Hope is our understanding of quantum mechanics. The cat should be dead, but it doesn't actually have to be until we open that box. And sometimes it isn't.

It's an essential part of the human condition because it represents a useful, if frequently futile, understanding that unexpected things actually do happen to our benefit. Occasionally.

Lettuce genocide.

Right under our noses, folks. Never again.

We saw the movie. We know what's in the box.

In Thailand, they haven't seen it yet, apparently.

It's not a crock, and you're missing the point.

Paying people some income number is pointless and expecting it to all just "work out" isn't borne out by reality. Inflation itself puts the lie to that, but even if you try some sort of "fair" income which is pinned to inflation, you're still going to have people who get themselves in a position where they will give themselves commitments in excess of their income. This doesn't happen immediately to everyone, but it eventually it does shake out that way.

We need to define what comfort entails and simply provide it. If you try to game the market with increasing salaries to provide comfort, you're not going make it work. As you said, we based our prosperity on the need for skilled workers who needed stuff Americans made in factories. We don't have that any more and we can't fake that prosperity by throwing mere fiat currency at people. You need a system that provides comfort to people efficiently in a manner that they cannot squander it, even if they try to.

Once you've provided for comfort, the numbers start becoming luxury. We need to look at what provides actual comfort rather than trying to take people down a notch. I just feel like the focus is on the "unfairness" and not on the real problem. I don't care if someone is rich, if I'm okay. We need to make sure everyone is okay, and that we are able to sustain it.

The reality is that people who make more will tend to value themselves at that monetary value, and live that lifestyle, instead of realizing they are making 70k a year for a 40k job.

In theory, people would understand that and take the extra money and invest it, or at the very least, understand that the basis of their current standard of living is unstable, and take precautions to ensure their financial security.

The reality is, even though people are entirely capable of doing the math themselves, when some banker tells them they can "afford" a 700k house or when their politicking or nice boss causes them to be paid above scale, the loss of that becomes equivalent to the loss of some sort of human right. They then expect to be compensated for their loss, even though the economics doesn't support that rate of pay.

So no, that's not a reason to deny someone a raise, but it doesn't necessarily provide a fix for the problem that there are people out there who don't have the skills needed or alternately, there are more people with that skillset than there is demand for that skillset out there.

There are two problems out there, and they are not actually directly related. The first is that people see large inequities in wages between the top and the bottom. The second is that some people have trouble making ends meet.

Although many people feel as if the 1% taking a drastic pay cut will solve the problem of poverty, the reality is that it will not necessarily. If Bill Gates has 90 billion dollars and I make say 50k a year, but I have everything I need to live comfortably, then is Bill Gates making 90 billion actually a problem? The answer is "no".

The actual problem is determining why people are not making enough to be comfortable. And for that, we do need to understand the issue of pay inequity, but we need to look away from what I'd consider simple envy, and look at solutions that actually get people out of poverty. You could shear away all 90 billion of Gates' money and dump it into a welfare fund for everyone in the USA. That's $300 per person. Once. Period. Shear away the earnings of the top 1% and you might increase that into a few thousand per person in a one time, lump sum. That wouldn't even be enough to pay for a semester of college at a state school.

The amount of money you get isn't actually a problem. We can manufacture money. The government prints it. But what happens when we give more of that money to your average person? I'd argue that a lot of people would suddenly become better off and more comfortable, but within a generation or two, you'd be sliding back to where you started. Why? Because some people make poor decisions about how to spend their money. While you can suggest that they get "tricked" or swindled out of it, most con men will tell you that their scams work basically because people get greedy and disengage their brain. They ignore good solid math to make risky decisions or take gambles which feel good to them, but cause long term disaster. You can't make that problem go away by simply giving them a raise, because bad decision-making is a black hole which can consume any amount of money you throw at it.

And on the other hand, you have people like your Gates' or Buffetts of the world. Some people are good at making cars, some people are good at being doctors. They are simply good at making *money*. Making money is a skill like anything else is, and some people have that skill. Those people will generate cash, because they are good at it, and they enjoy it. Just like you enjoy watching your favorite TV show. Those sorts of people will on average, always make more money than everyone else. Its a matter of focus, not criminality. If your tax laws allow a tax haven, they will use it, because it helps them be more profitable. Is it their responsibility to not take that completely legal break because you don't think they "need" it? Do they get to tell you that maybe you shouldn't buy a McMansion that you would know you can't afford if you simply added up your mortgage payments for 5/10/30 years and compared it to your take-home salary?

The market isn't wise, the market is simply us. It isn't this mythical thing that exists separately from humanity, it reflects what we ourselves do, both our good and bad decisions. It isn't the Messiah or a Prophet, it is simply the way things are. If you want to change how things are, you don't try and game the market, you listen to what it is telling you and you act on that. If people are poor, there is a reason they are poor and that reason is not always external to them, nor is it always out of their control.

If you want to end poverty, you don't simply redistribute money. You create an ongoing basis for providing people certain comforts despite their bad decision-making. The tricky part is how we set the level of comfort and then how we pay for it, and how we make sure people value it. Does everyone get a house? Sounds good, but how do we keep it from becoming "The Projects" where no one respects what they have been given. If they're renting a place, they'll never really fully believe it is theirs, but if we give them a house to own, how do we keep them from selling it to pay for their gambling debts?

I think that the talk about the 1% is a red herring. There are some asshole rich owners out there, but I think we need to focus on what causes those lower down the income line to be unable to maintain their standard of living over time. Giving people at that level a raise is not a permanent fix, it's a band-aid. It could provide an opportunity for some motivated person to make something of it, but most people will burn it up, just as surely as if they lit the bills and smoked them.

Which is why we don't do that.

A sliding scale of taxes implies that we give a certain value, politically, to certain sized religions. It's almost like an establishment of small, unobtrusive churches that don't threaten anyone and are easy to control. Which is sort of the same goal, with different tactics, that the old time governments had in establishing their state churches.

The right to petition has never had the authority to do anything but offer a means to go straight to the top without being stopped by the bureaucracy and gatekeepers, but it is important to have so that people can actually sign it and show that there is a large number of people who support the proposition and it won't be stopped at the door.

I think, however, that the people who post the petitions vastly underestimate the number of people needed to sign in order to use that strategy as a primary method.

Petitions are useless unless they represent a message that can't be ignored. They need to have enough signatures to crash the site. Getting 10,000 or 50,000 people on a petition would probably only rate the brief attention of a staffer. You could probably get a congressman's attention, but *only* if those signatures were primarily in their district. Otherwise, it's a big fat "whatever".

For the *President*, you literally need high hundreds of thousands, possibly well into the millions of signatures to make a real difference. His electorate is 300+ million people. 100,000 people is nothing. And even then, that million or so would be better if it was strategically concentrated in certain swing states.

I wouldn't say that they are "scared" of CoS. I'd say that it doesn't really matter much to them. CoS is a constitutional headache that the government doesn't need.

I'd say it is a religion as defined in law, but a religion currently run by criminals.

Take the Catholic Church. You can sincerely be a Catholic and believe in the value of the position of Pope, but there have been times that Popes were tried and their corpses thrown into the Tiber. And this was actually done by Catholics themselves.

CoS could (in 100 years) be a nice bland religious organization if it eventually comes under the control of more sincere and reasonable people who actually believe in that twaddle and want to run a church, as opposed to a scam.

The CoS leaders should be investigated and tried for the crimes that they have committed, but I'm okay with CoS keeping their exempt status.

The charity aspect is only one reason for tax exemption. It's a good one, but tax exemptions are also to keep them out of politics (directly anyway) and also, in the US, to avoid the situation where politicians can use tax policy to squeeze out those religions that they don't like.

So they can't operate a Political Action Committee. They get to, just like any other corporation, if you take away their tax exempt status.

Scientology, however, is a for profit business that is masquerading as a religion. In that sense, it is a fraud. It is not sincerely a religion to those who founded or operate it.

I'd also argue that some of the megachurches out there are also for profit frauds.

We may need to redefine what "non-profit" means. You can get very personally rich if you hold certain roles in a big non-profit, which can lead to undermining the concept of a non-profit. Sometimes, it is warranted, if you are simply an employee with specific skills needed to operate the organization. If you operate your church as a family business, however, I am not so sure that certain restrictions are unwarranted.

That said, given a choice of letting CoS have their tax exempt status and removing tax exempt status from all religions, I'd let them keep it. Taxing them removes money from them, but they'd probably just increase their pricing to pass it on to the ahem, "customer".

At the time, fighting that suit would have been an existential threat to the site given the CoS's aptitude for using lawyers. That's fine and all, if your primary activity is fighting that stuff and you're ready to do so.

However, this is primarily a tech news aggregation site that has a free speech commitment, not a free speech at all costs site. I'm willing to give them a pass on it. The reality is that the way the site works would allow someone to post that material again, and until CoS finds it and they set the DMCA on it again, this site would be able to temporarily host it, and would continue to do so until the lawyers attacked. That's good enough for me because it gets the material out there. If you're sharp-eyed enough, you could then grab it and spread it via your other channels. Mission accomplished.

This is actually what I heard about the Federal Obamacare exchanges. Effectively the contracts person at CGI was rolling over as the government kept shifting the requirements and adding extra. And it wasn't so much that more money wasn't provided, but it was the fact that you had a deadline to work against and even if they had added extra resources, the amount of time to get those resources up to speed would have crossed the deadline.

You need people that stand there and say, "You didn't get this in the contract, it's not reasonable to add this now, and even if you give us more money, you can't get it in by the deadline." That is the job of your legal, contracts, and ultimately your executives. It can be a fine line, because you don't want to piss off your big customer too much, but you still have to lay down the terms. If not, you'll get walked all over and the project will fail.

It is a much different world after 9/11 for Americans, especially with flying. There were hijackings and all before, but nothing like 9/11. I could believe in the 1990's someone would still be complaining about rather light security.

Today, you are lucky to just be asked a few questions, and whatever you are faced with, you shut up and deal with it or you have somebody in a room groping your genitals.

This is true. As a contractor, I paid absurd heath insurance rates. Now that I am older and married, forget it.

Granted, now we have Obamacare, but that shit is pretty damn expensive too, unless you are getting a grant to offset it. It may be just as much, if not more, than the rates I paid to obtain health insurance on my own.

Of course, I also know that I have to switch jobs every few years to make a decent raise, so in that respect, I'm living the contractor experience with less pay, but more overall safety. It's a trade I am happy to make as someone with a family, but as a young, single person, I'd might drool over the raw cash more because I'd have fewer things putting their claim on my paycheck, so I could invest the extra money more freely and make it work for me while still driving around an econo-box and living with roommates.

Which honestly, isn't the example to be had here. Jackie Robinson had to be superior to other ballplayers because there was a barrier. He gets credit because he had to play at that level to basically be "employed" due to that barrier.

If you take away the barrier, and you have two people in front of you for consideration with equal qualifications, the person who works hard to get to the same place is commendable, but no more intrinsically qualified to do the job you're hiring for. The reward in their work is that they are in that chair, they are not rewarding *you*. You may admire their tenacity, but there is no guarantee that their tenacity can be put to work for you. More to the point, there is no reason that the person who "got off easy" is not more useful to you for various reasons.

Does that person have to continue that level of effort just to maintain their spot on the team? If so, they may be working at 120% every day and have little to give when it comes to be crunch time. I remember an IT manager who I used to work with. He was Employee of the Year at the place I worked at because he worked 18 hour+ days and bled for his systems. The problem was, he was a hard worker, but he had little left for improving the system. After his inevitable burnout, we were left with a pile of crap that only someone who was working 18 hours a day could manage.

Work != Outcome. No matter if it feels morally satisfying.