ImSkeptical

I think progressive taxes are fine, my point was that the rich are paying their fair share.

I agree that rich benefit more from the status quo than the poor. That's part of why I'm not bothered by the fact that the rich pay a disproportionate (mathematically speaking only) share of the taxes. Plus, a rich person can give up a third of their income whereas a poor person couldn't.

What I'm saying is that it doesn't seem true to say the rich aren't paying their fair due. If you think that, then please answer what percentage of federal taxes do you think the 1% should pay and why would that be more fair than what they currently pay?

I don't think either of those are a problem. The problem is that we need more healthcare, more jobs, better jobs, healthier food for the poor, better education, etc. If we have to tax the hardworking doctors, or take more or even most of the billionaire's money, then I'm quite sanguine about that. So be it.

I think using taxes as a weapon against people is wrong though. So - to say that because some billionaire pays a lower tax rate, because his income comes through capital gains, that we must punish him with steeper taxes, or a wealth tax, or whatever plan you suggest, then I believe that is not only unproductive but also immoral to do so.

The basic problem is that the government is a poor steward of our money. Take education as an example. The US spends more money per student when it comes to education, and doesn't have outstanding scores in math, reading, science, or any category that I'm familiar with. There are problems with our education system, it's unequally distributed, it's not preparing kids for the careers of the future adequately, and other problems - but what's the solution? Spend more money, tax more, and so on?

On a similar subject, why should we take more money from the rich, who already pay a disproportionate share of federal taxes, so that we can buy more tanks we don't need, invade foreign countries, overthrow foreign governments, staff military bases around the world, and waste uncountable amounts of money on silly military projects.

If you look at all federal taxes, as this analysis of CBO numbers does [1], then it seems that the top 1% take 18% of income and pay 28% of all federal taxes. So, you are right that the portion of all federal taxes is not as great as I made it seem in my parent comment, that comment only takes into account federal income tax. But, I believe the overarching point and conclusion still stands.

1 - https://www.factcheck.org/2008/05/top-1-what-they-make-and-p...

In the United States people making 250k plus, ~the one percent, pay ~54% of the income tax [1]. Poor people, approximately the bottom third, pay nothing in income tax.

I too want poor people to earn and have more money but it doesn't seem true that the rich aren't paying their fair due.

1 - https://taxfoundation.org/new-irs-data-wealthy-paid-55-perce...

Edit: To the people downvoting me, please clarify why. From my perspective I'm directly addressing a point in the conversation with a legitimate source. I don't see why this should be downvoted, so please clarify for me.

Agreed, it would still be a tough task to complete.

That will be a brutal task, knowing that doing it ensures your colleague will get tortured and be unable to stop the torture by giving up the bitcoins. Still, probably for the best.

There are many restaurants that aren't stalking you on social media to figure out what foods you dislike.

I think a warehouse of alien artifacts is stranger than cheerleader uniforms.

I intended my comment to be on the topic of the thread I replied to, and not the subject of the article. I meant that I don't really understand when you can and can't discriminate based on things.

Why wouldn't they just have a blue check for "identity verified" and a green check for "Valued Community Member". Give your racists, weirdos, trolls, etc the blue check and no perks if you can identify them, and reporters, politicians, whatever the green check and the perks.

I really hate how big companies get paralyzed over problems like this. A small group would have solved this the same day the realized it was an issue.

I've never really understood this. Some restaurants, or clothing stores, have wait staff that are all women. In a massage place you can pick the gender of your masseuse - so surely a massage place that was already well staffed with one gender would be justified in gender discrimination. If I'm hiring a baby sitter for my daughter, I'm not going to hire a male person, and I'm sure there are many similar examples. I get that many times there is no justification for hiring preferences based on gender, but surely sometimes there is.

I believe the "super" in "super hero" refers to super powers, which Jones lacks. Also, vigilantes typically break the law, whereas Jones does not. In the videos I've seen, Jones is usually taking advantage of Washington's "mutual combat" law and challenging wrong doers to a fight. Then, he takes advantage of the fact that he is/was a professional MMA fighter and his opponent is a drunk jerk.

One line from the discussion section of this paper seemed to capture the essence of the concern:

>Although Japan's rate of homicide is low compared to many other advanced countries, Japan's rate of unexpected deaths including homicides, traffic accidents, industrial accidents, and suicides is near the median among the selected advanced industrial countries.

I don't believe we are discussing the fact of women's equality, but the attitudes towards it. You wrote:

>The OP said women were perceived as property. It doesn't take all men to believe that, it just takes most men.

And that's the sentiment I'm responding to. I don't believe it's true that most men, or even a large minority of men, believe that women are rapable property. That view strikes me as perverse and pernicious and I'd like to correct it for you if possible. I think the survey I already cited does directly refute this idea - most men believe that it is very important for men and women to have equal rights as men, which is surely incompatible with the "most men think women are rapable property" view.

I can understand being outraged about rape, but in order to act effectively against it, or about anything, you must first realize what is true, and it just is not true that any sizable portion of men think of women as rapable property in the United States.

Let's take a look at that CDC study you referenced, because I think it will actually offer illuminating insight that proves my point.

https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report2010-...

That's the 2010 version, although other years are similar. If you look on page 18 table 2.1 on the right hand column labeled "12 Month" you can see the percentage of women who were raped in the past 12 months - 1.1% of women. Shocking and horrifying, I agree. However, scroll on down to page 19 and see table 2.2 the same column, listed under the row for "Other Sexual Violence" you can see that 1.1% of US Men were "Made to penetrate" other people in the past 12 months.

Now, I'm not equating the two crimes exactly - I'd rather be forced to penetrate someone than be forcibly penetrated by them, but they are conceptually similar and both involve a sexual act being forced upon the victim. My point here is that men, using the "Past 12 Month" metric are victims of "Forced to penetrate" in the same proportion as women are "Forced to be penetrated" and yet, I doubt anyone would suggest that we live in a culture where men are rapable property.

The CDC study you reference, by the way, has a figure that is about an order of magnitude higher than what's seen in national crime surveys (that cover unreported rapes too) and has been criticized for conflating rape with sex while intoxicated. You can see the same language the CDC survey used in questions on page 17 of the PDF I linked above where they write that rape "includes times when the victim was drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent" - one reading of which could be that rape includes both "Times you were drunk" and "Times you were unable to consent". If you answered that "Yes" that you have had sex in the past 12 months to a question with that language, and you meant that you had had sex while drunk in the past 12 months, the CDC would have counted that as rape - interpreting your answer as being "Drunk and unable to consent."

As I've replied in a previous comment, in the US, 91% of people view equal rights between genders as "very important" (source below). How does that fit with your implied belief that most people perceive women as property? Are you, perhaps, located in Saudi Arabia?

I'm also curious for your source on the statistic that 1 in 5 women worldwide are raped.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/19/many-around-...

What you've shown is that not all swaps are valid, but you haven't shown that this particular swap is invalid.

The point of swapping the words is to illustrate that generalizing about people based on their sex is sexist. I hope you agree with that idea. If you do, then swapping the words can simply help put a more unfamiliar form of sexism into clearer view.

I think that attitude suggests you may have sub-normal acquaintances. I, for example, am not acquainted with anyone who doubts that women are people.

In the US 91% of people rate gender equality (that men and women should have the same rights) as being "very important". The ideas that men think of women as less than men, but also think it's very important they have equal rights are hard to reconcile.

I find your view perverse and lacking resemblance to reality.

1 - http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/19/many-around-...

I looked up a couple of these and it seems like a normal jacket with hidden pockets for bullet proof plates of armor to go over your vital organs. In retrospect, I guess that is the only way they could do it - but something about the article had me imagining something higher tech, like somehow the fabric was tougher or durable enough to stop bullets. My imagination was the bullet proof spray from Richie Rich, but the reality seems closer to wearing a bulletproof vest under your coat.

In my previous location I rode the bus about an hour each day to work. Noise cancelling headphones, plus some good podcasts and a subscription to audible made me quite enjoy it. I almost miss the fact that I'm about two hours a day short on my podcasts and audiobooks.

I'd include in that email an estimate of how much money has been spent on the preservation campaign so far.

"If your ancestor hadn't decided to dedicate X dollars (inflation adjusted Y dollars for current year) to this project you would have inherited calculateInheritant(tauntEmailRecipient, currentYear, familyTree, preferredCurrencyDenomination). PS - please reply to this email with contact information for any new descendants. If email is going out of style as a communication protocol, please reply with a program that, when executed, will take from standard in a filename that contains a message, and as a second parameter a contact address. Attached to this email you'll find a project spec describing this program more rigorously.

Yeah, that's my idea. Student loan shouldn't be a crushing obligation for life. Riskier terms for student loans will mean a lot less money available. Less money available will mean universities will stop building expensive buildings and hiring a million middle manager bureaucratic types that contribute no value, and will instead focus on driving down costs and focusing on their core value.

If a student is going to graduate 200k in debt with an art degree, you'd be silly to lend to that student. If a student was going ~10k in debt to graduate in a field with a lot of economic opportunity then that might be a smart choice.

That's why you need to keep it on some kind of cloud storage drive arranging an annuity or trust to keep paying the bills. Then, you have a script on a cloud server that posts on Craigslist once a year or month, hiring someone to duplicate your setup on a new cloud provider, opening a port for one of your existing nodes to connect to and verify, and also ask that person to modify the reproduction script of the clone, so that it will post on a Craigslist equivalent but not Craigslist. You'd also need some logic so that the rate you add clones is limited to the rate at which your fund to pay for the clones increases.

I quite like the visual design of this article. Very pretty.

The contents of the article, I'm less sure about. This line stuck out to me.

>“I’m 25 and I’m still in the same place I was when I earned minimum wage.” Four days a week she works at a dental office, Fridays she nannies, weekends she babysits. And still she couldn’t keep up with her rent, car lease and student loans.

She works at a dental office, I'm guessing she isn't a dentist or dental hygienist (both careers can expect to make 70k plus). So... Why does she have a lot of student loan debt? What did she go to college for? To become a part time office secretary and a baby sitter?

I'd have more sympathy for millennials if I knew them at a greater distance. As a millennial though, I was not afforded that luxury.

College has many useless subjects and so many more useless students. Why, for example, are you getting an English degree? I enjoyed writing and reading and took many high level English classes in college - but as a degree? To focus on it? Why? What's the point? You can pass an English class without reading the literature, just by getting summaries on Wikipedia and writing about them. If your degree can be obtained reliably by such tricks, how valuable is it?

The change we need to make is removing the obstacles around discharging student loan debt via bankruptcy. Then, I trust, lenders wouldn't lend to students without a good career plan, students who took on too much debt could get out of it, and schools would stop the crazy artificial inflation of their prices.

It's some kind of philosophical ethics problem that we can't experiment on humans even though there would be a net benefit. I feel like there are morally unintuitive solutions that may help - perhaps criminals of certain kinds, who have damaged society, could repay their debt, in part, by volunteering for trials we can be sure they understand. We might also leverage The suicidal by offering, after therapy, a way for them to live in comfort while contributing to humanity as experimental subjects.

I realize the mind recoils instinctively at these ideas, but it seems so frustrating and horrific that we have to delay life saving medical advanced due to insufficient experimental subjects.

Train your system to flag a Faraday cage then. This system won't be perfect, but I'd is it better than nothing? (Maybe, if it's medically safe). Plus, I bet your typical psycho killer isn't going to jump through a lot of technical hoops.

Instead of speaking vaguely, and pretending you speak on behalf of everyone, why don't you clearly state what problem you are having with this?

So it's only fine if a private individual hires models for their party?

Edit: Oops. I misread you the first time. Maybe my comment is no longer relevant.

But you chose to accept that job. The actor on TV isn't being treated unfairly because he/she has to lie and say they're a detective, or whatever. I don't see why the model is being mistreated because her role is software company employee.

If anyone is being mistreated by the lie, it's the person being lied to, who is, you know, being lied to. That said, this is a balance between having a fun party, and possibly feeling dumb when it turns out the girl you thought you were flirting with is actually a model hired to entertain you. I think it's up to those companies, the employees, and the models, to strike the right balance.

It seems like you're suggesting women should be free to do this, but men should be shamed for asking women to do it - which seems like a weird position to hold.

I can imagine some harm comes from this - e.g. an employee is mistaken for a model, or perhaps an employee is never mistaken for a model, but the magnitude of the harm doesn't seem so severe, and seems comparable to the benefit - the party is more fun.

I know why people have an intuitive dislike for this, it calls to mind paying for sex, sounds pathetic, and feels possibly misogynistic, but logically, I can't defend any of those positions myself.