It's also a fatally flawed concept in that there's no feasible way to avoid the taxation up front; you'll get it back later. This leads to inevitable binge spending on things that people don't need, rather than encouraging saving by doling the excess funds out a little bit at a time. (At least the Fair Tax does it monthly; some schemes go yearly, and that's just a disaster and a half.)

By contrast, with income tax, people making below a certain level avoid paying it up front (at least if they fill out their exemption forms correctly), which means they see more money in every paycheck, and it doesn't look like an extra check that they can spend, so psychologically, they're more likely to save it.

Also, the entire concept is flawed, because it operates under the mistaken assumption that the rich spend proportionally to the poor. The reality is that after someone's basic needs are met, most people don't spend that much of their income. People always imagine that rich people are constantly spending money on fancy boats, big houses, expensive cars, etc., but the reality is that they didn't become rich by spending their money. They became rich by saving it and investing it.

So any scheme that eliminates all taxes on stocks—where the rich spend the vast majority of their money—is basically a giant windfall to the wealthy. In effect, such a scheme would rapidly eliminate the middle class; anyone rich enough to spend most of their income on investments would get richer, and anyone below that magic fuzzy line would quickly become buried under the excessive sales tax rate and would join the ranks of the working poor.

The problem is not the 2% growth rate he speaks of, it's the unsubstantiated claim he makes that the historical return on capital was 4.5%. That's the basis of his claim that the growth at 2% causes inequity, and that claim about the return on capital is in question at best.

It was historically a lot higher than 4.5%.

When I was a kid, interest rates on loans were up around 15–17%, and we earned somewhere in the neighborhood of 10–12% on savings accounts. I don't foresee us ever returning to those sorts of rates in an era when most stock market funds average only 7% yield.

The real problem with lowering interest rates to boost the economy is that it disproportionately screws the people at the bottom. The rich can afford to float their wealth in the stock market. The poor need something more solid. And there's no longer any incentive for them to save money, because they can't earn revenue from it. This leads more people to spend all of their income instead of saving up for more expensive goods that could eventually provide them with a financial benefit, such as buying a house so they won't have to keep paying rent. As long as this gross inequality in ROI remains the norm, income inequality can only grow at an ever-increasing rate.

Want to fix the problem? Tax capital gains with the same progressive tax scheme as ordinary income. Then crank the prime rate up to 10%, but have the government provide small loans at low interest rates directly to individual consumers. This will immediately benefit people who have small amounts of money, and negatively impact people who have large amounts of money, thus rebuilding the middle class.

In other words, undo all the damage Reagan caused with his misguided trickle-down fantasy.

So the real problem is not identity theft at all, the real problem is vendors failing to properly identify the person, allowing a fraudulent transaction to occur and then pursuing the wrong person.

Exactly what I've been saying for years. There's no such thing as identity theft. You can't steal an identity, by definition, because an identity is who you are, not some arbitrary piece of information used to represent you. An SSN is an identifier, not an identity. (This is not precisely correct in the cryptographic sense of the term, but neither is an SSN in any way cryptographic, so that distinction is largely moot.)

With that said, identity fraud isn't entirely the fault of vendors. Much of the fault lies with the credit bureaus. Their business involves making claims about a person based on insufficient authentication, then charging money to consumers for "protection" against them making false claims when they fail to do their jobs correctly. Credit bureaus are the very definition of a protection racket (minus the physical violence).

The easy way to solve the problem is that when someone makes a false claim about you, sue the credit bureaus. Because you have no ongoing contractual relationship with them, they cannot compel you to binding arbitration, and because they are making false claims about you in writing, they are guilty of libel. It would only take a few thousand people doing this to force the credit bureaus to take authentication more seriously, such as providing call-back authentication at no cost to consumers—something that they should have been doing all along.

As I understand it, the flow rate is too low to inflate the bag on its own immediately. You provide most of the air to fill the bag by exhaling; it just replenishes some of the oxygen that you depleted. So eventually, it will inflate, but not immediately.

TSA also does some sort of screening for some Amtrak routes.

I seem to recall that the last time they tried that, the Amtrak Police escorted them off the premises. Nothing quite as much fun to watch as an interjurisdictional pissing match.

That's a place where you order bite-sized food, right? A dim sumery?

Nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. :-D

Wow. Why does a fifty-year-old, easily synthesized antibiotic that hasn't been under patent protection since the 1980s still cost $1,500? And particularly one that is getting less and less effective against real-world bacteria.... *sigh*

Acidophilus and Bifidus and Bulgaricus alone will not restore what you just killed with antibiotics, or what you lost through diarrhea.

No, but that's what your appendix is for. Besides, the last probiotic I took contained fifteen different kinds of bacteria, not just a couple. Granted, that's still less than a tenth of the predominant strains in a typical human gut, but the same techniques could just as easily produce a few hundred strains as fifteen.

And it is by no means crude. Crude is having someone poop in a jar, putting it in a blender, and giving yourself a poop enema. This method seems to be a simpler and cleaner way, as well as being possible to get it further into the intestines than you can do at home safely.

It's still a lot more crude than culturing all of the gut bacteria over an extended period of time, so that what you end up with is basically just the bacteria rather than dried crap.

IMO, the critical question that must be asked in determining whether the victim shares a portion of the blame is whether the victim's intentional actions or inaction actively made the situation worse than it otherwise would have been. If a drunk driver hits your car and you aren't wearing a seat belt, you'll be more seriously injured than if you are wearing one. Therefore, because everyone has been told for decades that they should wear seat belts, part of the blame for your injuries falls on you.

Dressing provocatively in a dangerous area is debatable, because although attire may have (slightly) raised the probability that a woman gets raped, it doesn't cause the rape, and it doesn't make the rape worse. Now you could argue that walking rather than taking a cab contributed to it, and if the neighborhood really is highly dangerous, that might be a reasonable argument, but because walking is not an unusual thing for people to do, and because it is difficult to avoid in many situations, that argument also falls flat. The victim in this situation, therefore, is not partially responsible.

However, taking nude pictures of oneself and sharing them with others is, IMO, not reasonably debatable. Photos that don't exist cannot be leaked. Therefore, the victim's actions were directly responsible for making the crime possible. That makes this more similar to deliberately choosing to leave your door unlocked and then complaining when a drug addict walks in and steals your stuff, rather than choosing what clothing to wear. Thus, IMO, the victim is partially responsible.

In much the same way, the guy wearing the gold made the crime possible by wearing it outside in a bad neighborhood. Had he been careful about when and where he wore it, it would not have gotten stolen. Therefore, he is partially responsible.

There's not really a placebo effect when death is involved, a least as far as we know. So placebos aren't really relevant. As for a control group, we know the case fatality rate of the disease, so if you see a dramatic change in that, it was either caused by a mutation in the virus or by the treatment. You can't be absolutely certain, because viruses do mutate to become less fatal over time, but those mutations are more likely to cause a small change in the CFR than a big one. After all, Ebola hasn't weakened much over decades. In effect, you can consider those thousands of victims to be a control group.

That's simply not true. Non-placebo-controlled open clinical trials are used all the time to determine the efficacy of treatment. They aren't nearly as airtight as double-blinded, placebo-controlled studies (because of the placebo effect), but to say that they prove nothing is overstating things quite a bit, particularly in situations where success or failure is black-and-white (because the patient either died or didn't).