Shouldn't a rise in taxes shift the supply curve slightly as fewer investors are willing to invest in the field for the lower ROI, thus raising prices?
Although granted, there are plenty of markets where the effect will not be particularly significant [e.g. because perhaps all of the investors are willing to accept a marginally reduced ROI given the transaction costs of investing in a new industry if the companies are not publicly traded].
Progressive income tax doesn't change the equation. That's because the question is whether to give you a check for $1 or a tax cut of $1. Either one costs the government exactly the same amount of money: $1.
Progressive income comes into it only on the other end: where does that $1 come from? It comes from a somewhat progressive income tax and a few assorted other taxes. That is a very important choice, but it does not change how much the $1 costs, which is why $1 in a check vs. a tax cut is a semantic distinction.
That semantic distinction is largely used to hoodwink most of America. Government spending is politically much easier to do in tax policy than it is to do in spending. A tax break is a much easier sell than a government subsidy of private industry.
Now you would be right, and there would be a difference, if the government were deciding between giving you a check for $1 and a tax cut for a progressively-determined amount, i.e. if it we were talking about $1 and another number.
But the only time we really do that is in tax deductions for individuals, [rather than tax credits], which are actually *anti*-progressive: if I am taxed at a higher rate than you, a $1 deduction for me is worth more than a $1 deduction for you, because I save my higher amount. That does not apply to corporations because their tax burden is constant for corporations of any notable size.
Note that there is also a MAJOR tax subsidy we give to google that we make available to all corporations: depreciation. We generally allow depreciation for tax purposes to exceed market and economic depreciation, so Google will get a nice bonus from that (the value of their new plant plus the value of tax benefits they receive will exceed the actual economic value of their new plant).
> The pains that people will take to bash Google have really risen to remarkable heights.
Not at all. Even in the extreme case of an entirely taxpayer-subsidized construction, there would be nothing wrong with Google deciding to build the facility: the choice would be consistent both with Google's obligations to its shareholders and with the more modern view that its obligations are to a broader constituency.
I suspect we are paying for a portion of the site, but do not know how much. That is an expense chosen by our elected representatives, theoretically as a combination of a normative choice and an economic belief that positive externalities of the incentivized activity [i.e., building the plant] are beneficial enough to society that subsidy by the taxpayer is appropriate.
Google is building it, but they are almost certainly not just investing in it--they are investing also in the tax breaks. (One could also argue the tax breaks alter the return on investment, but it is a semantic distinction from their point of view.) The tax breaks cost taxpayers money, so we are also investing in it.
Nothing in that bashes Google. If anything, Google by building the facility does what it's supposed to be doing. If the judgment about externalities is grossly wrong (notably if politics caused a massive evaluative failure during legislation), Congress may be at fault, but that wouldn't mean Google is.
> There should be more than enough energy in the Sun to power their servers.
Can we just go ahead and say there is more than enough energy in the Sun to power their servers? I know all the epistemological concerns about truthiness, but I don't think most of them really apply here...
Also, does anyone know whether Google is investing or we are? How much of a tax benefit do they get from this?
> In the real world, cheating would be called "collaboration".
Or unfair restraint of trade in violation of state law. Or antitrust violation. Or corporate espionage. Or theft of intellectual property. We have rules for how the "real world" is supposed to work, too.
> You deal with the words of really intelligent people, how they formulate their thoughts and how they use their language to express their thoughts. Really good stuff.
Well, yes and no. They tend to be reasonably intelligent, but they are often selected for their political or military role. (Caesar or Cicero, for example.)
That's not a rebuttal--knowledge of things developed since 1869 doesn't show anything about the level of education of an individual, it only tells you that individuals are working from a different set of knowledge. Being able to give a brief definition of Turing completeness is both less knowledge and less useful to a modern student than latin and greek taught to a rigorous high school standard as it used to be taught. Latin in particular gives you a better understanding of word roots, as well as a better ability to pick up or read romance languages. It's a hell of a lot easier to teach turing completeness than it is to teach latin.
Especially the Greek. I've never even heard of Greek being taught in high school, outside of a few really expensive places. Maybe a few magnet schools.
> The only time you really need a Navy is if you want, not to defend yourself, but to sail around the world attacking or threatening to attack other people in their own homes.
They can also be useful for defending or threatening to defend other people or supply lines. Keeping oil flowing into our economy, for example. Keeping industrial output flowing.
Power is most effective when one does not have to use it. A US carrier group is a massive military threat to almost any country in the world. It is more useful as a deterrent than as an offensive weapon. Moving a carrier group is sometimes as much a political as a military exercise.
A navy is also useful (though financially inefficient if that were their only mission) for giving humanitarian aid. We have a lot of hospital beds on those ships, and in the wake of natural disasters they can be quite helpful.
Finally, they are useful for projecting large amounts of power far from your own shores--when you are surrounded by thousands of miles of ocean that someone must cross to get to you, that is useful even defensively.
> No. One has a place in science classes, and one has a place in the garbage bin of history.
Call it a class in life, then, not in science. Criticize science on religious grounds and religion on scientific grounds. In real life people consider issues that involve both science and religion, including where they conflict. Our schools, of all places, should be flashpoints for those debates--let people learn and argue about what is right and why. The whole justification of the First Amendment free speech doctrine is that good speech is the appropriate response to bad speech--that open debate is good. A teacher should foster that.
The biggest problem isn't teachers thinking creationism is right. It's teachers being too closed-minded to listen to or discuss an opposing view--even if the view is wrong. Why do the republicans believe this? Why do the democrats believe they're wrong? And vice versa? That's a conversation you should be able to have with your students.
My impression is that in the US, the correlations are mostly there because of political parties. There's no logical reason most of them should be there. There are also some correlations due to education and its ties to liberalism and cute fuzzy animals on the one hand, and correlations between business success and lack-of-english-majory-thoughts (The why vs. the how) or cute-fuzzy-animals on the other.
> A species that was "very useful" to man would have been domesticated. Kinda like sheep, cattle, dogs, cats, and horses.
Or extremophile bacteria useful in terraforming planets or breaking down oil? We haven't even encountered all problems yet, much less studied every organism in such detail as to know whether it would be useful in solving a problem in its unmodified state, much less done so with the technology that will exist ten years from now. That's A LOT of stuff.
Maybe it's more efficient to allocate resources to studying those things than it is to preserving the species, but we put only a few resources into preserving species and many into studying those things, so maybe we haven't reached the tradeoff point yet.
Perhaps, but some of us think morality should influence policy decisions, our decisions, or the decisions of institutions that study endangered animals.
Nobody I've ever met--and nobody I would ever trust--advocates for absolute amorality. Open-mindedness, yes. Largely scientific decision-making processes, sure. But at the end of the day, one should not discount the morality of acts simply because they don't contribute to your own survival. If someone rapes a friend of mine, or even a total stranger, I don't think that's okay just because it doesn't influence my day. Even if their rationalization was "I need to make sure my evolutionary branch of humanity continues and I can't get a date, ergo this is justified by survival and rules against it are just morality."
I do agree with a slight modification of your statement--that the most important question in the endangered species question from a resource allocation perspective is how important the creature is to the ecosystem on which humanity depends. But I don't think morality should not be a factor in policy choices. For example, even on slashdot, where rationality and science are on occasion revered, people seem to care at least a little about whether mankind is responsible for the potential demise of a creature in determining whether we have an obligation to save it.
> a reputation of being pretty biased in favor of patents
Example? I mean, they are biased in favor of patents because that is what the law is--patents are entitled to a presumption of validity once they've gone through the whole USPTO approval process--but they also tend not to overturn the PTO when the burden is on a party to prove validity. But do you have statistics or anecdotes showing a general bias toward patents?
Oh, do you mean the tendency to find everything PSM and many things non-obvious? That would be fair. The lines are hard to draw, but it would be fair. (And SCOTUS is poking its nose in when it gets too bad.)
> And I suspect that this judge is an informed expert in the field of patent law.
Maybe, maybe not. He's probably heard at least some patent cases, and may or may not have more than a passing familiarity with the field. But he is likely to be good at learning, and his clerk is likely to be good at learning, and he has two people motivated by millions of dollars to make sure he understands everything on their respective sides. Usually something resembling the truth comes out in a well-funded case for that reason. Sometimes not, but that's hard to fix.
Agreed. I've learned that my grade school teacher believed in creationism but taught us evolution because she had to. But generally, they should be able to talk about both without fear of reprisal, so long as they don't denigrate either. They can poke holes in them large enough to drive a T-rex through, but they should do so respectfully. This insane assumption in the entire mainstream debate that kids are too stupid to hear "the religious right believes X and the secular left believes Y" or to watch the news is... insulting to the intelligence of our children.
Because obviously, we're geeks so we're all using 30-year-old ADM3A terminals.
Or they're geeks using char strings in the hope that their compilers/interpreters/databases/servers save resources because of that. Doubtful.
OR they're geeks using a very limited character set for security reasons. More likely. Better to whitelist than blacklist, and their whitelist is small.
On the other hand, isn't having to switch to chrome to make it reliable kinda... not-very-open-sourcey? (If you'll pardon the lack of English construction in that psuedosentence, and in this fragment.)
Twenty-seven point six billion Calories (kcal). Enough to feed 13.9 million people for a day, if that is all they ate--or 38,000 people for a year. (Assuming a 2,000 Calorie diet.)
They considered that, but circumstantial evidence pointed to sexual transmission. According to TFA, the virus has to complete a 2-week life cycle within the insect before it can infect the next human; Foy's wife fell ill just 9 days after his return. Thus she did not get it from an insect bite. In addition, the mosquitoes in that region are not known carriers. (Different species.)
Does the regulation allow shaping for largely content-neutral reasons? I favor a little shaping to keep non-netflix flowing--Wikipedia and plain text should always work.
Slashdot Mirror
> The software to show the map is not FOSS and also not available for Linux.
It's his fifty-five million! He can do what he wants with it!
Shouldn't a rise in taxes shift the supply curve slightly as fewer investors are willing to invest in the field for the lower ROI, thus raising prices?
Although granted, there are plenty of markets where the effect will not be particularly significant [e.g. because perhaps all of the investors are willing to accept a marginally reduced ROI given the transaction costs of investing in a new industry if the companies are not publicly traded].
Progressive income tax doesn't change the equation. That's because the question is whether to give you a check for $1 or a tax cut of $1. Either one costs the government exactly the same amount of money: $1.
Progressive income comes into it only on the other end: where does that $1 come from? It comes from a somewhat progressive income tax and a few assorted other taxes. That is a very important choice, but it does not change how much the $1 costs, which is why $1 in a check vs. a tax cut is a semantic distinction.
That semantic distinction is largely used to hoodwink most of America. Government spending is politically much easier to do in tax policy than it is to do in spending. A tax break is a much easier sell than a government subsidy of private industry.
Now you would be right, and there would be a difference, if the government were deciding between giving you a check for $1 and a tax cut for a progressively-determined amount, i.e. if it we were talking about $1 and another number.
But the only time we really do that is in tax deductions for individuals, [rather than tax credits], which are actually *anti*-progressive: if I am taxed at a higher rate than you, a $1 deduction for me is worth more than a $1 deduction for you, because I save my higher amount. That does not apply to corporations because their tax burden is constant for corporations of any notable size.
Note that there is also a MAJOR tax subsidy we give to google that we make available to all corporations: depreciation. We generally allow depreciation for tax purposes to exceed market and economic depreciation, so Google will get a nice bonus from that (the value of their new plant plus the value of tax benefits they receive will exceed the actual economic value of their new plant).
> The pains that people will take to bash Google have really risen to remarkable heights.
Not at all. Even in the extreme case of an entirely taxpayer-subsidized construction, there would be nothing wrong with Google deciding to build the facility: the choice would be consistent both with Google's obligations to its shareholders and with the more modern view that its obligations are to a broader constituency.
I suspect we are paying for a portion of the site, but do not know how much. That is an expense chosen by our elected representatives, theoretically as a combination of a normative choice and an economic belief that positive externalities of the incentivized activity [i.e., building the plant] are beneficial enough to society that subsidy by the taxpayer is appropriate.
Google is building it, but they are almost certainly not just investing in it--they are investing also in the tax breaks. (One could also argue the tax breaks alter the return on investment, but it is a semantic distinction from their point of view.) The tax breaks cost taxpayers money, so we are also investing in it.
Nothing in that bashes Google. If anything, Google by building the facility does what it's supposed to be doing. If the judgment about externalities is grossly wrong (notably if politics caused a massive evaluative failure during legislation), Congress may be at fault, but that wouldn't mean Google is.
> There should be more than enough energy in the Sun to power their servers.
Can we just go ahead and say there is more than enough energy in the Sun to power their servers? I know all the epistemological concerns about truthiness, but I don't think most of them really apply here...
Also, does anyone know whether Google is investing or we are? How much of a tax benefit do they get from this?
> In the real world, cheating would be called "collaboration".
Or unfair restraint of trade in violation of state law. Or antitrust violation. Or corporate espionage. Or theft of intellectual property. We have rules for how the "real world" is supposed to work, too.
> You deal with the words of really intelligent people, how they formulate their thoughts and how they use their language to express their thoughts. Really good stuff.
Well, yes and no. They tend to be reasonably intelligent, but they are often selected for their political or military role. (Caesar or Cicero, for example.)
Interesting. I didn't realize they had such a short historical usage period.
I wonder if they were allowed to use slide rules.
Although you don't really need one--it's really only relevant to one or two questions.
That's not a rebuttal--knowledge of things developed since 1869 doesn't show anything about the level of education of an individual, it only tells you that individuals are working from a different set of knowledge. Being able to give a brief definition of Turing completeness is both less knowledge and less useful to a modern student than latin and greek taught to a rigorous high school standard as it used to be taught. Latin in particular gives you a better understanding of word roots, as well as a better ability to pick up or read romance languages. It's a hell of a lot easier to teach turing completeness than it is to teach latin.
Especially the Greek. I've never even heard of Greek being taught in high school, outside of a few really expensive places. Maybe a few magnet schools.
New York lost, before the exchanges were electronic? Good luck cleaning up the economy after that.
> The only time you really need a Navy is if you want, not to defend yourself, but to sail around the world attacking or threatening to attack other people in their own homes.
They can also be useful for defending or threatening to defend other people or supply lines. Keeping oil flowing into our economy, for example. Keeping industrial output flowing.
Power is most effective when one does not have to use it. A US carrier group is a massive military threat to almost any country in the world. It is more useful as a deterrent than as an offensive weapon. Moving a carrier group is sometimes as much a political as a military exercise.
A navy is also useful (though financially inefficient if that were their only mission) for giving humanitarian aid. We have a lot of hospital beds on those ships, and in the wake of natural disasters they can be quite helpful.
Finally, they are useful for projecting large amounts of power far from your own shores--when you are surrounded by thousands of miles of ocean that someone must cross to get to you, that is useful even defensively.
> No. One has a place in science classes, and one has a place in the garbage bin of history.
Call it a class in life, then, not in science. Criticize science on religious grounds and religion on scientific grounds. In real life people consider issues that involve both science and religion, including where they conflict. Our schools, of all places, should be flashpoints for those debates--let people learn and argue about what is right and why. The whole justification of the First Amendment free speech doctrine is that good speech is the appropriate response to bad speech--that open debate is good. A teacher should foster that.
The biggest problem isn't teachers thinking creationism is right. It's teachers being too closed-minded to listen to or discuss an opposing view--even if the view is wrong. Why do the republicans believe this? Why do the democrats believe they're wrong? And vice versa? That's a conversation you should be able to have with your students.
My impression is that in the US, the correlations are mostly there because of political parties. There's no logical reason most of them should be there. There are also some correlations due to education and its ties to liberalism and cute fuzzy animals on the one hand, and correlations between business success and lack-of-english-majory-thoughts (The why vs. the how) or cute-fuzzy-animals on the other.
> A species that was "very useful" to man would have been domesticated. Kinda like sheep, cattle, dogs, cats, and horses.
Or extremophile bacteria useful in terraforming planets or breaking down oil? We haven't even encountered all problems yet, much less studied every organism in such detail as to know whether it would be useful in solving a problem in its unmodified state, much less done so with the technology that will exist ten years from now. That's A LOT of stuff.
Maybe it's more efficient to allocate resources to studying those things than it is to preserving the species, but we put only a few resources into preserving species and many into studying those things, so maybe we haven't reached the tradeoff point yet.
> Everything else is just moral masturbation.
Perhaps, but some of us think morality should influence policy decisions, our decisions, or the decisions of institutions that study endangered animals.
Nobody I've ever met--and nobody I would ever trust--advocates for absolute amorality. Open-mindedness, yes. Largely scientific decision-making processes, sure. But at the end of the day, one should not discount the morality of acts simply because they don't contribute to your own survival. If someone rapes a friend of mine, or even a total stranger, I don't think that's okay just because it doesn't influence my day. Even if their rationalization was "I need to make sure my evolutionary branch of humanity continues and I can't get a date, ergo this is justified by survival and rules against it are just morality."
I do agree with a slight modification of your statement--that the most important question in the endangered species question from a resource allocation perspective is how important the creature is to the ecosystem on which humanity depends. But I don't think morality should not be a factor in policy choices. For example, even on slashdot, where rationality and science are on occasion revered, people seem to care at least a little about whether mankind is responsible for the potential demise of a creature in determining whether we have an obligation to save it.
> a reputation of being pretty biased in favor of patents
Example? I mean, they are biased in favor of patents because that is what the law is--patents are entitled to a presumption of validity once they've gone through the whole USPTO approval process--but they also tend not to overturn the PTO when the burden is on a party to prove validity. But do you have statistics or anecdotes showing a general bias toward patents?
Oh, do you mean the tendency to find everything PSM and many things non-obvious? That would be fair. The lines are hard to draw, but it would be fair. (And SCOTUS is poking its nose in when it gets too bad.)
> And I suspect that this judge is an informed expert in the field of patent law.
Maybe, maybe not. He's probably heard at least some patent cases, and may or may not have more than a passing familiarity with the field. But he is likely to be good at learning, and his clerk is likely to be good at learning, and he has two people motivated by millions of dollars to make sure he understands everything on their respective sides. Usually something resembling the truth comes out in a well-funded case for that reason. Sometimes not, but that's hard to fix.
> sounds win-win for science
Agreed. I've learned that my grade school teacher believed in creationism but taught us evolution because she had to. But generally, they should be able to talk about both without fear of reprisal, so long as they don't denigrate either. They can poke holes in them large enough to drive a T-rex through, but they should do so respectfully. This insane assumption in the entire mainstream debate that kids are too stupid to hear "the religious right believes X and the secular left believes Y" or to watch the news is... insulting to the intelligence of our children.
Because obviously, we're geeks so we're all using 30-year-old ADM3A terminals.
Or they're geeks using char strings in the hope that their compilers/interpreters/databases/servers save resources because of that. Doubtful.
OR they're geeks using a very limited character set for security reasons. More likely. Better to whitelist than blacklist, and their whitelist is small.
Chrome functions fine with it?
On the one hand, that's good to know...
On the other hand, isn't having to switch to chrome to make it reliable kinda... not-very-open-sourcey? (If you'll pardon the lack of English construction in that psuedosentence, and in this fragment.)
Twenty-seven point six billion Calories (kcal). Enough to feed 13.9 million people for a day, if that is all they ate--or 38,000 people for a year. (Assuming a 2,000 Calorie diet.)
They considered that, but circumstantial evidence pointed to sexual transmission. According to TFA, the virus has to complete a 2-week life cycle within the insect before it can infect the next human; Foy's wife fell ill just 9 days after his return. Thus she did not get it from an insect bite. In addition, the mosquitoes in that region are not known carriers. (Different species.)
Does the regulation allow shaping for largely content-neutral reasons? I favor a little shaping to keep non-netflix flowing--Wikipedia and plain text should always work.