The latest report from my organization (please click on all the links and give me loads of personal information to sell) has disproved mythical woman month. The original myth holds that you can not get nine women pregnant and get a baby in one month. The absolutely latest and greatest agile methodology with Kanban technology and our copyrighted and patented bullshittology technique has totally disproved that theory. Come one, click, gimme my money. What are you waiting for?
The biggest break through in the treatment of parasites comes when there is only one manufacturer left in the world for a generic drug that is some 60 odd years old. I takes a particularly sharp eyed man to see the opportunity, buy the company and jack up the price by 7500%. That is a break through.
Slogging your balls off working in a lab for three decades and hoping there is a chance some foreign committee in Sweden would see your work and throw you a bone 7500% smaller than the new price for the generic drug... That is a fools game.
You need to have solid gold conductors to support this kind of quality in display. Sure, it is digital transmission with automatic error correction, but with the $7999 per meter Monster HDMI cable every one is a perfect straight line and every zero is a perfect circle. True videophiles can tell the difference. If you don't pay for it, you are just confessing your inferior vidophilabiltiy.
I always make it a point to let Capital One know before I use the credit card in India. They send me texts when the card is used.
Last year I told them I was traveling to Europe and India for two weeks. Found out in London that all their retailers use credit cards with pin numbers. American credit cards without pin numbers are authorized by the discretion of the retailer. Apparently if I use the card and deny making the charges, the merchant is in the hole in UK. Not sure if this is true, this what the pizzaria near Trafalgar Square told me. Anyway there were tons of fraudulent charges from London, mostly airline tickets bought from London to African destinations. Capital reversed ALL the charges from London. Had to call back and tell them the bonafide ones, I didn't want the legitimate businesses to suffer.
So far all the experience I had with credit card companies (Citi, Capital One) or debit cards (Schwab) were uniformly good.
The only minor negative experience was when Citi left a fraud alert phone message that let the cat out of the bag about a surprise Las Vegas trip I had planned for my wife.
What you say is very valid, but that is exactly how free market operates.
Free market is like evolution, it does not plan ahead, it gets stuck in local minima.
In a city for someone hoping to open a new bar, established areas would need very heavy capital. With a taxi system without surge pricing such a bar owner would strike new ground and may be eventually that area would grow and thrive as another established area. This is how load balancing would work in free market. But with Uber and surge pricing, it would strengthen existing high traffic areas and corridors would not let alternate areas to develop.
The solution to free marking cherry picking only the profitable sectors of an essential service has always been publicly funded government provided services. Post office is the perfect example. Contrary to popular opinion, the Post Office is extremely efficient. Private companies in USA would not even tell you time of the day for 50 cents. USPS will deliver a first class mail anywhere in the USA, even if it has to fly a single engine float plane for 150 miles from Anchorage, Alaska to Noname, Middle-of--nowhere county, Alaska.
So if Uber takes hold, the bar owners will convince government to provide a Post Office equivalent of a taxi service. Price will be low, but it will be a single bus that takes all the patrons from that area, travel all around the town and drop them in their homes over the next six hours.
Once you remove the quota, and the natural competition drives the price low, most of the honest intelligent taxi drivers will exit the profession. There is always demand for honest people looking for decent wages. At that point very few honest people will be driving the taxi. They will be honest only to the extent the honesty could be thrust on them.
A generation before Charles Darwin, Paley explored the question of origin of species. Some of his lines of arguments in favor of divine creation resonate to this day. He was an inspiring figure to Charles Darwin. His argument was: "If you come across a watch in the woods, you would instantly recognize it is not natural, the way components fit together, the purposefulness of the components etc would clearly convince you that it was not a naturally occurring object". This argument is called "Paley's watch" argument.
In this case the scientists are arguing the way the components of a natural are disassembled the way they are disarticulated shows the evidence of human hand. This is the reverse of Paley's watch, it is hctaw s'yelaP.
... the trunks of police cars. According to widely circulated "facts" about cola one thing I still remember is, "Every police car in America has a two liter bottle of coke in their trunks. It is the best thing to dissolve blood stains off asphalt" and "put a chicken bone into a bottle of coke, and it will dissolve completely in six days"
Now they are bottling municipal water supply and selling it at the same price as soda. No need to guard recipes, no need to worry about making concentrates... Their profit margin has increased despite the decrease in soda consumption.
Almost everyone would say without any hesitation throwing your new born baby in the river is an evil. But is it?
Ganga Mata, consort of Emperor Shantanu the Great, threw her new born baby into the Ganges, not once but seven times. You see eight celestials, Guardians of the eight directions were sentenced to live as humans, for some crime[*] they committed. On appeal their sentence was commuted for seven of them, they were allowed to die as soon as possible and return as celestials. They appealed to Mother Ganges to serve as their mother and kill them before they get a chance to commit any sin and be caught in the perpetual cycle of sins and rebirths. The eighth one who had to serve a full lifetime as a human, was spared by Mother Ganges. Once you get the details, you see what mother Ganges did was not evil at all, but an act of utmost kindness.
What life the eighth one had!
He was the one originally named Satyaviradhan, later named Bheeshman and lived a long and illustrious life, torn between the allegiance he swore to his father's throne and the degenerate their Crown Prince Duryodhanan had become. He gave his life for the oath of loyalty, his blessings and love for the righteous descendants of his dynasty. He fell on the tenth day of the battle, shot by his beloved grandson Arjunan (and the first gender reassigned warrior recorded anywhere, Shikandi) and died on the following winter solstice, roughly five thousand years ago.
[*] Their crime: They stole a cow that gave ambrosia as milk for the benefit of a human friend, lied about it.
It shows what a narrow cross section of America you are mingling with. Sample bias, them statisticians call it. And all it would take is one minor accident or illness they would really see how much it really costs them. 66% of personal bankruptcies in America are due to medical bills.
When you are smugly feeling superior about your employer provided healthcare, think about it: Guaranteed company pensions, defined benefit, not defined contribution, $xx per month, used to be as prevalent as employer provided healthcare is today. What happened to the guaranteed benefits plans? What makes you think your employers love you so much they will continue to provide healthcare? Have you ever priced what it would cost you if the employer throws you out to the wolves in the individual health plan market?
Get the damned gif, change the frame rate and I am going to see how it all ends and post the spoiler all over the net. Ha, Ha, Ha...(-- Evil laughter while caressing a docile white cat)
I can easily see how it started out as a legitimate piece of work and then got subverted by a small coterie of top level managers and a few on the code development side.
The auto companies repeatedly test the cars on their test bench. They use specially instrumented engines that collect so much of data on those test cars. Knowing which data was collected on the test harness and which were real road data is a legitimate data for debugging and fine tuning. The amount of data collected (actual valve position, commanded valve position, sensed crank angle, actual crank angle, time fuel injector open, time fuel injector done, blah blah...) would so copious they might turn off certain data collections under certain circum stances.
They might have started with a special manual switch on the dash to turn on "test bench" mode. They forget to turn it on a few times, invalidating lots of collected data because "on test bench" field was wrong. Some clever guy suggest automating it. All these would be very legitimate and most engineers on the team would be working on good faith that it is not a cheat device.
What I am trying to say is "auto detection of test bench run" has a legitimate purpose. They also have so many use profiles. CA air standards profile, Euro air standards profile, China air standards profile, India air standards profile etc. All these use cases are also quite legitimate. All the engineers working on all these projects would be doing work without compromising their integrity or ethics.
Eventually someone high up had a clever idea to load China/India urea use profile when the car is not on test bench. This work does not involve company wide collusion. It would require very few engineers on the coding side and a few top level managers. They would know what they are doing is implementing a cheat device. They might have even done it as a stop-gap measure intending to correct in a few weeks or few months.
Some scenario along the lines of... "Heinz, the air-quality team needs a few more weeks, they are behind, we are going to miss the deadline. But they are close, just a few more weeks. For now let us load India profile when not on test bench, once the air-quality team finishes the project we can quietly restore the setting. Or we have to delay the ship date by a few weeks". "Erwin, are you sure they would be done in six weeks". "Definite, absolutely". "OK I will talk to Walter and Karl. Keep Adolf and Joseph out of the loop. Keep it under your hat, and make sure there is no paper trail".
The main problem is bogus credentials. There are diploma mills in India where people who could not pass 8th grade in USA get BTech and MTech degrees. If the credential verification system is instituted so that foreign universities and colleges are checked and their credentials correctly validated it would go a long way in solving the problem.
The US treats a B Tech from IIT or an ME from IISc the same way as a B Tech This-is-a-totally-real-engg-college-in-my-backyard Institue of Technology.
Any US High school grad can be trained to do what these Masters and Bachelors being exported by the body shopping Indian companies.
But, it is collusion with corporate America. They know it true. But they figure their company will survive long enough to give them their bonus after that they plan to jump ship anyway.
Wow! You get to decide what one is allowed and what one is not. Truly American. Get wrap yourself in confederate flag with don't tread on me snake and attend a rally "to take our country back". You can pry my free America from my cold dead hands.
Oh, really? I would like to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, which I totally own.
Corporations use so many different tax dodges, having a post office box in a tax friendly state declared as the HQ, creating shell corporations to funnel profits through so many different countries and tax regimes, eventually they pay nothing. Companies as big as Apple, Google, Microsoft and GE pay no taxes.
But I really admire you for sticking up for these downtrodden and exploited mega billionaires. Without selfless sacrifices by people like you, they would just be mere kilo billionaires.
Thanks, so it does cost more. Just that the cost increase is not out of proportion to the increased efficiency. So it is not as big a deal. May be the cost will come down eventually?
I was wondering about New Gingrich. I am a liberal, I have very low opinion of him and to see he was paying at 29% effective rate was very surprising. My theory is that his lust was for power not money. Still he could have used quite legal tax planning tax mitigation strategies to get to 20 or 22% quite easily. I think he chose not to do it. He had Presidential ambitions and paying rate lower tax rate would have doomed him, he must have thought. He must have been kicking himself when he saw 14% effective Romney romped past him.
But still as a liberal it pains me to say it, but Newt did the right thing. No matter how much you disagree with the law, you must obey it as long as it is in effect or openly defy it and accept whatever punishment is due. Today October the Second is the birthday of Gandhi. He openly defied unjust laws and calmly took the punishment meted out. Newt obeyed the law he strongly disagreed with.
... its 5 GB usable internal memory isn't a lot for people who have a large library of picture-heavy e-books
The reason why I gave up on kindle reader is the fact they do a piss poor job on the charts, tables, maps and pictures. Resolution too poor to read the axis lables or the tick mark lables, legends too small, etc. Further navigating back and forth between a paragraph I am reading and referring back to the graph or map is real pain in the neck (some have a much lower opinion than that).
If you are insane enough to accumulate 5GB worth of books in the ebook format, you have no right to complain about the insanity on the part of amazon.
The new panels produce 30% to 40% more power over the current models, but they cost the same to manufacture -- about.55 cents per watt, according to Bass. The panels, which are 1.61 meters or 1.81 meters in size, depending on the model, will have a capacity of 355 watts each.
.
Curiously they don't claim it would cost the same to the users. May be a little profit taking, nothing wrong with that, they need some motivation and some returns to attract investments. Anyway they have competition, they are not the sole manufacturer of some life saving drug or something. Market will rein in the profits at the optimal level. And may be transportation and installation might be a little more expensive? Don't know, but encouraged the cost of manufacturing is same.
No you don't. 25% is the highest tax bracket you qualify. I am in 36.9% bracket. My effective tax rate including AMT is around 24%. Your effective federal tax rate is likely to be around 15% or less. You will end up paying more under many of the proposed flat tax proposals, 17% of ALL your income instead of 25% of the income in the top bracket. Newt Gingrich's effective rate was 29%, he was making 2 million a year. Mitt Romney's effective rate was 14%, he was making 22 million a year. Warren Buffet's effective rate was 15%. Same way you pay 8% after all the deductions and lower slabs to the state. There your effective tax rate is likely to be 5%.
Property taxes depends on property value, not income. Typically around 2% of the value of the property. Sales and gasoline taxes are around 8% of what you spend, not what you earn. Add ALL your taxes and divide by ALL your income, to get your effective tax rate. Most likely under 20%
You will be surprised by how much goods and services you get from the Government, direct and indirect for the low taxes you are paying.
Remember the onus is on the Government to protect ALL your property rights and all other rights too. If you were forced to protect your own property using your own dollars, you would find the taxes to municipality cheap for the policing you get. FBI chasing down all violent criminals everywhere is the reason why the crime is low in your neighborhood.
Of course you are not likely to be convinced your taxes are actually low, and you will benefit if tax rates are increased for incomes of the top 0.5% of the incomes. You will benefit a lot if capital gains rate is made equal to earned income rates. You need to have income over 1 million dollars a year to shuffle your income to rename it. You create shell companies owning shell companies and funnel the income through them and you can call your income anything you want, earned income, interest income, capital gains, dividend, qualified dividend, distribution etc etc. They can game the system. You can't.
But you will not worry about all these things. You will continue to claim in every forum that you pay 60% of your income. You will know it is a lie, but you will continue to say it. Probably because it allows you to entertain the fantasy that the high tax rates are the only reason you are in 25% tax bracket being subjected to the indignity of being schooled a liberal in 36.9% tax bracket on taxes.
Auto companies in general, German auto companies in particular have a good record of compliance. Despite all the complaints you hear about ignition switches, double saddle gas tanks, unintended accelerations or tire failure at cruise speeds... auto companies follow the law most of the time, are better monitored and take corrective action. Yes, it is infuriating what they do at times. But their track record of compliance, disclosure of information etc are quite good.
In the electronics industry it is time honored practice to game the benchmarks. Slashdotters know of so many benchmarks and slowly the industry games them and makes them useless, for graphics cards or chip throughputs etc. It would be a surprise only if TV makers did not game the benchmarks. It is not just the hardware companies.
For example NASA tested the radar cross section of well known shapes as a benchmark to evaluate the correctness of simulation software. Shapes like the NASA almond, or icecream-cone. Users are expected to run the simulation software to test how accurate the simulation results are. Curious thing, create the model exactly with same dimension well aligned with XYZ axes you would get dead bang accurate answer. Rotate the geometry by say, 1.23 degrees about X axis and then 4.56 degrees about Y axis. The solution should remain invariant under a rigid body transformation, (remember to rotate the excitations in synch). Some software would fail horribly. Much longer run times and much lower accuracy.
But the free market comes into play here. Some vendors who don't cheat educate the customers about it. They will brag, "our solution will remain invariant under rigid body xforms, test our competitor! just test it and then get back to us". But when the testing is done by government the feedback loop takes so much longer to close. Like this VW incident.
Slashdot Mirror
The latest report from my organization (please click on all the links and give me loads of personal information to sell) has disproved mythical woman month. The original myth holds that you can not get nine women pregnant and get a baby in one month. The absolutely latest and greatest agile methodology with Kanban technology and our copyrighted and patented bullshittology technique has totally disproved that theory. Come one, click, gimme my money. What are you waiting for?
Slogging your balls off working in a lab for three decades and hoping there is a chance some foreign committee in Sweden would see your work and throw you a bone 7500% smaller than the new price for the generic drug... That is a fools game.
You need to have solid gold conductors to support this kind of quality in display. Sure, it is digital transmission with automatic error correction, but with the $7999 per meter Monster HDMI cable every one is a perfect straight line and every zero is a perfect circle. True videophiles can tell the difference. If you don't pay for it, you are just confessing your inferior vidophilabiltiy.
Last year I told them I was traveling to Europe and India for two weeks. Found out in London that all their retailers use credit cards with pin numbers. American credit cards without pin numbers are authorized by the discretion of the retailer. Apparently if I use the card and deny making the charges, the merchant is in the hole in UK. Not sure if this is true, this what the pizzaria near Trafalgar Square told me. Anyway there were tons of fraudulent charges from London, mostly airline tickets bought from London to African destinations. Capital reversed ALL the charges from London. Had to call back and tell them the bonafide ones, I didn't want the legitimate businesses to suffer.
So far all the experience I had with credit card companies (Citi, Capital One) or debit cards (Schwab) were uniformly good.
The only minor negative experience was when Citi left a fraud alert phone message that let the cat out of the bag about a surprise Las Vegas trip I had planned for my wife.
Free market is like evolution, it does not plan ahead, it gets stuck in local minima.
In a city for someone hoping to open a new bar, established areas would need very heavy capital. With a taxi system without surge pricing such a bar owner would strike new ground and may be eventually that area would grow and thrive as another established area. This is how load balancing would work in free market. But with Uber and surge pricing, it would strengthen existing high traffic areas and corridors would not let alternate areas to develop.
The solution to free marking cherry picking only the profitable sectors of an essential service has always been publicly funded government provided services. Post office is the perfect example. Contrary to popular opinion, the Post Office is extremely efficient. Private companies in USA would not even tell you time of the day for 50 cents. USPS will deliver a first class mail anywhere in the USA, even if it has to fly a single engine float plane for 150 miles from Anchorage, Alaska to Noname, Middle-of--nowhere county, Alaska.
So if Uber takes hold, the bar owners will convince government to provide a Post Office equivalent of a taxi service. Price will be low, but it will be a single bus that takes all the patrons from that area, travel all around the town and drop them in their homes over the next six hours.
Once you remove the quota, and the natural competition drives the price low, most of the honest intelligent taxi drivers will exit the profession. There is always demand for honest people looking for decent wages. At that point very few honest people will be driving the taxi. They will be honest only to the extent the honesty could be thrust on them.
In this case the scientists are arguing the way the components of a natural are disassembled the way they are disarticulated shows the evidence of human hand. This is the reverse of Paley's watch, it is hctaw s'yelaP.
... the trunks of police cars. According to widely circulated "facts" about cola one thing I still remember is, "Every police car in America has a two liter bottle of coke in their trunks. It is the best thing to dissolve blood stains off asphalt" and "put a chicken bone into a bottle of coke, and it will dissolve completely in six days"
Now they are bottling municipal water supply and selling it at the same price as soda. No need to guard recipes, no need to worry about making concentrates... Their profit margin has increased despite the decrease in soda consumption.
Ganga Mata, consort of Emperor Shantanu the Great, threw her new born baby into the Ganges, not once but seven times. You see eight celestials, Guardians of the eight directions were sentenced to live as humans, for some crime[*] they committed. On appeal their sentence was commuted for seven of them, they were allowed to die as soon as possible and return as celestials. They appealed to Mother Ganges to serve as their mother and kill them before they get a chance to commit any sin and be caught in the perpetual cycle of sins and rebirths. The eighth one who had to serve a full lifetime as a human, was spared by Mother Ganges. Once you get the details, you see what mother Ganges did was not evil at all, but an act of utmost kindness.
What life the eighth one had!
He was the one originally named Satyaviradhan, later named Bheeshman and lived a long and illustrious life, torn between the allegiance he swore to his father's throne and the degenerate their Crown Prince Duryodhanan had become. He gave his life for the oath of loyalty, his blessings and love for the righteous descendants of his dynasty. He fell on the tenth day of the battle, shot by his beloved grandson Arjunan (and the first gender reassigned warrior recorded anywhere, Shikandi) and died on the following winter solstice, roughly five thousand years ago.
[*] Their crime: They stole a cow that gave ambrosia as milk for the benefit of a human friend, lied about it.
From every American I've spoken with, ...
It shows what a narrow cross section of America you are mingling with. Sample bias, them statisticians call it. And all it would take is one minor accident or illness they would really see how much it really costs them. 66% of personal bankruptcies in America are due to medical bills.
When you are smugly feeling superior about your employer provided healthcare, think about it: Guaranteed company pensions, defined benefit, not defined contribution, $xx per month, used to be as prevalent as employer provided healthcare is today. What happened to the guaranteed benefits plans? What makes you think your employers love you so much they will continue to provide healthcare? Have you ever priced what it would cost you if the employer throws you out to the wolves in the individual health plan market?
Get the damned gif, change the frame rate and I am going to see how it all ends and post the spoiler all over the net. Ha, Ha, Ha...(-- Evil laughter while caressing a docile white cat)
The auto companies repeatedly test the cars on their test bench. They use specially instrumented engines that collect so much of data on those test cars. Knowing which data was collected on the test harness and which were real road data is a legitimate data for debugging and fine tuning. The amount of data collected (actual valve position, commanded valve position, sensed crank angle, actual crank angle, time fuel injector open, time fuel injector done, blah blah ...) would so copious they might turn off certain data collections under certain circum stances.
They might have started with a special manual switch on the dash to turn on "test bench" mode. They forget to turn it on a few times, invalidating lots of collected data because "on test bench" field was wrong. Some clever guy suggest automating it. All these would be very legitimate and most engineers on the team would be working on good faith that it is not a cheat device.
What I am trying to say is "auto detection of test bench run" has a legitimate purpose. They also have so many use profiles. CA air standards profile, Euro air standards profile, China air standards profile, India air standards profile etc. All these use cases are also quite legitimate. All the engineers working on all these projects would be doing work without compromising their integrity or ethics.
Eventually someone high up had a clever idea to load China/India urea use profile when the car is not on test bench. This work does not involve company wide collusion. It would require very few engineers on the coding side and a few top level managers. They would know what they are doing is implementing a cheat device. They might have even done it as a stop-gap measure intending to correct in a few weeks or few months.
Some scenario along the lines of ... "Heinz, the air-quality team needs a few more weeks, they are behind, we are going to miss the deadline. But they are close, just a few more weeks. For now let us load India profile when not on test bench, once the air-quality team finishes the project we can quietly restore the setting. Or we have to delay the ship date by a few weeks". "Erwin, are you sure they would be done in six weeks". "Definite, absolutely". "OK I will talk to Walter and Karl. Keep Adolf and Joseph out of the loop. Keep it under your hat, and make sure there is no paper trail".
The US treats a B Tech from IIT or an ME from IISc the same way as a B Tech This-is-a-totally-real-engg-college-in-my-backyard Institue of Technology.
Any US High school grad can be trained to do what these Masters and Bachelors being exported by the body shopping Indian companies.
But, it is collusion with corporate America. They know it true. But they figure their company will survive long enough to give them their bonus after that they plan to jump ship anyway.
Wow! You get to decide what one is allowed and what one is not. Truly American. Get wrap yourself in confederate flag with don't tread on me snake and attend a rally "to take our country back". You can pry my free America from my cold dead hands.
Corporations use so many different tax dodges, having a post office box in a tax friendly state declared as the HQ, creating shell corporations to funnel profits through so many different countries and tax regimes, eventually they pay nothing. Companies as big as Apple, Google, Microsoft and GE pay no taxes.
But I really admire you for sticking up for these downtrodden and exploited mega billionaires. Without selfless sacrifices by people like you, they would just be mere kilo billionaires.
Thanks, so it does cost more. Just that the cost increase is not out of proportion to the increased efficiency. So it is not as big a deal. May be the cost will come down eventually?
But still as a liberal it pains me to say it, but Newt did the right thing. No matter how much you disagree with the law, you must obey it as long as it is in effect or openly defy it and accept whatever punishment is due. Today October the Second is the birthday of Gandhi. He openly defied unjust laws and calmly took the punishment meted out. Newt obeyed the law he strongly disagreed with.
I am a hu-person you insensitive clod!
... its 5 GB usable internal memory isn't a lot for people who have a large library of picture-heavy e-books
The reason why I gave up on kindle reader is the fact they do a piss poor job on the charts, tables, maps and pictures. Resolution too poor to read the axis lables or the tick mark lables, legends too small, etc. Further navigating back and forth between a paragraph I am reading and referring back to the graph or map is real pain in the neck (some have a much lower opinion than that).
If you are insane enough to accumulate 5GB worth of books in the ebook format, you have no right to complain about the insanity on the part of amazon.
They could sell the access credentials to their credit checking partners experian, equifax databases to Ukranian mafia and raise some real dough.
The new panels produce 30% to 40% more power over the current models, but they cost the same to manufacture -- about .55 cents per watt, according to Bass. The panels, which are 1.61 meters or 1.81 meters in size, depending on the model, will have a capacity of 355 watts each.
. Curiously they don't claim it would cost the same to the users. May be a little profit taking, nothing wrong with that, they need some motivation and some returns to attract investments. Anyway they have competition, they are not the sole manufacturer of some life saving drug or something. Market will rein in the profits at the optimal level. And may be transportation and installation might be a little more expensive? Don't know, but encouraged the cost of manufacturing is same.
No mention of life of the panels.
MORE GUNS, MORE GUNS!
This line has been added to defeat the lameness filter.
Property taxes depends on property value, not income. Typically around 2% of the value of the property. Sales and gasoline taxes are around 8% of what you spend, not what you earn. Add ALL your taxes and divide by ALL your income, to get your effective tax rate. Most likely under 20%
You will be surprised by how much goods and services you get from the Government, direct and indirect for the low taxes you are paying.
Remember the onus is on the Government to protect ALL your property rights and all other rights too. If you were forced to protect your own property using your own dollars, you would find the taxes to municipality cheap for the policing you get. FBI chasing down all violent criminals everywhere is the reason why the crime is low in your neighborhood.
Of course you are not likely to be convinced your taxes are actually low, and you will benefit if tax rates are increased for incomes of the top 0.5% of the incomes. You will benefit a lot if capital gains rate is made equal to earned income rates. You need to have income over 1 million dollars a year to shuffle your income to rename it. You create shell companies owning shell companies and funnel the income through them and you can call your income anything you want, earned income, interest income, capital gains, dividend, qualified dividend, distribution etc etc. They can game the system. You can't.
But you will not worry about all these things. You will continue to claim in every forum that you pay 60% of your income. You will know it is a lie, but you will continue to say it. Probably because it allows you to entertain the fantasy that the high tax rates are the only reason you are in 25% tax bracket being subjected to the indignity of being schooled a liberal in 36.9% tax bracket on taxes.
In the electronics industry it is time honored practice to game the benchmarks. Slashdotters know of so many benchmarks and slowly the industry games them and makes them useless, for graphics cards or chip throughputs etc. It would be a surprise only if TV makers did not game the benchmarks. It is not just the hardware companies.
For example NASA tested the radar cross section of well known shapes as a benchmark to evaluate the correctness of simulation software. Shapes like the NASA almond, or icecream-cone. Users are expected to run the simulation software to test how accurate the simulation results are. Curious thing, create the model exactly with same dimension well aligned with XYZ axes you would get dead bang accurate answer. Rotate the geometry by say, 1.23 degrees about X axis and then 4.56 degrees about Y axis. The solution should remain invariant under a rigid body transformation, (remember to rotate the excitations in synch). Some software would fail horribly. Much longer run times and much lower accuracy.
But the free market comes into play here. Some vendors who don't cheat educate the customers about it. They will brag, "our solution will remain invariant under rigid body xforms, test our competitor! just test it and then get back to us". But when the testing is done by government the feedback loop takes so much longer to close. Like this VW incident.