What happened to Fred Waterford again? 
13 Likes
Correct. California’s infamous Prop 13 comes to mind. One of the pitches from its conservative creator Howard Jarvis in 1978 was that retirees didn’t have kids in school anymore so why should they pay property taxes to support them. The result was that the state’s public K-12 schools were severely under-funded for more than a generation.
Of course, the same bitter and selfish old farts who bought Jarvis’s nonsense would later regularly complain about how education was better in “the good old days”.
13 Likes
People without children already pay more in taxes (per capita) because they are not using as many public resources and getting the same benefits that families with children are getting (the biggest one being an education in public schools).
Edit: This was already mentioned above, along with the child tax credit.
3 Likes
Ugh, I hate the “I don’t use ∆ so why should I pay?” argument. First of all you almost certainly have used ∆ and second of all don’t you want to live in a place with good ∆s? Don’t you want to make things better? If not what’s wrong with you? Because if ∆ is not funded you’ll certainly have to deal with the consequences of ∆ not working.
16 Likes
Full disclosure: I don’t have kids (despite being of an age where you’d expect me to have teenagers). But I have never – not even for one second – felt disgruntled about paying taxes for kid-related services I won’t use myself.
I figure these taxes can be easily and happily rationalized as either paying for the services I used as a kid, or as paying for a society I want to live in, or as helping to pay for the education and general well-being of the kids who will grow up to be the end-of-life care workers I might need if I’m lucky enough to live to a ripe old age.
In any case, anybody who whines about paying taxes for stuff they don’t obviously and directly benefit from is a turd.
18 Likes
Shave off the hair, and stick him in a sailor suit, and I bet he’d pass for the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
2 Likes
Those people are so short sighted. You want the youth educated and involved in extra curricular activities and able to grown in a safe, supportive environment. That way they have the tools to go on and do good, productive things in society.
5 Likes
The idea that Vance is bisectional is not true
Good, because anyone that’s taken numerical methods knows that it’s a very inefficient algorithm for root-finding:
Newton’s method or the closely related secant method are far superior.
7 Likes
Yeah: like become end-of-life carers for non-child-havers like me.
5 Likes
Veep debate question:
Should Donald Trump have been allowed to get divorced?
How about his second divorce?
17 Likes
Not sure if this has been posted
6 Likes
This retiree doesn’t kick too much about paying property taxes for public education because this retiree doesn’t want to be ruled by a stupid electorate.
14 Likes
Spare me the post-liberal lectures about children and the common good. These are the same people that accept having the highest infant & maternal mortality rates among developed nations, in red-states 30% of the children live in poverty and 20% experience hunger, and when thousands of Catholic young families desperately want to migrate to the US and the response is mass deportation.
8 Likes
You must have taken numerical methods a while ago! Newton isn’t guaranteed to converge, and the secant method has terrible worst-case performance. At least use Brent’s method, so you don’t lose the bracket on the root! (But most modern solvers use the ITP - Interpolate, Truncate and Project - algorithm of Oliveira and Takahashi.) Bisection is the easiest to code, and often Good Enough.
3 Likes
Do these people believe what they are saying?
4 Likes
8 Likes
5 Likes
Looks like the Vances do a lot of entertaining.
6 Likes
9 Likes
