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"Exploding" Termite Species Discovered
ananyo writes "A species of termite found in the rainforests of French Guiana takes altruism seriously: aged workers grow sacks of toxic blue liquid that they explode onto their enemies in an act of suicidal self-sacrifice to help their colonies. The 'explosive backpacks' of Neocapritermes taracua grow throughout the lifetimes of the worker termites, filling with blue crystals secreted by a pair of glands on the insects' abdomens. Older workers carry the largest and most toxic backpacks. Those individuals also, not coincidentally, are the least able to forage and tend for the colony: their mandibles become dull and worn as the termites age, because they cannot be sharpened by moulting (abstract)."
They swell up, they dribble, explode? I never saw it in the example provided.
This kind of suicidal defence using bodily fluids is not unheard of among certain termite species.
I laughed.
But my pedantic amateur entomologist self says that maggots are for flies. Termites have nymphs which sounds a whole lot more appealing anyway ;)
You're confusing tax rates with tax receipts. People didn't actually pay those higher rates. The high marginal rate was really nothing more than a subsidy for cities and counties. If you had money to invest you put it in double-tax-free muni bonds so you didn't have to pay any taxes on it. That was the real reason tax receipts went up when the tax rates were lowered - people moved their money out of munis because you could make more money even after taxes.
Not only that, but there were all sorts of ways to shelter your money from taxes that have since been eliminated. Everybody who made any kind of money had controlling interest in an money losing oil well or chinchilla farm or some other BS business. They wrote off the family car and half the house. Also, it was a hell of a lot easier to do cash business. Currency reporting requirements didn't happen until 1985, so a lot of people were completely off the IRS's radar.
In short, those high tax rates didn't hurt the economy because nobody paid them. The Economist had an article about this a few years back (behind a pay wall, unfortunately). It turns out wealthy people all over the world pay at most about 25% tax on their income, even in places with very high marginal rates like Japan and Sweden. As tax rates go higher they change their behavior. They take fewer risks and spend more time dealing with taxes and less time trying to make money. Worst case they move their money out of the country and invest it where tax rates are lower.
Look at corporate taxes. The US now has the highest corporate tax rates in the world. And yet, corporations pay almost nothing in taxes, because they've adjusted their operations to account for the tax code.
What was new about this discovery is that the termites stockpile crystals in their little backpacks that intensify the toxicity of the toxins they excrete from their glands when they detonate. In another article I read, it acknowledged that suicide bomber termites are old news. Using a crystal backpack to intensify the attack is what makes this significant.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Tax receipts (almost) always go up regardless of how you change tax rates because of growth in the economy and inflation. The exception being major recessions like 2008/2009.
One other thing business owners did was to leave the money in the business by investment and raises for workers. Wages and salary for workers tracked productivity very well from WW II up until the 1980s when Reagan dropped the top marginal tax rate from about 74% to under 40%. After that people started living on credit which got easier because all of those suddenly wealthier individuals had gobs of money to invest. That doesn't help the middle class much.