The whole Jesus = Zombie bit is an example of profoundly immoral argument. Name anything you believe in, absolutely anything, and somebody can oversimplify and reduce it to an absurdity or a profound insult. Marxist? Then you believe the state will wither away by getting larger so you're obviously an idiot! Capitalist? Then you worship a giant invisible hand that requires occasional human sacrefices - what a maroon! Pick a side, and then describe a strawman version of the other side and declare yourself winner, that's all you're doing.
Point taken. The difference is that interpreting economics from a Marxist or capitalist viewpoint does not require ignoring well-established physical laws.
This is true. It is also true that only 50% of people actually pay income tax. If we had a flat tax with no deductions, the whole population would be interested in reducing government spending. Right now 50% of the population wants more government spending because it doesn't cost them anything. Who wouldn't?
This statistic is misleading out of context. Everyone who works pays Social Security and Medicare taxes (currently 7.65%), meaning 100% of people with income pay income tax, and of course sales taxes when they spend it. They also pay property taxes explicitly (if they are property owners) or implicitly (as a hidden part of their rent).
The reason the number who pay income taxes is so low is because wages have fallen so much. So it's actually a symptom of one of the critical problems in our country, rather than in and of itself a problem. Anyway, it's completely criminal that if I sit on my ass doing nothing and let a big pile of money I have make more money for me, I only have to pay 15% on the capital gains, while if I go out and actually work the tax can be significantly higher on my earned income. Lumping capital gains in with earned income (with a maximum marginal rate of 35%) would go a long way in reducing the national debt that people pretend to care about when it is politically advantageous.
Here's an idea to clear up this mess nicely: get rid of all sales taxes. They're extremely regressive and complicate and impede commerce. Increase income, property, and capital gains taxes to compensate.
Thank you for the story, very informative. However, this sort of thinking should not be used as an excuse to absolve Foxconn and the like of their labor practices. You are not the first person I've heard this argument from on this topic, that these factories are such a step up from rural poverty that we should not criticize the companies, and that it is all part of the wonderful and necessary process of industrialization. My question for you would be then, how long do the populations of these countries have to endure miserable factory working conditions until we are allowed to criticize. 5 years? 10 years? 30 years? How much worker abuse is too much? How many hours per day is okay with you? 10? 12? 16? How young can the workers be? 16? 12? How low can the wages be?
As far as I'm concerned every worker in the world deserves the same rights as every other worker: reasonable hours leaving time for leisure, a living wage, and a safe workplace. I don't give a damn if they are the first generation off the farm and how much more money they are making compared with that.
Precheck members usually get to use security lines set up for first-class and elite-level frequent fliers.
Are they implying that first-class travelers are already getting this kind of preferential treatment?
Well, at New York LaGuardia if you fly American Airlines, the first class security line is the only one without an X-ray machine. It's been that way the last two times I've flown through there. So FYI terrorists, just get a little more of that Saudi money to fly first class and you can dodge the scanners. I'm so fucking proud of my country.
Oh not at all, you see, unless you're a big corporation with a lot of lawyers, you can't own any content. So they look "oh it's the little guy again" and "yeah this content would be nice to own" and with that, it's theirs.
Ah, but you can't exactly blame any of that on the technology.
I disagree with this to a certain extent. The fact that they are unmanned makes it much more likely they will be used because the risk is lower (sure, it's embarrassing when they get shot down and Iran shows them on TV but imagine how much worse it would be if they had a U.S. pilot instead). Their lower cost also makes them more likely to be used in high-risk situations. They replace on-the-ground operations which, while problematic on their own, are typically less likely to cause civilian casualties than firing missiles from the air. Also, the fact that they are remote piloted so present no risk of operator death likely only magnifies the outrage at their use in the targeted countries. Imagine your fellow citizens are being killed by robot planes in which there is zero possibility of striking back at the person pulling the trigger.
The downside — they're bandwidth hogs: a single Global Hawk drone requires 500 megabytes per second worth of bandwidth, the report finds, which is 500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War.
I think the downside is that the drones are used in "secret" CIA wars, routinely kill civilians, have been used by the President for extra-judicial assassination of at least one American citizen, and are increasingly eyed for use in domestic airspace. I'd put their bandwidth usage pretty far down on the list of reasons to be concerned about drones.
Can we dispense with this false dichotomy between "authoritarian" and (I suppose) "democratic" governments. It is part of this great fantasy that this sort of thing will only happen in bad third-world countries whose leaders wear military uniforms and chomp on cigars. Our grand democratic leaders would never do such things, except they do all the time and want to do more of it.
Mod parent up. This isn't 1950, plastics have come a long way and are often the far superior choice for materials. (Coincidentally I was listening to the Kinks' "Plastic Man" on my way to work this morning.)
I've been enjoying my Galaxy Nexus in the U.S. for a week now on the T-Mobile network. I ordered it from the UK and got it in 48 hours. Tethering works without issues. So good to be contract-free. It's a great phone, big minus is the lack of SD card slot but everything else is pretty near perfect.
You make a good point. I believe they needed to know the exact weight of the various craft to calculate required thrust and fuel supply. If the camera weighed enough that could have thrown off their calculations.
Now, if he hadn't spent the last 2.5 years largely doing exactly the opposite of what he campaigned on, angering his base to no end, he might be able to make better use of all of that data management. No amount of carefully worded campaign e-mails are going to convince me to vote for a President who has normalized extra-judicial assassinations of American citizens by the CIA.
A follow up question would be, do they mean that the concepts of religion and science are in always in conflict, or do they mean that religious people and scientific people are always in conflict? I would say the former is true, in that the fundamental bases for religion and science are exactly opposite (faith versus evidence) while people can disagree with one another or hold contradictory ideas in their head and not try to rip each others throats out.
Barnes and Noble's argument that the Borders customers whose data they bought will be protected by their own policy is specious. The very act of B&N purchasing the information is in and of itself a violation of the previous privacy agreement. That's like a bank robber saying, "Sure, I took the money, but don't worry, I won't share it with any other criminals."
I'm in the same boat. I actually attempted to replace the connector but the contacts are ridiculously tiny. That's the last Nokia phone I ever buy (for that reason and for their embrace of Microsoft).
Assange did what every newspaper does, publish leaked material. The NYTimes, Guardian, and others worked with him to do this. If you want to have Assange extra-judicially murdered you have to do the same to editors at these papers, for they did nothing more or less than he did.
Canada is the Architect of the manifest destiny which will engulf North America, adding 50 new provinces and numerous territories to our glorious nation.
Please do this as soon as you possibly can, the way things are going down here we don't have much time left.
About 2% of my cell phone usage is talking, the rest is web browsing and texting, neither of which make any noise. I don't think I'm that unusual of a cell phone user in that respect. Also, people who talk to other people on the train can be loud even when not on the phone. As a person who spends about 1 hour a day on subways and feel it would be nice if more of the major urban train systems in this supposedly first-world country had cell or even wi-fi access. I think we can survive the occasional loud caller.
Exactly. I would say most of the fundamental ideas have already been thought of in every field. I'm sure there's a lot more to know about life on earth but no one will ever come up with ideas as big as "natural selection with random mutation" or "DNA" ever again. Same in physics, the people working at CERN are going to find out new things but every other physics researcher is going to be tinkering around with what is already basically known.
Who even mentioned the 1st Amendment? Free speech as a principle is bigger than just the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Just because something isn't technically in violation of that particular clause doesn't mean it isn't undermining the freedom of speech.
As a hypothetical example, if Comcast decided not to allow any discussion of FCC regulatory policies to flow through their network infrastructure it wouldn't technically be a violation of the 1st Amendment, but it would quite clearly be a blow to free speech.
I'm looking forward to the first installment of the new IL-2 series of flight simulator games, IL-2: Cliffs of Dover here in the U.S. but while gamers in the UK and Australia will be enjoying the game in 1 week (March 31st) we Americans have to wait until April 19th. Given the fact that it may be a digital-only game and there is no real language difference here, what is the point of this?
My biggest problem with newspaper paywalls is that in any different week I get linked to stories in probably 15-20 different news sites. If every site charged $30+ a month to access, how many could I possibly afford? I wouldn't mind paying a bit to support news agencies but if all of them put up paywalls, how can they expect us all to pay for every one of them? NYT might be able to get away with it but a model like that would dry up every small paper out there because no one would pay for them. If it were somehow possible for me to pay $10-15 a month and have it split between the various news sites I visit I would be fine with that, but that would be very difficult to implement.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole Jesus = Zombie bit is an example of profoundly immoral argument. Name anything you believe in, absolutely anything, and somebody can oversimplify and reduce it to an absurdity or a profound insult. Marxist? Then you believe the state will wither away by getting larger so you're obviously an idiot! Capitalist? Then you worship a giant invisible hand that requires occasional human sacrefices - what a maroon! Pick a side, and then describe a strawman version of the other side and declare yourself winner, that's all you're doing.
Point taken. The difference is that interpreting economics from a Marxist or capitalist viewpoint does not require ignoring well-established physical laws.
This is true. It is also true that only 50% of people actually pay income tax. If we had a flat tax with no deductions, the whole population would be interested in reducing government spending. Right now 50% of the population wants more government spending because it doesn't cost them anything. Who wouldn't?
This statistic is misleading out of context. Everyone who works pays Social Security and Medicare taxes (currently 7.65%), meaning 100% of people with income pay income tax, and of course sales taxes when they spend it. They also pay property taxes explicitly (if they are property owners) or implicitly (as a hidden part of their rent).
The reason the number who pay income taxes is so low is because wages have fallen so much. So it's actually a symptom of one of the critical problems in our country, rather than in and of itself a problem. Anyway, it's completely criminal that if I sit on my ass doing nothing and let a big pile of money I have make more money for me, I only have to pay 15% on the capital gains, while if I go out and actually work the tax can be significantly higher on my earned income. Lumping capital gains in with earned income (with a maximum marginal rate of 35%) would go a long way in reducing the national debt that people pretend to care about when it is politically advantageous.
Here's an idea to clear up this mess nicely: get rid of all sales taxes. They're extremely regressive and complicate and impede commerce. Increase income, property, and capital gains taxes to compensate.
Thank you for the story, very informative. However, this sort of thinking should not be used as an excuse to absolve Foxconn and the like of their labor practices. You are not the first person I've heard this argument from on this topic, that these factories are such a step up from rural poverty that we should not criticize the companies, and that it is all part of the wonderful and necessary process of industrialization. My question for you would be then, how long do the populations of these countries have to endure miserable factory working conditions until we are allowed to criticize. 5 years? 10 years? 30 years? How much worker abuse is too much? How many hours per day is okay with you? 10? 12? 16? How young can the workers be? 16? 12? How low can the wages be? As far as I'm concerned every worker in the world deserves the same rights as every other worker: reasonable hours leaving time for leisure, a living wage, and a safe workplace. I don't give a damn if they are the first generation off the farm and how much more money they are making compared with that.
Precheck members usually get to use security lines set up for first-class and elite-level frequent fliers.
Are they implying that first-class travelers are already getting this kind of preferential treatment?
Well, at New York LaGuardia if you fly American Airlines, the first class security line is the only one without an X-ray machine. It's been that way the last two times I've flown through there. So FYI terrorists, just get a little more of that Saudi money to fly first class and you can dodge the scanners. I'm so fucking proud of my country.
Oh not at all, you see, unless you're a big corporation with a lot of lawyers, you can't own any content. So they look "oh it's the little guy again" and "yeah this content would be nice to own" and with that, it's theirs.
Hey, they do it with houses now, so why not intellectual property? http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/matt-taibbi-courts-helping-banks-screw-over-homeowners-20101110
Ah, but you can't exactly blame any of that on the technology.
I disagree with this to a certain extent. The fact that they are unmanned makes it much more likely they will be used because the risk is lower (sure, it's embarrassing when they get shot down and Iran shows them on TV but imagine how much worse it would be if they had a U.S. pilot instead). Their lower cost also makes them more likely to be used in high-risk situations. They replace on-the-ground operations which, while problematic on their own, are typically less likely to cause civilian casualties than firing missiles from the air. Also, the fact that they are remote piloted so present no risk of operator death likely only magnifies the outrage at their use in the targeted countries. Imagine your fellow citizens are being killed by robot planes in which there is zero possibility of striking back at the person pulling the trigger.
The downside — they're bandwidth hogs: a single Global Hawk drone requires 500 megabytes per second worth of bandwidth, the report finds, which is 500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War.
I think the downside is that the drones are used in "secret" CIA wars, routinely kill civilians, have been used by the President for extra-judicial assassination of at least one American citizen, and are increasingly eyed for use in domestic airspace. I'd put their bandwidth usage pretty far down on the list of reasons to be concerned about drones.
Can we dispense with this false dichotomy between "authoritarian" and (I suppose) "democratic" governments. It is part of this great fantasy that this sort of thing will only happen in bad third-world countries whose leaders wear military uniforms and chomp on cigars. Our grand democratic leaders would never do such things, except they do all the time and want to do more of it.
Mod parent up. This isn't 1950, plastics have come a long way and are often the far superior choice for materials. (Coincidentally I was listening to the Kinks' "Plastic Man" on my way to work this morning.)
I've been enjoying my Galaxy Nexus in the U.S. for a week now on the T-Mobile network. I ordered it from the UK and got it in 48 hours. Tethering works without issues. So good to be contract-free. It's a great phone, big minus is the lack of SD card slot but everything else is pretty near perfect.
You make a good point. I believe they needed to know the exact weight of the various craft to calculate required thrust and fuel supply. If the camera weighed enough that could have thrown off their calculations.
Now, if he hadn't spent the last 2.5 years largely doing exactly the opposite of what he campaigned on, angering his base to no end, he might be able to make better use of all of that data management. No amount of carefully worded campaign e-mails are going to convince me to vote for a President who has normalized extra-judicial assassinations of American citizens by the CIA.
A follow up question would be, do they mean that the concepts of religion and science are in always in conflict, or do they mean that religious people and scientific people are always in conflict? I would say the former is true, in that the fundamental bases for religion and science are exactly opposite (faith versus evidence) while people can disagree with one another or hold contradictory ideas in their head and not try to rip each others throats out.
Well, buildings can be named after benefactors whereas the faculty members inconveniently have already been named by their parents.
Barnes and Noble's argument that the Borders customers whose data they bought will be protected by their own policy is specious. The very act of B&N purchasing the information is in and of itself a violation of the previous privacy agreement. That's like a bank robber saying, "Sure, I took the money, but don't worry, I won't share it with any other criminals."
I'm in the same boat. I actually attempted to replace the connector but the contacts are ridiculously tiny. That's the last Nokia phone I ever buy (for that reason and for their embrace of Microsoft).
Assange did what every newspaper does, publish leaked material. The NYTimes, Guardian, and others worked with him to do this. If you want to have Assange extra-judicially murdered you have to do the same to editors at these papers, for they did nothing more or less than he did.
Canada is the Architect of the manifest destiny which will engulf North America, adding 50 new provinces and numerous territories to our glorious nation.
Please do this as soon as you possibly can, the way things are going down here we don't have much time left.
About 2% of my cell phone usage is talking, the rest is web browsing and texting, neither of which make any noise. I don't think I'm that unusual of a cell phone user in that respect. Also, people who talk to other people on the train can be loud even when not on the phone. As a person who spends about 1 hour a day on subways and feel it would be nice if more of the major urban train systems in this supposedly first-world country had cell or even wi-fi access. I think we can survive the occasional loud caller.
Exactly. I would say most of the fundamental ideas have already been thought of in every field. I'm sure there's a lot more to know about life on earth but no one will ever come up with ideas as big as "natural selection with random mutation" or "DNA" ever again. Same in physics, the people working at CERN are going to find out new things but every other physics researcher is going to be tinkering around with what is already basically known.
Yeah, I'm sure there's more data than what is shown on that graph but the standard deviation from that linear fit looks huge to me.
Who even mentioned the 1st Amendment? Free speech as a principle is bigger than just the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Just because something isn't technically in violation of that particular clause doesn't mean it isn't undermining the freedom of speech. As a hypothetical example, if Comcast decided not to allow any discussion of FCC regulatory policies to flow through their network infrastructure it wouldn't technically be a violation of the 1st Amendment, but it would quite clearly be a blow to free speech.
I'm looking forward to the first installment of the new IL-2 series of flight simulator games, IL-2: Cliffs of Dover here in the U.S. but while gamers in the UK and Australia will be enjoying the game in 1 week (March 31st) we Americans have to wait until April 19th. Given the fact that it may be a digital-only game and there is no real language difference here, what is the point of this?
My biggest problem with newspaper paywalls is that in any different week I get linked to stories in probably 15-20 different news sites. If every site charged $30+ a month to access, how many could I possibly afford? I wouldn't mind paying a bit to support news agencies but if all of them put up paywalls, how can they expect us all to pay for every one of them? NYT might be able to get away with it but a model like that would dry up every small paper out there because no one would pay for them. If it were somehow possible for me to pay $10-15 a month and have it split between the various news sites I visit I would be fine with that, but that would be very difficult to implement.