Just Say No! (alas too many people fear income tax)

Yeah, I think it comes down to that. I've lived in Texas at times, and it's a huge point of pride that there is no income tax in Texas. Of course, it still needs a budget to provide basic government services. So there are very high property taxes, moderate but recently increased sales taxes, and a recently introduced corporate tax (called the "franchise tax" in local lingo). Those are all in several ways actually worse than an income tax, but they "aren't an income tax", so politicians and voters prefer them.

I'm sure that will work well with the VOIP I use the machine for.

So you mean 2 extra steps then? One to open the cover, and another step to close the default app when I want to use something else instead?

Jennifer Bartlett does seem to be 2nd author on the linked paper (out of 14 authors). It's true the news story doesn't seem to have interviewed her or given much credit, though.

As the summary notes, it was only recently discovered that this system has three gravitationally bound stars, making it the widest such group currently known. Paper from a few months ago on the arXiv, and a news write-up of that.

With a value-added tax (VAT), if you buy $150 of intermediary stuff, and use it to produce $200 of stuff, the tax is levied on $200 in total value, which is charged as $150 on the first sale and $50 to the second sale. If you buy equipment that is producing goods or more equipment, you only pay sales tax on the incremental value added, not on the cost of the machinery.

With a sales tax, you either charge on both sales for the full amount, in which case a $200 product has paid sales tax on $350 worth of sales in this example, or you do special-case exemptions, such as exempting "manufacturing equipment" from sales tax entirely, as some states do. Sales taxes are also more brittle because since the entire tax on charged on the final retail transaction, it encourages black-market no-sales-tax sales.

So far they seem to be one of the safer parts of spaceflight, in that there have been 204 spacewalkers, and none died or suffered serious injuries. Whereas a number of people have died during take-off or reentry. On the other hand, they're typically planned for very carefully and not done that often. And 204 is too small a sample to reliably compare it to the safety of scuba diving, since serious scuba accidents, especially by professionals, are far less common than 1/200 dives.

Bitcoiners on reddit are completely delusional.

A sentence that is guaranteed to be true for two independent reasons. ;-)

Sure, but that's a market-internal "value" that doesn't lead to the kind of idealized market that actually makes any sense.

You can see this fairly clearly if you study dynamical systems. Some of them are "well-behaved", in which inputs/ouputs relate as you might expect. But many have internal pathologies that they can fall into if they reach certain states: feedback loops and chaotic behavior and such that's driven by system-internal (aka market-internal) dynamics and disconnected from anything else (such as any market-external notion of value).

Both parties in a trade value what they are getting more than what they give.

For a certain definition of value, yes, but not necessarily for the common one. In an idealized market, you do hope this is true for the common definition also: people have independently assessed how much they value some commodity, and offer a price accordingly. The price then converges on some aggregation of values.

But in real markets, this is often recursive: someone is offering $x for a commodity not because they themselves consider it to have a certain value, but because they think they will be able to resell it for $(x+y), due to market fluctuations. They may themselves consider it a worthless pile of trash valued at $0; day-traders, unlike value investors, don't make trade decisions based on their own assessments of the underlying value of the commodities or equities they're buying and selling. Instead they base their decisions on statistical estimates of market dynamics, independent of whatever the underlying item is and whether it may or may not have any value at all (models often don't even consider the underlying item in the equation).

Try keeping Ubuntu up to date. The individual downloads aren't as big but they are every day.

ISPs are not a charity, they are a business. Business exists to make money. Deal with it. If your politicians are doing favours, it is your politicians that is where the evil lies.

This is 2013 and we live in the richest nation in the world

Actually you live in the most indebted nation in the history of the world. ergo, you do not live in the "richest nation in the world" despite what your politicians would have you believe.

... i foiled a global internet attack that would have caused routers the world over to explode. just prove i didn't, right?

Also Netapp, Juniper, Bluecoat...