i saw the forbes link but i was putting it down as partisan or at least vested interest. a couple places show that tax revenues go up every year (w/ some 6 exception years) which casts doubt on the forbes data. this seems to say that http://www.factcheck.org/taxes/supply-side_spin.html. These guys have a really crappy site (so they must be academics) but they say "what evidence there is suggests there to be a correlation between lower taxes and LOWER revenues, not HIGHER revenues as suggested by supply-siders. There may well be valid arguments in favor of tax cuts. But higher tax revenues does not appear to be one of them." They also seem to show supporting data based on percentages rather than straight numbers for gdp which seems to be more valid, imho. http://www.econdataus.com/taxcuts.html

sold. I do see some value in the military spending (1 and 2) but if you give me 4-6 I can come in on 1 and 2.

that was easy. what else should we solve? how about something really hard like organ waiting list priorities?

results of your search are very mixed. the saddest thing i found when going through the google results is that I could tell what the article was going to say based on the source, ie all seemed partisan. Do you have any economic papers or non mass media sources that back up your analysis? This seemed to be the best source (on page 4 of hte results). But it seems to say the bush tax cuts were unsuccessful in their goals.
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/bush-tax-cuts/index.cfm

Right, so you took 5 years to pay back for an education that will benefit you for some 50 years of life. seems like a no brainer.

Besides, you don't seriously think it only costs 9k/student to run a university, do you? Think of how many people you interact with, teachers and staff, grounds, facilities. I ran across this infographic on Univ of Alaska. Presumably their heating bills (and maybe staff retention) are higher than most but I would expect this to be indicative of any institution. http://www.uafsunstar.com/archives/10184. Given roughly 35k students at that institution, that comes to about 24k / student / year.

another good article along the same lines is here; http://www.topuniversities.com/studying-abroad/advice/how-much-does-it-really-cost-study-us

Truthfully, i don't understand what the griping about the 9k/year rates is about. this is taken in the form of a loan from teh government which doesn't need to be paid back until you have a good job. Basically, the society is making a bet that each student will be successful. If the student is successful, they have to pay back that loan. If the student isn't successful, they don't pay it back and the state eats the cost. this seems completely reasonable for the state to take the risk and for the student to pay back if it works.

I used to be proud of over 1 year uptimes until i realized 2 things:
1. you aren't patching enough
2. when the reboot happens and it turns out your initialization script for one of your servers wasn't tested thoughly enough (b/c you never rebooted) you have a big problem. having configured it 6 months ago (timeline from when I learned my lesson) and half remembering which configs are which is going to lead to more downtime. You should really reboot after major (re)configurations to make sure your server comes back into the fold effectively... obviously, this should be during a controlled maintenance window but preventative maintenance still counts as maintenance

who hasn't automated their patching yet? being able to move OS's to other hosts (or datacenters) plus the drastic decrease in time to provision and general hardware abstraction is invaluable.

according to their site, http://ee.co.uk/plans#section-phones, the 500mb option is on the cheapest plan. for 36gbp you get 5gb. The previous highest i could find when shopping around early in the year was 2gb from vodafone.

While I would prefer an unlimited plan, this doesn't seem particularly unreasonable, or am i missing something?

It's not gov't involved. 'Tariff' in this context is simply the price the carriers are charging. I probably includes the taxes (VAT) but it is simply the price on the plan.

maybe mainland you do but in the UK, that isn't the case... I would say that a quarter of the help desks for national UK companies are based in the UK (completely anecdotally)

Not sure where you got that I was anti progress. I think the led crops idea is cool, i think the centrifuge idea is dumb. Perhaps our main disagreement is in scale. If we are only feeding 6 people, sure no problem, we could probably even build for 20. But once we start talking about 100+ people, a number I would very much like to see us pass, we are going to need to take as much of the complexity as we can (and no more) out of the system.

As far as materials, absent some miracle nano tubing based space elevator, lifting this crap off earth is both expensive and, especially when you start talking more environmentally sensitive items, dangerous. I can't dismiss the costs as easily as you seem to, i would look for a different engineering solution than 'wasting' all of that weight (and gross materials) on centrifuges.

Hmm.... so many problems, where to begin...
1. 50 square meters of vegetation per person. HOw are you going to build a structure large enough to do all your planting?
2. I see the snark remarks about getting your centrifuge spinning in a vacuum but you are providing oxygen and food. how are you going to get oxygen and food in and out with out appreciable loss of energy? (and gardeners, fertilizer, seeds. wait, where is the fertilizer coming from? capturing the astro port a potties will help but you will need a good deal more than that.)
3. You are talking about building huge lithium batteries. How are you getting that much lithium off the planet? I do like the heat battery idea mentioned in a few posts down, throw in some mirrors to concentrate and you have a battery of sorts without requiring a lot of material.
4. Materials is a huge issue. Anything we can build out of rock we need to bring (at least until we have fabrication set up). That is hugely expensive.

true, i get he impression that most of my mother-in-laws direct fears were hold overs from her mothers experiences. But i also get the feeling that there was serious chilling effect from the stalinist polices that was just starting to thaw in the 80s (when people started admitting they were not part of the communist party in mixed company). During my mother in laws time it was more about lines and scarcity.

Also, to say it is in any way equivalent to what is going on in the us is what i was arguing against. Even now (though It feels like putin is working on reviving the good old days) US is a far cry from where russia is. The recent example of pussy riot for example but more chilling, imho, is the arrest/discrediting of 3 political opponents that I know of, and I don't follow this at all.

apparently a vcr cost the equivalent of a small house. once again, you lack perspective

whereas most obstetricians in the western world will tell you that sex during pregnancy is considered a good thing. Releases a bunch of endorphins in the mother's blood stream that are considered good for both mother and baby.

no, i haven't.

That would be an interesting poll, how many people have?