I'm also a little lost how making it more difficult for ride sharing companies to operate enhances safety. The money for increased driver salaries will need to come from somewhere. That might be lower profits, higher fares, or reduced quality (and that might mean skimpier safety checks). How is this good for most people?
We tried that. The free market decided that passenger safety was a low priority, well below getting costs down.
Let me rephrase that: passengers decided they'd prefer to pay a lower taxi fare than have a safer ride. OK, I don't ride taxis much so who am I to say they made the wrong choice?
Drivers decided that the money they made by driving was worth the risk of maybe getting held up. Further they decided the cost of protecting themselves against that risk wasn't worth it. Again, I don't drive a taxi so I have no idea if that was a good call.
Not to put too find a point on it but who are you to think you know better than the people actually involved?
Because the customers were also having their incomes forced down they were also forced to use the lowest cost taxis, and ended up getting robbed, assaulted, raped and murdered, or just dying in an accident.
Wow, that's an astounding leap of logic. First, I doubt poor people use taxis much. Taxis in Manhattan are kinda expensive. You can always walk, take the bus, use the subway, drive your own car. There are lots of ways to get around so no one is forced to use a taxi. Then, even if you do choose to take a taxi, no one is forcing the robber/rapist/murderer to rob/rape/murder you. That person chose to commit a heinous crime and the fact you were in a taxi at the time is completely incidental.
Worst of all the taxpayer got to pick up the bill by having to support families that couldn't earn enough to survive, or pay to clean up the consequences of them not surviving. Crime, policing, child services, emergency medical care, it all costs you money.
And that's the Amazon or Walmart argument. I don't buy it. On a practical level, minimum wages are going to put some people out of jobs. How's that improve the situation? On an economic level, driving a taxi isn't a hugely high skill job (although learning the streets of Manhattan, Boston, or London is a skill I don't have). If that's the best skill you have, you're not going to earn much no matter what you do. The answer is to help them up their game, not force them out of a job.
The big problem is that these services will kill Taxi services if these they are not regulated to compete fairly with Taxis. Then, after Taxi services are gone and we're reliant on Uber, you might just wish that were not so.
OK, let's play this out. I like Uber and the like because it's more convenient, pleasant, and cheaper than taxis. How exactly will I be sorry when taxis go out of business?
I assume you think that as soon as taxis go out of business, Uber and Lyft will raise prices. Well, as long as there's competition between the two (and electric scooters and rent-a-bike and Waymo self-driving cars and AirX flying cars and...) they can't. And there always will be competition unless NYC squashes it.
I'm all for regulating them the same. I suggest removing restrictions on what a taxi can charge and how much they have to pay drivers. And removing restrictions on how many taxis can operate. Let the free market operate.
In other words, "paying drivers that much will make our service affordable to many of our riders."
In Pete's words, "For crying out loud, butt out. If drivers are being paid too little, they'd stop driving. Just how dumb do you think the drivers are?
I was with you up until the part which said plants under construction might not be profitable. I find it hard to believe anyone would build a plant where they can see the numbers aren't going to work. At least, not in any sort of free market. That's why nuclear plants don't get built (in the US): investors see the high (and highly variable) costs and don't fund the plant.
If the plant is being built by a government, well, governments aren't all that big on profit and loss so this report won't matter to them.
Or, and I'm just spitballing here, one could simply use the cash they have in hand rather than jump through hoops.
I realized the KISS principle isn't valued any more, but oddly enough, simple is usually better.
Well, carrying one card all the time (or one phone) and not carrying cash (and worrying about whether I have cash) sure sounds simpler to me. Processing all payments electronically sounds simpler if I was running a coffee shop. Sounds pretty KISS.
Anybody who drinks $5 bad coffee _isn't_ poor, just stupid.
Yeah, that's why you should buy $5 good coffee, that is to say, Philz. Literally $5 a cup, totally worth it.
That's Charbucks anywhere, it's worse in Manhattan and other high rent zip codes. Do homeless bums really want artisanal, small plot, central American coffee at $10 a cup?
I dunno but I see homeless-looking people bumming money outside the local Starbucks all the time. Sometimes I see them inside buying something (but I don't pay a huge amount of attention to what).
In my experience, entrepreneurs are extremely uncaring about other people's problems
Well, they are and they aren't. They care a great deal about solving the problem they're trying to solve in a way that people will pay money to have the solution. Or to be specific, they're trying to solve the problem of customers being hungry and wanting convenient and tasty food at a good price. As others have mentioned, part of the "good price" bit is not having to deal with cash.
As an entrepreneur, you can't solve every problem for everyone. I'm sure they recognize that some people like to use cash. They are deliberately deciding they are willing to forego that business in order to streamline their operations. Whether that's racist or classist, well, I don't know if they lost a lot of sleep worrying about that. You'd have to ask them.
Two-thirds of millennials have nothing saved for retirement.....
They're also not going to retire for another 40 or so years. They don't have forever to start saving but it's also not a crisis yet.
Social security, when it was established, was meant to be one leg of a stool," says Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "One leg would be the private pension through employment, a second leg personal savings, and a third leg social security. Social security is now the only source of income of a lot elderly have."
Well, people can still save if they want. Or at least try to accumulate assets (a house, investments, something like that). It doesn't have to be cash in a bank account. But if people choose not to do this, well, I can't control that.
Pension plans definitely were a passing trend. I think they only really got started in the first half of the 20th century and became widespread starting in the 40s. So for around 20 to 40 years, companies offered private pension plans then stopped. I classify that as an anomaly, not an established tradition. And we've since replaced them with 401k programs, which have substantial benefits for both employers and employees.
Bottom line, I think we still have three legs. Social Security still exists and still has the actuarial issues it's had for decades. Savings exists or doesn't as much as it's ever existed. Government-encouraged long term retirement savings, either pensions or 401ks are still out there. I don't see much structural change.
The local government should be building out the underlying infrastructure and ensuring good schools and good housing opportunities.
Well, if you modify that to "ensure there is good infrastructure, housing, schools, dining, and quality of life", I'm with you. I don't think local government necessarily can or should actually build and run all that stuff.
The argument is, I think, that the present value of Amazon and their employees' future investments, tax payments, and spending outweighs the incentive the city provides.
Yes, that's the argument. My understanding is it often turns out to be incorrect. It's hard to say for certain. The poster child tends to be sports stadiums. They often get subsidized and virtually never live up to their promises.
I don't live in the Big Apple so I don't have a dog in this fight. What I object to is Amazon and other large developers getting special treatment. If the tax laws are good enough for normal businesses, then they should be appropriate for Amazon. I don't buy the argument that big deals are somehow special.
Tax incentives aren't "giving" a company money, they're just not taking it.
I guess that's a technically valid way of looking at it.
Let's try this: I'm against giving Amazon or any other company special privileges not available to all companies and taxpayers. If the tax rules are good enough for all the rest of us, they're good enough for Amazon. If a tax break is good for Amazon, it ought to be good for all us schmucks too.
The thing to remember about MPEG is it was designed to make cheap hardware decoders possible. I don't think the designers really thought that much about people writing software encoders or decoders (especially not on 32-bit systems). As such, a 33-bit timestamp is no big deal: I can make a shift register/counter any width I want. And having a 0..299 counter cascaded with a 33-bit counter is also a piece of cake in hardware.
The way I read the proposition is the legislature could also just drop DST altogether, which is my preference. My distant second is year-round DST and really off on the horizon is what we have today.
"If self-driving cars really catch on and the number of traffic fatalities plunges, so will the number of organs available for transplant."
I heard a similar argument when we passed laws requiring motorcycle riders wear helmets. I still joke about "donor bikes" when some invulnerable 20-something blazes past me in traffic. I wonder if anyone has any stats about the organ supply when (presumably) fewer motorcycle riders killed themselves.
Unix time as a double is actually more sensible than a 64-bit time_t.
Makes sense. I wasn't aware of any version of time() which returned epoch time as a double. Maybe I should look harder.
If you want to work on a data structure which just makes programmers cringe, look at MPEG timestamps. They were originally defined as a 33-bit (!) counter running at 90 kHz. Eventually MPEG needed a more accurate clock so they added a 9-bit extension field which counts from 0 to 299 at 27 MHz. I'm sure the hardware-focused people thought this was reasonable. The software people just sigh, get another coffee, and write an abstraction class.
There is a very easy way to have avoided these problems with medical records:
Internally, all times are kept in a universal, unambiguous format: GMT is suggested
Bringing it back to "News for nerds", I'm with you on that (except substitute "epoch seconds" for "GMT"). However, this generates the "Which timezone to use?" problem.
(Side note: who's using 32-bit time_t and who's using 64-bit? If you're not working on 30 year mortgages, I don't see why you need 64-bit yet. On the other hand, I'd just as soon get ahead of the Y2038 problem. But then again, I hope to be retired by then so maybe I don't care.)
For the last few years, I've generally been working on management software for storage systems. In a complicated scenario, there can be many timezones involved. There's the timezone of the source storage system, a destination (if we're replicating data), the timezone of the management server, and the timezone of a web browser which is displaying a GUI. Oh, and the timezone of Corporate Galactic Headquarters, which is where all the meetings happen. We constantly get into long, involved discussions about which timezone to use. I think two things turn out to be important. One, pick a timezone and use it consistently. Second, always make sure the user can see which timezone we're using!
Most California ballot propositions are dumb but this fall, we actually have a useful one. We get to vote to empower our legiscritters to decide whether to stick with DST, go with year-round DST, or year-round standard time. I'm hoping we switch to year-round standard time (because I like using my analog watch as a compass:)). Lots of people like year-round DST. Either one is better than this clock switching nonsense.
Although I just noticed that more and more of my gizmos are network-attached and thus know how to adjust for me. "All" we need to do is push out an updated timezone database to all our IoT devices, make sure they set TZ correctly, and boom! we're done.
Hmmm, maybe the only thing worse than manually adjusting all the clocks is having a dozen idiot-savant devices which all know the correct time, it's just wrong.
I was thinking about this a little more. This issue exists whenever you have multiple tax jurisdictions. I don't know if there's a good way to resolve it that's fair to everyone in all cases.
For example, in the US, Washington state has no sales tax and Oregon (it's neighbor) has no income tax. This if you work in Oregon and live in Washington, you pay very little tax. There will always be ways to game the system like that.
The trick, of course, is to figure out who made what money where. As we've seen, companies have lots of incentive and ability to move their costs and revenue in such a way as to minimize their taxes.
Keep in mind that the maxima for the 1%'s income may be different than the maxima for the rest.
Yes! Very good point, you can extract the most tax revenue by having different rates for different people. I don't know if maximizing tax revenue is a good policy goal but the argument seems sound. The other way to spin it is the progressive tax argument, that it normalizes the pain of paying taxes because the rich can afford to pay more because the marginal utility of each dollar they earn is less.
And sometimes having a safety net is better than more average cash in pocket.
Yup, that's also a good argument against having national policies. Different people will have different preferences about whether they want cash or safety (or to be more blunt, cash for themselves versus safety for others). Having one policy for 300 million people ensures most people will be unhappy with the decision.
You just need to manage a thermal sink, i.e. a circulating relatively large volume of water, so that your compressed air and uncompressed air end up at similar temperatures.
And that's where I start to get confused on the physics. It probably would help if I'd taken thermodynamics.
So, can you help me out? If I compress a bunch of air, the resulting gas is smaller, under higher pressure, and hotter than it started. How much of the energy I put into compressing the gas went into heating it up? If I cool it down to its original temperature, what happens to the pressure? And once cooled down, how much energy do I get back by releasing it? Do I have to re-heat it before feeding it into a turbine?
(Here's my thought experiment. If I want to compress a volume of gas by 10x, I can increase the pressure by 10x or reduce the temperature to one tenth of the original. Either way, I think you wind up with a smaller volume of gas. But in the second case, the gas won't be under any pressure so if you vent it, nothing much will happen. Well, you'll get fog because the gas is at 30K and potentially has turned to liquid, but let's assume we're talking helium so that didn't happen. So in that case, all the energy was removed as heat and that's what you'll use to run a generator.)
What I'm getting at is whether the compressed gas is necessary. You could just take the electricity and heat something up: a pool of water or a tub of molten salt. If I need to have a water bath to hold and move the heat, maybe we should just skip the gas compression and expansion entirely. Does that make any sense?
Great! Let's tax Sergey Brin and Larry Page on their share of Google income.
I know you're being sarcastic but we do. When Google pays a dividend (if they do), Sergey and Larry get a huge chunk of that and pay income tax. What people don't like is that if Google keeps the money (to pay future dividends, to have an acquisition war chest, whatever), I'm proposing they don't get taxed on that. Current policy is that income gets taxed now, not when it's paid out as dividends.
What about all those other countries where they sucked in all their revenue?
I don't have a solid answer for that, other than companies tend to sell their shares world wide so their income will get somewhat distributed. They'll also hire workers all over the world. It won't exactly match where their income comes from and where their customers are. At some point, I kinda give up trying to get everything to match perfectly.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm also a little lost how making it more difficult for ride sharing companies to operate enhances safety. The money for increased driver salaries will need to come from somewhere. That might be lower profits, higher fares, or reduced quality (and that might mean skimpier safety checks). How is this good for most people?
We tried that. The free market decided that passenger safety was a low priority, well below getting costs down.
Let me rephrase that: passengers decided they'd prefer to pay a lower taxi fare than have a safer ride. OK, I don't ride taxis much so who am I to say they made the wrong choice?
Drivers decided that the money they made by driving was worth the risk of maybe getting held up. Further they decided the cost of protecting themselves against that risk wasn't worth it. Again, I don't drive a taxi so I have no idea if that was a good call.
Not to put too find a point on it but who are you to think you know better than the people actually involved?
Because the customers were also having their incomes forced down they were also forced to use the lowest cost taxis, and ended up getting robbed, assaulted, raped and murdered, or just dying in an accident.
Wow, that's an astounding leap of logic. First, I doubt poor people use taxis much. Taxis in Manhattan are kinda expensive. You can always walk, take the bus, use the subway, drive your own car. There are lots of ways to get around so no one is forced to use a taxi. Then, even if you do choose to take a taxi, no one is forcing the robber/rapist/murderer to rob/rape/murder you. That person chose to commit a heinous crime and the fact you were in a taxi at the time is completely incidental.
Worst of all the taxpayer got to pick up the bill by having to support families that couldn't earn enough to survive, or pay to clean up the consequences of them not surviving. Crime, policing, child services, emergency medical care, it all costs you money.
And that's the Amazon or Walmart argument. I don't buy it. On a practical level, minimum wages are going to put some people out of jobs. How's that improve the situation? On an economic level, driving a taxi isn't a hugely high skill job (although learning the streets of Manhattan, Boston, or London is a skill I don't have). If that's the best skill you have, you're not going to earn much no matter what you do. The answer is to help them up their game, not force them out of a job.
The big problem is that these services will kill Taxi services if these they are not regulated to compete fairly with Taxis. Then, after Taxi services are gone and we're reliant on Uber, you might just wish that were not so.
OK, let's play this out. I like Uber and the like because it's more convenient, pleasant, and cheaper than taxis. How exactly will I be sorry when taxis go out of business?
I assume you think that as soon as taxis go out of business, Uber and Lyft will raise prices. Well, as long as there's competition between the two (and electric scooters and rent-a-bike and Waymo self-driving cars and AirX flying cars and ...) they can't. And there always will be competition unless NYC squashes it.
I'm all for regulating them the same. I suggest removing restrictions on what a taxi can charge and how much they have to pay drivers. And removing restrictions on how many taxis can operate. Let the free market operate.
In other words, "paying drivers that much will make our service affordable to many of our riders."
In Pete's words, "For crying out loud, butt out. If drivers are being paid too little, they'd stop driving. Just how dumb do you think the drivers are?
It is plausible though.
I was with you up until the part which said plants under construction might not be profitable. I find it hard to believe anyone would build a plant where they can see the numbers aren't going to work. At least, not in any sort of free market. That's why nuclear plants don't get built (in the US): investors see the high (and highly variable) costs and don't fund the plant.
If the plant is being built by a government, well, governments aren't all that big on profit and loss so this report won't matter to them.
Or, and I'm just spitballing here, one could simply use the cash they have in hand rather than jump through hoops.
I realized the KISS principle isn't valued any more, but oddly enough, simple is usually better.
Well, carrying one card all the time (or one phone) and not carrying cash (and worrying about whether I have cash) sure sounds simpler to me. Processing all payments electronically sounds simpler if I was running a coffee shop. Sounds pretty KISS.
Anybody who drinks $5 bad coffee _isn't_ poor, just stupid.
Yeah, that's why you should buy $5 good coffee, that is to say, Philz. Literally $5 a cup, totally worth it.
That's Charbucks anywhere, it's worse in Manhattan and other high rent zip codes. Do homeless bums really want artisanal, small plot, central American coffee at $10 a cup?
I dunno but I see homeless-looking people bumming money outside the local Starbucks all the time. Sometimes I see them inside buying something (but I don't pay a huge amount of attention to what).
In my experience, entrepreneurs are extremely uncaring about other people's problems
Well, they are and they aren't. They care a great deal about solving the problem they're trying to solve in a way that people will pay money to have the solution. Or to be specific, they're trying to solve the problem of customers being hungry and wanting convenient and tasty food at a good price. As others have mentioned, part of the "good price" bit is not having to deal with cash.
As an entrepreneur, you can't solve every problem for everyone. I'm sure they recognize that some people like to use cash. They are deliberately deciding they are willing to forego that business in order to streamline their operations. Whether that's racist or classist, well, I don't know if they lost a lot of sleep worrying about that. You'd have to ask them.
Two-thirds of millennials have nothing saved for retirement.....
They're also not going to retire for another 40 or so years. They don't have forever to start saving but it's also not a crisis yet.
Social security, when it was established, was meant to be one leg of a stool," says Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "One leg would be the private pension through employment, a second leg personal savings, and a third leg social security. Social security is now the only source of income of a lot elderly have."
Well, people can still save if they want. Or at least try to accumulate assets (a house, investments, something like that). It doesn't have to be cash in a bank account. But if people choose not to do this, well, I can't control that.
Pension plans definitely were a passing trend. I think they only really got started in the first half of the 20th century and became widespread starting in the 40s. So for around 20 to 40 years, companies offered private pension plans then stopped. I classify that as an anomaly, not an established tradition. And we've since replaced them with 401k programs, which have substantial benefits for both employers and employees.
Bottom line, I think we still have three legs. Social Security still exists and still has the actuarial issues it's had for decades. Savings exists or doesn't as much as it's ever existed. Government-encouraged long term retirement savings, either pensions or 401ks are still out there. I don't see much structural change.
The local government should be building out the underlying infrastructure and ensuring good schools and good housing opportunities.
Well, if you modify that to "ensure there is good infrastructure, housing, schools, dining, and quality of life", I'm with you. I don't think local government necessarily can or should actually build and run all that stuff.
The argument is, I think, that the present value of Amazon and their employees' future investments, tax payments, and spending outweighs the incentive the city provides.
Yes, that's the argument. My understanding is it often turns out to be incorrect. It's hard to say for certain. The poster child tends to be sports stadiums. They often get subsidized and virtually never live up to their promises.
I don't live in the Big Apple so I don't have a dog in this fight. What I object to is Amazon and other large developers getting special treatment. If the tax laws are good enough for normal businesses, then they should be appropriate for Amazon. I don't buy the argument that big deals are somehow special.
Tax incentives aren't "giving" a company money, they're just not taking it.
I guess that's a technically valid way of looking at it.
Let's try this: I'm against giving Amazon or any other company special privileges not available to all companies and taxpayers. If the tax rules are good enough for all the rest of us, they're good enough for Amazon. If a tax break is good for Amazon, it ought to be good for all us schmucks too.
Dang, The DailyWTF.
Yay, another Daily WTF fan!
The thing to remember about MPEG is it was designed to make cheap hardware decoders possible. I don't think the designers really thought that much about people writing software encoders or decoders (especially not on 32-bit systems). As such, a 33-bit timestamp is no big deal: I can make a shift register/counter any width I want. And having a 0..299 counter cascaded with a 33-bit counter is also a piece of cake in hardware.
His characters all died and came back a few times. Surely we can make it work in real life just this once?
No, the headline is sort of wrong.
The way I read the proposition is the legislature could also just drop DST altogether, which is my preference. My distant second is year-round DST and really off on the horizon is what we have today.
Just start passing the death penalty for all sort of crimes, with the convict being disassembled for parts. What could go wrong?
"If self-driving cars really catch on and the number of traffic fatalities plunges, so will the number of organs available for transplant."
I heard a similar argument when we passed laws requiring motorcycle riders wear helmets. I still joke about "donor bikes" when some invulnerable 20-something blazes past me in traffic. I wonder if anyone has any stats about the organ supply when (presumably) fewer motorcycle riders killed themselves.
Unix time as a double is actually more sensible than a 64-bit time_t.
Makes sense. I wasn't aware of any version of time() which returned epoch time as a double. Maybe I should look harder.
If you want to work on a data structure which just makes programmers cringe, look at MPEG timestamps. They were originally defined as a 33-bit (!) counter running at 90 kHz. Eventually MPEG needed a more accurate clock so they added a 9-bit extension field which counts from 0 to 299 at 27 MHz. I'm sure the hardware-focused people thought this was reasonable. The software people just sigh, get another coffee, and write an abstraction class.
There is a very easy way to have avoided these problems with medical records:
Bringing it back to "News for nerds", I'm with you on that (except substitute "epoch seconds" for "GMT"). However, this generates the "Which timezone to use?" problem.
(Side note: who's using 32-bit time_t and who's using 64-bit? If you're not working on 30 year mortgages, I don't see why you need 64-bit yet. On the other hand, I'd just as soon get ahead of the Y2038 problem. But then again, I hope to be retired by then so maybe I don't care.)
For the last few years, I've generally been working on management software for storage systems. In a complicated scenario, there can be many timezones involved. There's the timezone of the source storage system, a destination (if we're replicating data), the timezone of the management server, and the timezone of a web browser which is displaying a GUI. Oh, and the timezone of Corporate Galactic Headquarters, which is where all the meetings happen. We constantly get into long, involved discussions about which timezone to use. I think two things turn out to be important. One, pick a timezone and use it consistently. Second, always make sure the user can see which timezone we're using!
Most California ballot propositions are dumb but this fall, we actually have a useful one. We get to vote to empower our legiscritters to decide whether to stick with DST, go with year-round DST, or year-round standard time. I'm hoping we switch to year-round standard time (because I like using my analog watch as a compass :)). Lots of people like year-round DST. Either one is better than this clock switching nonsense.
Although I just noticed that more and more of my gizmos are network-attached and thus know how to adjust for me. "All" we need to do is push out an updated timezone database to all our IoT devices, make sure they set TZ correctly, and boom! we're done.
Hmmm, maybe the only thing worse than manually adjusting all the clocks is having a dozen idiot-savant devices which all know the correct time, it's just wrong.
I was thinking about this a little more. This issue exists whenever you have multiple tax jurisdictions. I don't know if there's a good way to resolve it that's fair to everyone in all cases.
For example, in the US, Washington state has no sales tax and Oregon (it's neighbor) has no income tax. This if you work in Oregon and live in Washington, you pay very little tax. There will always be ways to game the system like that.
The trick, of course, is to figure out who made what money where. As we've seen, companies have lots of incentive and ability to move their costs and revenue in such a way as to minimize their taxes.
Keep in mind that the maxima for the 1%'s income may be different than the maxima for the rest.
Yes! Very good point, you can extract the most tax revenue by having different rates for different people. I don't know if maximizing tax revenue is a good policy goal but the argument seems sound. The other way to spin it is the progressive tax argument, that it normalizes the pain of paying taxes because the rich can afford to pay more because the marginal utility of each dollar they earn is less.
And sometimes having a safety net is better than more average cash in pocket.
Yup, that's also a good argument against having national policies. Different people will have different preferences about whether they want cash or safety (or to be more blunt, cash for themselves versus safety for others). Having one policy for 300 million people ensures most people will be unhappy with the decision.
You just need to manage a thermal sink, i.e. a circulating relatively large volume of water, so that your compressed air and uncompressed air end up at similar temperatures.
And that's where I start to get confused on the physics. It probably would help if I'd taken thermodynamics.
So, can you help me out? If I compress a bunch of air, the resulting gas is smaller, under higher pressure, and hotter than it started. How much of the energy I put into compressing the gas went into heating it up? If I cool it down to its original temperature, what happens to the pressure? And once cooled down, how much energy do I get back by releasing it? Do I have to re-heat it before feeding it into a turbine?
(Here's my thought experiment. If I want to compress a volume of gas by 10x, I can increase the pressure by 10x or reduce the temperature to one tenth of the original. Either way, I think you wind up with a smaller volume of gas. But in the second case, the gas won't be under any pressure so if you vent it, nothing much will happen. Well, you'll get fog because the gas is at 30K and potentially has turned to liquid, but let's assume we're talking helium so that didn't happen. So in that case, all the energy was removed as heat and that's what you'll use to run a generator.)
What I'm getting at is whether the compressed gas is necessary. You could just take the electricity and heat something up: a pool of water or a tub of molten salt. If I need to have a water bath to hold and move the heat, maybe we should just skip the gas compression and expansion entirely. Does that make any sense?
Thanks.
Great! Let's tax Sergey Brin and Larry Page on their share of Google income.
I know you're being sarcastic but we do. When Google pays a dividend (if they do), Sergey and Larry get a huge chunk of that and pay income tax. What people don't like is that if Google keeps the money (to pay future dividends, to have an acquisition war chest, whatever), I'm proposing they don't get taxed on that. Current policy is that income gets taxed now, not when it's paid out as dividends.
What about all those other countries where they sucked in all their revenue?
I don't have a solid answer for that, other than companies tend to sell their shares world wide so their income will get somewhat distributed. They'll also hire workers all over the world. It won't exactly match where their income comes from and where their customers are. At some point, I kinda give up trying to get everything to match perfectly.