I'm not sure that giving to universities etc. is self-interest
LIke the AC said, it is quid pro quo. When you get something back in exchange for your donations it isn't really charity. But as long as it isn't directly tangible the IRS can't really tax it so people tend to ignore it.
It's like donating to NPR. When they give you a tote bag the IRS requires that the value of the tote bag be counted against the amount of the donation because it is easy to quantify. While the value you get from be able to listen to NPR isn't easy to measure so it gets a free pass by the IRS, but it is still morally self interest.
Donating to BYU specifically (versus an unaffiliated university) gets him standing in the mormon church. Donating to his kids' private high-school makes sure that his grand-kids are at the front of the line even if they don't necessarily measure up to the school's normal admission standards.
Even if his grand-kids don't end up attending, donating money to a hoity-toity private high-school isn't really about helping the needy - only a small fraction of such donations go to needs-based scholarships, the rest go to school infrastructure that benefits wealthy kids. Is it really charity if it pays for 20 kids to go sailing on the lake for phys-ed and 19 of those kids drive to school in BMWs while 1 can only afford to ride the bus? That's an example from my personal experience at a similar school, with a sailboat donated to the school.
I'm happy with Tesla claiming a 5.4... as long as the same scoring is reported for other cars. I haven't heard a peep about what competing vehicles got when scored the same way. Maybe i missed it, but it sure seemed like none of the 'reporters' were willing to even do the mildest amount of investigation to give the public an honest comparison and that's where the real problem is.
Are these privacy advocates aware that the folks who want this most are the government that they are going to ask to curtail the ability to do it? It's like asking the playground bully to ask for permission to steal your lunch money...
"The government" is not monolithic. It may not be perfectly representative but that is the goal.
Then again, Romney gave away 30% of his income, which is very UNLIKE Clinton and suggests he may be a man of character.
Giving money to your own social clubs like the mormon church and its affiliates like Brigham Young University, or the George W Bush Library, or the private school where 5 of his kids attended isn't charity, it's tax-deductible self-interest.
Before I posted I went and read up on his tax returns, just to make sure that my assumption of self-interest was true. That he hadn't made a liar out of me and my cynicism by really giving the bulk of his donations to organizations that would not benefit himself in one way or another. In the process I found out some interesting "character" related points:
1) His 2010 tax return showed only 11% of his income went to non-profit deductions. The mormon church directly gets 10% straight off the bat as tithing, leaving 1% for everything else. In fact, his own 20-year summary shows he averaged less than 12.6% until the 30% spike in 2011 brought the average up to just under 13.5%. Why such an outlier in 2011 when he had roughly half the income that he did in 2010? Seems to me that once he won the party primary his donations went up.
2) In 2011 he did not claim the maximum allowed tax deductions for his donations. He only claimed a deduction for $2.25 of the $4 million that was eligible. Why would he do that? Well, the guy who runs Romney's family trust said it helped to keep his campaign promise of paying at least 13% in income tax every year. Here's my question, now that he lost the election, did he go back and file an amended return to claim the entire $4M? We will probably never know, maybe a real man of character would not. A real republican would be happy to over-pay his taxes without a complaint, right?
My source for those two points is this article at The Blaze - I figured I'd go with a conservative news source to give Romney the benefit of the doubt in the reporting.
This is not to say the Clintons' donations weren't similar self-serving, that's not my point at all. I'm saying you are drawing a questionable conclusion based on a narrow reading of the facts.
Yes you can private citizen, though It would be very difficult for you to photograph everyone's license plate at various locations all around the city 24/7 and store them forever. And you certainly can't link that person's phone records, bank records, browsing habits, etc.
I agree with the sentiment, but sadly it is out of date. License plates need to be completely rethought in lieu of the new capabilities available to both big brother (government) and little brother (citizenry).
Welcome to 2013, the terrerists are still winning without having to lift a finger.
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in -- and the West in general -- into an unbearable hell and a choking life."
-- Osama bin Laden, Al-Jazeera interview, (21 October 2001)
The short duration exaggerates the issue. If Google were to go away for a day or a week, most everyone would switch to some other service like Bing, etc. But when it goes down for just a few minutes people don't even have time to figure out that google is the problem itself rather than a hiccup in their internet connection. Most people will just hit reload a couple of times, curse, check their phone for text messages and by then everything has recovered and they quickly forget that there even was a problem.
Partner makes it sound like he might have been involved in the journalistic work (and detaining him would still be wrong).
He is involved - he was returning from a trip to Berlin to work with Laura Poitras the documentary film-maker whom Snowden also reached out to. The trip was paid for by Greenwald's newspaper, the Guardian.
I never heard that before, so I googled "field marshall baton napoleon" and found your first sentence, word for word, on the second link. Quote your sources dude. Don't take credit for someone else's words.
No slashdot tenure for auric_dude! Whatever will he do?
I use multiple: AdBlock Plus and Ghostery in my browser, a hosts file
Try RequestPolicy it is better than a hosts file because it is on a per-website basis. You can let "slashdot.org" pull content from "fsdn.net" while blocking all other websites from pulling content from "fsdn.net"
And it is a whitelist system rather than a black-list like the hosts file, adblock and ghostery, so nobody sneaks through just because you haven't updated it. The downside is that if those approaches are like driving an automatic transmission, using RequestPolicy is like driving a stick-shift.
People like you are the easiest ones to sucker because you think you are immune.
This stuff isn't just about overt and in your face advertising. It is also about product-placement, paid-for reviews on big-name websites, shill reviews on "consumer" websites and pretty much anything people with hundred million dollar marketing budgets can come up with - like this nationwide campaign
If you believe that you are able to withstand a hundred million dollars worth of research into how to manipulate the human psyche, you are delusional.
Advertising (really marketing) is at least two things:
1) To inform you of options to fill a need. 2) To convince you that you have a need.
(1) is useful in society, (2) is destructive to society
The problem is that practically all marketing tends to (2) over time. For example, sexy girls in advertisements. When they are in ads for stereotypically men's products (like beer) its obvious they are of type 2, but even when they are in ads for women's products like clothing they are still manipulative because they tell women if you just had this product you would be sexy too.
We (the people) gave them a little power, and they grossly over stepped the bounds.
I don't think it is useful to exaggerate. We don't have any evidence (yet) of malicious intent - almost all of the stuff in this report was just sloppiness because nobody was there to keep them in line. It isn't like they were digging up dirt on political candidates in order to sway elections or blackmailing the leaders of the Occupy movement to make them back off.
On the flip-side it is useful to note that this was an internal report - pretty much guaranteed not to turn up anything heinous because that would be career suicide for the investigators who report to the same command-structure they are investigating. So the relatively benign level of abuse is not proof that really bad shit has not happened, it just wouldn't be in this report if it did happen.
Take for instance, with personal cellphone jammers. They are illegal in the united states, specifically cited by the FCC. The reason, is that they disrupt vital comminications infrastructure,
That is untrue. They are illegal because they are not licensed to broadcast on those frequencies. The FCC doesn't allow ANY unlicensed broadcasters on restricted frequencies, no matter what the reason. Every cell phone has to get FCC licensing before it can be legally used in the US.
I was just wondering if there were someone that you could positively say was a leader, if not a king, of the cunts, and then you posted affirming that it was indeed the case.
Thank you, I certainly have had more than my fair share of cunts, but right now I'm mainly a one-cunt guy.
the license plate experiment was done by testing license plate cameras with a wide range of products, including the one the parent mentioned.
No they did not. I don't even need to watch the episode to know they didn't test the nophoto camera jammer - because it didn't exist 6 years ago when they ran the show. It is the result of an indiegogo crowd-funding campaign and only started shipping this year.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that giving to universities etc. is self-interest
LIke the AC said, it is quid pro quo. When you get something back in exchange for your donations it isn't really charity. But as long as it isn't directly tangible the IRS can't really tax it so people tend to ignore it.
It's like donating to NPR. When they give you a tote bag the IRS requires that the value of the tote bag be counted against the amount of the donation because it is easy to quantify. While the value you get from be able to listen to NPR isn't easy to measure so it gets a free pass by the IRS, but it is still morally self interest.
Donating to BYU specifically (versus an unaffiliated university) gets him standing in the mormon church. Donating to his kids' private high-school makes sure that his grand-kids are at the front of the line even if they don't necessarily measure up to the school's normal admission standards.
Even if his grand-kids don't end up attending, donating money to a hoity-toity private high-school isn't really about helping the needy - only a small fraction of such donations go to needs-based scholarships, the rest go to school infrastructure that benefits wealthy kids. Is it really charity if it pays for 20 kids to go sailing on the lake for phys-ed and 19 of those kids drive to school in BMWs while 1 can only afford to ride the bus? That's an example from my personal experience at a similar school, with a sailboat donated to the school.
I'm happy with Tesla claiming a 5.4 ... as long as the same scoring is reported for other cars. I haven't heard a peep about what competing vehicles got when scored the same way. Maybe i missed it, but it sure seemed like none of the 'reporters' were willing to even do the mildest amount of investigation to give the public an honest comparison and that's where the real problem is.
Are these privacy advocates aware that the folks who want this most are the government that they are going to ask to curtail the ability to do it? It's like asking the playground bully to ask for permission to steal your lunch money...
"The government" is not monolithic. It may not be perfectly representative but that is the goal.
Then again, Romney gave away 30% of his income, which is very UNLIKE Clinton and suggests he may be a man of character.
Giving money to your own social clubs like the mormon church and its affiliates like Brigham Young University, or the George W Bush Library, or the private school where 5 of his kids attended isn't charity, it's tax-deductible self-interest.
Before I posted I went and read up on his tax returns, just to make sure that my assumption of self-interest was true. That he hadn't made a liar out of me and my cynicism by really giving the bulk of his donations to organizations that would not benefit himself in one way or another. In the process I found out some interesting "character" related points:
1) His 2010 tax return showed only 11% of his income went to non-profit deductions. The mormon church directly gets 10% straight off the bat as tithing, leaving 1% for everything else. In fact, his own 20-year summary shows he averaged less than 12.6% until the 30% spike in 2011 brought the average up to just under 13.5%. Why such an outlier in 2011 when he had roughly half the income that he did in 2010? Seems to me that once he won the party primary his donations went up.
2) In 2011 he did not claim the maximum allowed tax deductions for his donations. He only claimed a deduction for $2.25 of the $4 million that was eligible. Why would he do that? Well, the guy who runs Romney's family trust said it helped to keep his campaign promise of paying at least 13% in income tax every year. Here's my question, now that he lost the election, did he go back and file an amended return to claim the entire $4M? We will probably never know, maybe a real man of character would not. A real republican would be happy to over-pay his taxes without a complaint, right?
My source for those two points is this article at The Blaze - I figured I'd go with a conservative news source to give Romney the benefit of the doubt in the reporting.
This is not to say the Clintons' donations weren't similar self-serving, that's not my point at all. I'm saying you are drawing a questionable conclusion based on a narrow reading of the facts.
Yes you can private citizen, though It would be very difficult for you to photograph everyone's license plate at various locations all around the city 24/7 and store them forever. And you certainly can't link that person's phone records, bank records, browsing habits, etc.
I agree with the sentiment, but sadly it is out of date. License plates need to be completely rethought in lieu of the new capabilities available to both big brother (government) and little brother (citizenry).
First it was only repo-men: License plate data not just for cops: Private companies are tracking your car
But the allure of monetizing those databases was too much, so the lobbying began: MVTRAC Spearheads Victory Over California SB 1330
And now the same companies that do track your phone calls, your bank records and your browsing habits are also selling license-plate tracking data:
Data Brokers Are Now Selling Your Car's Location For $10 Online
And just for shits and giggles I'm going to throw this one in, brought to you by those data brokers: Your employer may share your salary, and Equifax might sell that data
The terrorists' surrogate army has outposts at every airport in the land reminding people constantly that their ability to travel freely is limited.
Best fucking backronym for the TSA ever.
Welcome to 2013, the terrerists are still winning without having to lift a finger.
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in -- and the West in general -- into an unbearable hell and a choking life."
-- Osama bin Laden, Al-Jazeera interview, (21 October 2001)
On behallf of Monsanto let me say, "Tough shit!"
The short duration exaggerates the issue. If Google were to go away for a day or a week, most everyone would switch to some other service like Bing, etc. But when it goes down for just a few minutes people don't even have time to figure out that google is the problem itself rather than a hiccup in their internet connection. Most people will just hit reload a couple of times, curse, check their phone for text messages and by then everything has recovered and they quickly forget that there even was a problem.
> Switch to a brain controlled interface.
And then when your brain wears out you are totally screwed!
However it does not work to stop anyone who just uses numeric ip addresses.
So how long until he gets laryngitis and has to start typing again?
Partner makes it sound like he might have been involved in the journalistic work (and detaining him would still be wrong).
He is involved - he was returning from a trip to Berlin to work with Laura Poitras the documentary film-maker whom Snowden also reached out to. The trip was paid for by Greenwald's newspaper, the Guardian.
I never heard that before, so I googled "field marshall baton napoleon" and found your first sentence, word for word, on the second link. Quote your sources dude. Don't take credit for someone else's words.
No slashdot tenure for auric_dude! Whatever will he do?
> Advertising campaigns can also educate.
Yeah? Name one.of any significance.
Please say a pharmaceutical.
What it won't include: Pirate Sites
I use multiple: AdBlock Plus and Ghostery in my browser, a hosts file
Try RequestPolicy it is better than a hosts file because it is on a per-website basis. You can let "slashdot.org" pull content from "fsdn.net" while blocking all other websites from pulling content from "fsdn.net"
And it is a whitelist system rather than a black-list like the hosts file, adblock and ghostery, so nobody sneaks through just because you haven't updated it. The downside is that if those approaches are like driving an automatic transmission, using RequestPolicy is like driving a stick-shift.
This only affects stupid people.
People like you are the easiest ones to sucker because you think you are immune.
This stuff isn't just about overt and in your face advertising. It is also about product-placement, paid-for reviews on big-name websites, shill reviews on "consumer" websites and pretty much anything people with hundred million dollar marketing budgets can come up with - like this nationwide campaign
If you believe that you are able to withstand a hundred million dollars worth of research into how to manipulate the human psyche, you are delusional.
No, your definition is bogus.
No, your definition is bogus.
Advertising (really marketing) is at least two things:
1) To inform you of options to fill a need.
2) To convince you that you have a need.
(1) is useful in society, (2) is destructive to society
The problem is that practically all marketing tends to (2) over time. For example, sexy girls in advertisements. When they are in ads for stereotypically men's products (like beer) its obvious they are of type 2, but even when they are in ads for women's products like clothing they are still manipulative because they tell women if you just had this product you would be sexy too.
We (the people) gave them a little power, and they grossly over stepped the bounds.
I don't think it is useful to exaggerate. We don't have any evidence (yet) of malicious intent - almost all of the stuff in this report was just sloppiness because nobody was there to keep them in line. It isn't like they were digging up dirt on political candidates in order to sway elections or blackmailing the leaders of the Occupy movement to make them back off.
On the flip-side it is useful to note that this was an internal report - pretty much guaranteed not to turn up anything heinous because that would be career suicide for the investigators who report to the same command-structure they are investigating. So the relatively benign level of abuse is not proof that really bad shit has not happened, it just wouldn't be in this report if it did happen.
Take for instance, with personal cellphone jammers. They are illegal in the united states, specifically cited by the FCC. The reason, is that they disrupt vital comminications infrastructure,
That is untrue. They are illegal because they are not licensed to broadcast on those frequencies. The FCC doesn't allow ANY unlicensed broadcasters on restricted frequencies, no matter what the reason. Every cell phone has to get FCC licensing before it can be legally used in the US.
I was just wondering if there were someone that you could positively say was a leader, if not a king, of the cunts, and then you posted affirming that it was indeed the case.
Thank you, I certainly have had more than my fair share of cunts, but right now I'm mainly a one-cunt guy.
the license plate experiment was done by testing license plate cameras with a wide range of products, including the one the parent mentioned.
No they did not. I don't even need to watch the episode to know they didn't test the nophoto camera jammer - because it didn't exist 6 years ago when they ran the show. It is the result of an indiegogo crowd-funding campaign and only started shipping this year.
I cannot imagine how people think deliberately obscuring your license plate could ever possibly be legal.
Because it isn't obscured - to humans. The law doesn't say it needs to be readable by machines.
Be warned however; while this won't happen to humans, animals like cats have eyes which produce similar effect.
Yeah, people never get red-eye in photos.