Lurker > red sox 777

Hi Dilated Chemist, happy to be a team. Hadn't looked at this topic 'till now.

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90s games > 00s games

Sigh....this season is pretty boring. I wish Brandon would start trying to play like Russell. I think I've been spoiled by the good strategy in All-Star seasons.

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90s games > 00s games

His parents called him Coach when he was 18? What was he coaching.....

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90s games > 00s games

Are you serious? The firms making hundreds of millions of dollars a year are the ones that make thousands upon thousands of trades a day. Seriously, just read the wikipedia article on high frequency trading, and how it's come to completely dominate the US stock market. These aren't Warren Buffet types who are actually putting money into companies and helping them grow, most of these firms start and end the day with zero dollars in stocks.

Of course I'm serious, it's simple math. Hi-frequency trading is hurt far more than long run trading by our current tax system.

It doesn't mean that hi-frequency trading will be less profitable, because it ought to be intrinsically more profitable. If you're trading thousands of times a day, your expected gain on each trade can be 1/1000 of a percent and you'll be making money at an insanely fast rate.

Are you saying that we can eliminate hi-frequency trading without hurting the economy? I guess that's possible, but I wasn't really talking about hi-fi trading in the first place.....more like buying and selling every few months, or even a couple of years. That kind of trading is definitely good for the economy, and would be completely crippled with a, say, 50% tax rate.

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90s games > 00s games

Don't remember who the previous host was either, but it was a great idea. I don't remember what the results were last time, but my intuitive feeling is that people usually underrate the probability of upsets.

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90s games > 00s games

We can probably raise the long term capital gains rate though, as Warren Buffet suggests, just not anywhere near 80%. 30% might be okay. Though such a tax structure would impact 90% of investors more than Warren Buffet. His investment strategy is "buy and hold forever." Well if you hold forever, you're never going to pay taxes! The current tax structure as it is grossly favors long term investments over shorter ones- this is not just because of the different tax rates, but is true even with the same tax rate.

Example: Investor A buys a stock that rises 1000-fold in 10 years. He pays 15% tax when he sells, for an ending total of 850 times his initial investment. Investor B buys and sells once a year for 10 years, doubling his money each time. 2^10 = 1024. But he has to pay the tax each year, not just at the end, so his actual final total will be 1.85^10 times his initial investment. That comes out to around 470, only a little more than half of 850. With a 30% tax rate, this becomes 700 and about 200, less than a third. So you see how raising capital gains taxes will hurt Warren Buffet less than the vast majority of people.

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90s games > 00s games

You could lower the number to say, $10 million, and it would still elicit the same response, living off of a "mere" $2 million is no less un-horrifying. And of course, if a tax was that high, and you decided that an investment with that small a gain wasn't worth it, the only other option would be to make $0 in a year by not investing at all. If the tax were applied to all investments, your options would still be invest or don't, and the results would still be the same, but with the tax raise, you'd simply be making less as an end result, but so would everyone else. It would be terrible compared to now, sure, but it would A: encourage people to make better investments, and B: help the economy of the country you live in, which may benefit these people in ways that they don't know.

Oh you can live very very comfortably and extravagantly even. But you're not going to be helping our your country, because you won't be investing your money back into the economy. When Warren Buffet invests a billion dollars, that's a billion dollars that goes back out into the economy to be used to grow businesses. If he and others just hoard the wealth, that's bad for the country.

It's not as if this hasn't been attempted before. If you look at tax rates from the 1950s or 1960s, you'll be shocked at how high they are, and that's a good 10-20 years after the war ended. You'd be hard pressed to argue that, in economic terms, that quality of life is significantly better now than it was then. Education certainly was much better then, as was discrepancy between highest and lowest classes.

You can do this with income taxes, but not with capital gains. It's true that we can have much higher income taxes, and I favor that (along with higher limits to get into the higher tax brackets). If it were up to me, I'd raise taxes on income above 1 million, and then have another higher bracket above perhaps 3 million, and again above 10 million. 50% marginal tax rate starting at income of 10 million is fine by me.

Raising taxes on income isn't going to make people stop working for the most part, because they don't lose anything by working. And to the extent that they work less, it doesn't hurt the economy too much because their work really isn't worth that much to the economy. Raising taxes on capital gains makes investments untenable.

The difference is that your investments are going to have negative expected value. Normally you might have, say, a 75% chance of making 10%, a 25% chance of losing 10%. So, the expected value of your gain is 5% in this case, before taxes. Now let's implement that 80% tax. Now you have a 75% chance of winning 2% and a 25% chance of losing 10%. Your new expectation is.....-1%. So you are better off building swimming pools and stuffing them with money instead of water.

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90s games > 00s games

But the government is never going to pay you for your losses. If you're currently sitting at zero capital loss carryover and you do intend to make more than you lose in future, it's a terrible bet.

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90s games > 00s games

Honestly, if people who make over a billion dollars (however small a percentage this is) were taxed say, 80%, the ones that complained would be outed as the most greedy, because being "forced" to live off of a "meager" $200,000,000 earns you as much pity as Charlie Manson.

There are probably years (like 2008 perhaps) when there are zero people in the entire country who made 1 billion. In a typical year I doubt it's more than 10-20. But if you put in an 80% tax, it would go to zero every year. If you have $40 billion like Warren Buffet, you're not going to make an investment that earns you only 800 million when it goes up 10%, but still loses the full 4 billion when it goes down 10%. That's a terrible investment.

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90s games > 00s games

Greed = wanting money you think you deserve that you don't have. Rich capitalists are usually pretty aware they don't "deserve" their wealth.

Basically the whole concept of greed and deservingness is stupid, and the middle class buys into it to make themselves feel better about themselves.

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90s games > 00s games

Oh yeah? How so?

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90s games > 00s games

It's half and half. The middle class really is the greediest class.

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90s games > 00s games

Why isn't the Tea Party counterprotesting yet? It's about time someone got a counterprotest going.

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90s games > 00s games

I'd never buy a diet soda.

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90s games > 00s games

IMO, it's time to start giving universal welfare to all unemployed people. We're not going to call it a living wage, because that's a stupid idea. We need to make it clear to the greedy middle class that they are worthless. What better way to do that than by giving away money to the poor just because we can. And we can, because we can do it for less than the cost of Obama's latest stimulus plan. The poor aren't nearly as greedy as the middle class.

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90s games > 00s games

Someone should make a Monopoly variant based on Wall Street nowadays.

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90s games > 00s games

Don't ever pull multiple all-nighters in a row (or even a single one, really). You will get more done if you sleep for a couple hours, because you will work faster.

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90s games > 00s games

This is my vision of the future of America. 99% of the population will be unemployed and receive generous welfare. The 1% will be fantastically rich, so rich that they can afford to subsidize comfortable lifestyles for the other 99%. All work except for essential services and capital development will be outsourced overseas.

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90s games > 00s games

What makes you think casual voters won't do the same? Why would they care if the title of the contest says "Best Rivals" when their favorite character is in the match? If you're saying that the people who are really into these contests won't vote according to the "rules", why would people who don't have any interest in it vote differently?

There will be people in both camps from both groups. My theory that contest regulars will tend to care less about the rivalry aspect of it is much more speculative and mostly based on me- back in 2002 I'd have voted for 2 characters I liked over 1 character I liked slightly more and 1 character I hated. But now I care less who wins the match and more about what the final x-stats will look like.

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90s games > 00s games

I honestly think people who are highly invested in these contests will just pick their favorite character out of the 4 more often, not less. We're more attached to our favorite characters' performance in these contests. I'm not going to let Crono suffer just because his rival sucks.

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90s games > 00s games