You forgot the 4th position.
This question has no bearing on my life whatsoever and I can't believe how retarded society at large must be for that question to receive so much attention. Believe what you want to believe (or not believe) and respect others ability to do the same.
Your rehash of Pascal's wager is overly simplistic, just like the original.
What about you believe in God and it turns out Allah/Zeus/Odin/Pan/Quetzalcoatl/Invisible Pink Unicorn do(es) exist while God doesn't?
By the way, Pascal's wager was put on the Index by the Vatican... because faith through logic is not faith.
I haven't seen the CPU as the bottleneck on any of the DB servers I have administered in the last 4 years, except on seriously under-spec'd systems. The most CPU intensive DB at work is peaking at 3 cores out of 24, but maxes on IOPS (8GB link to an auto-tiered SAN, 50% SSD disk pool) and RAM (256GB) throughout the entire job.
Imagine a large corporation where every department has its own IT department, where no embedded IT department trusts any other embedded IT department and where few people trust the centralized IT. Throw in the fact that most of the IT is managed from Luxembourg, the political impossibility to enforce rules across the network, the relatively low salary for the IT people not on the paper pusher path (becoming internal would have cost me a whole third of my salary), the insanity of the promotion rules, core services being outsourced to the lowest bidder every five years... and you've got the recipe for the mess they're in.
The technical solutions to fix the EP IT issues are known and easy, the problem is getting the political support to make them stick.
Not necessarily, because in those 6 months he (or the rest of his team) would have been less productive as the promising applicant was trained.
I have been in that situation twice in the last two years and now the "promising applicant" would need to be exceptionally close or hired straight from the direct network of a team member... If I spend more time over 6 months training a new hire or controlling/correcting his work than I'd have spent doing the work myself in the first place, then it makes no sense to hire the "promising applicant". I would rather temporarily spread the workload across the team (and drop less important tasks if necessary) until "the right one" turns up.
Belgium effectively had a government. The exiting government handled the day to day business until the newly elected one finally moved in. The "crisis" actually reduced the Belgian deficit.
Second layer of icing on the cake, Belgian education is essentially free.
Tossing out numbers is idiotic at best, but since you fabricated numbers it's pure propaganda. The establishment of a tax system is based on percentages, not dollar amounts. Why? Because this is the only way to make the system fair. If I make 1 billion dollars and pay 10% tax, and you make 50 dollars and pay 10% tax, the system would be fair. What is unfair, is that someone holds the ability to make a billion dollars while other people in the same society starve.
Actually no, what you have described is the most repressive and unfair tax system possible in all cases where the cost of living is higher than 45 dollars. Let's, for the sake of the argument, say that the cost of living is 50 dollars. Now the person earning 50 dollars pays 5 dollars of tax and is thus 5 dollars short and can't afford the basic necessities. The person earning 1 billion dollars will pay 100 million dollars and thus still keep 899950 dollars above the cost of living. Hardly fair and clearly put in place for the profit of the people in charge. That is actually as close to the medieval model as you can get in modern society.
Let's for a second posit that not all money is equal in utility... money below the cost of living is way more useful than money above the cost of living, and the usefulness progressively decreases the further you get from the cost of living. I mean, if the cost of living is 50 dollars you don't want to keep less than those 50 dollars. That is why usually the tax system is working with progressive brackets (from 10% to 39.6% currently in the US) instead of a flat tax. Money below the cost of living should be taxed less than money above the cost of living, which is why the brackets and effective taxation rates depend on your situation (single, married filing taxes together, married filing taxes separately, head of household).
Practical example, at the current US tax rates, for a head of household earning 100000 dollars and not doing any fiscal optimization. The tax bracket is 25% but the effective tax rate is below that. The brackets are as follows: 10% for money between 0 and 12750, 15% for money between 12750 and 48600, 25% between 48600 and 125450. So he's effectively paying 10% for the first 12750 dollars he's earned (1275), 15% on the next 35850 dollars (5377.5) and 25% on what's left (51400, so 12850) for a grand total of 19502.5 dollars. That is an effective tax rate of 19.5%.
Non-German living in Germany.
Rates: varies between 0.24 and 0.27 per kWh, before taxes, depending on the subscription you take. My area is 100% renewable and has been for decades (several dams). The local government, before the energy supply was privatized, has spent a fortune on windmills and photo-voltaic parks but our energy supply is wholly generated by the dams.
The rates across the border for the same service are:
Yeah it's well known that geeks are unable to learn anything new.[/sarcasm] Granted, learning the soft skills required to be a successful manager may not be the easiest thing for the stereotypical geek. The good news is that I have only encountered a handful of the stereotypical geek in the 20 years I have worked in the field so far.
Do you know what really needs to die? Having managers that are so technically clueless that they think that repeating "make water rain upwards" often enough, and having repeated meetings about that concept, will make it happen. Or managers whose first answer to any request is "no".
"I've seen it. It's rubbish." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android
