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Comment Re:"Tax the rich" canard (Score 4, Interesting) 395

If the IRS grabbed 100 percent of income over $1 million, the take would be just $616 billion. That’s only a third of this year’s deficit.

This year's deficit is about $750 billion. I think you're emboldened quote is a little out of date.

Well, I don't really think rich people should pay for it ALL. Just a lot of it.

But let's look at that math. According to http://www.forbes.com/sites/mo...
the top 1% average in 2012 was $717,000 per household and there are roughly 1.2 million such households. Their income was therefore about $880 billion. Figures aren't in for last year but it's safe to say they're considerably higher.

The deficit last year was $564 billion. So yes, they could pay the deficit and have money to spare.
If you recognize that nobody's proposing that they do it without help from the moderately well-off, it starts looking not at all out of reach.

But paying the deficit wasn't even my point. If you want to nationalize health care, you do it with taxes. INSTEAD of the health-insurance premiums and all the nickel and your-whole-bank-account charges we pay now. Not in addition, INSTEAD.

Comment Re:Sanders amazes me (Score 5, Insightful) 395

Paying for them is a simple matter of raising taxes on wealthy people.

You think we can't afford to pay for health care? We're paying for it now through a combination of taxes and premiums, just in a less efficient system than what Sanders wants.

What other thing is it you think we can't afford that Sanders wants?

Comment Re:yep. Calling is wrong 70% of the time. Better i (Score 1) 93

A naive strategy that would beat most non pros would be as follows:
At each round of betting, evaluate how many stronger hands there are than your cards and how many weaker hands there are. If there are N other players at the table, you should bet if the number of stronger hands divided by the number of possible hands is less than 1/N because you should assume that whoever has the strongest cards is still in the game, so the strongest opponent is the strongest hand of N random hands.

Comment Re:Batteries are too expensive (Score 1) 533

Beating the utilities that way isn't even a goal that makes sense. Making the utilities work for the public should be the goal. Their function should be to get power to people that need it, when they need it, at the lowest cost consistent with that goal. They should belong to the public so there's no conflict of interest. Once solar systems are installed, they're the lowest cost source because they either produce power or the sit there in the sun not producing power. Generators have to be on line to make up the difference between power being produced right now and power demand right now.

Comment Re:Help me out here a little... (Score 4, Interesting) 533

To really handle it, you have to be able to prevent solar producers from putting power on the lines if there's too much production for the consumers. That means there need to be some restrictions on the design of solar systems so they don't keep dumping excess power into the grid when it's not needed. Ultimately this may mean that for cities with lots of solar systems, there will be parts of the day when your system limits itself to only producing what you can use in your house and puts no power back on the line.

Comment Re:No front page for Rand Paul? (Score 1) 676

Because nobody expects him to get the Republican nomination.

Also because this:
http://www.fec.gov/press/resou...
242 official candidates as of whenever they last updated that list at the FEC. Most of them are nobodies. Rand Paul isn't a nobody but he doesn't toe the line for a Republican Presidential candidate so he's not going to win the nomination. Smart money is on Jeb Bush. Dumb money is Ted Cruz or Rand Paul.

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