There is a certain current of Americans who hate France and all things related to French culture (I know, it's ironic, but stick with me...). Usually they tend to be tea party or hard core conservative types.
I'm none of the above. My thoughts about France are probably the same as the typical British person's are (if you're looking for a comparison, anyways.)
I'm also fairly certain that the French hate Americans more than I hate the French.
Sorry, but that 90% figure is sensationalist and just another way to say "look, we're getting screwed by the 1% more than we used to! Torches and pitchforks now!" and ultimately isn't useful. Why? Because practically nobody ever paid 90%, and furthermore the rich paid less of a burden then than they do today. Why? The tax system worked a lot differently then. It was the top marginal rate on an income above $300,000 for single, $400,000 for married. In order to effectively be paying 90%, they had to make over $2 million per year. Keep in mind that that kind of money was practically unheard of during that time.
Even if you adjust for inflation, you'll find less people making that amount then than there are today, mainly because all economies were much smaller, there was less money to be made, and overall there was much less wealth that even existed to begin with (and yes, the amount of "wealth" does increase as economies grow, which means there's more to go around.)
Bottom line: Today the rich DO pay a higher portion of taxes than they did then, even when adjusted for inflation. I'll let an investment broker do the explaining here:
In 1958, approximately two million filers (4.4% of all taxpayers) earned the $12,000 or more for married couples needed to face marginal rates as high as 30%. These Americans paid about 35% of all income taxes. And now? In 2010, 3.9 million taxpayers (2.75% of all taxpayers) were subjected to rates that were 33% or higher. These Americans—many of whom would hardly call themselves wealthy—reported an adjusted gross income of $209,000 or higher, and they paid 49.7% of all income taxes.
In contrast, the share of taxes paid by the bottom two-thirds of taxpayers has fallen dramatically over the same period. In 1958, these Americans accounted for 41.3% of adjusted gross income and paid 29% of all federal taxes. By 2010, their share of adjusted gross income had fallen to 22.5%. But their share of taxes paid fell far more dramatically—to 6.7%. The 77% decline represents the single biggest difference in the way the tax burden is shared in this country since the late 1950s.
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
So you see, even though the top marginal rate was higher back then, the rich paid LESS taxes than they do today. So stop with this Michael Moore bullshit (sorry, just that 90% figure gets thrown around so often, but it doesn't mean what the typical person thinks it would mean; as is typical in Michael Moore fashion.)
Have a nice day.
The problem is not over-production, it is that for some odd reason we see production as the goal of economy. Problem is, the goal is not production, it's selling.
No, the goal of an economy is to sort out who gets what scarce resources. That involves both producing the resources and selling them, though the selling part is optional. For example, if you build a computer, you didn't sell anything, meanwhile you have produced (the whole product is worth more than the sum of its parts, generally speaking. E.g. a graphics card is somewhat worthless unless it is inside of a working computer.)
The goal is cheaper, cheaper, CHEAPER! We have to produce cheaper. Cheaper than the competitor, and even if there is no competitor, we have to produce cheaper. Not to sell it cheaper, as the market theory would demand, but to increase the profit margin. But hell, even if we WERE selling it cheaper, it would not make a difference. Because whether you sell something for 100 or 50 does not matter if the prospective buyer has NOTHING.
That hasn't always been the case, and it still isn't in certain cases. Lean manufacturing is where the concept of cheaper being better largely comes from (it also simultaneously results in a more reliable product in most cases...there's the stereotype of "things just aren't made the way they used to be" but that largely isn't true...today we often throw out or sell perfectly good things, not because they break, but because we want to replace it with the latest and greatest. Concepts like six sigma and ISO9000 didn't exist in the 60's.)
Cheap simultaneously means the poor have greater purchasing power, which means they become weathier without the need for higher income.
However not all products are defined by how much bang for your buck they are, rather they are defined by their sticker price and strict distribution controls to prevent underselling. Such products are e.g. anything Apple sells, certain luxury cars, Bose speakers, certain high-fashion clothing, etc. Products like these are where "cheap" is generally thrown out the window. And you know what? This is the way things always have been for items that traditionally rich people buy. Once upon a time, for example, only really rich people had cars. This model started to end in the early 1800's, and it's what the Luddites were making a fit over: Now that the poor could have access to high quality goods, it suddenly made being an artisan not as lucrative as it once was. But, there still is room for luddites in niche markets, like paintings, pottery, etc.
It is a fact that the worlds poorest are now wealthier than they've ever been. That doesn't mean that they have more money, but things like world hunger have largely ended (still exists in a few pockets of areas, but that is mainly due to politics rather than economics in those cases) and quote-unquote "nice things" are much easier to afford. A common example I like to make is to compare the 80's with today...Remember how only the filthy rich could have 50" TVs, car phones, personal computers, and laser disc players? Now even the poor have much better TVs than the ones rich had in the 80's, cell phones that aren't tied to a car and have unlimited talk time for a flat rate, and blu-ray players, and I've seen more than one homeless person walking around with a working laptop. Used to be the homeless were lucky if they eat more than one meal in a day; now they're often overweight.
Today's poor make the rich of the 30's look like paupers, and the middle class of the 80's look like welfare recipients. I'm tired of this rhetoric of the occupy types who make a stink about being poor just because the goalpost for "poor" keeps moving higher and higher on some spreadsheet, meanwhile they ask for "fixes" that will just end up making things worse.
What do personal tax rates have to do with a corporation paying corporate taxes? There are no "75%" corporate taxes in France?
Technically true, and my point wasn't to say that corporations pay a 75% tax, rather my aim was to point out the biggest absurdity in their tax system in order to emphasize how bad it is. It is quite so bad that in fact that they are reversing course, which again I wanted to emphasize. As far as the 75% tax itself...the 75% figure cannot be taxed to individuals directly; I don't know exactly why, but apparently it's against their higher laws (constitution? I honestly don't know enough about French law.) What I do know is that it comes in the form of a payroll tax. The original law was written so that it was a regular personal income tax, but it was shot down in their court system, so it had to be rewritten to its current form, and the tax is paid before they even receive the money, or something to that effect.
The biggest waste is that once ET finally makes it home, it turns out he's not really wanted there anyways:
In some countries, maybe there's some blame to be had for escaping taxes...but France is a whole other argument. I mean shit, 75% tax on the wealthiest has resulted in a lot of them just flat out leaving that country. It got so bad that their dear leader is now lobbying against his own tax plan; the same plan that put it there to begin with.
Here's a good read on the subject:
Mod parent up, please.
I'm sick and tired of this thought process that there must be exactly X portion of a given race, gender, etc in a particular job field or working at a particular company to match the demographic portions of the overall society.
The fact is, not everybody wants to do these jobs in equal numbers. I recall not long ago a slashdot article mentioning the science of why given races/ethnicities prefer sticking together instead of intermingling (I'd get the link, but I don't want to take the time to find it) and it has nothing to do with racism.
Ever notice how blacks have their own co-culture? They call anybody who doesn't quote-unquote "act" that way "acting white." Gays do something similar, and they refer to ones who don't fit into the mainstream gay culture as "straight acting."
Likewise, it would follow that different ethnic groups, and indeed different genders and orientations, would pick up their own co-culture. These co-cultural differences *WILL* influence career choices, believe it or not. Likewise, not the same number of Asians may be interested in the same career choices as Arabs, or pick your own favorites and compare. It therefore also follows that not the same percent of any given demographic is going to be interested in a particular job to match their representation of the overall population.
What you're effectively trying to do is force whites and blacks to be equally interested in rap and country music in equal numbers, and it will never work no matter how hard you try. So can we please end this affirmative action madness already?
I guess this means my prime subscription will never include snu-snu.
Usually there are other indications along with these, such as scratches, abrasions, lacerations, etc, (RARELY bruising, as bruising usually occurs after the fact) that are normal when you struggle on the ground. In most of these pictures, you see no such indications. Typically that means the person was very quickly brought to the ground and cuffed as that picture was being taken. If that is the case, then it's very hard to argue that there was any kind of abuse. Abuse is when they beat on them either before or while they're on the ground, and you'd see marks show up rather quickly.
When I need to get an evil villain job done, at first I thought nuking it from orbit was the only way to be sure, but if you have one of these then you officially have more than one way to be sure. Convenient times we live in.
Right, because clearly beating somebody bloody with a baton is the only way they've ever handled it.
Most of these photos don't even depict abuse, rather they depict some derp acting like a jackass and then resisting arrest, and getting a knee to the neck. That's hardly what I'd call abuse, meanwhile the caption is "oh the humanity!"
Not every ISP is comcast. But anyways, I'm not saying it will for sure, however the doonsday scenario of some providers getting no traffic at all *probably* will not happen. If it does, I think we can do something about it, but for now it could very well not be a problem.
You'll have to understand I have little tolerance for activism. Typically activism is built around sensationalism, which is basically where you make a problem sound worse than it actually is (groups like PETA come to mind in the extreme cases.) I'm not really convinced that the internet will end without net neutrality. It could potentially make a few things inconvenient, but I'm not convinced that we need to get out our pitchforks and torches over it.
Besides, most of the people who make an issue of it vote for the same people who are actively working against it. That problem is especially pronounced here. Most people on Slashdot seem to love voting for Obama, yet while his administration seems to talk about wanting net neutrality, it only ever takes actions towards ending it (as well as services like Aereo, which his DOJ is actively fighting against.)
Kidney donation is already forbidden if there's even a slight chance of that happening. Those who have donated in the past are first in line as recipients for transplant.
This isn't a proposal by the way, the organ transplant system already operates this way in the US. They have other rules too like type O organs only go to type O recipients (otherwise type O people would only ever donate organs but never receive them.) It's a pretty well thought out system, but the supply is awful because nobody wants to participate.
Well, here's the main thing: I mostly don't have time to trudge through those man pages. The man pages frequently don't show example usage, which in many cases means you have to guess their syntax. Maybe not so bad if you code on a regular basis, but I don't.
I actually would love to be able to code in C, but every time I try to get around to it, one of the common things I'm told is that if you don't know C at this point already, then you really shouldn't bother with it, because there won't ever be any jobs that will ask for it unless you're writing device drivers (which is something I'll probably never do.)
If the learning curve wasn't so steep, I'd probably take a bigger interest in it. Instead though I have to deal with shits like you who talk down to anybody who isn't part of your clique, so I'm just not going to bother.
Net Neutrality is one of those things where I'm preferring a "wait and see" attitude. As a network engineer and as somebody who generally likes the status quo of uninhibited access to any content you want, my instinct says we need it, but then again I may also be wrong. Let me explain why...
One of my pet peeves about politics is how people make reactionary decisions to something they perceive as an imminent danger, but ends up not being one. One of the manifestations of this is the way we ban organ selling...In Iran, there are no shortages of organs, which is entirely the result of Iran allowing people to sell their organs. In the supposedly enlightened US, we tell people that getting paid for your kidneys is immoral. But look at it this way: Kidney dialysis has a high morbidity rate, and costs the government (via medicare) upwards of $100,000 per year for each patient who is on it, and they are on it for life. A kidney transplant on the other hand is a one time cost of $100,000 for the surgery followed by about $5,000 per year in drugs, results in much higher quality of life, and dramatically reduced morbidity. If you were to pay people $25,000 for a kidney, I'm sure you'd find many that would jump on it, and we'd save so much money on dialysis that it's not even funny. But somehow, the fact that they get paid money instead of donating for free, is considered immoral.
Whenever I propose that idea to people, they always suggest something to the effect of black markets arising where people get their kidneys stolen...but even in the days when organ selling was legal in the US, that never happened. Not even once. In fact, there are zero recorded cases of it ever happening period. There are all kinds of urban myths, even a Law & Order episode about it happening, but it never actually did. The reality is that you'll never in a million years find a transplant team who will participate in that. It's not an operation that just one doc can perform, it requires an entire team and a participating hospital to boot. Nobody is going to walk into a hospital with a bag of kidneys to sell.
The actual reason we got rid of organ selling in the US was because it made it almost impossible for non-rich to receive organs, because people would only sell them. There are all kinds of ways we can solve that problem without resorting to complete banishment; for example we could mandate that only the US government is permitted to buy, put a fixed price on it, or we could even do what Iran does where both the government and charitable organizations ensure that you'll always be able to afford to buy a kidney.
But still, because of these perceived problems, we'll probably never have that happen here. Same thing for prostitution (which actually does quite well for Germany, but if you ask any American they automatically assume prostitution results in increased violent crime, STDs, and pimping.)
Now, that big huge (perhaps oversized) rant aside...What are the potential upsides of doing away with Net Neutrality? It could possibly happen that ISPs might actually upgrade their networks for once if they're getting paid more. Maybe, who knows. The big thing though is that we don't really know, because we've never truly been without Net Neutrality. I'd be fine with trying it for 5 years and seeing what happens. They could do one of those laws that has a sunset provision where after 5 years it has to either be permanently extended or permanently removed (none of this doc fix bullshit.)
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
