What nonsense. Hopefully it should be obvious to anyone how switching to a form of electricity which is commonly smoothed and supplemented by X is very different from switching to X. Wind and solar are not natural gas any more than a modern F1 car is electric.
Also 30% is a hilarious underestimate of NG turbine efficiency. Modern passenger car ICEs are more efficient than that. Whose ass did you get these figures out of?
If by "always" you mean "mostly since the '80s and especially since the turn of the century" and by "normal" you mean "an uncommon phenomenon occurring mostly within a handful of specific megacorporations." The numbers and history don't lie:
You seem to think the stock market is important to the average Joe's finanical wellbeing, when it's actually one of the main engines of worsening inequality. In the US, the top 10% of households own 84% of the stocks:
It's also disingenuous to call Trump's massive transfer of wealth to the 1% with a little fiddling for mere mortals a tax break for middle and low earners. A lot of Americans are getting a nasty and expensive surprise thanks to Trump:
I was also reminded of the furor over GE's year of paying no taxes. That was seen as being remarkably bad back then, and now it's set to be the new normal. Congrats.
iOS turns a general-purpose computer into a walled-garden media consumption device, and as for Android, between the OS itself and the applications, the keyboard support is crap. And even Android isn't terribly useful until you root it.
CEOs in particular may only pay a few billion (5.2 for the Fortune 500) but looking at CEO pay in particular is too small a piece of the puzzle. There's the whole CxO suite and upper management at larger companies makes silly money too. Pro athletes and celebrities all make ridicululous amounts. The top 1%, which even includes engineers and lawyers in more expensive areas, makes around 1/5th of the income, that's very important in the scheme of things. Letting a few people hide their money away could cost huge chunks of tax revenue that a much larger number of people with much less money to spare would eventually have to make up for.
That would seriously leave few current CEOs in office. Think about how many are considered "eccentric," and that "eccentric" just means "crazy but wealthy." And then consider that most of the apparently level-headed ones are also psychopaths. If CEOs were hired on merit they would indeed be required to undergo mental health evaluations to get that position.
The goal should be to not only fund the government but to keep money from being siphoned out of the economy to various economic oubliettes, otherwise you'll be overtaxing the economy and setting the stage for a future government funding problem. Which is why it's important to make sure CEOs aren't doing that/are being heavily taxed.
It shouldn't be as tempting when you're a highly paid corporate lawyer, wealthy enough to play with 8 digits' worth of stocks...but that's the difference between regular greed and insane greed I guess.
Just look at the numbers. Fixed amount - % of earnings = higher effective tax rate the more you make (and negative taxation if you make sufficiently little). It's the same amount as saying the flat rate only applies above a certain income, plus giving money to the poor, but it's much simpler.
Well that's a decent argument for calling it progressive but I'm not sure how many people it would convince. The effect is progressive at mere mortals' incomes, but the numbers are still flat, and the progressiveness would quickly become a rounding error on the silly side of the income scale. The biggest flaw in this system is that it would put the richest people in the lowest tax bracket - the only tax bracket, but still the lowest. With a tax system like that, what rich guy needs loopholes?
Plus, there's no good reason for the government to know how much any citizen gets paid. A payroll tax takes care of taxing all income, without any individual paperwork at all - the average guy never interacts with tax collection.
In terms of pay privacy I think it's better to go in the other direction and make all incomes public, as Finland has done. Allowing the government to know people's pay is very useful for law enforcement and is a minimal invasion of privacy IMO. That information's already floating around in every bank, credit card company, and social media company in existence anyway. No point keeping it from just the government.
Very simple, very hard to cheat, 0 exceptions for the rich to take advantage of (so it will never happen). You can even pretend it's UBI to keep the UBI fans happy (though the yearly fixed amount might not be so high).
Not necessarily harder to cheat, just different. You might see compensation shift to the form of perks or services (like corporate jet/helicopter use, as Elon Musk and IBM's CEO have been caught doing). It might also push people from tax "avoidance" to more clear-cut evasion activity using foreign subsidiaries, which is more risky but would be much harder to catch if the government doesn't know anyone's income. It's already common to shift property off the books and tax free by assigning it to a shell company and then signing over that company's ownership.
"Fair" is not the word you want. Any rules, no matter how arbitrary or evil, that apply equally to all people without bias are "fair". It's better to be just than to be fair. It's better to be righteous than to be just. Ancient wisdom.
Good point, I can agree with this.
And of course in the very post you responded to I explained how to make it progressive. But even if it weren't it would still be better than sales taxes.
I agree a mix of income/dividends/gains would be better than sales taxes. Sales taxes are inherently regressive and the worst form of taxation in use today (unless you count illicit 3rd-world bribe-shakedowns).
But if you write *everyone* a check then it's not progressive, it's still flat. If you just write people below a certain income a check, it might just qualify for the most minimal definition of "progressive" but it would be almost flat...I wouldn't be pleased with it.
I thought the same thing. It wouldn't even be good for typical Windows gaming, since the RasPi computers don't have an x86 CPU. Also the cost of this OS is many times the cost of the hardware it's running on.
Spending less than you make is only a viable method to getting rich if you already have a very generous income. The rich spend less than they make because they make so much more than they have any need or want to spend.
Why? We don't tax people on their character or humanity. Neither do we pay them for those things, which is why we have everything from decabillionaire hyper-royalty to actual slaves in the world today. We tax people on things like income, sales, square footage of land, etc, and those are far from equal.
The "Fair Tax" would be a dream for the rich, resulting in massive savings for them. It's basically a flat sales tax on every damn thing. The rich spend far less than they make, and only a fraction of their spending is done in the US.
Meanwhile the lower classes would be devastated by the sales taxes since they spend most or all of what they make on the basic necessities of living and participating in the economy, and almost all of that spending is local. You'd soon see them take on the kind of spending patterns that are common for people in Latin America and the Caribbean, which would be to do as much of their shopping as possible during an annual trip outside of the country and smuggle back a ton of stuff to avoid getting reamed by ruinous sales taxes.
But the companies won't leave California so easily, and if they do, it would be better for the US as a whole to reduce the geographic income concentration of having all the tech megacorps packed into one region.
Bwahaha this guy's an idiot! When you have 6-digit amounts of money, you don't put such a large fraction of it in any one bank, never mind in some sketchy-ass cryptocurrency exchange! His net worth must've been all over the fucking place since it was basically tied to cryptocurrency values! Did he look at his life savings losing and earning (but mostly losing) the value of a high-end sports car every day and think "Yes, this is fine"!?
Oh, and there's the fact moving such quantities of money through such unaccountable mechanisms likely amounts to some kind of white-collar crime - or is at least an indication that he's likely engaged in some. Could be another hilarious self-own in the making!
Yet another one of capitalism's nasty positive feedback loops - left to its own devices, it would prefer to pack us all into stupidly expensive megacities like bees in a hive so that we can work ourselves most of the way to death for the privilege of living near the high-paying jobs that you need so that you can barely pay for that expensive real estate (further enriching the ownership class in the process)...
Profit-seeking capitalists would happily see the world burn and everyone die for the sake of quarterly dividends.
Agreed.
It's one of the many reasons humanity would have been better off under centuries of communism than ever experimenting with capitalism.
I'm not so sure. Purely from a climate perspective, perhaps, since it would've greatly limited the scale of ecologically rapacious behavior, but by any other measure communism could be just as bad or even worse. Communism is no better at long-term or environmentalist thinking - the USSR was the original coal-roller, praising factory pollution as a sign of industrial might. Have you seen the level of inequality *in* North Korea? It's just as horrific as what capitalism has produced, with 0.01%er teenagers regularly buying cups of coffee that cost more than an average worker could make in a month. Most communist economies never produced such incredible levels of inequality but NK has shown that it's possible.
In short, I think the only guaranteed benefit of mankind being communist rather than capitalist would be reducing damage to the Earth...although at the cost of widely increased human suffering. Strictly speaking the choice of economic system isn't the problem so much as a reluctance to direct those economic systems toward pro-average-human long-term goals. Instead communism was allowed to settle into a passive income source for the politburo's cushy lifestyle without much regard for the common worker, and capitalism has been allowed to run free, which is basically as close as you can get to opening a portal to hell.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah it's about that simple. Big holes, with construction equipment. Lined with concrete I guess. Plus a few pipes, turbine and pump in between.
What nonsense. Hopefully it should be obvious to anyone how switching to a form of electricity which is commonly smoothed and supplemented by X is very different from switching to X. Wind and solar are not natural gas any more than a modern F1 car is electric.
Also 30% is a hilarious underestimate of NG turbine efficiency. Modern passenger car ICEs are more efficient than that. Whose ass did you get these figures out of?
Easy solution: You dig two holes, of differing depths. Also safer that way (no chance of a dam burst).
If by "always" you mean "mostly since the '80s and especially since the turn of the century" and by "normal" you mean "an uncommon phenomenon occurring mostly within a handful of specific megacorporations." The numbers and history don't lie:
https://itep.org/the-35-percen...
You seem to think the stock market is important to the average Joe's finanical wellbeing, when it's actually one of the main engines of worsening inequality. In the US, the top 10% of households own 84% of the stocks:
https://awealthofcommonsense.c...
It's also disingenuous to call Trump's massive transfer of wealth to the 1% with a little fiddling for mere mortals a tax break for middle and low earners. A lot of Americans are getting a nasty and expensive surprise thanks to Trump:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...
I was also reminded of the furor over GE's year of paying no taxes. That was seen as being remarkably bad back then, and now it's set to be the new normal. Congrats.
iOS turns a general-purpose computer into a walled-garden media consumption device, and as for Android, between the OS itself and the applications, the keyboard support is crap. And even Android isn't terribly useful until you root it.
That could've been the end of legal unrestricted 3D printing right there!
CEOs in particular may only pay a few billion (5.2 for the Fortune 500) but looking at CEO pay in particular is too small a piece of the puzzle. There's the whole CxO suite and upper management at larger companies makes silly money too. Pro athletes and celebrities all make ridicululous amounts. The top 1%, which even includes engineers and lawyers in more expensive areas, makes around 1/5th of the income, that's very important in the scheme of things. Letting a few people hide their money away could cost huge chunks of tax revenue that a much larger number of people with much less money to spare would eventually have to make up for.
That would seriously leave few current CEOs in office. Think about how many are considered "eccentric," and that "eccentric" just means "crazy but wealthy." And then consider that most of the apparently level-headed ones are also psychopaths. If CEOs were hired on merit they would indeed be required to undergo mental health evaluations to get that position.
The goal should be to not only fund the government but to keep money from being siphoned out of the economy to various economic oubliettes, otherwise you'll be overtaxing the economy and setting the stage for a future government funding problem. Which is why it's important to make sure CEOs aren't doing that/are being heavily taxed.
It shouldn't be as tempting when you're a highly paid corporate lawyer, wealthy enough to play with 8 digits' worth of stocks...but that's the difference between regular greed and insane greed I guess.
Just look at the numbers. Fixed amount - % of earnings = higher effective tax rate the more you make (and negative taxation if you make sufficiently little). It's the same amount as saying the flat rate only applies above a certain income, plus giving money to the poor, but it's much simpler.
Well that's a decent argument for calling it progressive but I'm not sure how many people it would convince. The effect is progressive at mere mortals' incomes, but the numbers are still flat, and the progressiveness would quickly become a rounding error on the silly side of the income scale. The biggest flaw in this system is that it would put the richest people in the lowest tax bracket - the only tax bracket, but still the lowest. With a tax system like that, what rich guy needs loopholes?
Plus, there's no good reason for the government to know how much any citizen gets paid. A payroll tax takes care of taxing all income, without any individual paperwork at all - the average guy never interacts with tax collection.
In terms of pay privacy I think it's better to go in the other direction and make all incomes public, as Finland has done. Allowing the government to know people's pay is very useful for law enforcement and is a minimal invasion of privacy IMO. That information's already floating around in every bank, credit card company, and social media company in existence anyway. No point keeping it from just the government.
Very simple, very hard to cheat, 0 exceptions for the rich to take advantage of (so it will never happen). You can even pretend it's UBI to keep the UBI fans happy (though the yearly fixed amount might not be so high).
Not necessarily harder to cheat, just different. You might see compensation shift to the form of perks or services (like corporate jet/helicopter use, as Elon Musk and IBM's CEO have been caught doing). It might also push people from tax "avoidance" to more clear-cut evasion activity using foreign subsidiaries, which is more risky but would be much harder to catch if the government doesn't know anyone's income. It's already common to shift property off the books and tax free by assigning it to a shell company and then signing over that company's ownership.
"Fair" is not the word you want. Any rules, no matter how arbitrary or evil, that apply equally to all people without bias are "fair". It's better to be just than to be fair. It's better to be righteous than to be just. Ancient wisdom.
Good point, I can agree with this.
And of course in the very post you responded to I explained how to make it progressive. But even if it weren't it would still be better than sales taxes.
I agree a mix of income/dividends/gains would be better than sales taxes. Sales taxes are inherently regressive and the worst form of taxation in use today (unless you count illicit 3rd-world bribe-shakedowns).
But if you write *everyone* a check then it's not progressive, it's still flat. If you just write people below a certain income a check, it might just qualify for the most minimal definition of "progressive" but it would be almost flat...I wouldn't be pleased with it.
I thought the same thing. It wouldn't even be good for typical Windows gaming, since the RasPi computers don't have an x86 CPU. Also the cost of this OS is many times the cost of the hardware it's running on.
I see you're not familiar with modern median incomes. That was the case in the past, but not these days. Employees are being squeezed much tighter.
A tax cannot be both flat and fair IMO - to me, fair is progressive. We may disagree on moral grounds.
Spending less than you make is only a viable method to getting rich if you already have a very generous income. The rich spend less than they make because they make so much more than they have any need or want to spend.
Why? We don't tax people on their character or humanity. Neither do we pay them for those things, which is why we have everything from decabillionaire hyper-royalty to actual slaves in the world today. We tax people on things like income, sales, square footage of land, etc, and those are far from equal.
The "Fair Tax" would be a dream for the rich, resulting in massive savings for them. It's basically a flat sales tax on every damn thing. The rich spend far less than they make, and only a fraction of their spending is done in the US.
Meanwhile the lower classes would be devastated by the sales taxes since they spend most or all of what they make on the basic necessities of living and participating in the economy, and almost all of that spending is local. You'd soon see them take on the kind of spending patterns that are common for people in Latin America and the Caribbean, which would be to do as much of their shopping as possible during an annual trip outside of the country and smuggle back a ton of stuff to avoid getting reamed by ruinous sales taxes.
But the companies won't leave California so easily, and if they do, it would be better for the US as a whole to reduce the geographic income concentration of having all the tech megacorps packed into one region.
Bwahaha this guy's an idiot! When you have 6-digit amounts of money, you don't put such a large fraction of it in any one bank, never mind in some sketchy-ass cryptocurrency exchange! His net worth must've been all over the fucking place since it was basically tied to cryptocurrency values! Did he look at his life savings losing and earning (but mostly losing) the value of a high-end sports car every day and think "Yes, this is fine"!?
Oh, and there's the fact moving such quantities of money through such unaccountable mechanisms likely amounts to some kind of white-collar crime - or is at least an indication that he's likely engaged in some. Could be another hilarious self-own in the making!
I think the various Internet killswitches are being made primarily in case of a Black Mirror S01E01 scenario...
Just a perfectly innocent ongoing stream of repeated DNS lookups. No collusion!
https://www.newyorker.com/maga...
Yet another one of capitalism's nasty positive feedback loops - left to its own devices, it would prefer to pack us all into stupidly expensive megacities like bees in a hive so that we can work ourselves most of the way to death for the privilege of living near the high-paying jobs that you need so that you can barely pay for that expensive real estate (further enriching the ownership class in the process)...
Profit-seeking capitalists would happily see the world burn and everyone die for the sake of quarterly dividends.
Agreed.
It's one of the many reasons humanity would have been better off under centuries of communism than ever experimenting with capitalism.
I'm not so sure. Purely from a climate perspective, perhaps, since it would've greatly limited the scale of ecologically rapacious behavior, but by any other measure communism could be just as bad or even worse. Communism is no better at long-term or environmentalist thinking - the USSR was the original coal-roller, praising factory pollution as a sign of industrial might. Have you seen the level of inequality *in* North Korea? It's just as horrific as what capitalism has produced, with 0.01%er teenagers regularly buying cups of coffee that cost more than an average worker could make in a month. Most communist economies never produced such incredible levels of inequality but NK has shown that it's possible.
In short, I think the only guaranteed benefit of mankind being communist rather than capitalist would be reducing damage to the Earth...although at the cost of widely increased human suffering. Strictly speaking the choice of economic system isn't the problem so much as a reluctance to direct those economic systems toward pro-average-human long-term goals. Instead communism was allowed to settle into a passive income source for the politburo's cushy lifestyle without much regard for the common worker, and capitalism has been allowed to run free, which is basically as close as you can get to opening a portal to hell.