Although Amazon has a ridiculous P/E of 513 [google.com] at least they make some money and are not bleeding red ink line Go Daddy.
Amazon's P/E doesn't mean much because they are heavily reinvesting in the company with stuff like Kindle etc. They could be highly profitable tomorrow if they wanted but they appear to be thinking long term. If you want a better idea of the value of Amazon's stock look at their Revenue vs Market Cap multiple which is approximately 2X. Most fairly valued companies have a revenue multiple between 1X and 2X so Amazon is not really outrageously priced most likely. I doubt GoDaddy could flip a switch and be profitable tomorrow.
Of course you can. It breaks the law and makes you a criminal, but you can make that choice.
Ok Captain Pedantic, are you really that stupid that you cannot figure out that the word "legally" was implied? Since that was too difficult, "I cannot LEGALLY walk into Walmart and steal something...". Happy now?
Their rates for renewals are pretty high compared to the competition, so unless all registrars are unprofitable, I would think otherwise. 200 million sounds like executive pay run amok.
Unlikely but you can check the prospectus to find out. That sort of thing is required to be detailed in the prospectus for any IPO. I'm sure executive pay is a piece of it but it's unlikely to be the majority.
I think it should be a civil matter..... bill the researcher for the computer time intentionally misappropriated for non-work-related activities
Restitution is certainly warranted but whether it is a civil or criminal matter depends on the laws and whether he broke any. The fact that he took pains to hide his identity seems to indicate awareness that what he was doing was wrong. If the dollar amount of what he took is high enough then it becomes a criminal matter. If one of my employees stole company resources I would certainly fire them and seek restitution and if it was more than a pad of post-it-notes I'd probably call the police as well.
$150k counts as a lot of electricity. Even at the current difficulty, I find it hard to believe someone could have used that much power to mine only $8k worth of BTC.
Electricity is just one of the costs involved and probably not even close to the biggest one. You have to consider the cost of the computers and other gear amortized across usage, rent/facility cost, support infrastructure, staff, insurance, maintenance, and more. Furthermore you have to consider the opportunity cost if this guy used the system when it could have been put to other more productive use. Opportunity cost is probably where much of the $150K comes from. It was the price they could have sold the computer time for. I run a very small manufacturing company and it costs us around $60K per month just to keep the doors open even if we never produce a single product. The $150K number doesn't mean much out of context but it wouldn't be hard for me to believe a number in the tens of thousands of dollars.
1. you don't know if he actually wasted anything (the computers could have been idle otherwise)
Not relevant. Even if the computer was idle that doesn't give him the right to utilize it for his own enrichment. Furthermore even an idle computer costs money to operate and maintain, so if he did what he is accused of then it was certainly theft on some level.
2. perhaps he intended to donate the money, or he needed it to help a relative, etc.; you just don't know anything about the situation.
You're going to use a Robin Hood defense? You don't get permission to steal things just because you "intend" to donate the money to someone needy. I could point out that you don't know anything about the situation either. You have no evidence that altruistic motives were at work here. But it doesn't matter. Based on the available information it appears that this person tried to use a computer to enrich themselves or others unjustly at the expense of others. That is a crime regardless of intent. I cannot walk into Walmart and steal something just because I intend to give it away to someone needy.
when the 1000s of asshats who caused the financial crisis are held accountable...all of them...THEN...your question would be valid
Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because the scumbags in the financial world haven't been brought to account doesn't excuse what this guy (allegedly) did. If he committed a crime and it can be proven in an appropriate court of law then he deserves to be punished. We don't excuse people just because there are other criminals doing worse things.
the DA will surely pull some ridiculous damages figure but there's no reason to cripple good engineers forever w/ a felony for this
If it was indeed a crime then after due process takes its course then they absolutely do deserve to be tagged with a felony. There are plenty of engineers who are corrupt just like any other profession. If they committed a crime then they deserve the punishment. While innocent until proven guilty and all that, if they did what it appears then the absolutely deserve to go to jail and pay restitution.
Now if he was doing research into bitcoin and the mining of bitcoins, there might be a reason for him to have done that.
"Research into bitcoin"? Seriously? They were mining bitcoins and doing so at taxpayer expense. What legitimate "research" could they possibly have been doing?
How the fuck do you blow $200+ million a year being a registrar?
By buying pointless Super Bowl ads and selling your product for less than it actually costs to provide. It's not hard to lose a lot of money really fast if you sell a commodity product people want for less than it actually costs to provide it. I had a teacher once point out how easy it is to generate sales. Just sell a $2 bill for $1. You'll have all the revenue you can handle but you'll be out of business faster than you can say "Chapter 7 bankruptcy".
Where does the money go?
Go dig up the prospectus and it will tell you. I can't be bothered but my guess would be some combination of advertising, infrastructure and management compensation. Possibly debt service too if they went that route.
The SEC Filing indicates that they are not in the greatest financial condition.
Shocking. They sell an aggressively priced commodity product and spend a ton on stupid sexist advertising to people who aren't their customers. Their customer service sucks and their website (last I checked) is a hot mess. While I haven't read their prospectus I don't really see them ever being more than modestly profitable at best. They seem to be taking an Amazon business model - growing now and worrying about profits down the road. But unlike Amazon the economic barriers to competition are quite a bit lower.
And you've seen the source code for the Android device in your hand? Right. Didn't think so. Hell, even if you compiled it yourself I seriously doubt you looked. Furthermore 99.9999% of people wouldn't have the foggiest idea where to find the relevant bits of code even if they did have the source code. Which they don't. And even if they did they certainly don't have time to review all the code themselves. I'm as big a supporter of open source as anyone here but I'm under no illusion that it protects me from a company like Google.
Google isn't trying to hide anything from anyone, unlike Apple.
If you believe that I have some property I'd like to sell you. Just because they have a cute motto about not being evil doesn't mean much. Google is no better than Apple when it comes to collecting and selling information about you. They are an advertising company and that is how they make their money. They may not sell all your specific information to specific buyers but they definitely are using that information to make money. And if you think they aren't hiding anything just try waltzing into their headquarters and snooping around sometime. Tell me how that goes for you.
Force requires energy and the only energy being put into the system is rotational, and everything else that appears to be a force is simply some aspect of momentum
Congratulations, you just described movement in a non-inertial reference frame but you flunk vectors 101. Force requires mass and acceleration and nothing else - energy is merely a derived result in this case. The acceleration can be straight line or rotational. Acceleration occurs any time you have a change in velocity which is a vector. Change the magnitude (speed) or the direction (heading) and you have accelerated. So-called "fictitious forces" occur in the later case due to Newton's second law. The effects are real - they are only fictitious in the same sense that imaginary numbers are different from "real" numbers. You need both "real" and "fictitious" forces to accurately describe certain phenomena and the force (or force-like depending on reference frame) effects are demonstrably very real. In curved spacetime, ALL reference frames are non-inertial and in the real world spacetime is curved as far as we can tell. So saying "fictitious forces don't exist" is equivalent to saying we live in flat spacetime. This does not match our observations.
ABS is dangerous to people who learned to drive without it.
Only if they are not competent drivers to begin with. ABS was not on the vast majority of cars when I learned to drive and we seem to have somehow survived the transition. ABS demonstrably makes drivers safer and there is plenty of data to prove it.
The normal technique of locking and releasing the brakes by pumping the pedal doesn't work, because the brakes never lock in the first place, so all you end up doing is repeatedly letting go of the brake for no reason.
Manual pump braking works exactly the same way with or without ABS. ABS does exactly the same thing as manual pump braking but ABS does the braking and releasing but much faster than any human could possible do it and therefore it works better.
The only time I have ever slid though a stop sign in the snow was in an ABS vehicle.
Oh, well, one anecdote should convince us all... [/sarcasm] You can still slide in an ABS equipped vehicle if the road is sufficiently slippery. If the surface is truly close to frictionless it doesn't matter what kind of brake system you use. You are along for the ride. For example my driveway is fairly steep and after an ice storm you are going to slide down a portion of it. It does not matter what you do with the brakes because there is basically no friction between you and the road. You didn't slide through the intersection because of ABS. You slid because you were going too fast.
Centrifugal force is quite real. So is the Coriolis force and the Euler force . All three occur when the reference frame used to describe the force accelerates relative to another reference frame and in fact you cannot accurately solve many classical mechanics problems without them. For example the surface of the Earth is a rotating reference frame. Don't confuse the meaning of the term "fictitious force" to mean that it doesn't exist. A fictitious force is one that simple doesn't exist in an inertial reference frame. There still are non-inertial reference frames.
Suspension on cars do this automatically, already.
No they do not. Traditional suspensions do exactly the opposite of what this system does. Traditional suspensions compress the springs on the outside of the turn rather than the inside. This is why you are pushed into the door instead of into the bottom of your seat.
And where would people go to get cheaper products if *everyone* is paying carbon taxes?
Strawman argument. Such a carbon tax is not going to happen. There is simply too much economic incentive against it.
The only way a carbon tax will become feasible is if some other form of technology (say solar+fusion) becomes cheap enough that it can compete with fossil fuels even allowing for the fact that fossil fuels aren't required to pay for their carbon emissions. Then people will be able to still get their energy without costing jobs and reduced economic output.
Honestly I'd be pleased if we would even just stop subsidizing fossil fuel extraction. Big oil companies are absurdly profitable. They do not need tax incentives of any kind and yet they get lots of them.
Cheap labor is China's biggest export. I should have thought that was clear from the earlier post.
Yes, the cheap labor is a big reason production moved there,
It's not "a big reason", it is THE big reason. If labor costs in China had parity with those in the US (or were even close) then the manufacturing would occur elsewhere. Products with a higher material content and relatively lower labor content tend to stay domestic.
but that production still produces a great deal of pollution, not to mention transporting the product halfway around the world.
Producing steel for example is polluting no matter where you make it. China now leads the world in production of a lot of goods (like steel) thanks to their low labor costs but if those goods were produced in a different country then that country would suffer from much of the same pollution problems.
We have NO technology that can filter carbon in large quantities from burning fossil fuels. As long as we continue to burn large quantities of coal, oil and gas this problem will continue. The only technological solution we have for reducing carbon right now is nuclear and renewables like solar and wind and nuclear comes with its own set of serious problems. Carbon tariffs on any country will not solve the incentives problem - at most if will force the carbon emissions problem to occur elsewhere. Furthermore the US has a huge carbon footprint as well so it smacks of hypocrisy to insist that China reduce their emissions when we're even worse on a per-capita basis.
Does China currently have any incentive to buy the cleaner technology?
Sure they do. Same incentives we have. Pollution has very big health care costs, food supply costs, and if it goes on long enough, climate change costs. There are quality of life incentives. There are political incentives too - if enough people get upset enough about the pollution it can become a threat to the ruling party. The Chinese are acutely aware of the problem. It's just harder to deal with than you seem to think.
In fact implementing this tariff could be the thing that convinces them to start buying the cleaner tech.
China has more poor people than the entire population of any country in the world, save India. They are perfectly well aware of the need for pollution control but they also have the problem of trying to raise tens of millions of people out of poverty through economic growth. There is no easy answer to this.
Furthermore the US and other western countries pollute plenty themselves and it would be HUGELY hypocritical to impose a carbon tax when we emit plenty of the stuff ourselves. To a non-trivial degree the reason our carbon emissions are as low as they are is due to us outsourcing our emissions (along with product production) to China and elsewhere.
Want to cut down carbon emissions? Promote the use of nuclear, wind, solar and hydro power. Coal is plentiful and cheap in China and the US and it will not stop being used until other energy sources are competitive, even taking into account the fact that coal is not being forced to pay for much of the pollution it causes.
Manufacturers will still take the same revenue per unit sold, but they would sell fewer units with higher prices.
VERY unlikely and grossly oversimplifying the issue. I'm guessing you aren't actually in manufacturing. I run a manufacturing company. Manufacturers are very often not able to pass on cost increases to customers. The biggest product my company sells goes into some GM cars. If our costs go up, we have very limited ability to pass on that price increase to our customer. The customer in this case could decide to either take production in house or to find an alternative source. They buy it from us because we can do it cheaper but as material costs rise our ability to do that is reduced. All we do is assemble the product so there are no manufacturing techniques that could dodge or reduce the tariff. Not for us or for anyone else. Our material costs would rise and our profits (meager already) would fall.
You would be taxing away the competitive advantage that companies in a polluting country would have against companies in those who restricts its carbon emissions.
You are presuming that China would/could not tax US products equally in return. US companies want to do business in China. Ford and GM sell a lot of cars there for example. If the US (hypocritically) imposed a carbon tax on China then China would be virtually certain to impose on on US goods in return. Rather than cooperatively work together on the problem we would hurting both economies with a trade war that in the end would be very unlikely to solve the root problem.
In the short term, it would promote domestic business.
No it would not - at least not in the way you are thinking. It would make components in everything you buy more expensive. A lot of stuff is made in China and there is no alternative or domestic supply chain equivalent for much of it. Supply chains do not change overnight. It would take time (years) to shift substantial amounts of production elsewhere, even when such a thing is easily possible. Furthermore the main thing that people buy from China doesn't emit pollution. The #1 reason we make stuff in China right now is because of cheap labor.
RoHS stopped them putting hazardous substances in products just to keep costs down.
RoHS isn't really about economics related to production costs. It's primarily about keeping six known toxins out of products, specifically lead, mercury, cadmium, hexvalent chromium, PBB and PBDE. While there is a economic price tag attached, the economic cost of RoHS compliance is pretty minimal in practice. The majority of electronic components sold these days are RoHS compliant already. For most companies the primary cost is in using lead free solder and providing a certificate stating that the product is RoHS compliant.
That's a good idea. China needs an economic incentive to clean up their air pollution problem.
They've already got one. How expensive do you think it is going to be to treat the health problems of over a billion people caused by pollution? They also have a political motivation. The ruling party wants to stay in power and if the people get sufficiently pissed off about the pollution their continued rule might come into question.
I've been to China. They are WELL aware of the problem. The trick for them is dealing with it without causing massive economic damage in the process of dealing with it. China is trying to drag tens of millions of people out of poverty through economic growth. They have more poor people than the entire population of the US.
Hearing from someone that got disabled for the rest of their life because of a faulty Toyota vehicle, I tend to disagree. Toyota tried to cover up what happened repeatedly by claiming it was the mat, the brake pedal.. Anything but the real cause.
And this "real cause" was what exactly? Seriously, be specific. What do you know that countless automotive engineers and NTSB investigators couldn't find?
I've heard NOTHING that leads me to believe me to believe that these cases of "uncontrolled acceleration" were anything of the sort. Every example I've seen sounds exactly like people stepping on the gas when they think (mistakenly) that they are stepping on the brake. If you step on the brake it will overcome the accelerator every time no matter how hard you rev the engine. None of these vehicles are drive-by-wire - they use hydraulic braking. Same accusations were made with Audi years ago, with the same media circus.
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Although Amazon has a ridiculous P/E of 513 [google.com] at least they make some money and are not bleeding red ink line Go Daddy.
Amazon's P/E doesn't mean much because they are heavily reinvesting in the company with stuff like Kindle etc. They could be highly profitable tomorrow if they wanted but they appear to be thinking long term. If you want a better idea of the value of Amazon's stock look at their Revenue vs Market Cap multiple which is approximately 2X. Most fairly valued companies have a revenue multiple between 1X and 2X so Amazon is not really outrageously priced most likely. I doubt GoDaddy could flip a switch and be profitable tomorrow.
Of course you can. It breaks the law and makes you a criminal, but you can make that choice.
Ok Captain Pedantic, are you really that stupid that you cannot figure out that the word "legally" was implied? Since that was too difficult, "I cannot LEGALLY walk into Walmart and steal something...". Happy now?
Their rates for renewals are pretty high compared to the competition, so unless all registrars are unprofitable, I would think otherwise. 200 million sounds like executive pay run amok.
Unlikely but you can check the prospectus to find out. That sort of thing is required to be detailed in the prospectus for any IPO. I'm sure executive pay is a piece of it but it's unlikely to be the majority.
I think it should be a civil matter..... bill the researcher for the computer time intentionally misappropriated for non-work-related activities
Restitution is certainly warranted but whether it is a civil or criminal matter depends on the laws and whether he broke any. The fact that he took pains to hide his identity seems to indicate awareness that what he was doing was wrong. If the dollar amount of what he took is high enough then it becomes a criminal matter. If one of my employees stole company resources I would certainly fire them and seek restitution and if it was more than a pad of post-it-notes I'd probably call the police as well.
$150k counts as a lot of electricity. Even at the current difficulty, I find it hard to believe someone could have used that much power to mine only $8k worth of BTC.
Electricity is just one of the costs involved and probably not even close to the biggest one. You have to consider the cost of the computers and other gear amortized across usage, rent/facility cost, support infrastructure, staff, insurance, maintenance, and more. Furthermore you have to consider the opportunity cost if this guy used the system when it could have been put to other more productive use. Opportunity cost is probably where much of the $150K comes from. It was the price they could have sold the computer time for. I run a very small manufacturing company and it costs us around $60K per month just to keep the doors open even if we never produce a single product. The $150K number doesn't mean much out of context but it wouldn't be hard for me to believe a number in the tens of thousands of dollars.
(disclosure I'm an accountant)
1. you don't know if he actually wasted anything (the computers could have been idle otherwise)
Not relevant. Even if the computer was idle that doesn't give him the right to utilize it for his own enrichment. Furthermore even an idle computer costs money to operate and maintain, so if he did what he is accused of then it was certainly theft on some level.
2. perhaps he intended to donate the money, or he needed it to help a relative, etc.; you just don't know anything about the situation.
You're going to use a Robin Hood defense? You don't get permission to steal things just because you "intend" to donate the money to someone needy. I could point out that you don't know anything about the situation either. You have no evidence that altruistic motives were at work here. But it doesn't matter. Based on the available information it appears that this person tried to use a computer to enrich themselves or others unjustly at the expense of others. That is a crime regardless of intent. I cannot walk into Walmart and steal something just because I intend to give it away to someone needy.
when the 1000s of asshats who caused the financial crisis are held accountable...all of them...THEN...your question would be valid
Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because the scumbags in the financial world haven't been brought to account doesn't excuse what this guy (allegedly) did. If he committed a crime and it can be proven in an appropriate court of law then he deserves to be punished. We don't excuse people just because there are other criminals doing worse things.
the DA will surely pull some ridiculous damages figure but there's no reason to cripple good engineers forever w/ a felony for this
If it was indeed a crime then after due process takes its course then they absolutely do deserve to be tagged with a felony. There are plenty of engineers who are corrupt just like any other profession. If they committed a crime then they deserve the punishment. While innocent until proven guilty and all that, if they did what it appears then the absolutely deserve to go to jail and pay restitution.
Now if he was doing research into bitcoin and the mining of bitcoins, there might be a reason for him to have done that.
"Research into bitcoin"? Seriously? They were mining bitcoins and doing so at taxpayer expense. What legitimate "research" could they possibly have been doing?
How the fuck do you blow $200+ million a year being a registrar?
By buying pointless Super Bowl ads and selling your product for less than it actually costs to provide. It's not hard to lose a lot of money really fast if you sell a commodity product people want for less than it actually costs to provide it. I had a teacher once point out how easy it is to generate sales. Just sell a $2 bill for $1. You'll have all the revenue you can handle but you'll be out of business faster than you can say "Chapter 7 bankruptcy".
Where does the money go?
Go dig up the prospectus and it will tell you. I can't be bothered but my guess would be some combination of advertising, infrastructure and management compensation. Possibly debt service too if they went that route.
The SEC Filing indicates that they are not in the greatest financial condition.
Shocking. They sell an aggressively priced commodity product and spend a ton on stupid sexist advertising to people who aren't their customers. Their customer service sucks and their website (last I checked) is a hot mess. While I haven't read their prospectus I don't really see them ever being more than modestly profitable at best. They seem to be taking an Amazon business model - growing now and worrying about profits down the road. But unlike Amazon the economic barriers to competition are quite a bit lower.
With Android, you can see the source code
And you've seen the source code for the Android device in your hand? Right. Didn't think so. Hell, even if you compiled it yourself I seriously doubt you looked. Furthermore 99.9999% of people wouldn't have the foggiest idea where to find the relevant bits of code even if they did have the source code. Which they don't. And even if they did they certainly don't have time to review all the code themselves. I'm as big a supporter of open source as anyone here but I'm under no illusion that it protects me from a company like Google.
Google isn't trying to hide anything from anyone, unlike Apple.
If you believe that I have some property I'd like to sell you. Just because they have a cute motto about not being evil doesn't mean much. Google is no better than Apple when it comes to collecting and selling information about you. They are an advertising company and that is how they make their money. They may not sell all your specific information to specific buyers but they definitely are using that information to make money. And if you think they aren't hiding anything just try waltzing into their headquarters and snooping around sometime. Tell me how that goes for you.
Force requires energy and the only energy being put into the system is rotational, and everything else that appears to be a force is simply some aspect of momentum
Congratulations, you just described movement in a non-inertial reference frame but you flunk vectors 101. Force requires mass and acceleration and nothing else - energy is merely a derived result in this case. The acceleration can be straight line or rotational. Acceleration occurs any time you have a change in velocity which is a vector. Change the magnitude (speed) or the direction (heading) and you have accelerated. So-called "fictitious forces" occur in the later case due to Newton's second law. The effects are real - they are only fictitious in the same sense that imaginary numbers are different from "real" numbers. You need both "real" and "fictitious" forces to accurately describe certain phenomena and the force (or force-like depending on reference frame) effects are demonstrably very real. In curved spacetime, ALL reference frames are non-inertial and in the real world spacetime is curved as far as we can tell. So saying "fictitious forces don't exist" is equivalent to saying we live in flat spacetime. This does not match our observations.
ABS is dangerous to people who learned to drive without it.
Only if they are not competent drivers to begin with. ABS was not on the vast majority of cars when I learned to drive and we seem to have somehow survived the transition. ABS demonstrably makes drivers safer and there is plenty of data to prove it.
The normal technique of locking and releasing the brakes by pumping the pedal doesn't work, because the brakes never lock in the first place, so all you end up doing is repeatedly letting go of the brake for no reason.
Manual pump braking works exactly the same way with or without ABS. ABS does exactly the same thing as manual pump braking but ABS does the braking and releasing but much faster than any human could possible do it and therefore it works better.
The only time I have ever slid though a stop sign in the snow was in an ABS vehicle.
Oh, well, one anecdote should convince us all... [/sarcasm] You can still slide in an ABS equipped vehicle if the road is sufficiently slippery. If the surface is truly close to frictionless it doesn't matter what kind of brake system you use. You are along for the ride. For example my driveway is fairly steep and after an ice storm you are going to slide down a portion of it. It does not matter what you do with the brakes because there is basically no friction between you and the road. You didn't slide through the intersection because of ABS. You slid because you were going too fast.
Actually, the force that is pushing you against the seat is centripetal force, not centrifugal force.
Depends on your reference frame.
The only real force is the angular one
Centrifugal force is quite real. So is the Coriolis force and the Euler force . All three occur when the reference frame used to describe the force accelerates relative to another reference frame and in fact you cannot accurately solve many classical mechanics problems without them. For example the surface of the Earth is a rotating reference frame. Don't confuse the meaning of the term "fictitious force" to mean that it doesn't exist. A fictitious force is one that simple doesn't exist in an inertial reference frame. There still are non-inertial reference frames.
Suspension on cars do this automatically, already.
No they do not. Traditional suspensions do exactly the opposite of what this system does. Traditional suspensions compress the springs on the outside of the turn rather than the inside. This is why you are pushed into the door instead of into the bottom of your seat.
And where would people go to get cheaper products if *everyone* is paying carbon taxes?
Strawman argument. Such a carbon tax is not going to happen. There is simply too much economic incentive against it.
The only way a carbon tax will become feasible is if some other form of technology (say solar+fusion) becomes cheap enough that it can compete with fossil fuels even allowing for the fact that fossil fuels aren't required to pay for their carbon emissions. Then people will be able to still get their energy without costing jobs and reduced economic output.
Honestly I'd be pleased if we would even just stop subsidizing fossil fuel extraction. Big oil companies are absurdly profitable. They do not need tax incentives of any kind and yet they get lots of them.
And what would that be?
Cheap labor is China's biggest export. I should have thought that was clear from the earlier post.
Yes, the cheap labor is a big reason production moved there,
It's not "a big reason", it is THE big reason. If labor costs in China had parity with those in the US (or were even close) then the manufacturing would occur elsewhere. Products with a higher material content and relatively lower labor content tend to stay domestic.
but that production still produces a great deal of pollution, not to mention transporting the product halfway around the world.
Producing steel for example is polluting no matter where you make it. China now leads the world in production of a lot of goods (like steel) thanks to their low labor costs but if those goods were produced in a different country then that country would suffer from much of the same pollution problems.
We have NO technology that can filter carbon in large quantities from burning fossil fuels. As long as we continue to burn large quantities of coal, oil and gas this problem will continue. The only technological solution we have for reducing carbon right now is nuclear and renewables like solar and wind and nuclear comes with its own set of serious problems. Carbon tariffs on any country will not solve the incentives problem - at most if will force the carbon emissions problem to occur elsewhere. Furthermore the US has a huge carbon footprint as well so it smacks of hypocrisy to insist that China reduce their emissions when we're even worse on a per-capita basis.
Does China currently have any incentive to buy the cleaner technology?
Sure they do. Same incentives we have. Pollution has very big health care costs, food supply costs, and if it goes on long enough, climate change costs. There are quality of life incentives. There are political incentives too - if enough people get upset enough about the pollution it can become a threat to the ruling party. The Chinese are acutely aware of the problem. It's just harder to deal with than you seem to think.
In fact implementing this tariff could be the thing that convinces them to start buying the cleaner tech.
China has more poor people than the entire population of any country in the world, save India. They are perfectly well aware of the need for pollution control but they also have the problem of trying to raise tens of millions of people out of poverty through economic growth. There is no easy answer to this.
Furthermore the US and other western countries pollute plenty themselves and it would be HUGELY hypocritical to impose a carbon tax when we emit plenty of the stuff ourselves. To a non-trivial degree the reason our carbon emissions are as low as they are is due to us outsourcing our emissions (along with product production) to China and elsewhere.
Want to cut down carbon emissions? Promote the use of nuclear, wind, solar and hydro power. Coal is plentiful and cheap in China and the US and it will not stop being used until other energy sources are competitive, even taking into account the fact that coal is not being forced to pay for much of the pollution it causes.
Manufacturers will still take the same revenue per unit sold, but they would sell fewer units with higher prices.
VERY unlikely and grossly oversimplifying the issue. I'm guessing you aren't actually in manufacturing. I run a manufacturing company. Manufacturers are very often not able to pass on cost increases to customers. The biggest product my company sells goes into some GM cars. If our costs go up, we have very limited ability to pass on that price increase to our customer. The customer in this case could decide to either take production in house or to find an alternative source. They buy it from us because we can do it cheaper but as material costs rise our ability to do that is reduced. All we do is assemble the product so there are no manufacturing techniques that could dodge or reduce the tariff. Not for us or for anyone else. Our material costs would rise and our profits (meager already) would fall.
You would be taxing away the competitive advantage that companies in a polluting country would have against companies in those who restricts its carbon emissions.
You are presuming that China would/could not tax US products equally in return. US companies want to do business in China. Ford and GM sell a lot of cars there for example. If the US (hypocritically) imposed a carbon tax on China then China would be virtually certain to impose on on US goods in return. Rather than cooperatively work together on the problem we would hurting both economies with a trade war that in the end would be very unlikely to solve the root problem.
In the short term, it would promote domestic business.
No it would not - at least not in the way you are thinking. It would make components in everything you buy more expensive. A lot of stuff is made in China and there is no alternative or domestic supply chain equivalent for much of it. Supply chains do not change overnight. It would take time (years) to shift substantial amounts of production elsewhere, even when such a thing is easily possible. Furthermore the main thing that people buy from China doesn't emit pollution. The #1 reason we make stuff in China right now is because of cheap labor.
RoHS stopped them putting hazardous substances in products just to keep costs down.
RoHS isn't really about economics related to production costs. It's primarily about keeping six known toxins out of products, specifically lead, mercury, cadmium, hexvalent chromium, PBB and PBDE. While there is a economic price tag attached, the economic cost of RoHS compliance is pretty minimal in practice. The majority of electronic components sold these days are RoHS compliant already. For most companies the primary cost is in using lead free solder and providing a certificate stating that the product is RoHS compliant.
That's a good idea. China needs an economic incentive to clean up their air pollution problem.
They've already got one. How expensive do you think it is going to be to treat the health problems of over a billion people caused by pollution? They also have a political motivation. The ruling party wants to stay in power and if the people get sufficiently pissed off about the pollution their continued rule might come into question.
I've been to China. They are WELL aware of the problem. The trick for them is dealing with it without causing massive economic damage in the process of dealing with it. China is trying to drag tens of millions of people out of poverty through economic growth. They have more poor people than the entire population of the US.
"You might know me by another name... Star Day"
Never mind...
Hearing from someone that got disabled for the rest of their life because of a faulty Toyota vehicle, I tend to disagree. Toyota tried to cover up what happened repeatedly by claiming it was the mat, the brake pedal.. Anything but the real cause.
And this "real cause" was what exactly? Seriously, be specific. What do you know that countless automotive engineers and NTSB investigators couldn't find?
I've heard NOTHING that leads me to believe me to believe that these cases of "uncontrolled acceleration" were anything of the sort. Every example I've seen sounds exactly like people stepping on the gas when they think (mistakenly) that they are stepping on the brake. If you step on the brake it will overcome the accelerator every time no matter how hard you rev the engine. None of these vehicles are drive-by-wire - they use hydraulic braking. Same accusations were made with Audi years ago, with the same media circus.