I agree....mostly.
My plan, for when I'm emperor, is one tax rate based on the budget that pays for everything in full (no deficit, and pay off the debt) and puts 2% in the bank yearly for future unforseen disasters, with a base deduction of whatever poverty level in your state is +100%, so people barely out of poverty pay nothing.
Whatever that number is should be applied across the board, no loopholes, no special tax rates for certain types of income, no extra exemptions, nothing.
Also, 100% tax on money hidden offshore to avoid taxation and use RICO on the church(s) to pay off most of the debt first.


Yes, there were many reasons why the job market was good in the 50's for white guys, most of which are unthinkable or impossible today. For instance, a single income household with one average salary could not only save, they could often have a continuously rising standard of living. There's no way today, even on two incomes most families are in debt and downwardly mobile.

I would love it if we all paid a proportionate amount of tax regardless of wealth. I would also love it if they would remove all of the various loopholes that let people like our President scam their way out of paying hardly any taxes.

One of the things people always forget about the 50's is that one of the reasons why 'everyone' (white people for the most part, ethnicities need not apply) had good jobs, etc. is because a good chunk of people died in WW2/Korea. We lost over half a million people during the years from 1942 to 1953. Additionally there was a dramatic shift in female employment, meaning that for the first time many households were not wholly dependent on one salary.

Not wanting to get rich in Norway? Not wanting toys? Meh.
Military spending in Norway per capita? We're in 7th place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditure_per_capita

In Scandinavia anyone can get wealthy. Anyone can get a proper college education.

Health care? In the US you spend more per capita than in Scandinavia.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-spending/u-s-health-spending-twice-other-countries-with-worse-results-idUSKCN1GP2YN

I quite prefer the model here, and wouldn't switch for the world.
Sure I pay a lot of taxes - half my salary goes to taxes, and I pay 25% VAT on the rest - but I do get value for my money; education, health care, pension and a good infrastructure.

And hey - to help other countries - how about we add up the military spending we use with with how much we spend on development aid:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_country_donors

Fair points, but this is obviously a prototype.

Ultimately, the price of these will come down and even if you need to swap out the batteries, there's no reason that can't be automated too. Hell, a roomba basically does that now. The point is it doesn't need sleep or meal breaks and it doesn't care about working hours. Or you just leave it connected to a permanent power source (if you can teach it to drywall, you can teach it to avoid the cable).

And yeah, my numbers are obviously estimates, since this isn't commercially available yet, and you'd need to factor in capital investment, maintenance, etc. But you don't have to pay it a salary, it doesn't need medical and it doesn't have to comply with health and safety regs (at least, not for the robots H&S).

I find it difficult to believe that something like this could ever be less cost-effective than a human.

Of course, that's assuming a steady rate of improvement. Bipedal robots (like self-driving cars) have been "90% there" for many years now. It might be that the last 10% is REALLY, REALLY difficult.

My gut feeling is that we will see a tipping point. There will be some really challenging engineering/programming obstacle that stops these going mainstream, but eventually, someone will solve it and then the rate of progress will be exponential.

But you're right in that, that's certainly a few years away yet. I'm fascinated as to how we as a society/civilisation deal with mass automation.

Indeed, criticism is easy.

I'm personally a huge fan of the Khan Academy's method. That and also paying the teachers a massive salary.

That will of course never happen, because the rich people in charge are stupid, and they also want the general public to be stupid so that they can easily gain their votes.

Anyway, seems like the next generation of workers will all be robots, so perhaps we should all be learning how to run for our lives. ;-)

I disagree. Pinpointing the problem isn't very hard if you have some idea of where to look.

As someone who was 'coming of age' in my profession when No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and its successor the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), I can provide some insight into how these policies have been enacted and how both have been detrimental to the public education system as a whole. The former is a GWBush policy, and the latter is an Obama policy meant to mend the original law, so both liberals and conservatives are to blame to some degree, but both are based on the same philosophy of education and teacher-accountability.

There are some other mitigating factors and outside influences at work that should be noted: gun violence, the rise & ubiquity of the internet, and universal cell phone availability, all mostly concentrated in the past 10 years that play a large role. Cell phones, for example, are probably the worst thing to happen to education ever. They distract, they assist in cheating, they perpetuate arguments which can lead to physical altercations, and parents themselves advocate for their use "what if there's an emergency?!?!"

The idea of "teacher accountability" is the biggest culprit though.

Anecdotally, I've caught people cheating on papers. A girl in my honors English class basically plagiarised her entire final paper that we worked on for close to a month. The zero tanked her grade, which was already floundering, and the parent wanted to meet. I'd rather not go into detail to protect both the girl and my own anonymity, but suffice to say, all of the blame for this was aimed directly at me. How? Well I (apparently) "should have caught this sooner and intervened." Now, the final in that class is 8 pages long, I have ~125 students all working on it at the same time. but my ability to check something like that and my workload are beside the point. I'M NOT THE ONE WHO COPY PASTED A WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE AND DOCTORED IT UP SO IT COULD SQUEAK BY THE PLAGIARISM DETECTOR (shows she knew what she was doing, IMHO). Yet, I'm still the one being told that I was responsible for what happened.

Teacher-accountability SOUNDS like the right thing to do, but consider the following analogies

--Students are earning poor grades, therefore teachers should be demoted; put on probationary programs; lose some of their salaries; and if they do not improve their test scores, grades, and attendance; be terminated from their positions.

as to

--Impoverished people have poor oral hygiene/health, therefore their dentists should be forced to take pay cuts from insurance companies. If the patients continue to develop cavities and the like, the dentist should be forced to go for further training, and possibly lose his practice.

I have no control over attendance.
I have no control over their home life.
I have no control over children coming to school with holes in their shoes, having not eaten breakfast.

@Mordhaus the part about money grubbing could not be further from the truth.

I'll be brief b/c I know this is already too long for this forum, but Houton Mifflin, McGraw Hill, Etc. Book Company is facing a shortfall of sales in light of the digital age. It may be difficult to blame one entity, but that's a good place to start. They don't sell as many books, but guess who produces and distributes the standardized tests and practice materials? Those same companies who used to sell textbooks by the boatload.

When a student does poorly, they have to retest in order to recieve a diploma. $$$ if they fail again, they retest again and again there is a charge for taking the test and accompanying pretest materials. Each of which has its own fees that go straight to the former textbook companies. See: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/schools/testing/companies.html

In short, there is an incentive for these companies to lobby for an environment where tests are taken and retaken as much as possible. Each time a student has to retest that's more $ in their pocket.

How can they create an enviorment that faccilitates more testing? Put all the blame on the educators rather than the students.

That sounds a little tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory-ish, but the lobbying they do is very real: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/03/30/report-big-education-firms-spend-millions-lobbying-for-pro-testing-policies/?utm_term=.
9af18f0d2064

That, combined with exceptions for charter/private schools where students have the option to opt-out of said testing is skewing the numbers in favor of all of these for-profit companies: http://sanchezcharter.org/state-testing-parent-opt-out/ << one example (you can't opt-out in a public school, at least in my state)

@bobknight33 idk if i'd call business-minded for-profit policies "liberal"

Loved this whole story. After thinking about it for a while, I figured that Foster was probably going to get an NHL record for highest "career save percentage".

1) The contract that the emergency goalies sign makes them official NHL professional athletes for a day.
2) He came in and made 7 shots on 7 saves, a 100% save percentage.
3) Official player, official stats earned, yet extremely unlikely that he'll ever see another minute of ice time or shot against ... therefore, into the record books.

I looked at NHL stats page and a few other sources to try to figure out if that was correct, but everything I looked at limited "Career Save Percentage" stats to players with a high minimum number of games.

Then I saw this story:
https://chicago.suntimes.com/sports/blackhawks-emergency-goalie-scott-foster-accountant-jets/

Confirms that YES, he'll be in the records books, but he'll be tied with 17 other guys all having a 100% save percentage (after having faced between 1-17 shots).

So even though he's tied with 17 other guys, dude is set for life for a story to tell his kids / grandkids / strangers in the bar:

"So yeah, I'm a former NHL goalie. Retired with a career save percentage better than Brodeur or Roy. Left the game literally at the top of the charts."


I think Patrick Kane and/or Jonathan Toews should give their salary from this one game to the guy since the contract he signed precludes the team from paying him... (both make $10.5 million for this season, so 1/82 of that would be a bit over $125k)

And this is why you pay your workers a decent salary, have reasonable working hours etc. instead of just draining your employees.

It's good for your business and your customers to have workers that don't hate their jobs.

So... having an armed guard didn't deter this shooter... and this shooter, unlike many others, did not have a death wish, he went peacefully once found.

It's impossible to know how many shootings ARE deterred by armed guards.

But, we can know how many school shootings were stopped by armed guards... My quick search shows one shooting was stopped by an armed guard just days after, but nobody seems to have any statistics on how many armed guards stop shootings... If you're going to make the assertion that "guards are effective at engaging threats", you need to show numbers. Certainly, with as many politicians who want this to be the solution, and with the monumental rise in school shootings over the last decade, there should be someone, somewhere, capturing metrics on this sort of thing.

My position: Schools have a hard time paying teachers a reasonable salary... I doubt they're going to be getting top-of-the-line security guards... They'll be hiring retired, ex-military cooks who've had weapon training but never been shot at.

Don't entirely agree with that. There are plenty of skilled artists making really beautiful pieces for reasonable amounts of money. I had a local jeweller create a custom ring for my wife and another create a wedding band from titanium for me.

Neither cost "2 months salary", or even close to that, but both are really cool pieces that are completely unique.

In the civilised world, "doing taxes" is one of those weird things you are aware of because of American TV.

In my entire working life, my interaction with tax amounts to looking at my payslip whenever my salary changes and ... that's it.

My tax comes off my pay automatically, I pay a flat Goods and Services Tax of 15% on everything I buy, and there are various other duties, levies, etc., all of which are pre-calculated and included in the listed price.

There are a few "tax refund" companies around that will try and recoup a tax gain, but most of the time it amounts to so little money it's not worth it.

So, just fount out, Paula White, who is considered to be Trump's "spiritual advisor" used to run a church in Orlando where most of the congregants were poor and black.

She demanded they tithe at a really high level, sometimes insisting they give a whole month's salary. Other times she'd encourage them to donate jewelery, watches, anything of value they had on them. Afterwards she'd go through the collected items and pick out the ones she liked for herself.

She's not Christian, she's the Antichrist.

Also worth pointing out, when employer subsidized insurance does cover the exorbitant cost of these drugs, it's still being implicitly paid for, but is hidden as a lower salary.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/CEO-cuts-salary-so-he-can-raise-workers-pay-to-70-000-yr

CEO cut's salary so he can raise workers pay to 70,000/yr has been added as a related post - related requested by Mordhaus.