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Comment: Re:Why is it news (Score 1) 814

by Frequency Domain (#40036385) Attached to: From MIT Inventor To Tea Party Leader

Glad you brought that up. Debt/GDP is about where it was at the end of WWII. What differs now is the will to respond. That generation tightened their belts and raised taxes as high as in the 90% range for top tax brackets.

That generation also could cut government spending by 60%, since, y'know, they could just turn off the war economy they'd been under for the past four years. It's a lot harder to turn off entitlements.

Twelve years ago we were able to maintain a thriving economy, the entitlement programs, and top marginal tax rates below 40%, and we had budget surpluses. Now we have lower tax rates, a huge debt problem, and people saying we have to chop off support for the most vulnerable segments of society. We can fix the budget problem by a convex combination of entitlement cuts and tax increases, but you can't have it both ways and most people want the entitlements.

Comment: Re:Why is it news (Score 5, Informative) 814

by Frequency Domain (#40034783) Attached to: From MIT Inventor To Tea Party Leader

We've had this level of debt/GDP before, and we survived it. I'm not going to claim it's a good thing, but it's not the disaster the right would like to paint it as. We've paid it down before, we can do it again. But as we pay it down, remember that the overwhelming bulk of it was accumulated by three administrations -- Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II.

The lower graph is the debt/gdp ratio. As parent points out, growth is mostly in the last three Republican administrations. Also note that Obama wasn't sworn in until 2009, and the huge increase at the right began before Obama took office. In other words, it's the recession rather than the stimulus package.

Comment: Re:Whatever Apple's paying (Score 1) 193

by Frequency Domain (#39959447) Attached to: NY Times Apple Tax Article Flawed

Furthermore, corporations just have to raise prices, so in the end consumers pay for it. And they pay for it in a regressive way.

And assuming you work for a corporation, those 28% that "you" paid was actually paid by your employer, because that's where all your money comes from.

Your claims reflect a very common misconception. Basic supply/demand analysis shows how it actually works. The relevant slides are on pages 2-3 of the handout. The question of who bears the brunt of taxes depends on the relative elasticities of supply and demand.

Comment: Re:A Book You May Like (Score 1) 530

Looks like Ruby or Python will do the trick

Python has more market share than Ruby and I hear lots of other folks talk about how beautiful they find it. However, my primary field is computer simulation and object-oriented modeling is extremely important to me. I find it hard to get past having to explicitly include "self" as the first argument to methods in Python -- to me it makes Python feel like a procedural language which bolted objects on as an afterthought, while in Ruby OOP is integral. I seem to be in a minority on this, though.

Comment: Re:Well, no... (Score 1) 258

by Frequency Domain (#39846911) Attached to: The Science of Handedness

So what you're really saying is: you're kind of a big deal.

Not even close.

What I'm saying is that being ambidextrous in a one-side dominant population provides some quality-of-life benefits. I thought that viewpoint was relevant to the topic and I shared a few examples to illustrate the point. Nothing in that list is a big deal to anyone but my wife. It's the luck of the draw that I happened to be born ambidextrous, and to the extent that I think about it I consider it one of several ways in which I am fortunate.

Comment: Re:Well, no... (Score 3, Interesting) 258

by Frequency Domain (#39839813) Attached to: The Science of Handedness

You joke, but that was literally true for me w/ regards to handwriting. Then one day my second grade teacher saw me switching hands and freaked out. She made me sit on my left hand for the rest of the year and had the colossal gall to tell me that someday I'd thank her for it. When my doctor learned about it at my next annual physical, he was pissed off beyond belief. He didn't cuss, but he kept muttering about "superstitious morons" and "subjecting kids to the prejudices of idiots", or words to that effect.

Fortunately the only thing impacted was my handwriting. Fifty years later my left-handed writing still looks like a first-grader while my right-handed writing got arrested at a second grade level. But I'm one heck of a typist, when I played soccer I did equally well on either left or right wing, I'm popular at dinner parties because I can accommodate whoever I am seated next to without bumping elbows, and my wife thinks I'm a very versatile fellow.

Comment: It's been done (Score 1) 210

What I want to see is a real compromise of one of these systems that can be held up as a true scare story:

....

3. The results reported are undeniably wrong. Eg., the test voting was done in a controlled manner where everyone knew what the correct results should be and that everyone saw that everyone else had voted the way they were supposed to, so if the system functioned correctly it's known exactly how many votes should be cast for which candidate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy

So I'm ugly. So what? I never saw anyone hit with his face. -- Yogi Berra

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