I tend to take claims iDrive makes with a grain of salt given their approach to "security" on the client machine. If, on a Windows iDrive installation, one looks at (for a typical installation) C:\Program Files\IDrive\UserName.ini, one finds a line of the form:
Encryption password=Vjku_Ku_Oa_Rcuuyqtf_CCCDDDEEE
Of course, not to worry, the password is well encrypted with a sophisticated algorithm. Yes. ROT-2 for alpha characters. Really.
So, this user's actual encryption password is: This_Is_My_Password_AAABBBCCC
I understand that some people want the convenience of not having to enter their encryption password (or, even, a password vault password) when using the service or at system boot or user logon, but there seems to be no way to 'opt out' of this convenience.
I assume the engineers at iDrive used ROT-2 as a joke instead of putting the encryption password in clear text. I'm not a humorless guy, but there's a few areas that I don't like joking about -- and security is one of them. Unfortunately, this unfunny joke decreases security because it slightly increases the chances that some users won't realize that their encryption password is sitting in (almost) cleartext on their local disk and they won't protect it well (most users, of course, would have no idea this file even exists).
Since iDrive seems to think that security is something to be "funny" and "cute" about, I question their general judgement on the topic. (Of course, it's possible that they are incompetent and don't do security reviews -- I suppose that's worse).
This study was probably sponsored by mattress companies.
However, I've been told that there are other activities that wear out mattresses more quickly than sleeping -- perhaps their corporate research dollars would be better spent on studies which find that those activities are good for your health.
(Although, rumor has it that at least one party to such activities tends to go to sleep quickly thereafter -- so perhaps this study is complementary to such additional studies.)
Of course, the mattress companies would still be left with the problem of how to arrange for/. readers to have the opportunity to engage in such activities.
If they were immediately put into the prison's general population upon conviction, it probably wouldn't be too long before they weren't collecting pay anymore. Although, their dependent survivors would then be collecting something from their pension plan.
Aren't there some important missing steps in that process for respected journals? Those steps being performed by technical editors who:
* Review the flood of papers they receive.
* Reject the vast majority of papers received.
* Select appropriate reviewers for the remaining papers.
* Coordinate updates among reviewers/authors.
* Make a final publish/no publish decision.
Although these steps don't (I think) justify the outrageous prices for many journal subscriptions, it's a lot of tedious work that requires technical expertise and I'm not sure one can find enough unpaid qualified gatekeepers to do it reliably and in sufficient volume consistently enough.
These steps seem to be important to maintain the reputation of the journal by not passing too much unworthy BS to reviewers (thereby resulting in them withdrawing from the review pool) and by not rejecting too much really important work (that later gets published in a lesser journal raising its relative ranking and increasing fragmentation in the field and resulting in a lot of "fairly good" journals but no "great" journals in a field)
If this malware hit it from the Internet, then it would be trivial for the ISP to do the same exact thing to put the settings back.
I don't know much about DNSChanger, but in general I don't think this is necessarily true. If one was going to infect DSL modems with something like DNSChanger, it would be sensible to also attempt to have DNSChanger cut off the ability to make further changes (at least by anyone but the authors/distributors of DNSChanger - perhaps requiring a password known only to these parties).
I think Obama's pretty safe. No one wants Biden in the Oval Office (beyond, of course, for an occasional visit to apologize to the President for some gaffe.)
Selection of Vice President is very important to Presidential security -- Dan Quayle was much more important to insuring the safety of George Herbert Walker Bush than his entire Secret Service detail was.
Your arguments are counter-productive. You should be all for dense urban environments as long as people are required to live there, which they won't likely be in the lifespan of anyone currently alive.
(I assume, based on context, that you meant "aren't" not "are".) You seem to be assuming something here. I currently live in a fairly dense urban area and like some aspects of it and dislike other aspects of it -- I just recognize that it's not for everyone at all phases of their life (I've also lived in much less dense suburban/rural areas). I'm for personal freedom and choice where feasible. If people WANT to live in dense urban areas, they will -- no government intervention or "public policy" or income reallocation from the rural/suburban areas to the urban areas is required, it will just happen.
That's not actually true. There has been a big rise in urban gardening where certain public property is being turned into gardening centers. Most tower buildings could, in theory, have their roofs turned into garden, for example.
And you can grow a black walnut tree or an avocado tree or a peach tree which won't produce substantial crops for some years and which have a large footprint on your roof top (or, even in a "community garden")? In a "short" high rise, lets assume 10 floors of residences with an average residence size of 1300 sq ft and another 200 square feet of "public/utility" space per unit (amortized over all the units on the floor) -- or 1500 square feet. Some of the top of the tower roof would be devoted to pool, water tank, utilities - but lets just ignore all that. You have an absolute max of 150 sq feet (15x10 feet) per unit of space on the roof including space for aisle ways between plots -- really not much and certainly not enough for substantial food production or much of a hobby. Pretty much limited to annuals from a practical standpoint -- most other stuff gets too big and is too immobile.
Why go and buy a new lathe when renting it for a few hours is cheaper (or pay a monthly membership to you local makers club).
Because I want to use it on the spur of the moment, not have to take a bus or walk 20 minutes carrying materials back and forth. Not spontaneous enough for my taste. Obviously if all I cared about was the "cost", I wouldn't even make anything because a kid in China can make it much cheaper -- but "cost" obviously isn't the reason for well off engineers to make stuff.
That appears to be a problem which will probably solve itself within the century as long as birth rates continue to fall.
It is projected to do so -- but at a substantially higher population than now. And, projecting out that far is speculation at best - no matter which way you project. My point is, cramming people into dense urban environments to save on resources just isn't needed if we encourage reduced fertility rates. The couple living the greenest possible lifestyle and having TWO kids ultimately has a VASTLY larger resource foot print than a couple who uses resources freely without regard to the impact on the environment but has only ONE kid.
Indeed, even if it went down exactly as Thompson claims, the most charitable conclusion I can come up with is that he is not competent for the job.
Yahoo! filed, over his signature, SEC documents that included the phantom degree. It was his job to make sure that those filings were correct -- either because he personally knew they were or because he selected people to check them who were trusted. In this case, he had personal knowledge of the facts and, at best, didn't even read what he signed. I actually give a CEO a break if there is some arcane thing in such filings that is wrong if they have no personal direct knowledge of the area (for example swapping the currency exchange rates for Feb and March when they are within 0.01% of each other) and the people he delegated the task of checking to screwed up -- but that's not the case here.
I can't believe the guy lasted more than 24 hours after the revelation -- that says something very bad about Yahoo!
(Re: CA - expecting sanity would likely just lead to disappointment.)
A significant portion of the US population lives in areas that have a high cost of living by some measure. I could argue that taxpayers in high cost areas are subsidizing those who live in low cost areas where, in particular, housing and land are cheap.
Many areas are high cost because that's where jobs are for skilled workers in STEM, finance, bio, et al and these fields often benefit from their workers being physically present in one place. These are fields that require well educated people and that the US must encourage if they are to remain a leader in the world (okay, some here would argue about 'finance' being in that category). Of course, there are some areas that have a high cost of living for other reasons (such as geographical isolation - ref. Alaska and Hawaii).
Not all workers in high cost areas are in high paid "apex" jobs -- those with such jobs (as well as the businesses they work for) also require workers that are not in the "regional specialty". These other workers include auto mechanics, janitors, painters, retail workers, plumbers, police officers, firefighters, teachers, etc. These other workers need to live in the immediate area and, in turn, also use other services (the fire department responds when a teacher's house catches fire). These other workers also receive higher wages in high cost areas than in low cost areas in order to pay the higher costs of housing and services they consume in the region. On an individual basis these additional workers (unlike those with a region's "apex" jobs) could work elsewhere, but since the region requires these jobs (Amazon doesn't put out house fires or fix your car - shipping is just too expensive in both cases -- and in the former case, shipping a burning house to an Amazon Fire Suppression Center for processing may have some logistic complexities that would confound even Amazon) and someone has to do these jobs so these workers will exist.
One reason the US (and most countries) have a progressive tax system is to shift the tax burden from those that would have to forgo basic necessities of life to pay taxes if the system were not progressive. These basic necessities include housing (a big regional variable). The boundaries of tax brackets are not set because they are some natural constant like pi, e, or c -- they are set to achieve the social goals of progressive taxation and therefore do reflect the cost of goods and services. These brackets are adjusted regularly to reflect general inflation, I see no fundamental reason that they should not as well be adjusted to reflect regional cost of living as well.
Compare, for example, "fair market rents" (probably a reasonable proxy for cost of renting) of two bedroom units in Clay County Kentucky ($491/mo, $5892/yr) to those in San Francisco County California ($1,905/mo, $22,860/yr) - the annual difference is $16,968. Recall that for a couple filing jointly for TY 2012, the federal tax rate rises from 10% to 15% at $17,400 (of course, deductions have a big impact at this level and I'm not accounting for that, but nor am I accounting for food, utilities, transportation, or clothing costs) -- about THREE TIMES the "fair market" rent in Clay County and LESS than the "fair market" rent in SF County. I know these prices are not completely appropriate for comparison (as, for example, the units in Clay County may not be as nice, on the average, as the units in SF County), but there is clearly an enormous difference in the price of basic necessities and to ignore this in a progressive taxation system would seem to be counter to the whole notion of progressive taxation.
Because their friends and social network is there. It's not "sensible" from a strictly financial standpoint, but that's not the only consideration for most people.
IMHO, income tax rates should be adjusted for cost of living where the taxpayer resides. However, I don't know that adjusting Social Security benefits for cost of living is appropriate.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone to move to a lower cost area when they no longer have job considerations keeping them in a particular area. Also, if someone has spent many years working and living (and, presumably building up their social network) in the Silicon Valley at a mid wage job (i.e., less than the earnings cap for SS - which is $110,100 for 2012), their SS benefit is higher because the higher wages for the same job in the SV result in a higher average lifetime indexed earnings (although, this is still skewed because SS retirement benefits are regressive, the first dollar you contribute gives you six times the eventual retirement benefit as the last dollar you contribute on earnings just before hitting the cap).
I was going to post a comment that included much of this so I'll just add a couple things here.
People's interests differ. Some people like to tinker and/or express themselves in ways that are often rather incompatible with dense urban living. Obviously the GP doesn't have such interests and likes dense urban living which is fine, but imposing that on others with broader or different interests via public policy is arrogant, bigoted, and narrow minded.
In dense housing, there are usually many more rules (either your landlord's rules or your condo/town house association rules) than in more suburban or rural settings. These include what you can have outside your unit, what time you must turn your music down/off, when you can do your laundry or even run your dishwasher (or, even requirements that you have rugs on your floors instead of bare hardwood - seriously). These rules interfere, for example, with one's desire/tendency to work eclectic and irregular hours (and therefore to do non-work activities at similarly eclectic hours).
In dense housing, there's no place to have a substantial garden and/or orchard if you like to grow food. Maintaining your own compost heap on your high rise balcony just isn't very practical. Sure, community gardens exist in some areas, but they are generally inconvenient compared to going out your back door to tend your garden when you have 15 minutes to spare or when the rain let up for a few minutes. And, of course, community gardens are not suitable for growing your own long lived plants like fruit, nut, and citrus trees.
In dense housing, there's little place for making stuff of any size and/or have multiple maker projects active (some of which are eventually abandoned after sitting and taking space up for months). It's impractical to, on an impulse, buy a mini-lathe (and perhaps mod it) and then a couple days later wake up with a neat idea and wander down to your workshop for thirty minutes before breakfast to make a prototype of your idea.
Raising kids in a high density urban environment is quite a bit different as well. In suburban and rural settings, you can usually (unless you have Chester The Molester living next door) send your five and six year old into your (possibly fenced) back yard to safely play with minimal supervision for short periods when they need to "burn off some energy". In dense urban settings where one has to rely on communal outdoor play areas, one has to monitor the kids more closely (if, nothing else, to make sure a random eight year old who you've never seen isn't beating up your five year old) and has to escort them through public spaces on the way to the play area that they are not yet competent to safely navigate independently.
So, yes, for some people who are happy with a structured lifestyle, dense urban living is fine -- indeed, likely preferable as it provides some of that structure they crave in their life. But it's not everyone's goal.
Ultimately we will need to limit, either explicitly or via evolving of cultural attitudes, world population. There is some limit to our resources and the only answer to the "population problem" can't be to keep packing people closer and closer together and reducing the resources they can use. In reality, the world would be better off with a couple billion well educated and prosperous humans using resources fairly freely (although, intelligently) than with the seven billion we have now (let alone the 9.22 billion in 2075 as projected by the UN).
There's a tax on foreign ethanol, of any kind, even corn ethanol. But that's just protectionism. And its tax not subsidy.
It seems to me that there are two components here and that one is really a subsidy.
If there's a tax (I think it's actually an import tariff - but it pretty much walks like tax and quacks like a tax so let's refer to it as a tax) on foreign ethanol, that tax is of course actually paid by the end consumer of any product that includes foreign ethanol or whose production consumes foreign ethanol. The end consumer, of course, are individuals. Even if the tax is temporarily paid by a business it is eventually passed on to the end consumer -- for example, if a cab driver indirectly pays this tax when she fills up her cab's gas tank, it is ultimately passed on to her fares within hours. So, I would agree this is a tax not a subsidy (the end consumer pays it, the government ends up with the money to do with as they please).
However, if the tariff allows domestic ethanol producers to charge higher prices for their product (i.e., the protectionism is actually working), that delta in price functions much like subsidy except the middle man (the government) is not directly involved in its collection and redistribution -- only in causing it to be collected and redistributed. It's not much different than if the government slightly increased income taxes and then sent those increased proceeds to producers of domestic ethanol and called it a "subsidy".
Everything below is from 2005 (sorry, I've not crunched the numbers from more recent IRS reports).
The top one percent of tax returns reported an AGI over $364,657 and paid over 39 percent of aggregate personal income taxes. In the Silicon Valley, this would represent a middle aged couple who are both pretty good engineers and have some investment income from income they saved over the first 25 years of their career.
The top five percent of tax returns reported an AGI over $145,283 and paid over 59 percent of aggregate personal income taxes. In the Silicon Valley, this would represent a household with one marginally competent engineer and one person who works relatively unskilled jobs (requiring a high school education and the ability to add, multiply and subtract and speak competently).
Of course, one problem is that income taxes (and, for that matter, Social Security) benefits are not indexed by cost of living where the taxpayer (or Social Security recipient) is living. In much of the country, a household income of $145K is rich, but in the Silicon Valley, those wages let you buy a 1200 square foot fixer upper in an area where many houses have burgler bars on the windows (with good cause) and you wouldn't send your kids to the public schools if you were a responsible parent.
Wouldn't a taco chart just be the top half of a pie chart?
In other words it wouldn't even be big enough to cover the percentage of personal income taxes paid on the top five percent of tax returns (in 2005, for example, the top ONE percent paid over 39% of the total personal income taxes in the US).
Dude, you were easy. We didn't let them use the same characters. Usually the blatant copying of a "{" nailed them - lots of people seemed to copy that for some reason. The TAs loved it though - grading the assignments was really easy.
He has one small solar panel on the roof which powers the LED light in one room. Then he has a solar panel in that room which captures light from that room's LED to power the LED light in a second room. Then he has a solar panel in the second room which captures light from its LED light to power the LED light in a third room. Then he has a solar panel in the third room which captures light from its LED light to power the LED light in a fourth room. Then he has...
At night, he just shines an LED flashlight at the solar panel on the roof. This keeps all his rooms lit for several hours after dusk.
It also keeps most of the solar panels protected from the elements and puts them in places easy to clean.
Is that true even for lightning strikes - esp., for example, on the pole-top transformer that provides power to your (and a few neighbors') house(s)? Such power fluctuations are not the result of any malfunction in the local utility infrastructure -- there's nothing in the infrastructure to prevent damage in this case nor was there designed to be. It seems strange that the utility would be responsible beyond repairing their transformer/pole/wires.
Slashdot Mirror
I tend to take claims iDrive makes with a grain of salt given their approach to "security" on the client machine. If, on a Windows iDrive installation, one looks at (for a typical installation) C:\Program Files\IDrive\UserName.ini, one finds a line of the form:
Encryption password=Vjku_Ku_Oa_Rcuuyqtf_CCCDDDEEE
Of course, not to worry, the password is well encrypted with a sophisticated algorithm. Yes. ROT-2 for alpha characters. Really.
So, this user's actual encryption password is: This_Is_My_Password_AAABBBCCC
I understand that some people want the convenience of not having to enter their encryption password (or, even, a password vault password) when using the service or at system boot or user logon, but there seems to be no way to 'opt out' of this convenience.
I assume the engineers at iDrive used ROT-2 as a joke instead of putting the encryption password in clear text. I'm not a humorless guy, but there's a few areas that I don't like joking about -- and security is one of them. Unfortunately, this unfunny joke decreases security because it slightly increases the chances that some users won't realize that their encryption password is sitting in (almost) cleartext on their local disk and they won't protect it well (most users, of course, would have no idea this file even exists).
Since iDrive seems to think that security is something to be "funny" and "cute" about, I question their general judgement on the topic. (Of course, it's possible that they are incompetent and don't do security reviews -- I suppose that's worse).
Skip the lessons and move directly to solo skydiving w/o training -- your strategy will probably be more effective that way.
This study was probably sponsored by mattress companies.
/. readers to have the opportunity to engage in such activities.
However, I've been told that there are other activities that wear out mattresses more quickly than sleeping -- perhaps their corporate research dollars would be better spent on studies which find that those activities are good for your health.
(Although, rumor has it that at least one party to such activities tends to go to sleep quickly thereafter -- so perhaps this study is complementary to such additional studies.)
Of course, the mattress companies would still be left with the problem of how to arrange for
Please get an account. We are having a hard time locating your password in password dumps that have been posted recently.
If they were immediately put into the prison's general population upon conviction, it probably wouldn't be too long before they weren't collecting pay anymore. Although, their dependent survivors would then be collecting something from their pension plan.
Aren't there some important missing steps in that process for respected journals? Those steps being performed by technical editors who:
Although these steps don't (I think) justify the outrageous prices for many journal subscriptions, it's a lot of tedious work that requires technical expertise and I'm not sure one can find enough unpaid qualified gatekeepers to do it reliably and in sufficient volume consistently enough.
These steps seem to be important to maintain the reputation of the journal by not passing too much unworthy BS to reviewers (thereby resulting in them withdrawing from the review pool) and by not rejecting too much really important work (that later gets published in a lesser journal raising its relative ranking and increasing fragmentation in the field and resulting in a lot of "fairly good" journals but no "great" journals in a field)
Much to the chagrin of those who subscribe to the likes of the OWS and DailyKos agendas.
I don't know much about DNSChanger, but in general I don't think this is necessarily true. If one was going to infect DSL modems with something like DNSChanger, it would be sensible to also attempt to have DNSChanger cut off the ability to make further changes (at least by anyone but the authors/distributors of DNSChanger - perhaps requiring a password known only to these parties).
I have the feeling that the judge may even order them run though a meat grinder before returning them to Oracle on said platter.
Wait, wasn't Cheney the president?
I think Obama's pretty safe. No one wants Biden in the Oval Office (beyond, of course, for an occasional visit to apologize to the President for some gaffe.)
Selection of Vice President is very important to Presidential security -- Dan Quayle was much more important to insuring the safety of George Herbert Walker Bush than his entire Secret Service detail was.
It appears George Carlin was smart enough to realize his audience wasn't smart enough to know the difference between Median and Average.
(I assume, based on context, that you meant "aren't" not "are".) You seem to be assuming something here. I currently live in a fairly dense urban area and like some aspects of it and dislike other aspects of it -- I just recognize that it's not for everyone at all phases of their life (I've also lived in much less dense suburban/rural areas). I'm for personal freedom and choice where feasible. If people WANT to live in dense urban areas, they will -- no government intervention or "public policy" or income reallocation from the rural/suburban areas to the urban areas is required, it will just happen.
And you can grow a black walnut tree or an avocado tree or a peach tree which won't produce substantial crops for some years and which have a large footprint on your roof top (or, even in a "community garden")? In a "short" high rise, lets assume 10 floors of residences with an average residence size of 1300 sq ft and another 200 square feet of "public/utility" space per unit (amortized over all the units on the floor) -- or 1500 square feet. Some of the top of the tower roof would be devoted to pool, water tank, utilities - but lets just ignore all that. You have an absolute max of 150 sq feet (15x10 feet) per unit of space on the roof including space for aisle ways between plots -- really not much and certainly not enough for substantial food production or much of a hobby. Pretty much limited to annuals from a practical standpoint -- most other stuff gets too big and is too immobile.
Because I want to use it on the spur of the moment, not have to take a bus or walk 20 minutes carrying materials back and forth. Not spontaneous enough for my taste. Obviously if all I cared about was the "cost", I wouldn't even make anything because a kid in China can make it much cheaper -- but "cost" obviously isn't the reason for well off engineers to make stuff.
It is projected to do so -- but at a substantially higher population than now. And, projecting out that far is speculation at best - no matter which way you project. My point is, cramming people into dense urban environments to save on resources just isn't needed if we encourage reduced fertility rates. The couple living the greenest possible lifestyle and having TWO kids ultimately has a VASTLY larger resource foot print than a couple who uses resources freely without regard to the impact on the environment but has only ONE kid.
Indeed, even if it went down exactly as Thompson claims, the most charitable conclusion I can come up with is that he is not competent for the job.
Yahoo! filed, over his signature, SEC documents that included the phantom degree. It was his job to make sure that those filings were correct -- either because he personally knew they were or because he selected people to check them who were trusted. In this case, he had personal knowledge of the facts and, at best, didn't even read what he signed. I actually give a CEO a break if there is some arcane thing in such filings that is wrong if they have no personal direct knowledge of the area (for example swapping the currency exchange rates for Feb and March when they are within 0.01% of each other) and the people he delegated the task of checking to screwed up -- but that's not the case here.
I can't believe the guy lasted more than 24 hours after the revelation -- that says something very bad about Yahoo!
(Re: CA - expecting sanity would likely just lead to disappointment.)
A significant portion of the US population lives in areas that have a high cost of living by some measure. I could argue that taxpayers in high cost areas are subsidizing those who live in low cost areas where, in particular, housing and land are cheap.
Many areas are high cost because that's where jobs are for skilled workers in STEM, finance, bio, et al and these fields often benefit from their workers being physically present in one place. These are fields that require well educated people and that the US must encourage if they are to remain a leader in the world (okay, some here would argue about 'finance' being in that category). Of course, there are some areas that have a high cost of living for other reasons (such as geographical isolation - ref. Alaska and Hawaii).
Not all workers in high cost areas are in high paid "apex" jobs -- those with such jobs (as well as the businesses they work for) also require workers that are not in the "regional specialty". These other workers include auto mechanics, janitors, painters, retail workers, plumbers, police officers, firefighters, teachers, etc. These other workers need to live in the immediate area and, in turn, also use other services (the fire department responds when a teacher's house catches fire). These other workers also receive higher wages in high cost areas than in low cost areas in order to pay the higher costs of housing and services they consume in the region. On an individual basis these additional workers (unlike those with a region's "apex" jobs) could work elsewhere, but since the region requires these jobs (Amazon doesn't put out house fires or fix your car - shipping is just too expensive in both cases -- and in the former case, shipping a burning house to an Amazon Fire Suppression Center for processing may have some logistic complexities that would confound even Amazon) and someone has to do these jobs so these workers will exist.
One reason the US (and most countries) have a progressive tax system is to shift the tax burden from those that would have to forgo basic necessities of life to pay taxes if the system were not progressive. These basic necessities include housing (a big regional variable). The boundaries of tax brackets are not set because they are some natural constant like pi, e, or c -- they are set to achieve the social goals of progressive taxation and therefore do reflect the cost of goods and services. These brackets are adjusted regularly to reflect general inflation, I see no fundamental reason that they should not as well be adjusted to reflect regional cost of living as well.
Compare, for example, "fair market rents" (probably a reasonable proxy for cost of renting) of two bedroom units in Clay County Kentucky ($491/mo, $5892/yr) to those in San Francisco County California ($1,905/mo, $22,860/yr) - the annual difference is $16,968. Recall that for a couple filing jointly for TY 2012, the federal tax rate rises from 10% to 15% at $17,400 (of course, deductions have a big impact at this level and I'm not accounting for that, but nor am I accounting for food, utilities, transportation, or clothing costs) -- about THREE TIMES the "fair market" rent in Clay County and LESS than the "fair market" rent in SF County. I know these prices are not completely appropriate for comparison (as, for example, the units in Clay County may not be as nice, on the average, as the units in SF County), but there is clearly an enormous difference in the price of basic necessities and to ignore this in a progressive taxation system would seem to be counter to the whole notion of progressive taxation.
Because their friends and social network is there. It's not "sensible" from a strictly financial standpoint, but that's not the only consideration for most people.
IMHO, income tax rates should be adjusted for cost of living where the taxpayer resides. However, I don't know that adjusting Social Security benefits for cost of living is appropriate.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone to move to a lower cost area when they no longer have job considerations keeping them in a particular area. Also, if someone has spent many years working and living (and, presumably building up their social network) in the Silicon Valley at a mid wage job (i.e., less than the earnings cap for SS - which is $110,100 for 2012), their SS benefit is higher because the higher wages for the same job in the SV result in a higher average lifetime indexed earnings (although, this is still skewed because SS retirement benefits are regressive, the first dollar you contribute gives you six times the eventual retirement benefit as the last dollar you contribute on earnings just before hitting the cap).
I was going to post a comment that included much of this so I'll just add a couple things here.
People's interests differ. Some people like to tinker and/or express themselves in ways that are often rather incompatible with dense urban living. Obviously the GP doesn't have such interests and likes dense urban living which is fine, but imposing that on others with broader or different interests via public policy is arrogant, bigoted, and narrow minded.
In dense housing, there are usually many more rules (either your landlord's rules or your condo/town house association rules) than in more suburban or rural settings. These include what you can have outside your unit, what time you must turn your music down/off, when you can do your laundry or even run your dishwasher (or, even requirements that you have rugs on your floors instead of bare hardwood - seriously). These rules interfere, for example, with one's desire/tendency to work eclectic and irregular hours (and therefore to do non-work activities at similarly eclectic hours).
In dense housing, there's no place to have a substantial garden and/or orchard if you like to grow food. Maintaining your own compost heap on your high rise balcony just isn't very practical. Sure, community gardens exist in some areas, but they are generally inconvenient compared to going out your back door to tend your garden when you have 15 minutes to spare or when the rain let up for a few minutes. And, of course, community gardens are not suitable for growing your own long lived plants like fruit, nut, and citrus trees.
In dense housing, there's little place for making stuff of any size and/or have multiple maker projects active (some of which are eventually abandoned after sitting and taking space up for months). It's impractical to, on an impulse, buy a mini-lathe (and perhaps mod it) and then a couple days later wake up with a neat idea and wander down to your workshop for thirty minutes before breakfast to make a prototype of your idea.
Raising kids in a high density urban environment is quite a bit different as well. In suburban and rural settings, you can usually (unless you have Chester The Molester living next door) send your five and six year old into your (possibly fenced) back yard to safely play with minimal supervision for short periods when they need to "burn off some energy". In dense urban settings where one has to rely on communal outdoor play areas, one has to monitor the kids more closely (if, nothing else, to make sure a random eight year old who you've never seen isn't beating up your five year old) and has to escort them through public spaces on the way to the play area that they are not yet competent to safely navigate independently.
So, yes, for some people who are happy with a structured lifestyle, dense urban living is fine -- indeed, likely preferable as it provides some of that structure they crave in their life. But it's not everyone's goal.
Ultimately we will need to limit, either explicitly or via evolving of cultural attitudes, world population. There is some limit to our resources and the only answer to the "population problem" can't be to keep packing people closer and closer together and reducing the resources they can use. In reality, the world would be better off with a couple billion well educated and prosperous humans using resources fairly freely (although, intelligently) than with the seven billion we have now (let alone the 9.22 billion in 2075 as projected by the UN).
It seems to me that there are two components here and that one is really a subsidy.
If there's a tax (I think it's actually an import tariff - but it pretty much walks like tax and quacks like a tax so let's refer to it as a tax) on foreign ethanol, that tax is of course actually paid by the end consumer of any product that includes foreign ethanol or whose production consumes foreign ethanol. The end consumer, of course, are individuals. Even if the tax is temporarily paid by a business it is eventually passed on to the end consumer -- for example, if a cab driver indirectly pays this tax when she fills up her cab's gas tank, it is ultimately passed on to her fares within hours. So, I would agree this is a tax not a subsidy (the end consumer pays it, the government ends up with the money to do with as they please).
However, if the tariff allows domestic ethanol producers to charge higher prices for their product (i.e., the protectionism is actually working), that delta in price functions much like subsidy except the middle man (the government) is not directly involved in its collection and redistribution -- only in causing it to be collected and redistributed. It's not much different than if the government slightly increased income taxes and then sent those increased proceeds to producers of domestic ethanol and called it a "subsidy".
Everything below is from 2005 (sorry, I've not crunched the numbers from more recent IRS reports).
The top one percent of tax returns reported an AGI over $364,657 and paid over 39 percent of aggregate personal income taxes. In the Silicon Valley, this would represent a middle aged couple who are both pretty good engineers and have some investment income from income they saved over the first 25 years of their career.
The top five percent of tax returns reported an AGI over $145,283 and paid over 59 percent of aggregate personal income taxes. In the Silicon Valley, this would represent a household with one marginally competent engineer and one person who works relatively unskilled jobs (requiring a high school education and the ability to add, multiply and subtract and speak competently).
Of course, one problem is that income taxes (and, for that matter, Social Security) benefits are not indexed by cost of living where the taxpayer (or Social Security recipient) is living. In much of the country, a household income of $145K is rich, but in the Silicon Valley, those wages let you buy a 1200 square foot fixer upper in an area where many houses have burgler bars on the windows (with good cause) and you wouldn't send your kids to the public schools if you were a responsible parent.
In other words it wouldn't even be big enough to cover the percentage of personal income taxes paid on the top five percent of tax returns (in 2005, for example, the top ONE percent paid over 39% of the total personal income taxes in the US).
Dude, you were easy. We didn't let them use the same characters. Usually the blatant copying of a "{" nailed them - lots of people seemed to copy that for some reason. The TAs loved it though - grading the assignments was really easy.
I also often eat more than I grow... but then my circumference grows, so perhaps it all balances out.
Much better than that.
He has one small solar panel on the roof which powers the LED light in one room. Then he has a solar panel in that room which captures light from that room's LED to power the LED light in a second room. Then he has a solar panel in the second room which captures light from its LED light to power the LED light in a third room. Then he has a solar panel in the third room which captures light from its LED light to power the LED light in a fourth room. Then he has...
At night, he just shines an LED flashlight at the solar panel on the roof. This keeps all his rooms lit for several hours after dusk.
It also keeps most of the solar panels protected from the elements and puts them in places easy to clean.
Damn, I wish I had patented that idea.
yes - I was actually thinking of something hitting the low voltage side.
Is that true even for lightning strikes - esp., for example, on the pole-top transformer that provides power to your (and a few neighbors') house(s)? Such power fluctuations are not the result of any malfunction in the local utility infrastructure -- there's nothing in the infrastructure to prevent damage in this case nor was there designed to be. It seems strange that the utility would be responsible beyond repairing their transformer/pole/wires.