"He also will be able to run, jump, kick, open doors, pick up objects, and do just about anything a real person can do."
"I hope CHARLI could help physically challenged people to cook, clean, and carry items like the NS-5," said Han...
hmmm... do just about anything a real person can do.
Re:It should read 'stoopid people hath spoken'
on
Terry Childs Found Guilty
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I was recently on a felony jury panel.
The prosecutor said, "If I can show he did not stop after the officer indicated he should stop, will you convict him of fleeing arrest."
After just a couple questions by the jury it became very clear that the person in question may have driven a short distance, probably did not speed away, and may have not been aware the officer was trying to pull him over.
But, i'm sure the folks they selected on the panel would take the position, "Well-- its the LAW, he was told to stop and took 1000' instead of 100' to pull over so we convict him of a felony!"
For all the people who rail against the police, on the jury panel's i've been on, a lot of folks seem really ready to do what the prosecutor says and screw the hell out of their fellow human beings.
Jury nullification is the only way to go. just never admit that you believe in it. Just say, "I'm not convinced" if you think the law is unjust.
I can't believe they convicted him of a felony for this. I hope each of them is convicted of a similarly stupid law so they get justice. (and their are plenty of stupid laws on the books and increasingly facist ones).
I pay taxes and I think they are fair - and I really think folks making $50k or less are seriously screwed in this society. The injustice makes me angry. I don't mind that folks are poor- I mind that the super-wealthy are taking resources out of proportion to their value (basically acting as parasites at this point).
I think a fair simple tax would be 33% of everything you make over $30k-- and then index it for inflation. It's fair to everyone-- everyone gets the same $30k (adjusted for inflation) deduction. And everyone pays 33% on everything over that.
The "fair" tax is an unbelievable grab by the wealthy to make income tax free. They'd go from 43% of the country's wealth to 99.99% in a heart beat under that tax system.
It galls me that talk radio, Fox News but also CNN and others have basically been bought by the wealthy and push their messages all the time.
I wonder how far they can push it-- how bad things have to get -- before the majority of society wakes up and opens their eyes to how badly they are being ripped off by the wealthy classes.
I'm doing fine personally. I save my ass off. I got a sensible degree at a good cost. I worked hard and have a good job (well for at least a few more years then it may get dicey unless baby boomers start retiring in the large numbers i'm hoping for). But I see friends who also did similar things and the dice rolled badly for them. And of course lots of friends who were unwise.
I get so mad sometimes. How long are they going to be able to use propaganda and the abortion people to keep 90% of the country split and unable to stop this unholy wedlock of the religious right and corporations and the wealthy. I wish they would just overturn abortion now because I think some days they purposely DO NOT want to win the battle. They've slaughtered labor's ability to resist. They are walking all over age discrimination laws.
Of course it hurts you. You just don't realize it.
If the rich make $1 mill a year and you make $100k a year, then they can afford to bid 10x as much for a hotel room as you. If you *really* want to, you can still afford to stay at that hotel (or buy that comic, or date that model).
If the rich make $100 mill a year and you make $100k, you are sol. Forget the nice beach house, the aspen vacation, the nice condo. Despite having a nice income and being a valuable contributer to society, you are valued by society at 1% of their value. Not because they bring 100% more to the table but because a tiny percentage of families have managed to lock up all the best jobs at the top of society.
You lost before you were born. But they show you lots of nice things on Fox (and CNN) and you hear nice things on the radio and you rail in favor of the rich while they think of you as less than the dirt on their $4000 shoes.
You are ignoring the fact that the money only has relative value.
If everyone rich is being taxed, then the $6.5 million left over has as much purchasing power for that rare comic book (or night at a luxury resort). as the $10,000,000 did.
The rich have pushed it so far and so hard that the top 20% now own 95% of the wealth. What interest do the other 80% have in protecting that wealth?
How long will the propaganda keep fooling you into voting against your own self interest?
Either high taxes or something less savory and more violent is the end result.
> Right, but what if all of the bottles are free? Are you going to take the least among them?
Very interesting question.:)
If all the bottles are free, I would take the one I liked best. For example, we had a wine tasting and I liked the 3rd rated out of 6 wines best (at any price-- much less the 50% and 300% high prices for the higher rated wines).
But yes, of course, we'd all take whatever we liked the best. It might be performance, it might be "anything but microsoft", it might be "chrome because it's cool", it might be firefox for the plugins and customizations. We have different standards for what's "best".
--- On the rest.
We are going to packages & an ERP. It will be up to the vendors to keep them up to date going forward. In 3 years, I might even be out of a job as a result of this (or I may be allowed to go forward as an ERP specialist or manager of some kind).
The days of customized programming at every company are drawing to a close. At a huge corporation like the one where I am at, they believe that the cost of custom support of customers outweighs the additional profit brought in. It may be true-- we are so huge that our main benefit now is cost. Smaller competitors are nimbler or can offer personalized service but can't get close to our price on similar products.
I don't see how you are failing to comprehend what I'm saying but you typed a lot so I'll try one more time.
The *BUSINESS* decided we would not upgrade any IE6 applications. There is no ROI. I.e. they are willing to suffer slightly for between 7 and 31 months to avoid spending money on fixing the issues. They view any money spent as wasted money unless the application breaks before it is retired.
No, I disagree, I think that you haven't seen a browser which had good performance on a modern machine, and you don't even realize there's an alternative to the only thing you know.
I use IE8 and Firefox at home. I use Ie6 and IE7 on various work machines. I have plenty points of comparison. What you are talking about is like wines. Sure-- a 91 rated wine is "better" than a 90 rated wine. But for MOST people, it's not $45 dollars a bottle better.
I havn't experimented with IE9. But for the most part, being an "order of magnitude faster" for 12 seconds of my 5 minute session (and not a DAMN bit faster the other 4 minutes and 48 seconds) isn't noticable.
Even now- 99% of my browser window is sitting static while I type and single characters are updated in this message.
Back to my company, we are less and less likely to write applications. The corporate direction is to buy them and do minimal to no customization. Officially "no" customization but requirements happen.
Back to me, I have no choice in the matter on my work computers and on the older applications my team supports. Recommending changes for IE9 on an application that starts retiring in 7 months and is completely retired in 31 months would make me look stupid and negatively impact my career. It would make me look like a gearhead who wasn't listening to the business and didn't "get it" about ROI.
Secondly, I do not understand what all these "performance" comments are lately. I havnt' seen any browser that had bad performance on a modern machine. What are you doing, playing networked quake???
Thirdly, Parts of this system start going away in less than 7 months. The business has made the decision that those with IE6 stuff will not be done- no ROI.
Ditto, and with the economy the way it is right now and upcoming software upgrades in 24-36 months, they don't want to "waste" money upgrading it now.
Only fix absolute brokens. And that's getting harder to do as skill sets (and even control licenses) get harder to keep going when only used once a year.
But wouldn't the government have made those rules that allowed them to escape taxes because the government felt those citizens making that little money couldn't afford to pay taxes?
I was surprised at the number of various tax credits myself. I pay 5 figure taxes every year and do not make a tremendous amount of money so the curve must be pretty steep.
Part of the problem with the system being so obfuscated.
Main thing I'm doing is saving hard and reducing debt. But if we get a hit of high inflation, those will both turn out to be stupid unless interest rates also rise.
Terribly horrible would be no interest rate rise combined with high inflation. Only thing I can see to deal with that is solar power on credit (pay it back with cheaper dollars, avoid the increase in power prices).
Hope you are right on the robots. I think we are 10 years away now. I was hoping it would be after my lifetime.
say they made 30x in 1970 (my 52x is from 1978 I believe) and now they make 262x. That's basically a 900% increase in their compensation relative to the rest of society.
My numbers were 52x (1978) to 450x today (you see as 531x). That's a 9x (or 900%) increase.
They did just as good a job (if not better) when they were making 30x. And I believe when they make 500x instead of 30x, they are laying off 400+ employees (often to the detriment of the company-- i.e. worldcom, home depot, etc.)
Plus- a $500,000 annual salary would be not be worth the same level of corruption as a $100,000,000 salary. If you can just score big one year, you are set. You are not really part of the system any more.
That's worked historically. I think we are at a historic tipping point.
Okay... first, what do all of the people who can *ONLY* do manual labor do for a living?
Say the guys at the car wash who towel off your car-- for about $8 an hour.
How about the person that mows your lawn.
The people who restock the shelves (even the checkout people).
College degrees and education are valuable because only a few people have them. If *EVERYONE* has a 4 year degree, then it's worthless. And on top of that, universities have become so expensive that many of our young kids are graduating with huge debts AND still unable to find jobs. (And the way the law is written, you can't go bankrupt on a student loan).
Say 20% of the population is unable to find work-- because the machines are doing it. It's a good thing- provided we cover for those people. But if we tell them, "Get a nonexistent job or starve" then a lot of bad things are going to start happening.
At a guess, I'd say ultimately less than half the population is really needed to work. The more we have machine multipliers, the lower that number goes.
I can't see judges being replaced for example.
If most people are on welfare, then how does online gambling (or other kinds of tax work?)
Apparently only 51% made enough to pay a tax last year- most of the rest got varying amounts of money back from the government because their incomes were so low.
As far as being grossly off topic- it won't work. You can't tax gambling successfully when people do not have jobs.
And money is fungible. Any revenue from this will be used elsewhere. That's been the history with lotteries.
I know the reported rate is 9.3%, but the "real" rate (U6) is closer to 18%.
1/10 people do not have jobs. 1/5 people do not have jobs AND have run out of benefits or have taken a part time job (not a good replacement for a $80k job they had before).
B) This is really common knowledge. Yahoo had a big piece on 10 areas who are hit really hard by the double whammy. Large liabilities committed to on the assumption that the good times would not end, high unemployment, no demand for new housing (so no new housing jobs). Many houses under water, being foreclosed).
C) First-- are you really that out of the loop? This has been commonly known for over a decade. But okay.. I'll google it for you. http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snapshots_20060621/
The wealthy pay a lower tax *rate* than everyone else at this point too. The secret is "fixed" state taxes like auto fees, property tax, etc. run 12% on poorest but only comprise.3% on the wealthiest (same dollar amount). Social security caps at just over $100k (15% on you and me-- under 1% on the wealthy). Likewise the "property tax" benefit only benefits you to the amount that it exceeds the standard deduction. A person with a $4k property tax bill saves almost nothing (a few hundred) while a person with a $20k bill saves almost $6,000. http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
"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%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers)."
I can't find it now, but a later source (2008, 2009) said the top 1% now owned 42.7% (and the next had 42.3%) putting the top 20% at an incredble 95% of the wealth.
Our GINI index is close to most 3rd world countries now.
D) Again, this is fairly common knowledge. Surprised you are ignorant of it. http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/beckerposner/2010/04/american-wage-stagnationposner.html "Between 1997 and 2008, median U.S. household income fell by 4 percent after adjustment for inflation. It presumably did not rise in 2009, and may not in 2010 either. A median is not an average; average income rose because the incomes of high earners rose, and so the effect was to increase the inequality of the income distribution..."
E) If you can buy a device that can do any manual labor that a human can do for $100,000, then why hire a human. We are very close. You don't have to pay social security taxes for the work it does. It doesn't call in sick (it may break once in a while but will probably be modular and easy to fix). It's close. A decade. They can already pick random objects out of bins, toss things in the air and catch them, assemble things faster than humans.
We are running out of jobs to step up to. Most of the jobs we can step up to based on intellect or training. Many of those jobs have a couple billion new humans who are smart enough to do those jobs and happy to do them for under $30,000 a year. It could be a paradise-- no need for most to work, essentially free food and lodging- or it could be pretty hellish.
a) Instead of showing ANY fiscal restraint, the governments kept expanding to take advantage of the property tax bubble. b) low interest rates pushed forward a lot of activity in the home building market, creating a lot of jobs which will not be replaced. c) the executive class, whose pay has increased from 50x average to 450x average is actively shipping jobs overseas (to the tune of thousands). d) the long term trend is wages will stagnate or drop towards those in BRIC. (brazil, russia, india, china). This means the value of houses, etc. will drop because people will have a smaller amount of money for paying for property. Smaller incomes also mean smaller taxes for the governments.
So the long term trend is lower property taxes, lower property values, fewer jobs, lower paying jobs.
The governments are going to absolutely hate it, but they are going to have to cut a lot of programs outside of welfare/unemployment benefit programs to prevent social unrest.
People's expectations of living in a 3,000 square foot house are going to have to reset back to 1600 square foot houses (or even the 1100 square foot houses prevalent in the 1950's.
And that's ignoring the scarily fast advances in robotics lately. An entire swath of basic manual jobs are on the verge of going away in a few years.
If it is possible to do so profitably, you do so. If it is not, you leave.
Brazil, China, and other countries are making a choice to try to keep the 90% of the internet that they agree with and to forbid the 10% they disagree with. Ultimately, as computing power increases, they may succeed. It may or may not weaken them as countries. Watching porn 8 hours a day instead of pursuing business fraud did a lot of damage at the SEC. On the other hand, blocking creativity has not had good results in the past.
Number of potential girlfriends.... almost limitless Likelihood of this particular girlfriend making over 7 years anyway... slightly over 50%.
Number of potential chances to see nimoy before he dies.. about 1. Likelihood of nimoy making it another 7 years.. probably slightly under 50% (but he looks in good shape).
Tho I do like the snow-boarding, stomach distress plan above too.
It's tragic that Dr Tiller was murdered. My point was, even tho I disagree with Scott Roeder's action, I can understand the logic. I can't comprehend the logic for killing someone over a cartoon.
At my current pay level $25 is a rounding error. It's not worth my time to capture. I have been offering things for free on craigslist and putting them on the curb. Reuse is preferred to the local dump.
Heck, I put out a $499 yamaha receiver and speakers today (along with a bunch of wiring). The hassle of setting up surround sound on my TV just isn't worth it to me any more. I'm back to the basic stereo sound that comes with the TV (and a lot less wiring running around the base boards of my wood floors).
It's just too easy to become a prisoner of your possessions.
Slashdot Mirror
Flash is mostly blocked on my machines and wasn't a problem on other sites until recently.
About a a month ago, it started crashing while running Farmville regularly (every 2-3 days).
So much for the myth of "12 angry men".
We have fallen so far.
oh.. and on the robot thing...
http://www.vt.edu/spotlight/innovation/2010-04-26-charli/charli-robot.html
just posted on slashdot today.
"He also will be able to run, jump, kick, open doors, pick up objects, and do just about anything a real person can do."
"I hope CHARLI could help physically challenged people to cook, clean, and carry items like the NS-5," said Han...
hmmm... do just about anything a real person can do.
I was recently on a felony jury panel.
The prosecutor said, "If I can show he did not stop after the officer indicated he should stop, will you convict him of fleeing arrest."
After just a couple questions by the jury it became very clear that the person in question may have driven a short distance, probably did not speed away, and may have not been aware the officer was trying to pull him over.
But, i'm sure the folks they selected on the panel would take the position, "Well-- its the LAW, he was told to stop and took 1000' instead of 100' to pull over so we convict him of a felony!"
For all the people who rail against the police, on the jury panel's i've been on, a lot of folks seem really ready to do what the prosecutor says and screw the hell out of their fellow human beings.
Jury nullification is the only way to go. just never admit that you believe in it. Just say, "I'm not convinced" if you think the law is unjust.
I can't believe they convicted him of a felony for this. I hope each of them is convicted of a similarly stupid law so they get justice. (and their are plenty of stupid laws on the books and increasingly facist ones).
I pay taxes and I think they are fair - and I really think folks making $50k or less are seriously screwed in this society. The injustice makes me angry. I don't mind that folks are poor- I mind that the super-wealthy are taking resources out of proportion to their value (basically acting as parasites at this point).
I think a fair simple tax would be 33% of everything you make over $30k-- and then index it for inflation. It's fair to everyone-- everyone gets the same $30k (adjusted for inflation) deduction. And everyone pays 33% on everything over that.
The "fair" tax is an unbelievable grab by the wealthy to make income tax free. They'd go from 43% of the country's wealth to 99.99% in a heart beat under that tax system.
It galls me that talk radio, Fox News but also CNN and others have basically been bought by the wealthy and push their messages all the time.
I wonder how far they can push it-- how bad things have to get -- before the majority of society wakes up and opens their eyes to how badly they are being ripped off by the wealthy classes.
I'm doing fine personally. I save my ass off. I got a sensible degree at a good cost. I worked hard and have a good job (well for at least a few more years then it may get dicey unless baby boomers start retiring in the large numbers i'm hoping for). But I see friends who also did similar things and the dice rolled badly for them. And of course lots of friends who were unwise.
I get so mad sometimes. How long are they going to be able to use propaganda and the abortion people to keep 90% of the country split and unable to stop this unholy wedlock of the religious right and corporations and the wealthy. I wish they would just overturn abortion now because I think some days they purposely DO NOT want to win the battle. They've slaughtered labor's ability to resist. They are walking all over age discrimination laws.
Of course it hurts you. You just don't realize it.
If the rich make $1 mill a year and you make $100k a year, then they can afford to bid 10x as much for a hotel room as you. If you *really* want to, you can still afford to stay at that hotel (or buy that comic, or date that model).
If the rich make $100 mill a year and you make $100k, you are sol. Forget the nice beach house, the aspen vacation, the nice condo. Despite having a nice income and being a valuable contributer to society, you are valued by society at 1% of their value. Not because they bring 100% more to the table but because a tiny percentage of families have managed to lock up all the best jobs at the top of society.
You lost before you were born. But they show you lots of nice things on Fox (and CNN) and you hear nice things on the radio and you rail in favor of the rich while they think of you as less than the dirt on their $4000 shoes.
You are ignoring the fact that the money only has relative value.
If everyone rich is being taxed, then the $6.5 million left over has as much purchasing power for that rare comic book (or night at a luxury resort). as the $10,000,000 did.
The rich have pushed it so far and so hard that the top 20% now own 95% of the wealth. What interest do the other 80% have in protecting that wealth?
How long will the propaganda keep fooling you into voting against your own self interest?
Either high taxes or something less savory and more violent is the end result.
> Right, but what if all of the bottles are free? Are you going to take the least among them?
Very interesting question. :)
If all the bottles are free, I would take the one I liked best. For example, we had a wine tasting and I liked the 3rd rated out of 6 wines best (at any price-- much less the 50% and 300% high prices for the higher rated wines).
But yes, of course, we'd all take whatever we liked the best. It might be performance, it might be "anything but microsoft", it might be "chrome because it's cool", it might be firefox for the plugins and customizations. We have different standards for what's "best".
---
On the rest.
We are going to packages & an ERP. It will be up to the vendors to keep them up to date going forward. In 3 years, I might even be out of a job as a result of this (or I may be allowed to go forward as an ERP specialist or manager of some kind).
The days of customized programming at every company are drawing to a close. At a huge corporation like the one where I am at, they believe that the cost of custom support of customers outweighs the additional profit brought in. It may be true-- we are so huge that our main benefit now is cost. Smaller competitors are nimbler or can offer personalized service but can't get close to our price on similar products.
I don't see how you are failing to comprehend what I'm saying but you typed a lot so I'll try one more time.
The *BUSINESS* decided we would not upgrade any IE6 applications. There is no ROI. I.e. they are willing to suffer slightly for between 7 and 31 months to avoid spending money on fixing the issues. They view any money spent as wasted money unless the application breaks before it is retired.
No, I disagree, I think that you haven't seen a browser which had good performance on a modern machine, and you don't even realize there's an alternative to the only thing you know.
I use IE8 and Firefox at home. I use Ie6 and IE7 on various work machines. I have plenty points of comparison. What you are talking about is like wines. Sure-- a 91 rated wine is "better" than a 90 rated wine. But for MOST people, it's not $45 dollars a bottle better.
I havn't experimented with IE9. But for the most part, being an "order of magnitude faster" for 12 seconds of my 5 minute session (and not a DAMN bit faster the other 4 minutes and 48 seconds) isn't noticable.
Even now- 99% of my browser window is sitting static while I type and single characters are updated in this message.
Back to my company, we are less and less likely to write applications. The corporate direction is to buy them and do minimal to no customization. Officially "no" customization but requirements happen.
Back to me, I have no choice in the matter on my work computers and on the older applications my team supports. Recommending changes for IE9 on an application that starts retiring in 7 months and is completely retired in 31 months would make me look stupid and negatively impact my career. It would make me look like a gearhead who wasn't listening to the business and didn't "get it" about ROI.
Firstly, it's not my choice.
Secondly, I do not understand what all these "performance" comments are lately. I havnt' seen any browser that had bad performance on a modern machine. What are you doing, playing networked quake???
Thirdly, Parts of this system start going away in less than 7 months. The business has made the decision that those with IE6 stuff will not be done- no ROI.
Ditto, and with the economy the way it is right now and upcoming software upgrades in 24-36 months, they don't want to "waste" money upgrading it now.
Only fix absolute brokens. And that's getting harder to do as skill sets (and even control licenses) get harder to keep going when only used once a year.
But wouldn't the government have made those rules that allowed them to escape taxes because the government felt those citizens making that little money couldn't afford to pay taxes?
I was surprised at the number of various tax credits myself. I pay 5 figure taxes every year and do not make a tremendous amount of money so the curve must be pretty steep.
Part of the problem with the system being so obfuscated.
Main thing I'm doing is saving hard and reducing debt. But if we get a hit of high inflation, those will both turn out to be stupid unless interest rates also rise.
Terribly horrible would be no interest rate rise combined with high inflation. Only thing I can see to deal with that is solar power on credit (pay it back with cheaper dollars, avoid the increase in power prices).
Hope you are right on the robots. I think we are 10 years away now. I was hoping it would be after my lifetime.
I don't mind citing... but lately some of the citation requests are for things that were all over the news just a few weeks back.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/2010-04-07-income-taxes_N.htm
"Nearly half of U.S. households escape federal income tax"
So lying and hurting people would be okay to you and your friends if god wasn't real?
Most of my non-religious friends would be bothered by it.
a variety of numbers....
It was as lot more than a 450% increase.
Think about the units.
say they made 30x in 1970 (my 52x is from 1978 I believe) and now they make 262x. That's basically a 900% increase in their compensation relative to the rest of society.
My numbers were 52x (1978) to 450x today (you see as 531x). That's a 9x (or 900%) increase.
They did just as good a job (if not better) when they were making 30x. And I believe when they make 500x instead of 30x, they are laying off 400+ employees (often to the detriment of the company-- i.e. worldcom, home depot, etc.)
Plus- a $500,000 annual salary would be not be worth the same level of corruption as a $100,000,000 salary. If you can just score big one year, you are set. You are not really part of the system any more.
That's worked historically. I think we are at a historic tipping point.
Okay... first, what do all of the people who can *ONLY* do manual labor do for a living?
Say the guys at the car wash who towel off your car-- for about $8 an hour.
How about the person that mows your lawn.
The people who restock the shelves (even the checkout people).
College degrees and education are valuable because only a few people have them. If *EVERYONE* has a 4 year degree, then it's worthless. And on top of that, universities have become so expensive that many of our young kids are graduating with huge debts AND still unable to find jobs. (And the way the law is written, you can't go bankrupt on a student loan).
Say 20% of the population is unable to find work-- because the machines are doing it. It's a good thing- provided we cover for those people. But if we tell them, "Get a nonexistent job or starve" then a lot of bad things are going to start happening.
At a guess, I'd say ultimately less than half the population is really needed to work. The more we have machine multipliers, the lower that number goes.
I can't see judges being replaced for example.
If most people are on welfare, then how does online gambling (or other kinds of tax work?)
Apparently only 51% made enough to pay a tax last year- most of the rest got varying amounts of money back from the government because their incomes were so low.
As far as being grossly off topic- it won't work. You can't tax gambling successfully when people do not have jobs.
And money is fungible. Any revenue from this will be used elsewhere. That's been the history with lotteries.
I know the reported rate is 9.3%, but the "real" rate (U6) is closer to 18%.
1/10 people do not have jobs.
1/5 people do not have jobs AND have run out of benefits or have taken a part time job (not a good replacement for a $80k job they had before).
A) nothing I can address here.
B) This is really common knowledge. Yahoo had a big piece on 10 areas who are hit really hard by the double whammy. Large liabilities committed to on the assumption that the good times would not end, high unemployment, no demand for new housing (so no new housing jobs). Many houses under water, being foreclosed).
C) First-- are you really that out of the loop? This has been commonly known for over a decade. But okay.. I'll google it for you. .3% on the wealthiest (same dollar amount). Social security caps at just over $100k (15% on you and me-- under 1% on the wealthy). Likewise the "property tax" benefit only benefits you to the amount that it exceeds the standard deduction. A person with a $4k property tax bill saves almost nothing (a few hundred) while a person with a $20k bill saves almost $6,000.
http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snapshots_20060621/
The wealthy pay a lower tax *rate* than everyone else at this point too. The secret is "fixed" state taxes like auto fees, property tax, etc. run 12% on poorest but only comprise
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
"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%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers)."
I can't find it now, but a later source (2008, 2009) said the top 1% now owned 42.7% (and the next had 42.3%) putting the top 20% at an incredble 95% of the wealth.
Our GINI index is close to most 3rd world countries now.
D) Again, this is fairly common knowledge. Surprised you are ignorant of it.
http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/beckerposner/2010/04/american-wage-stagnationposner.html
"Between 1997 and 2008, median U.S. household income fell by 4 percent after adjustment for inflation. It presumably did not rise in 2009, and may not in 2010 either. A median is not an average; average income rose because the incomes of high earners rose, and so the effect was to increase the inequality of the income distribution..."
E) If you can buy a device that can do any manual labor that a human can do for $100,000, then why hire a human. We are very close. You don't have to pay social security taxes for the work it does. It doesn't call in sick (it may break once in a while but will probably be modular and easy to fix). It's close. A decade. They can already pick random objects out of bins, toss things in the air and catch them, assemble things faster than humans.
We are running out of jobs to step up to. Most of the jobs we can step up to based on intellect or training. Many of those jobs have a couple billion new humans who are smart enough to do those jobs and happy to do them for under $30,000 a year. It could be a paradise-- no need for most to work, essentially free food and lodging- or it could be pretty hellish.
a) Instead of showing ANY fiscal restraint, the governments kept expanding to take advantage of the property tax bubble.
b) low interest rates pushed forward a lot of activity in the home building market, creating a lot of jobs which will not be replaced.
c) the executive class, whose pay has increased from 50x average to 450x average is actively shipping jobs overseas (to the tune of thousands).
d) the long term trend is wages will stagnate or drop towards those in BRIC. (brazil, russia, india, china). This means the value of houses, etc. will drop because people will have a smaller amount of money for paying for property. Smaller incomes also mean smaller taxes for the governments.
So the long term trend is lower property taxes, lower property values, fewer jobs, lower paying jobs.
The governments are going to absolutely hate it, but they are going to have to cut a lot of programs outside of welfare/unemployment benefit programs to prevent social unrest.
People's expectations of living in a 3,000 square foot house are going to have to reset back to 1600 square foot houses (or even the 1100 square foot houses prevalent in the 1950's.
And that's ignoring the scarily fast advances in robotics lately. An entire swath of basic manual jobs are on the verge of going away in a few years.
140 Tw lim concise great, stimulating! Goethe, Sorry long, no time for short. Tw+blog for longer. Posterous ex. site. Tw efficient, grt!
You have to obey the law of the land.
If it is possible to do so profitably, you do so.
If it is not, you leave.
Brazil, China, and other countries are making a choice to try to keep the 90% of the internet that they agree with and to forbid the 10% they disagree with. Ultimately, as computing power increases, they may succeed. It may or may not weaken them as countries. Watching porn 8 hours a day instead of pursuing business fraud did a lot of damage at the SEC. On the other hand, blocking creativity has not had good results in the past.
Number of potential girlfriends.... almost limitless
Likelihood of this particular girlfriend making over 7 years anyway... slightly over 50%.
Number of potential chances to see nimoy before he dies.. about 1.
Likelihood of nimoy making it another 7 years.. probably slightly under 50% (but he looks in good shape).
Tho I do like the snow-boarding, stomach distress plan above too.
Well, you should be modded up as informative. :-)
I have the name backward in my above post.
It's tragic that Dr Tiller was murdered. My point was, even tho I disagree with Scott Roeder's action, I can understand the logic. I can't comprehend the logic for killing someone over a cartoon.
At my current pay level $25 is a rounding error. It's not worth my time to capture. I have been offering things for free on craigslist and putting them on the curb. Reuse is preferred to the local dump.
Heck, I put out a $499 yamaha receiver and speakers today (along with a bunch of wiring). The hassle of setting up surround sound on my TV just isn't worth it to me any more. I'm back to the basic stereo sound that comes with the TV (and a lot less wiring running around the base boards of my wood floors).
It's just too easy to become a prisoner of your possessions.