There is still a lot of stuff on the moon that could make the place a dang useful place for mining. Hydrogen isn't strictly necessary to make lots of useful artifacts.
We are in a very early stage of the development of space-and the real agenda now is figuring out just what is out there and how to use it. I suspect that someone will figure out some uses for the Moon even before that inventory is complete.
Well, the masses tend to care. I would also suggest that folks in the rapidly de-industrializing USA can't expect better treatment from China than it gives to their own people.
Just because Nasa under Dan Goldin couldn't make money in space doesn't mean the Chinese won't. A central question though: how will the increased prosperity in China translate into improved conditions for the masses?
The important thing to get: Why were US elites so concerned with beating the US in a technological contest? I would suggest this is because the self-image of the United States is one of being a technological power house. The founders of the US included prominent inventors like Franklin and Jefferson-something rather lacking in the present congress. If the US hadn't done something equal to what the soviets did, it would be like admitting that the present US government really isn't anything like what Franklin and Jefferson intended. Making that admission means the present elites risk the hostility of an important segment of the population. At the same time, efforts like Apollo are very costly/risky for present US elites-they wanted out as soon as possible.
My sense is that Linux/BSD are well on their way to winning the race to dominate the server market. The next major battleground is going to be the hand held market. Microsoft is weak there and the technology of the dominant player, palm is starting to show its age. Margins are thin for hand-held devices and players like Sharp don't want to pay the Microsoft tax. Gradually, the functionality of hand-held devices will increase in a market where linux is the dominant player. Also, the market for hand-held devices is potentially much larger than for desktop machines.
I'm not sure if this kills Microsoft, but at some point, I suspect developers will just quit taking much of their stuff seriously.
The policies you are suggesting are prohibited by US involvement in NAFTA and WTO(i.e. the US will have to withdraw from those treaties to implement anything like the policies you suggest). The one major party presidential candidate that has addressed this issue seriously is Dennis Kucinich who is also the only candidate that voted against H-1b expansion.
The basic problem is quite simple: politicians are forced to raise large sums of money to run in US national elections so large vitually all major candidates have sold out to major corporations. It is quiet profitable in the short term for corporate elites to buy the legislative process and transform public assets to private assets. However, the governments with the most substantial long term records of growth haven't allowed that sort of behavior.
The H-1b quota has for the time being returned to 65,000/year, but this summer as part of a "Free Trade Act" with Singapore and Chile, Congress created a loophole that allows a unspecified number of L1 visas from companies with offices in Singapore and Chile. Also, the ITAA is still lobbying to increase the H-1b allocation.
H1-b/L1 legislation basically allows major corporations to use a chance at a green card as a corporate perk(i.e. it is a corporate subsidy program according to the Nobel Prize Winner and Reagan Economics advisor Milton Friedman). The only presidential candidate that opposed H-1b expansion in 1998 was Dennis Kucinich.
There are some real systemic problems in the US(i.e. the tax structure more or less assures a substantial trade deficit, governmental budget deficit and export of capital). The current immigration/temporary worker visa policy is making this worse-basically assuring that those US citizens generating foreign exchange will face governmental subsidies to lower their wages--while US citizens in "protected" and "licensed" professions(i.e. lawyers, actuaries, accountants) have fewer such problems).
In the context of a political system that is for sale, reviving of an industry may not make much difference to the average tech worker.
We need development of space. That doesn't necessarily mean Nasa is the appropriate mechanism to make space happen. Prizes would be a low risk, high return way to make space happen.
Prizes for space transport could be done completely outside Nasa-and Nasa could be applied to some projects more appropriate for a large, government bureacracy.
I agree, prizes would be the low-risk, high-return way to go--and Nasa won't do it because they won't have control over it--even if it meant they could have space on less budget than they have now.
In the 1960's, there was an enormous pool of young, technical talent coming online-the early part of the boomer generation. Most of them were raised to trust/respect the government.
The Johnson/Nixon inflation, Watergate, the Farm crisis, the S&L crisis, the H-1b/L1 fad have changed that quite a bit. There is today very little incentive in America to go into a technical profession unless you can't really do other things that are more valued by the powers that be(i.e. become a trial lawyer, partner in a major accounting firm, collect lots of political donations).
Just look at what happened to the guys at Nasa when the government was done with them-it isn't a particularly appealing story(i.e. quite a few suicides at Nasa).
It might be interesting if the US government created some serious incentives similar to the X-prize for tools to develop space--but I don't see any evidence they'll do anything like that. The powers-that-be would rather role the dice on causing a nuclear war with their mideast policy and/or have buildings blowing up next door than take the risk of empowering American techies in any serious way.
Personally, I suspect it will-and the ramifications to the US power structure will be tremendous. The US elites expend a lot of energy to maintain the image that the US is _the_ technological superpower. Problem is, the US government isn't run by men like Franklin and Jefferson any more(guys that got fame by being scientists/inventors)-the congress today is composed almost entirely of a bunch of lying weasels that spend much of their time begging for money from corporate oligarchs and planning their eventual "cash out".
So can China beat the US in space? At this point, I suspect it can. The US elites are so rapicous they can't provide technical incentives to maintain the present industries in the US without liquidating resources-let alone build new space industries.
Besides, folks like Bush/Clinton are both kept in office by a steady stream of credit from China and other far eastern countries. Sooner or later that will come to an end. The Chinese leaders strike me as much more cagey than the old Soviet elites-they won't make a really big splash until they think it is too late for the US elites to do anything about it.
I think that the US may be rapidly approaching a major decision point in this area. Now, with Japan being the world leader in robotics, the likely way for the US to avoid robotics is to go strongly nationalistic/protectionist. The problem there though, is that policy would probably have a dramatically empowering effect on folks in the US with a technological bent. The US has borrowed in recent decades basically by threat of military force(i.e. loan us this money or we'll go ballistic-which was never said-but IMHO that has been the reality of the situation).
I think there is some risk the strain of this decision may tear the US apart quite literally. There is a portion of the US that wants to go technological-and a portion that doesn't. Now, when push comes to shove, the portion that wants to got technological has a tremendous advantage in a shooting war.
Well, the costs of many types of labor are already quite high if you factor in all the costs. What for example is the risk that we'll see some new epidemic arise as a result of globalization? Its been less than 90 years since the Influenza pandemic-in the big scheme odf things, that isn't that long.
Personally, I think we ought to be considering moving completely away from payroll and sales taxes towards taxes on land, polluting activities, monopoly capital(i.e. large companies), private concentrations of wealth. Tarriffs are probably a necessary short-term to handle the US balance of payments.
The point though: something like advancement of robotics really might necessitate substantial societal reorganization. My own concern though: would increases in productivity just be associated with increases in "make work" types of activities. In the US, what seems to have happened is the replacement of industrial activities with jobs in law, finance,accounting, civil service that largely amount to make-work programs for the middle class.
The Health Physics Society indicates that "As far as Three Mile Island (TMI) is concerned, I'm sure some folks feel they are survivors despite the fact that maximum doses were so low that no more than one or two cancer deaths would be predicted in a population of about two million in the 50-mile radius of the Island." http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q83 .html http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q339.h tml
Chernobyl was obviously quite a bit worse. The other thing that is tricky here: Looking at long-term and wide spread effects from such an accident. I'm not an expert in radiation biology, but I've seen folks that claim significant long term effects here.
Also, regardless of the actual deaths here, there is a matter of reduced property values. When TMI happened, a lot of folks lost property equity-and local governments lost tax base. I don't think it is unreasonable for interests that make decisions on the kind of scale of operating nuclear power plans to assume liability for their actions. Now, if you realistically factor in all the costs, other options(i.e. hydro, space based solar, ocean based artifical solar/hydro as proposed by TRW) may start looking a lot better.
Last time I checked, no private insurance company would insure a nuclear power plant(this liability is typically taken on by the US Federal government).
Now since Chernobyl and Three Mile Island we have a pretty good idea of the cost of a serious accident. Who is going to bear that cost here?
I don't think nuclear power is nearly as bad for a small village in Alaska or Siberia as in a densely populated area like France. Still, there _are_ risks here. I don't mind the government handling major infrastructural items-but I have serious reservations about the ability of government to accurately judge the magnitude of these kinds of risks.
This is an article you might relate to on the use of land taxes(which are different than property taxes): http://freestateproject.org/lvtaxation.ht m
Personally, I would like to see sales taxes and income taxes only used as a last resort-and would rather see taxes focusing on land, pollution, crime, identifiable health risks, and extreme concentrations of capital/income.
I was thinking free trade in the present context of the US where taxes on locally produced items are high-and many of the major trade partners(i.e. China) rely extensively on convict labor. Just FYI, I'm not a "strong protectionist", but I would tend to favor a tarriff sufficient to produce a zero balance of payments--and sufficient to cover activities related to keeping trade routes open. I also think that folks engaged in international trade/movements of people should bear liability for things like importation of diseases. I consider the present situation in which 70% of the world's currency reserves are in east asia a rather dangerous situation.
What I still don't see here: why are tarriffs a worse restriction on trade than sales or income taxes?
Free trade is basically a means by which corrupt elites are propped up via borrowing from foreign interests.
No, free trade is where global markets compete. It is totally fair and automatically encourages growth in developing countries in a way that makes giving aid money blindly to corrupt governments obselete. Countries that do not engage in free trade are punished by the world markets with reduced trade and slower growth. Non-free trade begets poverty, unemployment, and stagnation in the long term. It's really pretty simple.
I think the assumption is that taxes are bad in general, and they should be the minimum necessary to let the government do its essential duties.
The question remains, if you are going to have taxes, which we are, what is the least bad tax? BTW Nobel prize winner Milton Friedman claims it is property tax that exempts the value of improvements. Of course, there has been a recent pattern of taxing _every_ _except_ wealth.
According to Timothy Taylor of the University of Minnesota Hubert Humphrey Institute for public policy, the folks born after 1945 have paid quite a bit more of their incomes for taxes compared to the services they can expect than did previous generations.
As far as housing, I think you mistake a trailer or condo for a 4 bedroom house. The hour commute is generally related to avoiding unsafe schools. Yes, technology has improved, but according to the source I cited the only increase in expenditures(as measured with the CPI) are taxes, house payments, insurance and auto payments. Deal with it.
What is the role of free trade here? Free trade is basically a means by which corrupt elites are propped up via borrowing from foreign interests. I wouldn't personally object to _foreign capital investment_ in the US. But what we are seeing is wholesale transfer of land, currency and government debt to foreign interests-and stuff like dismantlement of the most modern shipyard in the US that was shipped to China(they got an excemption from US labor laws to do so too).
Why do you assume that taxes on imports are worse than other taxes? A lot of US military expenditures are basically focused on keeping trade routes open. Why shouldn't trade be taxes instead of general income to pay for services only some of the population use?
Also, until 1912, Tarriffs made up a major portion of US taxes--but in other respects, the US was much closer to a libertarian utopia than what we have now. Are you suggesting the US was a laughing stock nation until trade taxes/restrictions were serously cut?
The data suggests otherwise--the disposable income of families with children have dropped markedly since trade has loosened.
"The average two-income family earns far more today than did the single-breadwinner family of a generation ago. And yet, once they have paid the mortgage, the car payments, the taxes, the health insurance, and the day-care bills, today's dual-income families have less discretionary--and less money to put away for a rainy day--than the single-income family of a generation ago." http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465 090826/ vdare/002-9673790-1809637
One of the things that folks miss: The WTO/FTAA agreements have clauses in them that more or less mandate that a country have a lawyer/paperwork intensive tax system similar to the USA.
This was put in to keep countries from competing on the basis of their tax policies. The problem is that that there is a serious body of literature suggesting that other taxes are less economically destructive than income taxes. http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/br eckenfel d_on_land_value_taxation.html
This combination of low tarriffs/high internal taxes and regulation seems rather deadly to the US economy. So why does this perist? The Bush administration defense gurus seem to think that increased trade is necesary for reasons of international security http://www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets/ Basically any self-reliant nation is suspect.
This experiment in globalization has been associated with the destruction of the American middle class: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/046 5090826/ vdare/002-9673790-1809637 "The average two-income family earns far more today than did the single-breadwinner family of a generation ago. And yet, once they have paid the mortgage, the car payments, the taxes, the health insurance, and the day-care bills, today's dual-income families have less discretionary--and less money to put away for a rainy day--than the single-income family of a generation ago."
Globalization is basically a play by US/EU elites at global hegenomy that is sapping their strength and legitimacy in their home territories. Elite that make these kinds of moves typically don't retain their status as elites forever.
These n-tier applications are largely a throwback to mainframes. What they mean by "thin client" is they are essentially using a web browser as a 3270 terminal. Like mainframes, these n-tier solutions make administration easier. Still, just look at how often you use a major web page and you are being paced not by what your client is doing or your internet badwidth, but just waiting on a server.
The big thing that impelled the growth of middleware and n-tier was the predatory licensing policies of Oracle and other major database vendors and the fact that web browsers are so dang limited in their functionality. A lot of stuff in the SQL Server world is _still_ essentially client server. We also have databases like Postgresql.org that don't have the licensing problems Oracle did-and as Postgresql gets better replication and clustering features(this is a major priority of that team), it will become possible to throw a lot of hardware at a database--just like you can with oracle. A friend of mine did a simple web server that was a Postgresql perl stored procedure--it compared remarkable well to mod_perl--and was _much_ more simple to install and understand--basically you improved server performance by elimination of layers between the client and where the data was--which makes programs quiet simple-and fully uses the high level aspects of SQL.
Another solution here is www.technicalpursuit.com-these folks are basically working so that clients don't have to go back to a server for simple things like sorting a list.
The real state of the art for distributed applications isn't a web browser-or java type middleware- at all-is is probably www.mozart-oz.org --but it will probably be a while before anything like that goes mass market.
Stuff like Sybase and informix is going away-but middleware intensive systems just aren't a silver bullet. Generally only larger companies with deep pockets can develop software that way--and there are lot of other businesses that have serious database needs--those needs will get filled somehow.
Ross Perot was essentially correct. NAFTA and the US involvement in the WTO has been accompanied by massive transfer of US technological infrastructure overseas. This has been facilitated by substantial government deficits, massive immigration and transfer of US capital and real estate assets(as well as an increasing trend of the US government to vote on the basis of political donations rather than popular will). The problem was less apparent in the 90's because there was a brisk trade associated with facilitating the early parts of this transfer.
The latest "Free Trade" bills also contain provisions that expand L1 non-immigrant visas. These trade deals more or less mandate the US cannot effectively control its borders.
The only candidate for president seriously addressing this issue is Dennis Kucinich(www.kucinich.us).
A good example of a scripting language designed specifically for fault tolerant, real-time, distributed systems is mozart-oz.org The research team there(SICS) did a lot of work to make the networking layer very transparent.
Now, Mozart-oz hasn't had the trial by fire that PHP or Java have had--you won't see it used in a lot of commercial sites-but Mozart does show how the type of applications that folks think could only be done in Java, C# or C++, using an army of programmers can be done by a smaller team. Can it be done? Sure. Will it be done? Well, that depends on the will of the community ultimately.
I personally think this is the type of thing that is key to reducing the complexity of large software systems, but it is a _hard_ problem and will take a while to sort out.
There have been requests for getting some of the key features of Mozart-Oz, namely logic variables, into Python. I include this to show some of the difficulties in the discussion here(i.e. we get a lot of really smart folks that don't come to an obvious consensus on how to proceed here). I'm sure that there are some things that you can do in Java that PHP can't do yet-and some of these deal with needs of key markets like banks. Can those features be added? Well, that seems to be contention of some serious researchers in the field.
I worked at Sun years ago. At the time, I was proud to be associated with that company-their Unix was good and the admiration of many of my peers. The basic problem though with Sun: It was the kind of company where is paid to be popular rather than right. Deviations from the pervailing world view there were a good way to not be popular.
Java? Well, I have to use it for a class I'm taking, but I can't say that technology excites me--stuff like www.mozart-oz.org seems to leave J2EE in the dust. (Mozart means that stuff like Reilable multi-cast is more or less transparent which simplifies a lot of stuff compared to Java's baroque design-you can do a lot more in Mozart with a lot less code).
Sparc is a joke-there just isn't a compelling technical reason to use sparc. What sun could do here-through some money to Chuck Moore-who has some really interesting chip technology(www.colorforth.com). Basically, Moore can put a lot of cpu's onto one chip(because Forth chips have a simple design). A lot of stuff suddenly gets much more simple--and much lower power(which is important for stuff like robotics). Sun won't go that way though-it doesn't fit into a cast-of-thousands mentality that has developed there--they'd rather suck on the government tit and bet on what Milton Friedman calls the "corporate subsidy" of H-1b to keep Sun alive.
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There is still a lot of stuff on the moon that could make the place a dang useful place for mining. Hydrogen isn't strictly necessary to make lots of useful artifacts.
We are in a very early stage of the development of space-and the real agenda now is figuring out just what is out there and how to use it. I suspect that someone will figure out some uses for the Moon even before that inventory is complete.
Well, the masses tend to care. I would also suggest that folks in the rapidly de-industrializing USA can't expect better treatment from China than it gives to their own people.
Just because Nasa under Dan Goldin couldn't make money in space doesn't mean the Chinese won't. A central question though: how will the increased prosperity in China translate into improved conditions for the masses?
The important thing to get: Why were US elites so concerned with beating the US in a technological contest? I would suggest this is because the self-image of the United States is one of being a technological power house. The founders of the US included prominent inventors like Franklin and Jefferson-something rather lacking in the present congress. If the US hadn't done something equal to what the soviets did, it would be like admitting that the present US government really isn't anything like what Franklin and Jefferson intended. Making that admission means the present elites risk the hostility of an important segment of the population. At the same time, efforts like Apollo are very costly/risky for present US elites-they wanted out as soon as possible.
My sense is that Linux/BSD are well on their way to winning the race to dominate the server market. The next major battleground is going to be the hand held market. Microsoft is weak there and the technology of the dominant player, palm is starting to show its age. Margins are thin for hand-held devices and players like Sharp don't want to pay the Microsoft tax. Gradually, the functionality of hand-held devices will increase in a market where linux is the dominant player. Also, the market for hand-held devices is potentially much larger than for desktop
machines.
I'm not sure if this kills Microsoft, but at some point, I suspect developers will just quit taking much of their stuff seriously.
The basic problem is quite simple: politicians are forced to raise large sums of money to run in US national elections so large vitually all major candidates have sold out to major corporations. It is quiet profitable in the short term for corporate elites to buy the legislative process and transform public assets to private assets. However, the governments with the most substantial long term records of growth haven't allowed that sort of behavior.
H1-b/L1 legislation basically allows major corporations to use a chance at a green card as a corporate perk(i.e. it is a corporate subsidy program according to the Nobel Prize Winner and Reagan Economics advisor Milton Friedman). The only presidential candidate that opposed H-1b expansion in 1998 was Dennis Kucinich.
There are some real systemic problems in the US(i.e. the tax structure more or less assures a substantial trade deficit, governmental budget deficit and export of capital). The current immigration/temporary worker visa policy is making this worse-basically assuring that those US citizens generating foreign exchange will face governmental subsidies to lower their wages--while US citizens in "protected" and "licensed" professions(i.e. lawyers, actuaries, accountants) have fewer such problems).
In the context of a political system that is for sale, reviving of an industry may not make much difference to the average tech worker.
We need development of space. That doesn't necessarily mean Nasa is the appropriate mechanism to make space happen. Prizes would be a low risk, high return way to make space happen.
Prizes for space transport could be done completely outside Nasa-and Nasa could be applied to some projects more appropriate for a large, government bureacracy.
I agree, prizes would be the low-risk, high-return way to go--and Nasa won't do it because they won't have control over it--even if it meant they could have space on less budget than they have now.
In the 1960's, there was an enormous pool of young, technical talent coming online-the early part of the boomer generation. Most of them were raised to trust/respect the government.
The Johnson/Nixon inflation, Watergate, the Farm crisis, the S&L crisis, the H-1b/L1 fad have changed that quite a bit. There is today very little incentive in America to go into a technical profession unless you can't really do other things that are more valued by the powers that be(i.e. become a trial lawyer, partner in a major accounting firm, collect lots of political donations).
Just look at what happened to the guys at Nasa when the government was done with them-it isn't a particularly appealing story(i.e. quite a few suicides at Nasa).
It might be interesting if the US government created some serious incentives similar to the X-prize for tools to develop space--but I don't see any evidence they'll do anything like that. The powers-that-be would rather role the dice on causing a nuclear war with their mideast policy and/or have buildings blowing up next door than take the risk of empowering American techies in any serious way.
Personally, I suspect it will-and the ramifications to the US power structure will be tremendous. The US elites expend a lot of energy to maintain the image that the US is _the_ technological superpower. Problem is, the US government isn't run by men like Franklin and Jefferson any more(guys that got fame by being scientists/inventors)-the congress today is composed almost entirely of a bunch of lying weasels that spend much of their time begging for money from corporate oligarchs and planning their eventual "cash out".
So can China beat the US in space? At this point, I suspect it can. The US elites are so rapicous they can't provide technical incentives to maintain the present industries in the US without liquidating resources-let alone build new space industries.
Besides, folks like Bush/Clinton are both kept in office by a steady stream of credit from China and other far eastern countries. Sooner or later that will come to an end. The Chinese leaders strike me as much more cagey than the old Soviet elites-they won't make a really big splash until they think it is too late for the US elites to do anything about it.
I think that the US may be rapidly approaching a major decision point in this area. Now, with Japan being the world leader in robotics, the likely way for the US to avoid robotics is to go strongly nationalistic/protectionist. The problem there though, is that policy would probably have a dramatically empowering effect on folks in the US with a technological bent. The US has borrowed in recent decades basically by threat of military force(i.e. loan us this money or we'll go ballistic-which was never said-but IMHO that has been the reality of the situation).
I think there is some risk the strain of this decision may tear the US apart quite literally. There is a portion of the US that wants to go technological-and a portion that doesn't. Now, when push comes to shove, the portion that wants to got technological has a tremendous advantage in a shooting war.
Well, the costs of many types of labor are already quite high if you factor in all the costs. What for example is the risk that we'll see some new epidemic arise as a result of globalization? Its been less than 90 years since the Influenza pandemic-in the big scheme odf things, that isn't that long.
Personally, I think we ought to be considering moving completely away from payroll and sales taxes towards taxes on land, polluting activities, monopoly capital(i.e. large companies), private concentrations of wealth. Tarriffs are probably a necessary short-term to handle the US balance of payments.
The point though: something like advancement of robotics really might necessitate substantial societal reorganization. My own concern though: would increases in productivity just be associated with increases in "make work" types of activities. In the US, what seems to have happened is the replacement of industrial activities with jobs in law, finance,accounting, civil service that largely amount to make-work programs for the middle class.
Robots don't vote for demogogues of the right or left-or demand any kind of political voice/rights.
Robots don't sue their employers
Robots don't claim social welfare benefits in excess of the taxes they pay.
Robots don't bring relatives accross the border that have bad habits.
Robots don't contribute to bringing in epidemics from foreign countries(or nasty new diseases like West Nile or Drug resistant TB).
Robots don't require affordable housing or place demands on transportation resources.
The Health Physics Society indicates that "As far as Three Mile Island (TMI) is concerned, I'm sure some folks feel they are survivors despite the fact that maximum doses were so low that no more than one or two cancer deaths would be predicted in a population of about two million in the 50-mile radius of the Island."3 .htmlh tml
http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q8
http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q339.
Chernobyl was obviously quite a bit worse. The other thing that is tricky here: Looking at long-term and wide spread effects from such an accident. I'm not an expert in radiation biology, but I've seen folks that claim significant long term effects here.
Also, regardless of the actual deaths here, there is a matter of reduced property values. When TMI happened, a lot of folks lost property equity-and local governments lost tax base. I don't think it is unreasonable for interests that make decisions on the kind of scale of operating nuclear power plans to assume liability for their actions. Now, if you realistically factor in all the costs, other options(i.e. hydro, space based solar, ocean based artifical solar/hydro as proposed by TRW) may start looking a lot better.
Last time I checked, no private insurance company would insure a nuclear power plant(this liability is typically taken on by the US Federal government).
Now since Chernobyl and Three Mile Island we have a pretty good idea of the cost of a serious accident. Who is going to bear that cost here?
I don't think nuclear power is nearly as bad for a small village in Alaska or Siberia as in a densely populated area like France. Still, there _are_ risks here. I don't mind the government handling major infrastructural items-but I have serious reservations about the ability of government to accurately judge the magnitude of these kinds of risks.
This is an article you might relate to on the use of land taxes(which are different than property taxes):t m
http://freestateproject.org/lvtaxation.h
Personally, I would like to see sales taxes and income taxes only used as a last resort-and would rather see taxes focusing on land, pollution, crime, identifiable health risks, and extreme concentrations of capital/income.
Just FYI, I'm not a "strong protectionist", but I would tend to favor a tarriff sufficient to produce a zero balance of payments--and sufficient to cover activities related to keeping trade routes open. I also think that folks engaged in international trade/movements of people should bear liability for things like importation of diseases. I consider the present situation in which 70% of the world's currency reserves are in east asia a rather dangerous situation.
What I still don't see here: why are tarriffs a worse restriction on trade than sales or income taxes?
Free trade is basically a means by which corrupt elites are propped up via borrowing from foreign interests.
No, free trade is where global markets compete. It is totally fair and automatically encourages growth in developing countries in a way that makes giving aid money blindly to corrupt governments obselete. Countries that do not engage in free trade are punished by the world markets with reduced trade and slower growth. Non-free trade begets poverty, unemployment, and stagnation in the long term. It's really pretty simple.
The question remains, if you are going to have taxes, which we are, what is the least bad tax?
BTW Nobel prize winner Milton Friedman claims it is property tax that exempts the value of improvements. Of course, there has been a recent pattern of taxing _every_ _except_ wealth.
According to Timothy Taylor of the University of Minnesota Hubert Humphrey Institute for public policy, the folks born after 1945 have paid quite a bit more of their incomes for taxes compared to the services they can expect than did previous generations.
As far as housing, I think you mistake a trailer or condo for a 4 bedroom house. The hour commute is generally related to avoiding unsafe schools. Yes, technology has improved, but according to the source I cited the only increase in expenditures(as measured with the CPI) are taxes, house payments, insurance and auto payments. Deal with it.
What is the role of free trade here? Free trade is basically a means by which corrupt elites are propped up via borrowing from foreign interests. I wouldn't personally object to _foreign capital investment_ in the US. But what we are seeing is wholesale transfer of land, currency and government debt to foreign interests-and stuff like dismantlement of the most modern shipyard in the US that was shipped to China(they got an excemption from US labor laws to do so too).
Also, until 1912, Tarriffs made up a major portion of US taxes--but in other respects, the US was much closer to a libertarian utopia than what we have now. Are you suggesting the US was a laughing stock nation until trade taxes/restrictions were serously cut?
The data suggests otherwise--the disposable income of families with children have dropped markedly since trade has loosened.
"The average two-income family earns far more today than did the single-breadwinner family of a generation ago. And yet, once they have paid the mortgage, the car payments, the taxes, the health insurance, and the day-care bills, today's dual-income families have less discretionary--and less money to put away for a rainy day--than the single-income family of a generation ago."
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/046
One of the things that folks miss:
r eckenfel d_on_land_value_taxation.html
6 5090826/ vdare/002-9673790-1809637
The WTO/FTAA agreements have clauses in them that more or less mandate that a country have a lawyer/paperwork intensive tax system similar to the USA.
This was put in to keep countries from competing on the basis of their tax policies. The problem is that that there is a serious body of literature suggesting that other taxes are less economically destructive than income taxes.
http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/b
This combination of low tarriffs/high internal taxes and regulation seems rather deadly to the US economy. So why does this perist? The Bush administration defense gurus seem to think that increased trade is necesary for reasons of international security http://www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets/
Basically any self-reliant nation is suspect.
This experiment in globalization has been associated with the destruction of the American middle class:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/04
"The average two-income family earns far more today than did the single-breadwinner family of a generation ago. And yet, once they have paid the mortgage, the car payments, the taxes, the health insurance, and the day-care bills, today's dual-income families have less discretionary--and less money to put away for a rainy day--than the single-income family of a generation ago."
Globalization is basically a play by US/EU elites at global hegenomy that is sapping their strength and legitimacy in their home territories. Elite that make these kinds of moves typically don't retain their status as elites forever.
These n-tier applications are largely a throwback to mainframes. What they mean by "thin client" is they are essentially using a web browser as a 3270 terminal. Like mainframes, these n-tier solutions make administration easier. Still, just look at how often you use a major web page and you are being paced not by what your client is doing or your internet badwidth, but just waiting on a server.
The big thing that impelled the growth of middleware and n-tier was the predatory licensing policies of Oracle and other major database vendors and the fact that web browsers are so dang limited in their functionality. A lot of stuff in the SQL Server world is _still_ essentially client server. We also have databases like Postgresql.org that don't have the licensing problems Oracle did-and as Postgresql gets better replication and clustering features(this is a major priority of that team), it will become possible to throw a lot of hardware at a database--just like you can with oracle. A friend of mine did a simple web server that was a Postgresql perl stored procedure--it compared remarkable well to mod_perl--and was _much_ more simple to install and understand--basically you improved server performance by elimination of layers between the client and where the data was--which makes programs quiet simple-and fully uses the high level aspects of SQL.
Another solution here is www.technicalpursuit.com-these folks are basically working so that clients don't have to go back to a server for simple things like sorting a list.
The real state of the art for distributed applications isn't a web browser-or java type middleware- at all-is is probably www.mozart-oz.org --but it will probably be a while before anything like that goes mass market.
Stuff like Sybase and informix is going away-but middleware intensive systems just aren't a silver bullet. Generally only larger companies with deep pockets can develop software that way--and there are lot of other businesses that have serious database needs--those needs will get filled somehow.
Ross Perot was essentially correct. NAFTA and the US involvement in the WTO has been accompanied by massive transfer of US technological infrastructure overseas. This has been facilitated by substantial government deficits, massive immigration and transfer of US capital and real estate assets(as well as an increasing trend of the US government to vote on the basis of political donations rather than popular will). The problem was less apparent in the 90's because there was a brisk trade associated with facilitating the early parts of this transfer.
The latest "Free Trade" bills also contain provisions that expand L1 non-immigrant visas. These trade deals more or less mandate the US cannot effectively control its borders.
The only candidate for president seriously addressing this issue is Dennis Kucinich(www.kucinich.us).
Now, Mozart-oz hasn't had the trial by fire that PHP or Java have had--you won't see it used in a lot of commercial sites-but Mozart does show how the type of applications that folks think could only be done in Java, C# or C++, using an army of programmers can be done by a smaller team. Can it be done? Sure. Will it be done? Well, that depends on the will of the community ultimately.
I personally think this is the type of thing that is key to reducing the complexity of large software systems, but it is a _hard_ problem and will take a while to sort out.
There have been requests for getting some of the key features of Mozart-Oz, namely logic variables, into Python. I include this to show some of the difficulties in the discussion here(i.e. we get a lot of really smart folks that don't come to an obvious consensus on how to proceed here). I'm sure that there are some things that you can do in Java that PHP can't do yet-and some of these deal with needs of key markets like banks. Can those features be added? Well, that seems to be contention of some serious researchers in the field.
Python Logic SIG
Applying Logic Variables to Conventional Languages
The infamous Logic Variable PEP
I worked at Sun years ago. At the time, I was proud to be associated with that company-their Unix was good and the admiration of many of my peers. The basic problem though with Sun: It was the kind of company where is paid to be popular rather than right. Deviations from the pervailing world view there were a good way to not be popular.
Java? Well, I have to use it for a class I'm taking, but I can't say that technology excites me--stuff like www.mozart-oz.org seems to leave J2EE in the dust. (Mozart means that stuff like Reilable multi-cast is more or less transparent which simplifies a lot of stuff compared to Java's baroque design-you can do a lot more in Mozart with a lot less code).
Sparc is a joke-there just isn't a compelling technical reason to use sparc. What sun could do here-through some money to Chuck Moore-who has some really interesting chip technology(www.colorforth.com). Basically, Moore can put a lot of cpu's onto one chip(because Forth chips have a simple design). A lot of stuff suddenly gets much more simple--and much lower power(which is important for stuff like robotics). Sun won't go that way though-it doesn't fit into a cast-of-thousands mentality that has developed there--they'd rather suck on the government tit and bet on what Milton Friedman calls the "corporate subsidy" of H-1b to keep Sun alive.