Explain to me how it is moral for the government to do what would be immoral for you individually to do. If we have a government of delegated powers, then how can you delegate a power you yourself do not have?

Every government in history has used the threat of jail and violence to do things which advance the common good in violation of individual's wishes. Police, military, IRS, etc. It sounds like you're unsure about that basic principle. And specifically with regard to progressive taxation:

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion

That's a quote from Adam Smith, often called the father of modern capitalism. If you don't accept that argument, you're so far ideologically from myself or voters in our democracy that your best move is probably to move to this floating city and talk with its other inhabitant about Atlas Shrugged all day.

"Investing in the poor" has been the rallying cry for ever expanding government and ever expanding pubic debt for the last 100 years. How has that worked out for us? Have the poor been raised up? Surely after 100 years of social programs, welfare, public education the poor are now well off, right? Oh, they aren't? More people are on public assistance than every before and there are no signs of that changing?

You started with a pretty reasonable question, but I think you're oversimplifying the answer...

I'm saddened by the fact that society has somehow gotten to the point where the "logic" of "he has more so we can steal it from him!" some how is both morally and ethically justifiable.

Taxes have never been voluntary, and the wealthy person benefits from the stability that comes from not having a huge number of desperate, homeless, starving people. I don't think anything has qualitatively changed in your lifetime; it's just the numbers.

Hell, why stop at 50%? By your so called logic we surely can justify taking 95% of what they earn. They can afford it, right?

Funny you should say that. In the history of the federal income tax, the top marginal income tax bracket peaked at 86.45%, according to this history of top rates in wikipedia. It was over 70% from 1936 to 1971. I don't know the full brackets to say exactly what rate someone who makes more than that would pay on his/her overall income, but I expect people who make twice that ended up paying more than 50%, and society didn't fail. One could argue that this created the most prosperous time in our nation's history.

I'm not advocating rates this high. I'm just saying that it's worth investing in the poor for many reasons. fwiw, if I were to single-handedly set the federal income tax code, I might do something vey simple: your rate would be log(income/(people * per-person poverty level)) / log(c), capped at 0% on one side and m% on the other, with c and m chosen every year based on inflation-adjusted amounts of a 20-year exponentially weighted moving average of what it would take for 1% of people to hit the cap and the government to have no deficit or surplus. And I'd have sufficient social services for the poor to become not so poor if they're willing to work. Call it communism if you want, but there'd still be rich people, and it's not fundamentally different from how we've done things for generations.

Their $600/year sales tax burden does NOTHING to reduce our 14 trillion dollar deficit. And if they pay nothing, they have no problems asking for "more" stuff.

Sales taxes range from 5%-10%, right? You're suggesting that a family of four spends only $6,000-$12,000 / year? Even considering that sales taxes in many states exclude some necessities like unprepared foods, that sounds way too low to me. If they're really able to have a comfortable existence saving 60+% of their income (that includes a generous allowance for other state/local taxes), I'd agree with you, they should be able to cough up some federal income tax. But I don't think you're using realistic figures. The poverty level for this family is $22,500/year; I think you should expect they spend at least that much on taxable items and therefore pay at least $1,125-$2,250/year in sales tax alone. They probably also pay at least 10% of their income in state income tax, so add on another $5,000/year. Their total tax rate is at least 12.25% - 15%. Admittedly, this family could likely afford another 1% in federal income tax without problems, but of course you've picked the most outrageous example (beyond the income EIC covers...this is a different set of deductions); there are others who could not.

I had a lesion on my larynx. LA County picked up the tab.

I'm sorry to hear that, and about your father's passing. It's very good that LA County was able to pick up the tab, though. I wonder if after this round of budget cuts they would still be able to help out people like you. I don't know anything about lesions on the larynx...if you had gone untreated, would you have been able to work? would it have been life-threatening? To me it sounds like there are many ways in which you came very close to not making it as far as you have, and I wouldn't want to make it any harder.

In my own life, I had pneumonia once and anaphylaxis once. They were relatively minor inconveniences for me (a couple weeks sick and 5-10 pounds lost in the first case; just a really itchy rash in the second), but I also had good medical care and medication. If I hadn't, they would have been much more serious, maybe even fatal. I also used to get a lot of sinus infections, treated with antibiotics, and eventually had sinus surgery. I got allergy shots for five years. And if I'd been homeless, I probably also would have been likely to have more illnesses... I doubt I could have gotten where I am today.

What's silly is someone with a degree in 16th century literature and a $100,000-$200,000 debt is upset that they cant find a job that will help pay their student loans... Sounds to me that they would have been better off picking a different major/career path. A little "expected income" research when planning a major would have helped.

Yeah, my fiancée made the mistake of not thinking about how she got a job when she picked her major. (She eventually went to graduate school and got a degree that let her get a real job.) I'd thought of it as more of a middle-class mistake, though...do you know how often student loans don't get paid back for this reason? It wouldn't be too crazy for government-paid student loans to be only issued for majors that can be reasonably expected to return their investment...

In recent years, credits for low- and middle-income families have grown so much that a family of four making as much as $50,000 will owe no federal income tax for 2009, as long as there are two children younger than 17, according to a separate analysis by the consulting firm Deloitte Tax.

I can live with that. If you're thinking they're not paying taxes, you're wrong. They're just not paying federal income tax. This family of four making up to $50,000 will spend a far greater proportion of their income than I do and therefore also pay a far greater proportion of sales tax. There's also property tax, taxes paid by their employer(s), etc.

Hah. Me rich? Of my grandparents, 3 came to this country as children -- penniless. I'm the first one in my family to not only go to college, but to FINISH HIGH SCHOOL. I was effectively homeless for part of my 2nd term at the local community college -- living out of lockers and getting a $25 hotel 2 or 3 times a week until I got a better job and could afford a real room. I finished school with no debt and on my own blood/sweat.

Congratulations on your achievement. You obviously worked very hard...and, frankly, were a little bit lucky as well. What would have happened if you got a major illness during this time? Or your parents did and you had to drop out of college to support the family? Or any number of other scenarios...rags to riches stories like yours are inspiring but I don't think they're as common as you seem to be suggesting, even among smart people willing to work very hard. This infographic shows that the bottom 1/5th actually lost ground from 1980 to 2009.

My own luck was to be born into a loving, two-parent family who gave me healthy food, a stable home environment, medical care, and a college education. I now have an excellent job. Maybe I would have been able to pull it off without some of those things, but I'm sure glad I didn't have to.

With nearly 50% of the US paying no federal income tax, they have no problem asking for "more". Want to be 'fair'? Get rid of the EIC -- or at least prevent it from giving back MORE money that was originally paid by the recipient.

Now that's what I call class warfare. And so unlike raising taxes on people who can afford them, it is indeed rotten economics.

Have you looked at the actual table? For a single person, the Earned Income Tax Credit isn't available if (s)he earns more than $13,460. That's comparable to the US Census Poverty Threshold of $11,344 (for a person younger than 65). If not for the Earned Income Tax Credit, people who have an income might actually starve, go homeless, etc. So when I say this is class warfare, it is only because it could actually kill the working poor.

In contrast, the wealthy really can afford it without noticing. There was an interesting New York Times article on this recently, which linked to this Citizens for Tax Justice fact sheet. If you read through it, you'll see that the revenue from increasing the tax rate on the top 1% by income would be similar to that of raising it on the bottom 60% by the same percentage. I assure you, there will be enough left over to provide basic necessities of life! (In fact, I'm not in the top 1%, but I certainly could pay more taxes without great hardship. It might mean it'd take me longer to afford a house, but I'm not exactly homeless in my 2-bedroom rented townhouse.)

If you're not swayed by arguments such as "don't kill people with taxes", then consider no taxes on poor people an investment. If they have all of a home, healthy food on the table, adequate medical care, a quality education, and available jobs, it's reasonable to believe that many of them will go on to become middle-class tax-payers: enough so to pay back your investment with far more than the nominal 1% tax rate you're suggesting. In fact, by effectively selling too soon, you're virtually guaranteeing you'll throw away what you put in with that government-provided K12 education and the like.

So, it's only Google doing it?

Probably not. I just gave a couple I knew off the top of my head, and I'm a Google software developer. If you want a non-Google non-HTTP example...hmm, I'd guess MMORPGs would do the same thing. I don't play them myself, but WoW, Everquest, City of Heroes, etc. If I knew hostnames I'd give DNS results to prove it. In any case, geolocating through DNS is a general technique that many sites use for HTTP, at least one company uses for several non-HTTP products, and many others could use for a variety of protocols in the future.

All of these CDN services are based on HTTP. When you're using them, that's an HTTP server you're talking to. It's perfectly capable of geolocating you by IP, and it can either hand you back links to a local CDN, or redirect you to another server.

Then it's not possible to geolocate that first HTTP request.

What if you're just running bind for you local net vs the root servers? Bzzt. Doesn't work.

It should work, although it may not be necessary. I see six possibilities:

• Your local bind is configured to send queries to the authoritative servers for the domain.
  • You're using this extension: it sends along the web browser's IP address so it gets back a geolocated response for that address.
  • You're not using this extension: it doesn't send the web browser's IP address so it gets back a geolocated response for its own address. The two addresses are likely the same (or nearly so) so this distinction is irrelevant.
• Your local bind is configured to send queries on to some other recursive DNS server. (You take advantage of their cache to reduce your DNS latency.)
  • You're using this extension and the other server relays the extra data: you get a geolocated response for your web browser.
  • You're using this extension and the other server drops the extra data: you get a geolocated response for the other server.
  • You're not using this extension and the other server adds the extra data: you get a geolocated response for your DNS server.
  • You're not using this extension and the other server doesn't add the extra data: you get a geolocated response for the other server.

In all cases, the geolocated DNS response is at least as good as before, and in some it's an improvement, depending on how far the DNS servers are from you. If there's a latency degradation from this change, it'd be in the other recursive DNS server being slower to respond because the only cached responses it has are for different subnets. You can imagine techniques to mitigate that effect, though I haven't checked if the described work does so.

Full disclosure: I work for Google, but not on this.

Isn't this little more than an expensive band-aid for the underlying bandwidth problem?

Keep in mind that Google, Amazon, Akamai, etc. had already created geographically distributed networks to reduce latency and bandwidth. Improving the accuracy of geolocated DNS responses through a protocol extension is basically free and makes these techniques even more effective.

Also, Google cares a lot about latency. A major component of that is backbone transit latency, and once you have enough bandwidth to avoid excessive queueing delay or packet loss, I can imagine only four ways to significantly it: invent faster-than-light communications, find a material with a lower refractive index than the optical fibers in use today, wait for fewer round trips, or reduce the distance travelled per trip. This helps with the last. Building more fiber wouldn't help with any of those and would also be a lot more expensive.

Full disclosure: I work for Google (but not on this).

I often go into our data center, filled with 600 servers, and go listening for the hard drives that are noisier than normal so that I can predict which hard drives are going to fail next.

Dude. Work SMARTer, not harder.

I have QoS at the office that keeps our connection from pegging (it's limited to around 75% on the download and 90% on upload) and have never once encountered an issue with latency or jitter.

Right, then you solved the problem by ensuring the queue in question never gets filled. You added your own queues (more than one, prioritized), and you probably made those queues shorter. That works, but it's a shame that you had to throw away 25% of your download capacity and 10% of your upload capacity when it wouldn't be necessary if the equipment you were using had properly configured queues of its own. It's also unusual that you were able to do so: most people (including almost all home users) are not in a position to set up QoS on their download side. Imagine I called Comcast and asked them to set custom QoS settings on data they are sending to me. How do you think that conversation would go? And even for the upload side, most consumers don't have the equipment or knowledge to set up their own queueing.