It's not clear what you mean by retroactively. Do you mean that you're going to collect additional tax in the 2013 tax year on Joe Moneybag's 1987 through 2012 income?
Remember the tax debacle at the start of 2013? Just like that, only instead of new rates being set a few hours into the new year, they could be set a few months into the new year. Say, 11.99 months. This would require the wealthy to "reduce their income" retroactively, which would require time travel. I thought my statement was unambiguous, but apparently I was wrong and should have spelled it out from the start.
That tax legislation would never pass.
No shit. Tax legislation that raises taxes on the wealthy by 1% would never pass. I thought we were talking economics, not politics.
Income for the wealthy isn't primarily (if at all) from wages, but rather from investments - they aren't typically concerned with raises.
Fine, then s/raise/dividend/. I was speaking of income in the general sense, and turned to a raise in wages as an example that most/. readers could relate to. Perhaps I was mistaken in my assessment of the audience and should have phrased my statement in terms of gains on futures contracts. Either way, you seem to think that the wealthy would prefer to not have any income at all rather than have an income that is highly taxed. I'm not sure why you think the wealthy are sociopaths.
And what you call bullshit can be a real problem for the working poor. It's not hard to find verifiable reports of low-wage workers turning down a raise because bringing home a little more money makes them ineligible to receive social services, e.g. subsidized child care, for which the raise is insufficient to compensate. Our social safety net, such as it is, is more like a spider web. It's hard to get out once you're stuck in it.
Yes, that's right. Warren Buffet is such a great philanthropist only so that he may remain eligible for welfare. On a more serious note, I'm not sure how this statement relates to the conversation at hand (the wealthy foregoing income due to high income taxes).
As noted by many other posters, much of the wealth of the wealthy (again, not the merely rich) is in the form of assets such as stocks and land. That kind of wealth can grow without showing actual income, at least not until it's realized, e.g. selling some stock at a gain. Once you have enough of that sort of wealth accumulated, you can borrow against it to live an extravagant lifestyle while paying off the loan using relatively modest income from dividends, interest, and so on. I've heard that this technique is used by Larry Ellison.
So again, yes, the wealthy don't need any income. They can just take out loans, which they pay off with income. Something seems wrong with that logic, but I can't quite put a finger on it...
Except that the wealthy have the flexibility to organize their investments in such a way that they don't have enough income to push into the highest tax bracket. Even many of the merely rich could probably find ways to reduce their taxable income to avoid the harshest taxation.
So we've come full circle. The wealthy would forego income just to spite the rest of the country because.... because they would forego income just to spite the rest of the country. I have raised the question, but you appear to be begging it.
Haha, what? I'd love to live in your world, where telecoms never got retroactive immunity. In any case, I refer you to the venerable Wikipedia, where you'll find not only ample evidence of the US passing ex post facto laws but even a (debated) claim that "retroactive taxes are not ex post facto laws" anyway. Not quite as black and white as your memory seems to indicate.
I presume you are not particularly wealthy, and I know you arent facing a 100% tax bracket.
I'm not sure how that is relevant, but if you're suggesting that I would be opposed to being "paid" more, where the additional "pay" would go solely to the general fund, then I can only say that you are mistaken. I would very much be interested in additional funds going towards all of the amazing things that our government provides. I suppose lack of wealth is strongly correlated with lack of sociopathic tendencies?
Not at all, and you are completely missing the point - they would not, actually, wind up paying this tax.
Why not? You yourself claimed that they don't actually need any of their income, did you not?
Perhaps, not, but you can certainly remain wealthy without income once that state has been achieved, and you can hire accountants to reduce your taxable income as well as legislators to create special loopholes just for you in some cases!
Tacit agreement with my rebuttal wrapped up in a non sequitur, nice. But also, I see you talking about reducing taxable income in the context of "without income". You're funny.
The idea that it's possible in this situation to levy punitive taxes against the most wealthy and powerful individuals is absurdly naive.
This I can't argue against. It's naive to think the wealthy would ever go along with this willingly. That's why I expect some process a bit more forceful and violent will take the place of orderly taxation at some point in the future.
I dont know who you think you are agreeing with but it certainly isnt me, because I refute each and every one of those assertions, as naive and uninformed at best, straight out wrong-headed at worst.
No, you deny them. You have yet to refute anything. That would require logic.
One problem is that if you institute a punitive tax rate on income like that, the people affected will reduce their income.
What, retroactively? The uber-wealthy have time machines? Also, I call bullshit. I've never turned down a raise because the additional income would be taxed at a higher rate. Have you? That would be cutting off your nose to spite your face. It would make no sense unless you're an antisocial bastard more concerned with worsening other people's lives rather than improving your own.
Another is that their combined income is indeed likely to be quite a bit less than you think, as the number of such people is quite low.
Again, citation needed. I don't buy it. You don't amass $75B by having a reasonable income.
Truly wealthy people, try to understand, are not dependent on income.
Then they should have no problem being taxed to hell, since they won't really miss any of that income anyway, right?
It's not income that makes someone wealthy, you can have a high income with high expenses and be quite poor.
The first part of this statement is false. It is precisely income that makes someone wealthy, by definition. You can not accumulate wealth without income. The fact that income is necessary for accumulation of wealth does not mean it is sufficient, which is in line with the second part of your statement and has nothing to do with what we're talking about here.
A wealthy person has assets, and can go without any income at all if they need to.
So then we're in agreement. We should tax the truly wealthy at 90% marginal income tax rates, and they won't really be affected, since they can go without any income at all if they need to. After all, they still have their assets.
Last I checked, taxing 100% of income would "get" an amount equal to the total income. Are you suggesting that the income of the wealthy totals only $500 billion a year? Citation needed.
Waiting patiently for the "not a zero sum game, man!" retort.
The problem has nothing to do with a "fair share". The problem has everything to do with the rich sucking the money and life out of the economy. If the rich need to pay "an unfair share" to prevent that from happening, I'm all for it. Fairness is subjective; the collapse of the American economy is not.
Actually, I looked a little closer at the Forbes 400. It seems that, due to nature of wealth distribution, it would only take 50 people.
Yes, that's right. The wealthiest 50 private citizens from the United States alone could have funded this project last year. Their net worth totals 829.9 billion USD. And that was last year, before the 20% stock market surge of 2013. They could've funded this project and still had 1.8 billion USD left over for hookers and blow.
$190.8 billion in 1975 dollars (the equivalent of $828.11 billion today). Looks like the ultra-rich are stuck on Earth for the time being.
Last September, Forbes wrote: "The combined net worth of the 2012 class of the 400 richest Americans is $1.7 trillion."
So why exactly are the ultra-rich stuck on Earth? 400 private citizens from a single country could band together and build this thing and still not spend even HALF their money.
If the casing is anywhere near the bullet during ballistic deceleration, your gun is probably exploding.
I think you meant jacket when you said casing.
That following distance that you suggest would be equal to the stopping distance of your vehicle, at whatever speed you're travelling. After all, the vehicle in front of you could stop instantly if it were to collide with an unyielding object. In fact, if the collision is partially elastic, the vehicle you're following could actually reverse its direction in a near-instantaneous manner. This would lead to a following distance that is actually greater than your vehicle's stopping distance. And if you take into account that there's nothing stopping this vehicle in front of you from actually accelerating in reverse after an elastic collision, it would seem that your safe following distance is actually infinite.
That's right. No driving for you. At least not while there's at least one other vehicle on the roadway.
I at least hope you're not one of those left lane dicks that find some kind of sadistic pleasure in maintaining a "safe following distance" in the passing lane. Fuck you and the Geo Metro you drove in on.
Move? Perhaps I wasn't clear when I said "some of us can't afford the luxury of residing in..."
Moving costs money. Living somewhere that lacks tech jobs costs opportunity. Being surrounded by rednecks, hicks, and the Jesus fan club costs sanity.
Also, I don't see how not voting in elections would bring about legal concealed carry. In case that last sentence went over your head, I'm implying that the only ones on the ballot are the idiots that don't let you carry. Despite voting for write-ins for the last few elections, I still can't legally carry concealed, so this suggestion of yours doesn't seem to be panning out either.
And yes, carry anyway. That's a great way of earning yourself a mandatory minimum sentence. I refer you to the exciting story of Brian Aitken who had the pleasure of exploring the maze of NJ firearms laws personally. Carrying anyway is only a good idea if you don't mind spending several years in prison.
The first tool to "wear" when you start moving away from a disaster is your legal concealed firearm (which you have PRACTICED with and are proficient in handling).
Way to rub it in, asshole. Some of us can't afford the luxury of residing in the bible belt, appalachia, or some other shithole where "legal concealed firearm" isn't an oxymoron. And I say this as an owner of several firearms, a few of which could be (and would be) carried concealed if the legal climate in the developed states wasn't so fucking unconstitutional.
Thanks for the tip, as I'm currently researching moving out west (from NJ). I'm not even a smoker, but damn that's one totalitarian regime. There's literally no evidence that outside smoking can have any health impact on non-smokers. I'd hate to find myself living somewhere that implements policies that are counter to both reason and freedom.
I don't understand. Is there some other prerequisite for residency rights besides... residency?
If simply moving somewhere doesn't qualify you for residency rights, then what does?
Regarding in-state tuition vs out-of-state tuition, that has nothing to do with residency rights and everything to do with school policy. Had you moved to the state where your school was located several months (depending on the school) before enrolling, you would have been eligible for in-state tuition rates. You'd likely have recouped the cost from the additional rent payments within the first year of school, going by the average disparity between these two rates for most schools that I've seen.
But to answer your question, no, most states are not like this. I actually don't know of any states that are like this. When I moved from NJ to attend the University of Maine, I got a drivers license within a few days and was eligible to vote in Maine elections shortly after.
That's my point. It's time consuming, but the summary claims "take hundreds of years to work out on today's computers". It's been done before in the past, and computers haven't been around for hundreds of years. There's a difference between improved obfuscation techniques and real cryptography. You can't decrypt something just by studying it a byte at a time, whereas this obfuscation technique does in fact seem vulnerable to just such an approach.
While I grant that in this scenario, you won't be able to easily recover the original high-level interpreted language code, you'll still be able to see the equivalent machine code that the interpreter executes. In the end, you'll have the same thing that any disassembler would provide: a sequence of opcodes that describes the program you're investigating, no? I don't see how this differs materially from running any ordinary non-obfuscated [stripped symbol] compiled C++ binary through a disassembler. No, it won't get you back to the original C++ source, but it will still provide full insight into the operation of the program.
My understanding of computers is better than my understanding of cryptography. As far as I know, a CPU can only fetch an instruction and then execute it. If this program never gets decrypted into CPU instructions, then it can't really be a part of this fetch/execute cycle. Does this research only apply to stuff that runs on an FPGA, not a CPU?
Indeed, I misread your original claim. I thought you were saying that all previous presidents were either (D) or (R). I was only thinking of obligatory xkcd.
The great historian Randall Munroe illustrates how our first four presidents, who held office above the state level, predate the formation of the Democratic and Republican parties.
Re:And when are the Hellfire missles coming?
on
FAA OKs US UAVs
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· Score: 1
"Gun nut" here. Don't bother with the shotgun. Birdshot has an effective range of 200 yards, and even 00 buckshot won't damage a drone out past 500 yards. And that's horizontal range. Of course, you could use [non-Foster] slugs, but at that range you won't have a prayer at striking your target. You'd have much better luck with a rifle, but really, small arms aren't going to help you take down any drones unless they're flying very low, very slow, and you have very good aim.
Better idea: take apart a microwave oven, pull out the magnetron, and make yourself a nice long 2.4GHz waveguide.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not clear what you mean by retroactively. Do you mean that you're going to collect additional tax in the 2013 tax year on Joe Moneybag's 1987 through 2012 income?
Remember the tax debacle at the start of 2013? Just like that, only instead of new rates being set a few hours into the new year, they could be set a few months into the new year. Say, 11.99 months. This would require the wealthy to "reduce their income" retroactively, which would require time travel. I thought my statement was unambiguous, but apparently I was wrong and should have spelled it out from the start.
That tax legislation would never pass.
No shit. Tax legislation that raises taxes on the wealthy by 1% would never pass. I thought we were talking economics, not politics.
Income for the wealthy isn't primarily (if at all) from wages, but rather from investments - they aren't typically concerned with raises.
Fine, then s/raise/dividend/. I was speaking of income in the general sense, and turned to a raise in wages as an example that most /. readers could relate to. Perhaps I was mistaken in my assessment of the audience and should have phrased my statement in terms of gains on futures contracts. Either way, you seem to think that the wealthy would prefer to not have any income at all rather than have an income that is highly taxed. I'm not sure why you think the wealthy are sociopaths.
And what you call bullshit can be a real problem for the working poor. It's not hard to find verifiable reports of low-wage workers turning down a raise because bringing home a little more money makes them ineligible to receive social services, e.g. subsidized child care, for which the raise is insufficient to compensate. Our social safety net, such as it is, is more like a spider web. It's hard to get out once you're stuck in it.
Yes, that's right. Warren Buffet is such a great philanthropist only so that he may remain eligible for welfare. On a more serious note, I'm not sure how this statement relates to the conversation at hand (the wealthy foregoing income due to high income taxes).
As noted by many other posters, much of the wealth of the wealthy (again, not the merely rich) is in the form of assets such as stocks and land. That kind of wealth can grow without showing actual income, at least not until it's realized, e.g. selling some stock at a gain. Once you have enough of that sort of wealth accumulated, you can borrow against it to live an extravagant lifestyle while paying off the loan using relatively modest income from dividends, interest, and so on. I've heard that this technique is used by Larry Ellison.
So again, yes, the wealthy don't need any income. They can just take out loans, which they pay off with income. Something seems wrong with that logic, but I can't quite put a finger on it...
Except that the wealthy have the flexibility to organize their investments in such a way that they don't have enough income to push into the highest tax bracket. Even many of the merely rich could probably find ways to reduce their taxable income to avoid the harshest taxation.
So we've come full circle. The wealthy would forego income just to spite the rest of the country because.... because they would forego income just to spite the rest of the country. I have raised the question, but you appear to be begging it.
No ex post facto laws remember.
Haha, what? I'd love to live in your world, where telecoms never got retroactive immunity. In any case, I refer you to the venerable Wikipedia, where you'll find not only ample evidence of the US passing ex post facto laws but even a (debated) claim that "retroactive taxes are not ex post facto laws" anyway. Not quite as black and white as your memory seems to indicate.
I presume you are not particularly wealthy, and I know you arent facing a 100% tax bracket.
I'm not sure how that is relevant, but if you're suggesting that I would be opposed to being "paid" more, where the additional "pay" would go solely to the general fund, then I can only say that you are mistaken. I would very much be interested in additional funds going towards all of the amazing things that our government provides. I suppose lack of wealth is strongly correlated with lack of sociopathic tendencies?
Not at all, and you are completely missing the point - they would not, actually, wind up paying this tax.
Why not? You yourself claimed that they don't actually need any of their income, did you not?
Perhaps, not, but you can certainly remain wealthy without income once that state has been achieved, and you can hire accountants to reduce your taxable income as well as legislators to create special loopholes just for you in some cases!
Tacit agreement with my rebuttal wrapped up in a non sequitur, nice. But also, I see you talking about reducing taxable income in the context of "without income". You're funny.
The idea that it's possible in this situation to levy punitive taxes against the most wealthy and powerful individuals is absurdly naive.
This I can't argue against. It's naive to think the wealthy would ever go along with this willingly. That's why I expect some process a bit more forceful and violent will take the place of orderly taxation at some point in the future.
I dont know who you think you are agreeing with but it certainly isnt me, because I refute each and every one of those assertions, as naive and uninformed at best, straight out wrong-headed at worst.
No, you deny them. You have yet to refute anything. That would require logic.
1.00*x = 0 only when x is 0.
Your statement only holds true when there is no income.
Which is, to say, never.
One problem is that if you institute a punitive tax rate on income like that, the people affected will reduce their income.
What, retroactively? The uber-wealthy have time machines? Also, I call bullshit. I've never turned down a raise because the additional income would be taxed at a higher rate. Have you? That would be cutting off your nose to spite your face. It would make no sense unless you're an antisocial bastard more concerned with worsening other people's lives rather than improving your own.
Another is that their combined income is indeed likely to be quite a bit less than you think, as the number of such people is quite low.
Again, citation needed. I don't buy it. You don't amass $75B by having a reasonable income.
Truly wealthy people, try to understand, are not dependent on income.
Then they should have no problem being taxed to hell, since they won't really miss any of that income anyway, right?
It's not income that makes someone wealthy, you can have a high income with high expenses and be quite poor.
The first part of this statement is false. It is precisely income that makes someone wealthy, by definition. You can not accumulate wealth without income. The fact that income is necessary for accumulation of wealth does not mean it is sufficient, which is in line with the second part of your statement and has nothing to do with what we're talking about here.
A wealthy person has assets, and can go without any income at all if they need to.
So then we're in agreement. We should tax the truly wealthy at 90% marginal income tax rates, and they won't really be affected, since they can go without any income at all if they need to. After all, they still have their assets.
Last I checked, taxing 100% of income would "get" an amount equal to the total income. Are you suggesting that the income of the wealthy totals only $500 billion a year? Citation needed.
Waiting patiently for the "not a zero sum game, man!" retort.
The problem has nothing to do with a "fair share". The problem has everything to do with the rich sucking the money and life out of the economy. If the rich need to pay "an unfair share" to prevent that from happening, I'm all for it. Fairness is subjective; the collapse of the American economy is not.
Actually, I looked a little closer at the Forbes 400. It seems that, due to nature of wealth distribution, it would only take 50 people.
Yes, that's right. The wealthiest 50 private citizens from the United States alone could have funded this project last year. Their net worth totals 829.9 billion USD. And that was last year, before the 20% stock market surge of 2013. They could've funded this project and still had 1.8 billion USD left over for hookers and blow.
$190.8 billion in 1975 dollars (the equivalent of $828.11 billion today). Looks like the ultra-rich are stuck on Earth for the time being.
Last September, Forbes wrote: "The combined net worth of the 2012 class of the 400 richest Americans is $1.7 trillion."
So why exactly are the ultra-rich stuck on Earth? 400 private citizens from a single country could band together and build this thing and still not spend even HALF their money.
If the casing is anywhere near the bullet during ballistic deceleration, your gun is probably exploding.
I think you meant jacket when you said casing.
I can type faster than I can talk by a multitude, sometimes even faster than I can think
A quick look through YouTube's comments section reveals that you're not alone.
So we're both disagreeing with GP?
Thank you for your support, AC.
I was responding to a comment that defined tailgating and implicitly defined a safe following distance.
The definition for safe following distance that you suggest is not compatible with the one suggested previously.
Thank you for providing more arbitrary definitions of safe following distance. I'm sure that will clear up this disagreement.
That following distance that you suggest would be equal to the stopping distance of your vehicle, at whatever speed you're travelling. After all, the vehicle in front of you could stop instantly if it were to collide with an unyielding object. In fact, if the collision is partially elastic, the vehicle you're following could actually reverse its direction in a near-instantaneous manner. This would lead to a following distance that is actually greater than your vehicle's stopping distance. And if you take into account that there's nothing stopping this vehicle in front of you from actually accelerating in reverse after an elastic collision, it would seem that your safe following distance is actually infinite.
That's right. No driving for you. At least not while there's at least one other vehicle on the roadway.
I at least hope you're not one of those left lane dicks that find some kind of sadistic pleasure in maintaining a "safe following distance" in the passing lane. Fuck you and the Geo Metro you drove in on.
Move? Perhaps I wasn't clear when I said "some of us can't afford the luxury of residing in..."
Moving costs money. Living somewhere that lacks tech jobs costs opportunity. Being surrounded by rednecks, hicks, and the Jesus fan club costs sanity.
Also, I don't see how not voting in elections would bring about legal concealed carry. In case that last sentence went over your head, I'm implying that the only ones on the ballot are the idiots that don't let you carry. Despite voting for write-ins for the last few elections, I still can't legally carry concealed, so this suggestion of yours doesn't seem to be panning out either.
And yes, carry anyway. That's a great way of earning yourself a mandatory minimum sentence. I refer you to the exciting story of Brian Aitken who had the pleasure of exploring the maze of NJ firearms laws personally. Carrying anyway is only a good idea if you don't mind spending several years in prison.
The first tool to "wear" when you start moving away from a disaster is your legal concealed firearm (which you have PRACTICED with and are proficient in handling).
Way to rub it in, asshole. Some of us can't afford the luxury of residing in the bible belt, appalachia, or some other shithole where "legal concealed firearm" isn't an oxymoron. And I say this as an owner of several firearms, a few of which could be (and would be) carried concealed if the legal climate in the developed states wasn't so fucking unconstitutional.
because CHUDs
LOL.
Holy shit there's an outside smoking ban?!
Thanks for the tip, as I'm currently researching moving out west (from NJ). I'm not even a smoker, but damn that's one totalitarian regime. There's literally no evidence that outside smoking can have any health impact on non-smokers. I'd hate to find myself living somewhere that implements policies that are counter to both reason and freedom.
I don't understand. Is there some other prerequisite for residency rights besides... residency?
If simply moving somewhere doesn't qualify you for residency rights, then what does?
Regarding in-state tuition vs out-of-state tuition, that has nothing to do with residency rights and everything to do with school policy. Had you moved to the state where your school was located several months (depending on the school) before enrolling, you would have been eligible for in-state tuition rates. You'd likely have recouped the cost from the additional rent payments within the first year of school, going by the average disparity between these two rates for most schools that I've seen.
But to answer your question, no, most states are not like this. I actually don't know of any states that are like this. When I moved from NJ to attend the University of Maine, I got a drivers license within a few days and was eligible to vote in Maine elections shortly after.
The first rule of fight club...
False dichotomy.
Unfortunately, the dilemma is very much real.
That's my point. It's time consuming, but the summary claims "take hundreds of years to work out on today's computers". It's been done before in the past, and computers haven't been around for hundreds of years. There's a difference between improved obfuscation techniques and real cryptography. You can't decrypt something just by studying it a byte at a time, whereas this obfuscation technique does in fact seem vulnerable to just such an approach.
Now let's all enjoy our vodka and beer :)
Na zdrowie!
While I grant that in this scenario, you won't be able to easily recover the original high-level interpreted language code, you'll still be able to see the equivalent machine code that the interpreter executes. In the end, you'll have the same thing that any disassembler would provide: a sequence of opcodes that describes the program you're investigating, no? I don't see how this differs materially from running any ordinary non-obfuscated [stripped symbol] compiled C++ binary through a disassembler. No, it won't get you back to the original C++ source, but it will still provide full insight into the operation of the program.
So is the program never executed?
My understanding of computers is better than my understanding of cryptography. As far as I know, a CPU can only fetch an instruction and then execute it. If this program never gets decrypted into CPU instructions, then it can't really be a part of this fetch/execute cycle. Does this research only apply to stuff that runs on an FPGA, not a CPU?
Indeed, I misread your original claim. I thought you were saying that all previous presidents were either (D) or (R). I was only thinking of obligatory xkcd.
The great historian Randall Munroe illustrates how our first four presidents, who held office above the state level, predate the formation of the Democratic and Republican parties.
"Gun nut" here. Don't bother with the shotgun. Birdshot has an effective range of 200 yards, and even 00 buckshot won't damage a drone out past 500 yards. And that's horizontal range. Of course, you could use [non-Foster] slugs, but at that range you won't have a prayer at striking your target. You'd have much better luck with a rifle, but really, small arms aren't going to help you take down any drones unless they're flying very low, very slow, and you have very good aim.
Better idea: take apart a microwave oven, pull out the magnetron, and make yourself a nice long 2.4GHz waveguide.
Polish is a Slavic language.