I used to work for a guy who founded a software company in Sunnyvale. After Bush got reelected, he decided to sell the company to Agilent for a couple million bucks, went back to Australia, and formed a new company there. He comes back to visit sometimes, and says that he now gets a lot of questions from people in Australia- "What happened over there? Americans used to be smart!" His standard answer: "No, it's not that they're stupid, but the news they get in the U.S. is really bad."

Ooops, this is where I stopped reading.

1. The "difference" is math. You don't pay estate taxes on $5 or $5 million. It doesn't apply to the first $5.3 million dollars of inheritance.
2. If someone wants to leave an inheritance as a legacy to his children to enjoy, it IS his choice. A tax on a huge inheritance won't prevent anybody from doing that.
3. If someone leaves $5 million to their kids, it's usually not because they worked 100 times as hard as a school bus driver leaving $50K. In fact, the driver paid a percentage of income in tax that is roughly double what the millionaire paid.
4. School bus drivers who make $30K per year are not going to leave behind a $5.3 million dollar fortune of hard-earned money. But all the cable news shows this guy is willing to trust have got him and his redneck friends at church panicked about the "death tax".
5. People don't seem to understand this anymore, but it's the government's job to collect taxes on income. It doesn't matter if you have $5 or $5 million or $5 billion. If you want electricity going to traffic lights, you have to pay your fair share. Just because you're rich doesn't mean you get special rights to stuff your mattress. My friend worked hard and brought kids to school. If you want to see the hard work billionaires do, just run your kitchen faucet and light a match.

Yeah, I voted with the majority (of the popular vote)- guilty as charged.

It's "not the US government's anymore, only because some people now are so rich they can afford to legalize their activities. (The Mafia, OTOH, was never really good at infiltrating politics.)

Yes, two brothers were free at last to "pool together" donating 0.05% of their wealth through shady corporations to politicians who thump people with Bibles and propose policies from bad science fiction novels. And it's a good thing, too- this was the most expensive American election in history and now we need the help of billionaires if we want to win!

Why are we spending so much money on satellites? We could have bought a couple Cold War fighter jets that will never be used and that explode on liftoff!

Your friend is is a different guy, if he's the inheritor. The guy I was talking about is afraid that his kids are going to have to pay taxes on his life savings from driving a school bus.

You need to listen to someone other than Ted Cruz.

The Supreme Court ripped the First Amendment a new asshole in 2012 with their new concept that every dollar suddenly has free speech. "Going after the First Amendment" is a bullshit talking point made by people who directly benefit from corporate donations.

You should look into wolf-PAC. They're gathering petitions to state legislatures to allow votes on a Constitutional Amendment to reinstate laws on political donations that the Supreme Court entirely threw out the window with that Citizens United 5-4 decision.

But voters are easily convinced that if their freedom to form a corporate monopoly is central to their own economic future. I know a guy who drives a school bus and is worried sick about the estate tax.

Don't get your hopes up. I wrote "Javacup" on a coffee mug and Oracle is still refusing to pay up even though Sun illegally reproduced part of my work when they named their compiler. They plagiarized the first five letters right off the cup!

public static void main(String[] args) {...} Copyright (c) Orale Corporation. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

Yep. Microscopic processes are affected by quantum fluctuation, in both neurons and transistors. Macroscopically, a transistor behaves reliably, like a switch. Humans are less predictable- but their thoughts are more deterministic than they realize.

Sure; we have artificial neural network algorithms. Check out this letter-recognition (backpropagation) network using 80 neurons that I wrote in JavaScript during a boring Christmas vacation with my parents. (And it sucks- not because it's JavaScript, but it makes embarrassing mistakes, which are the fault of the huge string literal of neuron weights at the end of the code).

Biologically, the process with a real neuronal cell body reaching a certain (unpredictable) voltage and firing is extremely complex. The firing mechanism is an analogue process, unstable and unreliable (which is how it works). It produces a digital signal which has an unpredictable time lag (the axon length and density of boundaries between glial cells affect this) before it reaches synapses (cesspools of quantum indeterminism) and tickles dendrites of other cells. The development and positioning of cell processes (axons, dendrites, synaptic junctions) is a necessary consequence of learning, but these are affected by gene expression and are extremely hard to predict.

Still, given this entire messy system, people's thoughts, free will, and reactions to stimuli are much more deterministic than they realize. But I suspect that if you wanted to make a robot that acts like a person does, you would at the very least need a prolific stream of very high quality random numbers. Maybe you can simulate the brain of Stephen Hawking with a PRNG; I haven't tried. (I sure as hell wouldn't use JavaScript!)

Only if you count trackable, legal activity.