I have an idea: Anyone "earning" more than $1 million per year pays no Federal taxes. At all.

Instead, they just have to spend at least half of their "earnings" on goods and services. Every year. I don't care what they spend it on: Could be yachts, could be Oreos. Could be Chinese-made trinkets or American-made binoculars or Italian sports cars.

Don't care: They must spend it on goods and services. Not domestic investments. Not off-shore resources. And then prove that they've done so, every year, and prove that they've received these goods and services, and that they were all sold to them at reasonable market value.

(This likely means they'll need to employ an accountant. Cry me a river.)

In exchange, they owe no Federal tax. (I'm also in favor of saying they'd owe no state taxes, but that's 50 more arguments.)

The other half of their "earnings"? They can invest it. They can sit on it in an interest-bearing account. They can buy even more goods and services. They can have the bank give them 50% of their earnings in $2 bills so they can swim in them. Give it to their children and friends. Donate it to charity. Buy small countries. [More] Hookers and blow. Don't care.

If they fall short on spending 50% in a year, then they simply owe the remainder and a 25% penalty to the general fund: If they "earn" $1,000,000.00, and only spend $300,000.00, then they'll be required to put $250,000.00 into the kitty.

Hoarding thus solved, and their contractors and retailers thus wealthy (though perhaps not rich) and paying regular taxes, the wealth disparity is thus solved.

If they don't like this gambit, they can just, you know, earn less money. And then it will still automatically be spread out much the same by market forces.

Perhaps only clever in modern parlance; there was a time where flywheels were very, very common for energy storage. (And no, I don't mean the one between the engine in your car and the transmission.)

That said: It spun at 10k RPM before launch, which also seems mighty nifty for the time until one realizes that the bearings only have to work once...

Making a zip gun from plastic tubing is, however. And that's what a 3-d printed gun barrel is.

Now that I think about it, yeah, I guess I was one of the beta users. What the hell, I tried that with Gmail, years ago, and that worked out pretty well ...

The pre-public-release G+ was kind of odd-looking, but my God it was fast. I'm really sad about how quickly it went downhill.

Stop making sense.

Ok, I'll bite. I'll start by saying that my premise here is to demonstrate that the year of manufacture really doesn't fucking matter.

I have a 2002 GMC Safari cargo van. I also have a 1979 Pontiac Firebird Esprit.

They're both rear-wheel drive. The suspensions are almost identical. As are the brakes -- I think the front rotors might even be the same part. Idealized engine output is about the same. Both have open differentials. And no rear sway bar. Both have 15" wheels of similar overall circumference and width. Neither vehicle's design pays much attention to weight distribution.

Chief differences: The Safari is a little top-heavy and has much more body roll, and it is fuel-injected and has ABS, so it tolerates cold weather a bit better.

Yes, I'm comparing a work truck to a 34-year-old "sports car". It is not an unfair comparison even though more than 20 years separate them: In fact, it disturbs me somewhat to think this through and realize how similar they really are.

They work about the same. Braking sucks, cornering sucks, and acceleration is OK. Handling, in raw terms, is ridiculously similar: They both understeer badly, and there is no easy fix for it in street driving (late braking works, but scares the straights and tosses tools all over the truck).

Meanwhile, I also have a 1995 BMW 325i. It itself is creeping up on being 20, although other identical cars were produced 20 years ago.

Braking? The seatbelts can leave a bruise across your chest. Handling? Tends to understeer, but that's easily fixed with throttle manipulation instead of late-brake techniques. Winter? You betcha: Feed it correct tires and it goes where you tell it...quite boringly and predictably, in fact. Acceleration? Meh, but it's got an engine that is old enough to vote with over 200k hard miles and zero internal work.

Comparison to a buddy's new F-150 King Ranch with a twin-turbo Ecoboost V6, or another friend's new Mazda 3 with a spunkier 2.3l 4? I'll keep the old BMW, thanks...and the 18-year-old sedan certainly works better than the 11-year-old work truck, or the 34-year-old "sports car" that is almost the same.

But more to the point: Blindly comparing a 20-year-old car to a modern car? Good luck with that: There are simply too many variables. Automotive things do not change as fast as you think that they do, and do not change in easily-generalized directions. Generalizations suck because they're usually wrong. Please stop doing that.

(I could write more about the 1995 Chevy Beretta that I drove to death, or 1996 Pontiac Firebird that a deer ate, but I have no purpose in beleaguering the point further.)

I see this mode of operation in many cities in Ohio.

The lights have been there for eons, though control of them has been continually improved over my lifetime (at least) in accordance with available technology.

Perhaps your usual stomping round just sucks.

But I only get traffic tickets once every several years on average. I think I have had two tickets in the past decade.

I live in and do almost all of my driving in semi-rural Ohio, and the courts are not quite so factory-like here as you describe. There is an excellent chance that the officer will actually show up, if I follow all of the steps you present and actually get a real trial.

Once there, I suppose I could pull out the usual bag of tricks (tuning fork, ad infinitum), but it is likely that I will be found guilty.

And having once spent a month in jail for pissing off a judge in a civil matter, I do not want to repeat that.

So why should I bother with the fight? Because I'm a patriot? An altruist?

Nay. I think I'll just pay for the citation and move on.

So trains can't stop for shit because...couplings.

Obviously you fail to understand that each car on a train has its own braking system.

But I think there's a few other things you don't understand, so I'll let it slide. This time.

I'll just re-quote from the article the passage I quoted in a previous post:

Understanding this is pretty easy; if you choose not to do so, that's your business, so to speak.

No it's not. The summary (and the article, which is essentially the same fluff as the summary repeated several times--I RTFA'd so you don't have to) says to avoid technical jargon, which has actual meaning and is therefore terrifying to people who want to be executives. The bullshit list is business jargon, which is inherently meaningless and is therefore very useful to C*Os and those who like to imagine themselves in such positions.

For any /.er working in an environment like that, I'd like to think this would be a sign that it was time to get the hell out.

When G+ started out, it was clean, fast-loading, reliable, and did exactly what it was supposed to do and no more. You know ... like Google used to be. I had real hopes that G+:FB::Google:Yahoo.

Every change since then has made it uglier, slower, and buggier; with the latest interface changes they've not only caught up to but actually surpassed Facebook in the amount of irritating crap they shove at the user. Google may be able to coast on people's affection for them as a search engine (especially when the competition is Bing) but they're going to find it increasingly difficult to break into new markets if all they do is ape the worst behavior of the existing market leader--which in this case emphatically includes "adding a bunch of new 'features' when the ones we already have are kind of crap."

I still use Google as my primary search engine, Gmail as my e-mail provider, and Google Maps when I want to figure out how to go somewhere I haven't been before. Nothing they've done since then has provided any reason to switch from whatever solution I'm currently using. And I really don't think I'm alone in this.

:)

The problem with broad generalizations is that they're usually wrong.

Downtown in my fair city, the traffic lights do all of the following, all of the time:

Timer-based operation
Pedestrian button-based operation
Inductive loop operation
Photosensitive activation by emergency strobes of a certain cadence

The walk signals also operate whenever the light turns green for that direction, no matter what activated the light, unless it was activated by an emergency vehicle.

Despite all of this, the countdown displays make excellent predictors of an upcoming yellow light in normal traffic: It counts to zero (or 1, I forget), starts flashing some manner of "Don't Walk" idiogram for several seconds. After that, the yellow and solid "Don't Walk" happen concurrently.

Every. Single. Time. It's consistent.

Meanwhile, car-specific indicators do exist: Examples of them are on US 23 north of Columbus with a speed limit of 55MPH. The sign simply says "Prepare to stop if flashing" a good distance ahead of the intersections. By golly: If it's flashing when you approach that sign, you may as well coast because you'll be stopping soon enough.

In terms of trying to drive safely and proactively, I don't need a timer to tell me that the light will change soon. I just need an indicator. For me in my area, a dedicated flashing light works fine on higher-speed roads, as does a countdown timer on lower-speed city streets: I can see it fine at 35MPH. *shrug*