I would really need to see your figures and reasoning regarding the middle class having a negative tax rate. That's simply not feasible for any country. The dirty secret of the Scandinavian countries is that compared to the U.S. they have a much flatter tax rate.
Norway's top tax rate has been quite similar to that of the U.S. for quite a while. The biggest difference is that in the U.S. you needed to have over 8 times the average income to fall into that bracket, whereas in Norway it was only about 1.6 times that amount. This also ignores VAT or other taxes you might pay in Norway that don't exist or are fare lower in the U.S.
Of course if you think that's bad, you can always move to Denmark. The top marginal tax rate is around 55% (down from over 60% a decade ago) and there's still a 25% VAT. Social democracies don't just tax the rich, they tax the middle class, and everyone else as well. The cost of free healthcare or other government services is anything but.
I’m assuming that they were referring to software. I don’t think Apple builds any of the manufacturing equipment that they use, so the Chinese manufacturers already know how to produce a lot of that stuff. If the Chinese stole anything having to do with iTunes I truly pity them though.
Convenience mostly. YouTube has almost everything and since they gave the copyright owners the ability to collect from something another person uploaded, there’s not much incentive to remove the so-called illegally uploaded content.
Anything I could find on a streaming platform I can find on YouTube. However, the reverse is not true. There’s plenty of things I can listen to on YouTube that no streaming service offers. If your musical tastes stay outside of what’s popular, YouTube is a far better bet for finding it. Google’s algorithms might even play some other related music that you’ll really like but wouldn’t be able to get elsewhere as well. YouTube is also surprisingly good for music discovery as well.
If I didn’t already know this was something that Google had started years and years ago, I would get money that this was yet another weird little venture that Elon Musk had come up with.
Then perhaps we should do away with all of that automation and return to a time where over 90% of the country were farmers. The race to the bottom is precisely what allows us to live in such luxury, because all of the things that we need and many of those which we want have seen drastic price reductions because various enterprises were consistently finding new ways to undercut the competition.
I suppose Democratic Socialism works if you’re fine with everyone paying the majority of their income in taxes. I’m not. Hong Kong and Singapore do quite well, so perhaps we should emulate their model instead since they get those results for a lot less of their personal income. Why pay a higher cost than we need to?
It probably isn't necessary to know exactly what people should be eating to maximize their health. It's far more important to know what kind of things to stay away from to avoid the worst negative health consequences, and we've got a good enough idea there. No one is telling the general population to eat more sugar.
According to Wikipedia, they're the third largest party and hold approximately 1/7 of the seats in the federal parliament.
It seems unlikely that they would be missed by chance. Now the question becomes a matter of why they were likely excluded. It certainly could be that the hackers are sympathetic with that party, or it could be that whoever did the hacking wants to stir up even more shit be leaving an obvious group out of the leaks. If it were an outside antagonist like Russians (they're always at least a suspect) they'd probably want to create the largest amount of chaos. Weakening your opponent is good, but stirring the various factions up against each other and letting your opponents tear themselves apart from in-fighting is far more effective.
Why not just sell hunting rights on the poachers. I'm sure there are some people who'd pay tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars to go human hunting. If you're already going to kill them, you may as well at least try to make a buck while doing so.
You’re almost making an argument for even greater cuts. Wouldn’t it be great if the U.S. were the tax haven where the rest of the world funneled all of their money?
If the cheating is that great and everyone is doing it to some degree, it makes far more sense to lower the tax rate and collect a smaller percentage of everything being dodged than it does to keep on the current course. If you’ve got exact numbers this just becomes a simple math problem.
It probably depends on the game. A lot of them these days are slightly more complex and pretty Skinner Box designed to get you to spend additional money on in-app purchases, loot crates, or whatever other scheme the pimps have come up with.
It might not be for mindless zombies, but it may be trying to turn you into one.
This is why I can't wait for the future where 3D printing becomes sophisticated enough to fabricate parts for situations like that. Even it's the type of horribly expensive machinery that only an auto shop could afford, it's still better than the current situation where the parts are far more difficult (and expensive) to come by.
If you browse to the main page and look up at your tab, it reads "Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters" so it's still there. There's also a big difference between the phrasing you've used and what Slashdot is purporting to be. I've always read the phrase as that the news for nerds is the stuff that matters, at least to nerds. If you read it as "and News that Matters" as you seem to be doing, then one can make an argument for just about anything showing up here regardless of how much or little it has to do with technology or other nerdly matters. You've even done the necessary contortions to construe this story as something that matters, but now shouldn't Slashdot post any and all stories about politics between Russia and the United States, or does it only matter if someone is getting arrested as a spy?
The regular folks don't see any of that money and until recently, the government wasn't even spending any of it. The vast majority of what they take in for any given year ends up getting banked away into an investment fund (earning even more money) and as a result they've got a considerable nest egg.
The reason for this is that Norway has all kinds of taxes, fees, etc. related to cars, almost all of which have been waved or heavily reduced for electric vehicles. It isn't that it's rich people who can afford shiny new electric cars are suddenly buying them, it's that Norway has made cars hideously expensive for most people, but have removed those expenses if you buy an electric car. I don't know if they changed it at all, but previously they had no VAT on electric vehicles among other more environmentally friendly cars. That's a huge deal.
The lesson is that if you don't tax the ever living hell out of something, people are more likely to buy that thing than the competing alternatives.
I'm not saying that I don't need it and therefore no one does. I even said I wasn't aware that phones had this capability. Maybe this is something that I do need or at least might want. I just can't envision what this technology might be useful for and was asking if anyone was using this or had some particular use case in mind.
I know that phone manufacturers are adding this so that they've got some new gimmick to sell, but is there any consumer demand for this? I honestly wasn't even aware that this was something that phones could do, and I'm not particular sure that I care.
Does anyone with a newer device use this and if so, for what?
I suspect that it doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. Keep in mind that the vast, vast majority of men didn't become NASA engineers, great scientists, or really anything of particular note either. I don't know to what extent adversity is a necessary component in forging greatness, but I think most people will admit that you don't get good at solving incredibly large problems without having to persevere against smaller ones along the way.
We're also familiar with the idea of participation trophies and the notion of telling every kid their a winner. I think we can see that there's just as much downside if you swing the pendulum too far in the other direction. Maybe you get a few more brilliant scientists out of it, but I think you'll get a lot more disaffected youth and a load of narcissists being needlessly validated for half-rate efforts.
There's an ongoing battle between heaven and hell over which is going to get stuck with her. I don't know how it will turn out, but I can tell you that hell has a far better legal team.
I don’t know if brand really factors into it if the prices are too high. No matter how much someone wants something, you can’t sell it to them if they can’t afford it. I wouldn’t think to claim that Lamborghini’s brand is suffering just because I haven’t purchased any of their cars.
The bizarre part with Apple is that the margins are so obscene they could still make more money even with a sales drop, simply because they jacked the prices up enough to compensate. Maybe it’s not even a bad idea if they already knew sales would be down even if they kept prices the same. I’m still using a 6S and just don’t like the newer iPhones so have no desire to upgrade regardless of cost. I think there are others also turned off by the new design.
More people might notice and perhaps understand, but I don't know if they'd care. They'll look at it and conclude that they trust those companies enough that they're not concerned. What they won't understand is that those companies are buying all kinds of other data and aggregating it (and then perhaps selling that aggregated data in turn) such that they have far more information about a person than that person might consider possible.
If this bird were tasty, people would probably cultivate it and take care of it. Cows and chickens are scarcely in any danger of going extinct after all. Animals that are useful to humans in some way tend to thrive.
There’s an entire group of people in the United States who have no issue with the government funding large expensive projects. Some want government to solely fund the entirety of healthcare costs. Nuclear power plants ought to be relatively cheap compared to some of the other things that have been proposed.
Personally, I think the government should stay out of it, but nuclear is hardly uneconomical, especially if it isn’t handicapped or crippled due to regulations designed to make it that way. Funny how for some people big government is a solution to any problem unless it’s a solution they don’t want at all.
If I recall, the Free State Project was trying to get people to move to New Hampshire, not Vermont. I don't think they were offering to pay anyone to move either.
Slashdot Mirror
I would really need to see your figures and reasoning regarding the middle class having a negative tax rate. That's simply not feasible for any country. The dirty secret of the Scandinavian countries is that compared to the U.S. they have a much flatter tax rate.
Norway's top tax rate has been quite similar to that of the U.S. for quite a while. The biggest difference is that in the U.S. you needed to have over 8 times the average income to fall into that bracket, whereas in Norway it was only about 1.6 times that amount. This also ignores VAT or other taxes you might pay in Norway that don't exist or are fare lower in the U.S.
Of course if you think that's bad, you can always move to Denmark. The top marginal tax rate is around 55% (down from over 60% a decade ago) and there's still a 25% VAT. Social democracies don't just tax the rich, they tax the middle class, and everyone else as well. The cost of free healthcare or other government services is anything but.
I’m assuming that they were referring to software. I don’t think Apple builds any of the manufacturing equipment that they use, so the Chinese manufacturers already know how to produce a lot of that stuff. If the Chinese stole anything having to do with iTunes I truly pity them though.
Convenience mostly. YouTube has almost everything and since they gave the copyright owners the ability to collect from something another person uploaded, there’s not much incentive to remove the so-called illegally uploaded content.
Anything I could find on a streaming platform I can find on YouTube. However, the reverse is not true. There’s plenty of things I can listen to on YouTube that no streaming service offers. If your musical tastes stay outside of what’s popular, YouTube is a far better bet for finding it. Google’s algorithms might even play some other related music that you’ll really like but wouldn’t be able to get elsewhere as well. YouTube is also surprisingly good for music discovery as well.
If I didn’t already know this was something that Google had started years and years ago, I would get money that this was yet another weird little venture that Elon Musk had come up with.
Then perhaps we should do away with all of that automation and return to a time where over 90% of the country were farmers. The race to the bottom is precisely what allows us to live in such luxury, because all of the things that we need and many of those which we want have seen drastic price reductions because various enterprises were consistently finding new ways to undercut the competition.
I suppose Democratic Socialism works if you’re fine with everyone paying the majority of their income in taxes. I’m not. Hong Kong and Singapore do quite well, so perhaps we should emulate their model instead since they get those results for a lot less of their personal income. Why pay a higher cost than we need to?
It probably isn't necessary to know exactly what people should be eating to maximize their health. It's far more important to know what kind of things to stay away from to avoid the worst negative health consequences, and we've got a good enough idea there. No one is telling the general population to eat more sugar.
According to Wikipedia, they're the third largest party and hold approximately 1/7 of the seats in the federal parliament.
It seems unlikely that they would be missed by chance. Now the question becomes a matter of why they were likely excluded. It certainly could be that the hackers are sympathetic with that party, or it could be that whoever did the hacking wants to stir up even more shit be leaving an obvious group out of the leaks. If it were an outside antagonist like Russians (they're always at least a suspect) they'd probably want to create the largest amount of chaos. Weakening your opponent is good, but stirring the various factions up against each other and letting your opponents tear themselves apart from in-fighting is far more effective.
Why not just sell hunting rights on the poachers. I'm sure there are some people who'd pay tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars to go human hunting. If you're already going to kill them, you may as well at least try to make a buck while doing so.
I can’t tell if you’re a big statist or a rabid Libertarian.
You’re almost making an argument for even greater cuts. Wouldn’t it be great if the U.S. were the tax haven where the rest of the world funneled all of their money?
If the cheating is that great and everyone is doing it to some degree, it makes far more sense to lower the tax rate and collect a smaller percentage of everything being dodged than it does to keep on the current course. If you’ve got exact numbers this just becomes a simple math problem.
It probably depends on the game. A lot of them these days are slightly more complex and pretty Skinner Box designed to get you to spend additional money on in-app purchases, loot crates, or whatever other scheme the pimps have come up with.
It might not be for mindless zombies, but it may be trying to turn you into one.
This is why I can't wait for the future where 3D printing becomes sophisticated enough to fabricate parts for situations like that. Even it's the type of horribly expensive machinery that only an auto shop could afford, it's still better than the current situation where the parts are far more difficult (and expensive) to come by.
If you browse to the main page and look up at your tab, it reads "Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters" so it's still there. There's also a big difference between the phrasing you've used and what Slashdot is purporting to be. I've always read the phrase as that the news for nerds is the stuff that matters, at least to nerds. If you read it as "and News that Matters" as you seem to be doing, then one can make an argument for just about anything showing up here regardless of how much or little it has to do with technology or other nerdly matters. You've even done the necessary contortions to construe this story as something that matters, but now shouldn't Slashdot post any and all stories about politics between Russia and the United States, or does it only matter if someone is getting arrested as a spy?
The regular folks don't see any of that money and until recently, the government wasn't even spending any of it. The vast majority of what they take in for any given year ends up getting banked away into an investment fund (earning even more money) and as a result they've got a considerable nest egg.
The reason for this is that Norway has all kinds of taxes, fees, etc. related to cars, almost all of which have been waved or heavily reduced for electric vehicles. It isn't that it's rich people who can afford shiny new electric cars are suddenly buying them, it's that Norway has made cars hideously expensive for most people, but have removed those expenses if you buy an electric car. I don't know if they changed it at all, but previously they had no VAT on electric vehicles among other more environmentally friendly cars. That's a huge deal.
The lesson is that if you don't tax the ever living hell out of something, people are more likely to buy that thing than the competing alternatives.
I'm not saying that I don't need it and therefore no one does. I even said I wasn't aware that phones had this capability. Maybe this is something that I do need or at least might want. I just can't envision what this technology might be useful for and was asking if anyone was using this or had some particular use case in mind.
I know that phone manufacturers are adding this so that they've got some new gimmick to sell, but is there any consumer demand for this? I honestly wasn't even aware that this was something that phones could do, and I'm not particular sure that I care.
Does anyone with a newer device use this and if so, for what?
I suspect that it doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. Keep in mind that the vast, vast majority of men didn't become NASA engineers, great scientists, or really anything of particular note either. I don't know to what extent adversity is a necessary component in forging greatness, but I think most people will admit that you don't get good at solving incredibly large problems without having to persevere against smaller ones along the way.
We're also familiar with the idea of participation trophies and the notion of telling every kid their a winner. I think we can see that there's just as much downside if you swing the pendulum too far in the other direction. Maybe you get a few more brilliant scientists out of it, but I think you'll get a lot more disaffected youth and a load of narcissists being needlessly validated for half-rate efforts.
There's an ongoing battle between heaven and hell over which is going to get stuck with her. I don't know how it will turn out, but I can tell you that hell has a far better legal team.
I don’t know if brand really factors into it if the prices are too high. No matter how much someone wants something, you can’t sell it to them if they can’t afford it. I wouldn’t think to claim that Lamborghini’s brand is suffering just because I haven’t purchased any of their cars.
The bizarre part with Apple is that the margins are so obscene they could still make more money even with a sales drop, simply because they jacked the prices up enough to compensate. Maybe it’s not even a bad idea if they already knew sales would be down even if they kept prices the same. I’m still using a 6S and just don’t like the newer iPhones so have no desire to upgrade regardless of cost. I think there are others also turned off by the new design.
More people might notice and perhaps understand, but I don't know if they'd care. They'll look at it and conclude that they trust those companies enough that they're not concerned. What they won't understand is that those companies are buying all kinds of other data and aggregating it (and then perhaps selling that aggregated data in turn) such that they have far more information about a person than that person might consider possible.
If this bird were tasty, people would probably cultivate it and take care of it. Cows and chickens are scarcely in any danger of going extinct after all. Animals that are useful to humans in some way tend to thrive.
There’s an entire group of people in the United States who have no issue with the government funding large expensive projects. Some want government to solely fund the entirety of healthcare costs. Nuclear power plants ought to be relatively cheap compared to some of the other things that have been proposed.
Personally, I think the government should stay out of it, but nuclear is hardly uneconomical, especially if it isn’t handicapped or crippled due to regulations designed to make it that way. Funny how for some people big government is a solution to any problem unless it’s a solution they don’t want at all.
We must be doing reasonably well that not being able to live has come to mean suffering minor discomforts.
Doubtful, but I'm willing to bet that she winds up with a lot more publicity this way. Whether or not that's worth anything is another matter though.
If I recall, the Free State Project was trying to get people to move to New Hampshire, not Vermont. I don't think they were offering to pay anyone to move either.