SSD is still expensive, and die in time.

All hard drives die in time, and SSDs are getting to the point where their rated lifetime is actually longer than spinning disks. That is, unless you do ridiculous things like defragment your SSD.

The only reason a pyramid scheme is bad is because when people realize it's a pyramid scheme, there isn't actually enough money to pay everyone back. Although it's possible to describe bitcoins as a pyramid scheme, the money doesn't disappear the moment people decide to take it back. Although it's also possible to describe Social Security as a pyramid scheme, everybody already knows how it works so there's no surprise and the beneficiaries are poor old people instead of a handful of already-rich bankers. A Ponzi scheme is only bad because it will inevitably come crashing down on the poor fools who fell for it.

There are 3600 seconds in an hour, not 360.

24 and 60 were not arbitrary. They were chosen by ancient Babylonians because they are cleanly divisible by many numbers; 24 by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 12, and 60 by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30. It was important to be able to divide time cleanly because they didn't have fractions or decimals at the time. Citation needed, of course, but I don't have time to find a source and this is something I remember from when I was a kid.

I did not mean to say that $6,000-$40,000 is middle class. I was describing a separate situation. Unfortunately I wrote it in a way that didn't make that distinction clear. Also, I said "most", not all. The rest of my post dealt with the situations you described: shielding assets from taxation in ways that take time and money.

Now, it may be different where you live, but in Iowa it's possible for a family of four to live fairly comfortably and even contribute to the consumer economy on $25,000 a year. In fact, I know it's different in denser parts of the country. I guess that (and the impact global warming has had on almost eliminating winter around here) would be a good reason to move to Des Moines?

I really wish somebody would just link to an original story. This may be Slashdot, where everyone is supposed to know about everything going on with copyright, but I can't be the only one who doesn't know off-hand what the story is with Aaron Swartz. I'm even at least 50% sure I am aware of this story, but the name alone doesn't bring the whole thing back. In the future, please, just a little reminder at least.

Contain your sexism; long fingernails may be a key feature of your (female) secretary stereotype, but they get in the way of typing. Any professional, even potentially vain secretaries, will be more concerned with keeping her job than with conforming to your stupid preconceptions.

The point is that everyone gets tax breaks and the reason why is that our tax code is crazy complicated.

This is the definite truth. I can personally vouch for the fact that the federal government just loves giving huge tax credits to incomes between $6000 and about $40,000 a year. Middle class people can generally find enough deductions to drop their tax burden and they also have most of the same "loopholes" available to them that rich people do.

The real problem with the tax code is that it's so complicated that a person has to be able to pay good money to shield their money from taxes, mostly by paying an expert to deal with the labyrinthine tax code. It just doesn't become economical to do so until that person has some serious assets.

Of course, corporate tax code is completely from individual tax code. I personally clicked into this article to see if anyone who knows more than I do had yet addressed the claim that offering stock options doesn't cost Facebook anything. No matter how much all of us - myself included - would like to see corporations pay more taxes, the fact is that most of the ways they avoid paying up (but certainly not all) involve giving the money to their employees or charities instead. And no matter what anyone else on Slashdot seems to think, anyone cashing out stock options for Facebook is (now) a rich person paying taxes on that income.

The carriers don't "allow" it, they are required by law to support customers keeping their existing phone numbers. That service costs money and as we all know (it's the gist of this entire discussion) cell providers really hate to spend money in any way that might create customer loyalty.

Unlike in school, finding code off the internet isn't cheating, it's being efficient. It's also not without skill. A given person needs to really understand the problem to not only find a solution but be able to recognize whether it will work and tinker with the inputs and outputs to suit the particular problem.

I'm not in the military, but I'd join to fight the CowboyNeal menace.

What a colorful message! I've tried to think of some example of a Constitution-level issue that the Obama administration was involved in, and besides those that the Bush administration began (such as warrantless wiretapping) the only thing I can think of is Obamacare. And the Supreme Court upheld the one part of it - and there was only one part - that was at all questionable. I know there's a lot of disrespect nowadays for learned people, but don't you think that nine people who've been through law school and decades of legal experience would know better what's constitutional than you, I, some (other) random guy on the internet, or even your favorite politician?

Oh, and if you're one of those people who sadly believes that Obama is out to take your guns away, solely because he's a liberal and that's just what liberals do, may I suggest that you take a look at exactly how tiny an issue gun control has been for the last four years and is likely to be for the next four? Obama has done absolutely nothing related to the second amendment that a conservative wouldn't have done (you can't tell me that following a UN anti-terrorism resolution to restrict the sale of 10,000's of bullets at a time is something only a liberal would have done). There are far more important issues at stake to be afraid of what the black guy might do with your guns.

I don't think a reasonable person would ever come to those same conclusions just from reading the bible. It's possible to prove damn near anything with a few well-sourced bible passages, but that doesn't mean you're following the intent. A great deal of those bible passages have to do with the time in which they were written, where in my opinion the writer was interpreting any supposedly divine inspiration within his own cultural expectations (though many Christians prefer to believe that God essentially took over human bodies while they wrote scripture and the scripture was never revised thereafter). In old times it was certainly within cultural expectations that homos were bad and slavery was acceptable. That doesn't mean God wanted it that way.

To get back to my point though, your father clearly had some predefined beliefs coming from his upbringing and his experience. He chose to justify those beliefs through scripture rather than to redefine himself by the love of Jesus. It's depressingly common for people to do this, but all the harm religion does in this case is it lets those people feel self-righteous about their bigotry. I do feel sorry for you, and perhaps that extra self-righteousness is what gave your father the conviction to hurt others based on his bigotry. Hating the bible is a reasonable conclusion, but I don't agree that it's the best one. The best conclusion I can come up with, though, is that the catholics were justified in decreeing that common people shouldn't read the bible themselves. It's a complicated book where the smaller details tend to quite often contradict the larger themes.

I for one had never heard of a "Constitution Party" and was excited at the prospect, but greatly disappointed when I read their platform. Why is abortion such an important issue to them? The Constitution never even hinted at a position on the issue. In my opinion the founding fathers probably would have supported eugenics (that is, forced sterilizations and abortions) like most everyone before 1940. And I would have thought that if they intended to define marriage as between one man and one woman, they would have done so; they probably never thought the government would get that involved in marriage anyway (and another part of their platform, the abolition of federal income tax, would seem to negate anyway the strongest reason for the government to care).

I'm also terribly concerned by their seeming insistence that the constitution was perfect when it was written and has since then been corrupted by amendments and Supreme Court decisions. If the founding fathers thought they were creating a perfect document, they wouldn't have created a process for amendment or a Supreme Court. We might be better off with the system of government we had in 1800, but I don't think anybody should support failing to learn from our mistakes.

Oh, and what the bloody hell is up with the God stuff? They know that Jefferson was a deist right? That the founding fathers could best be described as agnostics in the era of rationalism, using language inherited from a Christian legacy to describe purely secular ideas? I'm pretty sure that even though the Declaration of Independence (which by the way isn't actually part of the constitution anyway and had to do with independence from Britain, not at all to do with individual independence) said we believed our "creator" endowed us all with certain inalienable rights, they didn't bother to bring in a scripture reference and in fact there is no scripture to support that statement. It's an 18th century rationalist idea. Nothing in the constitution is informed by Christianity.

No, the original still applies, because if you're not rich under Republicans you don't have enough money to do what you want anyway, and regardless of the party around the rich people can't do whatever they want in the bedroom 'cause we have tabloids.