Urobulos

You are getting confused time and time again with the idea of income tax=entire government revenue. Those numbers are true for income tax which makes up about half of US revenue.

To what extent is that people being less willing to achieve US citizenship and to what extent is this a result of increasingly more rigid immigration policies?

Since over the last 12 years or so I’ve been getting the feeling that US is far less welcoming to immigration than it used to be. Maybe a combination of post 9/11 security obsession and the recent economic downturn.

At least this is my perspective as an outsider, living in London.

Difference is US is a continent sized super power, a nation of 320 million people. Singapore is a city-state smaller than LA. Are we really going to compare the two as models for organizing government.

Sorry mate, but when I look at that pie chart it seems that you include things like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, DoD spending. If you consider these activities to be wholesale pointless then I guess it is impossible to have a proper discussion. In that pie chart actually 16% goes to Welfare/Unemployment though there is also the catch all “other mandatory spending” included in there.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding you from a short forum post, but I’m getting the feeling that you believe everyone can achieve everything only thanks to their own work. Which is completely untrue. Even the most staunch libertarian benefits from the way modern society works whether they like it or not. Laissez faire capitalism was already experimented with in late 19th/early 20th century. The era of greatest increase of wealth among all strata of society coincides with the emergence of a strong, modern state emphasizing the redistribution model.

Income tax is only part of the tax burden. Once you add sales tax, capital gains tax and a number of others you will see that the actual tax burden (rather than the difference in income tax alone) is not skewed strongly in favour of the poor. Actually most poor and lower middle-class Americans have a higher effective tax rate because most of the profits of the super-rich falls under capital gains taxes and can be further lowered by an army of tax advisers and lawyers. Warren Buffet’s comments that his effective tax rate is lower than that of his secretary is a perfect example. Obviously in actual dollars even 0.1% of Buffet’s tax burden is more than 100% of his secretary’s entire income, but the point when it comes to relative burdens still stands.

As to US having high taxes, I think Americans are mistaken. All highly developed countries of at least moderate size, have at least as high or much higher tax burden than US does. You can continue to compare yourself to middle-income economies which enjoy high growth rates like now and usually have lower taxes; like Brazil or China; but somehow people forget they have other types of stealth tax in corruption, legislative and juridical unpredictability, poor infrastructure, etc. For a highly developed country the US is has low taxes and a very high level of income inequality.

Pretty cool. Would love to see some more info on the imaging sensors in that satellite. Assuming it’s not top secret.

This actually got me thinking, is there any publicly available info on the specifications and operation of modern spy satellite optics. I’d assume no, but you never know,. I’m just wondering how these things compare to your average camera.

More funny when you think it applies to the Verge comment editing system :P

I share a flat with two Filipino girls, one Filipino guy and one Italian. Everyone in the flat has the S2, except the Italian who has some Nokia candy bar. I wonder whether there is any theme or just coincidence. Many of my Filipino friends have the iPhone 4/4s though. So at least judging by the 20+ London based people it seems like Samsung and Apple are the only ones that matter. Not exactly a representative sample mind you.

Depends on how it fits in your hand. When I hold my S2 (international version) a tiny bit of my palm is touching the front of the phone. Without measuring it, the bezel looks to me to be around 3 mm. If it was 1mm or zero then my hand would touch a bunch of pixels on the side of the screen. The could probably get around it by modifying the software to make the extreme edges of the phone unresponsive when held in portrait mode. When I am actually navigating and using the phone, I never really use the edges of the screen.

I like the idea of Giffgaff and vast majority of the hundreds of possible contract offers are utter rubbish. But if you look at Three’s one plan it’s 500 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited data, 29£ pcm and I think 30£ for the One X. Total cost over the two year contract 726£. Now buy the One X from Expansys for 500£, giffgaff does unlimited data and text and 250 minutes for 10£ per month, same with 400 minutes for 15£ or 800 minutes for 20£ pcm. Over the two years, including phone cost, you end up spending the same if you go for 250 minutes, 860£ if you go for 400, or 980£ for 800 minutes. Only difference is that you are not tied to a contract and the phone comes unlocked (but unlocking is cheap and easy so it doesn’t matter really).

O2 is usually a ridiculously overpriced network. Vodafone and Orange are pretty bad when it comes to pricing as well. T-Mobile UK has dreadful prices in store, but you can find some ok ones online. There are five network operators in UK, the four mentioned above and Three. In general Three have by far the most competitive pricing when it comes to data and texts. Differing factor is network quality. Some people swear by O2, T-Mobile and Orange now have an agreement to work on each others equipment so depending on location you will be automatically redirected to one that has the best coverage. I’ve never seen actual hard, properly referenced data on network quality. When it comes to coverage all five have pretty much covered all of UK (just slightly below 100% of the population), but depending on who you ask, call quality or data speeds vary. Imho these are all anecdotal though. I’d love to see an actual study.

Apart from them you have a whole bunch of virtual network operators using the infrastructure of the big five. e.g. Giffgaff (using O2 network), Virgin Mobile (T-mo and Orange), Tesco Mobile (O2 I think) and loads of others. They usually have a small (or even non-existent) high street presence. No (or few) shops, no rents, low overhead, low advertising budgets, but they have to pay charges to the real network for usage. Sometimes they also exclusively offer sim only deals rather than contracts with phones attached to the price.

The difference in price also comes down to the amount of minutes and texts included, though these days many carriers offer unlimited texts (or if not unlimited then something ridiculous like 3-5k texts per month) on many 25£+ pcm contracts. Minutes can vary though.

Can’t add much more other than that I fully agree. Just adding to the comment count really as it makes me sad to see 3000+ comments whenever there is something that can spark a fanboy sh*tstorm yet a very well written and interesting article gets little attention.

I think this is a completely separate issue. IF this was called HTC One X/S/Droid whatever then you would have a point. It’s pretty clear the HTC is focusing production and marketing efforts on the One series, but they will still produce other phones if required. Although the ads state the phone is made by HTC, I wonder how many regular users thinks of the Droids as a Verizon phone.