Yeah, the water in our reservoirs is pretty skanky, filled with algae, fish pee, and critters, yet the water coming out of my tap is perfectly clear and safe. I find it hard to believe treated sewage water is dirtier than lake and river water.
It doesn't seem like a good idea, but that is in no way based on hard science.
Reasonable people can disagree on this. Oil and gas released by fracking is driving huge reductions in coal use for power generation. Personally, I really like the unknown but apparently small costs from fracking against the known and enormous cost of mining and burning coal.
Second of all there's a difference between: is it safe to drink water from an arbitrary well, and why does this well that used to be safe to drink now contain fracking byproducts.
Did you read TFA? (This is Slashdot, why did I waste electrons asking?) It says the chemical concentration is well below safety limits. There is no reason to believe the water is unsafe.
If you put that aside, I do tend to agree, if the water used to be safe and now it's not and it is reasonably clear the drilling had something to do with it, the drillers have an ethical responsibility to make the well owners right.
It is the fracking companies' responsibilities to keep their chemicals out of our drinking water wells.
That's an interesting point. Ronald Coase won a Nobel prize for the Coase Theorem which says that's not always the economically sensible way to think about it. Ethically and morally, most people assume whoever got there first should win. If I dug the well first, I have a right to clean water. If the frackers got there first, I have to deal with whatever water they left behind. The Coase theorem says it really doesn't matter who got there first, as long as we can strike a bargain, we'll arrive at the optimal (greatest good, lowest cost) solution. That might be supplying filters to wells, paying well owners off, changing drilling techniques, buying the mineral rights and putting them in a land trust, or something you and I can't envision.
TFA points out that the levels detected are well within safety limits. Apparently no lives are actually at risk. Also these chemicals are used for other things so it's likely but not entirely certain they came from a well.
If it were my well and my house, I'd shrug and worry about more significant risks like the hockey game I played Sunday night.
That is not the problem. The problem is that we become INVESTED in a given party and vote for the party over the person.
It's actually a bit more complicated than that. We have a winner-take-all election system (and first-to-the-finish electoral college). There has been analysis which shows this tends to hit an stable equilibrium with two major parties. Once it becomes clear one of two parties is the only one with a viable chance of winning, people rationally don't pay attention to (or vote for) the minor party candidates.
There are many other voting systems which yield much better results. The problem is, they are much harder to explain and they don't "feel" as right. Americans are just never exposed to anything other than "you vote for one person, the creep who gets the most votes wins".
I'd love to see us try proportional representation, instant run offs, preference voting, or pretty much any other system. I just don't expect it to happen in any sort of scale in my lifetime. I certainly don't expect our elected officials to try changing it--they like the current system because they won using it.
*Sigh*. I've voted against her in every single election and she keeps coming back. Arnold might have been the Governator but DiFi is the one who really can't be killed.
I have no idea who keeps voting for her and why they're allowed to hold sharp objects.
I remember listening to an EconTalk podcast about when this was tried somewhere in Latin America. There was a bustling trade in fake license plates so you could swap them out and the number of cars people owned spiked up. In the end it was not very effective.
Obviously,the Paris experiment might have a different outcome but I suspect the Parisians will find ways to drive on the prohibited days. Uber/Lyft/Sidecar have to be giggling in glee. (I can't remember, did Paris ban ride sharing?)
in fact, regulation almost NEVER impacts on liberty.
Wait, I'll be at liberty to get ISP service from a provider who guarantees Netflix streams don't hiccup and preload at blazing speeds?
I'm at liberty to accept a job for $3 an hour if I value the experience?
Regulation, pretty much by definition, must constrain liberty. It prevents people (working in corporation and without) from behaving in the way they would prefer. I think what you believe is it doesn't impact liberty in a way you think is valuable. Problem is, I might not agree.
Business aren't people and don't HAVE freedoms...
This again? Businesses have rights because from a legal perspective, a business is a group of people and people don't give up their rights by joining a group. So a business has a right to free speech because the people constituting the business each have an individual right to free speech. Legally treating a business as a person is just shorthand to make things easier.
Precisely. Just undercutting someone's price isn't unfair. Even selling at a loss to get market share isn't unfair. Using political clout to get your competitors banned sure seems unfair.
I've always wondered what makes some competition fair and other not fair. Bribing officials and fraud seem unfair (although "illegal" seems more accurate). You could claim Uber, Lyft, and the like evade problematic laws and that is unfair to law abiding competitors. If, for example, ride-sharing rides don't pay a tax on commercial rides, well that doesn't seem right. I might not like the tax but that's a different story, you still need to pay it until the law changes. Just offering lower prices, even loss-leading prices, would be tough for the guy on the receiving end but that's not unfair.
Salary has not inflated with work hours so they really would be willing to pay you that same $150,000 without the extra work if they had to pay the overtime and do staffing properly since reduced unemployment drives wages up.
Then by all means, ask for it. Better yet, start your own software firm offering that deal and poach all the good programmers. If the money is just sitting on the table, why aren't you out grabbing it?
The answer is, of course, that salaries are generally at equilibrium. Employees negotiate for as much as they can (I certainly do each time I change jobs), employers push back equally hard. Everyone arrives at the best deal they can. It's extremely unlikely there's a ton of extra salary just sitting there because IT pros forgot to ask for it or were all such pushovers they didn't get it.
Sure, just as soon as this bright spark also puts some money into getting more men into nursing, human resources, and primary education, all fields as dominated by women as IT is by men. Maybe more so. I don't think my kids' elementary school had a single man on the staff other than the janitor.
There are hundreds of genuine cases of flammable water as a result of fracking. And lots of cases of illness.
I don't have any reliable evidence one way or the other. It's hard to pin down what causes illnesses and I don't trust the sob stories you see in the news or documentaries. From what I understand about fracking, it seems implausible it's causing much more damage than other forms of gas drilling. It definitely seems more benign than coal mining and, joule for joule, better than wind. But it's such a hot button issue I'm always worried about bias and hidden agendas.
Here's my bias. I'm really happy to have cheaper natural gas and electricity than without fracking. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of people living in shale basins are happier having the fracking industry than not having it. The environmental cost is localized to those areas. Who am I to tell them they are wrong?
Danged if I know, they're really hard to compare, especially if you don't accurately account for both the costs and benefits. It's going to come down to a judgement call which ones you think are worth it. But that's not my point. It seems we vigorously enforce environmental laws until they inconvenience some pet project of progressives (e.g. wind power or high speed rail in California), then suddenly we can just issue a waiver. If you truly cares about the environment and believe environmental protection laws are a good thing, you must uniformly apply them, even when that makes it difficult to achieve some end you desire. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
What cheeses me off is wind farms get a federal exemption from their provable environmental damage while fracking (which has cut carbon emissions way more than wind farms) has to prove it's 110% safe.
As others have observed, there's no totally benign energy source. Maybe killing birds and tortoises is the least damaging thing we can do. Fine. But how about we have a comprehensive, reasoned discussion of the costs and benefits of wind, coal, fracked natural gas, nuclear, oil, etc.?
This is patent nonsense, once you understand that a "mutually beneficial contract" is a fiction that already needs intervention to enforce. Contracts are pieces of paper with no value.
You really lost me at that. A contract is an agreement between two parties. The paper is just documentation, it's not the actual "contract". We grant governments the right to use force to enforce contract agreements because our society works much, much better when people can trust contractual agreements. I don't know anyone who thinks this is a bad thing, it's one of the most important reasons we institute governments (others being protecting property rights and personal safety).
Without a mechanism to force people to hold up their agreements, then contracts are worth no more than the paper they're written on. And that's why I prefer our society to the one of The Empire Strikes Back ("I am changing our agreement. Pray I don't change it again.").
What's odd is the Skunk Works was famous for banging out fantastic planes in record time. SR-71 development kicked off around 1960, the first flight was 1964, and it went into service in 1966, around six years after starting.
The fine article says the SR-72 will be ready for flight in '18 (five years from now) and might be operational in 2030 (!). Does it really take 17 years to develop an unmanned drone, albeit a really fast one?
It's not even a valley and it is definitely not made of silicon.
Huh? There are mountain ranges east and west of me, a big chunk of flat land running north/south in the middle. Ground mostly made of silicon dioxide (with bonus toxins from the closed silicon fabs). Have you ever actually been here? Do come, it's lovely.
No competition? Tell that to the old AT&T, which got crushed by it's children. Or Yahoo as it watches Goggle zoom ahead. Or Google, as it watches Facebook grow its mobile ad revenue like there's no tomorrow. Or Microsoft as even microsofties use iPads. Or PanAm as Southwest ate their lunch. In my company, I get a win/loss email every week about how we won a customer from our rivals and they beat us at another.
It's a mixed bag. Some markets are more open to competition than others. But competition is alive and well in many, many places.
Taxes are paid on earnings – i..e. when the profit is made. Not when that profit is distributed – i.e. dividends and buybacks.
Hmmm, I recall paying taxes when I receive dividend checks or sell stock back to the company. But regardless, I thought that was the gist of the outrage, that Apple was using tax shelters to defer paying tax on their earnings.
Yes, but you would be paying lower taxes. Cap Gains taxed are lower than personal income – which is rate of dividends – if you ignore the QDI / DRD rules.
Of course, but this gets into the whole debate about whether to tax earned and unearned income at different rates. I don't understand the economics enough to have an opinion.
Which leads to the question – why am I investing in Apple? It’s not because they are earning the rate of inflation on their cash pile. If I wanted that I could open a bank account.
As an investor, that's a great conversation to have with the board. Presumably you think they can invest the money more profitably than you can. If they're not doing that, well, Carl Icahn is always looking for some action:). Since I hold no Apple stock, it's really none of my business how you two settle this, nor is it the business of any other non-investor.
I did read TFSummary. It implied the only way a company contributes to society is by paying taxes. I was pointing out corporations contribute tremendous amounts to society even if the corporation pays no taxes. Taxes are how we fund government but government is not society, it's a creation and tool of society.
And further, since I view corporations as nothing more than the collection of people who invest and work for them, I don't think it's significant whether the employee, investor, customer, or company bursar writes the check to the IRS. Google "Who bears the burden of corporate income tax" to read more about this.
Slashdot Mirror
I only drink artisinal, free range, organic, fair trade, GMO-free, small batch, craft water.
Oh wait, that's beer. I drink liquid water.
I draw the line at River Ankh "water", which you can slice up and chew (Terry Pratchett, RIP, Soul Music)
Yeah, the water in our reservoirs is pretty skanky, filled with algae, fish pee, and critters, yet the water coming out of my tap is perfectly clear and safe. I find it hard to believe treated sewage water is dirtier than lake and river water.
It doesn't seem like a good idea, but that is in no way based on hard science.
Reasonable people can disagree on this. Oil and gas released by fracking is driving huge reductions in coal use for power generation. Personally, I really like the unknown but apparently small costs from fracking against the known and enormous cost of mining and burning coal.
Second of all there's a difference between: is it safe to drink water from an arbitrary well, and why does this well that used to be safe to drink now contain fracking byproducts.
Did you read TFA? (This is Slashdot, why did I waste electrons asking?) It says the chemical concentration is well below safety limits. There is no reason to believe the water is unsafe.
If you put that aside, I do tend to agree, if the water used to be safe and now it's not and it is reasonably clear the drilling had something to do with it, the drillers have an ethical responsibility to make the well owners right.
It is the fracking companies' responsibilities to keep their chemicals out of our drinking water wells.
That's an interesting point. Ronald Coase won a Nobel prize for the Coase Theorem which says that's not always the economically sensible way to think about it. Ethically and morally, most people assume whoever got there first should win. If I dug the well first, I have a right to clean water. If the frackers got there first, I have to deal with whatever water they left behind. The Coase theorem says it really doesn't matter who got there first, as long as we can strike a bargain, we'll arrive at the optimal (greatest good, lowest cost) solution. That might be supplying filters to wells, paying well owners off, changing drilling techniques, buying the mineral rights and putting them in a land trust, or something you and I can't envision.
TFA points out that the levels detected are well within safety limits. Apparently no lives are actually at risk. Also these chemicals are used for other things so it's likely but not entirely certain they came from a well.
If it were my well and my house, I'd shrug and worry about more significant risks like the hockey game I played Sunday night.
That is not the problem. The problem is that we become INVESTED in a given party and vote for the party over the person.
It's actually a bit more complicated than that. We have a winner-take-all election system (and first-to-the-finish electoral college). There has been analysis which shows this tends to hit an stable equilibrium with two major parties. Once it becomes clear one of two parties is the only one with a viable chance of winning, people rationally don't pay attention to (or vote for) the minor party candidates.
There are many other voting systems which yield much better results. The problem is, they are much harder to explain and they don't "feel" as right. Americans are just never exposed to anything other than "you vote for one person, the creep who gets the most votes wins".
I'd love to see us try proportional representation, instant run offs, preference voting, or pretty much any other system. I just don't expect it to happen in any sort of scale in my lifetime. I certainly don't expect our elected officials to try changing it--they like the current system because they won using it.
*Sigh*. I've voted against her in every single election and she keeps coming back. Arnold might have been the Governator but DiFi is the one who really can't be killed.
I have no idea who keeps voting for her and why they're allowed to hold sharp objects.
I remember listening to an EconTalk podcast about when this was tried somewhere in Latin America. There was a bustling trade in fake license plates so you could swap them out and the number of cars people owned spiked up. In the end it was not very effective.
Obviously,the Paris experiment might have a different outcome but I suspect the Parisians will find ways to drive on the prohibited days. Uber/Lyft/Sidecar have to be giggling in glee. (I can't remember, did Paris ban ride sharing?)
in fact, regulation almost NEVER impacts on liberty.
Wait, I'll be at liberty to get ISP service from a provider who guarantees Netflix streams don't hiccup and preload at blazing speeds?
I'm at liberty to accept a job for $3 an hour if I value the experience?
Regulation, pretty much by definition, must constrain liberty. It prevents people (working in corporation and without) from behaving in the way they would prefer. I think what you believe is it doesn't impact liberty in a way you think is valuable. Problem is, I might not agree.
Business aren't people and don't HAVE freedoms...
This again? Businesses have rights because from a legal perspective, a business is a group of people and people don't give up their rights by joining a group. So a business has a right to free speech because the people constituting the business each have an individual right to free speech. Legally treating a business as a person is just shorthand to make things easier.
Deal. Let's start building a Ringworld.
Precisely. Just undercutting someone's price isn't unfair. Even selling at a loss to get market share isn't unfair. Using political clout to get your competitors banned sure seems unfair.
I've always wondered what makes some competition fair and other not fair. Bribing officials and fraud seem unfair (although "illegal" seems more accurate). You could claim Uber, Lyft, and the like evade problematic laws and that is unfair to law abiding competitors. If, for example, ride-sharing rides don't pay a tax on commercial rides, well that doesn't seem right. I might not like the tax but that's a different story, you still need to pay it until the law changes. Just offering lower prices, even loss-leading prices, would be tough for the guy on the receiving end but that's not unfair.
Salary has not inflated with work hours so they really would be willing to pay you that same $150,000 without the extra work if they had to pay the overtime and do staffing properly since reduced unemployment drives wages up.
Then by all means, ask for it. Better yet, start your own software firm offering that deal and poach all the good programmers. If the money is just sitting on the table, why aren't you out grabbing it?
The answer is, of course, that salaries are generally at equilibrium. Employees negotiate for as much as they can (I certainly do each time I change jobs), employers push back equally hard. Everyone arrives at the best deal they can. It's extremely unlikely there's a ton of extra salary just sitting there because IT pros forgot to ask for it or were all such pushovers they didn't get it.
1. The mirrors have blindspots. That's why this proposal exists. Kids being backed over by cars is a common problem.
Depends on your definition of "common". I don't think 10 deaths and 1000 injuries a year is common at all, that sounds quite rare.
Sure, just as soon as this bright spark also puts some money into getting more men into nursing, human resources, and primary education, all fields as dominated by women as IT is by men. Maybe more so. I don't think my kids' elementary school had a single man on the staff other than the janitor.
There are hundreds of genuine cases of flammable water as a result of fracking. And lots of cases of illness.
I don't have any reliable evidence one way or the other. It's hard to pin down what causes illnesses and I don't trust the sob stories you see in the news or documentaries. From what I understand about fracking, it seems implausible it's causing much more damage than other forms of gas drilling. It definitely seems more benign than coal mining and, joule for joule, better than wind. But it's such a hot button issue I'm always worried about bias and hidden agendas.
Here's my bias. I'm really happy to have cheaper natural gas and electricity than without fracking. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of people living in shale basins are happier having the fracking industry than not having it. The environmental cost is localized to those areas. Who am I to tell them they are wrong?
Are these really equivalent?
Danged if I know, they're really hard to compare, especially if you don't accurately account for both the costs and benefits. It's going to come down to a judgement call which ones you think are worth it. But that's not my point. It seems we vigorously enforce environmental laws until they inconvenience some pet project of progressives (e.g. wind power or high speed rail in California), then suddenly we can just issue a waiver. If you truly cares about the environment and believe environmental protection laws are a good thing, you must uniformly apply them, even when that makes it difficult to achieve some end you desire. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
What cheeses me off is wind farms get a federal exemption from their provable environmental damage while fracking (which has cut carbon emissions way more than wind farms) has to prove it's 110% safe.
As others have observed, there's no totally benign energy source. Maybe killing birds and tortoises is the least damaging thing we can do. Fine. But how about we have a comprehensive, reasoned discussion of the costs and benefits of wind, coal, fracked natural gas, nuclear, oil, etc.?
This is patent nonsense, once you understand that a "mutually beneficial contract" is a fiction that already needs intervention to enforce. Contracts are pieces of paper with no value.
You really lost me at that. A contract is an agreement between two parties. The paper is just documentation, it's not the actual "contract". We grant governments the right to use force to enforce contract agreements because our society works much, much better when people can trust contractual agreements. I don't know anyone who thinks this is a bad thing, it's one of the most important reasons we institute governments (others being protecting property rights and personal safety).
Without a mechanism to force people to hold up their agreements, then contracts are worth no more than the paper they're written on. And that's why I prefer our society to the one of The Empire Strikes Back ("I am changing our agreement. Pray I don't change it again.").
What's odd is the Skunk Works was famous for banging out fantastic planes in record time. SR-71 development kicked off around 1960, the first flight was 1964, and it went into service in 1966, around six years after starting.
The fine article says the SR-72 will be ready for flight in '18 (five years from now) and might be operational in 2030 (!). Does it really take 17 years to develop an unmanned drone, albeit a really fast one?
It's not even a valley and it is definitely not made of silicon.
Huh? There are mountain ranges east and west of me, a big chunk of flat land running north/south in the middle. Ground mostly made of silicon dioxide (with bonus toxins from the closed silicon fabs). Have you ever actually been here? Do come, it's lovely.
No competition? Tell that to the old AT&T, which got crushed by it's children. Or Yahoo as it watches Goggle zoom ahead. Or Google, as it watches Facebook grow its mobile ad revenue like there's no tomorrow. Or Microsoft as even microsofties use iPads. Or PanAm as Southwest ate their lunch. In my company, I get a win/loss email every week about how we won a customer from our rivals and they beat us at another.
It's a mixed bag. Some markets are more open to competition than others. But competition is alive and well in many, many places.
Nope, there are no legal limits.
OK, IANATaxL.
Taxes are paid on earnings – i..e. when the profit is made. Not when that profit is distributed – i.e. dividends and buybacks.
Hmmm, I recall paying taxes when I receive dividend checks or sell stock back to the company. But regardless, I thought that was the gist of the outrage, that Apple was using tax shelters to defer paying tax on their earnings.
Yes, but you would be paying lower taxes. Cap Gains taxed are lower than personal income – which is rate of dividends – if you ignore the QDI / DRD rules.
Of course, but this gets into the whole debate about whether to tax earned and unearned income at different rates. I don't understand the economics enough to have an opinion.
Which leads to the question – why am I investing in Apple? It’s not because they are earning the rate of inflation on their cash pile. If I wanted that I could open a bank account.
As an investor, that's a great conversation to have with the board. Presumably you think they can invest the money more profitably than you can. If they're not doing that, well, Carl Icahn is always looking for some action :). Since I hold no Apple stock, it's really none of my business how you two settle this, nor is it the business of any other non-investor.
Taxes. RTFSummary for chrissake.
I did read TFSummary. It implied the only way a company contributes to society is by paying taxes. I was pointing out corporations contribute tremendous amounts to society even if the corporation pays no taxes. Taxes are how we fund government but government is not society, it's a creation and tool of society.
And further, since I view corporations as nothing more than the collection of people who invest and work for them, I don't think it's significant whether the employee, investor, customer, or company bursar writes the check to the IRS. Google "Who bears the burden of corporate income tax" to read more about this.