kingkongreveng_

Far better and simpler than flat taxes would be to eliminate all income taxes, both business and personal, and depend entirely on tariffs, excise taxes, and fees. Arithmetically this is completely feasible. Imagine if outside of import and export business and those industries affected by excise people had practically no interface with the federal government on a year by year basis.

> usable by "normal people."

I haven't owned an iPod, but I remember setting a couple up for my family on a PC. It was NOT some cakewalk. I hit problems and syncing later broke.

There was never anything notably usable about the ipod vs. competing models, especially those with the "drop the mp3 files on the usb drive" approach.

People said it was just another uninteresting mp3 player. They were right, no?

Didn't the iPod rise to market leader have far more to do with marketing than any performance merit?

This is a good and somewhat famous short story, pre "Catcher":

A Perfect Day for Bananafish http://www.freeweb.hu/tchl/salinger/perfectday.html

>>And, boy, was I hungry at first.

>That's the real secret, and it could use some expansion

Spending time hungry is totally unnecessary to achieve low body fat. It's about insulin management.

If you eat a high saturated fat diet you simply don't get the strong hunger pangs that are symptomatic of crashing blood sugar with a metabolism trained to run on sugar in preference to fatty acids.

He's talking about the uniquely hepatoxic properties of fructose vis-a-vis other sugars. I'm talking about the metabolism damaging insulin responses triggered by all carbohydrates, regardless of whether it's a piece of whole grain bread or a spoonful of honey (fructose).

> no butter and other dairies except for yoghurt

Nonsense. I'm 8% body fat and eat loads of butter (almost a stick a day) and whole fat yogurt. I don't exercise that much either. Dairy fat is one of the best possible foods. Excellent satiety and virtually no insulin response.

You have to say specifically "carbohydrate" and not single out sugar. People try to make this false distinction between "complex" and simple carbohydrates and sugar. ANY starch is broken down rapidly in the small intestine and absorbed as sugar.

C++ with a decent dynamic language beats the crap out of C with a decent dynamic language. Chaiscript is a great project.

You would take your C+Python app and rewrite the C bits in C++ and find it shorter and clearer and the same speed.

Labor costs are lower in much of Asia, but it's not that simple. Shipping costs, risks to IP, loss of flexibility and accessibility to the manufacturing operation all factor into the picture. There are plenty of examples of manufacturing operations returning to the US for these reasons. Germany is a higher cost labor market than the US yet you don't see much of this simplistic scenario where physical operations inevitably flee high wages.

The big issue driving away these operations on net is the regulatory nightmare of employing Americans and running a plant. You have OSHA, the EPA, and an ever growing body of employer mandates to contend with. Also, the US is now a high tax country from a business perspective.

Tax rates and government interventionism are major forces driving business overseas. A government "five year plan" to "refactor" the manufacturing industry is the poison not the medicine.

Perhaps this will help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot_calling_the_kettle_black

Regardless of precedents I see no justification for taxpayer dollars.

I hope you realize the US also has extensive cyber espionage efforts.

Why is a federal agency developing this? How is this in the national interest?

Everything in from East Falls Church on the orange line is walkable. It was car dealerships and gas stations 25 years ago. Silver spring on in on the red line is walkable.

My point about DC was more that the district itself has tons of ghetto that could easily be re-gentrified. The middle class left the row-houses in the 60s in many cities, they turned to ghetto, but this is not necessarily a permanent state of affairs.

To repeat, this is basically what has happened in NYC. The former ghetto inhabitants are now driving up the crime rate in northern Pennsylvania and other areas.

Privatize the road system. Completely private public transits will emerge to compete. It's really that simple.

People don't use public transit because they're already paying for the roads with their taxes. If they had to pay tolls reflecting the true cost of maintaining the roads they would choose public transit, and public transit accessible housing and workplaces.

Pre-50s toll roads were much more common and private street car lines were very common.

> reorganizing a major urban area to be walkable takes decades

It seems to take about 15 to 20 years. The dense walkable urban areas in Northern Virginia and Maryland grew up around the metro system in that time frame.

Large areas don't actually need to be reorganized, just refurbished. Many cities including philadelphia, baltimore, and DC to some extent have loads of developed space that's just low rent and crime ridden. Just put back in the streetcars that were ripped out in the 60s, fix-up the buildings, and price out the gangsters from living there. That's basically the story of NYC's rehabilitation in the 90s, except they didn't need streetcars.

> Buses are also generally unpleasant, usually populated by people with vast, on-display, personal problems like drug addiction, homelessness, mental health problems, etc. Mostly because people without these problems have cars and simply drive.

Some say car dependent suburbs are in large part a means for the middle class to self segregate from the underclass. In other words, avoid the people who can't afford to drive everywhere.

Arguably, the really good public transportation systems are all in fairly homogeneous societies with little to no social underclass. This might even hold within the US. Portland is one of the most homogeneous cities in America and has the densest middle class neighborhoods and decent transit.

Are you a bot? It's like eliza wants a citation.

How about the city of Los Angeles, for starters.

I don't know about any lumps, but common sense and history dictate that when 100,000 low skill laborers show up in a city inside a few years it will cause a lot of problems. Especially when they are not culturally assimilated. School budgets alone are a catastrophe.

> "voting with your feet" is a powerful tool for helping the poor and disadvantaged improve their lives

Trouble is what happens to the poor and disadvantaged already in the destination countries. Wages are suppressed and other resources are spread thinner. Call me crazy but I think a country should be run for the benefit of the people already in it.

I would find it almost impossible to eat low carb without dairy. But it's fairly easy with whole fat yogurt and half & half.

> bread is the foundation of western civilization

Yes, and there is a panoply of diseases only people eating grain get. They're referred to as the "diseases of civilization."

Do your own reading. I did mine and concluded bread intake should be minimized, whole grain or not.

New Guniea tribes are post agricultural. They indicate nothing about "paleo" tendencies.

There are no living or even especially recent hunter gatherer models to look at. People sometimes point to african bushmen, but they're stunted refugees scraping by on marginal wasteland. They don't match up with the consistently strong and healthy native american hunter gatherer skeletons.

> cheese

Cheese is OK as long as you have no casein allergies, which you probably don't.

Wine is low on the list of things to eliminate. This article painted a picture of some wacky lifestyle built around a paleo canon. I suppose with this sort of thing a lunatic fringe is inevitable. That stuff in the article about giving blood was just nonsense.

It's really just a short list of diet recommendations. Eliminate sugars & sweeteners and cut grain & potato products as low as feasible and you're doing 90% of it and getting 90% of the benefit.

Yes we can digest fructose. And when people found honey (basically pure fructose) I'm sure they gorged on it. But as a few links on the front page of this site have explained in recent days, fructose is borderline toxic.

Anthropological research in conjunction with modern medical research convincingly indicate several foods cause disease. The fact that we can digest all kinds of things is irrelevant.

It pretty much all boils down to avoiding sugars, grain products, and certain oils. It's a very easy case to buy if you read into it.

> UVB is needed to make Vit D from sunlight

Actually, it's UVA. To make appreciable vitamin D you have to be out in the midday sun when there's plenty of UVA, not after ~2:30pm.

> Iranian officials say years of veiled bombing threats prompted their country to exercise its “sovereign right” to protect its nuclear facilities by hiding them underground.

Sounds far from unreasonable to me.

Man, this article reads like Mossad ordered up some war drum beating.

You're probably being facetious, but I suspect that University of Phoenix and similar programs are, as an idea, higher education done right. My bet is the for-profit colleges will give establishment education a serious run for their money in coming years.