It's amazing how they have gotten the price so high without people complaining.
$600 isn't $100 too high. $400 for the Xbox-360 was $150 too high for a game CONSOLE (that's not a real PC). The early consoles cost about 2 days minimum wage to buy (so about $60 bucks). The current consoles cost over 10 days of minimum wage. This sony comes in at almost 14 days of minimum wage work.
From 2 days work to 14 days work is a HUGE increase.
I can customize a low-end $300 fry's pc into 15 months ago state of the art for about $300 and 2 hours (silent fan ($12), upgrade ram to 1gig ($29), new video card ($219), new power-supply ($29), $160 gig hard drive($39) ) and have a blazing PC for $600-- and it's also a PC.
I mostly agree with you with the caveat that if this caused a high level extinction, then the extreme pressure would select for some system of surviving the change and that system might be represented in a higher percentage of the population with each reversal.
Given a lack of evidence of mass extinction from these reversals, whatever systems there might be are probably selected out as noise/slightly expensive in the years between each event.
"The record holder, though, is undoubtedly Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge: the regime forced virtually the entire population into labor camps or prisons during the late 1970s, killing as many as two million of the country's six to seven million people."
I particularly liked the fact that cuba had zero prisoners. Wow! Either the criminals are running rampant there or there are no criminals according to "reported" prisoners.
There is a reason huge numbers of people want to come to the US. 1) lots of chance to get wealthy 2) lots of freedom to dress/talk/have sex how you want 3) a lot LOWER chance of being incarcerated or murdered despite misinformation by people like you.
They are welcome to go and live in China if they think it is such a great country and system of government. If they are going to live in America and benefit from the freedoms (and relative safety from the government) then they are going to get grief (and frankly should get worse) when they help enslave, murder, torture, etc. native peoples in other countries.
It's wrong to support a company which takes actions which are immoral and would be illegal here.
They are an AMERICAN company operating under AMERICAN laws. Their executives benefit from living in AMERICA. Notice a theme here?
If the executives of Yahoo want to go live in China (and risk being picked up and shot one night when they say the wrong thing) then I have no problem with that. You don't see us protesting the behavior of CHINESE companies behavior in CHINA.
Out of those options, your average return is 10% but your average real return is more like 5%.
So in 50 years you'll have 100k but it will buy as much as 10k would today.
I think that Roths are open to so many that they will have a lot of constituents preventing direct taxes on them (more likely to reduce your other benefits-- i.e. an indirect tax).
It's a lot more likely they will raise the tax rate from 33% to 40% which would hit 401k's a lot harder.
Personally, I think the rich are looting the country right now-- I see more and more tax bills which save them huge amounts of money while saving little or nothing for most people. Then the news reports the "average" savings and pushes the bill (for example in texas, we are going to have property tax relief. If you have a $70k house, it will save you nothing. If you have a million dollar house it will save you about $12,000. If we raised the homestead exception by $30,000, it would save everyone (rich and poor alike) about $1000 off their tax bills and reduce taxes on $70k houses to zero-- which has the added benefit of not tossing poor people out on the street and confiscating their houses).
You don't own anything that you pay taxes on-- the government just rents it to you.
Generally not good to cash out your 401k but 17% is pretty high (and I assume they could adjust it upwards?)
The key is spending less than you make tho. I live on 60% of my net- I'm trying to get that down to 50%. That means I sat with a broken TV for about 80 days before I bought a new one (ended up with a nice 55" HD for $1200 which was a great deal- it had been 1800 when I started saving).
Personally I think the ROTH is a lot better than the 401k.
1) The government MAY raise rates to 50%-- if so, you would be paying a higher rate on your 401k withdrawals than you avoided. 2) ROTHs you pay NO TAXES on. This is unlikely to change. 3) They will probably screw savers in 401k & ROTHs by reducing promised social security benefits (which effectively double taxes the 401k and taxes the ROTH). 4) If you get in a pinch, you can withdraw any money you put into the ROTH without penalty (but not earnings on that money). 5) Any earnings in the ROTH are tax free-- they are great for high-thrash mutual funds and stock trading because you don't have a lot of tax paperwork to deal with.
I do not totally disagree with you-- I have friends at other companies in the same town who do not have this heavy a load paperwork. However, it could also be that you work for a smaller company.
In any case- that is what our auditors required if they were going to sign off on our books- and there is -nothing- our executives could do to appeal that decision.
Apparently, SOX puts an enormous amount of power into the auditing firms hands .
Small company: a 20 hour project takes 20 hours.
Of course this is a huge corporation so... Pre-sox: a 20 hour project took about 40 hours. These days... Post sox: a 20 hour project takes at least 160 hours.
SOX has reduced my productivity by 75%. I spend the rest of the time (15 to 20 hours per project) filling out several forms that I didn't used to have to fill out, doing self-audits to confirm I filled out the forms, waiting for approval of my forms before I can go to the next step, etc.
Meanwhile- the execs in my company can write a $20,000 check without even a counter-signature from another exec and much larger checks with a counter-sig from *one* other exec with NO required paperwork of any kind and they get paid literally millions of dollars while our stock has declined constantly in price for years.
Why the heck sox means the "Massive Paperwork for Programmers" is beyond me.
And then when we have a high priority project that a big executive wants fast-- we toss all the paper work out the window and backfill it afterwards (even putting links to empty documents that will be filled in later).
Yea right- sox is a very good thing-- NOT. We already had laws against fraud. All we have to do is start ENFORCING them.
An enemy combatant is not whoever the president says it is.
Even as far off the reservation as Bush has gone, the military still respects the geneva convention and is drilled on not obeying unlawful orders and what kinds of orders are unlawful.
The geneva convention defines what a civilian is in GCIV Article 3:
1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.
---
A lot of what the president calls terrorists are really "unlawful combatants" which basically means they do not wear a standard uniform but instead go around in disquise.
Unlawful combatants including americans and british have been put away -and- executed in the past (1976 Luanda Trial).
---
The president shows some strong religio-fascist tendencies to be concerned about but fortunately he will be gone in another couple years and his political power (and ability to flout the law) is already on the decline.
So how would you define the IRA? - they killed children and old people...
In the question is the answer.
They became terrorists when they intentionally started killing civilians-- this would not be true if an open state of total war broke out between the protestants and catholics* but that never happened.
I don't hate the phrase- I find it disingenuous and a sly attempt to muddy the issue. The purpose of the statement that one man's freedom fighters are another man's terrorists is to legitimize and approve of terrorists behavior -- JUST like the governments purpose in labeling freedom fighters terrorists is to make it legitimate to go beyond civil norms in fighting the freedom fighters.
No-- it doesn't depend on which side you are on. If you are intentionally killing civilians to cause terror then you are a terrorist. What is so bleeding hard about understanding that unless you just -do not- want to understand and admit it.
--- *the great irony of course being that both sides worshipped religions which had a major commandments that "thou shalt not murder" but religion always implicitly says "thou shalt not murder " where is defined as .
The last time I was at a company that culled, it was random as far as anyone could tell. People there six years, people there one year. High producers and people who made mistakes a lot. Now THAT was even creepier since you had no clue why they picked the ones they did (we are talking dartboard here) then there was no way to try to avoid it.
However, the last person who mysteriously vanished ("all questions to hr") the rumor mill indicated that they pissed off an easy to piss off upper manager. They were hard working- but said the wrong thing in the wrong meeting apparently.
1) Never say your boss is wrong in a meeting -- do it privately. 2) If there is a big elephant in the room and NO ONE is talking about it-- mention it to your boss privately, there is probably a very good reason no one is mentioning the elephant (like "this project which is obviously going down smoking and technically impossible is still backed by the C.E.O. so we are going to keep working on it and pretend it can be done.")
2.5 an hour won't be bad when we are paying 3 cents for Lipitor like they are (vs $1 here). Offshoring sucks-- but it really sucks because they are charging us 1st world prices for products ($19 for a dvd vs $2.49 there) while wanting to pay 3rd world wages.
It will even out-- hell they have 20 to 40% annual inflation. But it is going to be a painful -decade- until it does level out. The coming chinese meltdown (oddly via bad real estate loans like japan who was also kicking our ass at one point) will slow things down a bit for a while.
It doesn't matter how much we talk to them- most teenagers are in the prime of their stupidity (and ignorance) (and sexual drive) (and naivite' about "true love") at that point in life.
So you assert that any one who uses the internet is a combatant then. Since you can't use the internet without paying some kind of tax unless you are stealing a connection or using the connection in a library (which is paid for by taxes).
Your definition is so broad as to be useless. Which is a wonderful technique (like calling freedom fighters terrorists to defuse both terms of their meanings) for trying to win arguments.
Fortunately, international law doesn't agree with your position or it would be a wacky world!
There is no logic when it comes to basic definitions.
Red is red. Blue is blue.
Revolutionaries are revolutionaries: they don't kill civilians. Terrorists are terrorists: they kill civilians to induce terror. Military is military: they fight wars, they kill enemy combatants*.
-- * yes the military kills civilians. heck, the military kills it's own members. but they do not do it on purpose except when a small sub-unit goes insane (viet nam: mai lai massacre, abu ghraib to some extent) or when a decision is made by the civilian authorities that we are at "total war" with an enemy at which point the killing gets pretty indiscriminate (Dresden firebombing-- which did have elements of terrorism to it).
I agree with you and think we need to keep the terms "freedom fighters, insurgents, revolutionaries" distinct from "terrorist".
Especially odius is "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist".
Freedom fighters don't kill children and old people.
A terrorist is a very particular thing- a person who kills civilians in order to induce terror in the target population. The purpose for inducing the terror vary.
Killing military and civilian members of the government are "legitimate" activities for revolutionaries, insurgents, and freedom fighters. Jefferson and others believed governments were necessary but inevitably went bad and so the people needed to be able to revolt against and resist them.
The war on Terrorists and "defending the children" seem to be the basis for our next fascist government in america.
Slashdot Mirror
It's amazing how they have gotten the price so high without people complaining.
$600 isn't $100 too high. $400 for the Xbox-360 was $150 too high for a game CONSOLE (that's not a real PC). The early consoles cost about 2 days minimum wage to buy (so about $60 bucks). The current consoles cost over 10 days of minimum wage. This sony comes in at almost 14 days of minimum wage work.
From 2 days work to 14 days work is a HUGE increase.
I can customize a low-end $300 fry's pc into 15 months ago state of the art for about $300 and 2 hours (silent fan ($12), upgrade ram to 1gig ($29), new video card ($219), new power-supply ($29), $160 gig hard drive($39) ) and have a blazing PC for $600-- and it's also a PC.
These tiered ISP advocates are searching desperately for some kind of "save the children and old people" arguement to support their monopoly pricing.
Ironic that the service is so much better for so much less in so many countries around the world.
I mostly agree with you with the caveat that if this caused a high level extinction, then the extreme pressure would select for some system of surviving the change and that system might be represented in a higher percentage of the population with each reversal.
Given a lack of evidence of mass extinction from these reversals, whatever systems there might be are probably selected out as noise/slightly expensive in the years between each event.
Interesting line in the straight dope link...
"The record holder, though, is undoubtedly Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge: the regime forced virtually the entire population into labor camps or prisons during the late 1970s, killing as many as two million of the country's six to seven million people."
I particularly liked the fact that cuba had zero prisoners. Wow! Either the criminals are running rampant there or there are no criminals according to "reported" prisoners.
There is a reason huge numbers of people want to come to the US. 1) lots of chance to get wealthy 2) lots of freedom to dress/talk/have sex how you want 3) a lot LOWER chance of being incarcerated or murdered despite misinformation by people like you.
They are welcome to go and live in China if they think it is such a great country and system of government. If they are going to live in America and benefit from the freedoms (and relative safety from the government) then they are going to get grief (and frankly should get worse) when they help enslave, murder, torture, etc. native peoples in other countries.
It's wrong to support a company which takes actions which are immoral and would be illegal here.
They are an AMERICAN company operating under AMERICAN laws. Their executives benefit from living in AMERICA. Notice a theme here?
If the executives of Yahoo want to go live in China (and risk being picked up and shot one night when they say the wrong thing) then I have no problem with that. You don't see us protesting the behavior of CHINESE companies behavior in CHINA.
Why you are correct.
We should not only sell them the gun to shoot us with but the ammo as well.
And then we should help them kill anyone protesting killing us before they come for us.
Come on guy- Yahoo is an american company-- it's okay to protest them helping a foreign government to advance non-american ideas.
Out of those options, your average return is 10% but your average real return is more like 5%.
So in 50 years you'll have 100k but it will buy as much as 10k would today.
I think that Roths are open to so many that they will have a lot of constituents preventing direct taxes on them (more likely to reduce your other benefits-- i.e. an indirect tax).
It's a lot more likely they will raise the tax rate from 33% to 40% which would hit 401k's a lot harder.
Personally, I think the rich are looting the country right now-- I see more and more tax bills which save them huge amounts of money while saving little or nothing for most people. Then the news reports the "average" savings and pushes the bill (for example in texas, we are going to have property tax relief. If you have a $70k house, it will save you nothing. If you have a million dollar house it will save you about $12,000. If we raised the homestead exception by $30,000, it would save everyone (rich and poor alike) about $1000 off their tax bills and reduce taxes on $70k houses to zero-- which has the added benefit of not tossing poor people out on the street and confiscating their houses).
You don't own anything that you pay taxes on-- the government just rents it to you.
My Kroger card is registered to the right honerable Mr. Harry Peter .
Generally not good to cash out your 401k but 17% is pretty high (and I assume they could adjust it upwards?)
The key is spending less than you make tho. I live on 60% of my net- I'm trying to get that down to 50%. That means I sat with a broken TV for about 80 days before I bought a new one (ended up with a nice 55" HD for $1200 which was a great deal- it had been 1800 when I started saving).
Personally I think the ROTH is a lot better than the 401k.
1) The government MAY raise rates to 50%-- if so, you would be paying a higher rate on your 401k withdrawals than you avoided.
2) ROTHs you pay NO TAXES on. This is unlikely to change.
3) They will probably screw savers in 401k & ROTHs by reducing promised social security benefits (which effectively double taxes the 401k and taxes the ROTH).
4) If you get in a pinch, you can withdraw any money you put into the ROTH without penalty (but not earnings on that money).
5) Any earnings in the ROTH are tax free-- they are great for high-thrash mutual funds and stock trading because you don't have a lot of tax paperwork to deal with.
Gold is now going up because gold is going up.
Yet people are piling on -- even tho it has little more intrinsic value than osterich eggs did in the 90's.
People are scared, then cautious, then risky, and finally greedy.
Then they get hammered- a whole lot of people lose a lot of money, and then they are back to being scared.
I'm up 32% over the last 24 months and I'm down to 50% exposure to this market.
I do not totally disagree with you-- I have friends at other companies in the same town who do not have this heavy a load paperwork. However, it could also be that you work for a smaller company.
In any case- that is what our auditors required if they were going to sign off on our books- and there is -nothing- our executives could do to appeal that decision.
Apparently, SOX puts an enormous amount of power into the auditing firms hands .
Small company: a 20 hour project takes 20 hours.
Of course this is a huge corporation so...
Pre-sox: a 20 hour project took about 40 hours.
These days...
Post sox: a 20 hour project takes at least 160 hours.
No joke. Not exagerating in the least.
SOX has reduced my productivity by 75%.
I spend the rest of the time (15 to 20 hours per project) filling out several forms that I didn't used to have to fill out, doing self-audits to confirm I filled out the forms, waiting for approval of my forms before I can go to the next step, etc.
Meanwhile- the execs in my company can write a $20,000 check without even a counter-signature from another exec and much larger checks with a counter-sig from *one* other exec with NO required paperwork of any kind and they get paid literally millions of dollars while our stock has declined constantly in price for years.
Why the heck sox means the "Massive Paperwork for Programmers" is beyond me.
And then when we have a high priority project that a big executive wants fast-- we toss all the paper work out the window and backfill it afterwards (even putting links to empty documents that will be filled in later).
Yea right- sox is a very good thing-- NOT. We already had laws against fraud. All we have to do is start ENFORCING them.
pretty interesting discussion here:
http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Terrorism
A liberal wikipedia apparently-- first I've heard of it.
An enemy combatant is not whoever the president says it is.
Even as far off the reservation as Bush has gone, the military still respects the geneva convention and is drilled on not obeying unlawful orders and what kinds of orders are unlawful.
The geneva convention defines what a civilian is in GCIV Article 3:
1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.
---
A lot of what the president calls terrorists are really "unlawful combatants" which basically means they do not wear a standard uniform but instead go around in disquise.
Unlawful combatants including americans and british have been put away -and- executed in the past (1976 Luanda Trial).
---
The president shows some strong religio-fascist tendencies to be concerned about but fortunately he will be gone in another couple years and his political power (and ability to flout the law) is already on the decline.
So how would you define the IRA? - they killed children and old people...
In the question is the answer.
They became terrorists when they intentionally started killing civilians-- this would not be true if an open state of total war broke out between the protestants and catholics* but that never happened.
I don't hate the phrase- I find it disingenuous and a sly attempt to muddy the issue. The purpose of the statement that one man's freedom fighters are another man's terrorists is to legitimize and approve of terrorists behavior -- JUST like the governments purpose in labeling freedom fighters terrorists is to make it legitimate to go beyond civil norms in fighting the freedom fighters.
No-- it doesn't depend on which side you are on. If you are intentionally killing civilians to cause terror then you are a terrorist. What is so bleeding hard about understanding that unless you just -do not- want to understand and admit it.
---
*the great irony of course being that both sides worshipped religions which had a major commandments that "thou shalt not murder" but religion always implicitly says "thou shalt not murder " where is defined as .
The last time I was at a company that culled, it was random as far as anyone could tell. People there six years, people there one year. High producers and people who made mistakes a lot. Now THAT was even creepier since you had no clue why they picked the ones they did (we are talking dartboard here) then there was no way to try to avoid it.
However, the last person who mysteriously vanished ("all questions to hr") the rumor mill indicated that they pissed off an easy to piss off upper manager. They were hard working- but said the wrong thing in the wrong meeting apparently.
1) Never say your boss is wrong in a meeting -- do it privately.
2) If there is a big elephant in the room and NO ONE is talking about it-- mention it to your boss privately, there is probably a very good reason no one is mentioning the elephant (like "this project which is obviously going down smoking and technically impossible is still backed by the C.E.O. so we are going to keep working on it and pretend it can be done.")
Agreed! We should universally support that there is no universal belief that everyone should support.
It's the basis of government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
The social contract... without it, anyone would be ethically in the right to eviscerate you and take your possessions.
2.5 an hour won't be bad when we are paying 3 cents for Lipitor like they are (vs $1 here). Offshoring sucks-- but it really sucks because they are charging us 1st world prices for products ($19 for a dvd vs $2.49 there) while wanting to pay 3rd world wages.
It will even out-- hell they have 20 to 40% annual inflation. But it is going to be a painful -decade- until it does level out. The coming chinese meltdown (oddly via bad real estate loans like japan who was also kicking our ass at one point) will slow things down a bit for a while.
It doesn't matter how much we talk to them- most teenagers are in the prime of their stupidity (and ignorance) (and sexual drive) (and naivite' about "true love") at that point in life.
So you assert that any one who uses the internet is a combatant then. Since you can't use the internet without paying some kind of tax unless you are stealing a connection or using the connection in a library (which is paid for by taxes).
Your definition is so broad as to be useless. Which is a wonderful technique (like calling freedom fighters terrorists to defuse both terms of their meanings) for trying to win arguments.
Fortunately, international law doesn't agree with your position or it would be a wacky world!
There is no logic when it comes to basic definitions.
Red is red.
Blue is blue.
Revolutionaries are revolutionaries: they don't kill civilians.
Terrorists are terrorists: they kill civilians to induce terror.
Military is military: they fight wars, they kill enemy combatants*.
--
* yes the military kills civilians. heck, the military kills it's own members. but they do not do it on purpose except when a small sub-unit goes insane (viet nam: mai lai massacre, abu ghraib to some extent) or when a decision is made by the civilian authorities that we are at "total war" with an enemy at which point the killing gets pretty indiscriminate (Dresden firebombing-- which did have elements of terrorism to it).
I agree with you and think we need to keep the terms
"freedom fighters, insurgents, revolutionaries" distinct from "terrorist".
Especially odius is "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist".
Freedom fighters don't kill children and old people.
A terrorist is a very particular thing- a person who kills civilians in order to induce terror in the target population. The purpose for inducing the terror vary.
Killing military and civilian members of the government are "legitimate" activities for revolutionaries, insurgents, and freedom fighters. Jefferson and others believed governments were necessary but inevitably went bad and so the people needed to be able to revolt against and resist them.
The war on Terrorists and "defending the children" seem to be the basis for our next fascist government in america.
Terrorists attack citizens to induce terror.
Give me plain old revolutionaries who have the precision to only kill the government they are resisting.