Before ADSL was available and affordable, I did have ISDN at my place.
It was charged by the minute, so I could not leave the data always on.
I set up an always on Linux box at my apartment with a PCI ISDN adapter. A voice mail application answered calls on one of the 4 ISDN phone numbers.
I modified this voice mail application to accept a PIN code to open PPP on the other B-channel to the ISP and read back the dynamic assigned IP on the phone. This was something I could not do with a single analog phone line and a modem.
This was not the reason to get the ISDN, but this was the first time I could remotely access my systems at home at will. Not that I needed to that much, but I could.
Flip side of the welfare state is the heavy tax burden.
Heavily progressive income tax makes it harder for individuals to accumulate capital for enterprenial endeavours, be it their own or investing in others'. This limits early stage investments and growth.
Also, there are limited incentives in investing in careers and productivity as net income is surprisingly similar in lowest 10% and highest 10% income earners.
Burden?
If the substrate/infrastructure you're playing in is maintained by our tax money, count your blessings and work to build trust in a system that, as others in this thread have already said, helps set everyone up to more-safely fail and grow.
No one person is so important that we need to cultivate philanthropists. I'd far rather we collectively decide what to do with wealth generated from natural resources (all the way up to human resources). We can do better than the relatively few wealthy people with the means and inclination to give back.
The question is, how do we build a stronger representative government in the United States (where I live) when we're so divided and distrusting? Having a common enemy might work, but it can't be another group of people to go to war with. Might need to be the metaphorical devil(s) on our shoulders, and for that we need good mental health training from a young age, which now, given how broken and dispersed so many family groups are, requires tax money guided by science and wisdom.
You and I are here but a moment. The bleeding edge of life will quickly pass us by, and the positive impact I am most proud of is the love and care I give to future generations, human and otherwise.
The taxation part is a burden no matter the outcome. It’s not optional, it’s a duty as a citizen to give a chunk of your money to the government. That is the load we are obligated to bear - a burden.
Also, you’re romanticizing what happens with tax money. When a major portion of it is going to a military I have no say in, I don’t get warm fuzzy feelings contributing my portion to the feds.
> how do we build a stronger representative government in the United States (where I live) when we're so divided and distrusting?
You’re assuming the conclusion here. Many people want a much weaker federal government and your question can be rephrased as “how do we make the anti-government people go away?”
He's saying the heavy tax burden drains capitol accumulation. Too generous benefits prohibits the filtering mechanism built into markets that stops a society's resources from being drained into unproductive resources. Not ideal, but advocates of near universal welfare support do not seem to have a good answer to this problem.
Their tax rates are only a few percentage points different from ours. I think the difference is that we funnel 20% of it to the military (2% for Norway) and their tax code probably has fewer loopholes for the rich to exploit.
Their total tax burdens are much higher than US citizens' tax burdens unless you're making 7 figures of W-2 income. The top marginal tax rate kicks in an order of magnitude lower in those countries, and hits most of the middle class. In the US, it hits very few people.
Also, the military is 20% of the discretionary budget, but 10% or less of the total budget.
When I at one point considered moving to the US, I did the numbers for UK and Norway, because I'm from Norway and live in the UK, and while Norway certainly came out higher in terms of tax than some US states, comparing with places I might be prepared to consider, like California, the difference was small enough it'd be more than eaten up by health insurance before considering the other costs of a reduced welfare system (e.g. needing a far bigger cushion in case of unemployment, far higher childcare costs etc.)
Your mileage will of course vary a lot depending on specifics, and especially which US states you compare with.
Yes, it is remarkably hard to come up with a US tax rate, because in single-payer healthcare countries your healthcare is covered. Here, how much do you pay? I couldn't even begin to guesstimate.
While you could probably find cheaper places to live in the US than California, and therefore find much more agreeable tax rates, it's not that easy. Culture varies a lot in the US. I love the South, but a some folks would rather drink poison than live there.
And you can't forget property taxes. These vary at the county or city level and can be quite significant. And, just for fun, they generally pay for the public schools, which depending on where you are may be abysmally awful, so now your "tax rate" includes stumping for private school, which could be the equivalent to a year's salary in some Nordic countries.
Health care in the US is effectively a corporate tax and should be labelled as such.
If you want to compare the real costs and benefits of starting a business you need to compare like for like, which includes all national, state, and privatised taxes and other indirect costs.
When you include those the reality-based answer is that the US fares relatively poorly.
Which is why the US has a more aggressive VC sector. Whether by accident or design start-ups are forced to look for outside funding far earlier, and bootstrapping is far harder.
The result is more of a monoculture that chases unicorns and less of a vibrant sector of independent small and medium businesses, some of which will grow into unicorns naturally.
For a full picture factor in outgoings for world class health and education per person (and other benefits that are free | much cheaper than US); these are very low cost for individuals and offset higher taxes by offering better value for money.
"World class" health and education brings you some of the worst maternal mortality rates in the developed world[1]. Doubling Canada's rate and adding a bit more really screams world class.
You do pay out the ass for it though so good job making someone rich I guess? Shame about all the dead babies though[2].
Indeed! Forgive me, I misinterpreted your earlier post to be claiming that the "low cost" of US healthcare offsets the "high taxes" of comparable countries.
US total government spending is officially 34% of total GDP, Germany is 43.7%. With much of that covering healthcare and collage education which more than makes up the difference for the median family. In the end, the US’s extreme defense spending and horrifically inefficient healthcare system is a massive drag on the economy.
What the US does differently from most of the EU is to hide as much spending as possible in the form of targeted tax breaks. From a cash flow perspective little changes but from a political standpoint it’s not spending.
US military spending is 4% of GDP. When a warmonger is president, that goes up to about 6% of GDP. The NATO commitment is 2% of GDP. It is not particularly extreme.
The real drag is the US healthcare system, which effectively finances most of the medical R&D for the US, India, South America, and Europe, and also provides ridiculous levels of treatment for people who are about to die (in comparison to other health systems). There is also the US social security system, which seems to be very inefficient at best...
Officially it’s $1.64 Trillion in 2022 on defense vs ~23.4 Trillion GDP or 7% GDP. https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=... You can see different numbers based on if you include stuff like the DoE spending on nuclear weapon ‘stewardship’ or only parts of the coast guard, national guard, VA etc.
US healthcare spending hardly subsidizes the rest of the world. Paperwork and insurance overhead don’t magically turn into R&D money. Litigation, malpractice insurance, excessive testing etc is just waste.
At best ~12% of US healthcare spending is for retail drugs, but it’s not that relevant globally when you consider how much US companies are spending on advertising vs R&D. Which is then compounded by how much more expensive US drug trials are.
The only way outlays are under 1 Trillion is if you ignore a great deal of defense spending. A classic trick is to hide future obligations like pensions and other benefits from current spending numbers, but if you need to hand out a pension to get people to work for you then obviously you should include either current spending in past obligations or the amount of additional obligations your adding this year as spending.
So yes, you can get imaginary defense costs to ~4%, but I ask you where is the coast guard, national guard, DoE, or VA’s budget here? “The budget funds five branches of the U.S. military: the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Force.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_... Some might argue the national guard isn’t defense spending but we sent 250,000 guard members to Iraq and the guard is fielding F-35’s.
I will acknowledge some some outliers like the United States Border Patrol, while it’s job is literally defending the border it probably shouldn’t be included in defense spending.
PS: It gets even sillier, not that long ago we where hiding the cost of the Iraq war from defense spending numbers.
For comparable benefits per citizen, the US are prohibitively expensive.
The argument that other countries might be technically higher in taxes will remain moot so long as in the US, needing an ambulance could mean years of financial hardship if you're not sufficiently well off. The same goes for lodging, food safety, etc.
The US government provides retirement benefits, including healthcare at retirement. You are not required to pay for college, and you can go to a cheap school if you want.
Early stage investment is usually paying below-market salaries of entrepreneurs — that is, doing exactly what the government would, except the government doesn’t take a big cut of your startup.
Additionally, the government doesn’t require you to network with the right people, come from the right subculture, etc.
Do you want your “taxes” to go to the needy or the wealthy? Because in startups angel investors are capturing bigger percentages of the capital from your labor than the government.
In Finland, Denmark, The Netherlands, and Sweden, the income distribution ratio[0] of the total income earned by the top 20% of earners vs the bottom 20% of earners is about ~4x. Denmark has a personal income tax rate of 56% [1]
Best data I could find[2] after a quick google on USA puts income distribution ratio around 5.2x, so not much of a substantial difference in gross income disparity vs USA at the 20th/80th percentiles. Personal income tax rate is about 37%[3], so certainly USA lets you keep more of your paycheck than Denmark.
So high earners in US are making ~20% more than their peers in Denmark relative to the bottom 20% in their respective countries, and folks in the US pay ~20% less tax as well.
Certainly it's a notable difference but we're not talking orders of magnitude here, especially since the above math doesn't account for all of the benefits that higher tax rate brings, both tangible and intangible.
However, when we're talking in absolute numbers, most Danes out-earn most Americans. The median wage in the US is ~$52k [4] vs Denmark at ~$72k [5], which closes the gap even more.
I suspect there are significant differences and outliers at the extremes however, and that is likely where most of the VC money lives - whether we're talking about angel investors dropping >$100k or VCs spending millions on pre-revenue companies. I'd wager we're well into the top 1% of earners in the US doing the funding. This is the most likely explanation to account for the differences in early stage investments and growth opportunities you described above, imho.
Afaik, TPMS does not follow a specific standard for communication. I saw a video about tpms and privacy issues. Because each sensor have a unique id, and beacons it out every minute. With four weels, you have an unique is every 15 seconds or so. The industry response was that it was an unreasonable attack since each car brand had their own protocol. Well, the rtlsdr projects now can decode a dusin. But my point was, that since there is no standard on how tpms should communicate, why would there be a regulation dictating it do be done in a specific manner? The end goal is that the cars drive with correct tire pressure.
Even though you don't know ruby, you should really check out the source code. It's very simple. __FILE__ is a reference to the current file name.
If you'd looked at the source code, you'd see that it's actually a pretty cheap quine, since it has access to that magic variable. You could do the same thing with just:
Timestamps were chosen over vector clocks intentionally.
"...the primary use case for classic vector clocks of merging non-conflicting updates to different fields w/in a value is already handled by cassandra breaking a row into columns."
If I remember correctly from the talk (I was one of the lucky attendees), Rick claimed basically it is not an issue. Standard time synchronization methods are sufficient for the problem domains Cassandra is meant to address.
Sure does. Luckily the availability of that program has yet to damage my N900. This can probably be attributed to my good judgment, but not everyone can be assumed to be capable of making good decisions when there are bad options available. A good thing Apple takes care of their mobile phone. Or is it the customer's phone? I'm getting confused.
A lot of the comments here are actually pretty disturbing to me. As if the general population assumes that Apple should be the caretakers of how customer's use their own phones, and that the general population isn't capable enough to make their own decisions regarding their own property. Very 1984 vibe to it.
To be fair, I have no objection to Apple in this case. I was simply surprised at how fully Apple customers have embraced the "protect us from ourselves" mentality.
I modified this voice mail application to accept a PIN code to open PPP on the other B-channel to the ISP and read back the dynamic assigned IP on the phone. This was something I could not do with a single analog phone line and a modem.
This was not the reason to get the ISDN, but this was the first time I could remotely access my systems at home at will. Not that I needed to that much, but I could.