First of all, quit being obtuse.

Second, train engineers are not the "original" engineers. The original engineers were people who designed siege engines (hence the name) for warfare -- ballistas, trebuchets, battering rams, etc. -- as well as fortifications. Military engineers predate trains by several thousand years.

Third, the second-oldest type of engineering is "civil engineering," and is named such because "civil" is the opposite of "military." Civil engineering is also several thousand years older than trains.

Oh, and by the way: the word "engine" didn't originally have anything to do with internal or external combustion; the Latin root word translates roughly as "a produced thing," or an object created by ingenuity. So in the truest sense, an engineer is anyone who uses his ingenuity to build something.

The only reason railroad engineers are called such is because presumably the earliest ones built the damn locomotive as well as operated it. Besides, the US and Canada are the only places that call people who drive trains "engineers" anyway -- everywhere else calls them "drivers," "operators" or "pilots."

Have you seen our tax code? When I took Federal Income Taxation in law school, I had to get a copy of the tax code, and it was about six inches thick. (I don't remember, or care, if or how much it was annotated.) That's a mighty long list of exceptions to consumption tax.

First of all, income tax is production tax, not consumption tax, so you've got your thinking backwards to begin with.

Second, just because the current implementation of the income tax is riddled with loopholes and power-grubbing statist bullshit, doesn't mean it has to be. A progressive income tax could be as simple as setting tax rate = f(income) where f(income) is a sigmoid curve such that f($0) = 0% and the limit as income approaches infinity is 100%. Politicians would fight over the parameters, of course, and most people would need a slightly fancier calculator to compute it, but the end result would fit on a page.

In contrast, to make a sales tax progressive it must be complicated, because somebody has to decide which goods people at each income level should be "allowed" to afford. In contrast, a simple sales tax where all goods are taxed at the same rate would be inherently regressive because low-income people spend 100% of their income buying stuff while high-income people don't.

I'm just curious if these are the same people who penetrated the SR site via phpMyAdmin, over the Internet, on 192.168.1.24?

I mean, what motivation could there have been at play?

Georgia makes such a distinction. If you go to a supermarket and buy the ingredients to make a sandwich they'll be taxed at something like 2%, but if you have the people at the supermarket's deli counter make you a sandwich it'll get taxed at something like 7%. If you buy both, your receipt will show the 2% tax applied to the subtotal of the sandwich ingredients and 7% tax applied to the subtotal of the prepared food. (In GA, taxes rates are also set on a city and county basis, so the actual numbers may vary.)

IMO, the categorization does get kind of arbitrary and capricious. For example, what about a pre-made sandwich in the deli's refrigerated case? What about a sandwich made in a factory instead of the deli? What about a doughnut made by the bakery vs. a boxed doughnut from the junk food aisle?

You could say "all the food bought at the grocery store gets taxed at the lower rate," but then the grocery store's deli has an unfair advantage over the likes of Subway. Or you could say "everything that's a processed dish (rather than a raw ingredient) gets taxed at the higher rate," but lots of things (e.g. cheese) can be either depending on how the customer intends to use them.

I dislike the IRS as much as anyone, but I think taxing income is a lot simpler to make progressive than trying to categorize all the different kinds of products available would be.

It should be quite obvious to you what happens when we tax people on what they own. We already have this: it's called property (or school) tax. It's what causes people to sell their homes and move, because they can't afford to live there anymore. These are usually people in or near retirement. If you think it's OK to kick old people out of their homes-- because we all know, they're such drags on society-- then you can have your draconian property tax.

You still won't eat the rich, which is what you obviously really want.

I'm starting to think that having private citizens pay any tax directly to the federal government is a problem. It completely overrides their right to govern themselves at the state and local level. Because the federal government is entitled to so much of the people's wealth, it is given de facto power over everything. Disagree? Then ask why every state's drinking age is 21.

Progressive income taxes have resulted in the largest debt in the history of mankind.

On the contrary, irresponsible tax cuts without commensurate decreases in spending have resulted in the largest debt in the history of mankind.

We could talk about the "coincidence" that said tax cuts disproportionally favored the wealthy (i.e., they made the tax less progressive), and that spending actually increased and most of that increase was for war.... but you don't really want to admit that, do you?

It's such an inconvenient fact that deficits tend to drop due to the policies of liberals and rise due to the policies of [neo-]conservatives, when [neo-]conservatives desperately try to lie and claim it's the other way around...

What makes an ad agency reliable to you?

One in which all of the employees are encased in carbonite, and whose computers and records have all been nuked from orbit.

Anything less and you have to assume they're still unreliable.

And what solutions do you recommend for individual blog authors to implement "host your own ads"?

Not Our Fucking Problem.

Sorry, but I will continue assuming all ads are crap I don't wish to see, served by companies who don't give a crap about my privacy or security and whom I therefore do not trust.

The revenue of web sites interests me not even a little.

Go to a subscription model and see if you can stay in business. Or accept that some fraction of users do not wish to see your advertising, and don't trust the companies serving them.

"one psychiatrist" is not a valid citation. Point me to a name, a study, and some literature to explain why this discovery hasn't taken the medical world by storm, I'm always happy to expand my knowledge.

No kidding ... attempting to force your way into something guarded by armed military personnel and then discovering they're not afraid of you isn't terrorism.

It's a frickin' Darwin award.

I consider that only one of them is dead to be either extraordinary luck, or surprising restraint on behalf of the soldiers.

You know, I'm a pretty heavy user of tinfoil with an inherent distrust of government.

But even I don't need to look at this as an abuse of power by the government.

The rights of US military personnel to shoot your stupid self for trying to ram through a gated checkpoint with big giant signs saying "we can and will stop you, by force if necessary" has been established for an incredibly long time.

Most of the last century, I should think. Probably MUCH longer.

Sorry, but this falls entirely in the domain of "if you didn't see this one coming you're an idiot".

yes but they shouldn't be, protecting secrets shouldn't be more important than protecting citizens.

There comes a point where what you are doing is telegraphing that you are no ordinary citizen doing ordinary things.

Approaching that gate with the big barricade, armed guards, and the huge sign which says "this isn't your usual place, and it isn't under the usual rules ... keep the hell out", and then deciding you're ramming it anyway? Well, as I said, that's a special kind of stupid.

It isn't like these guys went trigger happy and went after someone who was doing nothing at all. Trying to drive through a military check point on a military base sends a specific enough signal that I think to expect to NOT get shot in that context makes you an idiot.

Ramming gates on a military base isn't something you can reasonably expect to fall under the domain of things you can do without Really Fucking Bad Consequences.

I'm among the first to complain about government over-reach. But fucking with armed military personnel under strict orders to keep everybody out? Definitely not that.

Seems like further evidence that the NSA believes it can do *whatever* it wants to any peasant that puts a toe out of line. I question whether lethal force was necessary in this case.

While true that apparently the gate crashers didn't shoot anybody

1) This wasn't the NSA, directly. It was the US Army guards from what I can tell.
2) If you try to crash a gate guarded by any Army, I think you should reasonably conclude you might get shot

I dislike the NSA as much as any nerd, but by the time you're talking about the people who guard military bases and other secure compounds you kind of need to understand these guys are deployed under a set of orders which says "we'll be polite as long as that is possible, and then we'll be significantly less so".

Maybe you think the armed guards on a military base should say please and thank you and be friendly, but there's usually big giant signs that say "do not taunt the lions, they will bite".

It's hard not to see getting shot as a completely logical outcome of what happened.

So in some abstract sense I can see why the NSA could be considered a valid target in some contexts.

But, honestly, trying to gate crash an Army base and then getting into a shooting match with the guards ... well, that's a special kind of stupid.

If you and your religion wish to be able to discriminate against someone on the basis of your religion, then you and your religion should correspondingly lose the legal protection of being discriminated against.

If you are such a whiny idiot that you think it should be OK to say "we don't serve your kind here", then you should have no legal or moral basis to claim that someone shouldn't be able to do the same to you.

This is giving religion an extra special place in law ... protected from being discriminated against, while getting a special exemption to discriminate against someone else.

So either shut up, and accept that you have no other ways you're legally allowed to discriminate against someone ... or accept that it should also be someone else's right to refuse you because of your religion.

There is no in between, and any claims your religion is so precious as to require you receive rights nobody else has is complete crap.

Sorry, but the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIL want to have a society based on religious exceptionalism.

Which makes people who want to have religion be a special thing in law are full of shit, self entitled people, and are actually the enemies of a free and open society.