Just to point out the real isse is not income it is _wealth_ - that is what matters to the rich, the 0.1% own 40% of the nation's wealth, the top 1% owns 60% and the top 10% owns 80% a true progressive system would be set up so your tax bill is based on your wealth, not income - because one huge reason you pay taxes is so that the goverment will protect your property. Put in other terms, I could be a billionare and have _no_ income, but I would still own a significant chunk of the nation's economy.
Where do you get that we have more processing power with an add in than a mammalian brain the number I get is that the human brain is estimated at 100 million MIPS for a 1500 cc brain running at something like 100W - however you slice it (MIPS/cc or MIPS/W) I don't see how a $50 card gets anywhere near the performance of a 1.5 cc mammalian brain estimated at 100000 MIPS
These dangerous fantasies people have about stopping multiple home invaders with their glock or fighing off a government takeover are insane - what is wrong with these people and their delusions? - rarely is any home invason stopped by a firearm, you would think you would read about this in the local paper once in a while - and as for the government takeover, the last thing I would want if I was an insurgent is a firearm, I am a physicist, I could cause more mayhem by going shopping for the right stuff at home depot than I every could with an AK47, having an assault weapon would just out me as an insurgent
Actually this kind of atttitude discourages innovation - think of it, you have an idea which might be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to your employer yet they pay you 100K/year - should you dislose it and get your $400 dollar filing bonus while some fuck in the executive suite congratualates himself for hiring you and collects a bonus - besides I know this is hard to understand in the US but we are not owned by our employers, if you want the benefits of innovative ideas you have to give the people who innovate a cut of the action, if you don't do that you might as well just admit that we have indentured servitude in this country.
Actually all money is debt issued by the federal government, so all money is created by the goverment period. In fact you can think of taxes as a big money incinerator every year and the goverment just creates money to pay for what it wants to do every year - the debt/deficit is just the difference between the incinerated money and the money created out of thin air. To talk of "publicly funded with private funds" is the biggest piece of horseshit I have read in a long time, it assumes money comes from businesses or "wealth creators" (how Bill Gates can "create" money is a mystery to me, he has to get it from someone else) or some other bullshit - currency is created by the goverment, it _is_ debt, and the goverment can create it at will and decide to pay people to do whatever the goverment decides needs to be done. The reality is money is just a way of keeping score, what is real is what people _do_, if a guy in a goverment lab invents the transistor or a guy in bell labs makes a transistor it does not matter, what matters is we now know how to make a transistor - the fact is the goverment has used some of its money to invest in long term research, which has helped the econmony, businesses who always have to worry about revenue and costs generally do not invest in long term research, the gov't can because it doen't have to worry about getting the money back, all it really has to worry about is the amount of money in circulation.
Hey don't forget the socialist backwards mess of a country called Germany, with their health care, strong unions, social saftey net and state directed industrial policy - they are so backwards they can't make anything for themselves, and they are bankrupt! oh wait....
What we are seeing in silicon valley is that it has become a mature industry under capitalism, while regulated capitalism can do well for incubating new industries developed out of a pre-existing scientific base (usually funded by the goverment), once the products have matured most companies under capitalism focus on "securing the revenue stream" - not innovation or other activities which promote societal wealth - these activities involve locking others out and basically finding ways through marketing, branding and using their quasi-monoploy like status fasciliated by economies of scale - like driving down the cost of labor and shaking down suppliers. These activities of a mature industry under captialism while increasing individual wealth for the owners, perversely limit or decrease the wealth of society by driving down wages and dsicouraging innovation. Most countries recognise this at some lever through anti-trust laws, but the US doesn't really enforce them any more and in my opinion much more should be done to discourage predatory behavior, such as aboloshing or severely reworking patent law and taxing the shit out of genuinely unprodcutive activites like marketing and much of finance.
Yeah - the market will sort it out! Sure some people will die of rat poison but then everyone will know Nutritious food is rat poison! Of course then I could relabel the rat poison bacon bits... As some point we could get people to eat rat poison labelled "rat poison" because nobody will really know what the fuck is in the can!
I think another point in its favor is we have so much infrastructure built around the internal combustion engine that is nice that we can create fuel for these things with energy and air - no doubt such fuel will be expensive but at least it is another source
I agree these guys can just go and they can take their fucking money with them - but they can't unless they want to liquidate all their productive assets in the US which would cause the price of those assets to drop which would not neccesarily be a bad thing - real wealth comes from human knowledge and physical infrastructure, these people own the infrastructure and the _think_ they own the people who know how to do shit, what they would realize when they leave is the US physical infrastructure isn't going anywhere and that the people who know how to do shit are not going with them. Honestly, a lot of these guys are just human parasites who say whatever they think they need to say to get ahead, I see these guys every day where I work - they destroy and dismantle physical and human infrastructure to pay themselves at every opprotunity and nobody misses them when they leave.
Read Ian Bank's Culture novels - the entire society is run by superintelligent machines and everyone can live a life of liesure if they choose - in any event what is the point of improving productivity if you don't get to use some of that extra productivity to do what you want when you want? Right now after 30 years of increasing productivity we got basically zip for it except for an extremely rich ruling class.
I reference Ehrman in relation to the consistency of various biblical documenst over time, which was the topic the post I was replying to was refering to - I was not refering to his opinion about a historical Jesus, in fact I referenced the historical stories floating around the middle east and the fact that there are no Roman records of Jesus as collaborating evidence _along_ with bibilical inconsistency which point to Jesus not being a historical figure.
Actually maybe you should read "Misquoting Jesus" by B. Ehrman - it is written by a blblical scholar, actually the farther back in time you go the _less_ consistent the texts of the new testament are - the exact opposite of what you would expect if they all derived from a common source - this coupled with the fact that stories similar to story of Jesus (except with Egyptian or other mediteranean gods as heros) had been floating around for years before the supposed birth of Christ and finally the lack of any historical Roman records of Christ's existence make even the statment that "Christ was a historical figure" that I hear from even many atheists and agnostic completely untenable - there is no evidence for a historical Christ
You make a good point (even though I am not so sure about how great things were in the 1700s) - our society favors capital over labor, in othe words people who do the work don't get rewarded nearly as much as people who own the the stuff - if you have a lot of money it is far easier to just hire people to work and think for you and the system is set up so you, with the money, but do nothing are far more rewarded than the people who work - so for example I work at an R&D center, in order for me to collect a paycheck I have to sign a document saying essentially everything I think of belongs to the corporation, when I file a patent I get $400, the patent could be worth hundreds of millions - and shitheads who say "oh go work somewhere else" don't know shit about capital intensive industries - to design and produce a major piece of equipment may require 10s to 100s of millions of dollars, in addition there is a shitstorm a patents surrounding everything, and major corporations share patents to shut smaller players out, so if you design CT machines good luck starting your own company without state backing - if you watch Breaking Bad, Heisenburg talks about a real scientist at GE who invented man-made diamonds, he made GE a shitload of money, and he got a $10 savings bond for his trouble.
Most TV is such shit that I would't recommend that anybody watch it - let alone children under 3 - really, we have turned one of the most powerful mediums in the world into a lowest common denomiator cesspool designed to manipulate people into buying shit - just think of all the great stories that have been written, or how well informed people could be about the world and yet we get "survivor" & Snooki or our pathetic he said she said sensationalistic news coverage - our problems are so fucking huge and the bullshit has been layered so high that I really don't see how we can recover.
That is an interesting point, I have no idea why we celebrate profit, profit indicates market inefficiency -- of course most businesses love profit, which means, perversely you have try to do everything possible to prevent others from competing with you
You realize all those examples are of people who actually _work_ and by that I mean earn most of thier money by performing some sort of labor - I would sure as hell favor tax policies that favored _work_ over just collecting rents on capital which is what we have now in our country - a guy like Mitt Romney does not work, he pays people to work for him and get huge tax breaks for doing so - fuck him - at least a football player _does_ something for his fucking money instead of paying someone else to play football for him and then collecting a check from his employee's labor - when tax labor and not capital the society devolves into feudalism.
Austerity in times of high unemployment and low interest rates is pointless and self defeating - unemployment means you have unused human capital, which could be used to make capital improvement and inprove the nations assets, not to use it is to throw that away and that is not even considering the human cost - second when interst rates are rock bottom, it means it is a good time to borrow, the US treasury can now borrow at 1% so if the US borrowed $1Trillion you would only pay $10Billion in interest/year, it is called buy low sell high - Finally in a macoeconomic sense, which is the level at which the US government operates since it can print money and consumes a good fraction of the nations GDP, you _cannot_ "borrow frrom the future" this is the stupidist statement have ever heard, who the fuck has a time machine? One person's borrowing is another person's savings - that is an identity, when the US government goes into debt, the private sector balance sheet improves (it is called deleveraging), if the private sector whiches to reduce its debt the money has to go somewhere, where it goes is US treasuries, which is US gov't debt - finally most of the US debt is not owned by foriegn counties, it is owned by US citizens.
I believe the numbers I quoted were harmonized there are several lines on the table in the link and some refer to the issue you pointed out - but the only footnote to the numbers I used was " Assumes 55% city and 45% highway-miles. The source calculated average miles per gallon for light-duty vehicles by taking the reciprocal of the sales-weighted average of gallons per mile. This is called the harmonic average." but it was the new vechile efficiency I used not the fleet average, the fleet average has the caveat you mentioned
Not to be a troll but improvements in gas mileage are, in effect, reductions in CO2 emissions - average gas mileage for passenger cars has gone from 24.3mpg in 1980 to 33.9 in 2011 that is 40% less carbon to go the same distance (http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_04_23.html)
I seem to remember "We the people" somewhere in the constitution, I agree "We the people" may be clueless fuck-ups, but the idea is that the people of the United States control the government and not some bunch of feudal lords, robber barons, plutocrats, or business executives - and the people can do whatever the fuck they want to regulate said feudal lords in order to avoid the most outragous consequences of their actitions - if I recall correctly the Bill of Rights does not say a business exectutive has the right to defraud and scam people or run a pyramid scheme - their rights end where other people's right begin, some radicals might even say their is a right for a person to invest some money in a bank and not have it taken away because the CEO wants a new mistress.
+1 mod parent up - I believe people have suggested futures markets be restricted to producers and consumers, banks, hedge funds, and other speculators would be shut out - when you allow speculators in you can get crazy short-term price fluctuations because people are just following trends and have no intent of using the product they are speculating on.
Why do all these so-called capitalists suddenly forget the laws of supply and demand when it comes to workers - if you _pay_ them more the supply will increase - remember the nursing shortage? the problem was none of the hopsitals wanted to pay the nurses what the market called for - these assholes just want an oversuplly of cheap, skilled labor - I hate these fuckers.
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Just to point out the real isse is not income it is _wealth_ - that is what matters to the rich, the 0.1% own 40% of the nation's wealth, the top 1% owns 60% and the top 10% owns 80% a true progressive system would be set up so your tax bill is based on your wealth, not income - because one huge reason you pay taxes is so that the goverment will protect your property. Put in other terms, I could be a billionare and have _no_ income, but I would still own a significant chunk of the nation's economy.
Where do you get that we have more processing power with an add in than a mammalian brain the number I get is that the human brain is estimated at 100 million MIPS for a 1500 cc brain running at something like 100W - however you slice it (MIPS/cc or MIPS/W) I don't see how a $50 card gets anywhere near the performance of a 1.5 cc mammalian brain estimated at 100000 MIPS
These dangerous fantasies people have about stopping multiple home invaders with their glock or fighing off a government takeover are insane - what is wrong with these people and their delusions? - rarely is any home invason stopped by a firearm, you would think you would read about this in the local paper once in a while - and as for the government takeover, the last thing I would want if I was an insurgent is a firearm, I am a physicist, I could cause more mayhem by going shopping for the right stuff at home depot than I every could with an AK47, having an assault weapon would just out me as an insurgent
Actually this kind of atttitude discourages innovation - think of it, you have an idea which might be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to your employer yet they pay you 100K/year - should you dislose it and get your $400 dollar filing bonus while some fuck in the executive suite congratualates himself for hiring you and collects a bonus - besides I know this is hard to understand in the US but we are not owned by our employers, if you want the benefits of innovative ideas you have to give the people who innovate a cut of the action, if you don't do that you might as well just admit that we have indentured servitude in this country.
mod parent up
Actually all money is debt issued by the federal government, so all money is created by the goverment period. In fact you can think of taxes as a big money incinerator every year and the goverment just creates money to pay for what it wants to do every year - the debt/deficit is just the difference between the incinerated money and the money created out of thin air. To talk of "publicly funded with private funds" is the biggest piece of horseshit I have read in a long time, it assumes money comes from businesses or "wealth creators" (how Bill Gates can "create" money is a mystery to me, he has to get it from someone else) or some other bullshit - currency is created by the goverment, it _is_ debt, and the goverment can create it at will and decide to pay people to do whatever the goverment decides needs to be done. The reality is money is just a way of keeping score, what is real is what people _do_, if a guy in a goverment lab invents the transistor or a guy in bell labs makes a transistor it does not matter, what matters is we now know how to make a transistor - the fact is the goverment has used some of its money to invest in long term research, which has helped the econmony, businesses who always have to worry about revenue and costs generally do not invest in long term research, the gov't can because it doen't have to worry about getting the money back, all it really has to worry about is the amount of money in circulation.
Hey don't forget the socialist backwards mess of a country called Germany, with their health care, strong unions, social saftey net and state directed industrial policy - they are so backwards they can't make anything for themselves, and they are bankrupt! oh wait....
What we are seeing in silicon valley is that it has become a mature industry under capitalism, while regulated capitalism can do well for incubating new industries developed out of a pre-existing scientific base (usually funded by the goverment), once the products have matured most companies under capitalism focus on "securing the revenue stream" - not innovation or other activities which promote societal wealth - these activities involve locking others out and basically finding ways through marketing, branding and using their quasi-monoploy like status fasciliated by economies of scale - like driving down the cost of labor and shaking down suppliers. These activities of a mature industry under captialism while increasing individual wealth for the owners, perversely limit or decrease the wealth of society by driving down wages and dsicouraging innovation. Most countries recognise this at some lever through anti-trust laws, but the US doesn't really enforce them any more and in my opinion much more should be done to discourage predatory behavior, such as aboloshing or severely reworking patent law and taxing the shit out of genuinely unprodcutive activites like marketing and much of finance.
Yeah - the market will sort it out! Sure some people will die of rat poison but then everyone will know Nutritious food is rat poison! Of course then I could relabel the rat poison bacon bits... As some point we could get people to eat rat poison labelled "rat poison" because nobody will really know what the fuck is in the can!
I think another point in its favor is we have so much infrastructure built around the internal combustion engine that is nice that we can create fuel for these things with energy and air - no doubt such fuel will be expensive but at least it is another source
How about Meth?
I agree these guys can just go and they can take their fucking money with them - but they can't unless they want to liquidate all their productive assets in the US which would cause the price of those assets to drop which would not neccesarily be a bad thing - real wealth comes from human knowledge and physical infrastructure, these people own the infrastructure and the _think_ they own the people who know how to do shit, what they would realize when they leave is the US physical infrastructure isn't going anywhere and that the people who know how to do shit are not going with them. Honestly, a lot of these guys are just human parasites who say whatever they think they need to say to get ahead, I see these guys every day where I work - they destroy and dismantle physical and human infrastructure to pay themselves at every opprotunity and nobody misses them when they leave.
Read Ian Bank's Culture novels - the entire society is run by superintelligent machines and everyone can live a life of liesure if they choose - in any event what is the point of improving productivity if you don't get to use some of that extra productivity to do what you want when you want? Right now after 30 years of increasing productivity we got basically zip for it except for an extremely rich ruling class.
I reference Ehrman in relation to the consistency of various biblical documenst over time, which was the topic the post I was replying to was refering to - I was not refering to his opinion about a historical Jesus, in fact I referenced the historical stories floating around the middle east and the fact that there are no Roman records of Jesus as collaborating evidence _along_ with bibilical inconsistency which point to Jesus not being a historical figure.
Actually maybe you should read "Misquoting Jesus" by B. Ehrman - it is written by a blblical scholar, actually the farther back in time you go the _less_ consistent the texts of the new testament are - the exact opposite of what you would expect if they all derived from a common source - this coupled with the fact that stories similar to story of Jesus (except with Egyptian or other mediteranean gods as heros) had been floating around for years before the supposed birth of Christ and finally the lack of any historical Roman records of Christ's existence make even the statment that "Christ was a historical figure" that I hear from even many atheists and agnostic completely untenable - there is no evidence for a historical Christ
You make a good point (even though I am not so sure about how great things were in the 1700s) - our society favors capital over labor, in othe words people who do the work don't get rewarded nearly as much as people who own the the stuff - if you have a lot of money it is far easier to just hire people to work and think for you and the system is set up so you, with the money, but do nothing are far more rewarded than the people who work - so for example I work at an R&D center, in order for me to collect a paycheck I have to sign a document saying essentially everything I think of belongs to the corporation, when I file a patent I get $400, the patent could be worth hundreds of millions - and shitheads who say "oh go work somewhere else" don't know shit about capital intensive industries - to design and produce a major piece of equipment may require 10s to 100s of millions of dollars, in addition there is a shitstorm a patents surrounding everything, and major corporations share patents to shut smaller players out, so if you design CT machines good luck starting your own company without state backing - if you watch Breaking Bad, Heisenburg talks about a real scientist at GE who invented man-made diamonds, he made GE a shitload of money, and he got a $10 savings bond for his trouble.
Most TV is such shit that I would't recommend that anybody watch it - let alone children under 3 - really, we have turned one of the most powerful mediums in the world into a lowest common denomiator cesspool designed to manipulate people into buying shit - just think of all the great stories that have been written, or how well informed people could be about the world and yet we get "survivor" & Snooki or our pathetic he said she said sensationalistic news coverage - our problems are so fucking huge and the bullshit has been layered so high that I really don't see how we can recover.
That is an interesting point, I have no idea why we celebrate profit, profit indicates market inefficiency -- of course most businesses love profit, which means, perversely you have try to do everything possible to prevent others from competing with you
You realize all those examples are of people who actually _work_ and by that I mean earn most of thier money by performing some sort of labor - I would sure as hell favor tax policies that favored _work_ over just collecting rents on capital which is what we have now in our country - a guy like Mitt Romney does not work, he pays people to work for him and get huge tax breaks for doing so - fuck him - at least a football player _does_ something for his fucking money instead of paying someone else to play football for him and then collecting a check from his employee's labor - when tax labor and not capital the society devolves into feudalism.
Austerity in times of high unemployment and low interest rates is pointless and self defeating - unemployment means you have unused human capital, which could be used to make capital improvement and inprove the nations assets, not to use it is to throw that away and that is not even considering the human cost - second when interst rates are rock bottom, it means it is a good time to borrow, the US treasury can now borrow at 1% so if the US borrowed $1Trillion you would only pay $10Billion in interest/year, it is called buy low sell high - Finally in a macoeconomic sense, which is the level at which the US government operates since it can print money and consumes a good fraction of the nations GDP, you _cannot_ "borrow frrom the future" this is the stupidist statement have ever heard, who the fuck has a time machine? One person's borrowing is another person's savings - that is an identity, when the US government goes into debt, the private sector balance sheet improves (it is called deleveraging), if the private sector whiches to reduce its debt the money has to go somewhere, where it goes is US treasuries, which is US gov't debt - finally most of the US debt is not owned by foriegn counties, it is owned by US citizens.
I believe the numbers I quoted were harmonized there are several lines on the table in the link and some refer to the issue you pointed out - but the only footnote to the numbers I used was " Assumes 55% city and 45% highway-miles. The source calculated average miles per gallon for light-duty vehicles by taking the reciprocal of the sales-weighted average of gallons per mile. This is called the harmonic average." but it was the new vechile efficiency I used not the fleet average, the fleet average has the caveat you mentioned
Not to be a troll but improvements in gas mileage are, in effect, reductions in CO2 emissions - average gas mileage for passenger cars has gone from 24.3mpg in 1980 to 33.9 in 2011 that is 40% less carbon to go the same distance (http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_04_23.html)
I seem to remember "We the people" somewhere in the constitution, I agree "We the people" may be clueless fuck-ups, but the idea is that the people of the United States control the government and not some bunch of feudal lords, robber barons, plutocrats, or business executives - and the people can do whatever the fuck they want to regulate said feudal lords in order to avoid the most outragous consequences of their actitions - if I recall correctly the Bill of Rights does not say a business exectutive has the right to defraud and scam people or run a pyramid scheme - their rights end where other people's right begin, some radicals might even say their is a right for a person to invest some money in a bank and not have it taken away because the CEO wants a new mistress.
+1 mod parent up - I believe people have suggested futures markets be restricted to producers and consumers, banks, hedge funds, and other speculators would be shut out - when you allow speculators in you can get crazy short-term price fluctuations because people are just following trends and have no intent of using the product they are speculating on.
Why do all these so-called capitalists suddenly forget the laws of supply and demand when it comes to workers - if you _pay_ them more the supply will increase - remember the nursing shortage? the problem was none of the hopsitals wanted to pay the nurses what the market called for - these assholes just want an oversuplly of cheap, skilled labor - I hate these fuckers.