Indeed. It would make far more sense for most folk to rig up solar panels into one's home, feeding back into the grid when the car isn't charging, and then plug the car in when it needs power. Even that, thought, doesn't currently seem to be cost-effective. I have half a double garage roof that is nicely positioned for solar shingles once they become cheap enough to install, but last I checked it wasn't even close. Solar hot water heaters are currently the most practical solar power systems AFAIK.
Don't forget that married couples tend to have far more deductions than singles -- dependents, mortgage interest, etc.
Those deductions apply to singles too, you don't have to be married to take advantage of them. So the same couple filing separately would be better off.
As for the IRA, I was earning a whopping $35K when I was not eligible thanks to my wife working (and she was earning even a little less than that, mind you.)
I'm saving enough for retirement, I'm just ticked I'll have to work an extra six months to retire at the same comfort level because I'm paying disproportionately high taxes because of arbitrarily uneven tax rules.
P.S. A large investment in a NASDAQ index fund in early 2000 was not my best retirement move ever...
Freebies? More like higher taxes if you both earn decent livings, because more of your income is in the upper brackets. I would have saved a lot of money -- not to mention been eligible for IRAs*, more dependent care reimbursement, etc. -- if I wasn't married. Sure we get tax breaks for dependents, but they would have saved each of us individually exactly the same amount they save us as married's. The only married couples that get a break are ones where one spouse doesn't work outside the home. Look up "marriage penalty" sometime. If you earn about the same amount (like my wife and I do), it's especially heinous, because qualification for Roth IRAs, etc. is capped for married couples' combined income at substantially less than twice the limit for singles.
So sorry, but your claim is nonsense. Gays want to get married because they want to make the formal commitment that is recognized by society, and "freebies" like right of inheritance, next of kin status for medical issues, etc. that don't cost the rest of us a dime (save possibly in estate taxes.)
* In the mid-90's, I was working a job with no retirement benefits. I could not open a traditional IRA because my wife had retirement benefits from her job. Those benefits were in no way larger because she was married.
A real-world example: "Roth IRA Income Limits You can contribute to a Roth IRA if your adjusted gross income is below these limits:
Full $2,000 contribution Single/Head of household Up to $95,000 Married filing jointly Up to $150,000" -- from quicken.com
Got a couple where one earns $90K, one $80K? Single, they could both do full Roth contributions. Married? $0.
Even better, there's an extension that allows right-click searches to select between those search engines. At the moment I can't find it, however; anyone remember the name?
There are other extensions that give you a big collection of search choices, but I like the single configuration system.
My parents have a gas-fireplace with a standby mode. It just sits there and uses very little gas with a tiny flame. I cannot fathom how this is a good thing or a useful thing or anything!
Without that, if there is a gas leak, you can get quite a build-up. Then one spark and boom! That's why gas stoves have a pilot light, and that's probably why your parents' fireplace has the tiny flame.
I have a gas fireplace that is like that, although you can shut off the outside tank and shut the system down completely during warmer months.
And say there are 100 million machines with your reduced power consumption. How many power stations does that save, with all the polution not being belched into the air?
For commodity items, there's a reasonably high correlation between cost and power usage. For items of a similar nature, we can extend that to general environmental impact. Creating those $10 transformers requires the use of energy, not to mention disposal costs. It may be that the energy required to create them, on average, is greater than the energy saved in using them. That's probably especially true now, with HDTV sets, LCDs, etc. slowly replacing CRTs.
My minivan gets pretty lousy mileage. But given the low number of miles I do regularly, it doesn't pay environmentally to replace it with something more efficient, given the energy and materials that would be used in constructing the economy vehicle I would get.
Among other things, you might get a faster download.
Basically, what you should do is analyze the cost to you, with this use of your bandwidth as part of the cost. If they sell DRMed digital files for the same cost as a DVD, there's not much point getting it. If they sell for much cheaper (or more flexibly, such as ITMS selling recent, individual episodes), then it's a lot more interesting.
One thing not mentioned here, BTW, is that money isn't an item of inherent value. If you burn a stack of $100 bills, the main effect of that action is that everyone else's money gets trivially more valuable. But the money itself is no real loss. So the real impact of a rich person and what they do with their money is how many people are employed just satisfying that person's needs. Remember Enron's Ken Lay and his dozen homes? Who needs that, that's just wasteful. Gates' house falls into that category, but given his incredible wealth, that it seems to be his main personal indulgence, and he makes use of it for business, I'm more forgiving. Ellison and his larger and larger yachts? Not so much. Buffett and his modest lifestyle? He's practically a middle-class person except with a special number associated with him.
I actually think Gates is giving away about as much as he thinks he can without spending it wastefully or risking his ownership stake of Microsoft. Trying to give away billions in a way that actually helps people rather than attracting lazy leeches is extremely hard. (Look at the people who ran scams like creating fake relatives who supposedly died in 9/11, or how some Iraq money is being spent for example.) That's why he has the foundation, and a person he trusts implicitly -- his father -- at its head. But yes, the older he gets, the less he'll care about his ownership stake in Microsoft.
I think you can classify a person's acts as good and bad, rather than tagging them as fundamentally good or bad. Gates has been a rapacious capitalist, and a generous philanthropist. Jobs has been a sleazeball (ripping off Woz very early in their relationship), but without him, Apple would be a shadow of what it is. In some ways, it's because Jobs is (from the sound of it) an a**h*** that Apple has contributed to the computer industry as much as it has.
What was the quote about you can still be moral and earn a million, but not a billion?
There is an undeniable fact here: we've taken billions and billions of carbon from the ground and put it into the atmosphere by burning it. Start with that. We can argue about what effect the introduction of all this carbon into the atmosphere has had and will have, but don't just stick your head in the ground and claim that it has no effect because Moscow was cold today.
I don't mind having a soundtrack tag, I just don't think it's the genre of music. Also, it's a tag for the album, not the particular piece; "Build Me Up Buttercup" appearing in "There's Something about Mary" doesn't change its genre. (You might want a separation between albums and songs, when nigh-identical versions appear in multiple places.)
Note that in your example (and in the version in my iTunes), Vanessa shows up in the song name, not the performer. And if I wanted all Sammy Hagar's stuff, his work with Van Halen wouldn't show up at all.
ID3 is definitely way too limited, in all its forms.
If I have music, I'd like to be able to associate lyrics, cover art, performer names, composers, etc. So if I want a playlist of music with Vanessa Carlton, Counting Crows' "Big Yellow Taxi" will show, for Bono, "Children of the Revolution" off the Moulin Rouge soundtrack will appear, etc.
Perhaps the genre classification is best done with multiple adjectives describing tempo, etc. But soundtrack definitely should not be a genre for music by itself.
But I don't feel pain. What I feel is electrochemical signals from neurons that I interpret as pain. (There are even some people who don't feel pain, which is quite a problematic malady.) And said robot dog could be programmed to interpret its own electrical signals from sensors as pain.
Science fiction has presented this conundrum for many years with no easy answers. Is Data from Star Trek alive? What about the cylons from Battlestar Galactica? The replicants in Blade Runner? We like to think we're more than "meat puppets", but it's certainly possible a manufactured meat puppet might feel the same way.
If there's no silicon heaven, "Where would all the calculators go?"
That's as maybe, but people can certainly develop emotional attachments. Heck, motion isn't necessary; any parent knows of the attachment between a child and their stuffed animal, and the stress losing it would cause.
Would this mean that those EULAs that say you can't copy software are invalid?
The existing legal protections for copyrighted info would apply. So you could make a backup as per law, but you couldn't legally make copies for friends, etc.
Note that while many EULAs shouldn't be valid as they attempt to modify a contract after the fact, i2hub's EULA is more acceptable because it covered free software, and thus there's no prior contract. Regardless, an EULA should be irrelevant to the issue here; an EULA cannot absolve a person of copyright violations, only the copyright license holder can do that.
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Did you hear a loud whooshing sound?
[Foghorn Leghorn imitation]
Son, I say son, it's a joke, son. I keep pitchin'm and you keep missin'm.
Nice boy that, but about as sharp as a sackful of wet mice.
I know what you mean.
At 18, I could grab my manly equipment, bend it with all my might, and it wouldn't bend at all.
At 30, I could grab my manly equipment, bend it with all my might, and it would deflects a quarter inch.
Now at 40, I grab my manly equipment, bend it with all my might, and it deflects a half inch.
So I'm getting stronger!
Free markets are GREAT at emergency planning. Where do you think insurance came from?
Most flood insurance? The government. Bank deposit insurance? The government. Pensions? You got it...
(I remember you, Russ, when you were a near-Socialist, so it's fun to spar with the new Russ...)
Indeed. It would make far more sense for most folk to rig up solar panels into one's home, feeding back into the grid when the car isn't charging, and then plug the car in when it needs power. Even that, thought, doesn't currently seem to be cost-effective. I have half a double garage roof that is nicely positioned for solar shingles once they become cheap enough to install, but last I checked it wasn't even close. Solar hot water heaters are currently the most practical solar power systems AFAIK.
Ooooh, 3 digit UID. Better show some respect to the elderly.
Have a care, sir, or I shall take of my belt, and by God, my trousers will fall down!
P.S. "Dodgy" is USian too.
It appears the BMW site was also referencing 'used cars' as well as new cars, and redirecting to their own site.
Sounds dodgy to me.
Dodgy? Chrysler was doing this too?
Financially it might make sense, but as mentioned, there are the non-tax reasons to stay married.
Don't forget that married couples tend to have far more deductions than singles -- dependents, mortgage interest, etc.
Those deductions apply to singles too, you don't have to be married to take advantage of them. So the same couple filing separately would be better off.
As for the IRA, I was earning a whopping $35K when I was not eligible thanks to my wife working (and she was earning even a little less than that, mind you.)
I'm saving enough for retirement, I'm just ticked I'll have to work an extra six months to retire at the same comfort level because I'm paying disproportionately high taxes because of arbitrarily uneven tax rules.
P.S. A large investment in a NASDAQ index fund in early 2000 was not my best retirement move ever...
Not true.
If you quit, you don't get severance pay. Fired, on the other hand...
Freebies? More like higher taxes if you both earn decent livings, because more of your income is in the upper brackets. I would have saved a lot of money -- not to mention been eligible for IRAs*, more dependent care reimbursement, etc. -- if I wasn't married. Sure we get tax breaks for dependents, but they would have saved each of us individually exactly the same amount they save us as married's. The only married couples that get a break are ones where one spouse doesn't work outside the home. Look up "marriage penalty" sometime. If you earn about the same amount (like my wife and I do), it's especially heinous, because qualification for Roth IRAs, etc. is capped for married couples' combined income at substantially less than twice the limit for singles.
So sorry, but your claim is nonsense. Gays want to get married because they want to make the formal commitment that is recognized by society, and "freebies" like right of inheritance, next of kin status for medical issues, etc. that don't cost the rest of us a dime (save possibly in estate taxes.)
* In the mid-90's, I was working a job with no retirement benefits. I could not open a traditional IRA because my wife had retirement benefits from her job. Those benefits were in no way larger because she was married.
A real-world example:
"Roth IRA Income Limits
You can contribute to a Roth IRA if your adjusted gross income is below these limits:
Full $2,000 contribution
Single/Head of household Up to $95,000
Married filing jointly Up to $150,000" -- from quicken.com
Got a couple where one earns $90K, one $80K? Single, they could both do full Roth contributions. Married? $0.
Yeah, right.
"But Osama, Osama, you said they had to go to FISA before they could wiretap our conversations! Now they're doing it without a warrant!"
"What can I say, how can I get a lawyer when we won't deal with Jews?"
Even better, there's an extension that allows right-click searches to select between those search engines. At the moment I can't find it, however; anyone remember the name?
There are other extensions that give you a big collection of search choices, but I like the single configuration system.
My parents have a gas-fireplace with a standby mode. It just sits there and uses very little gas with a tiny flame. I cannot fathom how this is a good thing or a useful thing or anything!
Without that, if there is a gas leak, you can get quite a build-up. Then one spark and boom! That's why gas stoves have a pilot light, and that's probably why your parents' fireplace has the tiny flame.
I have a gas fireplace that is like that, although you can shut off the outside tank and shut the system down completely during warmer months.
And say there are 100 million machines with your reduced power consumption. How many power stations does that save, with all the polution not being belched into the air?
For commodity items, there's a reasonably high correlation between cost and power usage. For items of a similar nature, we can extend that to general environmental impact. Creating those $10 transformers requires the use of energy, not to mention disposal costs. It may be that the energy required to create them, on average, is greater than the energy saved in using them. That's probably especially true now, with HDTV sets, LCDs, etc. slowly replacing CRTs.
My minivan gets pretty lousy mileage. But given the low number of miles I do regularly, it doesn't pay environmentally to replace it with something more efficient, given the energy and materials that would be used in constructing the economy vehicle I would get.
Among other things, you might get a faster download.
Basically, what you should do is analyze the cost to you, with this use of your bandwidth as part of the cost. If they sell DRMed digital files for the same cost as a DVD, there's not much point getting it. If they sell for much cheaper (or more flexibly, such as ITMS selling recent, individual episodes), then it's a lot more interesting.
One thing not mentioned here, BTW, is that money isn't an item of inherent value. If you burn a stack of $100 bills, the main effect of that action is that everyone else's money gets trivially more valuable. But the money itself is no real loss. So the real impact of a rich person and what they do with their money is how many people are employed just satisfying that person's needs. Remember Enron's Ken Lay and his dozen homes? Who needs that, that's just wasteful. Gates' house falls into that category, but given his incredible wealth, that it seems to be his main personal indulgence, and he makes use of it for business, I'm more forgiving. Ellison and his larger and larger yachts? Not so much. Buffett and his modest lifestyle? He's practically a middle-class person except with a special number associated with him.
I actually think Gates is giving away about as much as he thinks he can without spending it wastefully or risking his ownership stake of Microsoft. Trying to give away billions in a way that actually helps people rather than attracting lazy leeches is extremely hard. (Look at the people who ran scams like creating fake relatives who supposedly died in 9/11, or how some Iraq money is being spent for example.) That's why he has the foundation, and a person he trusts implicitly -- his father -- at its head. But yes, the older he gets, the less he'll care about his ownership stake in Microsoft.
I think you can classify a person's acts as good and bad, rather than tagging them as fundamentally good or bad. Gates has been a rapacious capitalist, and a generous philanthropist. Jobs has been a sleazeball (ripping off Woz very early in their relationship), but without him, Apple would be a shadow of what it is. In some ways, it's because Jobs is (from the sound of it) an a**h*** that Apple has contributed to the computer industry as much as it has.
What was the quote about you can still be moral and earn a million, but not a billion?
There is an undeniable fact here: we've taken billions and billions of carbon from the ground and put it into the atmosphere by burning it. Start with that. We can argue about what effect the introduction of all this carbon into the atmosphere has had and will have, but don't just stick your head in the ground and claim that it has no effect because Moscow was cold today.
I don't mind having a soundtrack tag, I just don't think it's the genre of music. Also, it's a tag for the album, not the particular piece; "Build Me Up Buttercup" appearing in "There's Something about Mary" doesn't change its genre. (You might want a separation between albums and songs, when nigh-identical versions appear in multiple places.)
Note that in your example (and in the version in my iTunes), Vanessa shows up in the song name, not the performer. And if I wanted all Sammy Hagar's stuff, his work with Van Halen wouldn't show up at all.
Point well taken, it looks like there's a lot of good design in the actual tagging format.
ID3 is definitely way too limited, in all its forms.
If I have music, I'd like to be able to associate lyrics, cover art, performer names, composers, etc. So if I want a playlist of music with Vanessa Carlton, Counting Crows' "Big Yellow Taxi" will show, for Bono, "Children of the Revolution" off the Moulin Rouge soundtrack will appear, etc.
Perhaps the genre classification is best done with multiple adjectives describing tempo, etc. But soundtrack definitely should not be a genre for music by itself.
So he's spongeworthy?
But I don't feel pain. What I feel is electrochemical signals from neurons that I interpret as pain. (There are even some people who don't feel pain, which is quite a problematic malady.) And said robot dog could be programmed to interpret its own electrical signals from sensors as pain.
Science fiction has presented this conundrum for many years with no easy answers. Is Data from Star Trek alive? What about the cylons from Battlestar Galactica? The replicants in Blade Runner? We like to think we're more than "meat puppets", but it's certainly possible a manufactured meat puppet might feel the same way.
If there's no silicon heaven, "Where would all the calculators go?"
That's as maybe, but people can certainly develop emotional attachments. Heck, motion isn't necessary; any parent knows of the attachment between a child and their stuffed animal, and the stress losing it would cause.
Would this mean that those EULAs that say you can't copy software are invalid?
The existing legal protections for copyrighted info would apply. So you could make a backup as per law, but you couldn't legally make copies for friends, etc.
Note that while many EULAs shouldn't be valid as they attempt to modify a contract after the fact, i2hub's EULA is more acceptable because it covered free software, and thus there's no prior contract. Regardless, an EULA should be irrelevant to the issue here; an EULA cannot absolve a person of copyright violations, only the copyright license holder can do that.