To claim that someone who is arguing in favor of an absolute decrease be willing to accept a (more severe from a social-stature perspective) relative decrease lest they be branded hypocritical ignores the difference between these categories.

No. It doesn't. It accurately portrays a hypocrite. Social standing has zero place in a discussion about taxation. Sorry, if your beliefs cost you relative standing. If relative standing is important enough to you that you would sacrifice your supposed principles to maintain your standing, then your argument is injured by your hypocrisy. You can believe you should pay more or you can believe that you should not pay more. If you believe the former, argue for it, and do not follow through because you want to protect relative social standing then you are a hypocrite. The words spoken argue individual sacrifice for the needs of the country. The actions taken advance the individual's desires antagonistic to the argument for the country's needs.

If you want to play in the pool of politics, go crazy. Say anything you like. If you want to make a political argument, live it. Anything less hurts your case. People who harp on family values, but are out having affairs hurt their case. People who are tough on crime but trade favors to get friends/relatives off the hook hurt their case.

There are lots of game theory exercises about a lot of human behavior. So what. Hypocrisy is one of many human behaviors. The fact that game theory can model it in no way legitimizes it.

Allow me to assert that the bulk of the people you disagree with here do not see these as equivalent, so your argument of hypocracy rings false in their ears.

Oh, I see the problem. We're just going to roll with opinions, not logic. Got it.

It only hurts his argument if you're coming from a mindset in which "paying $X more, while everyone else does not" and "paying $X more, like everyone else" are equivalent acts.

No. It hurts his argument regardless of whether or not you believe those are equivalent acts. There are a number of applicable sayings. "Put up or shut up" or, more fittingly, "put your money where your mouth is".

Warren Buffet is trying to make the case that everybody should be legally obligated to pay more money. But if he thought everybody should be compelled to pay more money, he must already believe he should pay more money. He does not. Therefore it is obvious that he does not feel morally obligated to pay more. Which leaves his argument open to questions of motive. The only motive I'm sure it cannot be is "it's good for the country!" It can only hurt the country to pay less than he thinks is appropriate for him to pay, regardless of other people also underpaying. And that does hurt his argument.

Also.. "peer pressure" is a shitty reason for taxation. So.. "$X more, while everyone else does not" and "$X more, like everyone else" are only different for shitty reasons for arguments about taxation.

Look, corporations are "people" for the purposes of BUSINESS. That is all. Regardless of what any court of law may say, business is the end of the need for corporate personhood. Because it is easier to write Corp X on a legal document. And because signage is really hard to do when you have to write "Offices of Shareholder A, Shareholder B, Shareholder C ... Shareholder M901c760". You need a skyscraper just to hold the sign, even if the sign is in a uselessly small font.

Collectives do not have rights, inherently. They have rights transitively because individuals do. So a group cannot hold office or vote. But the group cannot inherently own anything either. A corporation on the deed is, as I said above, shorthand for writing out each shareholder's ownership in the property in proportion to their shares. It is administrating thousands of individual's property rights to save a lot of people a lot of time (and save a lot of paper).

Political speech does not need a collective. Because the result of political speech, governance, is the desired collective*. Giving corporations access to political speech gives some people two voices. Their own plus their corporate one. This is not equitable. Also.. those who would speak with a corporate voice have huge financial incentives to speak in favor of corporate friendly laws without regard to things like civil liberties. This is not desirable.

Undesirable inequality should not be acceptable, nor one of daily reality.

*In a government that actually represents the people. Not.. the fictional people.

Selfishness is not reduced or eliminated by talking about selfish behavior. So if minimizing one's tax burden is selfish, then he is. And, because he talks about how he shouldn't do what he is doing, he is hypocritical in his selfishness.

And, like I said, he'd have more credibility if he paid, himself, the appropriate level of funds to the US government. It is not a difficult process. His claim is that he should be paying more. So.. why the fuck doesn't he just step up and pay it? He does not do it. Which is why his argument suffers. He acts in ways that are not in line with his mouth. You know.. lead by example?

Even Warren Buffet claims all the deductions and tax breaks he can, all while pointing out that he could and should pay more. If he, or I, or Fluffeh just gave money to the federal government, it would have no measurable effect on the overall deficit or direction of government spending.

On the other hand.. it would make Warren Buffet's claims more credible. If he should pay more taxes, and doesn't.. it hurts his argument severely to spend a lot of money on tax accountants to pay less in taxes. The extra voluntary payments aren't covering for other people's selfishness. Its fucking covering one person's share of the supposed extra costs we should all be paying. "Do as I say, not as I do" isn't a strong argument for most people. If we should pay more and don't, making us selfish, then not paying more when he could makes Buffet both selfish and hypocritical.

Well.. since conceiving a child is no prerequisite to raising a child, I'd say you've got no point either.

lol.. console plebian.. funny stuff. The PC industry is not "doing great." It survives. Big fucking deal. Perhaps you would like to look up the definition of "flourishing." The market segment that is doing well is, as I said, the segment hitting the price points (and game types) as can be found on mobiles. This is essentially the segment that consoles are NOT suited to, precisely because they are readily filled by the mobile or PC that quite a lot of people have or can get for less than a console.

Maybe you'd like to stop replying without thinking.

Also, I've spent way more hours on PC games than console ones.

Yep. it worked so well the PC game ecosystem is flourishing! Only.. it isn't, really, unless we're talking indie developers that are hitting close to the mobile app price points. I have a hard time believing Microsoft, Sony, or console development studios are going to aim that low ..

You, sir, are a rather nice guy. Me? I'd make 'em get a tattoo on their big lying faces that reads:
WARNING: Politics as a profession has been linked to ignorance, corruption, and sociopathy

So that every time they speak into a camera, we will all be reminded that nothing they say is to be trusted.

.... and get everybody to compile all their stuff a second time?

Not so simply solved..

I'm not sure you understand the point of benchmarking.
You can benchmark a lot of stuff. But its pointless to benchmark HD read/write speeds when what you're interested in is FLOPS. So there are benchmarks which see how many floating point ops your system can do. And there are benchmarks about hard drive performance. But there tends not to be one benchmark to rule them all.

BAPco say that SYSmark is a benchmark for real-world business app performance. But AMD say SYSmark doesn't utilize the GPU in any way.

Given that modern operating systems go to GPUs for rendering, which they're good at, and freeing up CPU time for CPU stuff, SYSmark isn't benchmarking what they claim to be benchmarking.

Which would make SYSmark a pointless benchmark.

Okay, but SYSmark isn't a CPU benchmark.

From BAPco's SYSmark page:

SYSmark® 2012 is the latest version of the premier performance metric that measures and compares PC performance based on real world applications.

As stated by the GP, there are CPU benchmarks such as SPEC's. But SYSmark isn't one and AMD alleges it isn't designed to benchmark what they say they're benchmarking.

And... your solution is to advance ... what, coal? where bits of radioactive particulates, greenhouse gasses, and carcinogens are released into the air .. which, I don't know if you know this, gets everywhere.

I mean, I guess when it gets bad enough we can just make a planetary exclusion zone. But thats gonna make a lot of people unhappy. Its rather hard to just pick up and find a new planet.

YOU are doing the nuclear industry no favors by making such arguments. The nuclear industry has responded, but governments are more interested in listening to people like you who do not know what they're talking about. Thus newer, safer reactors don't get built and we're at greater risk because we're still using old hardware past its end of life date.

The nuclear industry has responded to safety concerns by developing reactors with passive safeties, meaning that even in the event of complete coolant system failure, they still will not meltdown. And they do not use water as a coolant/neutron moderator so they don't get hydrogen buildup leading to explosions in a failure state either. They have reactors that can consume "waste" from current reactors as fuel reducing the need for storing a bunch of radioactive waste.

What's the obvious logic? You may as well take the tires, and do something with them that will probably leave them in some form of litter. After all, you've paid for their disposal. You may as well take them and get some entertainment or other temporary use out of them, too. Instead of just leaving them with the store to be disposed of.

Thats sorta what not requiring the fee to be paid does.. Yes, if the fee isn't required, you could walk out with the tires and the money and still do the same thing. But that means that it has to be worth the fee+entertainment-effort before you'll do it.

when the fee is required regardless, you're out the money either way. In effect, it is no longer part of your decision making process. You can either leave the tires, expend no effort, and get no entertainment. Or you can take the tires and do something stupid but fun with them and then leave them. More than likely guilt free, too. Since you "paid" for their disposal. They're just not being disposed of from the store.