You are not the only one. I remember one of my former colleagues standing in front of a vending machine, just looking at it, for over 5 minutes... I asked him what was up, and he replied "There's too much choice. There should just be one chocolate bar." He was only half joking.
The "trademark issues" were that you can't patch Firefox and keep calling it Firefox.
You can if you have permission e.g. Ubuntu patch their Firefox, and yet it is still called Firefox. Debian also had permission, once upon a time. The dispute with Debian wasn't over source code patches, it was over the patch that removed the Firefox logo, because it was provided under a non-free license.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"
The question is how this is interpreted; there is agreement that it prohibits support of one religion over others, but does it also allow or prohibit the creation of laws that specifically target all religions? The Supreme Court has decided that the interpretation of the Founding Fathers (including Madison and Jefferson) was that the clause prohibits the creation of laws that target (either supporting or prohibiting) religions in general.
The "wall of separation" was built by Thomas Jefferson in his letter to the Danbury Baptists. In this letter Jefferson refers directly to the text in the First Amendment, with no additional context.
That is not the only context. James Madison, who was the principal drafter of the Establishment Clause, also wrote about the "great Barrier", "perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters", "line of separation between the rights of religion and the civil authority... entire abstinence of the government", and "practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government as essential to the purity of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States":
The Jefferson quotation cited in Black's opinion is from a letter Jefferson wrote in 1802 to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, that there should be "a wall of separation between church and state." Critics of Black's reasoning (most notably, former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist) have argued that the majority of states did have "official" churches at the time of the First Amendment's adoption and that James Madison, not Jefferson, was the principal drafter. However, Madison himself often wrote of "perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters" (1822 letter to Livingston), "line of separation between the rights of religion and the civil authority... entire abstinence of the government" (1832 letter Rev. Adams), and "practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government as essential to the purity of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States" (1811 letter to Baptist Churches)." - Establishment Clause
Everson used the metaphor of a wall of separation between church and state, derived from the correspondence of President Thomas Jefferson. It had been long established in the decisions of the Supreme Court, beginning with Reynolds v. United States from 1879, when the Court reviewed the history of the early Republic in deciding the extent of the liberties of Mormons. Chief Justice Morrison Waite, who consulted the historian George Bancroft, also discussed at some length the Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments by James Madison, who drafted the First Amendment; Madison used the metaphor of a "great barrier." - First Amendment
We know that ozone and petro-Diesel particulates have unambiguous and demonstrable effects on public health; where CO2 at atmospheric levels does not.
The Clean Air Act is not limited to short-term demonstrable effects on public health, in fact it explicitly covers atmospheric issues like ozone and SO2: "The 1990 amendments added provisions for addressing acid rain, ozone depletion and toxic air pollution..." (from linked Wikipedia article)
Section 109(b)(1) of the CAA (Clean Air Act) instructed the EPA to set "ambient air quality standards the attainment and maintenance of which in the judgment of the Administrator, based on [the] criteria [documents of Section 108] and allowing an adequate margin of safety, are requisite to protect the public health."
Re-read the quote - it does not support your argument. In fact, it delegates the legal authority to judge the necessity of regulation to the EPA Administrator. The Administrator has the power to decide and to enact whatever regulations are necessary to protect the public health.
There just is no mandate for the EPA to regulate CO2 at this time.
No, it was called Greenland as a marketing ploy. Greenland:
"The name Greenland comes from the early Scandinavian settlers. In the Icelandic sagas, it is said that Norwegian-born Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland for murder. He, along with his extended family and thralls, set out in ships to find a land rumored to lie to the northwest. After settling there, he named the land Grønland ("Greenland"), supposedly in the hope that the pleasant name would attract settlers."
YOU, as the plaintiff, have to show that YOU have actual standing by showing that YOU have sustained damages from the direct action or inaction of whomever you are suing.
Surely being 'emotionally invested in the success of patent law' would require you to want it to achieve what it was meant to achieve?
Michel's argument is a familiar and persuasive one - if there are problems with the patent system, then those problems should be fixed, rather than exempting entire industries from its scope. Some might claim that it is an argument based on ideology rather than pragmatism, but that does not make it invalid. Why should electrical engineers be vulnerable to patent trolls, whilst software engineers aren't? Why should a program expressed in VHDL and uploaded to an FPGA be worthy of patent protection, whilst the same algorithm implemented in C and running on a CPU isn't? Why should engineers in every industry have to worry about patents, but software engineers be excused? There is the argument that software is just an expression of mathematical functions, which as an abstract concept is unpatentable. But isn't a CPU design also an expression of mathematical functions, that just happen to implement logic gates and other circuits?
The pragmatic difference is that the barrier to entry for software programming is much, much lower. When a person can violate your patents with nothing more than a PC and a compiler, then there are potentially tens of thousands of people who will end up doing so. But the actual result is no different to that of other industries - the PC is to software what Star Trek 3D replicators would be to hardware - if we actually had 3D replicator technology, then people working in every industry would be living under the threat of patent trolls, and many of them would be calling for their industry to be exempted. So, why should software be treated as a special case?
Consider two possible worlds: one where we build thousands of nuclear plants. Another where instead we equip the whole world with solar.
The difference is that we already have the technology to build nuclear power plants on a scale to power the world. We do not have the technology to build photovoltaic farms to power the world. This situation might change, if the technology develops to a point where solar becomes viable, but it would require some huge technological leaps - perhaps photovoltaic plastics. Providing only 1/4 of UK's energy consumption (pop. 62M) would require more than 100 times all the photovoltaics that exist in the entire world right now. Another quote:
Fantasy time: solar farming
If a breakthrough of solar technology occurs and the cost of photovoltaics
came down enough that we could deploy panels all over the countryside,
what is the maximum conceivable production?...
How audacious is this plan? The solar power capacity required to deliver this 50 kWh
per day per person in the UK is more than 100 times all the photovoltaics
in the whole world. So should I include the PV farm in my sustainable
production stack? I’m in two minds. At the start of this book I said I
wanted to explore what the laws of physics say about the limits of sustainable energy, assuming money is no object. On those grounds, I should
certainly go ahead, industrialize the countryside, and push the PV farm
onto the stack. At the same time, I want to help people figure out what
we should be doing between now and 2050. And today, electricity from
solar farms would be four times as expensive as the market rate. So I feel
a bit irresponsible as I include this estimate in the sustainable production
stack in figure 6.9 – paving 5% of the UK with solar panels seems beyond
the bounds of plausibility in so many ways. If we seriously contemplated
doing such a thing, it would quite probably be better to put the panels in
a two-fold sunnier country and send some of the energy home by power
lines. We’ll return to this idea in Chapter 25.
perhaps migration scripts would be a better approach than simply trusting each package upgrade to never fail...
That is what do-release-upgrade does. It downloads a migration tarball for the package that you are upgrading to. That tarball contains scripts that are supposed to fix any upgrade issues that can't be (or aren't) handled within the package itself. If you want to see how this works, have a look at the upgrade tarball for Precise
That would be pretty much all the farming in the Scottish Highlands, for example.
Nobody is disputing that in some geographically poor areas grazing is advantageous - the quote I provided said as much - and the Scottish Highlands is recognised as an agriculturally disadvantaged area. The rest of the E.U. isn't. So, the question is, what percentage of sheep and cow sold in the E.U. is reared on land similar to the Scottish Highlands? Because if it is less than 95%, then your claim that "It doesn't matter how much grass and scrubby plants cows need to eat to produce a kilo of beef, because it won't do us a bit of good if they don't" is invalid, as clearly some significant amount of the land could be used to farm alternative crops.
You know that Aberdeen Angus beef you like so much? Guess what kind of farmland the cows are grazed on?
Aberdeen Angus is a breed that is reared worldwide; the term is not geographically protected for beef farmed in the Scottish Highlands. Aberdeen Angus farmed in southern England is probably fed from land that could just as easily be used to grow human consumable crops, and the diet is probably supplemented with grain and soya.
Yes, we do. Without a military our civilization would fall to a more aggressive civilization. A military is necessary to create the environment where your civilization can do something other than be a servant to another.
Interesting, then, that the Founding Fathers envisaged a United States without a standing army...
“A standing army is one of the greatest mischief that can possibly happen” - James Madison
It doesn't matter how much grass and scrubby plants cows need to eat to produce a kilo of beef, because it won't do us a bit of good if they don't.
In modern farming, what percentage of cows do you think are fed using only scrubby grass land as a food source? We're talking here about land that is so useless that it can't be used to grow any human consumable crops like rice, wheat, potatoes etc. I would bet that the vast majority of "green grass" cow farms in the U.S. and Western Europe would be just as capable of growing potatoes as grass.
Do these calculations give an argument in favour of vegetarianism, on
the grounds of lower energy consumption? It depends on where the animals feed. Take the steep hills and mountains of Wales, for example. Could
the land be used for anything other than grazing? Either these rocky pasturelands are used to sustain sheep, or they are not used to help feed
humans. You can think of these natural green slopes as maintenance-free
biofuel plantations, and the sheep as automated self-replicating biofuel-harvesting machines. The energy losses between sunlight and mutton are
substantial, but there is probably no better way of capturing solar power
in such places. (I’m not sure whether this argument for sheep-farming in
Wales actually adds up: during the worst weather, Welsh sheep are moved
to lower fields where their diet is supplemented with soya feed and other
food grown with the help of energy-intensive fertilizers; what’s the true
energy cost? I don’t know.) Similar arguments can be made in favour of
carnivory for places such as the scrublands of Africa and the grasslands of
Australia; and in favour of dairy consumption in India, where millions of
cows are fed on by-products of rice and maize farming.
On the other hand, where animals are reared in cages and fed grain
that humans could have eaten, there’s no question that it would be more
energy-efficient to cut out the middlehen or middlesow, and feed the grain
directly to humans. - source
Depending on how you account for these factors, you reach very different answers about who should pay for carbon emissions.
The obvious answer to the question "who should pay for emissions?" is "the people who did it". You are, for some reason, attempting to lump in lots of other environmental issues to the one of CO2 emissions. When we regulated SO2 emissions, we just did it - we didn't wait until we had figured out how to handle deforestation or population growth in Africa, or how to somehow "correct" the effects of colonialism or emigration in Europe thousands of years ago.
If you don't think that the emitter should pay, then who should? The rich? The poor? Everyone pay an equal share? If so, how do you account for different salary rates in different nations - should everyone pay an equal proportion of their income? It is ridiculous to suggest that, say, Africans with their average income of $315 a year should have the same responsibility towards paying this cost as Westerners who earn many times more, especially when it was the Western nations who contributed most to the increase in co2 levels:
The major countries with the biggest per-capita emissions are Australia,
the USA, and Canada. European countries, Japan, and South Africa are
notable runners up. Among European countries, the United Kingdom
is resolutely average. What about China, that naughty “out of control”
country? Yes, the area of China’s rectangle is about the same as the USA’s,
but the fact is that their per-capita emissions are below the world average.
India’s per-capita emissions are less than half the world average. Moreover,
it’s worth bearing in mind that much of the industrial emissions of China
and India are associated with the manufacture of stuff for rich countries.
So, assuming that “something needs to be done” to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions, who has a special responsibility to do something? As I
said, that’s an ethical question. But I find it hard to imagine any system
of ethics that denies that the responsibility falls especially on the countries to the left hand side of this diagram – the countries whose emissions are
two, three, or four times the world average. Countries that are most able
to pay. Countries like Britain and the USA, for example.
If we assume that the climate has been damaged by human activity, and
that someone needs to x it, who should pay? Some people say “the
polluter should pay.” The preceding pictures showed who’s doing the
polluting today. But it isn’t the rate of CO2 pollution that matters, it’s
the cumulative total emissions; much of the emitted carbon dioxide (about
one third of it) will hang around in the atmosphere for at least 50 or 100
years. If we accept the ethical idea that “the polluter should pay” then
we should ask how big is each country’s historical footprint. The next
picture shows each country’s cumulative emissions of CO2, expressed as
an average emission rate over the period 1880–2004.
Average pollution rate
Congratulations, Britain! The UK has made it onto the winners’ podium.
We may be only an average European country today, but in the table of
historical emitters, per capita, we are second only to the USA.
It takes 15 Terawatts to power the world [wikipedia.org] and each fission reactor apparently provides about 1 gigawatt [euronuclear.org], so to furnish 50% of the world's energy needs of today with nuclear, we'd need to build 1 billion nuclear fission reactors.
I heard that nuclear power can’t be built at a sufficient rate to
make a useful contribution.
The difficulty of building nuclear power fast has been exaggerated with
the help of a misleading presentation technique I call “the magic playing
field.” In this technique, two things appear to be compared, but the basis of
the comparison is switched halfway through. The Guardian’s environment
editor, summarizing a report from the Oxford Research Group, wrote “For
nuclear power to make any significant contribution to a reduction in global
carbon emissions in the next two generations, the industry would have to
construct nearly 3000 new reactors – or about one a week for 60 years. A
civil nuclear construction and supply programme on this scale is a pipe
dream, and completely unfeasible. The highest historic rate is 3.4 new
reactors a year.” 3000 sounds much bigger than 3.4, doesn’t it! In this
application of the “magic playing field” technique, there is a switch not
only of timescale but also of region. While the first figure (3000 new reactors
over 60 years) is the number required for the whole planet, the second figure
(3.4 new reactors per year) is the maximum rate of building by a single
country (France)!
A more honest presentation would have kept the comparison on a per-
planet basis. France has 59 of the world’s 429 operating nuclear reactors, so
it’s plausible that the highest rate of reactor building for the whole planet
was something like ten times France’s, that is, 34 new reactors per year.
And the required rate (3000 new reactors over 60 years) is 50 new reactors
per year. So the assertion that “civil nuclear construction on this scale is
a pipe dream, and completely unfeasible” is poppycock. Yes, it’s a big
construction rate, but it’s in the same ballpark as historical construction
rates.
How reasonable is my assertion that the world’s maximum historical
construction rate must have been about 34 new nuclear reactors per year?
Let’s look at the data. Figure 24.14 shows the power of the world’s nuclear
fleet as a function of time, showing only the power stations still operational
in 2007. The rate of new build was biggest in 1984, and had a value of
(drum-roll please...) about 30 GW per year – about 30 1-GW reactors. So
there!
Progressivism is a recognized political concept that advocates deliberate social change in response to other social and non-social changes that occur in the world, whether that be industrialisation, urbanisation, technology etc. Past progressive issues include limiting (and ultimately, banning) child workers, allowing women to participate in the workforce, and allowing women and ethnic minorities to vote. More modern movements include outlawing discrimination on the basis of religion, sexual orientation, race, and age.
At the time of all of these movements that advocated social change, there were opposing social conservative movements, which advocated maintaining the existing social rules and structure. And still, in modern times, there are many people who believe that a return to the social norms of the past would be preferable to modern society, even if that means abandoning or limiting the use of technology. In particular, cell phones, smart phones, and the internet have all prompted social change, whether it be small social change like people talking on the train, changes in sexual behaviour as a result of widespread access to hardcore pornography, or people directly using these devices to communicate and organise larger social change like the Arab Spring. There are social conservatives that oppose all of these things.
In reality, it is very difficult to stop non-social changes from prompting social change, but it is possible - as societies like North Korea and Afghanistan show - if a concerted effort is made to limit the spread of change, and the impact of technological developments.
Libertarians aren't advocates of pedophilia, bestiality, necrophilia or incest,
Some of them are though - there is a large branch of Libertarianism that believes that the government should not have the power to regulate interactions between consenting individuals, which is what the laws on consensual necrophilia and incest do. Bestiality is a bit different, because there is the issue about whether the animal consents, but some of them clearly do, and in a world where it is legal to kill an animal, it is hard to justify why the less worse crime of "consensual" sex with an animal should be illegal. The issue of pedophilia is again one of consent, and there are many Libertarians who believe the government should not be outlawing sex between consenting people - the law as it stands is black and white, but clearly are some underage people who are capable of consenting to sex - many Libertarians believe that the government should not be regulating the sex lives of these individuals.
and nor do they - in business - try to delegitimize ways for private citizens to make money.
They do if those ways of making money are against the principles of liberty - for example, most Libertarians would be against slavery, even though it is a way for private citizens to make money.
City driving isn't usually done for long stretches - unless it's stop and go, in which case nothing is happening to make it require much brain exercise.
It also helps to be well educated: "According to the study, 96% of the immigrant founders held graduate or postgraduate degrees, with 47% holding master's degrees and 27% having Ph.D.s. About three-quarters had their highest degrees in the STEM fields." - Forbes
That is true. However, research with a much larger sample size also reports immigrants form a disproportionate number of successful entrepreneurs.
The Implications Of Immigrant Entrepreneurship:
A survey of 28,000 companies found that immigrants were key founders in more than a quarter of all the engineering and technology companies set up in the U.S. between 1995 and 2005.
The new research--led by Vivek Wadhwa, an executive-in-residence at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering--is a follow-up of a study published earlier this year by Wadhwa and his team that had counted $52 billion in annual sales by these immigrant-founded companies. Total employment at those companies: roughly 450,000.
...
According to the study, 96% of the immigrant founders held graduate or postgraduate degrees, with 47% holding master's degrees and 27% having Ph.D.s. About three-quarters had their highest degrees in the STEM fields. The largest concentrations outside of that were in business, accounting and finance.
Wadhwa says the Duke project underscores the point that a significant portion of immigrants in the U.S. are highly educated, fueling a tech boom, leading innovation and creating jobs. The report cites U.S. Census data to say that immigrants from India, the U.K., China, Taiwan, Japan and Germany are better educated than native U.S. citizens.
The results of the study are especially significant for Indian immigrants, according to Wadhwa. "Indians are among the best educated of all immigrant groups," he says, adding that Indians founded more engineering and technology companies in the U.S. in the decade up to 2005 than the next four groups combined--those from the U.K., China, Taiwan and Japan. They accounted for 26% of all start-ups, about 117,000 jobs and $14 billion in revenue in 2005.
It is of-course NONSENSE that a nation without INCOME TAXES is a nation without public streets, without other infrastructure, without even laws.
That depends on the nation. There are certainly some (Somalia comes to mind) that would fit that definition. There are others (Monaco) where no income tax clearly works - but here's the important question to ask yourself: the government of Monaco does spend money on infrastructure, so where does that money come from? And could the U.S. get money in the same way? Some nations (United Arab Emirates) have no income tax, but pay for public infrastructure through social security levies, and by generating income through government enterprise e.g. state owned companies in the oil industry. Other countries just increase other taxes (like property or VAT or oil/gas) to compensate for the lack of income tax. Getting rid of income tax does not destroy government, it just makes it raise money through other means. Do you want government taking over private enterprise, or increasing tax in other areas?
The US is one of the few places where US companies have to pay income earned overseas when it brought back onshore. Which means the same income is taxed twice
No it isn't. When a U.S. company repatriates foreign profits they get a U.S. tax credit equal to the amount of mandatory foreign tax they have paid:
U.S. companies pay federal tax on their worldwide profits. This would result in double taxation of foreign earnings that are also taxed by a foreign country, but foreign taxes generally can be claimed as a credit against U.S. taxes on foreign earnings. For example, a U.S. company with an Italian branch deriving $100 million of income and paying $25 million of Italian taxes would pay federal taxes of $10 million ($35 million less $25 million). Forbes
24.2% is the reported global effective tax rate, but Apple has allegedly "bulked up" that figure by including "potential future U.S. tax" on foreign earnings invested outside the United States - earnings that, in reality, will never be taxed in the U.S. It is speculated that Apple may have done this so that it can defer those profits and hence still report bumper profits during future leaner years, or that it is just better PR to appear to be paying more tax than they really are. See this report which estimates Apple's effective global tax rate at 12.8% - not as low as the 9.8% estimate, but not far off:
Apple reports a worldwide effective tax rate of
24.2 percent. A lower effective tax rate increases a
company’s reported book profits. Apple would
have a lower reported effective tax rate and higher
profits if it recorded its tax expense the way most
other companies do. Under generally accepted accounting principles, U.S. companies do not have to
book tax expense on foreign profits if the company
deems them to be permanently invested overseas.
To lower their reported effective tax rates and boost
their reported after-tax profits, most companies
assume all of their unrepatriated foreign profits are
permanently reinvested offshore. If Apple asserted
that all of its foreign earnings were permanently
invested outside the United States, it would have
booked an estimated $3.6 billion less in tax expense,
and its effective tax rate would be 12.8 percent. (See
the table.) When assessing Apple’s tax situation
relative to that of most other companies, this adjusted rate is probably more relevant than the
reported 24.2 percent rate.
Why doesn’t Apple maximize reported profit like
most other companies? We can only speculate.
Perhaps because it is breaking all records for profitability now, it is saving some profits for less
fortunate times in the future. As the Joint Committee on Taxation recently wrote: ‘‘If the company
accrues the tax expense in the year the profits are
earned, it may later decide that those funds will not
be repatriated after all. At that later time it may then
reverse the tax expense and shift financial statement
income from the prior period into the current
period.’’ (See ‘‘Present Law and Background Relating to the Interaction of Federal Income Tax Rules
and Financial Accounting Rules,’’ JCX-13-12, Feb. 7,
2012, Doc 2012-2443 or 2012 TNT 26-15.)
An alternative explanation is that perhaps Apple
— with its young, socioeconomically elite customer
base — does not want the negative publicity that a
low effective tax rate could generate with groups
like Citizens for Tax Justice and US Uncut.
To be fair to both Greenlining and the New York Times article, both did point out that the tax year figure might include portions assigned to previous or future years:
Without such tactics, Apple’s federal tax bill in the United States most likely would have been $2.4 billion higher last year, according to a recent study by a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan. As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent. (Apple does not disclose what portion of those payments was in the United States, or what portion is assigned to previous or future years.) NYT
The third method, which this report uses, is what a company reports on its 10-K as “cash taxes paid.” This is how much a company actually paid in taxes in a given year. But that figure includes the company’s taxes paid everywhere, including taxes paid to states, the U.S. federal government, and to other countries. Some of that money could be paid for back taxes and some could eventually be refunded. While imperfect, this is the best estimate of how much a company actually pays in taxes in a given year. Until the government or the Financial Accounting Standards Board requires companies to report more, this is the best figure available. Greenlining
The section of TFA that you quoted shows not the slightest hint of a mention of racism or extremism.
Apparently, back in 2009, he was contracted by the BNP to train their members. That is where the racist/extremist angle comes from. He may not or may not personally be a racist extremist, but he was contracted to advocate and teach extreme and illegal methods of "self-defense" to a bunch of racists who believe that non-whites should be forced from Britain or exterminated. Apparently the BNP training courses didn't actually happen due to adverse publicity, but it does seem odd that, once again, he is intending to tour areas where racial tensions are higher.
Slashdot Mirror
You are not the only one. I remember one of my former colleagues standing in front of a vending machine, just looking at it, for over 5 minutes... I asked him what was up, and he replied "There's too much choice. There should just be one chocolate bar." He was only half joking.
The "trademark issues" were that you can't patch Firefox and keep calling it Firefox.
You can if you have permission e.g. Ubuntu patch their Firefox, and yet it is still called Firefox. Debian also had permission, once upon a time. The dispute with Debian wasn't over source code patches, it was over the patch that removed the Firefox logo, because it was provided under a non-free license.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion"
The question is how this is interpreted; there is agreement that it prohibits support of one religion over others, but does it also allow or prohibit the creation of laws that specifically target all religions? The Supreme Court has decided that the interpretation of the Founding Fathers (including Madison and Jefferson) was that the clause prohibits the creation of laws that target (either supporting or prohibiting) religions in general.
The "wall of separation" was built by Thomas Jefferson in his letter to the Danbury Baptists. In this letter Jefferson refers directly to the text in the First Amendment, with no additional context.
That is not the only context. James Madison, who was the principal drafter of the Establishment Clause, also wrote about the "great Barrier", "perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters", "line of separation between the rights of religion and the civil authority... entire abstinence of the government", and "practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government as essential to the purity of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States":
The Jefferson quotation cited in Black's opinion is from a letter Jefferson wrote in 1802 to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, that there should be "a wall of separation between church and state." Critics of Black's reasoning (most notably, former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist) have argued that the majority of states did have "official" churches at the time of the First Amendment's adoption and that James Madison, not Jefferson, was the principal drafter. However, Madison himself often wrote of "perfect separation between the ecclesiastical and civil matters" (1822 letter to Livingston), "line of separation between the rights of religion and the civil authority... entire abstinence of the government" (1832 letter Rev. Adams), and "practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government as essential to the purity of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States" (1811 letter to Baptist Churches)." - Establishment Clause
Everson used the metaphor of a wall of separation between church and state, derived from the correspondence of President Thomas Jefferson. It had been long established in the decisions of the Supreme Court, beginning with Reynolds v. United States from 1879, when the Court reviewed the history of the early Republic in deciding the extent of the liberties of Mormons. Chief Justice Morrison Waite, who consulted the historian George Bancroft, also discussed at some length the Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments by James Madison, who drafted the First Amendment; Madison used the metaphor of a "great barrier." - First Amendment
We know that ozone and petro-Diesel particulates have unambiguous and demonstrable effects on public health; where CO2 at atmospheric levels does not.
The Clean Air Act is not limited to short-term demonstrable effects on public health, in fact it explicitly covers atmospheric issues like ozone and SO2: "The 1990 amendments added provisions for addressing acid rain, ozone depletion and toxic air pollution..." (from linked Wikipedia article)
Section 109(b)(1) of the CAA (Clean Air Act) instructed the EPA to set "ambient air quality standards the attainment and maintenance of which in the judgment of the Administrator, based on [the] criteria [documents of Section 108] and allowing an adequate margin of safety, are requisite to protect the public health."
Re-read the quote - it does not support your argument. In fact, it delegates the legal authority to judge the necessity of regulation to the EPA Administrator. The Administrator has the power to decide and to enact whatever regulations are necessary to protect the public health.
There just is no mandate for the EPA to regulate CO2 at this time.
The Supreme Court has already ruled that the EPA has the authority. Your personal opinion may disagree with the legal rulings of the Supreme Court, but the legal situation is clear.
where in the Constitution it gives the federal government the power to regulate the climate.
The legal issue isn't regulating the climate, but regulating CO2 emissions, and the U.S. Supreme Court has already decided that Federal regulation of emissions is constitutional.
no it was called greenland because it was green.
No, it was called Greenland as a marketing ploy. Greenland:
"The name Greenland comes from the early Scandinavian settlers. In the Icelandic sagas, it is said that Norwegian-born Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland for murder. He, along with his extended family and thralls, set out in ships to find a land rumored to lie to the northwest. After settling there, he named the land Grønland ("Greenland"), supposedly in the hope that the pleasant name would attract settlers."
YOU, as the plaintiff, have to show that YOU have actual standing by showing that YOU have sustained damages from the direct action or inaction of whomever you are suing.
Actually, you don't: Public trust doctrine. It's in TFA.
Surely being 'emotionally invested in the success of patent law' would require you to want it to achieve what it was meant to achieve?
Michel's argument is a familiar and persuasive one - if there are problems with the patent system, then those problems should be fixed, rather than exempting entire industries from its scope. Some might claim that it is an argument based on ideology rather than pragmatism, but that does not make it invalid. Why should electrical engineers be vulnerable to patent trolls, whilst software engineers aren't? Why should a program expressed in VHDL and uploaded to an FPGA be worthy of patent protection, whilst the same algorithm implemented in C and running on a CPU isn't? Why should engineers in every industry have to worry about patents, but software engineers be excused? There is the argument that software is just an expression of mathematical functions, which as an abstract concept is unpatentable. But isn't a CPU design also an expression of mathematical functions, that just happen to implement logic gates and other circuits?
The pragmatic difference is that the barrier to entry for software programming is much, much lower. When a person can violate your patents with nothing more than a PC and a compiler, then there are potentially tens of thousands of people who will end up doing so. But the actual result is no different to that of other industries - the PC is to software what Star Trek 3D replicators would be to hardware - if we actually had 3D replicator technology, then people working in every industry would be living under the threat of patent trolls, and many of them would be calling for their industry to be exempted. So, why should software be treated as a special case?
Consider two possible worlds: one where we build thousands of nuclear plants. Another where instead we equip the whole world with solar.
The difference is that we already have the technology to build nuclear power plants on a scale to power the world. We do not have the technology to build photovoltaic farms to power the world. This situation might change, if the technology develops to a point where solar becomes viable, but it would require some huge technological leaps - perhaps photovoltaic plastics. Providing only 1/4 of UK's energy consumption (pop. 62M) would require more than 100 times all the photovoltaics that exist in the entire world right now. Another quote:
Fantasy time: solar farming
If a breakthrough of solar technology occurs and the cost of photovoltaics came down enough that we could deploy panels all over the countryside, what is the maximum conceivable production? ...
How audacious is this plan? The solar power capacity required to deliver this 50 kWh per day per person in the UK is more than 100 times all the photovoltaics in the whole world. So should I include the PV farm in my sustainable production stack? I’m in two minds. At the start of this book I said I wanted to explore what the laws of physics say about the limits of sustainable energy, assuming money is no object. On those grounds, I should certainly go ahead, industrialize the countryside, and push the PV farm onto the stack. At the same time, I want to help people figure out what we should be doing between now and 2050. And today, electricity from solar farms would be four times as expensive as the market rate. So I feel a bit irresponsible as I include this estimate in the sustainable production stack in figure 6.9 – paving 5% of the UK with solar panels seems beyond the bounds of plausibility in so many ways. If we seriously contemplated doing such a thing, it would quite probably be better to put the panels in a two-fold sunnier country and send some of the energy home by power lines. We’ll return to this idea in Chapter 25.
perhaps migration scripts would be a better approach than simply trusting each package upgrade to never fail...
That is what do-release-upgrade does. It downloads a migration tarball for the package that you are upgrading to. That tarball contains scripts that are supposed to fix any upgrade issues that can't be (or aren't) handled within the package itself. If you want to see how this works, have a look at the upgrade tarball for Precise
That would be pretty much all the farming in the Scottish Highlands, for example.
Nobody is disputing that in some geographically poor areas grazing is advantageous - the quote I provided said as much - and the Scottish Highlands is recognised as an agriculturally disadvantaged area. The rest of the E.U. isn't. So, the question is, what percentage of sheep and cow sold in the E.U. is reared on land similar to the Scottish Highlands? Because if it is less than 95%, then your claim that "It doesn't matter how much grass and scrubby plants cows need to eat to produce a kilo of beef, because it won't do us a bit of good if they don't" is invalid, as clearly some significant amount of the land could be used to farm alternative crops.
You know that Aberdeen Angus beef you like so much? Guess what kind of farmland the cows are grazed on?
Aberdeen Angus is a breed that is reared worldwide; the term is not geographically protected for beef farmed in the Scottish Highlands. Aberdeen Angus farmed in southern England is probably fed from land that could just as easily be used to grow human consumable crops, and the diet is probably supplemented with grain and soya.
Yes, we do. Without a military our civilization would fall to a more aggressive civilization. A military is necessary to create the environment where your civilization can do something other than be a servant to another.
Interesting, then, that the Founding Fathers envisaged a United States without a standing army...
“A standing army is one of the greatest mischief that can possibly happen” - James Madison
It doesn't matter how much grass and scrubby plants cows need to eat to produce a kilo of beef, because it won't do us a bit of good if they don't.
In modern farming, what percentage of cows do you think are fed using only scrubby grass land as a food source? We're talking here about land that is so useless that it can't be used to grow any human consumable crops like rice, wheat, potatoes etc. I would bet that the vast majority of "green grass" cow farms in the U.S. and Western Europe would be just as capable of growing potatoes as grass.
Do these calculations give an argument in favour of vegetarianism, on the grounds of lower energy consumption? It depends on where the animals feed. Take the steep hills and mountains of Wales, for example. Could the land be used for anything other than grazing? Either these rocky pasturelands are used to sustain sheep, or they are not used to help feed humans. You can think of these natural green slopes as maintenance-free biofuel plantations, and the sheep as automated self-replicating biofuel-harvesting machines. The energy losses between sunlight and mutton are substantial, but there is probably no better way of capturing solar power in such places. (I’m not sure whether this argument for sheep-farming in Wales actually adds up: during the worst weather, Welsh sheep are moved to lower fields where their diet is supplemented with soya feed and other food grown with the help of energy-intensive fertilizers; what’s the true energy cost? I don’t know.) Similar arguments can be made in favour of carnivory for places such as the scrublands of Africa and the grasslands of Australia; and in favour of dairy consumption in India, where millions of cows are fed on by-products of rice and maize farming.
On the other hand, where animals are reared in cages and fed grain that humans could have eaten, there’s no question that it would be more energy-efficient to cut out the middlehen or middlesow, and feed the grain directly to humans. - source
Depending on how you account for these factors, you reach very different answers about who should pay for carbon emissions.
The obvious answer to the question "who should pay for emissions?" is "the people who did it". You are, for some reason, attempting to lump in lots of other environmental issues to the one of CO2 emissions. When we regulated SO2 emissions, we just did it - we didn't wait until we had figured out how to handle deforestation or population growth in Africa, or how to somehow "correct" the effects of colonialism or emigration in Europe thousands of years ago.
If you don't think that the emitter should pay, then who should? The rich? The poor? Everyone pay an equal share? If so, how do you account for different salary rates in different nations - should everyone pay an equal proportion of their income? It is ridiculous to suggest that, say, Africans with their average income of $315 a year should have the same responsibility towards paying this cost as Westerners who earn many times more, especially when it was the Western nations who contributed most to the increase in co2 levels:
The major countries with the biggest per-capita emissions are Australia, the USA, and Canada. European countries, Japan, and South Africa are notable runners up. Among European countries, the United Kingdom is resolutely average. What about China, that naughty “out of control” country? Yes, the area of China’s rectangle is about the same as the USA’s, but the fact is that their per-capita emissions are below the world average. India’s per-capita emissions are less than half the world average. Moreover, it’s worth bearing in mind that much of the industrial emissions of China and India are associated with the manufacture of stuff for rich countries.
So, assuming that “something needs to be done” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, who has a special responsibility to do something? As I said, that’s an ethical question. But I find it hard to imagine any system of ethics that denies that the responsibility falls especially on the countries to the left hand side of this diagram – the countries whose emissions are two, three, or four times the world average. Countries that are most able to pay. Countries like Britain and the USA, for example.
Historical responsibility for climate impact
If we assume that the climate has been damaged by human activity, and that someone needs to x it, who should pay? Some people say “the polluter should pay.” The preceding pictures showed who’s doing the polluting today. But it isn’t the rate of CO2 pollution that matters, it’s the cumulative total emissions; much of the emitted carbon dioxide (about one third of it) will hang around in the atmosphere for at least 50 or 100 years. If we accept the ethical idea that “the polluter should pay” then we should ask how big is each country’s historical footprint. The next picture shows each country’s cumulative emissions of CO2, expressed as an average emission rate over the period 1880–2004. Average pollution rate
Congratulations, Britain! The UK has made it onto the winners’ podium. We may be only an average European country today, but in the table of historical emitters, per capita, we are second only to the USA.
It takes 15 Terawatts to power the world [wikipedia.org] and each fission reactor apparently provides about 1 gigawatt [euronuclear.org], so to furnish 50% of the world's energy needs of today with nuclear, we'd need to build 1 billion nuclear fission reactors.
Your math is wrong. 15*10^12 / 1*10^9 = 15000 reactors. The estimate I've read is lower, 3000 new reactors over 60 years, i.e. 50 new reactors a year globally, which might be acheivable. See Sustainable energy without the hot air, chapter 24: Nuclear: Mythconceptions
I heard that nuclear power can’t be built at a sufficient rate to make a useful contribution.
The difficulty of building nuclear power fast has been exaggerated with the help of a misleading presentation technique I call “the magic playing field.” In this technique, two things appear to be compared, but the basis of the comparison is switched halfway through. The Guardian’s environment editor, summarizing a report from the Oxford Research Group, wrote “For nuclear power to make any significant contribution to a reduction in global carbon emissions in the next two generations, the industry would have to construct nearly 3000 new reactors – or about one a week for 60 years. A civil nuclear construction and supply programme on this scale is a pipe dream, and completely unfeasible. The highest historic rate is 3.4 new reactors a year.” 3000 sounds much bigger than 3.4, doesn’t it! In this application of the “magic playing field” technique, there is a switch not only of timescale but also of region. While the first figure (3000 new reactors over 60 years) is the number required for the whole planet, the second figure (3.4 new reactors per year) is the maximum rate of building by a single country (France)!
A more honest presentation would have kept the comparison on a per- planet basis. France has 59 of the world’s 429 operating nuclear reactors, so it’s plausible that the highest rate of reactor building for the whole planet was something like ten times France’s, that is, 34 new reactors per year. And the required rate (3000 new reactors over 60 years) is 50 new reactors per year. So the assertion that “civil nuclear construction on this scale is a pipe dream, and completely unfeasible” is poppycock. Yes, it’s a big construction rate, but it’s in the same ballpark as historical construction rates.
How reasonable is my assertion that the world’s maximum historical construction rate must have been about 34 new nuclear reactors per year? Let’s look at the data. Figure 24.14 shows the power of the world’s nuclear fleet as a function of time, showing only the power stations still operational in 2007. The rate of new build was biggest in 1984, and had a value of (drum-roll please...) about 30 GW per year – about 30 1-GW reactors. So there!
Progressivism is a recognized political concept that advocates deliberate social change in response to other social and non-social changes that occur in the world, whether that be industrialisation, urbanisation, technology etc. Past progressive issues include limiting (and ultimately, banning) child workers, allowing women to participate in the workforce, and allowing women and ethnic minorities to vote. More modern movements include outlawing discrimination on the basis of religion, sexual orientation, race, and age.
At the time of all of these movements that advocated social change, there were opposing social conservative movements, which advocated maintaining the existing social rules and structure. And still, in modern times, there are many people who believe that a return to the social norms of the past would be preferable to modern society, even if that means abandoning or limiting the use of technology. In particular, cell phones, smart phones, and the internet have all prompted social change, whether it be small social change like people talking on the train, changes in sexual behaviour as a result of widespread access to hardcore pornography, or people directly using these devices to communicate and organise larger social change like the Arab Spring. There are social conservatives that oppose all of these things.
In reality, it is very difficult to stop non-social changes from prompting social change, but it is possible - as societies like North Korea and Afghanistan show - if a concerted effort is made to limit the spread of change, and the impact of technological developments.
Libertarians aren't advocates of pedophilia, bestiality, necrophilia or incest,
Some of them are though - there is a large branch of Libertarianism that believes that the government should not have the power to regulate interactions between consenting individuals, which is what the laws on consensual necrophilia and incest do. Bestiality is a bit different, because there is the issue about whether the animal consents, but some of them clearly do, and in a world where it is legal to kill an animal, it is hard to justify why the less worse crime of "consensual" sex with an animal should be illegal. The issue of pedophilia is again one of consent, and there are many Libertarians who believe the government should not be outlawing sex between consenting people - the law as it stands is black and white, but clearly are some underage people who are capable of consenting to sex - many Libertarians believe that the government should not be regulating the sex lives of these individuals.
and nor do they - in business - try to delegitimize ways for private citizens to make money.
They do if those ways of making money are against the principles of liberty - for example, most Libertarians would be against slavery, even though it is a way for private citizens to make money.
City driving isn't usually done for long stretches - unless it's stop and go, in which case nothing is happening to make it require much brain exercise.
Route planning and navigating through a complex urban environment can require more thought than driving along a relatively straight highway. MRI scans on taxi drivers have shown actual physical brain changes from learning complex urban maps.
It also helps to be well educated: "According to the study, 96% of the immigrant founders held graduate or postgraduate degrees, with 47% holding master's degrees and 27% having Ph.D.s. About three-quarters had their highest degrees in the STEM fields." - Forbes
The story dwells on one person's story
That is true. However, research with a much larger sample size also reports immigrants form a disproportionate number of successful entrepreneurs. The Implications Of Immigrant Entrepreneurship:
A survey of 28,000 companies found that immigrants were key founders in more than a quarter of all the engineering and technology companies set up in the U.S. between 1995 and 2005.
The new research--led by Vivek Wadhwa, an executive-in-residence at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering--is a follow-up of a study published earlier this year by Wadhwa and his team that had counted $52 billion in annual sales by these immigrant-founded companies. Total employment at those companies: roughly 450,000.
...
According to the study, 96% of the immigrant founders held graduate or postgraduate degrees, with 47% holding master's degrees and 27% having Ph.D.s. About three-quarters had their highest degrees in the STEM fields. The largest concentrations outside of that were in business, accounting and finance.
Wadhwa says the Duke project underscores the point that a significant portion of immigrants in the U.S. are highly educated, fueling a tech boom, leading innovation and creating jobs. The report cites U.S. Census data to say that immigrants from India, the U.K., China, Taiwan, Japan and Germany are better educated than native U.S. citizens.
The results of the study are especially significant for Indian immigrants, according to Wadhwa. "Indians are among the best educated of all immigrant groups," he says, adding that Indians founded more engineering and technology companies in the U.S. in the decade up to 2005 than the next four groups combined--those from the U.K., China, Taiwan and Japan. They accounted for 26% of all start-ups, about 117,000 jobs and $14 billion in revenue in 2005.
It is of-course NONSENSE that a nation without INCOME TAXES is a nation without public streets, without other infrastructure, without even laws.
That depends on the nation. There are certainly some (Somalia comes to mind) that would fit that definition. There are others (Monaco) where no income tax clearly works - but here's the important question to ask yourself: the government of Monaco does spend money on infrastructure, so where does that money come from? And could the U.S. get money in the same way? Some nations (United Arab Emirates) have no income tax, but pay for public infrastructure through social security levies, and by generating income through government enterprise e.g. state owned companies in the oil industry. Other countries just increase other taxes (like property or VAT or oil/gas) to compensate for the lack of income tax. Getting rid of income tax does not destroy government, it just makes it raise money through other means. Do you want government taking over private enterprise, or increasing tax in other areas?
The US is one of the few places where US companies have to pay income earned overseas when it brought back onshore. Which means the same income is taxed twice
No it isn't. When a U.S. company repatriates foreign profits they get a U.S. tax credit equal to the amount of mandatory foreign tax they have paid:
U.S. companies pay federal tax on their worldwide profits. This would result in double taxation of foreign earnings that are also taxed by a foreign country, but foreign taxes generally can be claimed as a credit against U.S. taxes on foreign earnings. For example, a U.S. company with an Italian branch deriving $100 million of income and paying $25 million of Italian taxes would pay federal taxes of $10 million ($35 million less $25 million). Forbes
Apple reports a worldwide effective tax rate of 24.2 percent. A lower effective tax rate increases a company’s reported book profits. Apple would have a lower reported effective tax rate and higher profits if it recorded its tax expense the way most other companies do. Under generally accepted accounting principles, U.S. companies do not have to book tax expense on foreign profits if the company deems them to be permanently invested overseas. To lower their reported effective tax rates and boost their reported after-tax profits, most companies assume all of their unrepatriated foreign profits are permanently reinvested offshore. If Apple asserted that all of its foreign earnings were permanently invested outside the United States, it would have booked an estimated $3.6 billion less in tax expense, and its effective tax rate would be 12.8 percent. (See the table.) When assessing Apple’s tax situation relative to that of most other companies, this adjusted rate is probably more relevant than the reported 24.2 percent rate.
Why doesn’t Apple maximize reported profit like most other companies? We can only speculate. Perhaps because it is breaking all records for profitability now, it is saving some profits for less fortunate times in the future. As the Joint Committee on Taxation recently wrote: ‘‘If the company accrues the tax expense in the year the profits are earned, it may later decide that those funds will not be repatriated after all. At that later time it may then reverse the tax expense and shift financial statement income from the prior period into the current period.’’ (See ‘‘Present Law and Background Relating to the Interaction of Federal Income Tax Rules and Financial Accounting Rules,’’ JCX-13-12, Feb. 7, 2012, Doc 2012-2443 or 2012 TNT 26-15.)
An alternative explanation is that perhaps Apple — with its young, socioeconomically elite customer base — does not want the negative publicity that a low effective tax rate could generate with groups like Citizens for Tax Justice and US Uncut.
Without such tactics, Apple’s federal tax bill in the United States most likely would have been $2.4 billion higher last year, according to a recent study by a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan. As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent. (Apple does not disclose what portion of those payments was in the United States, or what portion is assigned to previous or future years.) NYT
The third method, which this report uses, is what a company reports on its 10-K as “cash taxes paid.” This is how much a company actually paid in taxes in a given year. But that figure includes the company’s taxes paid everywhere, including taxes paid to states, the U.S. federal government, and to other countries. Some of that money could be paid for back taxes and some could eventually be refunded. While imperfect, this is the best estimate of how much a company actually pays in taxes in a given year. Until the government or the Financial Accounting Standards Board requires companies to report more, this is the best figure available. Greenlining
The section of TFA that you quoted shows not the slightest hint of a mention of racism or extremism.
Apparently, back in 2009, he was contracted by the BNP to train their members. That is where the racist/extremist angle comes from. He may not or may not personally be a racist extremist, but he was contracted to advocate and teach extreme and illegal methods of "self-defense" to a bunch of racists who believe that non-whites should be forced from Britain or exterminated. Apparently the BNP training courses didn't actually happen due to adverse publicity, but it does seem odd that, once again, he is intending to tour areas where racial tensions are higher.