jeremyt

I'm willing to concede that the effect is uncertain at low and middle incomes, but I think it has been shown quite convincingly that when tax rates go up the rich work less.

To answer your question honestly, it's going to depend on how much disposable income I have.

If I'm making enough to pay for all of my needs and wants after the rate goes up, then I'll probably work less... Because what's the point?

If the difference is whether I can pay rent or not, then I'll probably work more.

This is just false.

Even Slate, which is hardly a right-wing bastion, concedes that there is an effect (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...)

If we subjected you to a 99% tax rate tomorrow, would you work less than before? A yes answer is all that is needed to concede the point theoretically. Then, we're just arguing about magnitude. And I just don't believe you if you answer no: Who is going to work a full-time $50,000 a year job when they're only taking home $500/year?

For further reading, Paul Graham has argued that redistribution through higher tax rates leas to less entrepreneurship (http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html)

Or maybe he just happens to believe what he says? Maybe he believes that the sensitive information that Snowden released is damaging the security of the US?

I personally think Snowden was a traitor. He released way more information than was necessary to accomplish his goal; The information he released has almost certainly put lives in jeopardy; AND he fled to Russia which is essentially a totalitarian state where his presence, if not aiding in a material way, is aiding Russia in a PR capacity. If you haven't noticed, Russia is turning out to be, if not a geopolitical foe, and outright enemy of the United States.

Why have we got to jump to questioning people's motivations every time they stray from the party line? ...As if there is only one acceptable opinion to hold on everything.

Sheesh

Well, no, I'd really prefer the tyranny of no one. As in: if I have a political view that differs from the majority, I'd like to be able to hold that view and still keep my job based on how well I do my job.

What if I have a family, need my job, and don't have the luxury of being a Gandhi or an MLK?

I don't know what kind of dream world you live in, but most people are just trying to get by. If given the choice between speaking out and perhaps facing consequences or keeping quiet, I think most people will just say forget it and keep quiet.

You may see this as a feature, but this outcome is contrary to the stated goals of the founders of this nonprofit.

Seriously, I really don't want to live in a world where I have to be a Gandhi or a MLK on every issue on which I disagree with the majority.

You call it a marketplace of ideas; I call it tyranny of the majority.

Rap genius was penalized, but then the penalty was quietly lifted after a couple months. Tell me a less well-connected company would've gotten such a deal.

No, I'm making the claim that if you get in trouble with SEO - even if it's an honest mistake - being on the good side of the Google team can mean the difference between your company surviving or dying.

I can point to rap genius as a public example (and that wasn't even an honest mistake), but I've seen this happen myself and I've talked to a number of people who have admitted that Matt Cutts or someone on the search team personally intervened in their issue.

To clarify: I'm not saying anyone is taking action against people they don't like, I'm saying that it's very easy to not take action to help people you don't like.

Whether I agree with your point or not, I don't think that changes anything. My argument stands even if I change the words "now that" into "since"

With respect, I think it's a safe bet that this organization wasn't formed to prevent Russia or China from participating in domestic politics. It seems squarely focused on the David Kochs and Tom Steyers of the world.

And if Russia or China was participating to a significant degree in our internal politics, that would come out as a national security issue and should be dealt with in other ways.

I know that my position isn't popular, but the Federalist papers talked about this issue, and took the position that for every David Koch there is a Tom Steyer. Why not let them waste all of their money fighting each other? There are several recent examples illustrating that money doesn't buy elections. Maybe it's not a fact yet, but there's enough evidence behind it that I think it's a defensible position.

If this takes off, I think the end result will be less participation in the political process by average Americans, who fear retaliation down the road. Maybe it looks like a difficult balance to you, but I think I would always come down on the side of more speech rather than less.

Considering what recently happened at Mozilla, and other examples where we see protesters showing up at people's private homes, I oppose this effort.

I used to think that disclosure was the answer when it came to campaign-finance reform: let anybody give as much as they want as long as it's publicly disclosed.

But now that people can lose their job because of their political views, I'm much more reluctant to speak out in favor of or donate to causes I believe in. Hell, I'm afraid to even say what I'm saying right now because it'll put me on record publicly opposing Matt Cutts, who can basically make or break any future companies I participate in that rely on SEO as a strategy.

I think people should be able to donate to causes anonymously without worrying about retaliation..

Whatever. I'm sure we can find something completely unrelated in his background to disqualify him. Just give the Internet a little bit of time.

He really does do that...

Cofounder of thumbtack here - left in 2010, which basically directly competes with taskrabbit now.

I can understand how you would be skeptical that there's much going on behind the scenes, but you have to understand that this is mostly on purpose. It SHOULD look simple from the outside.

But underneath, we're vetting, categorizing, and matching. How do you fill a request for house painting with a database of perhaps 100 house painters that are qualified? You don't want too many bids, but you want enough to give the customer a decent choice. How many leads to you send out to get, say, three bids?

It's all algorithms, and we've been working heads down on it for years and are getting pretty good at it. Not easy, though.

This article doesn't address whether "recycling is worth it" or not, and instead basically states a truism: If you have X amount of stuff, and you divert Y amount of that stuff to other places, you will be left with Z amount of stuff which is less than what you started with.

I'm assuming the ship would be fortified to such a degree that by the time you could "hack" into the steering system or offload any decent amount of cargo, the authorities would have been notified and would be en route.

Not to mention the fact that pirates seem to want to steal the whole ship and appear to be ill-equipped to offload cargo.

Did anyone else read this and think that it might be a good way to do away with piracy also? If there's no steering wheel to grab a hold of, there's no way to steal the ship, and with an absence of hostages, it would be a lot easier to deal with attempted theft, too.

Because everybody can find a position that they don't like that somebody else has taken. If we start dragging all these issues out and start boycotting everyone, it will rip the fabric of our society apart.

"A group of 40 students and researchers at the university studied the writing of 11 candidates...It’s important to stress that the team isn’t saying its study points conclusively to Mr. Szabo, only that of the people it studied, he appears – on the basis of his writing – to be the most likely candidate."

Well, now, since we've got this all straightened out, let's just do it right the next time.

Reply below with your suggestions on what political views will be litmus tests for CEO positions in the future. We can compile a list, and then dig into the next candidate's background to make sure that all of her or his views are within the realm of acceptability.

A lot of people just want to apply this to the CEO position, but frankly a hostile work environment can be created by coworkers, too. So, I propose that we dig into the backgrounds of all the people that work at Mozilla and make sure that the organization is thoroughly purged of people who could possibly offend someone with her or his views.

Thanks for the link. It's an interesting idea, and if I spent very much time messing with HTML and jquery, it looks like it could save me a lot of time.

My specific case is that I don't really have any HTML to work with, just wireframes.

Of course, I could use a tool like Macaw to spit the HTML out and then put the shorthand into the code, but ideally I don't have to work with HTML/CSS/JavaScript at all.

I'm actually looking at indigo studio that was recommended below, and it looks like it nails my use case.

Thanks for the recommendation. It looks like a really solid option.

I thought I'd just jump in and add here that while we ultimately had to roll our own solution because we outgrew them, Mixpanel had hands-down the best support that I've ever experienced of any company.

Because the elements only exist in my wireframes :)

Thanks for the link.

With the caveat that I just watched the video and didn't do any further digging...

It looks really cool, but it may be for people who need a lot more freedom with their animations. Honestly, my needs could be met with just a handful of interactions (slide up, slide down, modal, tooltip, show, hide) with a handful of events (mouse in, mouse out, click, etc)

Yes, it looks like it's not what I'm looking for. Just wanted to post in case there were others out there like me who were confused.

Some thoughts:

I heard about this a couple months ago at a conference on rapid prototyping, and I've been waiting for it to come out in the hopes that we would finally have a rapid prototyping solution for user interface designs. I'm basically looking for a balsamiq with lots of built-in animations and UI interaction patterns.

Unfortunately, it looks like this product is geared more towards being a full-featured WYSIWYG for webpages rather than a prototyping tool for UI.

I need something that will allow me to say "when the user clicks on this, this other element slides down"... Preferably without having to do the HTML and JavaScript myself. I don't need it to be production worthy, as my developers will insist on doing the code themselves anyway.

It looks to me like this is a great tool for either people who don't know HTML/CSS or firms that need to kick out webpages quickly where the designers don't want to hand code the HTML/CSS.

Not saying that isn't a huge market, it's just not targeted toward UI prototyping.

That said, if the goal here is to provide a Dreamweaver 2.0 that spits out much better quality code, then this option looks really solid and slick.

Well, if your first sentence is correct, then I think we have a major constitutional crisis, because I just described what amounts to an effective repeal of the law.

To extend the idea further: What's to stop the president from changing any deadline or date in any law? Almost every bill passed by Congress contains a line that reads "this act is to be effective on date X". If the president can waive this it will, then we have not only just given him a line-item veto, we have given him a line item repeal.

If the case is that the only impediment to the executive branch unilaterally rewriting laws is politics, then we don't really live in a representative government with checks and balances, we live in a term limited elected dictatorship.

It's my opinion that the current president is firmly in unconstitutional territory.

Well, here's my question, then. If the Obama administration has the power to postpone both the employer mandate and the signup deadlines... What's to stop a Republican president in 2016 from coming in and saying that the employer and the individual mandate are now "postponed" because of implementation difficulty until 2025. It seems to me a Republican president could just move all of the deadlines and effectively repeal the law without having to repeal it.

Hm, I've read your comment several more times and it still plainly reads to me that you are arguing that China's leadership, being engineers, have a better grasp of the futility of being corrupt... and since the United States is led by lawyers then corruption is to be expected.

In short, we should expect the United States to be corrupt because of lawyers and China to be not corrupt because of engineers, and I'm just saying that's the opposite of the truth.

I really don't care all that much, I'm just really curious now why you bothered to mention China at all if what you were trying to say was that the US is worse than we thought.