These are not tax-breaks available to all manufacturers. Deducting operating costs from taxable income is not a tax break. Deducting operating costs from payable tax or getting to deduct investments at a higher rate than other industries do, is.
The tax breaks are different from country by country, the Angolan tax breaks are by far the most generous. In Angola they get to deduct ALL costs from payable tax (not taxable income). That effectively means that the government of Angola pays for ALL the Oil-companies expenses.
UK grants temporary reductions in tax rate. Favorable write off rules. Favorable (below market rate) loans. Norway covers 88% of development costs for new projects, this rate is higher than the tax rate. Large part of R&D grants earmarked for oil and gas. Transportation of petroleum products used to be subsidized. Several East African countries: VAT and customs exemption (for parts or all of the activities / investments), more generous carry forward / carry back rules for losses. Favorable write off rules compared to other industries (ended in some of the countries). The US: Oil companies gets tax incentives meant to keep jobs in the US - moving the oilfield to China is not a real threat. Investments in new wells are written off as operating expenses the year they occur, other businesses have to write off investments over several years. Oil companies operating in other countries gets to deduct royalty costs from their overseas operations on US tax (if the royalty is in the form of tax). Several African and South American countries: Subsidizes petroleum products for local use - inflates global oil prices by increasing purchasing power for a particular product. China: 0% interest loans to Oil companies, refineries etc.
The list is almost endless. Oil companies enjoy tax benefits and subsidies at a far higher rate than any other global business. The amount of money available as incentive for green energy production is negligible in comparison.
It's safe except where it REALLY isn't. You volunteering to move in close proximity to the Chernobyl plant? How about Fukashima? I even agree with your general point that nuclear's safety record is overall pretty good but your evaluation metric isn't the only relevant one and possibly not the most important. Risk is not simply a calculation of historical outcomes but also potential future outcomes. Nuclear might be safer now but it is not clear that it will remain so. Really it would only take a small number (possibly just 1) of nuclear accidents catch up in the number of deaths caused.
I volunteer to live within 15km of any new nuclear power plant built with current technology and safety margins. Your statement about only a few or possibly one nuclear accident catching up to the number of deaths caused by other methods of power generation is absolutely absurd. More than a million people die yearly because of accidents and air pollution caused by other means of energy production. That would mean we'd have to have 500 Chernobyls a year to come even close.
The devastation caused by the Chernobyl accident is extremely limited and even if it happened once a year, nuclear would still be WAY safer than coal.
AND: The Chernobyl accident should NOT be attributed to a failure at a power plant - the accident was caused by an insane experiment combined with faulty equipment. Without the mad experiment the had no business being run at a normal power plant, there would have been no accident.
Fukashima is the only large scale accident under "normal" operating conditions - and by "normal" in this case we have waves significantly larger than the safety margins the plant was built to withstand. A new plant would have been constructed with better safety margins, but they were good enough for approval some 50 years ago - a time when we were less risk-adverse as a culture.
And remind me again, what's the number of fatalities from Fukashima? It's the 2nd largest accident and the number of confirmed fatalities has so far stopped at 2. Estimates of long term fatalities stop at about a 1000. That's 1/1000 of last years coal fatalities.
Nuclear pollution is (thankfully) infrequent but VERY severe when it occurs. When a nuke plant goes bad it can easily make an area uninhabitable for centuries. Coal plants are pretty nasty too but not as acutely and the cleanup is far quicker in terms of human lifetimes. Neither is without its drawbacks.
Plus you seem to be forgetting that nuclear power is presently inseparable from the potential to create nuclear weapons which in turn have the potential to kill billions. Coal might slowly choke us to death but nuclear weapons could erase that deaths/TWh gap within hours. I'm not opposed to nuclear power (in fact I think it is underutilized) but let's not pretend that there are no safety issues involved. There are without question governments and political leaders who I genuinely think should be kept away from nuclear power because of the proliferation problem. Even reactors like Thorium designs which make weapons harder still don't eliminate the problem entirely.
Nuclear weapons is irrelevant. Modern plants does not produce weapons grade materials in any meaningful quantities, and even if they did - that should not stop stable democracies from implementing them. I'm not suggesting building a 1. or 2. generation plant in Afghanistan. Small terrorist states would not be able to produce nuclear weapons capable of killing billions as you say. Worst case (and then I really mean worst case) is a single city attack - 1 - 20 million people. That fissionable material would however never come from a modern power plant in the US or Europe.
From the countries where I've worked: Angola: All expenses are deducted from payable tax (not deducted from taxable income) = 100% subsidized. Norway: 88% subsidy, down from 91%.
Depending on who does the math the combined global oil subsidy is somewhere between 750 billion dollars and 2 trillion dollars. IMF estimates that 2.5% of global GDP goes to oil subsidies.
Fossil fuels are already heavily subsidized through tax-breaks and government investment. Most new oil projects are 50-80% subsidized (when counting tax-breaks as subsidy). That's without counting the cost of "stabilizing" the oil rich regions in the middle east with "peace operations".
If coal power plants had to pay for the actual damages they cause, solar, wind and hydro would be substantially cheaper than coal. Coal based electricity production cause 1 000 000 deaths a year globally, not counting potential future deaths caused by climate change.
If you want a free and functioning energy market, ALL costs related to energy production needs to be included.
Nuclear power is the safest power source we have (4000 times safer than coal, 900 times safer than oil) - it has caused far fewer deaths than any other type of power generation pr TWh produced.
Nuclear is green, but not renewable.100% renewable is unrealistic on short-medium timescale.
100% renewable+nuclear should be possible for electricity production and heating in a 20-30 year perspective (or 16 if the country in question is Germany).
Moving transportation to non-fossil based fuel will probably take significantly more time. Civilian nuclear powered transport ships, or airplanes, will not happen anytime soon. Synthetic fuel production is too inefficient and electric long haul transport is only feasible for trains without unforeseen breakthroughs.
Detectable in a SETI sense, that is detactable from 10s or 100s of lightyears away.
Good luck picking up a satellite-TV or DAB radio transmission 100 light years away. Communication is moving away from high effect broadcast to point-to-point.
We've more or less stopped using detectable radio signals ourselves. Most communication is now carried in fiber optics, and the radio we use is either satellite or many small low power transmitters transmitting encrypted traffic.
Give it another 20-30 years, and we would not be transmitting anything by radio that could be picked outside our solar system.
You see, it's because if you want a standard platform for gaming, there's one above the rest - Windows. Like it or not, that's the truth.
What Valve understood, but you fail to understand is that this is the way it WAS. It's no longer true with Windows 8, 8.1 and Microsofts plans and new limitations.
HFCS and regular sugar are similar, but there's still a difference in how the body responds. Tests on animals have shown significant damage from intake of HFCS not present in animals consuming the same amount of regular sugar. Why? Don't think they know yet.
Regular sugar contains fructose and glucose in the form of sucrose. HFCS contains free fructose and glucose and also contains various traces from the starch -> sugar conversion.
Does the hydrolysis in the body that breaks up sucrose also trigger something else that reduces the effect of fructose in the liver? Does sucrase regulate hydrolysis of sucrose and thereby reduces the amount of glucose and fructose available to the body compared to HFCS? Does HFCS somehow disturb sucrase production?
Is is possible that the HFCS still contains enough trace amounts of the amino acids used to break down the starch to create a similar reaction in the food consumed together with the HFCS? Are the proteins present after the HFCS process harmful?
Western agents posed a much more real threat to the USSR and the USSR way of life than terrorists pose the US and the american way of life.
Evil has taken root in your government, and you must speak out now before doing so will be outlawed and you find yourself shipped off to your version of the gulag.
Make no mistake, the current abuses of power in the US is just as bad as anything that happened in post Stalin USSR.
Oh -- and about seatbelts: There's no question that they make folks who are belted in safer. However, it's also well-established that they make people who aren't belted in -- such as pedestrians -- less safe: Drivers behave more recklessly when they feel secure, and seat belts and anti-lock brakes provide such security.
But the overall reduction in fatalities is still reduced significantly. Where I live the fatalities pr transported km have been reduced by a factor of 20 for children since before seat belt and child safety seats where required by law. For adults the reduction due to improved cars, airbags etc. is a factor of 4 in the same period.
We have ~200-250 car related fatalities a year, of which ~20 are pedestrians. Of the ~150 car related ones ~50% did not wear a seat belt. 1-2% of the population does not wear seat belts.
CSS, images and javascript (if the code itself is not derived from the platform source) is no more a derivative work than a photo frame is a derivative work of a (specific) photo. Both can change the look of another work without changing the original work - both can, with minor adjustments, be used with other works.
I don't like what they are doing, but I don't understand how any sane interpretation of copyright laws could find this to be considered infringement. If this somehow creates a derivative work, then all browser-plugins that change the way any webpage looks or behaves is also infringing. Adblock -> gone In browser spellcheck -> gone Screen reader for the blind -> gone Firebug -> gone Selector gadget -> gone
It's not a chicken-and-egg problem, it's a delusion and cluelessness problem.
Several of the worlds most successful businessmen are investing in this. Take a look at the list of advisers and investors: http://www.planetaryresources.com/team/ Clueless would not be the first word that comes to mind as characteristic for that group.
With plans for permanent lunar installations, probably within the next 10-20 years (China, India and Japan all have plans for permanent facilities on the moon - the US might also enter the race) the market will be there by the time the asteroid capture and mining is up and running. Add the possibility of Mars mission(s) (American, Chinese or private) before 2040 and the mining business looks good.
Any new space station (ISS replacement, moon logistics station at L1 or low moon orbit, mars staging station at Moon L2) would benefit tremendously from having materials available without having to pay the gravity tax.
Slashdot Mirror
FAIL
Tax breaks are defined as subsidy in all free trade agreements.
These are not tax-breaks available to all manufacturers. Deducting operating costs from taxable income is not a tax break. Deducting operating costs from payable tax or getting to deduct investments at a higher rate than other industries do, is.
The tax breaks are different from country by country, the Angolan tax breaks are by far the most generous. In Angola they get to deduct ALL costs from payable tax (not taxable income). That effectively means that the government of Angola pays for ALL the Oil-companies expenses.
UK grants temporary reductions in tax rate. Favorable write off rules. Favorable (below market rate) loans.
Norway covers 88% of development costs for new projects, this rate is higher than the tax rate. Large part of R&D grants earmarked for oil and gas. Transportation of petroleum products used to be subsidized.
Several East African countries: VAT and customs exemption (for parts or all of the activities / investments), more generous carry forward / carry back rules for losses. Favorable write off rules compared to other industries (ended in some of the countries).
The US: Oil companies gets tax incentives meant to keep jobs in the US - moving the oilfield to China is not a real threat. Investments in new wells are written off as operating expenses the year they occur, other businesses have to write off investments over several years. Oil companies operating in other countries gets to deduct royalty costs from their overseas operations on US tax (if the royalty is in the form of tax).
Several African and South American countries: Subsidizes petroleum products for local use - inflates global oil prices by increasing purchasing power for a particular product.
China: 0% interest loans to Oil companies, refineries etc.
The list is almost endless. Oil companies enjoy tax benefits and subsidies at a far higher rate than any other global business. The amount of money available as incentive for green energy production is negligible in comparison.
It's safe except where it REALLY isn't. You volunteering to move in close proximity to the Chernobyl plant? How about Fukashima? I even agree with your general point that nuclear's safety record is overall pretty good but your evaluation metric isn't the only relevant one and possibly not the most important. Risk is not simply a calculation of historical outcomes but also potential future outcomes. Nuclear might be safer now but it is not clear that it will remain so. Really it would only take a small number (possibly just 1) of nuclear accidents catch up in the number of deaths caused.
I volunteer to live within 15km of any new nuclear power plant built with current technology and safety margins.
Your statement about only a few or possibly one nuclear accident catching up to the number of deaths caused by other methods of power generation is absolutely absurd. More than a million people die yearly because of accidents and air pollution caused by other means of energy production. That would mean we'd have to have 500 Chernobyls a year to come even close.
The devastation caused by the Chernobyl accident is extremely limited and even if it happened once a year, nuclear would still be WAY safer than coal.
AND: The Chernobyl accident should NOT be attributed to a failure at a power plant - the accident was caused by an insane experiment combined with faulty equipment. Without the mad experiment the had no business being run at a normal power plant, there would have been no accident.
Fukashima is the only large scale accident under "normal" operating conditions - and by "normal" in this case we have waves significantly larger than the safety margins the plant was built to withstand. A new plant would have been constructed with better safety margins, but they were good enough for approval some 50 years ago - a time when we were less risk-adverse as a culture.
And remind me again, what's the number of fatalities from Fukashima? It's the 2nd largest accident and the number of confirmed fatalities has so far stopped at 2. Estimates of long term fatalities stop at about a 1000. That's 1/1000 of last years coal fatalities.
Nuclear pollution is (thankfully) infrequent but VERY severe when it occurs. When a nuke plant goes bad it can easily make an area uninhabitable for centuries. Coal plants are pretty nasty too but not as acutely and the cleanup is far quicker in terms of human lifetimes. Neither is without its drawbacks.
Plus you seem to be forgetting that nuclear power is presently inseparable from the potential to create nuclear weapons which in turn have the potential to kill billions. Coal might slowly choke us to death but nuclear weapons could erase that deaths/TWh gap within hours. I'm not opposed to nuclear power (in fact I think it is underutilized) but let's not pretend that there are no safety issues involved. There are without question governments and political leaders who I genuinely think should be kept away from nuclear power because of the proliferation problem. Even reactors like Thorium designs which make weapons harder still don't eliminate the problem entirely.
Nuclear weapons is irrelevant. Modern plants does not produce weapons grade materials in any meaningful quantities, and even if they did - that should not stop stable democracies from implementing them. I'm not suggesting building a 1. or 2. generation plant in Afghanistan.
Small terrorist states would not be able to produce nuclear weapons capable of killing billions as you say. Worst case (and then I really mean worst case) is a single city attack - 1 - 20 million people. That fissionable material would however never come from a modern power plant in the US or Europe.
From the countries where I've worked:
Angola: All expenses are deducted from payable tax (not deducted from taxable income) = 100% subsidized.
Norway: 88% subsidy, down from 91%.
Depending on who does the math the combined global oil subsidy is somewhere between 750 billion dollars and 2 trillion dollars. IMF estimates that 2.5% of global GDP goes to oil subsidies.
WHO estimated 1 000 000 deaths per year as a consequence of coal mining and energy production.
Fossil fuels are already heavily subsidized through tax-breaks and government investment. Most new oil projects are 50-80% subsidized (when counting tax-breaks as subsidy). That's without counting the cost of "stabilizing" the oil rich regions in the middle east with "peace operations".
If coal power plants had to pay for the actual damages they cause, solar, wind and hydro would be substantially cheaper than coal.
Coal based electricity production cause 1 000 000 deaths a year globally, not counting potential future deaths caused by climate change.
If you want a free and functioning energy market, ALL costs related to energy production needs to be included.
Nuclear power is the safest power source we have (4000 times safer than coal, 900 times safer than oil) - it has caused far fewer deaths than any other type of power generation pr TWh produced.
Nuclear is green, but not renewable.100% renewable is unrealistic on short-medium timescale.
100% renewable+nuclear should be possible for electricity production and heating in a 20-30 year perspective (or 16 if the country in question is Germany).
Moving transportation to non-fossil based fuel will probably take significantly more time. Civilian nuclear powered transport ships, or airplanes, will not happen anytime soon. Synthetic fuel production is too inefficient and electric long haul transport is only feasible for trains without unforeseen breakthroughs.
And that matters why?
The cost of living there is interest + maintenance.
If you had the money already, the cost of living there is the interest you could have gotten on an investment of similar risk + maintenance.
Irrelevant.
What was interest rates back then?
The relevant number is the % of income spent on paying interest on your mortgage.
Current capacity is somewhere north of 50 billion. That's without any new technology.
Try EVE. No two days are ever the same.
Detectable in a SETI sense, that is detactable from 10s or 100s of lightyears away.
Good luck picking up a satellite-TV or DAB radio transmission 100 light years away.
Communication is moving away from high effect broadcast to point-to-point.
We've more or less stopped using detectable radio signals ourselves. Most communication is now carried in fiber optics, and the radio we use is either satellite or many small low power transmitters transmitting encrypted traffic.
Give it another 20-30 years, and we would not be transmitting anything by radio that could be picked outside our solar system.
You see, it's because if you want a standard platform for gaming, there's one above the rest - Windows. Like it or not, that's the truth.
What Valve understood, but you fail to understand is that this is the way it WAS. It's no longer true with Windows 8, 8.1 and Microsofts plans and new limitations.
HFCS and regular sugar are similar, but there's still a difference in how the body responds.
Tests on animals have shown significant damage from intake of HFCS not present in animals consuming the same amount of regular sugar.
Why? Don't think they know yet.
Regular sugar contains fructose and glucose in the form of sucrose. HFCS contains free fructose and glucose and also contains various traces from the starch -> sugar conversion.
Does the hydrolysis in the body that breaks up sucrose also trigger something else that reduces the effect of fructose in the liver?
Does sucrase regulate hydrolysis of sucrose and thereby reduces the amount of glucose and fructose available to the body compared to HFCS?
Does HFCS somehow disturb sucrase production?
Is is possible that the HFCS still contains enough trace amounts of the amino acids used to break down the starch to create a similar reaction in the food consumed together with the HFCS?
Are the proteins present after the HFCS process harmful?
Eh.
It's not beating optimization by hand, it's beating computerized optimization of all plausible options worked on by experts in the field.
Gitmo is just as bad, if not worse than post-Stalin gulag. I'd take work-camps over systematic torture any day.
As for the 2nd paragraph, I don't understand what your argument is. The USSR fell in large part due to influence from western agents.
Western agents posed a much more real threat to the USSR and the USSR way of life than terrorists pose the US and the american way of life.
Evil has taken root in your government, and you must speak out now before doing so will be outlawed and you find yourself shipped off to your version of the gulag.
Make no mistake, the current abuses of power in the US is just as bad as anything that happened in post Stalin USSR.
Oh -- and about seatbelts: There's no question that they make folks who are belted in safer. However, it's also well-established that they make people who aren't belted in -- such as pedestrians -- less safe: Drivers behave more recklessly when they feel secure, and seat belts and anti-lock brakes provide such security.
But the overall reduction in fatalities is still reduced significantly.
Where I live the fatalities pr transported km have been reduced by a factor of 20 for children since before seat belt and child safety seats where required by law. For adults the reduction due to improved cars, airbags etc. is a factor of 4 in the same period.
We have ~200-250 car related fatalities a year, of which ~20 are pedestrians.
Of the ~150 car related ones ~50% did not wear a seat belt. 1-2% of the population does not wear seat belts.
Depends on your POV.
Elections are peaceful revolutions. Use that power to throw out the clowns.
CSS, images and javascript (if the code itself is not derived from the platform source) is no more a derivative work than a photo frame is a derivative work of a (specific) photo.
Both can change the look of another work without changing the original work - both can, with minor adjustments, be used with other works.
I don't like what they are doing, but I don't understand how any sane interpretation of copyright laws could find this to be considered infringement.
If this somehow creates a derivative work, then all browser-plugins that change the way any webpage looks or behaves is also infringing.
Adblock -> gone
In browser spellcheck -> gone
Screen reader for the blind -> gone
Firebug -> gone
Selector gadget -> gone
AFAIK the GPL only applies to linking. The JS and the server software are not combined to form one program in any sensible definition of linking.
BUT if the non-free javascript / css itself is a derivative of the javascript or css it replaces, it becomes GPL.
Categorizing javascript as art might get earn you a new shirt and a nice padded room without a view.
It all depends on whether the javascript (or CSS) is a derivative work of the platform code or not.
It's not a chicken-and-egg problem, it's a delusion and cluelessness problem.
Several of the worlds most successful businessmen are investing in this.
Take a look at the list of advisers and investors: http://www.planetaryresources.com/team/
Clueless would not be the first word that comes to mind as characteristic for that group.
With plans for permanent lunar installations, probably within the next 10-20 years (China, India and Japan all have plans for permanent facilities on the moon - the US might also enter the race) the market will be there by the time the asteroid capture and mining is up and running. Add the possibility of Mars mission(s) (American, Chinese or private) before 2040 and the mining business looks good.
Any new space station (ISS replacement, moon logistics station at L1 or low moon orbit, mars staging station at Moon L2) would benefit tremendously from having materials available without having to pay the gravity tax.