They don't even need to nationalise the whole electricity system. My local supplier generates 99.9% of the electricity locally through one renewable source... that is the way it has been locally for as far as I can tell. And yet, we pay through the nose "to encourage the switch to renewable energies".

It would be nice if the price reduction reached the end consumer... the retail price is still more than 25 times that.

Would that announcement have been made like 8 days ago?

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:

• Luxembourg: 0.16€/KWh (+6% VAT) for 100% renewable (http://www.leoenergy.lu/particuliers/nos_tarifs/electricite__1).
• France: 0.1209€/KWh (all taxes included) for renewable.

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".

If you are happy with limiting yourself to that glass ceiling, be my guest... I personally find it unbearable to have reached the highest seniority/compensation when you still have half (or more) of your career in front of you.

Even tho they are based in my country for tax reasons, itunes and amazon refuse to provide this service to me. I could buy from a service in another country, but according to the rights holder representatives that crime is as heinous as pirating. The catalog of services that are available to me usually doesn't contain the music I enjoy, so in the end I stopped consuming. This is a loss they will somehow blame on piracy, even tho it has nothing to do with it.

I indeed do not hold a credit card anymore, the vast majority of shops around here do not accept them.

So you mean the big fuss is over them being able to do "grep $googleid unified_services_access.log" instead of "grep $googleid *service_access.log"?

The problem with the 100 pushup challenge is that you quickly hit the diminishing return point... you rapidly cross the line between growth and endurance training. Not that there is anything fundamentally wrong with that, it depends of your own objectives. But for general fitness and hypertrophy, you'd incease your returns by inceasing the difficulty of the exercise (change the weight distribution) of your pushup once you can do 3x8 with perfect form. You should also train squats, L-sits and pullups to try and train most major muscle groups. C25K is a very good "by the numbers" program to start running. B210K picks up from there to double the distance. Running will do wonders for your stamina and your lower body muscles. There are also many calisthenics programs out there that don't require a lot of investment. Overcoming Gravity, Building the Gymnast Body, Never Gymless...

I'd watch your link, but ":/ Unfortunately, this video is not available in Germany because it may contain music for which GEMA has not granted the respective music rights. Sorry about that".

You actually don't need to use cat (a command designed to concatenate files) or grep, you can get around just with the shell internals. So with a text based log, you can still go around checking the logs if /bin went the way of the dodo.

Also text is very disk corruption resistant compared to binary... what happens to your nice binary format when a single block of the disk it resides on is gone?

Don't get me wrong, I can sort of see the appeal of their proposed solution as a complement to the existing syslog... but as a complete replacement?