OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.
While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.
These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.
Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.
If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.
To understand why, you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.
I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off. And to those who argue that higher rates hurt job creation, I would note that a net of nearly 40 million jobs were added between 1980 and 2000. You know what’s happened since then: lower tax rates and far lower job creation.
Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.
The taxes I refer to here include only federal income tax, but you can be sure that any payroll tax for the 400 was inconsequential compared to income. In fact, 88 of the 400 in 2008 reported no wages at all, though every one of them reported capital gains. Some of my brethren may shun work but they all like to invest. (I can relate to that.)
I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people. They love America and appreciate the opportunity this country has given them. Many have joined the Giving Pledge, promising to give most of their wealth to philanthropy. Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering.
Twelve members of Congress will soon take on the crucial job of rearranging our country’s finances. They’ve been instructed to devise a plan that reduces the 10-year deficit by at least $1.5 trillion. It’s vital, however, that they achieve far more than that. Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.
Job one for the 12 is to pare down some future promises that even a rich America can’t fulfill. Big money must be saved here. The 12 should then turn to the issue of revenues. I would leave rates for 99.7 percent of taxpayers unchanged and continue the current 2-percentage-point reduction in the employee contribution to the payroll tax. This cut helps the poor and the middle class, who need every break they can get.
But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.
My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.
The theory that our universe is contained inside a bubble, and that multiple alternative universes exist inside their own bubbles -- making up the 'multiverse' -- is, for the first time, being tested by physicists.
Two research papers published in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review D are the first to detail how to search for signatures of other universes. Physicists are now searching for disk-like patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation -- relic heat radiation left over from the Big Bang -- which could provide tell-tale evidence of collisions between other universes and our own.
Many modern theories of fundamental physics predict that our universe is contained inside a bubble. In addition to our bubble, this `multiverse' will contain others, each of which can be thought of as containing a universe. In the other 'pocket universes' the fundamental constants, and even the basic laws of nature, might be different.
Until now, nobody had been able to find a way to efficiently search for signs of bubble universe collisions -- and therefore proof of the multiverse -- in the CMB radiation, as the disc-like patterns in the radiation could be located anywhere in the sky. Additionally, physicists needed to be able to test whether any patterns they detected were the result of collisions or just random patterns in the noisy data.
A team of cosmologists based at University College London (UCL), Imperial College London and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics has now tackled this problem.
"It's a very hard statistical and computational problem to search for all possible radii of the collision imprints at any possible place in the sky," says Dr Hiranya Peiris, co-author of the research from the UCL Department of Physics and Astronomy. "But that's what pricked my curiosity."
The team ran simulations of what the sky would look like with and without cosmic collisions and developed a ground-breaking algorithm to determine which fit better with the wealth of CMB data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). They put the first observational upper limit on how many bubble collision signatures there could be in the CMB sky.
Stephen Feeney, a PhD student at UCL who created the powerful computer algorithm to search for the tell-tale signatures of collisions between "bubble universes," and co-author of the research papers, said: "The work represents an opportunity to test a theory that is truly mind-blowing: that we exist within a vast multiverse, where other universes are constantly popping into existence."
One of many dilemmas facing physicists is that humans are very good at cherry-picking patterns in the data that may just be coincidence. However, the team's algorithm is much harder to fool, imposing very strict rules on whether the data fits a pattern or whether the pattern is down to chance.
Dr Daniel Mortlock, a co-author from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, said: "It's all too easy to over-interpret interesting patterns in random data (like the 'face on Mars' that, when viewed more closely, turned out to just a normal mountain), so we took great care to assess how likely it was that the possible bubble collision signatures we found could have arisen by chance."
The authors stress that these first results are not conclusive enough either to rule out the multiverse or to definitively detect the imprint of a bubble collision. However, WMAP is not the last word: new data currently coming in from the European Space Agency's Planck satellite should help solve the puzzle.
University of Manchester scientists, working with colleagues in Edinburgh and Australia, have provided the first direct biological evidence for a genetic contribution to people's intelligence.
Previous studies on twins and adopted people suggested that there is a substantial genetic contribution to thinking skills, but this new study -- published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry -- is the first to find a genetic contribution by testing people's DNA for genetic variations.
The team studied two types of intelligence in more than 3,500 people from Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Newcastle and Manchester. The paper, by Dr Neil Pendleton and colleagues, found that 40% to 50% of people's differences in these abilities could be traced to genetic differences.
The study examined more than half a million genetic markers on every person in the study. The new findings were made possible using a new type of analysis invented by Professor Peter Visscher and colleagues in Brisbane. As well as the findings in people from Scotland and England, the team checked their results in a separate group of people from Norway.
Dr Pendleton, who led the Manchester team in the Centre for Integrated Genomic Research, said: "This is the first reported research to examine the intelligence of healthy older adults and, using a comprehensive genetic survey, we were able to show a substantial genetic contribution in our ability to think.
"The study confirms the earlier findings of the research in twins. However, that research could not show which genes were or were not contributing to cognitive ability. Our work demonstrates that the number of individual genes involved in intelligence is large, which is similar to other human traits, such as height.
"We can now use the findings to better understand how these genes interact with each other and the environment, which has an equally significant contribution. With our collaborators, we will take this work forward to find the biological mechanisms that could maintain our intellectual abilities and wellbeing in late life. "
The study, in collaboration with Professor Ian Deary at the University of Edinburgh, was funded in Manchester by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
[quote[The physics world was abuzz with some tantalizing news a couple of weeks ago. At a meeting of the European Physical Society in Grenoble, France, physicists -- including some from Caltech -- announced that the latest data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) might hint at the existence of the ever-elusive Higgs boson. According to the Standard Model, the remarkably successful theory of how all the fundamental particles interact, the Higgs boson is responsible for endowing every other particle with mass. And as the last remaining particle pr edicted by the Standard Model yet to be detected, its discovery is one of the chief goals of the LHC, the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth and perhaps the most complex scientific endeavor ever attempted.
Sitting underground near Geneva, Switzerland, the LHC accelerates protons around a ring almost five miles wide to nearly the speed of light, producing two proton beams that careen toward each other. Most of the protons just keep on going past each other, but a small fraction of them collide, creating other particles in the process. But these particles are fleeting, decaying into lighter particles before they can be detected. The challenge for physicists is to pick out hints of new, exotic physics from the flurry of newly minted particles. By sifting through the data, they hope to tease out signs that some of these particles are Higgs bosons.
The LHC is equipped with several detectors, but the ones that are the largest and are going after the Higgs are called ATLAS (A Large Toroidal Apparatus) and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS); Caltech plays a prominent role in the latter. Both experiments recently reported what physicists are calling "excess events." That is, the LHC appears to have created slightly more events than would be expected if the Higgs does not exist. The bump occurred in the region between 130 and 150 gigaelectron volts (GeV -- a unit of energy that is also a unit of mass, via E = mc2, where the speed of light, c, is set to a value of one), which is the expected mass range of the Higgs. But the data are not yet statistically significant enough to be called a definite signal, let alone a discovery of the Higgs particle, says Harvey Newman, professor of physics.
There are two possible explanations for these results, he says. The bump in the data could just be background events due to some unknown source or it could be the first signs of the Higgs. "One could speculate that it's an unusual statistical fluctuation," he says. "But I don't think so."
The LHC is now operating with 7 teraelectron volts (TeV, a thousand times higher than a GeV) of energy at the center of mass between the two proton beams, and may increase to 8 TeV next year (the maximum energy is 14 TeV, which will be reached by 2014).
Physicists will continue to ramp up the LHC, boosting it to higher energies and increasing the number of collisions to improve the chances of producing Higgs bosons. With several times more particle interactions, the physicists are continuing to close in on the Higgs, as well as other new particles and interactions. There's a chance that by the end of next year, they may determine, once and for all, whether the Higgs exists.
Searching for SUSY
If it turns out that the Higgs does not exist, then physicists will have to do some serious rethinking about the Standard Model. "But even if the Higgs exists, the Standard Model still has fundamental problems," Newman says. For example, the theory is not self-consistent. "The most natural way to solve these problems," he says, "is with supersymmetry."
Evidence for supersymmetry, abbreviated SUSY ("soosie"), is also something that physicists had anticipated at the LHC. The theory proposes that each fundamental particle has a supersymmetric partner -- for example, a quark's partner is called a "squark." There are many versions of the theory, from simple toy models to subtler ones. So far, however, the LHC hasn't detected any signs of supersymmetry. "Many of the models we're excluding are toy models," says Maria Spiropulu, an associate professor of physics. So even though people might be disappointed, it's way too early to rule out the theory. "Some people get depressed that SUSY is being excluded. But it's quite the opposite -- we're confirming that nature is much more subtle than what the obvious thing would be."
Caltech at the LHC
Spiropulu and Newman, who are now at the LHC working on the latest data run, lead the Caltech team of 40 physicists, students, and engineers that's part of the CMS collaboration. Spiropulu, who joined the faculty in 2008, is an expert on devising ways to discover exotic phenomena beyond the Standard Model, such as theories of supersymmetry that predict particles of dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up almost a quarter of the universe.
When Newman arrived at Caltech in the 1980s, he did a lot of the groundwork in designing the crystal detectors that are now used in CMS. He also developed the worldwide grid of networks and data centers that stores and processes the flood of data coming from the LHC. With the LHC generating gigabytes of data per second, no single site can hold all the information, so the data is handled in a distributed fashion at hundreds of sites throughout the world, including Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research, where the first university-based center for LHC data analysis was invented. Newman's team also runs the transatlantic network that links the LHC to the United States, allowing data to flow between Europe and North America. His team, together with Steven Low, professor of computer science and electrical engineering, developed the state-of-the-art applications for transferring data over long distances, enabling terabytes of data to stream between sites at speeds of up to the 100 gigabits per second. Newman and engineer Philippe Galvez also developed a system called Enabling Virtual Organizations, an internet-based tool that helps physicists and scientists from other fields communicate and collaborate from anywhere in the world.
According to Newman and Spiropulu, the Caltech team consists of experts in everything from the detector and data analysis to how new phenomena might manifest themselves at the LHC. Because the group is involved in so many aspects of CMS, Caltech is making a particularly significant contribution, Spiropulu says. "We are one of the leading groups in the U.S. -- and I would say also in the entire CMS collaboration."
Undergraduates are also a critical part of the team. In the last two years, there have been a total of 24 students from the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) and Minority Undergraduate Research Fellowships (MURF) programs, as well as from programs at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the site of the LHC). This year, four SURF students are spending their summer at the LHC. "Caltech students can really 'do things' from an early age -- at a level one rarely sees elsewhere," Newman says[/quote]
edit: i need to figure out how to actually make them playable here w/o it just being a link :/
edit2: Some funny fb statuses from a friend of mine.
Just got off the phone with my mate. He says its been raining non-stop in his area for 3 days and his wife has done nothing but stare at the window the whole time. He says if it keeps raining for much longer he'll have to let her back in the house.
If the zombie apocalypse ever happens, im just going to surround my house with outward facing treadmills. I should be fine.
Please put this on your status if you know someone (or are related to someone) who has been eaten by dragons. Dragons are nearly unstoppable and, in case you didn't know, they can breathe fire. 93% of people won't copy and paste this, because they have been eaten by dragons.
edit3: need opinions. where should I put the 2nd tv?
A young Chinese couple has sold all three of their children in exchange for money to play online games at Internet cafes, reports a southern Chinese newspaper.
According to Sanxiang City News, the couple met in an Internet cafe back in 2007 and bonded over their obsession with online video games. A year later, the parents -- who are both under 21 -- welcomed their first child, a son. Days after his birth, they left him home alone while they went to play online games at an Internet cafe 30 km away.
In 2009, Li Lin and Li Juan welcomed their second child, a baby girl, and came up with the idea to sell her for money to fund their online game obsession. They did so, receiving RMB 3,000 (less than $500), which they spent entirely shortly after. The couple then proceeded to sell their first child and got 10 times as much for him -- RMB 30,000, or about $4600.
Upon having their third child -- another boy -- the parents followed in their previous footsteps and also got RMB 30,000 for him.
They were finally turned into authorities when Li Lin’s mother found out what her son and his girlfriend had done.
When asked if they missed their children, the parents answered, "We don’t want to raise them, we just want to sell them for some money.”
Sanxiang City News reports the couple didn't know they were breaking the law.
For anyone who doesn't have this yet.
I have invites...PM or comment email if u want one. Will give out first come first serve til I run out (they don't tell u how many invites u get)
EDIT: Invites may take a little bit to get there due to google holding them. But I'm not sure on this (just invited an alt email of mine to see how long it takes ) Will invite anyone who pms.
EDIT2: Got invite to 2nd email about 45 mins after it was sent, sooo invites may not take that long.
A man who developed cancer in his windpipe has gotten a new trachea, grown entirely from his own stem cells over two days in a laboratory in Sweden. The operation is remarkable because it's the first time a completely synthetically grown organ has been transplanted into a patient, The Guardian reported. "The synthetic trachea was created by growing the patient's own stem cells on an artificial 'scaffold', which British scientists helped design. Windpipes have been grown from stem cells before, but only using the collagen 'skeletons' of donated tracheas ... Professor Paolo Macchiarini, an Italian expert in regenerative medicine who led the groundbreaking operation, designed the Y-shaped synthetic trachea scaffold with Professor Alexander Seifalian, from University College London." The success of the operation means that patients who need organ transplants could conceivably be able to have them specially grown instead of having to wait for a donor.
...
They started several years ago by using a donor trachea as a scaffold to build a new trachea. They stripped away all the cells lining and enclosing the donor trachea, leaving behind only the cartilage-containing skeleton. Using a shoebox-sized bioreactor developed by Harvard Bioscience Inc. of Holliston, Mass., they then seeded some of the patient's own stem cells into the scaffold.
The whole thing was mounted on a rotating drum, similar to a rotisserie for barbecuing chickens. The drum alternately dipped it into a nutrient medium that provided everything needed for the cells to grow and proliferate, and then lifted it out so the cells could get oxygen.
...
Instead of using a donor trachea for the scaffold, materials scientist Alexander Seifalian of University College London built one in a lab. The base was a glass tube with dimensions obtained from three-dimensional images of Beyene's trachea. Then Seifalian used a medical plastic called polyethylene glycol to build a scaffold around it. The plastic is very porous, allowing the stem cells to grow into it. The scientists put hormones in the nutrient soup to induce the stem cells to change into the cells normally found in the lining and exterior of a trachea. After two days in the bioreactor, the trachea was implanted in Beyene, where the cells continued to grow and proliferate. The whole process took less than a week.
...
Researchers have previously used virtually identical techniques to produce synthetic blood vessels, urethras and bladders. The common denominator in all of those is that the synthetic organs are basically hollow tubes or, in the case of the bladder, a hollow sphere. They may have to have the ability to stretch or shrink slightly in response to natural conditions, but they really have no other function.
Producing a more sophisticated organ, such as a heart, will require researchers to make something that actually carries out a function. In the case of a heart, it would have to beat and open and close valves at the appropriate times.
Also, noted Dr. Alan J. Russell, a tissue engineer at the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, such solid organs have much thicker tissue and thus need an internal system of blood vessels to supply oxygen and nutrients. That is a far more difficult task.
"That's still years away," said Atala, whose team is trying to make synthetic kidneys. "Ninety percent of the patients on a transplant list are waiting on a kidney. We are absolutely working very hard on that."
My roommate has one super fucking annoying flaw which is whenever a disagreement or debate comes up about any issues they get super loud, super emotionally involved, and spout of things which are ideological crap and have no basis in reality or facts to back them up at all. This occurs over fucking everything, which movie is better, which band is better, etc. Obviously it also occurs more vehemently over other issues where we differ like healthcare, taxation, government, economics, iraq, religion. Seeing how I'm an atheist/left-centrist and she's a orthodox christian/libertarian.
One ultra depressing side not is that despite this her and i have managed to reach compromise agreements on everything which satisfies both of us, something congress never seems to do ever. Also granted I sometimes fuck up in statements and have to go back and correct myself. Perfect example was last night. I said I hated the statement "more people have died due to religion then any other cause" which is repeated over and over by atheists in soundbytes on interviews and is pretty much a straight up lie. But that got us to the typical line which follows afterwords "without religion good ppl would do good things and bad ppl would do bad things, but if you want a good person to do a bad thing, that takes religion" which I happen to agree with massively (note: i do agree other things cause good ppl to do bad things like economic troubles leading to theft for food etc but these are unimportant to the statement). Then I pointed out examples of this mainly the pope letting child molesters go free and misinformation about condoms helping the spread of aids.
Any how we go on arguing this for a while and eventually I get to the war on drugs being another example since the temperance movements and anti-drug movements get their upstart, and base justification from religious ideals which has led to a waste on resources, ppl, and extremely poor drug controls, even scientists in the 70s said pot should not be a schedule 1 drug. (e.g. Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was the main driving force of prohibition and protestant ministers were the creators in large part.)To which her response was not the expected "well i'm christian and i don't think drugs should be illegal" (which obv response is, ur the exception not the rule as seen by ur also accepting evolution) but instead she responded with "some drugs need to be made illegal like meth, crack, heroin, and maybe things would be better off if alcohol was illegal". WTF complete fucking 180 degree turn from her libertarian ideals of "everything should be legalized the gov't has no right to tell me what i can and can not put in my body" solely just to be consistent in her blind refutation that religion causes and said the only reason I brought this up was "because I want pot to be legalized so badly". Which I don't even fucking want, decriminalization of possesion&personal growing along with medical legalization is completely different then flat out legalization.
Then we go on and eventually get to what makes ppl poor (at this point the whole religion thing is gone) where I argue that many americans are not paid an actual livable wage, combined with the cost of college tuition leads to a situation of lower standards of living then there should be for many americans and occasional rampent credit card debt. She says that it is solely based on poor dumb ppl misspending money and having runaway debt. Which is a fucking lie also, the whole "average american is in debt 7.5k" is a bullshit statistic because it's the mean debt of americans. The median and mode credit card debt for the average american is fucking 0. The median debt for a person who actually has credit card debt is only 3k. ( http://www.erictyson.com/articles/20090623 ) so yes there are some ppl misusing credit cards, but there are many more who just make shit money. The whole "save for college, get a degree and you'll get a good job" is bullshit since with the rising cost of college many ppl can't afford to go or won't get in. Plus college degrees don't guarantee jackshit ( http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07krugman.html?_r=2&ref=opinion )
The combination of always being emotionally angry, arrogant as fuck about her misled facts which never hold up to any actual scrutiny is fucking aggravating. This is on the whole an EXTREMELY SMALL problem since we rarely talk about anything that will lead to an argument (often by me just not really talking much )
One disclaimer is that I did say one thing which was factually wrong last night when I said that the majority of Africa is Christian (this was during the catholic aids debate) but apparently africa is 47% islam, 42% christian. But countries that are primarily islam have almost no aids, the countries that are primarily christian have the worst aids rates http://www.martinrothonline.com/MRCC11.htm so the fact was wrong, but the idea behind it was correct.
/whine
I'm not gonna have some drawn out debate in any comments w/ someone about any of these views either, i just needed to vent this fucking annoyance
EDIT:
EDIT2:
didn't want to make a new entry, but this is cool.
One of the best/most important ted speeches i've listened to imo. It is not very for lack of a better phrase at 4AM intellectually stimulating especially as ted speeches go (no new information to anyone who has examined the ideas at all). But damnit the idea is so fucking important in today's world.
) Will invite anyone who pms. 
