I really don't understand what they've written there. They miss the fantastic search results, but not having them makes them more productive? I have a feeling they're just trying to besmirch Google's reputation and are willing to say whatever it takes, whether it's true or not.
I have a slightly different theory. If you look at what's changed in the past few years, you'll see that this engine-spamming has increased massively. People now devote their days to trying to fool Google into listing them higher than they deserve. Taken in this context, the quality of result moving up slowly sounds pretty good - if the results are improving, despite the efforts of thousands of people and companies to reduce their quality, the technology behind the search must be moving forwards fairly quickly.
The big problem of course will be the bandwidth available to the distributing servers, since peer-to-peer is by nature non-sequential.While bandwidth to homes increases rapidly year-on-year, the bandwidth available to servers is much more expensive to increase.
Microsoft vary their schedule for some vulnerabilities - I assume there's some sort of cost/benefit going on to decide which ones are worth causing problems to patch quickly. As for the problems with other vendors - that's hardly Microsoft's fault, and at any rate those products tend to be easier to protect than the operating system itself.
I'm not saying the system's perfect, just that there are good reasons for the existence of patch Tuesday; it's not just a random piece of bureaucracy.
Unless you think the US is losing, they're going fine (for the purposes of illustrating that you would lose to the US army). How many US generals have been killed in the war? Why would you do better at killing the president?
When Microsoft releases a patch for an exploit, it's immediately known that computers are wide open to this attack. Malicious hackers - virus writers and the like included - can reverse engineer the patch to find out what vulnerability is being patched exactly, and know that, since your organization doesn't patch until such-and-such day, you're wide open to attacks. "Exploit Wednesday", the day after patch Tuesday, is a testament to the importance of Microsoft's patches in the development of exploits. Companies can't afford to gear up for patches every day, but can't afford to risk the ramifications of not applying a patch immediately either. Patch Tuesday gets them out of this catch-22.
If they decide to make themselves king after taking office you'd better hope you've got more support than nuts with RPGs. Like perhaps the courts declaring it to be a ridiculous assertion and derailing his legislation, Congress impeaching him and the Secret Service removing him from the White House. If he has support from the people in power - Congress, chiefs of police, military generals - then a nut with an RPG isn't going to get anything except a bullet in the head when he tries to get past the newly-installed military road blocks around the King. This is why I don't understand the argument that the Second Amendment is necessary to keep people safe from the Government. If the Government is corrupt then either the military, police and whichever branches of the government aren't corrupt will fix the problem, or you'll be fighting against a one-and-a-half million man army, armed and trained to a higher level than you and with a budget of over 500 billion dollars. It's just not going to end well...
I thought your SS number was public? If it is, what's stopping me finding out your reply code and then fooling you? It might not be a worry for you or me, but for people in important positions single-target attacks are a problem.
I think we're going at this different ways. I don't just want a system that's better than the current one - that's hardly challenging. I want a system that resists these sorts of attacks and isn't difficult for people to use - unlike requiring them to enter two passwords. You originally described your solution as being infallible, which is why I was comparing it to a benchmark rather higher than "better than the current system".
2) No -- a faked box wouldn't work. If I type in my SSN it won't reply with "Ouch!" -- unless someone looked over my shoulder when I used a REAL box. This "man in the middle attack" would only work at an establishment with regular customers that has REAL and FAKE boxes. So, you capture the "check key" -- or authorization response with a hidden camera, and then play that back for the customer when they come in again. But that is at least more work than now... and it requires someone who is authorized for business (something to lose), and a repeat customer -- which means that anyone running such a scam has a bit more exposure than the one-hit tourist who is your ideal target. That's about the only scam that could work -- and it is a bit trickier than the phony ATMs that have done the same scam. In this case, you'd have to have a real ATM next to a phony one -- and match the customer on a second pass.
A faked box wouldn't work - if you take a faked box as being just a box with numbers stuck on the outside. If I fake a box by taking my real one and pointing a hidden camera at the keypad then it will still respond correctly. Alternatively I can just put up a sign saying that the feedback isn't working - maybe accompany it with a broken looking screen - and then clear out your account. Or I can just shoulder-surf it. Also, are you saying that you wouldn't allow people to get their password back if they forgot it or that you'd stick with normal photo-ID - all that does is create a system, no more secure than the current one (because it's just a compression of the current one into a password) but that is seen as infallible - misplaced confidence isn't good for security.
1) OK, that works for changing your current password, what would you have happen if you forget your password? You can't just rely on photo ID and similar, since we know that can be faked. And remember that it's not the banks that do the authorizing, it's bank employees. These can be crooked just like everyone else.
2) The faked box doesn't do anything fancy. It just sits there, looks like a normal box - and is. Except that it records every button you press, perhaps by having a camera watching the keypad, perhaps by changing the keypad itself to monitor you. Think about it; people don't build whole fake ATMs now to steal PINs, they just put a camera on a real one.
3) No reply - I mentioned it because you phrased it like an advantage, but if you don't mind, it's not part of your plan.
1) What's to stop someone else going and submitting a new password? Why can't the authentication the bank does be faked? 2) What's to stop a shop using a faked terminal to get your password? 3) How would this reduce the tracking? They'd still be able to log everywhere you requested authorization. 4) How is requiring a password to shop an improvement?
The other problem is insecurity of the place; it doesn't matter how secure the transmission is if there's someone watching you cast your vote to make sure you voted for the right person; with a voting booth you can't vote unless you're alone and no one waiting outside knows whom you voted for.
Of course, it's VERIO's network, they're free to have whomever they like as customers. I just find it dubious that they're TOS'ing Young for abuse or violations of their AUP when they simultaneously decide to host spamming scum:
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.lasso?isp=ver io.net I think they might be, actually - in several of the emails in the linked conversation between Verio and Cryptome, it warns them that people repeatedly receiving DMCA notices are in violation of the AUP. Doesn't sound like it matters whether the notices are fair or unfounded.
The questions about areas he hasn't personally analysed aim to show that he hasn't been diligent enough to produce 'expert testimony'. Specifically, according to Federal Rule of Evidence 702, expert evidence is admissible only if
(1) the testimony is based upon sufficient facts or data, (2) the testimony is the product of reliable principles and methods In this instance, the facts upon which he is basing his testimony amount to an assumption that the ISP and MediaSentry information is perfectly accurate, and his results are the product of a proprietary, non-peer-reviewed procedure, using proprietary software and with no known error rate and no evidence to support its accuracy. These questions aren't irrelevant, they aim to establish that the expert's evidence is inadmissible.
If you promise that something will happen, without knowing for sure that it will happen, that's fraud. Specifically false representation, in this case "A statement of fact with no reasonable basis to make that statement".
It would be fraud on the basis of financial gain in that it would reduce the fallout from the problem. At least, it would today.
No, it's not. That's optimism. There are four elements required for it to be fraud:
Intentional misprepresentation of a known (currently existing) fact
Knowledge of the fact's falsity
Intention to cause someone to act on the misrepresentation
Action by another person, to their detriment.
Promises to help someone out that you never fulfill can never be fraudulent unless you intend to harm them by those statements. It is similarly not a breach of contract, since there is no consideration for the contract to exist, and it was not intended to create a legal relationship, so it is prima facie invalid.
You say your parents haven't planned well for their retirement, and presumably don't have much saved away but you don't think they should receive any state assistance. How, then, should they get the money to pay for things?
There are chiefly two areas of your post that I strongly disagree with. First is your assumption that if you don't have enough money to retire on it's your fault; this simply isn't true. The factors that could cause you not to have sufficient money saved range from "acts of God" like fraud or theft, through to economic problems like falling property prices and so on. What about someone who immigrates to the US at 50? No matter what job they have they won't manage to put away enough. The same goes for someone on a low-wage job. If you're earning less than $13,000 a year there is no way you could put away enough to survive with no Government help.
This is the second point with which I really disagree. I think you're under-estimating heavily the amount of money you need to save to retire without any state assistance. The Department of Health and Human Services puts the poverty threshold for a single person at $9,800 per year. A ballpark estimate for the amount you need to save, from 20 until you retire at 67 and living in retirement until you're 78 (the average) requires you to save $3,574.72 every year. And that's just to stay above the poverty threshold - 10 times your estimate of a dollar a day. To have any money for luxuries you need to save more. If you have any dependants you need to save more ($4,647.13 a year for one dependant). If you earn less than $13,000 and have no children, or less than 16 or 19 thousand dollars a year with 1 and 2 children respectively, you cannot afford to stay afloat both now and in retirement without help.
Estimating that your parents will retire in 20 years, they need to save $27,000 a year to have enough money to survive unaided in their retirement - let's reduce that to $20k since they probably have some savings. But since even this is clearly impossible, if the state doesn't fund them they will have to rely on charity to be able to feed, house and clothe themselves. I hope they have nice neighbours.
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
on
The End is Nigh for XP
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I find that Linux improves my productivity; it runs faster - not a lot faster, but enough to be noticeable. Having multiple virtual desktops comes in handy. Having things like iso burning built into the OS saves a few minutes here and there. I know I can open just about any file thrown at me with something - even the most proprietary documents succumb to one of my office programs - whereas on Windows I have to have third party programs to open archives. It handles accents much more nicely. I don't get "time to restart" prompts in the middle of working... A lot of it is also familiarity, of course, but once you're used to the idiosyncrasies, not having to worry about security or stability save you more time than you'd expect - or at least more time than I expected.
Of course, not being distracted by games helps too!
While you can't sign away your human rights, that isn't the issue here - the article only covers communications with a reasonable expectation of privacy, so signing a declaration of consent to monitoring would render the article impotent.
should we really punish people for being born into a poor family
punish? by not giving them handouts? Where did this entitlement come from?
Society punishes those in poor families. Tending to come from a poorer neighbourhood means they are likely to go to a worse school. They have worse healthcare, less materials to learn from. They are less likely to succeed because of where they were born, before they were even able to make one choice for themselves. "Handouts" - which seems an unreasonably emotive word to me, since you're not giving them money, just taking less in tax - seek to equalize this situation. America is meant to be the land of opportunity, but as I've mentioned in my previous comments, the low social mobility and low social floor combine to make it the land of unbounded opportunity to those born into money or power.
They are probably not stupider, but perhaps more likely to make poor life decisions based on cultural norms. I have no idea why you brought this up. Certainly you don't think that just because minorities are involved that there is some sort of racist/sexist causation. If so, lets see the data on why.
I brought this up in response to Cayene8's statement that he should not have to pay to support someone too stupid to plan for the future. I wanted to know whether he maintains that the fact that minorities are overly represented by the poor is just because they lack the intelligence to plan ahead.
I could do this, but then I would ignoring the fact that I have a measure of control over these things and moreover, supporting a mentality that not only condones but rewards laziness/stupidity. I'm no Ayn Rand, but this definitely does not sit well with me.
Looking at the matter safe in the knowledge that you will never need Government handouts makes it very easy to call them frivolous. In the same way, knowing they were white made it very easy for 16th-Century Europeans to explain how Black people lacked the capability to be anything but slaves. A report by The Economist showed the American "meritocracy" to be failing, with 40% of those from low-income families growing up to live in a low-income family, while 46% of those from high income families stayed in that bracket. The truth is that success is not just a matter of working hard and being clever - if your parents are illiterate or don't believe in education, if they need you to work to earn money, if your local school is failing... all these things will shape the success you end up with. The idea of the veil of ignorance isn't to deprive you of useful knowledge, it's to deprive you of knowledge that could bias your decision. As I asked in my previous post, imagine that instead of knowing where you are now you were about to be born. You have a 43% chance of earning less than $25,000, a 22% chance of earning less than $12,500. Would you still say that the Government should wash its hands of those 'idiots' if you could be about to be one of them?
But I'm not, and neither is anyone else. And before you condescend to tell me I've never been in some of these people's shoes, let me remind you that you've not been in mine.
But shouldn't we be? Shouldn't we recognize that circumstances have as much to do with who we are as we do? That a hard-working boy living in a slum, with no books or regular teachers, isn't going to turn out as well as the same boy living in Beverly Hills? I'm not asking you to imagine that you're in anyone else's shoes, only to accept that being poor isn't necessarily because of laziness or stupidity. And that poor people deserve the same opportunities as everyone else, even if it's a little more expensive to give them those opportunities.
OK, so life isn't fair. But that doesn't mean that we can't try to make it better. It's a fallacy to think that the only reasons that someone won't have put aside money for retirement or healthcare are stupidity or poor planning; recent research has shown the US to have lower social mobility than a lot of developed countries - should we really punish people for being born into a poor family? And as I pointed out before, people from minorities are massively over-represented by those under the poverty line - are they just stupider?
What incentive is there in it for ME to work hard to succeed (measured solely in $$'s earned for my expenditure), if I basically have to give it back to the country to support those who earn less, especially due to above mentioned stupidity?
If you really succeed - whether by working hard or by being born into money and power - you will be in the top tax bracket. You will pay 35% tax on an income of at least $336,551, leaving you $218,758 per year to live on. You've taken a hit, but you're still not going to be groping behind the sofa for food money - and by European standards this is very low taxation. On the other hand, if you make $11,340 a year, with 2 dependant children, you will receive $4,536 a year in assistance through the EITC scheme. This is quite possibly the difference between eating and not eating. (again, by European standards, this seems very low; even in the UK, which has a comparatively conservative policy regarding benefits, the same family would receive $8,200.) Now take into account John Rawles' veil of ignorance; imagine you haven't yet been born and have no idea where in society you will end up. You have (rounding to the nearest integer) a 22% chance of earning less than $12,500 and a 43% chance of earning less than $25,000. Your chance of earning more than $50,000 is 29%. Things look even worse if we take into account other possibilities - what if you have an accident, or are unemployed? Nationally, you have a 4.8% chance of being unemployed, roughly the same as your chance of earning over $100,000. If you were making your decision based on these chances, rather than in the knowledge that you aren't in a position to need Government assistance to stay alive, would you still think that people shouldn't have to lower their living standards to put food on someone elses plate - despite the fact that otherwise, that plate might be empty?
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't understand what they've written there. They miss the fantastic search results, but not having them makes them more productive? I have a feeling they're just trying to besmirch Google's reputation and are willing to say whatever it takes, whether it's true or not.
I have a slightly different theory. If you look at what's changed in the past few years, you'll see that this engine-spamming has increased massively. People now devote their days to trying to fool Google into listing them higher than they deserve. Taken in this context, the quality of result moving up slowly sounds pretty good - if the results are improving, despite the efforts of thousands of people and companies to reduce their quality, the technology behind the search must be moving forwards fairly quickly.
The big problem of course will be the bandwidth available to the distributing servers, since peer-to-peer is by nature non-sequential.While bandwidth to homes increases rapidly year-on-year, the bandwidth available to servers is much more expensive to increase.
I suppose it could be if it repeated something universally known (or something in the summary).
Microsoft vary their schedule for some vulnerabilities - I assume there's some sort of cost/benefit going on to decide which ones are worth causing problems to patch quickly. As for the problems with other vendors - that's hardly Microsoft's fault, and at any rate those products tend to be easier to protect than the operating system itself.
I'm not saying the system's perfect, just that there are good reasons for the existence of patch Tuesday; it's not just a random piece of bureaucracy.
Unless you think the US is losing, they're going fine (for the purposes of illustrating that you would lose to the US army). How many US generals have been killed in the war? Why would you do better at killing the president?
When Microsoft releases a patch for an exploit, it's immediately known that computers are wide open to this attack. Malicious hackers - virus writers and the like included - can reverse engineer the patch to find out what vulnerability is being patched exactly, and know that, since your organization doesn't patch until such-and-such day, you're wide open to attacks. "Exploit Wednesday", the day after patch Tuesday, is a testament to the importance of Microsoft's patches in the development of exploits. Companies can't afford to gear up for patches every day, but can't afford to risk the ramifications of not applying a patch immediately either. Patch Tuesday gets them out of this catch-22.
If they decide to make themselves king after taking office you'd better hope you've got more support than nuts with RPGs. Like perhaps the courts declaring it to be a ridiculous assertion and derailing his legislation, Congress impeaching him and the Secret Service removing him from the White House. If he has support from the people in power - Congress, chiefs of police, military generals - then a nut with an RPG isn't going to get anything except a bullet in the head when he tries to get past the newly-installed military road blocks around the King. This is why I don't understand the argument that the Second Amendment is necessary to keep people safe from the Government. If the Government is corrupt then either the military, police and whichever branches of the government aren't corrupt will fix the problem, or you'll be fighting against a one-and-a-half million man army, armed and trained to a higher level than you and with a budget of over 500 billion dollars. It's just not going to end well...
I thought your SS number was public? If it is, what's stopping me finding out your reply code and then fooling you? It might not be a worry for you or me, but for people in important positions single-target attacks are a problem.
I think we're going at this different ways. I don't just want a system that's better than the current one - that's hardly challenging. I want a system that resists these sorts of attacks and isn't difficult for people to use - unlike requiring them to enter two passwords. You originally described your solution as being infallible, which is why I was comparing it to a benchmark rather higher than "better than the current system".
A faked box wouldn't work - if you take a faked box as being just a box with numbers stuck on the outside. If I fake a box by taking my real one and pointing a hidden camera at the keypad then it will still respond correctly. Alternatively I can just put up a sign saying that the feedback isn't working - maybe accompany it with a broken looking screen - and then clear out your account. Or I can just shoulder-surf it. Also, are you saying that you wouldn't allow people to get their password back if they forgot it or that you'd stick with normal photo-ID - all that does is create a system, no more secure than the current one (because it's just a compression of the current one into a password) but that is seen as infallible - misplaced confidence isn't good for security.
1) OK, that works for changing your current password, what would you have happen if you forget your password? You can't just rely on photo ID and similar, since we know that can be faked. And remember that it's not the banks that do the authorizing, it's bank employees. These can be crooked just like everyone else.
2) The faked box doesn't do anything fancy. It just sits there, looks like a normal box - and is. Except that it records every button you press, perhaps by having a camera watching the keypad, perhaps by changing the keypad itself to monitor you. Think about it; people don't build whole fake ATMs now to steal PINs, they just put a camera on a real one.
3) No reply - I mentioned it because you phrased it like an advantage, but if you don't mind, it's not part of your plan.
4) Ah, OK.
1) What's to stop someone else going and submitting a new password? Why can't the authentication the bank does be faked?
2) What's to stop a shop using a faked terminal to get your password?
3) How would this reduce the tracking? They'd still be able to log everywhere you requested authorization.
4) How is requiring a password to shop an improvement?
Pretty sure it's "Interblag".
The other problem is insecurity of the place; it doesn't matter how secure the transmission is if there's someone watching you cast your vote to make sure you voted for the right person; with a voting booth you can't vote unless you're alone and no one waiting outside knows whom you voted for.
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.lasso?isp=ve
There are a few commenters who are missing the point of the motion, which is what the article is about.
This is Slashdot. Of course there are! And most of the rest didn't even read the summary, let alone TFA.If you promise that something will happen, without knowing for sure that it will happen, that's fraud. Specifically false representation, in this case "A statement of fact with no reasonable basis to make that statement".
It would be fraud on the basis of financial gain in that it would reduce the fallout from the problem. At least, it would today.
No, it's not. That's optimism. There are four elements required for it to be fraud:- Intentional misprepresentation of a known (currently existing) fact
-
Knowledge of the fact's falsity
-
Intention to cause someone to act on the misrepresentation
-
Action by another person, to their detriment.
Promises to help someone out that you never fulfill can never be fraudulent unless you intend to harm them by those statements. It is similarly not a breach of contract, since there is no consideration for the contract to exist, and it was not intended to create a legal relationship, so it is prima facie invalid.You say your parents haven't planned well for their retirement, and presumably don't have much saved away but you don't think they should receive any state assistance. How, then, should they get the money to pay for things?
There are chiefly two areas of your post that I strongly disagree with. First is your assumption that if you don't have enough money to retire on it's your fault; this simply isn't true. The factors that could cause you not to have sufficient money saved range from "acts of God" like fraud or theft, through to economic problems like falling property prices and so on. What about someone who immigrates to the US at 50? No matter what job they have they won't manage to put away enough. The same goes for someone on a low-wage job. If you're earning less than $13,000 a year there is no way you could put away enough to survive with no Government help.
This is the second point with which I really disagree. I think you're under-estimating heavily the amount of money you need to save to retire without any state assistance. The Department of Health and Human Services puts the poverty threshold for a single person at $9,800 per year. A ballpark estimate for the amount you need to save, from 20 until you retire at 67 and living in retirement until you're 78 (the average) requires you to save $3,574.72 every year. And that's just to stay above the poverty threshold - 10 times your estimate of a dollar a day. To have any money for luxuries you need to save more. If you have any dependants you need to save more ($4,647.13 a year for one dependant). If you earn less than $13,000 and have no children, or less than 16 or 19 thousand dollars a year with 1 and 2 children respectively, you cannot afford to stay afloat both now and in retirement without help.
Estimating that your parents will retire in 20 years, they need to save $27,000 a year to have enough money to survive unaided in their retirement - let's reduce that to $20k since they probably have some savings. But since even this is clearly impossible, if the state doesn't fund them they will have to rely on charity to be able to feed, house and clothe themselves. I hope they have nice neighbours.
I find that Linux improves my productivity; it runs faster - not a lot faster, but enough to be noticeable. Having multiple virtual desktops comes in handy. Having things like iso burning built into the OS saves a few minutes here and there. I know I can open just about any file thrown at me with something - even the most proprietary documents succumb to one of my office programs - whereas on Windows I have to have third party programs to open archives. It handles accents much more nicely. I don't get "time to restart" prompts in the middle of working... A lot of it is also familiarity, of course, but once you're used to the idiosyncrasies, not having to worry about security or stability save you more time than you'd expect - or at least more time than I expected.
Of course, not being distracted by games helps too!
While you can't sign away your human rights, that isn't the issue here - the article only covers communications with a reasonable expectation of privacy, so signing a declaration of consent to monitoring would render the article impotent.
should we really punish people for being born into a poor family
punish? by not giving them handouts? Where did this entitlement come from?
Society punishes those in poor families. Tending to come from a poorer neighbourhood means they are likely to go to a worse school. They have worse healthcare, less materials to learn from. They are less likely to succeed because of where they were born, before they were even able to make one choice for themselves. "Handouts" - which seems an unreasonably emotive word to me, since you're not giving them money, just taking less in tax - seek to equalize this situation. America is meant to be the land of opportunity, but as I've mentioned in my previous comments, the low social mobility and low social floor combine to make it the land of unbounded opportunity to those born into money or power.
They are probably not stupider, but perhaps more likely to make poor life decisions based on cultural norms. I have no idea why you brought this up. Certainly you don't think that just because minorities are involved that there is some sort of racist/sexist causation. If so, lets see the data on why.I brought this up in response to Cayene8's statement that he should not have to pay to support someone too stupid to plan for the future. I wanted to know whether he maintains that the fact that minorities are overly represented by the poor is just because they lack the intelligence to plan ahead.
I could do this, but then I would ignoring the fact that I have a measure of control over these things and moreover, supporting a mentality that not only condones but rewards laziness/stupidity. I'm no Ayn Rand, but this definitely does not sit well with me.Looking at the matter safe in the knowledge that you will never need Government handouts makes it very easy to call them frivolous. In the same way, knowing they were white made it very easy for 16th-Century Europeans to explain how Black people lacked the capability to be anything but slaves. A report by The Economist showed the American "meritocracy" to be failing, with 40% of those from low-income families growing up to live in a low-income family, while 46% of those from high income families stayed in that bracket. The truth is that success is not just a matter of working hard and being clever - if your parents are illiterate or don't believe in education, if they need you to work to earn money, if your local school is failing... all these things will shape the success you end up with. The idea of the veil of ignorance isn't to deprive you of useful knowledge, it's to deprive you of knowledge that could bias your decision. As I asked in my previous post, imagine that instead of knowing where you are now you were about to be born. You have a 43% chance of earning less than $25,000, a 22% chance of earning less than $12,500. Would you still say that the Government should wash its hands of those 'idiots' if you could be about to be one of them?
But I'm not, and neither is anyone else. And before you condescend to tell me I've never been in some of these people's shoes, let me remind you that you've not been in mine.But shouldn't we be? Shouldn't we recognize that circumstances have as much to do with who we are as we do? That a hard-working boy living in a slum, with no books or regular teachers, isn't going to turn out as well as the same boy living in Beverly Hills? I'm not asking you to imagine that you're in anyone else's shoes, only to accept that being poor isn't necessarily because of laziness or stupidity. And that poor people deserve the same opportunities as everyone else, even if it's a little more expensive to give them those opportunities.
OK, so life isn't fair. But that doesn't mean that we can't try to make it better. It's a fallacy to think that the only reasons that someone won't have put aside money for retirement or healthcare are stupidity or poor planning; recent research has shown the US to have lower social mobility than a lot of developed countries - should we really punish people for being born into a poor family? And as I pointed out before, people from minorities are massively over-represented by those under the poverty line - are they just stupider?
What incentive is there in it for ME to work hard to succeed (measured solely in $$'s earned for my expenditure), if I basically have to give it back to the country to support those who earn less, especially due to above mentioned stupidity?If you really succeed - whether by working hard or by being born into money and power - you will be in the top tax bracket. You will pay 35% tax on an income of at least $336,551, leaving you $218,758 per year to live on. You've taken a hit, but you're still not going to be groping behind the sofa for food money - and by European standards this is very low taxation. On the other hand, if you make $11,340 a year, with 2 dependant children, you will receive $4,536 a year in assistance through the EITC scheme. This is quite possibly the difference between eating and not eating. (again, by European standards, this seems very low; even in the UK, which has a comparatively conservative policy regarding benefits, the same family would receive $8,200.) Now take into account John Rawles' veil of ignorance; imagine you haven't yet been born and have no idea where in society you will end up. You have (rounding to the nearest integer) a 22% chance of earning less than $12,500 and a 43% chance of earning less than $25,000. Your chance of earning more than $50,000 is 29%. Things look even worse if we take into account other possibilities - what if you have an accident, or are unemployed? Nationally, you have a 4.8% chance of being unemployed, roughly the same as your chance of earning over $100,000. If you were making your decision based on these chances, rather than in the knowledge that you aren't in a position to need Government assistance to stay alive, would you still think that people shouldn't have to lower their living standards to put food on someone elses plate - despite the fact that otherwise, that plate might be empty?