Trust me it's really popular to call new sources of revenue (or old ones renamed and raised) as "fees" rather than taxes. That way politicians get to proclaim in their campaigns that they've never voted to raise "taxes". Sure your bill is higher, but it's the "fees", not more taxes.
You do realize there's all sorts of levels of "government" right?
I work for a local (county) government myself. My salary is mostly funded by the county's main source of income: property taxes (with a bit extra from sales taxes).
Income tax goes to the federal and state government. Why would I not pay taxes to those entities when my salary isn't being funded by it?
Or if you go to state employees - why withhold the federal government's taxes when their salary is funded mostly by state income taxes (and vice versa)?
If I had a nickel for every time some internet genius thought there was some simple fix to all of government's problems I'd be rich enough to all ALL of our taxes.
Shouldn't any reasonable marketing idiot realize that actually having a feature that prevents the automatic car from driving into someone and NOT making it standard is a recipe for a major lawsuit?
Saying "You know, we tried to make it work, and just couldn't, so be careful." is a lot more defensible than saying "We figured we could withhold a vital safety feature in order to charge another few hundred bucks for it.".
Not always. County and local roads are funding largely by the county, but not all of their budget comes from property taxes. A lot of their budget comes from the state, or from special option taxes (ie, our county has an extra $0.01 on the dollar of sales tax specifically for road improvements). They also can get federal grants and such.
Dwindling? 63% of the population supports the death penalty, and the low point in public support was actually back in the 1960's. Indeed over the last century support has gone up and down here and there but there is no downward trend overall. We're actually higher in support now than when the first poll was done in 1936.
I see you couldn't address my simple question. Why doesn't he want to live in Africa, among his own race, and ONLY his own race? Could it possibly be because he is a 'white supremacist', and believes that white people make better societies than blacks do?
Perhaps because most people don't take race into account at all for such positions and economically people tend to be much better off in the US? Afterall if his goal was to live among white people as you suggest then several countries in Europe would be a far more sensible choice.
For Christianity, that means hating gays, subjugating minorities, and living a selfish, materialistic life while judging others.
Perspective. Christians over here are greedy, call some people some mean names, and are refusing to make a few gay wedding cakes, whilst Muslims are hacking up and beheading people with machetes and you try to draw an equivalence?
Um, I'm not a religious person myself, but I grew up in one of the most backwoods fundamentalist Southern Baptist Christian families you can imagine. Even they viewed the Old Testament as basically "good reading" that was completely superseded by the New Testament.
You generally can use the Old Testament as a guide (ie, the Ten Commandments), but if it is contradicted AT ALL by the New Testament then the New Testament takes precedence.
In terms of raw performance ability, AMD still lags a good bit. In terms of performance per $$$ AMD still isn't a bad value.
IMHO for standard consumer and business desktops AMD is still plenty fine. The servers, high-end workstations, and gaming market is where they have issues. They just have no high-performance chips (at any price) to compete in those sectors.
Or you could just have a regular coffee maker for such occurrences and a Keurig for day-to-day. My little drip coffee maker normally sits under the cabinet unless I need to make a pot (rare). It cost like $20.
I do think that the whole "University party culture" thing has seriously warped our societal view of higher education.
There are ton of people who don't view college as anything but a chance to go wild for 4 years. When I enrolled it was obvious that around half the students there were basically just a bunch of children that were finally turned loose without parental supervision.
Heck I went to a state university with 7 students from my high school graduating class (only 3 of which graduated). One girl dropped out after 1 year, but got a fast food job right next to campus (4 hours away from home) just so that she could continue to party with all people still in college.
You make the assumption that everyone finds the social process of "wooing" someone to be enjoyable. To some its fun - to others its absolute tedious and unenjoyable work. Time is money, and personally 4 hours of time is worth far more than $100.
Well, I guess it is a result of selecting differently based on personal preferences, parties and companies that need bought women, vs those who don't.
This weird taboo attitude towards sex confuses me.
Compare it to say, food. How much sense would it make if someone was proudly proclaiming their social and masculine prowess because they flew into a foreign town and then managed to track down a random stranger and after several hours of conversation and work, they convinced this stranger to cook them dinner. Might not even be a good dinner, but by golly they cooked it.
You'd consider them half crazy for not just going to a restaurant and ordering something - that would have probably been more enjoyable. As crazy as it sounds though, we attach that same thought process to sex. A guy who spends 4 hours worth of time and $200 in drinks and dinner to bed some random girl is seen as awesome while a guy who cuts to the chase with a $300 prostitute is shunned.
And the best (or I guess worst) excuse I've heard - from women - as to why prostitution shouldn't be legalized? Because if men had access to sex that easily they'd lose too much power in the relationship. That's the honest to goodness answer I've heard from quite a few of them.
If that happens one bullet doesn't typically "push" the other one out. Typically a bore obstruction will cause pressure to build dramatically resulting in a buldged and potentially ruptured barrel. You'd still quite possibly die with the gun to your head - but you wouldn't likely have 2 bullets in it.
BTW - usually this occurs on accident, not intentionally. Often times following what's termed a "squib" - a round of ammunition with a primer seated but no gun powder. The primer detonates and is enough to drive the bullet slightly into the barrel, but not out of it.
This is particularly a problem on a revolver. On a semi-auto a squib usually won't cycle the action, meaning you'd have to clear a jam first and might likely realize that something is wrong (a squib sounds very, very quiet compared to a normal shot). On a revolver though if you're shooting the next cylinder will just rotate into place and fire - the action isn't powered by the previous shot.
I've written PHP, Java, Javascript, C#, C++, C, and VB (and have dabbled in Ruby and Python), and I still don't get the hate for PHP. Granted, weakly-typed variables are a bit aggravating, but that's the only major complaint I have with it.
I pretty much hate our "disposable" culture anyways. Building things to a higher quality and repairing them when they break is just much more resource friendly - and you end up with better stuff to boot.
Which is better - a $15 waffle iron from Walmart that breaks and needs to be replaced every other year - or a $75 one that will last 25 years and when it does eventually break can be fixed for $10 to run another year? Which uses less raw materials over the life of the product? Think about not only the construction materials but also the packaging as each time that replacement comes in more plastic, cardboard, and styrofoam packaging.
As a people (and really as a planet) we seem to have forsaken and inclination to look at things from a long term perspective - its all about what's cheap in the short term. Eventually we will have to look at things differently.
To my knowledge (correct me if I'm wrong), the money from tickets issued by the police goes at least partially to the local county and state
You're correct that in most (all?) of the US the local municipality gets a portion of any driving citations.
That's why many of them (at least here in SC) will often issue a "Careless Operation" ticket when they pull you over as a "favor". A speeding ticket here is often less than $100 but levies "points" against your license (ie, they make your insurance rate go up). Careless Operation runs around $250 but has no points associated, so your insurance generally isn't affected. The drivers thinks they're getting off lucky as the extra $150 in fines is much lower than the difference in insurance premiums would be and the police get a portion of a larger fine.
There is actually one small town nearby here that is documented to have over 2/3 of its annual budget come from traffic citations. The "town" is little more than an intersection with a population of under 100 people, but they have a police force of exactly 1 officer who just writes tickets all day long. The speed limit conveniently drops from 55 mph to 35 mph for about 1/4 mile while driving through there. Locals know better than to speed through that area, but they mostly catch people just passing through. I've always joked with friends that its a ticketable offense to drive through there with out-of-state plates.
The Chinese, Indian and Eastern European devs are starting to get costly
That's not necessarily a bad thing. As the living standards an education levels of each group goes up eventually places run out of cheap backwaters to outsource to. Eventually the whole world gets more skilled and more prosperous.
Trust me. A government can keep the lower class down. They can tax us into oblivion, and take away most of our freedoms and we'll take it in stride. Take away the porn though, and the peasants will burn this bitch down.
The Wright brothers pretty much killed off the fledgling aviation industry in the US by patenting everything related to aviation
Patents also helped here though - sometimes designing around them spurs innovation.
The Wright Brothers had a "warping wing" method for turning the plane that they had patented. To get around that patent aileron's were invented - and were a far superior technology.
Compared to Ouya most certainly, but Amazon has 15x the market cap of Nvidia. The only thing Nvidia has there is potentially better hardware specs, and a stronger brand identification with the games industry.
Although one thing that may have hobbled the FireTV was making the game controller an optional accessory. It is harder to convince devs to target a platform when only part of your userbase can really take advantage of stuff.
Honestly, I don't doubt the technical feasibility of an Android console, but they just don't seem to be catching on.
I was one of the "early adopters" that bought an Ouya. I figured I would mostly use it for XBMC anyways and the games would just be a bonus. Thankfully XBMC works OK as the games never really materialized there (the Final Fantasy ports are about the only thing decent available).
I also bought a FireTV - again, mostly as a video device (Netflix, Hulu) for the living room TV. Again - the games haven't really taken off. The Telltale games are available on it (but then again they're available almost everywhere) and I did see SW: Knights of the Old Republic was made available for it, but overall its pretty stale.
Personally, I'm not going to be rushing out for this one until it proves itself to not be another flop. The only thing that MIGHT would interest me would be the ability to stream games from a PC, but all the steaming options I've seen in the past recommend a wireless or "robust" Wifi connection, which I generally interpret to mean it'll suck over WIFI.
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Trust me it's really popular to call new sources of revenue (or old ones renamed and raised) as "fees" rather than taxes. That way politicians get to proclaim in their campaigns that they've never voted to raise "taxes". Sure your bill is higher, but it's the "fees", not more taxes.
By making it not taxable, they could be causing an employee to drop into a lower tax bracket overall.
"Lower tax brackets" (or rather, their effect on taxes) are a persistent myth.
There are tax brackets, but you're only taxed at the higher rate for overage from the previous tax bracket.
http://blog.taxact.com/how-tax...
You do realize there's all sorts of levels of "government" right?
I work for a local (county) government myself. My salary is mostly funded by the county's main source of income: property taxes (with a bit extra from sales taxes).
Income tax goes to the federal and state government. Why would I not pay taxes to those entities when my salary isn't being funded by it?
Or if you go to state employees - why withhold the federal government's taxes when their salary is funded mostly by state income taxes (and vice versa)?
If I had a nickel for every time some internet genius thought there was some simple fix to all of government's problems I'd be rich enough to all ALL of our taxes.
Shouldn't any reasonable marketing idiot realize that actually having a feature that prevents the automatic car from driving into someone and NOT making it standard is a recipe for a major lawsuit?
Saying "You know, we tried to make it work, and just couldn't, so be careful." is a lot more defensible than saying "We figured we could withhold a vital safety feature in order to charge another few hundred bucks for it.".
Not always. County and local roads are funding largely by the county, but not all of their budget comes from property taxes. A lot of their budget comes from the state, or from special option taxes (ie, our county has an extra $0.01 on the dollar of sales tax specifically for road improvements). They also can get federal grants and such.
Dwindling? 63% of the population supports the death penalty, and the low point in public support was actually back in the 1960's. Indeed over the last century support has gone up and down here and there but there is no downward trend overall. We're actually higher in support now than when the first poll was done in 1936.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/160...
I see you couldn't address my simple question.
Why doesn't he want to live in Africa, among his own race, and ONLY his own race? Could it possibly be because he is a 'white supremacist', and believes that white people make better societies than blacks do?
Perhaps because most people don't take race into account at all for such positions and economically people tend to be much better off in the US? Afterall if his goal was to live among white people as you suggest then several countries in Europe would be a far more sensible choice.
For Christianity, that means hating gays, subjugating minorities, and living a selfish, materialistic life while judging others.
Perspective. Christians over here are greedy, call some people some mean names, and are refusing to make a few gay wedding cakes, whilst Muslims are hacking up and beheading people with machetes and you try to draw an equivalence?
Um, I'm not a religious person myself, but I grew up in one of the most backwoods fundamentalist Southern Baptist Christian families you can imagine. Even they viewed the Old Testament as basically "good reading" that was completely superseded by the New Testament.
You generally can use the Old Testament as a guide (ie, the Ten Commandments), but if it is contradicted AT ALL by the New Testament then the New Testament takes precedence.
And how far back was that? Not likely more than 30 years. A far cry from "always".
In terms of raw performance ability, AMD still lags a good bit. In terms of performance per $$$ AMD still isn't a bad value.
IMHO for standard consumer and business desktops AMD is still plenty fine. The servers, high-end workstations, and gaming market is where they have issues. They just have no high-performance chips (at any price) to compete in those sectors.
Or you could just have a regular coffee maker for such occurrences and a Keurig for day-to-day. My little drip coffee maker normally sits under the cabinet unless I need to make a pot (rare). It cost like $20.
That's kinda just restating what he was saying . . .
I do think that the whole "University party culture" thing has seriously warped our societal view of higher education.
There are ton of people who don't view college as anything but a chance to go wild for 4 years. When I enrolled it was obvious that around half the students there were basically just a bunch of children that were finally turned loose without parental supervision.
Heck I went to a state university with 7 students from my high school graduating class (only 3 of which graduated). One girl dropped out after 1 year, but got a fast food job right next to campus (4 hours away from home) just so that she could continue to party with all people still in college.
You make the assumption that everyone finds the social process of "wooing" someone to be enjoyable. To some its fun - to others its absolute tedious and unenjoyable work. Time is money, and personally 4 hours of time is worth far more than $100.
Well, I guess it is a result of selecting differently based on personal preferences, parties and companies that need bought women, vs those who don't.
This weird taboo attitude towards sex confuses me.
Compare it to say, food. How much sense would it make if someone was proudly proclaiming their social and masculine prowess because they flew into a foreign town and then managed to track down a random stranger and after several hours of conversation and work, they convinced this stranger to cook them dinner. Might not even be a good dinner, but by golly they cooked it.
You'd consider them half crazy for not just going to a restaurant and ordering something - that would have probably been more enjoyable. As crazy as it sounds though, we attach that same thought process to sex. A guy who spends 4 hours worth of time and $200 in drinks and dinner to bed some random girl is seen as awesome while a guy who cuts to the chase with a $300 prostitute is shunned.
And the best (or I guess worst) excuse I've heard - from women - as to why prostitution shouldn't be legalized? Because if men had access to sex that easily they'd lose too much power in the relationship. That's the honest to goodness answer I've heard from quite a few of them.
If that happens one bullet doesn't typically "push" the other one out. Typically a bore obstruction will cause pressure to build dramatically resulting in a buldged and potentially ruptured barrel. You'd still quite possibly die with the gun to your head - but you wouldn't likely have 2 bullets in it.
BTW - usually this occurs on accident, not intentionally. Often times following what's termed a "squib" - a round of ammunition with a primer seated but no gun powder. The primer detonates and is enough to drive the bullet slightly into the barrel, but not out of it.
This is particularly a problem on a revolver. On a semi-auto a squib usually won't cycle the action, meaning you'd have to clear a jam first and might likely realize that something is wrong (a squib sounds very, very quiet compared to a normal shot). On a revolver though if you're shooting the next cylinder will just rotate into place and fire - the action isn't powered by the previous shot.
I've written PHP, Java, Javascript, C#, C++, C, and VB (and have dabbled in Ruby and Python), and I still don't get the hate for PHP. Granted, weakly-typed variables are a bit aggravating, but that's the only major complaint I have with it.
I pretty much hate our "disposable" culture anyways. Building things to a higher quality and repairing them when they break is just much more resource friendly - and you end up with better stuff to boot.
Which is better - a $15 waffle iron from Walmart that breaks and needs to be replaced every other year - or a $75 one that will last 25 years and when it does eventually break can be fixed for $10 to run another year? Which uses less raw materials over the life of the product? Think about not only the construction materials but also the packaging as each time that replacement comes in more plastic, cardboard, and styrofoam packaging.
As a people (and really as a planet) we seem to have forsaken and inclination to look at things from a long term perspective - its all about what's cheap in the short term. Eventually we will have to look at things differently.
To my knowledge (correct me if I'm wrong), the money from tickets issued by the police goes at least partially to the local county and state
You're correct that in most (all?) of the US the local municipality gets a portion of any driving citations.
That's why many of them (at least here in SC) will often issue a "Careless Operation" ticket when they pull you over as a "favor". A speeding ticket here is often less than $100 but levies "points" against your license (ie, they make your insurance rate go up). Careless Operation runs around $250 but has no points associated, so your insurance generally isn't affected. The drivers thinks they're getting off lucky as the extra $150 in fines is much lower than the difference in insurance premiums would be and the police get a portion of a larger fine.
There is actually one small town nearby here that is documented to have over 2/3 of its annual budget come from traffic citations. The "town" is little more than an intersection with a population of under 100 people, but they have a police force of exactly 1 officer who just writes tickets all day long. The speed limit conveniently drops from 55 mph to 35 mph for about 1/4 mile while driving through there. Locals know better than to speed through that area, but they mostly catch people just passing through. I've always joked with friends that its a ticketable offense to drive through there with out-of-state plates.
The Chinese, Indian and Eastern European devs are starting to get costly
That's not necessarily a bad thing. As the living standards an education levels of each group goes up eventually places run out of cheap backwaters to outsource to. Eventually the whole world gets more skilled and more prosperous.
Trust me. A government can keep the lower class down. They can tax us into oblivion, and take away most of our freedoms and we'll take it in stride. Take away the porn though, and the peasants will burn this bitch down.
The Wright brothers pretty much killed off the fledgling aviation industry in the US by patenting everything related to aviation
Patents also helped here though - sometimes designing around them spurs innovation.
The Wright Brothers had a "warping wing" method for turning the plane that they had patented. To get around that patent aileron's were invented - and were a far superior technology.
Compared to Ouya most certainly, but Amazon has 15x the market cap of Nvidia. The only thing Nvidia has there is potentially better hardware specs, and a stronger brand identification with the games industry.
Although one thing that may have hobbled the FireTV was making the game controller an optional accessory. It is harder to convince devs to target a platform when only part of your userbase can really take advantage of stuff.
Honestly, I don't doubt the technical feasibility of an Android console, but they just don't seem to be catching on.
I was one of the "early adopters" that bought an Ouya. I figured I would mostly use it for XBMC anyways and the games would just be a bonus. Thankfully XBMC works OK as the games never really materialized there (the Final Fantasy ports are about the only thing decent available).
I also bought a FireTV - again, mostly as a video device (Netflix, Hulu) for the living room TV. Again - the games haven't really taken off. The Telltale games are available on it (but then again they're available almost everywhere) and I did see SW: Knights of the Old Republic was made available for it, but overall its pretty stale.
Personally, I'm not going to be rushing out for this one until it proves itself to not be another flop. The only thing that MIGHT would interest me would be the ability to stream games from a PC, but all the steaming options I've seen in the past recommend a wireless or "robust" Wifi connection, which I generally interpret to mean it'll suck over WIFI.