all of them have no money, each of them buys less, and as a result none of them can sell their full production capability. So they work at below capacity, and everyone ends up with less stuff. That's the situation we're in right now.
If you are stuck in a weird one sided trade, where you build car engines all day long, but when you sell it, you get back pieces of paper but you can buy NOTHING with them, then why the hell did you even bother?
That's a fair question to ask the Chinese. But we're the guys who are getting the car engines and giving them pieces of paper, so why wouldn't we keep doing that as long as we can?
Do you know that USA imports 90% of its sea food? USA is SURROUNDED with oceans, why is it importing 90% of sea food? It's because there is enough demand, but there is no production.
Nope, it's because domestic companies either can't supply what people want, or are uncompetitive. If there was a production problem, i.e. a shortage of investment, US companies would be running their factories flat out and complaining that they couldn't hire enough staff or get the investment to build bigger factories.
when you say: "put money into hands of people", what do you mean exactly?
I mean progressive taxation, i.e. wealth redistribution, i.e. using governmental authority to take money away from the rich (in whose hands it is not benefiting the economy, because all it provides there is investment capital, and we have much more of that than we need right now), and give it to the poor, who will use it to buy more stuff, which leads to increased economic growth - more trade, higher employment, all the things we want from the economy.
Do you think the people should be able NOT to reduce the trade deficit, but still have the money to buy goods from producing nations?
I thought we were talking about rich vs poor here, so I don't really see the relevance of the trade deficit. My point is simply that it is in the interests of the economic wellbeing of the country for wealth to be spread around equitably, rather than concentrated in the hands of the few - and I approve of the use of governmental authority towards this end.
In fact, I'd say that the OSS drivers have (or at least had 8 months ago when I still struggled with fglrx) better 2D performance, If you have a 4096x1536 desktop you could actually count the seconds it took to move a window.
I'm still in that position, so I'm guessing your card is better supported than mine or something. (This is on my work machine; on my home machine with an nvidia card running freebsd everything moves instantly. So I'm in a position to compare)