jeremyt

Hillary "It was all just a response to a video" Clinton

Bernie "Terrorism is caused by global warming" Sanders

Harry “light-skinned” and speaking “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Reid

Al “White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires … We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was … we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.” Sharpton

Barack "If you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance" Obama

Nancy "We have to pass it to find out what's in it" Pelosi

Elizabeth "I'm Indian because my ancestors had high cheekbones" Warren

Harry "Mitt Romney didn't pay any taxes" Reid

Hank "I'm not sure if Guam can tip over" Johnson

Leland "I am a leading gun proponent, but am running a illegal gun trafficking business on the side" Lee

Al "the entire North ‘polarized’ cap will disappear in 5 years" Gore

Just a few

As an example of a loophole, investors can buy stock in a company, hold it for five years, and currently get 0% capital gains on the appreciation.

You don't need an intermediary to do this; you can do this right now.

It's just that most regular people don't have the money to invest, and if there's no money to invest then there's no money to apply toward loopholes.

And then you have to pick winners.

Same thing with putting company investments in Roth IRAs. This tax loophole would be idiotic for any normal person, but with somebody who's not planning on using the Roth for retirement it makes perfect sense.

But, you have to pick winners or Joe sixpack just lost his retirement savings.

The first is a sort of dumb and dumber "we landed on the moon!" feeling where I actually can't believe that someone didn't know that there used to be a 90% marginal tax rate. Perhaps you live outside of the United States?

The second is that the 90% tax rate is completely misleading, as there were so many deductions and loopholes that hardly anybody ever paid it.

Every time somebody brings up the 90% rate, it's always someone on the left attempting a "We could raise tax rates a whole lot more; just look at how high they used to be". It's one of the most disingenuous arguments in politics.

This seems like a very weird pricing strategy on the one hand and a very weird charitable strategy on the other.

Frankly, the last thing poor people need is free access to high-end stock trading tools so they can piss away their money on losers and transaction fees.

This seems about the same as offering poor people free rides to the gas station so they can buy a lottery ticket. I mean, you're giving them a free ride, but to what end?

For the record, I never went to a better school because nobody ever told me that I could.

My high school graduation rate was somewhere around 50%, and when the guidance counselors found out that I got a scholarship to the University of Tennessee, they pretty much made a plaque to commemorate the success and then moved on to the other kids.

It's a problem I'd like to work on in the next couple of years.

However, while I'm opining, I might add that I could be the exception that proves the rule.

All three of my cofounders were Ivy educated, and a heavy proportion of our early investors and advisors were either connections from their social network or people who they met at the various Ivy networking functions.

I'm really not sure what to say about it. It's just how the world works. People like to help people that they know, and when you go to an Ivy League school it just so happens that the people you share a dorm room with are going to be in a much better position to help you than my freshman year roommates at UT.

The UT alumni Association, bless their hearts, can't seem to see any purpose for contacting alumni except for donations and to organize football watching parties.

My most successful friends from back home are lawyers, doctors, and small business owners. My cofounders' most successful friends from back home are venture capitalists, Stanford professors, and finance types.

Using hand soap with triclosan has antibacterial properties, none of which contribute to antibiotic resistance. There are lots of reasons to quit using antibacterials in your house, and I have stopped, but contributing to the antibiotic resistance problem is not one of them.

Just because something is approved by the FDA doesn't mean that it's safe and effective. And, conversely, just because something isn't approved by the FDA doesn't mean it isn't safe and effective.

There isn't something magical about a clinical trial that suddenly removes all doubt about a substance. And this magical government agency isn't infallible, and has frankly made mistakes, some of them pretty major, in the past.

Let me share something with you. I've been suffering from severe RSI for close to 13 years. I've seen about five different doctors; I've had nerve conduction tests; I've had three rounds of physical therapy. Nothing works. I keep going back to the doctor, and they keep assigning physical therapy. Do you know why? Because, it's the only approved treatment that they can offer. Most of the doctors that I've seen refuse to even talk about anything else.

So I go out on my own, and I do some research, and I start trying things. Some herbal supplements, some alternative treatments. And you know what? This thing called trigger point massage therapy, in the span of about four months, improved my symptoms about 80%. I also found that B vitamin supplements helped with the nerve tingling issues. And that was several years ago and I'm still almost completely functional.

If I listened to people like you, I'd still be practically incapacitated and unable to support myself.

I think he's probably intelligent enough to look into any suggestions himself. After all, that's why people have ultimate control over their medical care. You're just being closed minded and pedantic, and your lecture on medical ethics is naïve.

So, if I may, get off your fucking high horse.

It's not like I'm telling this guy to go cut his left arm off. I'm basically doing the equivalent of telling him to go drink a bunch of cups of green tea and try a supplement of a compound that's so safe that it's approved for human consumption without a prescription. If it was dangerous, your precious FDA would yank it off the shelves in five minutes, right?

And if he tries my suggestion and it relieves his symptoms, even a little bit (even if it's placebo), then it's worth it. By all means, go see a doctor, but don't assume that doctors are all-knowing and all powerful and they are aware of and can prescribe the perfect treatment for your illness.

/edit I'll add that this is what happens when you leave mental health treatment exclusively to doctors. Hammer; nail, indeed. http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/10/23/study-two...

Problem. In their paper 'On The Security of Password Manager Database Formats', P. Gasti and K. B. Rasmussen have presented attacks on the KDB and KDBX file formats based on unauthenticated header data. For KDB, this issue has allowed silent data removal attacks. For KDBX, the issue has allowed silent data corruption attacks. Both were minor security issues (confidentiality was not compromised).

Status. Header data authentication has been introduced for both KDB and KDBX in KeePass 1.24 and 2.20, in order to prevent the attacks. Also see the release notes KeePass 1.24 and 2.20 Header Authentication. P. Gasti and K. B. Rasmussen published their paper in a responsible disclosure process, and the defenses in KeePass have been implemented before the issues were presented to the public.

"K15 have made some relatively minor changes to the bias correction methods, and the result is a large increase in the post-1998 trend.

A. They added 0.12 oC to readings collected by buoys, ostensibly to make them comparable to readings collected by ships. As the authors note, buoy readings represent a rising fraction of observations over recent decades, so this boosts the apparent warming trend.

B. They also gave buoy data extra weight in the computations.

C. They also made adjustments to post-1941 data collected from ships, in particular a large cooling adjustment applied to readings over 1998-2000.

Taken together these changes largely explain the enhanced trend over the past 15 years. So now everybody needs to decide if they think these adjustments are valid.

Perhaps they are. The main problem for us observers is that other teams have looked at the same issues and come to different conclusions. And the post-1998 K15 data don’t match that from other independent sources, including weather satellites."

To put it plainly: if the data doesn't fit, just make some convenient corrections and then suddenly it'll fit exactly what you want it to.

I encourage you to read the whole critique:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/04/a-first-look-at-possib...

The more I dig into this stuff the more I realize that the data, at least prior to satellite measurements, is just crap and needs to be discarded.

Frankly, the claims made in this article are a bit ridiculous. To anyone with any kind of math or science background, the claim that one can accurately measure the temperature of the earth down to two decimal places is hubris.

But it's even worse when one considers that the distribution of temperature recording stations isn't uniform, that large swaths of the earth have barely any coverage at all, and that the most accurate way of measuring temperature has only been available for the last couple of decades (satellite measurements). And I might add that the article above uses surface temperatures and not satellite measurements.

In many of these temperature stations, temperatures are still recorded by hand, on a piece of paper, by observing a thermometer. One has to deal with different measurements made by different people and equipment as things are replaced or repaired.

Additionally, lots of these temperature stations have had their recorded temperatures adjusted upward. I always wondered why, and I did some investigation and found out that it was because the temperature stations had been moved from an urban environment to a more rural environment. However, the measurements have not been subsequently adjusted down as those new environments urbanized. What we see is a ratchet effect, not in actual temperature but in observed temperature.

What's the upshot? The supposed 0.02 increase in temperature is well within the margin of error for both the surface level temperature measurements and the estimation made in the upward temperature adjustments at many sites.

I'm not so much against private-sector unions, I just don't think people should be forced to join the union when they don't want to. And I don't believe that unions are net plus for technological or economic progress.

Your paragraph about government regulation is hard to disagree with because it is so broad. Of course, I think everyone would agree that sometimes light touch regulation is necessary, but it's the "sometimes" and the "light touch" that becomes a problem. I'm honestly not sure what kind of point you're making here. I'm certainly not arguing for no regulation.

And as for getting far more value from taxes than what we pay, I guess that depends on what we pay. I guess I would disagree generally, but anyone making the claim that I, personally, will get more value from my taxes than what I pay is kind of laughable.

Certainly entitled to your opinions, but frankly what you've written just sounds like "Nothing's perfect, whatyagonnadoo?" I feel like I can do better.

/edit typed the exact opposite of what I meant

Having done a startup myself, and now as an investor, taxes have already gone up from 15% to 23.8%. It appears to me that Sanders' solution to everything is higher taxes on the rich (investors). He wants to raise the capital gains tax, he wants to raise the estate tax, and he wants to eliminate the cap on the payroll tax so that rich people pay an extra 12 or so percent on top of the combined ~40-50% of taxes they already paid, combined state and federal.

This just keeps being repeated, as if it's fact, but it's just not true. In fact, it's less true than the opposite conclusion.

It's been shown, repeatedly that toy preference, conflict resolution style, gender identity, and now even the genetic programming of the immune system are very different between the sexes, and exist at birth.

I'm not aware of any reason to believe sexual preference doesn't fall into the same bucket. In fact, wasn't this the entire basis of the gay rights movement?

The literature is extensive, and I don't have time to list all the references at the moment, but here's a couple to start off with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamen...

For further reading, you can browse through "The Optimistic Child" by Doctor Martin Seligman.

I remember reading about a specific study done on humans, but I can't recall enough to find it at the moment. However, there seem to be several similar studies done on primates that reinforce the conclusion.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamen...

/edit Here it is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

To be clear, I'm not saying that an MBA student or an aspiring artist can't decide to start a home cleaning business and sign up with our service.

I'm no longer with the company, but I will say that the entire time that I was there, at no point was our business model based on recruiting/training unexperienced people to fill our verticals. In fact, our biggest worry was getting enough high-quality experienced providers.

I'm not privy to future plans, but currently any recurring work is just an added benefit to our service providers.