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Comment Re:Solution (Score 1) 410

The Fair Tax (one sales tax proposal) fixes this by giving a stipend to everyone that's equivalent to taxes paid on necessities. So someone that makes at or below the poverty line will essentially pay no taxes (I don't remember what the exact number is, but I think the stipend was $5Kish, tied to inflation, of course), and someone who makes $200K will pay significantly more, but have the $5K they spent on necessities or so refunded.

Also, your percentage math is a bit off.

Comment Re:Fuck Canadian content welfare system (Score 1) 324

Being overwhelmed with cheap American content doesn't assist in educating Canadians about Canadian values and awarenesses.

Why should this even remotely matter? It is not a government's job to educate its citizens about values that it wants to promote. In fact, that's an extraordinarily bad idea.

Comment Re:'Pass it on to the consumer' (Score 2) 324

I don't think that you understand capitalism. The companies that will be affected (and indeed, every for-profit company, everywhere) already charge the most money that they can. I know some customers would theoretically pay more for any given item, but each company charges as much as possible for its products, regardless of its costs. If I own a company that makes a widget for $80 and can sell it for $100, I'll do that. I won't sell it for less because it would still be profitable. On the other hand, if my costs increase to $90 per widget, I can't suddenly charge $110 for the same item and keep the same level of income. Some customers, maybe even most, will stop buying the widget. If these companies now have to pay more taxes, many will move out of the higher-taxing countries completely, and some may just fold. Sure, some could probably afford to pay more taxes and still be profitable, but it certainly won't make their shareholders happy.

Submission + - Tesla plans to power its Gigafactory with renewables alone

AmiMoJo writes: In his press conference, Elon Musk stated that the factory will produce all of its own energy using a combination of solar, wind, and geothermal. Engineering.com looks at the feasibility of the plans. Spoiler alert: it looks possible, though some storage will be required. Fortunately, if there is one thing the Gigafactory won't be short of it's batteries.

Comment The benefits of specialization (Score 4, Insightful) 548

I learned C++ first and just kind of learned various languages and technologies as the need arose, and now I know several languages and my projects have been widely varied. But I noticed that most of my peers who specialized were much more in demand, and therefore pretty much had their pick of jobs, made more money, and had better working conditions. The kind of specialization I'm referring to is learning something that less than ~5% of programmers know, but is still in some demand, and likely to be in demand in ten or twenty years. Or if you pick something that many programmers already know, learn the shit out of that one thing so that there aren't many others that have your level of knowledge in that one thing. In an interview, impressive knowledge of something specific is always better than just adequate knowledge of many things.

Also, learn how to be interviewed. It is a very valuable skill.

Comment Re:Football Manager (Score 1) 39

You kind of suspect that there's some huge archive of historical data about football in the back of a project like that, to parameterise the players and teams, but it never occurred to me that they had 1300 of their own scouts performing observations.

From what I've read on their own forums, they do have an enormous number of "scouts" that give them information, but most are volunteers, so the information is sometimes suspect. I'm sure that most of the players in the top leagues around the world have fairly accurate attributes, but when you're relying on one guy in Uruguay, for example, to give you info on every third-tier team, some of it naturally going to be way off. So teams that will be using this data hopefully understand that those 1300 "scouts" are usually just fans of the game that happen to live in an area where they can contribute.

Comment Re:All that money... (Score 1) 39

And I still have to turn it off after a couple minutes because it's putting me to sleep.

Not every game has to have a high score to be exciting (I'm assuming that's why you find it boring). Look at USA-Belgium in the World Cup: 0-0 after 90 minutes and one of the most exciting games of the tournament even before extra time. American sports fans have been unintentionally brainwashed by the major sports here to want score-score-score, but as more people watch the one true sport, more people are "converting", especially when they find out no ads for 45 minutes at a time.

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