It takes the average U.S. worker nearly a month to make what the average CEO earns in an hour

twolf1 · 2012-05-25T22:06:17.330672+00:00

To be fair, I'm not really advocating a revolution - just a really big hike in capital gains and estate taxing. Let the money die after a generation and get recirculated back in. I do not feel this is fascist because it's not making a statement about who is worthy and who is not. It's just stating very clearly that money is a means to an end and should be treated that way. It's also a statement that the purpose of government is to keep us all on a fair playing field, which it currently is not doing. I also think, and this is a strongly related opinion, that the draft should be reinstated on more or less the same grounds. To me, the purpose of both of these actions is to reintroduce fair play and the notion of a public good to be served, two concepts which I feel do not presently exist.

Singlemalt_28 · 2012-05-25T21:00:34.763288+00:00

Cool down. He has done quite a lot with his first four years. You got to walk down the hill to fuck all the cows.

What people rarely point out is this: pot was made illegal by linking it to the fear of the black man. While this connection is meaningless to us, there are still a lot of voters for whom echoes of that messaging remain. So if it's going to be a black guy who legalizes it, he better be at the absolute tail end of the decision making process. Obama needs to be surrounded by a house and judicial branch that are begging him to legalize before he can do it safely.

As much as I am frustrated by the lack of action, Obama's stance on marijuana legalization strikes me as similar to Tom Sawyer's position on whitewashing the fence.

papermatthew · 2012-05-25T20:21:15.827772+00:00

I totally did misread what you said. And now I am clogging he internet with this pitiful apology. I will be in the back, flagellating myself with reeds.

twolf1 · 2012-05-25T20:05:32.760601+00:00

See - I don't see it as charity. I see it as introducing necessarily balance. The idea that the wealthy lose their money in a couple of generations is just absolutely wrong. The pile grows, and the legislation to protect it grows stronger. The pile always grows. I live with a Dupont right now - lower on the food chain in the family, but still his pile grows. His parents sort of work when they feel like it, as does he. It's a different world, and it owns ours. You will never have what they have. Ever. No matter how hard you work, or what you invest in.

This is the reason it's not charity; wealth begets more wealth unless its flow is interrupted. They continue to make more and do less. The money earns more than they could ever do working. And their piles are enormous right now. And they are undeserved, and it is not unamerican to take money from those who have more than they need to supplement those who have never had enough.

But I understand where you are coming from, and I'm not trying to demonize you personally. I'm sure you;re a great person. I just think that you have been given an unfavorable view of charity and a puritan work ethic, which makes you a great candidate to perpetuate the status quo at the expense of yourself. So think about it, maybe, and I will work on digesting your argument as well.

crapidrawatwork · 2012-05-25T19:52:13.489293+00:00

Turns out the person on the other end of the phone is also a low level employee trying to maintain their value in a market with high unemployment. All decisions are made to keep away blame and get things done quickly. Getting things done well doesn't matter nearly as much to the hiring manager's boss. Fill the slot and move on. The odds of there being a feedback loop between the hirer and the hiree 6-12 months down the line when they can assess whether it was a good fill are pretty low. People respond to accountability, not to some ethereal notion of good process or quality.

papermatthew · 2012-05-25T19:30:40.377735+00:00

I agree in the case of pure content without doubt, but in the case of visualizing nested relationships, to me the darker on the outside and lighter as you get to the center makes more sense because it clearly defines the external container of each element. The dark background makes a better border or shell, if you will. It's very possible that I just eat too many Hostess Cupcakes, though.

twolf1 · 2012-05-25T19:25:02.409689+00:00

Fair points. Here is the point where we disagree: I do not see income redistribution as "stealing", and I do begrudge the guy up the ladder his stack of cash. It is unreasonably large. I grew up amongst the actually wealthy. Not the nouveau motherfuckers that make a couple million and think they're why America is great; the people who actually run the country and have been doing so since its founding.

I make no conspiracy theory. You don't have to when you know that old money exists and the extent of its influence. Folks who think there isn't a firm class structure in place in this country don;t summer in the Hamptons or Nantucket. It's not that these people are bad or have done anything explicitly wrong, by and large - they just don't have to work if they choose not to, and do not have to worry about money. It's not the ultimate solution to everything, but it creates a different set of priorities and a different awareness of the world.

To me, it is government's role to take the money from those who are too out of touch to know how to help others with it, and to facilitate that process. Government's role is to provide equality, and to provide advocacy, assistance, and elevation for people who came in on the low end.

I understand your point, but I don't think the government does as bad a job as you describe. I think that the military has no business existing at the scope it does, and I think that people have trouble funding education because it take a long time for that investment to play out, but in between those two huge misses, there is good being done. And a lot of the places where there isn't good being done, the only problem is funding. Schools especially. Although there are a lot of indemic problems in our educational system, a lot of them could be very rationally dealt with by doubling funding on everything. And to me, that's one of several initiatives which I would gladly support, both financially and politically.

What I don't like about your viewpoint, which I see as more or less libertarian, is that it is fundamentally selfish and un-involved, and I think those are two very bad places to start building a society from. To me, it is the equivalent of Cartman yelling "screw you guys - I'm going home." And I also find it to be ineffective unless everyone thinks that way, so in that sense it suffers from the same fundamental flaw as communism and extreme socialism.

abeuscher · 2012-05-25T18:54:02.759530+00:00

Okay this may sound thick, but what offspring question where? I love kids. I have worked with them on and off for years. I am totally into having them, dating someone who has them, raising them, playing with them - all that shit. I didn't mean to skip a question or be evasive.

twolf1 · 2012-05-25T18:48:05.673736+00:00

No I make $75k. Last time I looked it up it said I was 94th percentile. Not at all trying to be hyperbolic - trying to make the point that the acquisition and sheperding of money is an unworthwhile way to live one's life, and that the amount of taxes I pay has a poor relationship to my quality of life here, and that that is one of the most fundamental issues people get wrong. Taxes are neither good nor bad, just a payment made for services rendered. We are not, I would argue, being served well by that money here, and what I see is that people use the "fear" of higher taxes to resist change and maintain the status quo.

I apologize if the info on my income seemed wrong - working with the figures I have. I just checked on Wikipedia and it looks like I was wrong - I'm in the 75th percentile or thereabouts, which makes a little more sense to me.

papermatthew · 2012-05-25T18:01:06.109280+00:00

This might seem silly, but could the difficulty just be that you have the gradient effect reversed? It seems to me that visually it makes more sense for the upper levels to be darker, and for the page containers to get lighter as you move to the center of the stack. It's a pretty minimal change, but I agree that there's something a little off about it. The idea is solid. It seems like you may learn more about what's working and not in converting from wireframe to reality, as there's always some part of the UI process that is hard to wrap your head around until the tires meet the road. Or at least that's how I experience the process.

Good idea, though.

illspirit · 2012-05-25T17:51:47.922995+00:00

One of these guys reached one of my old bosses. It's to my own discredit that I couldn't talk him out of it. I then watched my boss spend my raise money on whatever snake oil the guy was selling while I remade his site with proper valid structure and meta tagging. Then the "expert" got all the credit, made more than 10k off of my work, and to this day continues to get the credit with that firm for that work. My own fault for not being able to summarize my thoughts in Powerpoint form, and instead just doing the right thing. I've learned my lesson, though. I no longer try to participate in SEO discussions with stupid people.

twolf1 · 2012-05-25T16:59:42.351351+00:00

I already donate about a third of my income via taxes. Moving to most European countries, I would actually save some money. Plus my income would not be devoted to paying medical bills, which about 1/4 of it is slated for at present, in insurance payments and other treatments and stuff. And I'm not very sickly. Also, and this is really important: I would donate about 50% of my income if I knew that I could lose my job and not go homeless, and could get sick and not go homeless. If my kids could go to college on the cheap (this is situational depending on the country), then I would go 60% or higher.

Most people don't really care about money and taxes; they care about security and free time. What do I need money for? So I can buy a car or a house? I can't afford those now and I'm earning in the 94th percentile in the US and I live paycheck to paycheck. How can things get worse?

scottums · 2012-05-25T00:31:29.946844+00:00

An argument could absolutely be made for the word casualty. In fact, if she had made a deliberate choice to put it there, it would be interesting. But she didn't. Because she's a shitty writer. I think here we have not an example of a guy trying to nitpick on someone for trying something new, but instead an example of a guy picking one emblematic snippet of idiocy from a vast ocean of them in order to make a valid challenge.

And if you and I could agree that we both had enough respect for each other that we knew that we already had our fundamentals down, then being semantic would be dickish and nasty. But if you're a dumb bimbo who tripped and fell into an undeserved publishing deal then tried to call the result "art", then I probably would feel pretty justified in poking some holes in your work, yeah.

Listen - I like poetry, and talking about it and everything. I really do. It was my major. But poetry critique is not group therapy. There are wrong answers, and there is shitty poetry. A lot of it. That is just objectively shitty. So I don't really mind when someone tells someone else that they made a stupid word choice that they don't understand. I really wish more celebrities would at least fuck with each other a little bit because they clearly need it.

scottums · 2012-05-24T23:44:47.788806+00:00

Sorry, but poetry is about concise and perfect word placement. And we're talking about a published body of work, not her high school fucking yearbook page. This was her claiming to be literary and not knowing that "casualty" is not a form of the word "casual"? That's a level of stupid I would pick out if I was actually asked to read her fucking book of shit and then talk to her about it like it was a real body of work.

scottums · 2012-05-24T23:40:57.035620+00:00

That's a fucking outstanding story, and definitely comes to mind reading this.

treiner5 · 1 day

Much better. I now want to be able to do two things:

1) See a visual representation somehow of which are the top voted items

2) More importantly, I want to be able to resort by votes.

Just suggestions. Thanks for circling back. Glad you liked the feedback.

Suriv_Dnim · 1 day

Same person runs the rudder on either side - crew is usually 6, I believe, so they're all swapping sides every tack or jibe. The sail Doesn't let out all the way, but they do fly a spinnaker when they're on a flat run. I must confess I don't exactly understand the science behind the sails - just know that they make the boats go insanely fast and that they're really expensive. Pretty sure America's Cup is on TV starting pretty soon. Unless that was last year and I smoked it away. One of my favorite sports to watch on TV, honestly.

Suriv_Dnim · 1 day

Exactly. There is nothing scarier than a loose line on one of those boats. In a sunfish or a laser, the reaction is like "haha! Guess I shouldn't have dropped the mainsheet in the water while I was opening my beer!" Whereas on one of these a loose line would cut someone's leg off.

Okay obviously not the mainsheet but sunfish's don't have jib lines and I was having trouble remembering the other ropes.

soundhaudegen · 1 day

Have you ever been stalked by a salesman? This is remarkably polite compared to some of my responses to people. There is no way that this represents the first interaction between these two people. That's clear from the context of the top message he's replying to.

Suriv_Dnim · 1 day

Compared to that, this would be like getting into a fighter jet after going on the Dumbo ride at Disney world. Just saying this because competitive sailing in general scares the bejeezus out of me but I love taking out a sunfish or a laser anytime.

PrettyBoyFloyd · 1 day

Well - let's see what new bit of failure has resulted from trying to engineer the media experience to favor the provider.

The red flag here is Paramount. That means Redstone, and that means visceral incompetence to understand how to use technology.

hongryghost · 1 day

I think if you're not living somewhere that is deregulated then yeah, sure. But a lot of the pics we see are from the Northwestern US where things are a lot more relaxed. I think it's about as stupid as posting pictures of oneself drunk or drinking heavily on the web, which appears to me to be a very prevalent practice.

Situational, but not universally stupid.

Mozen · 1 day

This reminds me of that Far Side comic where the guy who cleans out the snake cages at the zoo has a collective case of the heebie jeebies.

Seriously, though - social implications aside - these experiments sound scary as hell.

treiner5 · 1 day

This is a good idea and a good site. I would register the surrounding cities and be looking for money to expand before someone else scoops you. Seriously - this is the kind of thing you could easily turn into a full time job.

I would seriously think about putting some legal protection around it on the cheap and making sure you can scale it if you want to.

On the site: the one item I didn't like in the UI was the radio buttons for the up and down vote. I realize you probably don't want to rip the arrows off of Reddit, even though they make notionally the most sense, but using something graphic would be better.

huncutvagyok · 1 day

Do you have anything higher res? I can barely make it out.

For me it's electron-microscope-quality pixel density levels or nothing at all.

Nice kitten.

abeuscher

TROPHY CASE

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