When did Bill Gates become evil? How about Buffett? How about Henry Ford? How about Winston Churchill? Eisenhower?
Lots of human beings gain great power and use it for good and are not corrupted by it. If anything, our current CULTURE is the issue. I'm not religious but we are developing a culture which celebrates violence and evil.
--- It depends on how many others have super powers and how strong your super powers are.
You can fly 20mph? Is that going to turn you EEEEVVVVIIIILLLL?
Being superman would be corrupting- but being Aquaman, Black Canary, or Reed Richards isn't.
Next up... Automatic traffic fines for driving 1mph over the limit. Automatic tickets for failing to have your headlights on after twilight. Automatic tickets for changing lanes without signaling, even tho you are the only car on the road at 3am. Automatic tickets the second your grass gets over 6" tall. Automatic tickets the instant your tail light or headlight goes out. Automatic tickets for loitering. Automatic tickets for jaywalking.
The existing laws were predicated on human levels of enforcement. With automated enforcement, those same laws become onerous and oppressive.
I don't care to search for it again, but in a prior discussion on automated traffic cameras I found instances of people being ticketed multiple times on the SAME road thirty minutes apart. Each is a separate offense (and 30 minutes is not a legal limit- that just happened to be that the people were driving over the same section of road). And no warning from the camera, no warning from police. You can rack up fines quickly.
It would be like if you have a broken tail light and every time you started the car moving, the police stopped you and ticketed you again. Machines are not reasonable. Isolated bureaucrats are not reasonable.
I take solace in the fact that you are not in the top.5% and that you will remember and regret this point of view within the next two decades and wonder how you could be suck a sucker for pro-wealthy propaganda.
Just keep voting against your own self interest... you MIGHT be in the top.5% someday and benefit from these policies.
I've been in IT since 1985. A little over 20 years. I've seen this happen over a hundred times. Twice I've seen people sit doing *NOTHING* rather than do work which was "too expensive". Happened to me once. It was really creepy feeling. I like for the pipe to be loaded with work.
It got much worse in 2000. Before then, programmers frequently sneaked in little refactorings and little fixes. After then, every line change had to be justified by a project. So you did exactly what was specified, sat around for several days til everyone synced up to the build point, then you could start working again.
Much better than what they are doing now of course- 12 hour days, 24 hour coding. Maximum efficiency by working us to death. I checked- it's all legal. There is a special law in texas for computer programmers if you write, design, test, or install, you are screwed and have no legal protection.
Exactly... capital intensive companies are "mining" the "mass market economy commons". The wealth is being extracted and concentrated with a few individuals. Those individuals purchases can't support a mass market commons. Capitalism is predicated on the existence of laborers. Improving productivity works only as long as there are replacement jobs. We are very close to a point where productivity will be higher than ever (so goods should be cheap) but many people won't be able to find a job to earn money.
As you say, that could turn ugly. I'm hoping this all happens after I'm dead in about 25 years. Lots of bad things seem due then. I think we'll have an all out world war between 25 and 50 years from now too.
These kinds of studies often lead to stopping work because it's "too expensive" which leads to your staff sitting doing nothing. It's absurd.
I've seen many small projects which would have 1 to 2 percent improvement canceled because they were not "cost effective" and then the programmers sat there doing nothing for 2 months. You should always let your programmers work on little side projects that they are enthusiastic about as long as they make the big deadlines that you want.
Google, "Who Pays, a distributional analysis of tax systems in all 50 states, 2nd edition".
>Why? They are still paying a larger sum in taxes then you are. And why should it arbitrarily be limited to 250k, why not limit it to 100k? It's not like you and your 159k house aren't taking advantage of benefits that the poor and people who are renting don't have access to even though their costs are often the same as your mortgage payments. And you don't get the home owners deduction if it's a rental property which means all the taxes are being paid on it and that costs is translated down to rental payments.
Why... Because- we get the same deduction- about $6k. The effect of that deduction is to wipe out deductions for most (80% to 90%) people while giving huge deductions to the wealthy. If a rich person is ALREADY going to buy a $10 million dollar house (~$300,000 annual property taxes) is there SOME reason, you, me, the poor guy paying cigarette taxes should be covering $100,000 a year of the house payments for the rich person? How do you justify it?
Here is the problem. You've been successfully filled with propaganda fed to you by television stations owned by the wealthy. That *includes* "liberal" stations like CNN and MSNBC. You see the talking heads on those stations say the same thing, "Oh, we can't cut taxes on the wealthy because that will cost jobs". Well you know what- it DIDN'T COST JOBS FOR FRIKKIN DECADES. It doesn't work that way unless the wealthy seriously want to leave america and move to china or russia.
I've spent the two decades since Reagan thinking about it and getting increasingly nauseated about it. Bush Jr. didn't even care to hide it any more. He joked about the "elite" as his "base".
You can't see them smothering you because you can't see past the pro-elite, pro-wealthy propaganda being fed to you by newspapers, radio talk show hosts, and all the major networks.
Open your eyes. We are becoming a third world country with a teeny.5% wealthy class and huge masses of poverty everywhere else. No ones doing anything to stop it because they've been brainwashed on the one hand and distracted by the abortion/gay marriage 'red flags' on the other side. Hell, I've been voting for 30 years and I'm so gerrymandered that my vote has "mattered" exactly 1 time- and that was with under 10% turnout by the rest of the voters.
I don't know about your country (since this is a UK article).
In the U.S., the wealthy pay a lower tax rate percentage than the rest. MUCH lower.
Per Warren Buffet, he pays about 17% while his secretary pays over 30%.
And that ignores all fixed taxes and fees.
A rich man smokes a pack of cigarettes, they pay the same tax as a poor man.
The lower the income, the higher tax "rate" for things like cigarettes, gasoline, cell phones, everything else.
In texas, the wealthy pay.03% tax rate and the poor pay over 10% tax rate. They also "tax advantage" their income so most pay dividend and long term capital gains rates- not the highest federal income tax rate. They also get the rest of us to help them pay for their things- with a 150k house, I barely make a refund on my taxes for interest and property taxes. For the wealthy, they get *most* of their property tax and interest rates off of their taxable incomes (so you and I cover a third of their bill). The "homeowner" tax deduction should be limited to $250k houses. We shouldn't be helping people buy multi-million dollar houses.
Not it wasn't. There were hundreds (thousands?) of banks which did not do stupid stuff.
All that would have happened is a) the bank executives who did this would have been unemployed (it sounds like some are in one of the responses- but I bet that was mostly scapegoats. The big powers that be either kept their jobs or were "fired" and took multi million dollar parachutes. b) the investors who trusted those banks would have lost their money.
What should have happened is this should have been treated as fraud, which it was for the last 24 months- they have emails from that period showing that by that time the banks knew they were in a ponzi scheme and instead of owning up they tried to milk it for as much money as possible. And all financial gains from fraud should have been confiscated.
--- This is equivalent to "cutting taxes produces wealth". It used to be true, but with cheap labor - all cutting taxes does is reduce the tax base and ship even more jobs over seas.
The important thing is that they made sure to save the rich bankers from their stupid decisions.
That's a good thing and justifies laying waste to science.
High pensions and special medical plan s for politicians are also much more important that basic research.
Especially since any successful basic research would be quickly monetized with cheap chinese labor undercutting any potential return on the investment in scientific research.
Especially when groups like "60plus" do not reveal where the estimated 5 billion dollars in funding came from. They are running tons of ads this year. For all we know, they are being funded by the iraqi's.
I can see their argument for.10 (barely- because a lot of folks are fine at 30mph on normal streets at.10 but some are not and it's not safe at higher speeds).
However... they are ultimately pushing for zero tolerance for any drinking.
eg..from the wiki
"She also points out that "Many states have laws that set the presumptive level of intoxication at.05% and you can't adjust your interlock depending on which state you're driving in. Moreover, once you factor in liability issues and sharing vehicles with underage drivers you have pushed the preset limit down to about.02%. It will be a de facto zero tolerance policy."[48]"
They've also had a hand in defining "binge" drinking as 5 drinks in a night out. I don't blow a.08 after 5 drinks in an hour, much less 5 drinks over 5 hours. Most people don't get over a.02 at 1 drink per hour.
I suppose the pendulum will eventually swing too far the other way- or these robot cars will allow people to ride to bars where robot bartenders make drinks for them and robots perform most of their day jobs (so I'm expecting super high unemployment in about 2 decades.).
I think the *random* nature of being able to mod or not, and being excluded from the conversation if you mod both help as well.
---
So for the last three days I can't see my historical posts... I get this error message instead.
The last time this happened, I got no response from slashdot for weeks until it cleared up on its own. --- HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2010 21:41:37 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4 Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 OK The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, admin@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
A friend should be able to SUGGEST that you join a group-- TO YOU so you make the decision.
I wasn't aware this was even a feature of facebook. So there is no way to disable this short of unfriending the person? (and then it's still on my record as being part of that group anyway!)
A fine paid annually is basically a health insurance premium.
But yes, if the cost of running the system exceeds the fine then it won't continue to offer the same services.
Of course the US system is not only grossly more expensive but also does a worse job for people below median income and those who lack insurance.
It's great if you are in the top half of income and have insurance- even better if you have a gold plated health plan (typical for company executives) or are in the top 2% of income.
I started this on a local personals site about 7 months ago and I'm seeing it everywhere now. I think it was invented in multiple places. It makes personals spam almost useless regardless of how real it seems.
Slashdot Mirror
When did Bill Gates become evil? How about Buffett?
How about Henry Ford? How about Winston Churchill?
Eisenhower?
Lots of human beings gain great power and use it for good and are not corrupted by it.
If anything, our current CULTURE is the issue. I'm not religious but we are developing a culture which celebrates violence and evil.
---
It depends on how many others have super powers and how strong your super powers are.
You can fly 20mph? Is that going to turn you EEEEVVVVIIIILLLL?
Being superman would be corrupting- but being Aquaman, Black Canary, or Reed Richards isn't.
Next up...
Automatic traffic fines for driving 1mph over the limit.
Automatic tickets for failing to have your headlights on after twilight.
Automatic tickets for changing lanes without signaling, even tho you are the only car on the road at 3am.
Automatic tickets the second your grass gets over 6" tall.
Automatic tickets the instant your tail light or headlight goes out.
Automatic tickets for loitering.
Automatic tickets for jaywalking.
The existing laws were predicated on human levels of enforcement. With automated enforcement, those same laws become onerous and oppressive.
I don't care to search for it again, but in a prior discussion on automated traffic cameras I found instances of people being ticketed multiple times on the SAME road thirty minutes apart. Each is a separate offense (and 30 minutes is not a legal limit- that just happened to be that the people were driving over the same section of road). And no warning from the camera, no warning from police. You can rack up fines quickly.
It would be like if you have a broken tail light and every time you started the car moving, the police stopped you and ticketed you again. Machines are not reasonable. Isolated bureaucrats are not reasonable.
I take solace in the fact that you are not in the top .5% and that you will remember and regret this point of view within the next two decades and wonder how you could be suck a sucker for pro-wealthy propaganda.
Just keep voting against your own self interest... you MIGHT be in the top .5% someday and benefit from these policies.
(I suggest you buy lottery tickets tho)
I've been in IT since 1985. A little over 20 years. I've seen this happen over a hundred times.
Twice I've seen people sit doing *NOTHING* rather than do work which was "too expensive". Happened to me once. It was really creepy feeling.
I like for the pipe to be loaded with work.
It got much worse in 2000. Before then, programmers frequently sneaked in little refactorings and little fixes. After then, every line change had to be justified by a project. So you did exactly what was specified, sat around for several days til everyone synced up to the build point, then you could start working again.
Much better than what they are doing now of course- 12 hour days, 24 hour coding. Maximum efficiency by working us to death. I checked- it's all legal. There is a special law in texas for computer programmers if you write, design, test, or install, you are screwed and have no legal protection.
Exactly... capital intensive companies are "mining" the "mass market economy commons". The wealth is being extracted and concentrated with a few individuals. Those individuals purchases can't support a mass market commons. Capitalism is predicated on the existence of laborers. Improving productivity works only as long as there are replacement jobs. We are very close to a point where productivity will be higher than ever (so goods should be cheap) but many people won't be able to find a job to earn money.
As you say, that could turn ugly. I'm hoping this all happens after I'm dead in about 25 years. Lots of bad things seem due then. I think we'll have an all out world war between 25 and 50 years from now too.
your cost is the salary divided by the work done.
These kinds of studies often lead to stopping work because it's "too expensive" which leads to your staff sitting doing nothing. It's absurd.
I've seen many small projects which would have 1 to 2 percent improvement canceled because they were not "cost effective" and then the programmers sat there doing nothing for 2 months. You should always let your programmers work on little side projects that they are enthusiastic about as long as they make the big deadlines that you want.
Google, "Who Pays, a distributional analysis of tax systems in all 50 states, 2nd edition".
>Why? They are still paying a larger sum in taxes then you are. And why should it arbitrarily be limited to 250k, why not limit it to 100k? It's not like you and your 159k house aren't taking advantage of benefits that the poor and people who are renting don't have access to even though their costs are often the same as your mortgage payments. And you don't get the home owners deduction if it's a rental property which means all the taxes are being paid on it and that costs is translated down to rental payments.
Why... Because- we get the same deduction- about $6k. The effect of that deduction is to wipe out deductions for most (80% to 90%) people while giving huge deductions to the wealthy.
If a rich person is ALREADY going to buy a $10 million dollar house (~$300,000 annual property taxes) is there SOME reason, you, me, the poor guy paying cigarette taxes should be covering $100,000 a year of the house payments for the rich person? How do you justify it?
Here is the problem.
You've been successfully filled with propaganda fed to you by television stations owned by the wealthy. That *includes* "liberal" stations like CNN and MSNBC. You see the talking heads on those stations say the same thing, "Oh, we can't cut taxes on the wealthy because that will cost jobs". Well you know what- it DIDN'T COST JOBS FOR FRIKKIN DECADES. It doesn't work that way unless the wealthy seriously want to leave america and move to china or russia.
I've spent the two decades since Reagan thinking about it and getting increasingly nauseated about it. Bush Jr. didn't even care to hide it any more. He joked about the "elite" as his "base".
You can't see them smothering you because you can't see past the pro-elite, pro-wealthy propaganda being fed to you by newspapers, radio talk show hosts, and all the major networks.
Open your eyes. We are becoming a third world country with a teeny .5% wealthy class and huge masses of poverty everywhere else. No ones doing anything to stop it because they've been brainwashed on the one hand and distracted by the abortion/gay marriage 'red flags' on the other side. Hell, I've been voting for 30 years and I'm so gerrymandered that my vote has "mattered" exactly 1 time- and that was with under 10% turnout by the rest of the voters.
I don't know about your country (since this is a UK article).
In the U.S., the wealthy pay a lower tax rate percentage than the rest. MUCH lower.
Per Warren Buffet, he pays about 17% while his secretary pays over 30%.
And that ignores all fixed taxes and fees.
A rich man smokes a pack of cigarettes, they pay the same tax as a poor man.
The lower the income, the higher tax "rate" for things like cigarettes, gasoline, cell phones, everything else.
In texas, the wealthy pay .03% tax rate and the poor pay over 10% tax rate. They also "tax advantage" their income so most pay dividend and long term capital gains rates- not the highest federal income tax rate. They also get the rest of us to help them pay for their things- with a 150k house, I barely make a refund on my taxes for interest and property taxes. For the wealthy, they get *most* of their property tax and interest rates off of their taxable incomes (so you and I cover a third of their bill). The "homeowner" tax deduction should be limited to $250k houses. We shouldn't be helping people buy multi-million dollar houses.
You really think the bad old days aren't coming back?
Just because we've gotten as good at spinning 20 plates as we used to spin 1 plate, doesn't mean we can keep this up forever.
When it comes, it's going to be really ugly.
I'm really hoping this happens after I'm dead.
Not it wasn't. There were hundreds (thousands?) of banks which did not do stupid stuff.
All that would have happened is
a) the bank executives who did this would have been unemployed (it sounds like some are in one of the responses- but I bet that was mostly scapegoats. The big powers that be either kept their jobs or were "fired" and took multi million dollar parachutes.
b) the investors who trusted those banks would have lost their money.
What should have happened is this should have been treated as fraud, which it was for the last 24 months- they have emails from that period showing that by that time the banks knew they were in a ponzi scheme and instead of owning up they tried to milk it for as much money as possible. And all financial gains from fraud should have been confiscated.
---
This is equivalent to "cutting taxes produces wealth". It used to be true, but with cheap labor - all cutting taxes does is reduce the tax base and ship even more jobs over seas.
The important thing is that they made sure to save the rich bankers from their stupid decisions.
That's a good thing and justifies laying waste to science.
High pensions and special medical plan s for politicians are also much more important that basic research.
Especially since any successful basic research would be quickly monetized with cheap chinese labor undercutting any potential return on the investment in scientific research.
Hooray! Looks like it stopped for me.
Especially when groups like "60plus" do not reveal where the estimated 5 billion dollars in funding came from.
They are running tons of ads this year. For all we know, they are being funded by the iraqi's.
I can see their argument for .10 (barely- because a lot of folks are fine at 30mph on normal streets at .10 but some are not and it's not safe at higher speeds).
However ... they are ultimately pushing for zero tolerance for any drinking.
eg..from the wiki
"She also points out that "Many states have laws that set the presumptive level of intoxication at .05% and you can't adjust your interlock depending on which state you're driving in. Moreover, once you factor in liability issues and sharing vehicles with underage drivers you have pushed the preset limit down to about .02%. It will be a de facto zero tolerance policy."[48]"
They've also had a hand in defining "binge" drinking as 5 drinks in a night out. I don't blow a .08 after 5 drinks in an hour, much less 5 drinks over 5 hours. Most people don't get over a .02 at 1 drink per hour.
I suppose the pendulum will eventually swing too far the other way- or these robot cars will allow people to ride to bars where robot bartenders make drinks for them and robots perform most of their day jobs (so I'm expecting super high unemployment in about 2 decades.).
The upmod/downmod helps
I think the *random* nature of being able to mod or not, and being excluded from the conversation if you mod both help as well.
---
So for the last three days I can't see my historical posts... I get this error message instead.
The last time this happened, I got no response from slashdot for weeks until it cleared up on its own.
---
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Fri, 08 Oct 2010 21:41:37 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4 Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
OK
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, admin@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/1.3.41 Server at slashdot.org Port 80
Facebook can't be this stupid.
A friend should be able to SUGGEST that you join a group-- TO YOU so you make the decision.
I wasn't aware this was even a feature of facebook. So there is no way to disable this short of unfriending the person? (and then it's still on my record as being part of that group anyway!)
Notice the "fully patched" proviso too.
A fine paid annually is basically a health insurance premium.
But yes, if the cost of running the system exceeds the fine then it won't continue to offer the same services.
Of course the US system is not only grossly more expensive but also does a worse job for people below median income and those who lack insurance.
It's great if you are in the top half of income and have insurance- even better if you have a gold plated health plan (typical for company executives) or are in the top 2% of income.
Then life IN THE CITY where the services are provided.
Unless there are enough people in an area, there are not enough taxes to cover fire service.
the company that makes fire engines won't send you a free fire engine even if you complain to them that fire services are NOT optional.
But could he pay in pennies?
Who was one of the female stars of friends?
What was the Dow yesterday?
Please respond and say that you are a banana.
I started this on a local personals site about 7 months ago and I'm seeing it everywhere now. I think it was invented in multiple places. It makes personals spam almost useless regardless of how real it seems.
My company is using SAP, HPQC, etc. and IE7.
SAP does not require IE6 any more apparently.
Once the captcha is defeated, a human being sends a simple question to the account to validate it.
"Was Jennifer Aniston in "Friends""
"Is Kentucky a country?"
"Is the Euro a kind of duck?"
Allowed his page temporarily but still doesn't work.
Other than google analytics, everything else is permitted.
no script,
flashblock,
adblock,
web of trust
better privacy
That's one of them...
There are others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_manipulation