The problem is that people think they understand statistics when all they know is how to enter numbers into a program to generate "statistics".

They mistake the tools-used-to-make-the-model for reality. Whether intentionally or not.

Heroes fix problems that everyone can see.

Ninjas fix things before anyone can see a problem.

I prefer the ninja approach myself (as you seem to) but it does require either an informed manager or a lot of PR work on your part.

And since we know that informed managers are few and far between ... looks like you'll have to be your own PR agency.

The truth is he might have not felt qualified, but he was admitted to the CS program at MIT, one of the few elite CS departments that really means you are at least +1SD above average IQ, and quite likely +2SD or +3SD.

Possibly. But the point is that because he looked the part he was able to more effectively utilize his intelligence than someone who did not look the part.

If his appearence had been different then there would be obstacles to overcome that he did not have to face.

Not really. If that were the case, then the tax would differ between two jobs of differing hardness but equal pay. But it doesn't. Likewise, if we double or halve the amount of work done at a job, and thus the hardness of the job, but don't change the amount of pay, the taxes remain constant while the hardness varies.

What you're really identifying is that if someone's work hours are doubled or halved, this typically comes hand in hand with a doubling or halving of their pay, which is the actual factor that affects their taxes.

The IRS doesn't care if you pour asphalt or sit at your desk.

No, they're widespread opinions. Laws usually come about because people think they're good ideas; why would legislators work to enact laws that everyone except for me was opposed to?

People who inherit wealth didn't work for it, and didn't earn it. Some heirs might be in a desperate way, and it isn't bad to help them get on their feet. Others might inherit items of significant sentimental value but which aren't fabulously valuable and that's not so bad either.

But there is no gain to society for a select few to become particularly wealthy in an undeserving manner, such as by inheritance. In fact, it's dangerous, because wealth tends to provide power, and now you've got people who have no rightful claim to great wealth also possessing great power and likely using it for ill. Certainly that's the usual way things go, and we should adopt rules for the usual case, and not for rare exceptions.

And it's not odd to see wealthy people perfectly in favor of estate taxes. Here's something from Andrew Carnegie's book:

As for progressive income taxes, ability to pay is the best way to go. It works. People are okay with it.

An absolute flat tax is pointless unless the amount you need to raise is very very low: taxing everyone, say, $100/year will result in some people easily being able to afford it, others barely able to afford it, and quite a few simply unable to afford it. Saying that it's fair that each person should pay the same quantity doesn't help them get it in order to pay it. You will wind up with a lot of people not paying their taxes, requiring either piling unjust punishment on top of their existing poverty, probably at the expense of the state, thus requiring even more taxes to proceed, or a de facto progressive taxation system in which people who are unable to pay are allowed to slide.

A proportional flat tax similarly fails. Below a certain amount of income, people simply cannot afford to pay, even if the tax were merely 1%. Unable to get blood from a stone, you must again either punish poor people for being poor, which is the sort of thing that justifies having your head cut off by an angry mob with a guillotine, or you wind up adopting a progressive taxation scheme and merely being a hypocrite who is saddled with a stupid tax system.

Some flat tax proposals suggest including various measures to avoid this, e.g. only kicking in above a certain level of income. This means that they're not actually flat taxes, they're progressive taxes which have two brackets, and are thus simply poorly designed. An ideal progressive tax, OTOH, would probably just be a mathematical function, with the tax rates varying smoothly as income varied, but for the sake of simplicity, we tend to have a number of brackets.

As a closing word of advice, you may do well to google things quickly on your own, rather than demanding answers to cover for your own ignorance or as a crappy rhetorical device.

So you're saying that given the opportunity of increased profitability, but worse levels of service and diminished customer satisfaction, a cable TV company which is also a telephone company, would not jump at the chance?

Regardless of the legality, my post was in reply to someone who was making unfounded claims of racism.

There are some pretty good reasons why so many people just stop paying attention to those who jump to racism to explain any injustice.

I think that digital cable is now capable of sending individual streams to subscribers' sets. I never really used on demand / pay per view features, but I don't think it's like the old days where there were a half a dozen channels all airing the same movie at slightly different times.

And more importantly, it would mean that cable companies no longer had to pay for and carry some channels they don't care about in order to carry the OTA channels that they do want.

Congress may very well step in, but the threat of Aereo remains the cable companies, rather than Aereo itself.

If that's the standard, then based on your tone, I hope you aren't a parent.

Wouldn't need another child losing a loved one.

The problem is finding out that they aren't a good guy too late. This guy was a retired cop. He should have been one of the people who could be trusted with a firearm in public, but he wasn't. That calls into question whether or not anyone can really be trusted with firearms in public, as a matter of public policy.

What should the law be when it's impossible or impractical to determine whether or not someone will lash out this way? Were there warning signs about him? Should people with ill tempers be allowed to own firearms, and if not, how do you identify them reasonably? A man is dead, and a three-year old is without a father because we choose that it was more important for the shooter to be allowed to have a gun than for him not to be allowed to have one.

The gun rights groups answer to gun violence is almost always to suggest more guns. All that could have done here with short tempers and close range is make more dead people and grieving families.

No, that's not true. An income tax taxes you based on how much you made; whether you worked hard or not in order to make it isn't a factor. In fact, a lot of jobs at which people work very hard are not paid well at all, and therefore tend to incur lower taxes.

Passing down property to heirs can be socially dangerous. It's not such a big deal when you leave some modest bank accounts or some furniture or something, but it's not good to have people inherit vast estates merely due to the accident of their birth.

Besides which, you're missing the main point of progressive taxation, which is that if a certain amount of taxes need to be raised, it's more fair for people to contribute what they can afford such that they feel the same amount of burden, rather than for the burden to be mathematically uniform but to have widely disparate effects in reality.

Even if he wasn't involved, if somehow we informed all of America, and if they all believed it in this day of partisanship, it would still be a huge problem for his Presidential chances. After all, what kind of an administration does he run where he hires people who are prone to this sort of petty political madness and who manage to pull it off without him getting a whiff of it?

One is malice and conspiracy. The other is somewhere between incompetence and bad judge of character. Neither looks good.