Sorry, everybody with some decency had asked themselves that question before. Of course decency is a quality rarely found in the target audience of a GOP debate.

That depends on how their insurance think about the importance of passenger screening.

The iPad wasn't a revolution, it was an evolution of the iPhone. Without the iPhone and its apps the iPad wouldn't have been the success it has been. Apple's genius was recognizing that they could extend the striving ecosphere of the iPhone to another device, and thereby kickstart its adoption. That's the major advantage they've had over other people trying to launch tablets, and it's an advantage that they created, so I'm not belittling it. The device in itself wasn't revolutionary.

But $100,000 for someone earning $20M/yr is a much more trivial expense than $100 for someone making $20K/yr. For the former it cuts into affording stuff like this year's Lamborgini, for the latter it will cut directly into one of food, shelter, clothes, transportation. Not to say that this system isn't fairer than a flat $100 for everybody, just pointing out that once you earn several 100 times what is needed for a comfortable living, a few $100,000 more don't have add much value (except for the bragging rights).

But that's exactly the point! Traffic lights are there for cars because they can cause lots of damage. That, and it is much more comfortable to wait for a traffic light to turn green sitting in a car, listening to some music of your choosing at a temperature of your prefernce than it is half standing on a bike exposed to weather and traffic noise. All this skews cyclists towards running traffic lights before any sense of entitlement comes into play.

I've been using WindowMaker as my window manager since sometime during the nineties. I use it to keep open lots of xterms, a few emacs windows, Thunderbird, Firefox clearly assigned to virtual desktops. That's all I need for work. I tried using fluxbox, but after I had to do post-mortem debugger resuscitations one too many times, I found out that I don't need fluxbox's tabbed windows, and that stability easily is the most important issues for my "focussed window determination software". Every once in a while I fire up whatever KDE's application panel tends to be called that day and see what new apps the admins have installed, but if I need them, I launch them from an xterm. Much easier than looking around the ever-changing start-menu varieties invented by GUI designers.

So yes, except for moving focus between windows IMO everything is easier done from the command line.

Steve Urkel?

The German guy who got fired (had to resign, actually) was not an official, he was working for his party. He also (probably, IANAL, developing story and all that) didn't do anything illegal, he just misused the trust bestowed upon him. Which probably is worse, even though I don't see how his party (FDP) was in any way hurt by him telling the progress of their coalition dealings with the CDU to the US. Just a jerk trying to be important. And probably the wrong person for the job.

I was fairly disappointed by the first day of this wikileaks release. So American diplomats report back to their foreign ministry about the politicians in their host country, and write the same thing the local newspapers are writing? Wow. What a revelation! Made me lose interest very quickly.

So his argument is that consumption taxes encourage saving money. But that makes it even more unfair to the poor who don't have money to save. Rephrasing his argument: people who can afford to save money can gain more with a consumption tax than with an income tax. In other word, it's a gift to rich people. Which was exactly my first point.

As for the second point and your reply (your sister). I would wonder if it's not actually a gain in quality of life for her that working overtime is discouraged. Her boss certainly won't expect her to do it if there's nothing in it for her. Maybe he'll hire another person -- it will certainly be cheaper for him to hire another person than to pay your sister adequately for the extra time if your numbers are correct. I.e. everybody benefits, it seems. And if she actually enjoys working so much and my point concerning quality of life doesn't hold, then she will certainly also enjoy working overtime without compensation ;)

Lastly, yes, if people benefit extraordinarily, I don't see why they should not also contribute extraordinarily (your point about the taxation quantiles).

Consumption taxes mostly affect the poor. Why? Because they spend a larger fraction of their income on goods. So in that sense it's a much more unfair tax. On the other hand, concerning the argument that an income tax discourages from working: with an income tax you have more money if you work more. How's that discouraging? Could you expand on Mankiw's argument?