Your argument is wrong for obvious reasons. Of course you have to invest loads of resources into a single cow before you can eat it ... I mean that's not hard to grasp.
Furthermore it is completely pointless to compare economics of ancient cultures with a modern industrialized civilization.
... we are all just single, elementary experiments within a gigantic, global monte carlo simulation :)
All you can hope for is that your random configuration plays well - b/c you will never know for sure - it's the supervising virtual and hypthetical power evaluating your performance after termination as a statistic.
Then again - don't strive for material satisfaction and you will be a billionaire immediately - and your currency is happiness.
> “Oh my God, can you grab him?” I shouted at the woman at the door, as my 3-month-old puppy darted out into the cold and I tried to stop my 6-year-old twins from following suit. She obliged, and I was able to get a proper look at her. It was in the 30s outside, unseasonably cold for Florida, and the young woman holding my squiggling puppy was wearing nothing but a light spring sweater, shivering and looking miserable. I invited her in. ... "
I fell asleep by the end of that paragraph - gimme the fac's, dude ...
We're building a tracker for EU legislative process. There's xml markup for legislative documents (akoma ntoso) and we need to transform the pdfs that the EU publishes into it to allow, for example, user annotation (and just good html representation in general. We've built on this South African project: https://github.com/longhotsummer/slaw
The amount of taxes being collected throughout the year are by design higher than what you actually owe to the government. That's the same in most countries.
Of course you can get your overpaid taxes back by means of the tax return - but a lot of people don't have the money or time or knowledge to do that.
The overpaid money is to the government if requested back, an interest-free loan - if not requested back, a gift.
If the government would now tell the IRS to fill out the form for you - then there would be significantly less income - due to more accurate taxation.
> The amount of taxes being collected throughout the year are by design higher
This is not true at all. You decide how much money will be deducted from each paycheck by filling out form W-4 and similar state forms. You can make withholding adjustments after each paycheck.
IRS will penalize you if you "prepay" too little (for instance, if you owe them more than 10% of your total tax), but there nothing that prevents you from not giving them interest-free loan.
I have found that when I fill the forms out honestly and accurately, it results in too much tax being withheld. It is certainly true that I can fudge the forms to get a more accurate withholding (and I have done that at times), but it does seem to withhold too much by default.
This process does not replace tax return, so I am not sure why would you compare it to filing a tax return. It's a required step to establish your paycheck withholdings. You will do it anyway. There is always a risk of penalty if you make a mistake while filling out this form or have unexpected income during the year.
Well, with regards to what "Westeners" nowadays consider civilized - Singapore is lagging behind SF I'd care to argue. Just consider gay rights and expressing affection in public - so in that respect there is rather an anti-correlation between cleanliness of public facilities and cultural development.
Public Displays of affection, beyond holding hands, doesn't have any rock solid claim on being "civilized" in my books - so, I'll call that more a question of currently fashionable behavior, much akin to public nudity (the recognizing of which probably has a better claim to being civilized in my books). As far as gay rights, agreed - Singapore is behind the curve on officially recognizing gay marriage. With that said, it's not as though Singapore is actually enforcing any of these laws - Singapore has a pretty active gay community/nightlife: http://blog.happymassage.com/the-gay-bars-guidance-in-singap...
> Public Displays of affection, beyond holding hands, doesn't have any rock solid claim on being "civilized" in my books - so, I'll call that more a question of currently fashionable behavior, much akin to public nudity (the recognizing of which probably has a better claim to being civilized in my books).
The civilized definition of being civilized is not to accept things depending on your personal opinion of what is civilized and what is not, but rather to not criminalize things that have no rational reason to be criminalized.
Public displays of affection, just like public nudity, gay marriage or chewing gum, are simply not reasonable things to make illegal.
It's absolutely ridiculous. And I don't get why this isn't upvoted more. There have been several much less serious cases been recently on the front page.
I guess HN voting is simply tilted all the way. (Note to myself: Need more fake accounts)
Of course, but intelligent people react to new qualities - and this case is super-weird and gets even more tasteless when you see the cops on the clip and how the act. It just doesn't make sense.
Furthermore it is completely pointless to compare economics of ancient cultures with a modern industrialized civilization.