Don't you feel great about the fact that YOU are busting your ass so that the federal government can over-pay a bunch of useless bureaucrats to conduct studies and domineer over search services?
Tell you what feds, quit stealing from me and I'll figure out how to avoid the horrible perils of advertisements in my search results on my own.
I see what you're saying, but what promises or claims has the search engine made to you? On what basis do you form the "expectation" that the displayed results are not advertising?
"If you know you're going to go, why do people train their offshore replacements."
Severance package and unemployment benefits?
Re:Open Source is similar to the Tea Party ...
on
The IRS vs. Open Source
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"limited access to things that won't kill you (birth control, for example), and free access to things that will (i.e. guns)."
The birth control issue is about government forcing employers to pay for their employees' birth control. When there's a law that says employers must subsidize firearms purchases, I'll oppose that too.
Re: Social Security, one idiot with a sign doesn't speak for the whole movement and SS is only a "handout" when it's given to people who haven't paid into it their entire working lives.
"There's no such thing as "libertarianism". It's only a bunch of teenagers and retirees screaming "Gimme mine!"."
Funny. All the libertarians I know adopt the attitude "Leave me the hell alone". They don't want to be "given" anything. Just the right to keep the fruits of their own labor. No government bailouts, handouts, subsidies or special privileges for anyone.
What the government hates most about the TEA Party is that it was largely dispersed and lacking centralized leadership and hierarchy.
" Its what they do that shows that is just a propaganda lie."
Who's "they"? Some big-money organization like "Tea Party Patriots" who hijacked the name? Or, you saw some mainstream media depictions of so-called "TEA Party" members acting like idiots, so that discredits the whole movement and everyone involved?
There are bad taxes and worse taxes. The inflation tax is the worst. Income tax sucks. The least bad are consumption taxes.
The simple way to avoid this negative effect on the poor is to send every single person in the USA their tax "prebate" at the beginning of the year.
$prebate = $tax_rate * $income_threshold
That way, anybody with income below a certain threshold (poverty level or some multiple thereof?) would be unaffected by the tax. If they were below the poverty level, it would even be a windfall.
" Then you'll have the IRS doing business shakedowns Mafia style."
That's what they are doing NOW, against businesses and individuals. Pay us, or you will be subjected to violence. Classic extortion racket.
One of the many appealing things about the fair tax is that it makes the tax code inherently simple. Forget the thousands of pages of BS and legalese that allows the rich and the corporations to dodge taxes. Forget the IRS having so many arbitrary powers. How are the rich going to avoid U.S. customs if they buy things outside the USA? Why would they even bother if the price (tax included) of domestic goods was competitive?
Paul Ryan's status as an elected official affords him a speaking platform, but it doesn't give him any special right to redefine terminology. He can call himself whatever he wants, but the rest of us who might self-apply that label don't need to scramble around and invent new words just because we don't want to be associated with Paul Ryan. I think anyone on-board with Ryan would call themselves "Republican".
You can start by calling it "THE Government" instead of "Our government". "Our" implies ownership or mutual participation. As you pointed out, the NSA, IRS and the rest of the criminals are operating a cartel designed to extort wealth from and exert control over The People.
It's "The People" on one side and "The government" on the other side. There is no "our". You're either one of them(a government parasite) or one of us (the American people).
If we had some people in Congress and the Senate who were genuine leaders with a modicum of courage and respect for the oath they swore on The Constitution, they'd go public. Let's see Big Brother arrest some of our elected officials for "treason" because they tell their constituents what the government is doing.
After all of Obama's speeches telling us about how the programs have congressional oversight, I've been demanding that my elected asshats in DC tell me exactly who knows the details. No luck yet. I've suggested that it must be the intelligence committees, but my Rep. and Senators won't give me any specifics.
We need to pass a bill which sets a new government mandate on automobile manufacturers? And this needs to be done so that market forces can address the problem?
The reason we got to this point is government intervention in the economy. More government intervention is not the answer.
The government should just STOP. Stop anything and everything that they are doing to subsidize here, penalize there, micro-manage this, incentivize that, etc. All of their policies together have produced nothing but a colossal economic clusterf***!
If they had kept their fat, stupid noses OUT of the transportation infrastructure and hadn't spent the last century spending trillions to subsidize the automobile and petroleum industry, we wouldn't have nearly as many problems.
The government has the fix for everything. Just let them confiscate more of our wealth and give them more power to micro-manage every aspect of our lives. That's the solution to this problem and apparently every other problem.
Unless your tech company is providing services which require a physical presence, what's the appeal of NYC? Real estate prices alone are a very compelling reason to locate elsewhere.
"... evangelical movements in the USA, all of which are zionist..."
I've never understood that. You're talking about "Christian evangelicals" I assume. Jews openly reject the teachings of Christ and deny him messianic status. How then can a group of Christians be such rabid supporters of a Jewish state? Is this a temporary alliance against Islam or something?
Then again, there's a lot of stuff about religion that doesn't make any sense to me.
Why do you say that? Because someone DARED to differentiate a segment of the human population?
Based on anecdotal evidence accumulated in the U.S.A. I think the idea of Jews having higher IQs on average than the rest of the population is an entirely plausible hypothesis. My guess is that a real study would put the median Jewish IQ almost +1 std. deviation above the median of the rest of the country.
If racial/ethnic differences don't conform to your naive "we're all the same" world view, tough shit. The truth isn't politically correct.
He's not afraid of the rape allegations dumb ass. In fact, he's not even wanted for the crime of rape in Sweden. He's wanted for "questioning".
He's rightly concerned that he will be extradited to the USA and be subjected to indefinite detention as a "terrorist". Sweden refuses to provide a guarantee that this won't happen.
If Swedish authorities would question Assange, either remotely, or by coming to the UK OR if Sweden would guarantee that Assange would not be extradited to the USA upon return to Sweden, there would be no drama.
Better to apply a price per "NOT trade". One of the main ways that HFT works to skim money is to submit and cancel thousands of orders.
For example, say you put in an order to buy 100 shares of company 'X' at $10 per share. Suppose a big investment bank wants to dump 100 shares at $9.90. In a fair market, you both submit your orders, your buy is executed at $9.90 and the $10 surplus is yours. With HFT, these guys submit their sell order at $10.50, then immediately cancel and re-submit at $10.49, then $10.48. Rinse and repeat down until they hit your $10. Basically, HFT just allowed the bank to take $10 that would be yours in an honest market. If we applied a tiny fee to orders that were not executed, it would go a long way to leveling the playing field,
"Iowa Senator Tom Harkin and Oregon Representative Peter DeFazio want a.03 percent tax on nearly every trade in nearly every market in the U.S."
No, No, No! This is an excuse to establish a "financial transactions tax". It is not aimed at the evil Wall St. bankers, it's aimed at the little people.
Your paycheck is direct-deposited? TAX You contribute to your 401K? TAX You make a cash withdrawal? TAX You write a check to pay a bill? TAX
There are a couple of simple steps to stop the abuses of HFT. Of course, the government doesn't get a cut, which is why the tax idea will be popular in government. If we really wanted to stop the HFT abuses, it could be done with two simple steps. Maybe even one of these would suffice.
1. A minuscule fee for orders above a certain number which are not executed. Say $.03 for every order above 100. Wouldn't hurt the small investor, but would limit the practice of submitting and canceling millions of orders.
2. All orders must be valid for a certain human-detectable amount of time, say 5 seconds. It should not be acceptable to submit and cancel an order before a well positioned human could possibly react.
The markets are so rife with garbage like HFT and insider trading and so distorted by the Federal Reserve's "QE" and POMO policies, that they have ceased to fulfill their original purpose as a price discovery mechanism. IMO, the small scale investor is a fool to play in this market.
There really is a tradeoff between liberty and safety. As long as we have a free society there are going to be people who abuse their freedom to harm others. Continuing to expand government powers in an effort to stop all crime just opens up the potential for abuse of power. Historically, governments abusing their power have been the source of a lot more human misery than individuals abusing their liberty.
You could actually glean a lot of personal information about individuals just by knowing who called whom, from where, and at what time. I think the government should need to demonstrate probable cause and get a warrant for that.
They've created an incredibly successful mechanism for gathering detailed information about millions of users. Unlike past methods of market research, FB has provided a sufficient incentive for people to willingly surrender troves of personal information. Remember, FB users are the "product" not the "customer".
I'd never buy their stock, because I think they're a long term bust, but I've got to respect their talent for information gathering.
Companies do seem to go through a perverse transformation as they grow. I'd add "accountants" to your MBA and lawyer list. The companies start out as innovators and inventors when they're run by engineers. Once the bean counters take over, it's all about the quarterly numbers. When your time frame for decision making is 3 months, or at most a year, who cares about innovation and invention that *might* pay off years later? I think patents definitely drain resources because companies are involved in defensive patenting or spend time pursuing or fighting lawsuits. I believe that this pervasive short term thinking is what really strangles invention however.
In this country, there is a formal legal process for determining whether or not a person has committed a crime. It doesn't involve exchanges in the mainstream media.
We also operate under the presumption of innocence and put the burden of proof on the government.
Until the government presents evidence to a grand jury and gets an indictment, I don't even think Snowden should be considered an "accused criminal".
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you feel great about the fact that YOU are busting your ass so that the federal government can over-pay a bunch of useless bureaucrats to conduct studies and domineer over search services?
Tell you what feds, quit stealing from me and I'll figure out how to avoid the horrible perils of advertisements in my search results on my own.
I see what you're saying, but what promises or claims has the search engine made to you? On what basis do you form the "expectation" that the displayed results are not advertising?
Oh, come on. Making fun of the butchery of the English language done by non-native speakers is now "racist"? Lighten up a bit.
"If you know you're going to go, why do people train their offshore replacements."
Severance package and unemployment benefits?
"limited access to things that won't kill you (birth control, for example), and free access to things that will (i.e. guns)."
The birth control issue is about government forcing employers to pay for their employees' birth control. When there's a law that says employers must subsidize firearms purchases, I'll oppose that too.
Re: Social Security, one idiot with a sign doesn't speak for the whole movement and SS is only a "handout" when it's given to people who haven't paid into it their entire working lives.
"There's no such thing as "libertarianism". It's only a bunch of teenagers and retirees screaming "Gimme mine!"."
Funny. All the libertarians I know adopt the attitude "Leave me the hell alone". They don't want to be "given" anything. Just the right to keep the fruits of their own labor. No government bailouts, handouts, subsidies or special privileges for anyone.
What the government hates most about the TEA Party is that it was largely dispersed and lacking centralized leadership and hierarchy.
" Its what they do that shows that is just a propaganda lie."
Who's "they"? Some big-money organization like "Tea Party Patriots" who hijacked the name? Or, you saw some mainstream media depictions of so-called "TEA Party" members acting like idiots, so that discredits the whole movement and everyone involved?
There are bad taxes and worse taxes. The inflation tax is the worst. Income tax sucks. The least bad are consumption taxes.
The simple way to avoid this negative effect on the poor is to send every single person in the USA their tax "prebate" at the beginning of the year.
$prebate = $tax_rate * $income_threshold
That way, anybody with income below a certain threshold (poverty level or some multiple thereof?) would be unaffected by the tax. If they were below the poverty level, it would even be a windfall.
fairtax dot org
" Then you'll have the IRS doing business shakedowns Mafia style."
That's what they are doing NOW, against businesses and individuals. Pay us, or you will be subjected to violence. Classic extortion racket.
One of the many appealing things about the fair tax is that it makes the tax code inherently simple. Forget the thousands of pages of BS and legalese that allows the rich and the corporations to dodge taxes. Forget the IRS having so many arbitrary powers.
How are the rich going to avoid U.S. customs if they buy things outside the USA? Why would they even bother if the price (tax included) of domestic goods was competitive?
Paul Ryan's status as an elected official affords him a speaking platform, but it doesn't give him any special right to redefine terminology. He can call himself whatever he wants, but the rest of us who might self-apply that label don't need to scramble around and invent new words just because we don't want to be associated with Paul Ryan.
I think anyone on-board with Ryan would call themselves "Republican".
Appalling! I wonder how anyone could possibly hate the IRS and the government. After all they've done for us.
You can start by calling it "THE Government" instead of "Our government". "Our" implies ownership or mutual participation. As you pointed out, the NSA, IRS and the rest of the criminals are operating a cartel designed to extort wealth from and exert control over The People.
It's "The People" on one side and "The government" on the other side. There is no "our". You're either one of them(a government parasite) or one of us (the American people).
If we had some people in Congress and the Senate who were genuine leaders with a modicum of courage and respect for the oath they swore on The Constitution, they'd go public. Let's see Big Brother arrest some of our elected officials for "treason" because they tell their constituents what the government is doing.
After all of Obama's speeches telling us about how the programs have congressional oversight, I've been demanding that my elected asshats in DC tell me exactly who knows the details. No luck yet. I've suggested that it must be the intelligence committees, but my Rep. and Senators won't give me any specifics.
We need to pass a bill which sets a new government mandate on automobile manufacturers? And this needs to be done so that market forces can address the problem?
The reason we got to this point is government intervention in the economy. More government intervention is not the answer.
The government should just STOP. Stop anything and everything that they are doing to subsidize here, penalize there, micro-manage this, incentivize that, etc. All of their policies together have produced nothing but a colossal economic clusterf***!
If they had kept their fat, stupid noses OUT of the transportation infrastructure and hadn't spent the last century spending trillions to subsidize the automobile and petroleum industry, we wouldn't have nearly as many problems.
The government has the fix for everything. Just let them confiscate more of our wealth and give them more power to micro-manage every aspect of our lives. That's the solution to this problem and apparently every other problem.
Unless your tech company is providing services which require a physical presence, what's the appeal of NYC? Real estate prices alone are a very compelling reason to locate elsewhere.
" ... evangelical movements in the USA, all of which are zionist ..."
I've never understood that. You're talking about "Christian evangelicals" I assume. Jews openly reject the teachings of Christ and deny him messianic status. How then can a group of Christians be such rabid supporters of a Jewish state? Is this a temporary alliance against Islam or something?
Then again, there's a lot of stuff about religion that doesn't make any sense to me.
Why do you say that? Because someone DARED to differentiate a segment of the human population?
Based on anecdotal evidence accumulated in the U.S.A. I think the idea of Jews having higher IQs on average than the rest of the population is an entirely plausible hypothesis. My guess is that a real study would put the median Jewish IQ almost +1 std. deviation above the median of the rest of the country.
If racial/ethnic differences don't conform to your naive "we're all the same" world view, tough shit. The truth isn't politically correct.
He's not afraid of the rape allegations dumb ass. In fact, he's not even wanted for the crime of rape in Sweden. He's wanted for "questioning".
He's rightly concerned that he will be extradited to the USA and be subjected to indefinite detention as a "terrorist". Sweden refuses to provide a guarantee that this won't happen.
If Swedish authorities would question Assange, either remotely, or by coming to the UK OR if Sweden would guarantee that Assange would not be extradited to the USA upon return to Sweden, there would be no drama.
Better to apply a price per "NOT trade". One of the main ways that HFT works to skim money is to submit and cancel thousands of orders.
For example, say you put in an order to buy 100 shares of company 'X' at $10 per share. Suppose a big investment bank wants to dump 100 shares at $9.90. In a fair market, you both submit your orders, your buy is executed at $9.90 and the $10 surplus is yours.
With HFT, these guys submit their sell order at $10.50, then immediately cancel and re-submit at $10.49, then $10.48. Rinse and repeat down until they hit your $10. Basically, HFT just allowed the bank to take $10 that would be yours in an honest market. If we applied a tiny fee to orders that were not executed, it would go a long way to leveling the playing field,
"Iowa Senator Tom Harkin and Oregon Representative Peter DeFazio want a .03 percent tax on nearly every trade in nearly every market in the U.S."
No, No, No! This is an excuse to establish a "financial transactions tax". It is not aimed at the evil Wall St. bankers, it's aimed at the little people.
Your paycheck is direct-deposited? TAX
You contribute to your 401K? TAX
You make a cash withdrawal? TAX
You write a check to pay a bill? TAX
There are a couple of simple steps to stop the abuses of HFT. Of course, the government doesn't get a cut, which is why the tax idea will be popular in government. If we really wanted to stop the HFT abuses, it could be done with two simple steps. Maybe even one of these would suffice.
1. A minuscule fee for orders above a certain number which are not executed. Say $.03 for every order above 100. Wouldn't hurt the small investor, but would limit the practice of submitting and canceling millions of orders.
2. All orders must be valid for a certain human-detectable amount of time, say 5 seconds. It should not be acceptable to submit and cancel an order before a well positioned human could possibly react.
The markets are so rife with garbage like HFT and insider trading and so distorted by the Federal Reserve's "QE" and POMO policies, that they have ceased to fulfill their original purpose as a price discovery mechanism. IMO, the small scale investor is a fool to play in this market.
There really is a tradeoff between liberty and safety. As long as we have a free society there are going to be people who abuse their freedom to harm others. Continuing to expand government powers in an effort to stop all crime just opens up the potential for abuse of power. Historically, governments abusing their power have been the source of a lot more human misery than individuals abusing their liberty.
You could actually glean a lot of personal information about individuals just by knowing who called whom, from where, and at what time. I think the government should need to demonstrate probable cause and get a warrant for that.
"And what FB innovated in, exactly?"
They've created an incredibly successful mechanism for gathering detailed information about millions of users. Unlike past methods of market research, FB has provided a sufficient incentive for people to willingly surrender troves of personal information.
Remember, FB users are the "product" not the "customer".
I'd never buy their stock, because I think they're a long term bust, but I've got to respect their talent for information gathering.
Companies do seem to go through a perverse transformation as they grow. I'd add "accountants" to your MBA and lawyer list. The companies start out as innovators and inventors when they're run by engineers. Once the bean counters take over, it's all about the quarterly numbers. When your time frame for decision making is 3 months, or at most a year, who cares about innovation and invention that *might* pay off years later?
I think patents definitely drain resources because companies are involved in defensive patenting or spend time pursuing or fighting lawsuits. I believe that this pervasive short term thinking is what really strangles invention however.
In this country, there is a formal legal process for determining whether or not a person has committed a crime. It doesn't involve exchanges in the mainstream media.
We also operate under the presumption of innocence and put the burden of proof on the government.
Until the government presents evidence to a grand jury and gets an indictment, I don't even think Snowden should be considered an "accused criminal".