Spending has gone up twice as much (in constant dollars) over the last 30 years as revenue has. Based on that, it's pretty difficult to make a good case that the issue is revenue and not out of control spending.
Total non-sequitur. You are blaming a gap between two numbers exclusively on one of them and don't even notice what you're doing.
I'm trying to not do the opposite. I'm not claiming it is all a revenue issue. However, when you do tax cuts at the same time as increased spending, you can't blame the spending alone. I don't even understand how any sane person could even argue that point.
Every time some cretin tries to shoe-horn the entirety of computer programming into one simple paradigm, a ton of other cretins jump up and down hailing him as the new messiah.
And then, after a couple years worth of CS students have been corrupted with this useless crap and it hits the real world, it turns out that life is a wee bit more complicated.
The fight to limit spending is a fight for the economy.
In logic 101, you learn to look for assumptions first, because if an assumption is wrong, then the entire rest of the logic chain doesn't need to be examined anymore, as it is meaningless.
Your wrong assumption is that the problem is with the spending. But a deficit is not a problem of high spending, it is a problem of spending more than you have. You can fix it by reducing your spending, or by increasing your income.
Would it make sence to trim your spending to borrow less?
Most western countries have been cutting all kinds of expenditure for two decades now. The cuts have not been equally distributed - military spending has not been affected as much as social spending, for example.
At the same time, taxes have been abolished or reduced for the top income brackets. No, wait, for the very, very top only. I consistently earned quite well for most of that time, I've seen personally what the press has only picked up recently: The destruction of the middle class. The gap between me and the guy working at the supermarket hasn't changed all that much. But the gap between me and the guy who owns supermarket chain, that has become insane.
If you raise taxes on property and wealth by 1%, then half of the additional income from that tax will come from the famous 1% that Occupy has been going on about.
So if you think that the poor can't survive a 1% tax increase, then increase the tax 2% for the top 1% income bracket, and you will get the same net tax increase. I don't know many billionaires who'd have to starve if they were taxed 2% more.
Left unsaid in the linked article, (and also the Square website) is how square is going to monetize this, other than by *cough* losing one out of a hundred payments.
No need to get paranoid there. Many online services are introduced for free and fees are added on later. Unless I'm horribly mistaken, PayPal started out that way, too.
I live in (west) Germany. We had a surveilance state next door for decades, and many people I know used to live there. They all knew that phone and letters were being listened to. No one made much of a fuss, because - well, you could be locked up for it. But it did change the way society worked. And when things finally came to blows, the mass-surveilance was one of the reasons people actually took to the streets.
I wouldn't be surprised if this alone is not enough to set the average american in motion. But it may add up with other things, like being out of a job, having your house and car reposessed, whatever else happens. There's a limit to what people are willing to take.
Stop seeing every issue in isolation and start seeing them as part of a whole.
At least as far back as Machiavelli, people in power know that the best way to prevent the masses from protesting is to make sure they have too much to lose.
In foreign politics, the US has publicly available documents that spell out how young men are the main source of unrest in contries like Iraq. More specifically: Unmarried, unemployed young men. As soon as they have a job, some personal wealth and/or especially a family, they stop making trouble.
It's all about the pyramid of needs. If I threaten you with hunger, your civil liberties suddenly become a lot less important.
And that's what a bad economy, high unemployment, cuts in social security, etc. do - they increase uncertainty and fear for basic needs.
Can Free Software do any better, than to imitate the broken Microsoft model?
Yes, it could. Unfortunately, it doesn't because some morons have decided that copying is more important than inventing.
There are a couple of really good and different tools, like LyX. But honestly, the problem with productivity tools like these is that they aren't cool and sexy, so it needs momentum to carry the developers, because the coolness alone doesn't do it.
We have 4-5 parties in our parliament. And yet, the votes go ever closer to 50/50 - not of two parties, but of the two most likely coalitions.
For over 10 years now, we've not had one national election in which things were not close enough for coalition agreements to decide who rules, not the popular vote.
Evil requires coercion and can't exist without it.
That's evil for the primitive evil overlord. The really evil people are the ones who make you believe that they've earned it all and you work for them off your own, free will. Because if your force people, they will try to escape at the first opportunity. But if you convince them that it was their choice, we have these funny psychological processes in our heads that make us defend our past choices, even if we're presented with evidence that they were wrong.
Actually counting the votes is a pointless expense. The system works just as well by flipping a coin.
People as a whole already know that. Just individuals don't realize it yet.
People misunderstand things like "swarm intelligence", but you can see it in elections. For decades now, in most western countries, the election results have become ever closer to the coin toss - 50/50 distribution. That is swarm intelligence at work. Individually, most people still think their vote makes a difference, but collectively, we've already realized that it doesn't matter and the choices are identical.
The mighty, wealthy, whatever you call it will always strive to get or stay in control. It's human nature, I wouldn't even call it evil.
The evil part is that in order to do so, they will subvert the very institutions that were meant to prevent it. With democracy, it didn't take too long, but it's been a boiling-frog problem - instead of revolutions and big changes, it simply drifted over time.
It's not a USA and it's not a two-party problem. We have 4-5 countries in the parliament in my country (depending on how the election went, some of the smaller parties sometimes don't make it in). And still, when it comes to the day-to-day politics, you can write a complete list of the differences between them on a very small piece of paper.
In the words of a local satirist: "Are you trying to sell me shit in different flavors?"
Hell, even my credit card company doesn't screw me over
Or you don't notice. Remember that money is not the only thing they can screw you with.
For example, I'm getting more and more angry every time YouTube tries to convince me to use my real name, and it never goes away. The best you get out of it is "ok, we'll ask you again later". No, you stupid piece of crap, I want you to accept my answer once and for all, period.
But, Google wants your personal data, because that is what they are selling to their customers (which isn't you, you're the product). So they keep insisting as much as they can get away with. Because my account data with my real name on it would be more valuable then without.
Some companies screw you on service fees, some on quality, some on customer service - but they all screw you somewhere.
While this is true, I think the author was pointing out one of the 'flaws' of capitalism; Technology and infrastructure makes offering such amenities a very cheap proposition. And yet, you wind up paying through the nose for them in certain situations;
What makes you think that's a flaw, and not a feature?
It is basically a misrepresentation of the true cost of the good or service being provided.
Ah, you are thinking free market and capitalism are the same thing. Yes, the rest of your comment pretty much indicates that as well. Well, time to wake up and realize that they aren't.
Capitalism simply means that the means to production are in the hands of private entities (companies or individuals), in contrast to ownership by cooperatives, the state, or the nobility.
The Free Market theory is about how trade and exchange of goods happen. Nothing in the theory requires the buyers or sellers to be capitalists. You could easily have socialist collectives exchanging goods between them on a free market, for example.
A true free market system works best when all the agents have equal access to the data needed to make informed decisions;
Wrong. It seems to be a detail, but it is one of the most important ones: A free market doesn't work "best" under this condition, it is a precondition. If you do not have total information, you do not have a free market, period. Which, yes, means each and every single market in the real world is not a free market, but an approximation.
That's not just semantics. When dealing with the real world, you should never forget that the conclusions from the free market theory may or may not apply.
What could've been a good article is, unfortunately, just your typical uninformed zero-research blog rant.
What's missing is what journalism is all about: Going deeper, finding the causes, even if they are more then one step away.
For example, why do some hotels charge for Internet and others don't? No, it's not the price, that is counterintuitive (cheap hotels often offer free Internet, expensive ones charge, as the article also says). So what is it? Well, other articles on the topic that did some actual research dug up the answer years ago: It's not the price, it's the guests. Hotels that are largely frequented by business travellers will charge, because a) their guests really need Internet and b) are ready to pay for it because it's business expenses anyways. Hotels that are largely frequented by tourists offer free-of-charge, because their customers would probably go to a nearby Starbucks instead if they charged and Internet or not may be the deciding factor between this hotel or the other one down the road as in the low price range there are fewer actual differences between the hotels.
If stuff like that had been in the article for the other 4 items as well, it would've been a good read.
For example, if you locked your keys in your car and had to break a window to get them, would you really not tell the cop this and instead remain silent?
The best thing to do is to call the police, tell them about the situation, and then proceed to open your car.
The police isn't always your enemy. I've worked with the police in business situations, and in that case everything changes. But if you are approached by the police, the first rule to remember is that the police officer is not your friend. At best, he is currently trying to figure if he wants to be your friend or not, i.e. if you're a criminal.
For my money, I will take the advice of every defense attorney who has spoken on whether one should talk to police which is DO NOT TALK TO THE POLICE WITHOUT THE PRESENCE OF YOUR ATTORNEY.
I dimly remember (never been in that situation, fortunately) that you don't talk to the police, period. You talk to your lawyer, and your lawyer talks to the police.
Consumers aren't dumb. They are just individuals with limited resources up against a multi-billion dollar marketing machine (with a software department attached).
It's like going against an aircraft carrier battle group in a rubber boat with sticks.
It's almos as if they were fishing for ridicule. Are you guys sure there isn't a whiteboard somewhere in MS marketing where they track the scores of who can make the most ridiculous statement and still be taken seriously by at least some media?
Do not trust your memory. Both physical and mental trauma can lead to partial memory loss, and if you have significant amount of money there, both are likely part of a scenario in which the last thing you need is not getting at your money (because you need it for medical bills).
It looks like I'll have to start keeping track of the lies.
Use mnemonics - if you invent an address, make the first letter of the street and the town identical. If you invent a birthday, use the same day and vary years, or the other way around. Some people use spam-catch email addresses including the sites name - e.g. tom.nameofthesite@mydomain.com - so if they get spam they know who sold their address. You can use the same trick in your invented personal data. So your G+ address is 1 Google Ave. while your FB address is 1 Facebook Road. Stuff like that.
Depends on what they are using it for. If the purpose is individual identification, the data doesn't have to be correct, just unique. If they want to track you, behavior is more important than data, and so on.
But in general, I agree. When those "bonus card" systems for the supermarket etc. came to Europe, I was the guy at the CCCamp to propose everyone in the room stand up and exchange their cards with someone else at random.
But life is turning into a cyberpunk story in one important regard: The vast majority of the population doesn't know nor care about fighting this crap. Those of us who do, we are very few. We are the 1% in this aspect. Your and my data polluting doesn't change a thing in the big picture.
And that's where you are right on the money: If someone came up with a device that does that automatically, and had some other benefit related to this feature so it is of interest to grandma to use it, then you'd have ruined the current Internet top dogs business model in one brave stroke.
So far, it didn't happen. Bitcoin value is almost exactly where it was before his arrest (though it did move quite a bit in the days immediately following).
You are an idiot. The overhead of firing and then re-hiring people, especially if they have even basic skills, is quite substantial. Unless what I initially said is true - their HR processes suck - then keeping the people around, maybe at reduced hours and pay, is almost always more efficient for a short-term interruption. In addition, the benefits in motivation and employee loyalty are massive, and these are things you can not easily buy whenever you feel like it.
Slashdot Mirror
Spending has gone up twice as much (in constant dollars) over the last 30 years as revenue has. Based on that, it's pretty difficult to make a good case that the issue is revenue and not out of control spending.
Total non-sequitur. You are blaming a gap between two numbers exclusively on one of them and don't even notice what you're doing.
I'm trying to not do the opposite. I'm not claiming it is all a revenue issue. However, when you do tax cuts at the same time as increased spending, you can't blame the spending alone. I don't even understand how any sane person could even argue that point.
Bingo.
Every time some cretin tries to shoe-horn the entirety of computer programming into one simple paradigm, a ton of other cretins jump up and down hailing him as the new messiah.
And then, after a couple years worth of CS students have been corrupted with this useless crap and it hits the real world, it turns out that life is a wee bit more complicated.
The fight to limit spending is a fight for the economy.
In logic 101, you learn to look for assumptions first, because if an assumption is wrong, then the entire rest of the logic chain doesn't need to be examined anymore, as it is meaningless.
Your wrong assumption is that the problem is with the spending. But a deficit is not a problem of high spending, it is a problem of spending more than you have. You can fix it by reducing your spending, or by increasing your income.
Would it make sence to trim your spending to borrow less?
Most western countries have been cutting all kinds of expenditure for two decades now. The cuts have not been equally distributed - military spending has not been affected as much as social spending, for example.
At the same time, taxes have been abolished or reduced for the top income brackets. No, wait, for the very, very top only. I consistently earned quite well for most of that time, I've seen personally what the press has only picked up recently: The destruction of the middle class. The gap between me and the guy working at the supermarket hasn't changed all that much. But the gap between me and the guy who owns supermarket chain, that has become insane.
If you raise taxes on property and wealth by 1%, then half of the additional income from that tax will come from the famous 1% that Occupy has been going on about.
So if you think that the poor can't survive a 1% tax increase, then increase the tax 2% for the top 1% income bracket, and you will get the same net tax increase. I don't know many billionaires who'd have to starve if they were taxed 2% more.
Left unsaid in the linked article, (and also the Square website) is how square is going to monetize this, other than by *cough* losing one out of a hundred payments.
No need to get paranoid there. Many online services are introduced for free and fees are added on later. Unless I'm horribly mistaken, PayPal started out that way, too.
That doesn't mean it doesn't bother people.
I live in (west) Germany. We had a surveilance state next door for decades, and many people I know used to live there. They all knew that phone and letters were being listened to. No one made much of a fuss, because - well, you could be locked up for it. But it did change the way society worked. And when things finally came to blows, the mass-surveilance was one of the reasons people actually took to the streets.
I wouldn't be surprised if this alone is not enough to set the average american in motion. But it may add up with other things, like being out of a job, having your house and car reposessed, whatever else happens. There's a limit to what people are willing to take.
Stop seeing every issue in isolation and start seeing them as part of a whole.
Bingo.
At least as far back as Machiavelli, people in power know that the best way to prevent the masses from protesting is to make sure they have too much to lose.
In foreign politics, the US has publicly available documents that spell out how young men are the main source of unrest in contries like Iraq. More specifically: Unmarried, unemployed young men. As soon as they have a job, some personal wealth and/or especially a family, they stop making trouble.
It's all about the pyramid of needs. If I threaten you with hunger, your civil liberties suddenly become a lot less important.
And that's what a bad economy, high unemployment, cuts in social security, etc. do - they increase uncertainty and fear for basic needs.
Can Free Software do any better, than to imitate the broken Microsoft model?
Yes, it could. Unfortunately, it doesn't because some morons have decided that copying is more important than inventing.
There are a couple of really good and different tools, like LyX. But honestly, the problem with productivity tools like these is that they aren't cool and sexy, so it needs momentum to carry the developers, because the coolness alone doesn't do it.
No, it's independent of the party number.
We have 4-5 parties in our parliament. And yet, the votes go ever closer to 50/50 - not of two parties, but of the two most likely coalitions.
For over 10 years now, we've not had one national election in which things were not close enough for coalition agreements to decide who rules, not the popular vote.
Evil requires coercion and can't exist without it.
That's evil for the primitive evil overlord. The really evil people are the ones who make you believe that they've earned it all and you work for them off your own, free will. Because if your force people, they will try to escape at the first opportunity. But if you convince them that it was their choice, we have these funny psychological processes in our heads that make us defend our past choices, even if we're presented with evidence that they were wrong.
Actually counting the votes is a pointless expense. The system works just as well by flipping a coin.
People as a whole already know that. Just individuals don't realize it yet.
People misunderstand things like "swarm intelligence", but you can see it in elections. For decades now, in most western countries, the election results have become ever closer to the coin toss - 50/50 distribution. That is swarm intelligence at work. Individually, most people still think their vote makes a difference, but collectively, we've already realized that it doesn't matter and the choices are identical.
The mighty, wealthy, whatever you call it will always strive to get or stay in control. It's human nature, I wouldn't even call it evil.
The evil part is that in order to do so, they will subvert the very institutions that were meant to prevent it. With democracy, it didn't take too long, but it's been a boiling-frog problem - instead of revolutions and big changes, it simply drifted over time.
It's not a USA and it's not a two-party problem. We have 4-5 countries in the parliament in my country (depending on how the election went, some of the smaller parties sometimes don't make it in). And still, when it comes to the day-to-day politics, you can write a complete list of the differences between them on a very small piece of paper.
In the words of a local satirist: "Are you trying to sell me shit in different flavors?"
Hell, even my credit card company doesn't screw me over
Or you don't notice. Remember that money is not the only thing they can screw you with.
For example, I'm getting more and more angry every time YouTube tries to convince me to use my real name, and it never goes away. The best you get out of it is "ok, we'll ask you again later". No, you stupid piece of crap, I want you to accept my answer once and for all, period.
But, Google wants your personal data, because that is what they are selling to their customers (which isn't you, you're the product). So they keep insisting as much as they can get away with. Because my account data with my real name on it would be more valuable then without.
Some companies screw you on service fees, some on quality, some on customer service - but they all screw you somewhere.
While this is true, I think the author was pointing out one of the 'flaws' of capitalism; Technology and infrastructure makes offering such amenities a very cheap proposition. And yet, you wind up paying through the nose for them in certain situations;
What makes you think that's a flaw, and not a feature?
It is basically a misrepresentation of the true cost of the good or service being provided.
Ah, you are thinking free market and capitalism are the same thing. Yes, the rest of your comment pretty much indicates that as well. Well, time to wake up and realize that they aren't.
Capitalism simply means that the means to production are in the hands of private entities (companies or individuals), in contrast to ownership by cooperatives, the state, or the nobility.
The Free Market theory is about how trade and exchange of goods happen. Nothing in the theory requires the buyers or sellers to be capitalists. You could easily have socialist collectives exchanging goods between them on a free market, for example.
A true free market system works best when all the agents have equal access to the data needed to make informed decisions;
Wrong. It seems to be a detail, but it is one of the most important ones: A free market doesn't work "best" under this condition, it is a precondition. If you do not have total information, you do not have a free market, period. Which, yes, means each and every single market in the real world is not a free market, but an approximation.
That's not just semantics. When dealing with the real world, you should never forget that the conclusions from the free market theory may or may not apply.
What could've been a good article is, unfortunately, just your typical uninformed zero-research blog rant.
What's missing is what journalism is all about: Going deeper, finding the causes, even if they are more then one step away.
For example, why do some hotels charge for Internet and others don't? No, it's not the price, that is counterintuitive (cheap hotels often offer free Internet, expensive ones charge, as the article also says). So what is it? Well, other articles on the topic that did some actual research dug up the answer years ago: It's not the price, it's the guests. Hotels that are largely frequented by business travellers will charge, because a) their guests really need Internet and b) are ready to pay for it because it's business expenses anyways. Hotels that are largely frequented by tourists offer free-of-charge, because their customers would probably go to a nearby Starbucks instead if they charged and Internet or not may be the deciding factor between this hotel or the other one down the road as in the low price range there are fewer actual differences between the hotels.
If stuff like that had been in the article for the other 4 items as well, it would've been a good read.
For example, if you locked your keys in your car and had to break a window to get them, would you really not tell the cop this and instead remain silent?
The best thing to do is to call the police, tell them about the situation, and then proceed to open your car.
The police isn't always your enemy. I've worked with the police in business situations, and in that case everything changes. But if you are approached by the police, the first rule to remember is that the police officer is not your friend. At best, he is currently trying to figure if he wants to be your friend or not, i.e. if you're a criminal.
For my money, I will take the advice of every defense attorney who has spoken on whether one should talk to police which is DO NOT TALK TO THE POLICE WITHOUT THE PRESENCE OF YOUR ATTORNEY.
I dimly remember (never been in that situation, fortunately) that you don't talk to the police, period. You talk to your lawyer, and your lawyer talks to the police.
My thoughts exactly. Why is this article on /. ? Has this news site turned into someone's Wordpress site without anyone noticing?
With all due respect, do post your blog articles to your blog, and not on /.
Consumers aren't dumb. They are just individuals with limited resources up against a multi-billion dollar marketing machine (with a software department attached).
It's like going against an aircraft carrier battle group in a rubber boat with sticks.
It's almos as if they were fishing for ridicule. Are you guys sure there isn't a whiteboard somewhere in MS marketing where they track the scores of who can make the most ridiculous statement and still be taken seriously by at least some media?
Do not trust your memory. Both physical and mental trauma can lead to partial memory loss, and if you have significant amount of money there, both are likely part of a scenario in which the last thing you need is not getting at your money (because you need it for medical bills).
It looks like I'll have to start keeping track of the lies.
Use mnemonics - if you invent an address, make the first letter of the street and the town identical. If you invent a birthday, use the same day and vary years, or the other way around. Some people use spam-catch email addresses including the sites name - e.g. tom.nameofthesite@mydomain.com - so if they get spam they know who sold their address. You can use the same trick in your invented personal data. So your G+ address is 1 Google Ave. while your FB address is 1 Facebook Road. Stuff like that.
Depends on what they are using it for. If the purpose is individual identification, the data doesn't have to be correct, just unique. If they want to track you, behavior is more important than data, and so on.
But in general, I agree. When those "bonus card" systems for the supermarket etc. came to Europe, I was the guy at the CCCamp to propose everyone in the room stand up and exchange their cards with someone else at random.
But life is turning into a cyberpunk story in one important regard: The vast majority of the population doesn't know nor care about fighting this crap. Those of us who do, we are very few. We are the 1% in this aspect. Your and my data polluting doesn't change a thing in the big picture.
And that's where you are right on the money: If someone came up with a device that does that automatically, and had some other benefit related to this feature so it is of interest to grandma to use it, then you'd have ruined the current Internet top dogs business model in one brave stroke.
So far, it didn't happen. Bitcoin value is almost exactly where it was before his arrest (though it did move quite a bit in the days immediately following).
That is an actual cool feature of Bitcoin - you can copy money. You can only spend it once, but you can have a backup copy of your money. Or several.
You are an idiot. The overhead of firing and then re-hiring people, especially if they have even basic skills, is quite substantial. Unless what I initially said is true - their HR processes suck - then keeping the people around, maybe at reduced hours and pay, is almost always more efficient for a short-term interruption. In addition, the benefits in motivation and employee loyalty are massive, and these are things you can not easily buy whenever you feel like it.