I disagree. I've had plenty of jobs where I didn't agree with management's policies. Some of them I even did things that were distasteful to me, such as pressuring customers for profitable add-ons or giving the partially bogus company response to a valid complaint. Depending on how much I needed the job and how good the job was, I've done things that were unquestionably wrong. It was easier to live with since it wasn't my decision, since my supervisor was forcing my hand, since the alternative was unemployment.
I don't do these things anymore, but there's no certainty that I won't have to again. If the tech sector collapses again and I find myself doing tech support again (Please, no! not a 3rd time!) I may well find myself in that unpleasant situation again. And who knows, if I luck into a situation where I'm making millions I might hesitate to let my scruples ruin an otherwise good thing.
What I'm saying is this: Here is a man in the most high-profile position possible in his line of work. He can make a difference within the boundaries set for him. If he stands up for his beliefs, the administration will simply replace him with a less competent and more pliable subject. How does that help the public? And it sure hurts the individual. I don't think anyone can judge his actions unless they've been in a similar situation and done the "right thing," besides the fact that I don't think the ethical choice is clear.
Sometimes you can do more good as a reluctant part of the problem than you can as a noble but sidelined martyr.
heh, you and me both.
Fortunately for the human race, two idiots can have a non-retarded baby. If the hapless kid can escape the limitations of his environment there's a good chance for a productive life.
I suspect that efforts to somehow maximize genetic fitness would backfire anyway. You rarely hear about the offspring of a genius, athlete, artist, etc. doing anything worthwhile, although that might be due to the corrosive influence of too much money, fame, and a sense of entitlement.
You might not understand Darwinism correctly. Smoking doesn't kill many users before they are done reproducing. Anything that kills an organism after it is done reproducing won't have much of an affect on gene propagation. If anything, I suspect that smokers tend to reproduce more than nonsmokers due to educational and class correlations.
The Darwinism meme is misused quite a bit. For example, uneducated people with low IQ tend to have the most babies. So when we laugh about the Darwin Award winner who mauled himself to death in a chipper, keep in mind he probably already has spread his genes more than us smart people ever will. And spreading genes is all Darwinism is about.
A lot of people seem to have the idea that Darwinism punishes the individual for being unfit by killing him. That's not really correct. A stupid person who has 5 babies before they turn 21 and dies holding up a liquor store with a toy gun is remarkably successful, genetically speaking.
Maybe I'm weird, but I'd prefer a window that looked out over plants and wasn't directly in the sun.
People used to become irate at me for closing the blinds when the sun was in my face. What am I supposed to do, sit there and squint while I get a sunburn?
Wrong!
People are punished all the time for things that didn't happen.
Drunk drivers are arrested even if they don't cause a wreck. Wannabe child molesters are arrested for talking to a cop on myspace.
Uh, the lance fragment was fired from a heavy gun. There's no way a whale could slam against a piece of coral at those kinds of speeds. Besides, if the whale slammed into it, it would only puncture into the skin. It wouldn't keep going for the several feet of blubber and have enough momentum left over to penetrate bone.
I like your idea, but won't spammers do something similar? The big advantage spammers have is the motivation of viagra loot. They seem pretty damn motivated, more so than the good guys. Remember, to them computational intensity means very little when they have hundreds of thousands of zombies.
The biggest arm in the spammer arsenal will always be offering free porn to people who solve a capcha. It uses people to solve the turing test, which will always succeed.
My friend worked for an employment verifications company doing exactly this type of check. You could get a simple check for a few dollars, which was a criminal background and credit check. You could get employment or education verification, reference checks, etc. A top-shelf full verification ran hundreds of dollars.
I couldn't believe all the crap they found. People lied about all kinds of things on their applications and resumes. People lied about their criminal history, usually substituting something minor for a felony conviction.
I don't approve of the movement towards an Orwellian character investigation, but can certainly understand how a lot of businesses find it to be comforting. It is a very big market, and one that is growing rapidly. They ran checks for fast food workers to CEOs and everything in between, for a wide range of companies. Their biggest clients were financial and healthcare companies.
I disagree that the panic and overreaction about terrorists is rational. Just like the panic and overreaction about child molesters or school shootings is rational.
Nobody in charge is looking at the costs. Nobody in charge is calculating the risks. If they were, they'd realize that the occasional airliner exploding is a lot cheaper than putting hundreds of millions of people through a huge hassle day after day. Our airport security is a joke, costs a huge amount, and protects us from a very small risk.
We'd be better off with armed guards around electric fans, which injure or kill thousands of citizens each year.
I don't know what it is. People just get nuts about certain very small risks. The fact that it is terrorists, perverts, or kids with guns makes people crazy and see things wrong.
Think of the huge lost opportunity. If we invested the trillions of dollars we waste on terrorism paranoia we could really have something great. Instead of preventing a tiny risk of possible harm we could have guaranteed benefit for many more people. We could go a long way towards curing cancer, heart disease, etc. and save millions of people year after year. The terrorists, perverts, and schoolyard crazies could never keep up. It's completely irrational.
It's like spending all your discretionary income on insurance. You don't have anything to show for it after time passes. Either you threw your money away, or "best case" a catastrophe is compensated/averted. We should invest in our future, accept that life has risks, and look at them with a clear head.
If we end up quivering chicken-hearted wrecks always worrying about terrorists, spending hundreds of billions a year and giving up our liberties, the terrorists win year after year without so much as blowing up a mailbox.
I think it is neurotic to worry about nukes when there are real dangers to obsess about, like getting struck by lightning or hit by a meteor. (Just in case you think those are valid concerns, I'm joking)
Why do people like to worry about things so oddly? People die in car wrecks way more than from chicken poisoning or terrorism or whatever stupid thing people worry about is.
BTW, my great-grandfather owned a lot of property in San Francisco during the fire. He lost his candy store in the fire and nearly his life. Afterwards he predicted that people wouldn't want to live in big cities after yet another big-city disaster (there were a big string of them) so he sold all of his property for a tidy profit. If he'd held on to it, my family could have been billionaires.
People like to live in cities. If fires, earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, and so forth don't stop them I doubt the occasional nuke will either. You're still more likely to kill yourself in a car wreck or taking a bath.
If median income growth was lower than inflation for an extended amount of time would it be acceptable to be concerned? Especially if the top 1% doubled its wealth? I'm willing to accept the rising tide theory as long as all boats are being lifted. When most boats are sinking I stop trusting the theory. I'm quite comfortable with my income and wealth, but I don't want to live in a society with a Mexico-like wealth gap. I think it makes for a bad society, even if I'm among the "haves."
Tax shelters are a very big business. My father, whose net worth is only $1.5m makes a huge profit paying a tax advisor $20k/year. Some of the things he suggests are borderline illegal, and he tells my dad so. My dad is too honest (and chicken) to do any of these "borderline illegal" things even though the savings would be vast and everybody else is doing it. I'm nearly at the point where I'll need to consider these issues. I don't know how I'll handle it, but I'm sure I'll worry about getting audited. Poor & middle income people don't worry about taxes, they just take the standard deduction or itemize their mortgage and file their w-2s.
That's a very good point. Even though a chip fab is an expensive thing to build and operate, unit costs are quite low. Once the R&D cost is recovered, chips can be sold profitably for a few dollars each. The secret is to have a huge market. I'd say the global market for microchips is in the hundreds of millions.
It is an interesting issue. I have a friend from Lebanon who is visiting family there right now. The stories he tells me are scary, everybody has guns and knows somebody who has lost a family member or worse. I don't think I'd be happy to live like that. I don't know how things would turn out here if government fell, but all too often all over the world it seems a power vacuum results in mass violence. I'm capable of defending myself, but if there are thousands of armed fuckers with nothing to lose I don't like the odds.
I work for a membrane manufacturer, and I can tell you that membrane does not have to be expensive. The materials are cheap, the process is cheap, and with smart testing you can have good labor costs and yields. The reason our membranes are expensive is scale. We make about 15 systems a day, that isn't very many to spread overhead to. If we expanded to make 1500/day the cost would drop from $5k/system to a few hundred.
The market for fuel cells is vastly greater than the market for RO systems. Poor people without clean water to drink still use energy. Relatively poor people that wouldn't think of getting a water filter use tons of energy. Even among the wealthy RO units aren't common. We could use fuel cells in so many areas. If it scales down we could put one in every computer, car, and house. There is such a massive potential market the economy of scale would be huge.
Ah, an idealist. I find that philosophy intriguing but I don't think it would work in practice. It is hard to even imagine. I think that thugs and scammers would prosper. All it would take is a powerful enough group of people who don't adhere to the non-aggression principle to ruin everything. I am wary of avoiding the tragedy of the commons under such a system. (not that our current system has avoided it!)
It's not that simple. There are men with guns that prevent armies of homeless children from running amok and destroying everyone's property. Everybody has to pay for those men with guns, even the people that would be better off without them. You're expecting everyone to pay for police protection, laws and courts, and the legally protected ownership of property whether or not it is to their benefit. Property owners benefit from this mandatory taxation but suddenly, hypocritically change their tune when it benefits someone else.
To be honest, you support taxes unless you are an anarchist. We're simply discussing where you'd like to see the line drawn. It seems to me that you want taxes for services that benefit you but not taxes that don't. That is an understandable position, but it is problematic to defend ethically.
Property tax isn't strictly regressive. The tax on 1/50th of an apartment building or a small home is a lot lower than the tax on a million dollar mansion. I think making the mill levy progressive is an interesting idea.
I don't think the rental situation is simple at all. When property values rise, rents tend to rise and as we've seen lately when property values fall rents tend to fall. Property owners have to charge what the market will bear, and sometimes that is less than the cost of owning the property. If this goes on for long, property will fall in value as fewer investors buy rental property. If property taxes were doubled, property values would fall which would tend to drive down rent. This would be countered by the increase in renters and the decrease in supply of properties. I can't say which would dominate, but I've seen the rent vs. own cost ratio fluctuate wildly depending on tax law, interest rates, property value trends, inflation, supply/demand changes, local economy, etc.
In any case, it is simplistic to say that property taxes are simply passed through to renters. If property tax was abolished rents would possibly go up as people bought property suddenly driving prices up.
High wealth is sufficient to have high income, but high income is not sufficient to have high wealth. If I had $100 million in assets, I could easily generate a risk-free $5-10 million/year without doing any work. On the other hand, an earned $5-10 million/year can be blown away easily year after year, leaving a high income earner broke when they retire.
In general, the people making millions from their wealth don't pay much in taxes. They have shelters, pay capital gains rates, etc. People making millions from labor pay a lot in taxes. I don't entirely accept that income from wealth should be treated differently than income from labor, aside from the whole taxation on wealth issue.
I realize we need to encourage investment, but taxing income from wealth at a lower rate than income from work seems designed to increase the wealth gap.
I am tired all day but come evening I'm wide awake. It's frustrating. At least my spontaneous TV-watching can only go so far since I have broadcast-only reception. At 1 AM I'm not going to download a show just because I'm having trouble falling asleep and the only thing on TV is infomercials. I just need to keep avoiding the on-demand web TV shows. That could get out of hand easily.
I heard (have not tested) of a way to rid yourself of some robo-dialers. First, have a recording device handy. Call a number you know to be disconnected. Record the three-beep signal. Place this at the beginning of your answering machine/voice mail intro. Machines hear the tone and log the number as disconnected. People calling hear the three beeps and hang up.
This is brilliant. I couldn't find verification with a quick google search. Anyone know of this?
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. I've had plenty of jobs where I didn't agree with management's policies. Some of them I even did things that were distasteful to me, such as pressuring customers for profitable add-ons or giving the partially bogus company response to a valid complaint. Depending on how much I needed the job and how good the job was, I've done things that were unquestionably wrong. It was easier to live with since it wasn't my decision, since my supervisor was forcing my hand, since the alternative was unemployment.
I don't do these things anymore, but there's no certainty that I won't have to again. If the tech sector collapses again and I find myself doing tech support again (Please, no! not a 3rd time!) I may well find myself in that unpleasant situation again. And who knows, if I luck into a situation where I'm making millions I might hesitate to let my scruples ruin an otherwise good thing.
What I'm saying is this: Here is a man in the most high-profile position possible in his line of work. He can make a difference within the boundaries set for him. If he stands up for his beliefs, the administration will simply replace him with a less competent and more pliable subject. How does that help the public? And it sure hurts the individual. I don't think anyone can judge his actions unless they've been in a similar situation and done the "right thing," besides the fact that I don't think the ethical choice is clear.
Sometimes you can do more good as a reluctant part of the problem than you can as a noble but sidelined martyr.
heh, you and me both. Fortunately for the human race, two idiots can have a non-retarded baby. If the hapless kid can escape the limitations of his environment there's a good chance for a productive life. I suspect that efforts to somehow maximize genetic fitness would backfire anyway. You rarely hear about the offspring of a genius, athlete, artist, etc. doing anything worthwhile, although that might be due to the corrosive influence of too much money, fame, and a sense of entitlement.
You might not understand Darwinism correctly. Smoking doesn't kill many users before they are done reproducing. Anything that kills an organism after it is done reproducing won't have much of an affect on gene propagation. If anything, I suspect that smokers tend to reproduce more than nonsmokers due to educational and class correlations. The Darwinism meme is misused quite a bit. For example, uneducated people with low IQ tend to have the most babies. So when we laugh about the Darwin Award winner who mauled himself to death in a chipper, keep in mind he probably already has spread his genes more than us smart people ever will. And spreading genes is all Darwinism is about. A lot of people seem to have the idea that Darwinism punishes the individual for being unfit by killing him. That's not really correct. A stupid person who has 5 babies before they turn 21 and dies holding up a liquor store with a toy gun is remarkably successful, genetically speaking.
Maybe I'm weird, but I'd prefer a window that looked out over plants and wasn't directly in the sun.
People used to become irate at me for closing the blinds when the sun was in my face. What am I supposed to do, sit there and squint while I get a sunburn?
Wrong! People are punished all the time for things that didn't happen. Drunk drivers are arrested even if they don't cause a wreck. Wannabe child molesters are arrested for talking to a cop on myspace.
Uh, the lance fragment was fired from a heavy gun. There's no way a whale could slam against a piece of coral at those kinds of speeds. Besides, if the whale slammed into it, it would only puncture into the skin. It wouldn't keep going for the several feet of blubber and have enough momentum left over to penetrate bone.
I like your idea, but won't spammers do something similar? The big advantage spammers have is the motivation of viagra loot. They seem pretty damn motivated, more so than the good guys. Remember, to them computational intensity means very little when they have hundreds of thousands of zombies.
The biggest arm in the spammer arsenal will always be offering free porn to people who solve a capcha. It uses people to solve the turing test, which will always succeed.
My friend worked for an employment verifications company doing exactly this type of check. You could get a simple check for a few dollars, which was a criminal background and credit check. You could get employment or education verification, reference checks, etc. A top-shelf full verification ran hundreds of dollars.
I couldn't believe all the crap they found. People lied about all kinds of things on their applications and resumes. People lied about their criminal history, usually substituting something minor for a felony conviction.
I don't approve of the movement towards an Orwellian character investigation, but can certainly understand how a lot of businesses find it to be comforting. It is a very big market, and one that is growing rapidly. They ran checks for fast food workers to CEOs and everything in between, for a wide range of companies. Their biggest clients were financial and healthcare companies.
I disagree that the panic and overreaction about terrorists is rational. Just like the panic and overreaction about child molesters or school shootings is rational.
Nobody in charge is looking at the costs. Nobody in charge is calculating the risks. If they were, they'd realize that the occasional airliner exploding is a lot cheaper than putting hundreds of millions of people through a huge hassle day after day. Our airport security is a joke, costs a huge amount, and protects us from a very small risk.
We'd be better off with armed guards around electric fans, which injure or kill thousands of citizens each year.
I don't know what it is. People just get nuts about certain very small risks. The fact that it is terrorists, perverts, or kids with guns makes people crazy and see things wrong.
Think of the huge lost opportunity. If we invested the trillions of dollars we waste on terrorism paranoia we could really have something great. Instead of preventing a tiny risk of possible harm we could have guaranteed benefit for many more people. We could go a long way towards curing cancer, heart disease, etc. and save millions of people year after year. The terrorists, perverts, and schoolyard crazies could never keep up. It's completely irrational.
It's like spending all your discretionary income on insurance. You don't have anything to show for it after time passes. Either you threw your money away, or "best case" a catastrophe is compensated/averted. We should invest in our future, accept that life has risks, and look at them with a clear head.
If we end up quivering chicken-hearted wrecks always worrying about terrorists, spending hundreds of billions a year and giving up our liberties, the terrorists win year after year without so much as blowing up a mailbox.
I think it is neurotic to worry about nukes when there are real dangers to obsess about, like getting struck by lightning or hit by a meteor. (Just in case you think those are valid concerns, I'm joking)
Why do people like to worry about things so oddly? People die in car wrecks way more than from chicken poisoning or terrorism or whatever stupid thing people worry about is.
BTW, my great-grandfather owned a lot of property in San Francisco during the fire. He lost his candy store in the fire and nearly his life. Afterwards he predicted that people wouldn't want to live in big cities after yet another big-city disaster (there were a big string of them) so he sold all of his property for a tidy profit. If he'd held on to it, my family could have been billionaires.
People like to live in cities. If fires, earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, and so forth don't stop them I doubt the occasional nuke will either. You're still more likely to kill yourself in a car wreck or taking a bath.
If median income growth was lower than inflation for an extended amount of time would it be acceptable to be concerned? Especially if the top 1% doubled its wealth? I'm willing to accept the rising tide theory as long as all boats are being lifted. When most boats are sinking I stop trusting the theory. I'm quite comfortable with my income and wealth, but I don't want to live in a society with a Mexico-like wealth gap. I think it makes for a bad society, even if I'm among the "haves."
Tax shelters are a very big business. My father, whose net worth is only $1.5m makes a huge profit paying a tax advisor $20k/year. Some of the things he suggests are borderline illegal, and he tells my dad so. My dad is too honest (and chicken) to do any of these "borderline illegal" things even though the savings would be vast and everybody else is doing it. I'm nearly at the point where I'll need to consider these issues. I don't know how I'll handle it, but I'm sure I'll worry about getting audited. Poor & middle income people don't worry about taxes, they just take the standard deduction or itemize their mortgage and file their w-2s.
That's a very good point. Even though a chip fab is an expensive thing to build and operate, unit costs are quite low. Once the R&D cost is recovered, chips can be sold profitably for a few dollars each. The secret is to have a huge market. I'd say the global market for microchips is in the hundreds of millions.
It is an interesting issue. I have a friend from Lebanon who is visiting family there right now. The stories he tells me are scary, everybody has guns and knows somebody who has lost a family member or worse. I don't think I'd be happy to live like that. I don't know how things would turn out here if government fell, but all too often all over the world it seems a power vacuum results in mass violence. I'm capable of defending myself, but if there are thousands of armed fuckers with nothing to lose I don't like the odds.
I work for a membrane manufacturer, and I can tell you that membrane does not have to be expensive. The materials are cheap, the process is cheap, and with smart testing you can have good labor costs and yields. The reason our membranes are expensive is scale. We make about 15 systems a day, that isn't very many to spread overhead to. If we expanded to make 1500/day the cost would drop from $5k/system to a few hundred.
The market for fuel cells is vastly greater than the market for RO systems. Poor people without clean water to drink still use energy. Relatively poor people that wouldn't think of getting a water filter use tons of energy. Even among the wealthy RO units aren't common. We could use fuel cells in so many areas. If it scales down we could put one in every computer, car, and house. There is such a massive potential market the economy of scale would be huge.
You're worrying about things that have never happened. People have been worrying about the bomb for 60 years, but the smart money has been on no bomb.
Ah, an idealist. I find that philosophy intriguing but I don't think it would work in practice. It is hard to even imagine. I think that thugs and scammers would prosper. All it would take is a powerful enough group of people who don't adhere to the non-aggression principle to ruin everything. I am wary of avoiding the tragedy of the commons under such a system. (not that our current system has avoided it!)
It's not that simple. There are men with guns that prevent armies of homeless children from running amok and destroying everyone's property. Everybody has to pay for those men with guns, even the people that would be better off without them. You're expecting everyone to pay for police protection, laws and courts, and the legally protected ownership of property whether or not it is to their benefit. Property owners benefit from this mandatory taxation but suddenly, hypocritically change their tune when it benefits someone else.
To be honest, you support taxes unless you are an anarchist. We're simply discussing where you'd like to see the line drawn. It seems to me that you want taxes for services that benefit you but not taxes that don't. That is an understandable position, but it is problematic to defend ethically.
Property tax isn't strictly regressive. The tax on 1/50th of an apartment building or a small home is a lot lower than the tax on a million dollar mansion. I think making the mill levy progressive is an interesting idea.
I don't think the rental situation is simple at all. When property values rise, rents tend to rise and as we've seen lately when property values fall rents tend to fall. Property owners have to charge what the market will bear, and sometimes that is less than the cost of owning the property. If this goes on for long, property will fall in value as fewer investors buy rental property. If property taxes were doubled, property values would fall which would tend to drive down rent. This would be countered by the increase in renters and the decrease in supply of properties. I can't say which would dominate, but I've seen the rent vs. own cost ratio fluctuate wildly depending on tax law, interest rates, property value trends, inflation, supply/demand changes, local economy, etc.
In any case, it is simplistic to say that property taxes are simply passed through to renters. If property tax was abolished rents would possibly go up as people bought property suddenly driving prices up.
High wealth is sufficient to have high income, but high income is not sufficient to have high wealth. If I had $100 million in assets, I could easily generate a risk-free $5-10 million/year without doing any work. On the other hand, an earned $5-10 million/year can be blown away easily year after year, leaving a high income earner broke when they retire.
In general, the people making millions from their wealth don't pay much in taxes. They have shelters, pay capital gains rates, etc. People making millions from labor pay a lot in taxes. I don't entirely accept that income from wealth should be treated differently than income from labor, aside from the whole taxation on wealth issue.
I realize we need to encourage investment, but taxing income from wealth at a lower rate than income from work seems designed to increase the wealth gap.
The wealthiest 1 percent have 40% of the wealth. So they're being undertaxed.
I am tired all day but come evening I'm wide awake. It's frustrating. At least my spontaneous TV-watching can only go so far since I have broadcast-only reception. At 1 AM I'm not going to download a show just because I'm having trouble falling asleep and the only thing on TV is infomercials. I just need to keep avoiding the on-demand web TV shows. That could get out of hand easily.
That explains my alcoholism. Every year when they make more and longer breaks I make more and stronger drinks.
This is brilliant. I couldn't find verification with a quick google search. Anyone know of this?
I was actually looking at that. It's super-overkill for what I want, but it might be fun to play around with an enterprise-grade PBX for my land line.
You lucky bastard. In the US there is no way to charge the caller for local calls.
This may stop working soon, though. VOIP doesn't cost diddly-squat. Phone spam may become as much of a problem as e-spam soon enough.