AS DEFICIT EXPLODES, GOP DEMANDS EMERGENCY TAX CUT FOR THE RICH

[DBT]

It's the impression I get based on what you say, not something I make up, or my interpretation of your remarks.

Read what you are saying. Look at the narrative that you present. The impression it gives is that many if not most businesses cannot afford to pay their employees decent wages.

I'm not saying this to upset you, just pointing out the image that your argument paints.

Maybe the problem is in what YOU consider "decent wages" as opposed to what the prospective employees who were more the eager to earn those wages that were offered.

Wrong. A decent wage relates to cost of living as calculated on the price of goods and services in any given state or nation. People who are in need of money often take what is being offered. They do that because as individuals they have very little bargaining power.

 

[skepticalbip]

It's the impression I get based on what you say, not something I make up, or my interpretation of your remarks.

Read what you are saying. Look at the narrative that you present. The impression it gives is that many if not most businesses cannot afford to pay their employees decent wages.

I'm not saying this to upset you, just pointing out the image that your argument paints.

Maybe the problem is in what YOU consider "decent wages" as opposed to what the prospective employees who were more the eager to earn those wages that were offered.

Wrong. A decent wage relates to cost of living as calculated on the price of goods and services in any given state or nation. People who are in need of money often take what is being offered. They do that because as individuals they have very little bargaining power.

It is still YOU that pretends to dictate what someone else who is working for a wage should consider to be a "decent wage".

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I wasn't talking about extraordinary circumstances.

I guaranty you that almost all companies start up with the intention of generating a profit. But unintended or extraordinary circumstances occur each day that make it difficult. Some companies, such as tech companies, SAAS, and other such companies, always take awhile to generate profits. Many companies sign leases also that require them to continue making rent payments regardless of their status. So owners often make the calculation that even if they aren't profitable, that it's better to continue operating to make the rental payment, than call it quits.

You make it sound like the world is falling apart. That a profitable business is practically impossible to achieve....therefore ordinary workers have no option but to work for shit wages.

What you don't seem to understand is that the huge profits you think exist aren't there. The leftists routinely report the numbers from a few very well placed companies, not the numbers for the market as a whole.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You make it sound like the world is falling apart. That a profitable business is practically impossible to achieve....therefore ordinary workers have no option but to work for shit wages.

Buddy. You are really making some assumptions here. Please do not put words in my mouth. I'm simply trying to educate you to understand that most retail and restaurant business do not generate great profits because they have no barriers to entry to protect them. I started a tech company. And I do have IP that allows me to sell at a profit. However, it takes years to develop the product, develop the sales channels, and etc.

It's the impression I get based on what you say, not something I make up, or my interpretation of your remarks.

Read what you are saying. Look at the narrative that you present. The impression it gives is that many if not most businesses cannot afford to pay their employees decent wages.

I'm not saying this to upset you, just pointing out the image that your argument paints.

The "image" he paints is reality. You're living in leftist fantasyland where there's tons of money to pay for social causes.

 

[DBT]

Wrong. A decent wage relates to cost of living as calculated on the price of goods and services in any given state or nation. People who are in need of money often take what is being offered. They do that because as individuals they have very little bargaining power.

It is still YOU that pretends to dictate what someone else who is working for a wage should consider to be a "decent wage".

You didn't read what I said. I pointed out that a living wage is calculated on the basis of CPI. The cost of housing, food, travel, clothing, etc. Therefore income for full time work should at least meet the cost of living. Ideally more because something needs to be put away for emergencies. This has nothing to do with me.

 

[DBT]

It's the impression I get based on what you say, not something I make up, or my interpretation of your remarks.

Read what you are saying. Look at the narrative that you present. The impression it gives is that many if not most businesses cannot afford to pay their employees decent wages.

I'm not saying this to upset you, just pointing out the image that your argument paints.

The "image" he paints is reality. You're living in leftist fantasyland where there's tons of money to pay for social causes.

The stats don't support the image that most businesses cannot afford to pay their employees a living wage or better. You need to support what you claim, not just state it. You have been asked to do that numerous times.

 

[skepticalbip]

Wrong. A decent wage relates to cost of living as calculated on the price of goods and services in any given state or nation. People who are in need of money often take what is being offered. They do that because as individuals they have very little bargaining power.

It is still YOU that pretends to dictate what someone else who is working for a wage should consider to be a "decent wage".

You didn't read what I said. I pointed out that a living wage is calculated on the basis of CPI. The cost of housing, food, travel, clothing, etc. Therefore income for full time work should at least meet the cost of living. Ideally more because something needs to be put away for emergencies. This has nothing to do with me.

And according to the World Health Organization, there is no poverty in the U.S. so no one who does not at least meet the basic cost of living. After that point it amounts to who is deciding what minimum level of life is desirable. Personal taste is that the WHO sets the bar far too low, but hey that is personal opinion. However, I have no idea who's scale you are using. If you are basing in on someone having difficulty making ends meet then there are people making six figures that haven't been able to do that and have to declare bankruptcy.

 

[DBT]

You didn't read what I said. I pointed out that a living wage is calculated on the basis of CPI. The cost of housing, food, travel, clothing, etc. Therefore income for full time work should at least meet the cost of living. Ideally more because something needs to be put away for emergencies. This has nothing to do with me.

And according to the World Health Organization, there is no poverty in the U.S. so no one who does not at least meet the basic cost of living. After that point it amounts to who is deciding what minimum level of life is desirable. Personal taste is that the WHO sets the bar far too low, but hey that is personal opinion. However, I have no idea who's scale you are using. If you are basing in on someone having difficulty making ends meet then there are people making six figures that haven't been able to do that and have to declare bankruptcy.

You need to show figures from WHO to see what their criteria is. If they are claiming that there is no poverty in the U.S, they are delusional.

 

[KeepTalking]

You didn't read what I said. I pointed out that a living wage is calculated on the basis of CPI. The cost of housing, food, travel, clothing, etc. Therefore income for full time work should at least meet the cost of living. Ideally more because something needs to be put away for emergencies. This has nothing to do with me.

And according to the World Health Organization, there is no poverty in the U.S. so no one who does not at least meet the basic cost of living.

Show your work, and provide a citation, please.

 

[skepticalbip]

You didn't read what I said. I pointed out that a living wage is calculated on the basis of CPI. The cost of housing, food, travel, clothing, etc. Therefore income for full time work should at least meet the cost of living. Ideally more because something needs to be put away for emergencies. This has nothing to do with me.

And according to the World Health Organization, there is no poverty in the U.S. so no one who does not at least meet the basic cost of living. After that point it amounts to who is deciding what minimum level of life is desirable. Personal taste is that the WHO sets the bar far too low, but hey that is personal opinion. However, I have no idea who's scale you are using. If you are basing in on someone having difficulty making ends meet then there are people making six figures that haven't been able to do that and have to declare bankruptcy.

You need to show figures from WHO to see what their criteria is. If they are claiming that there is no poverty in the U.S, they are delusional.

WHO is concerned with world standards not relative wealth of people within specific countries. Their standard of poverty is US$1.25 per day (in 2011 dollars). Most people in the U.S. live in such luxury (by world standards) that they have no concept of what poverty is. A trip to India, Bangladesh, or Africa isn't needed to see what real poverty is... A short hop to Haiti will do.

This is why there are millions/year trying to migrate to the U.S. They see even our minimum wage jobs as allowing them to live in luxury compared to their current situation.

A look at another country's not poor but average family, the average family income in Mexico (that is average not lowest) is $843/month so a minimum wage job in the US would be a nice raise for the average Mexican family (that would be highly insulted if you called them poor).

 

[laughing dog]

Poverty can be defined as an absolute measure (as the WHO) or as a relative measure. It is no comfort to those at the bottom run of the USA that they are not poor by the standards of the WHO because they live in the USA not Moldova or Borneo or Mali. And IMO, a wealthier country ought to aspire to raise the standard of living of its neediest citizens to the general standard of living of its population.

 

[lpetrich]

More debunking Half-Life's claim of Bill Gates's superior genius.

I'd mention that operating systems consist of three main parts: a kernel, app support, and utility apps. There may not be a clear line between the second and third one, and parts of the second one may be merged into a kernel.

Now to OS kernels.

First, does a computer need an OS? The first ones were programmed without one, and OS-less programming has continued to be done for lower-end embedded systems and lower-spec game consoles. For instance, a microwave oven doesn't need very fancy programming. It has a rather simple program that it always runs.

But when one wants to do several things in sequence, or several things at the same time, that's what an OS is for. The first ones were for batch duty, and thus single-tasking. Multitasking developed from that. A simple kind is cooperative multitasking, where each active app runs for a big, then gives up control to another one. That's only used in special cases, because the most generally useful kind is preemptive multitasking, where the OS kernel forces an active app to pause and then makes another active app resume. That can be guaranteed to keep an app from hogging the CPU, something difficult in cooperative multitasking. Preemptive multitasking is essentially universal except for some special cases.

Turning to memory, the first computers used nothing special - every memory access was translated into a real-memory location. That's done on the lower-end embedded systems and lower-spec game consoles. But trying to fit an app into available memory can sometimes be difficult, so that's why overlays were invented - one specifies which parts of an app can be swapped into and out of the same areas of memory. That's rather awkward, and the next step is the move the overlays to behind the scenes: virtual memory. Each memory access's address is translated into a real-memory address by the memory-management hardware, and if it isn't present, then it's copied in from a "pagefile" or "swapfile". To make room, anything not used in a while is copied out into that file.

For multiple active apps in a single memory space, they can allocate memory from inside of it either mixed together or in partitions, one for each active app. Going further, one can give each app its own memory space -- protected memory. That means that an app cannot trample on another app's memory contents.

 

[DBT]

You need to show figures from WHO to see what their criteria is. If they are claiming that there is no poverty in the U.S, they are delusional.

WHO is concerned with world standards not relative wealth of people within specific countries. Their standard of poverty is US$1.25 per day (in 2011 dollars). Most people in the U.S. live in such luxury (by world standards) that they have no concept of what poverty is. A trip to India, Bangladesh, or Africa isn't needed to see what real poverty is... A short hop to Haiti will do.

This is why there are millions/year trying to migrate to the U.S. They see even our minimum wage jobs as allowing them to live in luxury compared to their current situation.

A look at another country's not poor but average family, the average family income in Mexico (that is average not lowest) is $843/month so a minimum wage job in the US would be a nice raise for the average Mexican family (that would be highly insulted if you called them poor).

Comparing income rates between the U.S and third world countries is not a measure of poverty within the U.S....cost of living, etc. It's a piss poor metric, as I'm sure you know.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It's the impression I get based on what you say, not something I make up, or my interpretation of your remarks.

Read what you are saying. Look at the narrative that you present. The impression it gives is that many if not most businesses cannot afford to pay their employees decent wages.

I'm not saying this to upset you, just pointing out the image that your argument paints.

The "image" he paints is reality. You're living in leftist fantasyland where there's tons of money to pay for social causes.

The stats don't support the image that most businesses cannot afford to pay their employees a living wage or better. You need to support what you claim, not just state it. You have been asked to do that numerous times.

Reality: In a competitive industry (which is most industries) competition drives profit margins as low as they reasonably can be. Anything that drives them lower results in fewer companies entering the field to replace those that die, this persists until the lack of competition drives prices up to restore the profit margins. (The reverse also occurs--if the profit margins are too high more companies enter, driving down profits.) This is a slow process but inherent in market forces, you will not see a long term deviation from this except in non-competitive industries. (For example, the oft-cited example of Apple. Nobody else can sell iPhones and iPads, they can charge a premium.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You didn't read what I said. I pointed out that a living wage is calculated on the basis of CPI. The cost of housing, food, travel, clothing, etc. Therefore income for full time work should at least meet the cost of living. Ideally more because something needs to be put away for emergencies. This has nothing to do with me.

And according to the World Health Organization, there is no poverty in the U.S. so no one who does not at least meet the basic cost of living. After that point it amounts to who is deciding what minimum level of life is desirable. Personal taste is that the WHO sets the bar far too low, but hey that is personal opinion. However, I have no idea who's scale you are using. If you are basing in on someone having difficulty making ends meet then there are people making six figures that haven't been able to do that and have to declare bankruptcy.

You need to show figures from WHO to see what their criteria is. If they are claiming that there is no poverty in the U.S, they are delusional.

The data that show poverty ignore benefits. Once you count welfare and the like the only ones below the minimum are those who aren't within the system--mostly criminals and homeless.

 

[lpetrich]

Looking at computer history, by 1980 or so, the big computers - mainframes and minicomputers - all had OSes with preemptive multitasking and protected memory. So Bill Gates had no part in the development of the two PM's, let alone the hardware that they ran on.

Microsoft got into OSes with DOS, an imitation of a common OS of desktop computers back then, CP/M. It was single-tasking with a command-line user interface. However, an app could make its own GUI. Its memory management was "real mode", meaning that it had no memory-address translation in it. So it was a throwback to the early days of computers, though a necessary one from the sort of hardware that was easily affordable.

By the mid-1980's, PC CPU chips were made capable of "protected mode", memory-address translation, something that made possible virtual memory. But DOS continued to support having only one memory space. Also by then, MS started working on a GUI shell for DOS: Windows. The first two versions were awful, but the third one caught on. Windows 3.x ran as a DOS app, with its apps being hosted by it. Those apps were cooperatively multitasked relative to each other.

In the early 1990's, MS hired someone who helped develop a big-computer OS called VMS, and he got to work on Windows NT - WNT = VMS with letters advanced. WinNT had both preemptive multitasking and protected memory, but it was rather high-end at first.

A sort of half-DOS-half-NT was released in 1995 as Windows 95, and it had successors Windows 98 and Windows ME. NT itself had successors Windows 2000 and Windows XP, and XP became all of MS's desktop-OS line.

Since around 2000, all three main desktop OSes, Windows, MacOS, and Linux, have had both PM's.

One may give credit to Bill Gates for his business strategies, but not much else about MS -- if anything.

 

[DBT]

The stats don't support the image that most businesses cannot afford to pay their employees a living wage or better. You need to support what you claim, not just state it. You have been asked to do that numerous times.

Reality: In a competitive industry (which is most industries) competition drives profit margins as low as they reasonably can be. Anything that drives them lower results in fewer companies entering the field to replace those that die, this persists until the lack of competition drives prices up to restore the profit margins. (The reverse also occurs--if the profit margins are too high more companies enter, driving down profits.) This is a slow process but inherent in market forces, you will not see a long term deviation from this except in non-competitive industries. (For example, the oft-cited example of Apple. Nobody else can sell iPhones and iPads, they can charge a premium.)

You are just restating your claim. You need to back your claim with evidence. The sector you mention is doing well enough to pay a decent wage to their employees, exorbitant salaries for management and sill turn a healthy profit.

 

[skepticalbip]

Poverty can be defined as an absolute measure (as the WHO) or as a relative measure. It is no comfort to those at the bottom run of the USA that they are not poor by the standards of the WHO because they live in the USA not Moldova or Borneo or Mali. And IMO, a wealthier country ought to aspire to raise the standard of living of its neediest citizens to the general standard of living of its population.

Your "relative measure" is inappropriately adopting the term "poverty". Someone being less wealthy than someone else is a very different thing than being poor. Calling it "poverty" is just for emotional appeal.

 

[laughing dog]

Poverty can be defined as an absolute measure (as the WHO) or as a relative measure. It is no comfort to those at the bottom run of the USA that they are not poor by the standards of the WHO because they live in the USA not Moldova or Borneo or Mali. And IMO, a wealthier country ought to aspire to raise the standard of living of its neediest citizens to the general standard of living of its population.

Your "relative measure" is inappropriately adopting the term "poverty". Someone being less wealthy than someone else is a very different thing than being poor. Calling it "poverty" is just for emotional appeal.

 Poverty can be viewed as an absolute measure or a relative measure. Your argument is based on your ideological biases, not on accepted views or usage or logic.

Really, the WHO definition is basically arbitrary. There is no compelling reason why their standard is more appropriate than a higher or lower absolute value.

 

[skepticalbip]

Poverty can be defined as an absolute measure (as the WHO) or as a relative measure. It is no comfort to those at the bottom run of the USA that they are not poor by the standards of the WHO because they live in the USA not Moldova or Borneo or Mali. And IMO, a wealthier country ought to aspire to raise the standard of living of its neediest citizens to the general standard of living of its population.

Your "relative measure" is inappropriately adopting the term "poverty". Someone being less wealthy than someone else is a very different thing than being poor. Calling it "poverty" is just for emotional appeal.

 Poverty can be viewed as an absolute measure or a relative measure. Your argument is based on your ideological biases, not on accepted views or usage or logic.

Really, the WHO definition is basically arbitrary. There is no compelling reason why their standard is more appropriate than a higher or lower absolute value.

Then, by your definition, any attempt at elimination of poverty is a futile exercise. There will always be people with more than others no matter how wealthy the bottom becomes.