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While charity is objectively good, Christianity and Islam are terrible at administering it and, for that reason alone, the government might as well get a piece of their pie. According to The Economist:The church is the largest single charitable organisation in the country. Catholic Charities USA, its main charity, and its subsidiaries employ over 65,000 paid staff and serve over 10m people. These organisations distributed $4.7 billion to the poor in 2010, of which 62% came from local, state and federal government agencies.Sounds impressive, doesn't it? Well, what about the 62% that comes from taxpayers? That's the majority of the charity money they distributed. Here's a graphic to show the details:In 2010, only 4.7 billion dollars (2.74%) of the 171.6 billion dollars spent by the church was for charity. Of that amount, 62% (2.914 billion dollars) came from taxpayers. The following table breaks it down in billions and percents.It might seem impressive that the church spent 4.7 billion dollars on charity but keep in mind that 62% (2.914 billion dollars) of that amount came from U.S. taxpayers. That means only 38% (1.786 billion dollars) actually came directly from the church . . . not as impressive but, still, a lot of money. Or is it? Total spending (171.6 billion dollars) by the church was almost a hundred times more than the 1.786 billion dollars of church money contributed to charity. If you do the math (1.786 / 171.6) only 1.04% of total church spending went to charity. That's right, only 1% of church funds was spent on charity!?! How do they get away with that?N O T E : The Economist article doesn't make clear whether the 2.914 billion dollars (62% of taxpayer money the church spent on charity) represents all, or just part, of the taxpayer money they received. Actually, I had no idea the church gets any taxpayer money . . . and I don't like it one bit. Isn't that unconstitutional? What? A free ride on taxes is not enough for the Catholic church?Do other Christian denominations do any better? I'm sure that some do but, judging from TV evangelists, I lean toward pessimism on the question. It seems that megachurches spend more on themselves than on charity. I don't know if there's data to back up that suspicion.And what about Islam? As it turns out, Islam is a very charitable religion. But it's got one problem: virtually all of Muslim giving (Zakat) goes only to other Muslims. They're not very charitable to us infidels. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about zakat:Zakāt (Arabic: زكاة‎ [zæˈkæːt], "that which purifies"[1]), or alms-giving is the practice of charitable giving by Muslims based on accumulated wealth, and is obligatory for all who are able to do so. It is considered to be a personal responsibility for Muslims to ease economic hardship for other Muslims and eliminate inequality for followers of Islam.[2] The practice is one of the Five Pillars of Islam.As a mandatory obligation of Islam, zakat is treated something like a property tax in some Islamic countries. There's also a voluntary form of charity called Sadaqah. There's nothing in the Quran or ahadith that prevents giving sadaqah to infidels. However, Muslim clerics frown upon doing so. If any Muslims do give sadaqah to infidels, they don't brag about it.Of course, there's also the matter of charity going to terrorist organizations. This is difficult to prevent because the Quran and ahadith encourage (in no uncertain terms) contributing to Jihad.So, with Christianity and Islam, charity is not all it's cracked up to be: especially in comparison to secular charities like the Red Cross (4% overhead), Doctors Without Borders (1.1%), Oxfam (6%), Stand Up to Cancer (9%), Kiva·org [Loans that change lives] (0%), Charity Water (11%) and many more.I call religious charity positive but only with some major caveats. Other than charity, what has religion done for mankind (objectively speaking)? Yeah . . . you're drawing a blank too, aren't you? The education and health care they provide are financially self-sustaining enterprises (which are also provided at least as well by non-religious institutions), so I wouldn't say they are done 'for mankind'. Art comes to mind but it's not as if the inspiration and creativity of artists wouldn't have blossomed without religion. Maybe you have some nominees you can offer in the comments to this post.A D D E N D U M :I just found this information about how we subsidize religion in the U.S.According to the Washington Post Wonkblog, You give religions more than $82.5 billion a year!The full scale of subsidies religions get is pretty staggering:When people donate to religious groups, it's tax-deductible. Churches don't pay property taxes on their land or buildings. When they buy stuff, they don't pay sales taxes. When they sell stuff at a profit, they don't pay capital gains tax. If they spend less than they take in, they don't pay corporate income taxes. Priests, ministers, rabbis and the like get "parsonage exemptions" that let them deduct mortgage payments, rent and other living expenses when they're doing their income taxes. They also are the only group allowed to opt out of Social Security taxes (and benefits).

Malaysian people comprise of a multi ethnic makeup of different races, the primary race are ~65% Malay/bumiputera ~20% Chinese ~ 10% Indians and others. Non Malays Malaysian are usually 3rd or 4th generations Malaysians whose forefathers came to Malaysia.Preferential treatment of Malays can be looked into from different angles. As a Malaysian who works abroad and comes home every year, these are some of the policies that I know in place.1. Cheaper house ownership. Malays purchasing home enjoys as much as 10% discount. Back in the days, some property developers will openly advertise a 5% discount but the last 2014 trip I was back, I've seen property developer Sime Darby which is government linked offering up to 10%. What happens really is that Malaysian of other race will need to pay more simply to upset the discounts enjoyed by the Malays.2. Malay ownership in Public Listed Companies. Listed companies in Malaysia will have to allocate, iirc, 30% of their shares to Malays. If you are a Malay entrepreneur, all is fine and dandy and you yourself fulfill this quota. But if you are non-Malay, say Chinese, Indian, or others, then you will have to reserve certain percentage of your share sales to Malays, or introduce VCs or private equity that have malay ownership before entering IPOs.3. Education opportunity. Malaysians are not born equal, when it comes to education well performing Malays are pluck from primary and secondary school to enter special boarding schools, these boarding schools will be given extra resources compared with the normal schools and many Malays who studied there are groom to enter the best universities abroad since young, with Malaysian government's scholarship of course.4. Education again. The government will force Malay participation in every level, and I mean every level. When table tennis was primarily a Chinese sports, the government introduced a Malay category so as to encourage Malay participation. Also, every year Malaysia sends around 5 participant for the Olympia Math competition, instead picking on merit, 2 or 3 participants have to be Malays.5. Government positions. It is written in the constitution that only Malays can be the prime minister or the State Minister with the exception of Penang and Malacca state (Malaysia has 13 states). This means that if you are not a Malay, then you will never be able to be the people's leader. Singapore was seceded from Malaysia because Lee Kuan Yew championed a Malaysia for Malaysians. If Singapore was still part of Malaysia, Lee would have not been able to become the prime minister even if he wins a majority vote6. Government bonds. Only Malays can buy certain government bonds, which as you'd imagine by now, has the highest return of all bonds, These bonds are called Amanah Saham Bumiputera. Of course non Malays can buy Government bonds too, but theirs are called Amanah Saham Nasional, which fetches a lower return rate.7. Universities entrance. It is known that Malaysians of other races are continually discriminated when it comes to university entrance. The Quota system introduced is hardly anything like the preferential treatment introduced by certain countries to encourage minorities in tertiary education. For a start, 65% of Malaysia's population are Malay, secondly, the preferential is given so much to Malays that I know that other races have abandon the national tertiary system altogether. I myself is a victim of this system, having scored 11As in SPM, which is Malaysia's version of O Levels, I still failed to receive a degree offer from Malaysia's public university. I went on to received the prestigious Erasmus Mundus scholarship offered by the EU and went on to work for the biggest tech companies in the world.8. Religious issues. All in the name of preserving harmony, the government has banned the use of "Allah" and other phrases to be used in other religion. Christians in Malaysia have been using the word Allah for decades if not longer to refer to their god, but now they are barred from using it because by doing so will "destroy the harmony of the country" as it is forbidden to challenge the "special rights of Malays". Afterall, the special rights is written in the constitution.Summary: Preferential treatment or locally known as Quota has been a hotly debated issue since independence. Even though there is a need to preserve certain rights for the Malay, many have argued that such blanket preferential treatment has hampered the countries development, and also crutched the Malay themselves.-------------addendum:1. Venture funding. Malays enjoy sweeter VC deals. Government VC launched two funds in the past quarter. Superb fund solely for Malays have 100 million ringgit (30mil USD) for investments over 3 years, while Cradle fund which is open to all Malaysians have 60 million ringgit (18mil USD) for 4 - 5 years.===========new contents(March 2017===========Further priviledges9. Donation receipts are tax deductible. However if you donate Zakat, which is the form donated by Malays since Malays are overwhelmingly Muslims, deduction is performed on your total tax paid. For others, oir donation, be it to a religious or humanitarian organization, is based on taxable income.10. House price subsidies has gone further, now there are housing areas that give 15% discounts:

As others have pointed out, pre-recorded reel-to-reel tapes once were widely available. Back in the ’60s, you could buy them alongside LPs and 45s in your local record shop, for a bit more than vinyl — perhaps $9.99 apiece. My father had a boxful, all acquired around the time he purchased a stereo reel-to-reel recorder in 1966.My suspicion is that when “serious audiophiles” are talking about classical reel-to-reel tapes, it is the pre-recorded tapes from this era they are talking about. These tapes appear to be widely available on eBay, and they command rather high prices. There is another option these days, though, and I’ll get to that in a moment.The pre-recorded open-reel tapes of the ’60s covered every genre that was being released on vinyl at the time — jazz, pop, classical and rock. I suspect less than 10 percent of all titles were released on open reel, and there was a heavy tilt toward classical selections and soundtracks, the sort of material the more mature audience was buying at the time.One thing worth knowing about this format is that the standards actually fell over time. In the early ’60s these tapes often were available at 7 1/2 inch-per-second speed, but by the ’70s they were being offered mainly at 3 3/4 ips, with noticeable degradation of sound quality.The market for pre-recorded reel-to-reel tapes declined precipitously around the time competitive cassette players were introduced. Around 1973 and 1974 we saw several innovations that allowed cassettes to offer similar sound quality to open-reel decks — Dolby noise reduction, three-head decks and chrome tape. At last, background noise and hiss were reduced to levels most listeners could accept. Reel-to-reel decks began their long, slow fade. We saw the last consumer reel-to-reel decks about 1985 or 1986.Pre-recorded tapes vanished much more quickly. They disappeared from stores almost immediately, and for a time, until the early ‘80s, the main source was the Columbia Record and Tape Club, mainly releases on the Columbia (CBS) label. But eventually even mail order options dried up, too.Pre-recorded tapes are available once again, however, for super-serious audiophiles willing to spend exorbitant amounts of money. I think it’s probably best I let someone else explain. Here’s a great YouTube post about this new format, from the Techmoan channel, titled “The Most Expensive Music Format (in the World)”:The thing is, spending hundreds of dollars for a single album is not the sort of thing most of us would ever consider doing — not even those of us who appreciate good sound. So it’s far more likely that the reel-to-reel tapes of old are the ones that are generating the attention. When classical music fans talk about pre-recorded tapes, they most likely are talking about classical performances recorded 40 to 60 years ago. The tape itself is going to be 40 to 60 years old as well.And this leads me to a story…In 1986, I was working at a newspaper in my home town of Spokane, and I noticed a squib in the briefs section that said the “Friends of the Library” were holding a sale. Among the offerings would be reel-to-reel tapes. It got me curious, so of course I showed up. The Spokane Public Library was selling its entire reel-to-reel collection. The whole thing. My eyes bugged out. There were maybe 500 tapes on the folding tables in the library auditorium. I remembered seeing the tapes back when I was in high school, lining the shelves in the audio section, behind glass — in the ‘70s they seemed among the library’s most-prized holdings. And now they were fifty cents apiece. I bought maybe ten bucks’ worth — albums by the Stones and Paul Revere and the Raiders, Sinatra and Duke Ellington and so forth. One of the volunteers mentioned they were glad at least someone was interested. No one seemed to be buying reel-to-reel tapes.I tossed and turned all night. I didn’t want to be the guy who talks 30 years after the fact about all the cool stuff he could have purchased years ago if he’d just had his wits about him. I called the library the next day. I told ’em I’d be interested in making a big purchase from whatever they had left, at their price, if they’d just open the door for me again. I made an appointment and wound up spending something like $90, for pretty much all the library’s classical material and some of the more interesting curiosities — spoken-word plays, the speeches of JFK, Bob Newhart comedy albums, even a recording of a non-ironic minstrel show. A guy who played in the Spokane Symphony showed up right behind me, just as I was carting my big stack of booty to the cashier. He was furious. He pulled one classical tape out of the remaining pile. “You missed one,” he snarled.You know, listening to those tapes was a little like listening to an NPR classical station in the pre-CD era. Outstanding performances with a fair amount of hiss. In fact, I’m sure I was listening to the same stuff I heard on the Spokane public radio station. Probably it had copied off the library’s entire holdings sometime in the past.Most of the tapes were in excellent condition. A few had problems — several tapes snapped when exposed to the stress of the take-up reel on my machine, an indication that some users had exposed them to heat, or perhaps that they were made poorly in the first place. Others sounded muffled. But for the most part, the tapes were crystal-clear, with none of the pops and clicks we had to endure with LPs. The sound was as good as it got in the era before CDs.I noticed, looking at the check-out labels, that the reels were frequently checked out in the ’60s and early ‘70s, but usage faded in the late ‘70s, and there were virtually no check-outs after 1980. The latest copyright date on any of the tapes was 1978, for the Time After Time soundtrack album, an orchestral score. It had been checked out a grand total of three times, the last time in 1981.Anyway, I still have ’em — I transferred many to CD about 20 years ago, and they seemed to be holding up fine.When I see these same reels listed on eBay for $30 and more, I chuckle a bit. All were released on LP, and some of the most iconic performances were later released on CD, generally a bit clearer in that format because of remastering and the absence of hiss. But I imagine many were never re-released. And when I see people bidding up a storm on these titles, I remember, gee, I bought them all for 50 cents apiece.A first additional thought: Jeremy Burns’ answer to this question surmises that many reels may have had dynamics boosted or employed noise reduction to overcome the inherent hissiness of reel-to-reel tape. I don’t think that’s true. Classical recordings in particular were considered an audiophile product, and it was common in the early ’60s for manufacturers to include a few liner notes about the recording process, on the outside of the package where buyers would see them. While liner notes on stereo records always noted the use of the RIAA equalization curve, stereo tapes made no mention of deliberate distortion such as this. In fact, I think one of the appeals of stereo tapes was that no compression needed to be employed. In the early ‘60s, the main technique to avoid hiss appears to have been to record at 7 1/2 ips. This was largely abandoned by the late ’60s for the cheaper but much-worse sounding 3 3/4 speed. It’s possible to get a good recording at this speed if quality tape is used. But one of the reasons this sounded worse was that manufacturers also switched to cheaper tape formulations around the same time. Generally reel-to-reel tapes employed no consumer noise reduction technology, simply because it wasn’t available until the early ‘70s, and most decks and pre-recorded tapes were made prior to that time. I have seen only one pre-recorded open-reel tape that employed Dolby noise reduction — the 1978 recording ot the Time After Time soundtrack mentioned above. I’ve never seen a reel-to-reel deck with Dolby, though I’m sure a few were probably made. Basically, by the time noise reduction came along, reel-to-reel was already on its way out.A second additional thought: After writing the above, I realized there was one other pre-recorded product available for reel-to-reel that often is overlooked. This product remained on the market far longer than the factory-recorded tapes mentioned above, but it was as niche-y as they come — old-time radio.You have to remember, old-radio shows were recorded originally onto enormous 16-inch transcription disks that circulated to radio stations in the ’40s and ‘50s. Pressings were limited, and in some cases they weren’t pressed at all, and simply survived in one-of-a-kind acetates retained by the original sponsors and their advertising agencies. Other records were cut by radio stations in the West to allow them to time-shift East-coast recordings for the Pacific time zone. And many of these transcription disks circulated world-wide, with commercials edited out, for use by the Armed Forces Radio Service. Many disks were de-accessioned and destroyed in the ’60s and ’70s when it appeared dramatic radio had no commercial value. Sometimes collectors literally fished the disks out of dumpsters, but more often they convinced long-lived radio stations they’d give the bulky disks a better home. And since much of this activity occurred in the ’60s and very early ‘70s, they recorded them on to reel-to-reel tape, the best and really only medium available at the time. They put these shows into general circulation, making copies for others for sale or trade.These reels generally took advantage of the stereo capabilities of the reel-to-reel decks of the time. Since all recordings were in mono, they placed a separate program in each channel. Reels typically had eight or 12 half-hour shows, depending on the length of the tape. So it was very important to play them on a machine with good separation between channels — luckily, most decks did.I worked at a newspaper in the Tri-Cities, Washington in the late ’80s through the mid-90s, and got to know one of the nation’s leading merchants in this material, Dan McCoy of Richland, Wash. Doing business as McCoy’s Recording, he had several thousand of these tapes in his catalog. Dan had a bank of about a dozen TEAC reel-to-reel decks in his basement (and later in a commercial shop) turning out copies all day long. He said got his tape from the CIA, of all places, bulk-erased high-quality Ampex tape that I suppose had originally been used to monitor foreign-language radio broadcasts. I wrote several stories about his operation, and I bought about 300 reels myself. The cost was about a dozen reels for $100. These tapes cover the vast variety of programming heard on the radio in the age before TV.I suppose classical-music fans might appreciate the broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera and the NBC Symphony Orchestra. But since every important classical work was re-recorded in the hi-fi era, these recordings are mainly of historical interest. Where music is concerned, probably the greatest interest was in big-band remotes, one-of-a-kind performances that never could be repeated. And of course, there were thousands of dramatic and comedic programs as well, even news broadcasts. About 55,000 programs survived in this way, according to a catalog of circulating shows issued by OTR enthusiast Jay Hickerson in about the year 2000. In some cases, these reels preserved the programming of other English-speaking countries that their originating networks chose to destroy. South Africa, for instance, was one of the last countries to adopt television broadcasting, and old-style radio drama continued as late as 1980. The original network recordings were destroyed in the early ’80s when this type of broadcasting ceased, and what survives of South African broadcasting remains with us today only because some recordings circulated widely among American collectors.The use of tape for OTR died out in about the year 2000, when, in a brief space of time, collectors transferred their tapes to MP3 and made the files available on the Web for free. Dan’s operation ceased in 2012, if I remember right, and he passed a couple years later. He told me in the ’90s that he made arrangements to donate his collection to the Washington State University school of broadcast for a tax deduction, and I imagine that’s where most of his stuff ended up. I’m not sure if you can get reels like these anywhere anymore. This is unfortunate, because MP3 is an inherently inferior medium, and many of the files were recorded at alarmingly low bitrates. Sadly these inferior files are the main form in which these recordings survive. The surviving tapes command a premium on eBay.These tapes of course are of a different character than the factory pre-recorded tapes of the ’60s and ’70s — everything was custom order, and nothing was produced in large quantities. But when we’re talking about the sort of material available for owners of reel-to-reel machines, this custom-recorded product also deserves a mention.