Why on earth would you want to worship a deity who sets bears on children who mock a bald man (elijah?) and is planning ahead of time on killing billions of humans in really gruesome ways (a lake of blood 6' deep 400 miles in diameter from the deaths-- revalations) and lots of other really evil nasty stuff?
Seriously... revalations gets very lovecraftian. everyone should give it a look! It's kinda cool.
Hmm.. The idea that a mystical beeing hand crafted bees to bee efficient? The need for a supernatural strawman to explain things when we have perfectly good, rational explanations which do not need a G-L to explain why bees are efficient at collecting pollen?
It's just goofy thinking that even over a million years, slight advantages in reproduction would make any difference.
Besides, the world was created last tuesday with everything in place as it is anyway. Some folks just talk crazy with this natural selection and evolution stuff. But since G-L created them this way last week, you have to assume it was for a purpose. Probably to test us.
Did the giant gorilla lesbian look out from her mountain beyond the horizon and create perfect bees to begin with a million years ago? Or have a million years of natural selection culled the perfect algorithm by providing a reproductive advantage?
If it was the G-L, then how did the bees remain unchanged when so many other species have changed and when we observe natural selection every day.
I can see why G-L let's humans die i such terrible ways tho. She favors animals over man.
This is a good example of people doing what you incent them to do instead of doing what you meant.
I think that the intention was that a chatbot be *smart* enough to fool a judge.
the outcome is the chatbox has no intelligence and is just matching against a huge databases of responses created by a human. really no more than an eliza program plus a huge database. so really no A/I change in 40 years.
I'd be much more excited about a program that genuinely understood just one concept. Red, or liberal or whatever.
They are still "home" til very close to the end so that's pretty tough. You don't go from "Okay!" to "Gone". My father was 'still home' for at least a few hours a day up until 2 months before he died from forgetting how to swallow.
I'm on many boards and slashdot's lack of editing ability is a real challenge.
Not just headers but entire posts can be invalidated by missing one "not" or similar word.
I don't see why everyone is getting so erratic. Clearly HD's are on their way out. It may be 5 years, it may be 15 years but SSD's will replacement once the price is right.
I've had good luck with my "1" SSD but it is slower than my hard drive for running firefox or open office. I had to copy them to my notebook (5400rpm) hard drive. It flashes a lot and my performance sucks. It's a SANDisk $8 dollar wonder tho so I'm not expecting high performance.
I havn't had an SSD fail yet. It's been years since i had a hard drive fail tho I did lose my boot ability after installing a video driver two years ago.
And we are being focused on federal income taxes to avoid talking about the total tax.
This would be like me punching you repeatedly in the head and stomach and then wanting to restrict our discussion to only punching you in the head.
The bottom quintile pay extremely heavy taxes.
It doesn't have to be this harsh on them. I'm in the top quintile. The way we are acting is irresponsible and will lead to civil unrest. In my opinion, a lot of the top has lost all empathy and are a bunch of greedy bastards at this point.
And booze taxes, gasoline taxes, cell phone taxes, cable tv taxes, water taxes, electricity taxes, car license taxes, property taxes (which are in your rent), school taxes (also in your rent), franchise fees, natural gas taxes, toll road fees, battery reclaimation fees, tire recycling fees, state park fees, fishing permits (a tax on fishing), hunting, boating, jet skiing, etc. etc. etc.
It was 10.3% in 2007. In 2009 it is up to 12% for the bottom quintile. It's about 6% for people making in the middle quintile. How about the top 1%?-- it's.03% of their income.
Fixed taxes hit the poor very hard.
The wealthy are putting a lot of money into getting taxes lowered. Don't buy their propaganda. Understand that even "liberal" tv stations and newspapers are now owned by wealthy people. There is no voice for the poor any more.
Look at the modding and comments on this thread. It's paramount to "cops are bad, rioting people should get a free pass".
I've seen the "free music" line here on slashdot many many times over the last few years. are you reading the same site? Seriously, they make up about 5 % of the comments in any given copyright discussion thread.
I'm for a reasonable copyright period. I like the 14+14 idea we started with in the US. I also like the "pay an ongoing fee or it goes public domain".
Otherwise, I'm in violent agreement with the rest of your post. The music industry blew it by being greedy, libraries are great, there is a lot of great music (more than I could listen to in the rest of my life) out there at more reasonable prices. And there's basically free legal music on the radio, jango, pandora. Other free music- the signal to noise ratio is pretty bad. You suggest craphound. I'll have to look at it.
Do you know of any reviewer/filter for free music to rate/weed out the dross?
Rioting has long been a viable tool for oppressed masses to strike back (selective destruction of that catholic church, selective destruction of asian stores in LA riots).
Rioting because someone stopped your party, or because you won a sports game is not a valid reason. You should be rounded up, fined, and sent to jail to prevent similar occurrences.
Rioting should be a tool for desperate people, not for pampered drunken college students.
The current proposed tax cuts by both republicans and democrats save the people making up to 150k is a fairly constant 2k. However, for the top 1%, the average savings is 100k.
I'd be fine with retaining for everyone a 1k tax cut and taking the excess and applying it to the burgeoning deficits. Personally, I'd prefer to let my taxes rise 3k, let theirs rise 100k, and stop spending our grandchildren's money.
Actually I took two but they probably didn't apply to this situation. Cognitive (we learn things this way, isn't that interesting?) and Industrial ( lighting changes affect productivity- just the changes not any particular change, aren't people interesting?)
I could see this situation playing either way. The cop could be too aggressive and provoke them or the cop could be too weak and provoke them.
The modders and most (but not all) posters seem focused on the wimpy girl and bubbles not the lack of respect which could turn ugly too or the frequent tendency of people to riot for no particular good cause.
I can see both sides, they pretty rabidly only see one side.
They only pay social security tax if they get their income from wages (that's a really small number-most of their income is in other forms than salary).
And on top of that, if they do get 1 million in salary. they would pay the same 7500 (secretly 15,000) that the 100k salary person does. So it drops from an effective 15% tax to an effective 1.5% tax. If they make 10 million, their effective tax is.15%.
So they pay it, but it's not much of a factor.
They should pay it- since there is a small risk they'll be bankrupted and need a retirement income. But.. they should be means tested out of it if they 'win' the lottery and retire wealthy. It's more of a retirement insurance. I expect to be means tested out of 25% to 50% of my social security.
You have an issue that people need a certain amount to survive. Say it is $10,000. At the least then, the tax system would be 23% of all income less a $10,000 deduction per year.
Problem- all fixed taxes (like cigarette and booze taxes) are a smaller rate-- and it would be grossly unfair to tax a wealthy person the same "rate" for a buying booze. It would also be dumb since they would get a poor person to buy the booze and then pay them a fee for doing that. I.e. The same booze would be $11 for mr. poor but $111 for mr rich. That would be dumb.
Likewise, trusts, dividends, overseas income, purchasing goods overseas at a low price and bringing it home, setting yourself up as a business and then deducting the cost of your car bill,cell bill, travel.
The rich are wealthy enough to redefine their income or to pay for the laws to be redefined.
Right now, I think the wealthy have won long enough (30 years) and the poor are hurting pretty badly and it's time to stop the process and reverse it.
As far as estate tax- I strongly believe we need that for other reasons. We need to break up concentrations of wealth before they threaten the nation. A sufficiently wealthy company or person can basically ignore the law.
Federal taxes only. It shows part of what you are saying-- the wealthy pay more than their share of the federal tax bill.
In 2008, the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 38.0 percent of all federal individual income taxes and earned 20.0 percent of adjusted gross income, compared to 2007 when those figures were 40.4 percent and 22.8 percent, respectively.
The top 5 percent earned 34.7 percent of the nation's adjusted gross income, but paid approximately 58.7 percent of federal individual income taxes.
However, not so fast. http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html uses the same data to produce different results. Reason- the wealthy successfully hide their income in capital appreciation, holding stocks which they do not realize profits on, equity in businesses which they are not taxed on and trusts.
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, Also... in 2008, only 19% of the income reported by the 13,480 individuals or families making over $10 million came from wages and salaries. See Norris, 2010, for more details.) ---
And none of the above addresses SStax. A 15% tax on most of us but not on the top 5%.
Doesn't address state tax. That's a separate PDF that I saved -- google it yourself- "tax rates by state". it breaks out all 50 states and the rates people pay. typically the wealthy pay.03 to.05% while the bottom 20% pay about 10 to 12 % of their income for the fixed state and local taxes and federal user fees.
--- We are sliding into an oligarchy. And on top of that, automation and robotics are going to destroy an enormous amount of jobs over the next two decades. We may reach a point where many can't find a job. What do we do? Let them starve?
The average person starts off with a base non federal (mostly state) tax rate of over 10%. That ignores state income tax- its just school tax, gas tax, cigarette tax, phone tax, car license tax, toll road fees.
That tax rate is fixed (if you have a cell phone, your taxes are about $30 regardless of if you are rich or poor).
That means the effective tax rate on the wealthy is.03% for the same taxes.
After that you have social security tax. 7.5% on people making up to about $100k. (but a "hidden additional 7.5% you don't see). Not paid by the wealthy again.
This means people making $50k to $100k pay a higher portion of their income in taxes than people making much more. Federal income tax is just a red herring. but even there, the wealthy can structure their "income" as "dividends" and other tax advantaged income and pay a much lower rate on their income than everyone else.
It's broken. The top.5% are getting about 20% of the income and have about 40% of the wealth. They should be paying about 20% of the income taxes and 40% of the property taxes.
When you include the tiny amount for the bottom 20%, the wealthy should probably pay a little bit higher taxes than that too. They don't.
The students were the ones rioting. They are responsible for their own behavior regardless of the actions of the police. And they were probably engaging in illegal behavior when the cops got pulled in (lateness of the hour, public disturbance, etc.)
Even if someone is sleeping with your husband, that doesn't justify killing them. You don't get to say, "The cops said to go inside so we were justified in rioting and starting fires".
Ohio (Kent State), 2009. An end-of-year college block party spiraled out of control as police fired pellets and used pepper spray to break up hundreds of rioting students who sparked a string of street fires at Kent State University.
People riot even when good things happen (like trashing their city after winning a big sports game).
But I imagine the riot was the fault of the police, not the students.
Slashdot Mirror
Why on earth would you want to worship a deity who sets bears on children who mock a bald man (elijah?) and is planning ahead of time on killing billions of humans in really gruesome ways (a lake of blood 6' deep 400 miles in diameter from the deaths-- revalations) and lots of other really evil nasty stuff?
Seriously... revalations gets very lovecraftian. everyone should give it a look! It's kinda cool.
Hmm.. The idea that a mystical beeing hand crafted bees to bee efficient? The need for a supernatural strawman to explain things when we have perfectly good, rational explanations which do not need a G-L to explain why bees are efficient at collecting pollen?
It's just goofy thinking that even over a million years, slight advantages in reproduction would make any difference.
Besides, the world was created last tuesday with everything in place as it is anyway. Some folks just talk crazy with this natural selection and evolution stuff. But since G-L created them this way last week, you have to assume it was for a purpose. Probably to test us.
Did the giant gorilla lesbian look out from her mountain beyond the horizon and create perfect bees to begin with a million years ago? Or have a million years of natural selection culled the perfect algorithm by providing a reproductive advantage?
If it was the G-L, then how did the bees remain unchanged when so many other species have changed and when we observe natural selection every day.
I can see why G-L let's humans die i such terrible ways tho. She favors animals over man.
And yet a 5 year old .. understands... the essence of them.
And yet parrots (which this is) can understand simple numbers and the color green.
So.. it makes sense that in order to understand green, you need to give the chatbot the ability to see.
This is a good example of people doing what you incent them to do instead of doing what you meant.
I think that the intention was that a chatbot be *smart* enough to fool a judge.
the outcome is the chatbox has no intelligence and is just matching against a huge databases of responses created by a human. really no more than an eliza program plus a huge database. so really no A/I change in 40 years.
I'd be much more excited about a program that genuinely understood just one concept. Red, or liberal or whatever.
They are still "home" til very close to the end so that's pretty tough. You don't go from "Okay!" to "Gone".
My father was 'still home' for at least a few hours a day up until 2 months before he died from forgetting how to swallow.
I'm on many boards and slashdot's lack of editing ability is a real challenge.
Not just headers but entire posts can be invalidated by missing one "not" or similar word.
I don't see why everyone is getting so erratic. Clearly HD's are on their way out. It may be 5 years, it may be 15 years but SSD's will replacement once the price is right.
I've had good luck with my "1" SSD but it is slower than my hard drive for running firefox or open office. I had to copy them to my notebook (5400rpm) hard drive. It flashes a lot and my performance sucks. It's a SANDisk $8 dollar wonder tho so I'm not expecting high performance.
I havn't had an SSD fail yet. It's been years since i had a hard drive fail tho I did lose my boot ability after installing a video driver two years ago.
And we are being focused on federal income taxes to avoid talking about the total tax.
This would be like me punching you repeatedly in the head and stomach and then wanting to restrict our discussion to only punching you in the head.
The bottom quintile pay extremely heavy taxes.
It doesn't have to be this harsh on them. I'm in the top quintile. The way we are acting is irresponsible and will lead to civil unrest. In my opinion, a lot of the top has lost all empathy and are a bunch of greedy bastards at this point.
And booze taxes, gasoline taxes, cell phone taxes, cable tv taxes, water taxes, electricity taxes, car license taxes, property taxes (which are in your rent), school taxes (also in your rent), franchise fees, natural gas taxes, toll road fees, battery reclaimation fees, tire recycling fees, state park fees, fishing permits (a tax on fishing), hunting, boating, jet skiing, etc. etc. etc.
It was 10.3% in 2007. In 2009 it is up to 12% for the bottom quintile. It's about 6% for people making in the middle quintile. How about the top 1%?-- it's .03% of their income.
Fixed taxes hit the poor very hard.
The wealthy are putting a lot of money into getting taxes lowered. Don't buy their propaganda. Understand that even "liberal" tv stations and newspapers are now owned by wealthy people. There is no voice for the poor any more.
Look at the modding and comments on this thread. It's paramount to "cops are bad, rioting people should get a free pass".
I've seen the "free music" line here on slashdot many many times over the last few years. are you reading the same site? Seriously, they make up about 5 % of the comments in any given copyright discussion thread.
I'm for a reasonable copyright period. I like the 14+14 idea we started with in the US. I also like the "pay an ongoing fee or it goes public domain".
Otherwise, I'm in violent agreement with the rest of your post. The music industry blew it by being greedy, libraries are great, there is a lot of great music (more than I could listen to in the rest of my life) out there at more reasonable prices. And there's basically free legal music on the radio, jango, pandora. Other free music- the signal to noise ratio is pretty bad. You suggest craphound. I'll have to look at it.
Do you know of any reviewer/filter for free music to rate/weed out the dross?
No that's an overreaction in the other direction.
Rioting has long been a viable tool for oppressed masses to strike back (selective destruction of that catholic church, selective destruction of asian stores in LA riots).
Rioting because someone stopped your party, or because you won a sports game is not a valid reason. You should be rounded up, fined, and sent to jail to prevent similar occurrences.
Rioting should be a tool for desperate people, not for pampered drunken college students.
Actually not the case.
The current proposed tax cuts by both republicans and democrats save the people making up to 150k is a fairly constant 2k. However, for the top 1%, the average savings is 100k.
I'd be fine with retaining for everyone a 1k tax cut and taking the excess and applying it to the burgeoning deficits. Personally, I'd prefer to let my taxes rise 3k, let theirs rise 100k, and stop spending our grandchildren's money.
Actually I took two but they probably didn't apply to this situation. Cognitive (we learn things this way, isn't that interesting?) and Industrial ( lighting changes affect productivity- just the changes not any particular change, aren't people interesting?)
I could see this situation playing either way. The cop could be too aggressive and provoke them or the cop could be too weak and provoke them.
The modders and most (but not all) posters seem focused on the wimpy girl and bubbles not the lack of respect which could turn ugly too or the frequent tendency of people to riot for no particular good cause.
I can see both sides, they pretty rabidly only see one side.
This from CBO is informative.
http://www.wealthandwant.com/issues/income/income_distribution.html
Here is the analysis by state of the total tax load (it's much higher on the poor than people realize).
http://www.itepnet.org/whopays3.pdf
This is updated as of 2009! More current than the 2006 version I was quoting.
The tax on the lowest quintile is up from 10.3% to 12.2% in only 3 years!
They only pay social security tax if they get their income from wages (that's a really small number-most of their income is in other forms than salary).
And on top of that, if they do get 1 million in salary. they would pay the same 7500 (secretly 15,000) that the 100k salary person does. So it drops from an effective 15% tax to an effective 1.5% tax. If they make 10 million, their effective tax is .15%.
So they pay it, but it's not much of a factor.
They should pay it- since there is a small risk they'll be bankrupted and need a retirement income. But.. they should be means tested out of it if they 'win' the lottery and retire wealthy. It's more of a retirement insurance. I expect to be means tested out of 25% to 50% of my social security.
There is no fair tax.
You have an issue that people need a certain amount to survive. Say it is $10,000.
At the least then, the tax system would be 23% of all income less a $10,000 deduction per year.
Problem- all fixed taxes (like cigarette and booze taxes) are a smaller rate-- and it would be grossly unfair to tax a wealthy person the same "rate" for a buying booze. It would also be dumb since they would get a poor person to buy the booze and then pay them a fee for doing that. I.e. The same booze would be $11 for mr. poor but $111 for mr rich. That would be dumb.
Likewise, trusts, dividends, overseas income, purchasing goods overseas at a low price and bringing it home, setting yourself up as a business and then deducting the cost of your car bill ,cell bill, travel.
The rich are wealthy enough to redefine their income or to pay for the laws to be redefined.
Right now, I think the wealthy have won long enough (30 years) and the poor are hurting pretty badly and it's time to stop the process and reverse it.
As far as estate tax- I strongly believe we need that for other reasons. We need to break up concentrations of wealth before they threaten the nation. A sufficiently wealthy company or person can basically ignore the law.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html
Federal taxes only.
It shows part of what you are saying-- the wealthy pay more than their share of the federal tax bill.
In 2008, the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 38.0 percent of all federal individual income taxes and earned 20.0 percent of adjusted gross income, compared to 2007 when those figures were 40.4 percent and 22.8 percent, respectively.
The top 5 percent earned 34.7 percent of the nation's adjusted gross income, but paid approximately 58.7 percent of federal individual income taxes.
However, not so fast.
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
uses the same data to produce different results.
Reason- the wealthy successfully hide their income in capital appreciation, holding stocks which they do not realize profits on, equity in businesses which they are not taxed on and trusts.
In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%,
Also...
in 2008, only 19% of the income reported by the 13,480 individuals or families making over $10 million came from wages and salaries. See Norris, 2010, for more details.)
---
And none of the above addresses SStax. A 15% tax on most of us but not on the top 5%.
Doesn't address state tax. That's a separate PDF that I saved -- google it yourself- "tax rates by state". it breaks out all 50 states and the rates people pay. typically the wealthy pay .03 to .05% while the bottom 20% pay about 10 to 12 % of their income for the fixed state and local taxes and federal user fees.
---
We are sliding into an oligarchy.
And on top of that, automation and robotics are going to destroy an enormous amount of jobs over the next two decades. We may reach a point where many can't find a job. What do we do? Let them starve?
The average person starts off with a base non federal (mostly state) tax rate of over 10%. That ignores state income tax- its just school tax, gas tax, cigarette tax, phone tax, car license tax, toll road fees.
That tax rate is fixed (if you have a cell phone, your taxes are about $30 regardless of if you are rich or poor).
That means the effective tax rate on the wealthy is .03% for the same taxes.
After that you have social security tax. 7.5% on people making up to about $100k. (but a "hidden additional 7.5% you don't see). Not paid by the wealthy again.
This means people making $50k to $100k pay a higher portion of their income in taxes than people making much more. Federal income tax is just a red herring. but even there, the wealthy can structure their "income" as "dividends" and other tax advantaged income and pay a much lower rate on their income than everyone else.
It's broken. The top .5% are getting about 20% of the income and have about 40% of the wealth. They should be paying about 20% of the income taxes and 40% of the property taxes.
When you include the tiny amount for the bottom 20%, the wealthy should probably pay a little bit higher taxes than that too. They don't.
Thanks,
Never seen such atrocious modding on a subject.
A riot didn't occur so for all we know, arresting the girl prevented a riot by putting the stupid in the crowd on notice.
So in this case, the scandal would be if it turned out there was a real person off stage instead of it being a computer projected image?
Getting a 5, informative and then a Troll mod in the same thread should be an achievement.
The students were the ones rioting. They are responsible for their own behavior regardless of the actions of the police. And they were probably engaging in illegal behavior when the cops got pulled in (lateness of the hour, public disturbance, etc.)
Even if someone is sleeping with your husband, that doesn't justify killing them.
You don't get to say, "The cops said to go inside so we were justified in rioting and starting fires".
Funny thing you should mention Kent State...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/26/kent-state-riot-police-fi_n_191561.html
Ohio (Kent State), 2009. An end-of-year college block party spiraled out of control as police fired pellets and used pepper spray to break up hundreds of rioting students who sparked a string of street fires at Kent State University.
People riot even when good things happen (like trashing their city after winning a big sports game).
But I imagine the riot was the fault of the police, not the students.