The same fantasy world as the AC I replied to who stated that raising corporate taxes are automatically passed on. Corporations pay as little as they can in wages and charge as much as they can for their products. Personal taxes go up, they'll only raise wages if forced to retain their labour force. Corporate taxes go up, they'll only raise prices if consumers will pay. The truth is they're already paying as little as they can and charging as much as they can.
While you have a valid point, here we're talking about (numbers etc pulled from my ass) Google France making a Billion after the usual expenses but then they pay Google Cayman Islands a Billion for the use of the Google name bringing Google Frances profits down to zero so they don't pay any tax. Meanwhile as there is no tax in the Cayman Islands, Google Cayman Islands makes huge profits. It's more complicated and there are more steps but basically it is a game of creating fake expenses to avoid having a profit in countries that charge tax on profit.
I don't think anyone has a problem with corporations paying taxes on their net after subtracting real expenses. The problem is that, eg Google UK pays 10s of billions to Google Cayman Islands for the use of the name Google bringing their expenses up above their gross so they can apply for tax benefits instead of paying taxes. On paper they lost money but Google International made huge profits and Google International owns Google UK and Google Cayman Islands outright.
Socialism can be the people owning the means of production directly rather then through the government. Examples of capitalism vs socialism include banks vs credit unions, co-op utilities vs AT&T, Enron etc. Lots of small businesses vs a couple of large businesses also seem closer to socialism then what we have now.
Here in Canada companies get refunded their sales tax as charging it to them is not fair. They often get sweetheart deals on property tax by threatening to go somewhere else and payroll taxes top out at something like the first $100,000 earned. Also many taxes have been replaced by fees. Buying a $20 toaster or a $200 toaster means paying the same $10 environmental fee.
Here in Canada where more then 2 parties actually win seats, we currently have a government with a mandate that allows them to do anything the Supreme Court doesn't object to, and unlike previous governments they don't ask first, just pass laws and fight like hell to have them declared constitutional. Takes years for bad laws to work their way through the court system. This due to the 62% of voters who did not want these guys in power splitting their vote. If the results are 33% 33% and 34% the ones with 34% can run all over the other 66%. The other thing is how when a third party does meet success, they move in the direction of the other party or get overrun by members of the other party which leads to more of the same shit.. At least in America someone can get elected by promising major change. Look at Obama, he got elected with a good chunk of the votes because he promised to be different. Of course he turned out to be more of the same and a major disappointment but the people clearly wanted a change.
Personal taxes do not make economic sense because they don't pay the taxes, the corporations do. The corporations have to pay higher salaries so people have the same take home pay so corporations have to charge more.
I think the most miraculous part of modern medical care compared to the '70's is the price. Life expectancy hasn't gone up all that much, quality of life at the end also hasn't gone up all that much, at least for the average person. Same with vehicles, if you can afford a new car every few years, current cars are a huge improvement over the '70's. If you have to deal with second or third hand vehicles due to making less money in real terms, modern cars are horrible. I have a 15 year old truck. It's a nightmare compared to the vehicles I owned that were made in the '70's. Even the spark plugs are inaccessible, really requiring removing the cab to do a simple tune-up. It failed the emissions test and I'm probably going to have to junk it and can't afford a replacement. Thing's a pig compared to the 72 Datsun I used to have. Even lining up for gas, spending 5 bucks a week was superior to spending a hundred bucks for gas now and I used to drive for pleasure. Now it's like drive as little as I can as they eliminated the lineups by jacking the price up to the point where people can't afford to drive. For the common person life hasn't improved all that much. For the top 10% it has improved and for the top 0.1% life has really improved.
In Canada, we have low taxes and high fees. Every time you get an extra $10 on your pay check from a tax cut, your employer has an excuse to not raise your pay to match inflation and you pay an extra $20 in fees. But we have low taxes so it must be great. Of course since the right wingers got into power and cut spending like crazy in the things they hate like making sure our meat isn't poisonous, the budget surplus is gone to be replaced with promises about how with even more cuts the budget will be balanced once again in a few years.
They're all horrible. Telus charges me $5 for not making enough long distance calls, $9 for call display (which the wife insists on having) and $35 for crappy dial-up. They have package deals if you get high speed but they sure as hell aren't ever going to upgrade the old copper lines around here. They might put in a cell tower if they're paid enough by BC Hydro (government run power company) so they can actually use that expensive smart meter that they installed on the pretext of saving me money and fixing the power outages quicker, perhaps in 71 hours instead of 72 hours.
In BC we've had successive right wing governments that campaign on lower taxes as they're good for the economy. So instead of having a tax on that toaster that is a percentage, they have an environment fee that's $10. Since the fee is the same whether you pay $25 for the toaster or buy the $100 toaster it hits the poor the hardest. There are many similar examples so that many purchases are way higher then expected, especially if you're poor. Since obviously the rich need to keep all their money, it's only logical that the poor pay the largest percentage of their income in "fees" to make up for the low taxes. Bastards also learned how to do a budget at the Hollywood school of accounting and people fall for it. Car analogy, they're cheap to operate if you never change the oil, never do a tune up and if you sell the tires you can really cut your expanses. Just down the road you're going to pay for being short-sightless.
Personally I'm not "in debt to my eyeballs" but a lot of people are. Credit is very easy to get, I'm always getting offers of credit cards and such, and by all reports household debt is very high.
Were you alive and working in the '70s? In many ways things were better. There was enough work and even a minimum wage job could support me better then now when I make 2.5X minimum wage. Some of the toys now might be better and the big thing is that debt is available which is why the average person is in debt to their eyeballs.
The world may always need ditch diggers, but 50 guys with shoves that have to be supervised to make sure they are doing a good job aren't worth one halfway competent guy with a high school diploma (and probably more these days) who can run a $100k ditch digging machine safely.
I know someone with a ditch digging company, some of the machinery was actually a million dollars (drainage ditches that have a very exact slope requirement), he still employs 2 helpers and they still have to use shovels a couple of times a day when the machine has problems and to finish the ends of the ditch. He's a high school dropout who inherited his dads business and he dropped out of school because he got sick of teachers who make disparaging remarks about ditch-diggers "study hard or you'll get stuck digging ditches." He's quite wealthy and has more work then he needs. Own the right machinery and you can do quite well. Though if the price of machinery drops enough, competition will drive even the machine owners wages down towards zero.
The 100 k cycle is mostly the cycle of Earths orbit changing. Goes from circular to oval and back and sometimes it's summer in the northern hemisphere when the Earth is closest to the sun, other times is the opposite. The erosion thing is quicker then 100 M years though maybe it should still be measured in millions. In geological time frames the carbon content of the atmosphere has fluctuated a lot, following things like massive volcanic out gassing and continents rearranging themselves.
Yea, too much of something too quick can be bad. Whether life will adjust to the acidified oceans over the long term and pull out much of that CO2 I don't know and it doesn't matter much to us if things readjust over millennium or longer. There is an amazing amount of limestone in existence, just look at the white cliffs of Dover.
Yeah, I'm tired and slightly drunk and probably trolling. My apologies. Now I should go to bed and tomorrow I'll probably regret this whole conversation:)
Did you read where I said that it is all generalities? Of course some women are gong to want to have lots of kids, the hope is that it will average out to flat or minus growth. And human population, I've been to the States, always amazed me how populated it was. Middle of nowhere there were people living. Still lots of empty room. With luck in progress, cheap fusion for example, once we get to a trillion or two the heat output of all those fusion plants is going to be a limitation. Even if we move the Earth out to the orbit of Pluto, we're limited. Whether that limit is 10 billion or 10 trillion we're limited by the laws of thermodynamics, period. What is your problem? You act like that natural limits are planned and get so uptight about it. The truth is that expansion for ever doesn't work and with luck, in general, people will naturally stop breeding like crazy because they won't be worried about most of their children dying. If some want to have lots of kids and they can afford it and they aren't like the local Mormons forcing kids to marry and have children, fine. People should have freedom, and by not having to worry about infant mortality, money or food, and living room, not to mention being forced to do what they don't want then they can actually practice freedom.
Guess I should have added a/s. Much of what he said is true but I was trying to emphasize that over geological time frames (perhaps 10s or perhaps 100s of millions of years) what we do doesn't matter. What does matter is our, and our childrens lifetimes. Your last part, the majority of carbon deposits, including organic, are actually tied up as calcium carbonate. Do you know how much limestone there is? Previous mass extinction events show life recovers amazingly quick, some 10's of million years will probably result in a bio-diverse eco-system. In geological time frames, time frames that see the continents themselves totally rearrange themselves, what we do probably won't matter. In human time frames of course it will.
I wonder what was the driving force behind that? Culture expectations, wealth enough to afford it, just wanting to do it? Be interesting if there were any good studies done. Unluckily it is hard to do good studies on societal behaviour, can't get good controls and so many factors. Perhaps it's just wishful thinking on my part that people given the right circumstances will have fewer children and really the driving force behind the low birth rates in developed countries is the need for both sexes to work to maintain a standard of living. Really I was just responding to the GPs attitude that any one saying that ideally we need less people means that they want to use force to control population and I'd like to think that richer people without worries like their children dying will naturally have fewer children, which data does support but as they say, correlation does not necessary equal causation but it might.
Interesting, I hadn't thought about soil erosion. What I was thinking about was rock weathering where CO2 is consumed by silicate weathering which results in calcium carbonate. This page shows it pretty well, http://dilu.bol.ucla.edu/home.html. There are vast amounts of carbon sequestered as calcium carbonate, maybe half that has ever been released from the mantle. Wiki mentions that erosion also transports dissolved CO2 to the ocean where various organisms convert it to calcium carbonate, think shells falling to the bottom of the ocean to form limestone. In geological time frames this has a large impact on global climate. When the continents are in one mass there is little rainfall in the interior and little erosion. Global CO2 levels increase along with temperature. And the opposite also happens, lots of continents, especially with mountain ranges in the right places so lots of rainfall on land causing erosion and CO2 levels go down. This is perhaps the current situation.
Never heard the claim that it is the better-off women in America who breed more, usually the claims are the opposite. Of course it is all generalizations so there are going to be exceptions. And who said anything about actively discouraging breeding? The idea is to empower people to make their own decision while taking away the motivations of lots of children like needing them for labour or a retirement plan. Perhaps the most important thing is to empower women as it seems they'd (generally) rather not spend their lives raising children when they can do other stuff. The places with fast growing populations generally treat women as property, and not even that valuable property. Important to also give them access to birth control as well so they can decide when to have children. The Earth is limited and even if we expand outside of Earth we are still limited by light speed and even without that limitation it is only the outside of a shell that would be expanding. At some point the population of the Earth will stabilize, whether voluntarily or through out stripping resources.
He's right about solar forced global warming (about a tenth of a degree every million years currently) means the ultimate extinction event will happen in perhaps a billion years and he's also right about whatever we do to the carbon cycle won't lead to long term harm. It's just the next few thousand years, a blip in geological time, that we will affect, probably leading to a major extinction event and the end of civilization as we know it. Still in a few tens of million years whatever we do now won't show. Personally, seems the next centuries are more important to humanity and we will affect them and I'd like my descendents to have a good life. People used to say that we couldn't affect the quality of water in the local river, lake or ocean long term but we sure found out we could affect it short term.
The feedback mechanism is known. Temperature goes up, evaporation rate goes up leading to more rainfall which causes more erosion which sequesters more carbon. After a few thousand years this feedback will bring the CO2 level back down. All we need is some patience and the climate will correct itself.
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The same fantasy world as the AC I replied to who stated that raising corporate taxes are automatically passed on.
Corporations pay as little as they can in wages and charge as much as they can for their products. Personal taxes go up, they'll only raise wages if forced to retain their labour force. Corporate taxes go up, they'll only raise prices if consumers will pay. The truth is they're already paying as little as they can and charging as much as they can.
While you have a valid point, here we're talking about (numbers etc pulled from my ass) Google France making a Billion after the usual expenses but then they pay Google Cayman Islands a Billion for the use of the Google name bringing Google Frances profits down to zero so they don't pay any tax. Meanwhile as there is no tax in the Cayman Islands, Google Cayman Islands makes huge profits.
It's more complicated and there are more steps but basically it is a game of creating fake expenses to avoid having a profit in countries that charge tax on profit.
I don't think anyone has a problem with corporations paying taxes on their net after subtracting real expenses. The problem is that, eg Google UK pays 10s of billions to Google Cayman Islands for the use of the name Google bringing their expenses up above their gross so they can apply for tax benefits instead of paying taxes. On paper they lost money but Google International made huge profits and Google International owns Google UK and Google Cayman Islands outright.
Socialism can be the people owning the means of production directly rather then through the government.
Examples of capitalism vs socialism include banks vs credit unions, co-op utilities vs AT&T, Enron etc. Lots of small businesses vs a couple of large businesses also seem closer to socialism then what we have now.
Here in Canada companies get refunded their sales tax as charging it to them is not fair. They often get sweetheart deals on property tax by threatening to go somewhere else and payroll taxes top out at something like the first $100,000 earned. Also many taxes have been replaced by fees. Buying a $20 toaster or a $200 toaster means paying the same $10 environmental fee.
Here in Canada where more then 2 parties actually win seats, we currently have a government with a mandate that allows them to do anything the Supreme Court doesn't object to, and unlike previous governments they don't ask first, just pass laws and fight like hell to have them declared constitutional. Takes years for bad laws to work their way through the court system. This due to the 62% of voters who did not want these guys in power splitting their vote. If the results are 33% 33% and 34% the ones with 34% can run all over the other 66%.
The other thing is how when a third party does meet success, they move in the direction of the other party or get overrun by members of the other party which leads to more of the same shit..
At least in America someone can get elected by promising major change. Look at Obama, he got elected with a good chunk of the votes because he promised to be different. Of course he turned out to be more of the same and a major disappointment but the people clearly wanted a change.
Personal taxes do not make economic sense because they don't pay the taxes, the corporations do. The corporations have to pay higher salaries so people have the same take home pay so corporations have to charge more.
I think the most miraculous part of modern medical care compared to the '70's is the price. Life expectancy hasn't gone up all that much, quality of life at the end also hasn't gone up all that much, at least for the average person.
Same with vehicles, if you can afford a new car every few years, current cars are a huge improvement over the '70's. If you have to deal with second or third hand vehicles due to making less money in real terms, modern cars are horrible. I have a 15 year old truck. It's a nightmare compared to the vehicles I owned that were made in the '70's. Even the spark plugs are inaccessible, really requiring removing the cab to do a simple tune-up. It failed the emissions test and I'm probably going to have to junk it and can't afford a replacement. Thing's a pig compared to the 72 Datsun I used to have. Even lining up for gas, spending 5 bucks a week was superior to spending a hundred bucks for gas now and I used to drive for pleasure. Now it's like drive as little as I can as they eliminated the lineups by jacking the price up to the point where people can't afford to drive.
For the common person life hasn't improved all that much. For the top 10% it has improved and for the top 0.1% life has really improved.
Going for the funny mod.
In Canada, we have low taxes and high fees. Every time you get an extra $10 on your pay check from a tax cut, your employer has an excuse to not raise your pay to match inflation and you pay an extra $20 in fees. But we have low taxes so it must be great.
Of course since the right wingers got into power and cut spending like crazy in the things they hate like making sure our meat isn't poisonous, the budget surplus is gone to be replaced with promises about how with even more cuts the budget will be balanced once again in a few years.
They're all horrible. Telus charges me $5 for not making enough long distance calls, $9 for call display (which the wife insists on having) and $35 for crappy dial-up. They have package deals if you get high speed but they sure as hell aren't ever going to upgrade the old copper lines around here. They might put in a cell tower if they're paid enough by BC Hydro (government run power company) so they can actually use that expensive smart meter that they installed on the pretext of saving me money and fixing the power outages quicker, perhaps in 71 hours instead of 72 hours.
In BC we've had successive right wing governments that campaign on lower taxes as they're good for the economy. So instead of having a tax on that toaster that is a percentage, they have an environment fee that's $10. Since the fee is the same whether you pay $25 for the toaster or buy the $100 toaster it hits the poor the hardest. There are many similar examples so that many purchases are way higher then expected, especially if you're poor. Since obviously the rich need to keep all their money, it's only logical that the poor pay the largest percentage of their income in "fees" to make up for the low taxes.
Bastards also learned how to do a budget at the Hollywood school of accounting and people fall for it.
Car analogy, they're cheap to operate if you never change the oil, never do a tune up and if you sell the tires you can really cut your expanses. Just down the road you're going to pay for being short-sightless.
Personally I'm not "in debt to my eyeballs" but a lot of people are. Credit is very easy to get, I'm always getting offers of credit cards and such, and by all reports household debt is very high.
Were you alive and working in the '70s? In many ways things were better. There was enough work and even a minimum wage job could support me better then now when I make 2.5X minimum wage. Some of the toys now might be better and the big thing is that debt is available which is why the average person is in debt to their eyeballs.
The world may always need ditch diggers, but 50 guys with shoves that have to be supervised to make sure they are doing a good job aren't worth one halfway competent guy with a high school diploma (and probably more these days) who can run a $100k ditch digging machine safely.
I know someone with a ditch digging company, some of the machinery was actually a million dollars (drainage ditches that have a very exact slope requirement), he still employs 2 helpers and they still have to use shovels a couple of times a day when the machine has problems and to finish the ends of the ditch.
He's a high school dropout who inherited his dads business and he dropped out of school because he got sick of teachers who make disparaging remarks about ditch-diggers "study hard or you'll get stuck digging ditches."
He's quite wealthy and has more work then he needs. Own the right machinery and you can do quite well. Though if the price of machinery drops enough, competition will drive even the machine owners wages down towards zero.
The 100 k cycle is mostly the cycle of Earths orbit changing. Goes from circular to oval and back and sometimes it's summer in the northern hemisphere when the Earth is closest to the sun, other times is the opposite.
The erosion thing is quicker then 100 M years though maybe it should still be measured in millions. In geological time frames the carbon content of the atmosphere has fluctuated a lot, following things like massive volcanic out gassing and continents rearranging themselves.
Yea, too much of something too quick can be bad. Whether life will adjust to the acidified oceans over the long term and pull out much of that CO2 I don't know and it doesn't matter much to us if things readjust over millennium or longer.
There is an amazing amount of limestone in existence, just look at the white cliffs of Dover.
Yeah, I'm tired and slightly drunk and probably trolling. My apologies. Now I should go to bed and tomorrow I'll probably regret this whole conversation :)
Did you read where I said that it is all generalities? Of course some women are gong to want to have lots of kids, the hope is that it will average out to flat or minus growth.
And human population, I've been to the States, always amazed me how populated it was. Middle of nowhere there were people living. Still lots of empty room. With luck in progress, cheap fusion for example, once we get to a trillion or two the heat output of all those fusion plants is going to be a limitation. Even if we move the Earth out to the orbit of Pluto, we're limited. Whether that limit is 10 billion or 10 trillion we're limited by the laws of thermodynamics, period.
What is your problem? You act like that natural limits are planned and get so uptight about it. The truth is that expansion for ever doesn't work and with luck, in general, people will naturally stop breeding like crazy because they won't be worried about most of their children dying. If some want to have lots of kids and they can afford it and they aren't like the local Mormons forcing kids to marry and have children, fine.
People should have freedom, and by not having to worry about infant mortality, money or food, and living room, not to mention being forced to do what they don't want then they can actually practice freedom.
Guess I should have added a /s. Much of what he said is true but I was trying to emphasize that over geological time frames (perhaps 10s or perhaps 100s of millions of years) what we do doesn't matter. What does matter is our, and our childrens lifetimes.
Your last part, the majority of carbon deposits, including organic, are actually tied up as calcium carbonate. Do you know how much limestone there is?
Previous mass extinction events show life recovers amazingly quick, some 10's of million years will probably result in a bio-diverse eco-system. In geological time frames, time frames that see the continents themselves totally rearrange themselves, what we do probably won't matter. In human time frames of course it will.
I wonder what was the driving force behind that? Culture expectations, wealth enough to afford it, just wanting to do it? Be interesting if there were any good studies done. Unluckily it is hard to do good studies on societal behaviour, can't get good controls and so many factors.
Perhaps it's just wishful thinking on my part that people given the right circumstances will have fewer children and really the driving force behind the low birth rates in developed countries is the need for both sexes to work to maintain a standard of living.
Really I was just responding to the GPs attitude that any one saying that ideally we need less people means that they want to use force to control population and I'd like to think that richer people without worries like their children dying will naturally have fewer children, which data does support but as they say, correlation does not necessary equal causation but it might.
Interesting, I hadn't thought about soil erosion. What I was thinking about was rock weathering where CO2 is consumed by silicate weathering which results in calcium carbonate. This page shows it pretty well, http://dilu.bol.ucla.edu/home.html. There are vast amounts of carbon sequestered as calcium carbonate, maybe half that has ever been released from the mantle. Wiki mentions that erosion also transports dissolved CO2 to the ocean where various organisms convert it to calcium carbonate, think shells falling to the bottom of the ocean to form limestone.
In geological time frames this has a large impact on global climate. When the continents are in one mass there is little rainfall in the interior and little erosion. Global CO2 levels increase along with temperature. And the opposite also happens, lots of continents, especially with mountain ranges in the right places so lots of rainfall on land causing erosion and CO2 levels go down. This is perhaps the current situation.
Never heard the claim that it is the better-off women in America who breed more, usually the claims are the opposite. Of course it is all generalizations so there are going to be exceptions.
And who said anything about actively discouraging breeding? The idea is to empower people to make their own decision while taking away the motivations of lots of children like needing them for labour or a retirement plan. Perhaps the most important thing is to empower women as it seems they'd (generally) rather not spend their lives raising children when they can do other stuff. The places with fast growing populations generally treat women as property, and not even that valuable property. Important to also give them access to birth control as well so they can decide when to have children.
The Earth is limited and even if we expand outside of Earth we are still limited by light speed and even without that limitation it is only the outside of a shell that would be expanding. At some point the population of the Earth will stabilize, whether voluntarily or through out stripping resources.
He's right about solar forced global warming (about a tenth of a degree every million years currently) means the ultimate extinction event will happen in perhaps a billion years and he's also right about whatever we do to the carbon cycle won't lead to long term harm. It's just the next few thousand years, a blip in geological time, that we will affect, probably leading to a major extinction event and the end of civilization as we know it. Still in a few tens of million years whatever we do now won't show.
Personally, seems the next centuries are more important to humanity and we will affect them and I'd like my descendents to have a good life.
People used to say that we couldn't affect the quality of water in the local river, lake or ocean long term but we sure found out we could affect it short term.
The feedback mechanism is known. Temperature goes up, evaporation rate goes up leading to more rainfall which causes more erosion which sequesters more carbon. After a few thousand years this feedback will bring the CO2 level back down.
All we need is some patience and the climate will correct itself.