Health care is generally a better bet than road safety, with many interventions saving money rather than costing it, but road safety is certainly near the top. Here's an impressively comprehensive list (but, sadly, rather old): http://www.ce.cmu.edu/~hsm/bca...
You maximize profit. the amount of tax you pay on profit is irrelevant to the process of maximizing it.
Not true. First, it affects debt vs equity decisions (and location decisions). Second, think about decisions on how much to invest. The tax reduces the return on investments in equities, pushing investment in to other locations and types of investment (government debt, say, or property) or reducing it in total. Corporate taxes are thought to reduce growth this way - by reducing the amount of capital and research.
All taxes are ultimately paid by people....maybe shareholders, or employees, or customers, but always people even if via a corporate proxy. For corporate taxes it seems to be employees that pay the most
A much better answer would be to abolish corporate taxes and instead tax dividends through existing income tax systems. It'd get rid of a whole layer of distortion and bureaucracy, increase investment, reduce the destabilizing debt-over-equity preference (if the same tax was applied to debt interest) and it'd be a lot harder to avoid because, unlike profits, dividend payments are mostly an easily determined amount going to a shareholder in an easily determined country. Oh, and international tax competition would work less well: few shareholders will move to make their dividends cheaper.
Taxes on profits affect quite a few bad things, but mostly not related to prices.
First, they reduce wage payments (75% of the amount of tax changes paid for that way according to http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/ideas-... but estimates vary).
Second, they reduce investment (https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/263560/4069_CT_Dynamic_effects_paper_20130312_IW_v2.pdf guesses at a 2.5-4.5% change from the 28% to 20% reduction in the UK - and about £500 more per household per year in wages).
Finally, they distort stuff. Companies borrow more and raise less in equity (no corporate tax in interest), and become less stable. They distort their operations and do pointless paperwork to exploit tax loopholes. This is waste.
It says that a $1 increase in corporate taxes reduces the wage bill by $0.75.
However, exactly where the taxes fall is quite opaque and estimates vary a lot. That's one reason politicians can't/won't get rid of the taxes: everybody thinks someone else pays them.
Presumably those would already be deducted from taxable profits. And in the UK they should be taxed as employment income (which is generally a much higher total tax rate than on profits and dividends).
You can encrypt with two public keys, and for decryption send it off to your two key-holding machines in turn.
Or you can go one step further and encrypt the card number with two one-time pads, store the encrypted card number and encrypted one time pads, and do the decryption by sending the pads off to be decrypted by the separately-controlled systems. Then the key-holding machines don't have access to any card data themselves.
PCI DSS even requires that no one person can have a 'key component' which gives them any knowledge of the full key. So you can't just split a key in to two halves, even if you could do the decryption. I can't help thinking that whoever wrote it really wanted to write 'just by an HSM'.
Symmetrically encrypted credit cards, OK, I can see it, though it's far from a silver bullet.
Symmetrically encrypting credit card numbers is tough to do within the rules unless you have a hardware security module. Under PCI DSS, the complete key used for decryption is not allowed to be within the control of one person, including the sysadmin. So, you can't have the complete key on one machine because then the sysadmin can get it (except HSMs, which prevent even the administrator from getting at the keys). You can, however, have two physically separately controlled machines, with no overlapping access rights, and use keys in both.
Then, to reduce latency, load, failure risk, etc., you can have a public key on your server and use it for encrypting card numbers during payments, and use a much more expensive and complicated process for decrypting them when you need to make refunds.
If someone has hacked your database layer, they probably have your decryption keys from the app layer too.
That's one reason for the rule. The other is to stop someone (including a sysadmin) running off with the complete key - instead, they'd have to send the encrypted data through the online decryption process. Not only is that logged (and possibly limited), it may be something that you don't have access to if, say, you've stolen a backup or decommissioned disk.
For a software architect type of position you're going to need a good overview of the techniques available for solving a business and technical problem. You don't need to know what commands to use, you certainly don't need to know the maths behind RSA, but not knowing of the existence of public key cryptography is not a good sign. It's not a difficult thing to know, it can occasionally allow you to think of design solutions you'd never have otherwise thought of, and is surely totally standard in a CS degree.
On its own maybe it's not a fatal flaw - it's never going to be hard to find a question you know the answer to but your interviewer doesn't and so it's an easy trap to overstate the importance of something like that. Probably someone else would thing the same thing about never having heard of XA distributed transactions, or Spring, or sed or somesuch. And I don't think it's a good interview technique to fish for a very specific answer; better, I think, to pose a higher level technical or business problem and interactively sketch out design decisions.
But, still, someone making high level design decisions about software should be someone curious enough to want to know what it is once they've heard of it.
An American company can make a profit in Norway using Danish workers and pay it out to a shareholder in Brazil, and yet pay US taxes. Also, you might think that corporate taxes are paid by shareholders, but mostly they come out of wages. This paper comes to a figure of 75% out of wages: http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/ideas-... . Why should Danish workers and Brazilian shareholders pay US taxes on work done in Norway?
Defining 'profit', never mind 'profit in country x', is difficult and this is easy to abuse. It's not progressive (it doesn't depend on the income of whoever pays it) and is one of the easier taxes to avoid.
A better system would be to use your income tax system to tax the dividends received by your residents and scrap corporate taxes. It removes a whole layer of bureaucracy, avoidance and international tax competition. With a very small number of exceptions, most people will not emigrate to avoid tax in the way that companies do. And it's fairer: labour income is far more heavily taxed than other kinds and there should be some equalization (it should, of course, be combined with equalization with taxes on interest, capital gains and so on).
Intercept (wiretap) evidence is not admissible in UK courts. (I think there are some exceptions when it comes from other governments, but not if the UK government asked for it).
Damn, I'm slightly out with the first number. It should be £12074. To spend 30k on an employee you make the official salary be £26362, you pay as the employer 13.8% (£3638) on employers' national insurance contributions, then the employee pays 12% employee's national insurance and 20% income tax (£8436) on that.
What's ridiculous is that the amount in your contract (26,362) isn't equal to any of the amounts of money involved. It's not what it costs the employer to pay you (30k), it's not what you receive.
It doesn't have to be done that way, an alternative is to tax corporate profits entirely as personal income when they become dividends, and not tax them at the corporate level at all. Then it's much less ambiguous which country and rate applies.
Suppose a UK company has £30k it wants to pay to you and you're already in the standard tax bracket. The total tax paid can be:
As an employee: 13.8%, then 12% + 20% = £12415
As a lender or pensioner: 20% = £6000
As a shareholder (very small company, from profits, no avoidance): 20% then 10% = £8400
As a shareholder (big company, from profits, no avoidance): 21% then 10% = £8670
As a shareholder (big company, corporation tax completely avoided): 10% = £3000
See how it's employees who get screwed the most? And how much variation there can be between companies?
Instead of trying to make an impossible system work, I think it'd be better to charge about 30% on all (middle level) incomes (except maybe pensions) and scrap all the other taxes, including the corporate ones.
It's where we'll end up anyway if countries continue to compete on corporate tax rate.
Because the objective of price matching policies is to convert a competitors sale to your sale. If the competitor can't fulfill the order then you haven't lost a customer to them and don't need to price match.
Only partly. Traditionally, price matching was an anti-competitive measure to support prices. It says to your competitors 'don't both trying to compete on price because we'll just match you and we'll both lose'.
An increase in extreme weather, on the other hand, makes gardening and farming a whole lot harder. A frost or drought at the wrong time can completely destroy your crop. You can adapt to changing conditions by growing different crops, but only if you know what the weather is likely to be like. Otherwise your frost tolerant plants get killed by drought one year and then your drought tolerant plants get killed by floods the next.
If Russia cut off gas supplies to Europe then leaving more gas (or electricity) spare to export could be a very good move. Aside from supporting economies with which Denmark trades and making money from the sales, it'd surely give Denmark some diplomatic leverage, too.
Indeed. I suspect that he couldn't sue them, because if he'd used his IP whilst working for them he'd be implicitly giving them a licence, but that it could still cause them problems because he could withdraw the licence when he feels like it.
The situation surely shouldn't be that much different to someone who'd patented something for a previous employer, just that your employer in this case was effectively your own small business. You can't use it in your new job, and you shouldn't try to sell your old employer's stuff to them because you're supposed to be doing your job only in the interests of your new employer.
So, your living costs are something very approximating twice what the monthly car cost would be, and I presume you'd be paying it for something like 5 years. That gives you a choice between 1: accelerating very fast for a few tens of seconds per day, instead of rather slower and 2: having two and a half years off work (or retiring earlier) and doing something important to you instead.
There's nothing actually illogical about preferring the first. But I think it's reasonable to call it an extreme preference.
I honestly think the EU would be fully willing to integrate Scotland from day one.
I'm sure the EU will let Scotland in. I don't think that's really the question (I really wouldn't take those who say that Scotland will be blocked seriously) - it's more about what other countries will want in return, and whether other countries with secessionist movements will want it to do it the hard way or the easy way. Countries in international bodies don't tend to agree to anything without getting something they want, even if it's not related. So, Scotland may find it hard to get all the exemptions the UK has and the budget will be up for negotiation. In theory new states are supposed to join the Euro and Schengen (which I would like but would drive UKIPers and the UK Conservatives insane), but I'm sure they'll be able to avoid that if they give something else up and take longer over it. But I imagine that the worst part for Scotland will the uncertainty whilst it's negotiated. Businesses will hate that.
I would think that the UK government would not believe that an invader in Scotland would stop at the border. As such, it'd be far more likely to provoke a nuclear response to a conventional attack than, say, an invasion of Turkey (though, one would hope, NATO conventional forces would be a different matter).
Re:Economist Article is Exceedingly Precise
on
Patents That Kill
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· Score: 1
$89 billion is surely false precision, but it's not unreasonable to put a value on lives when you have an economic decision to make. None of them work all that well, but it's better than just flailing in the dark which is the alternative.
For example, you can look at how much it would cost to save those lives another way (eg, through spending on road or rail safety or other, known, healthcare spending). This might give you a figure of a few million. But you tend to find huge discrepancies between spending in different areas - eg, much more in air and rail safety or terrorism prevention than in road safety - depending on how the public responds to those things. Refusing to put a cost on lives this way kills - governments spend huge sums on rail (eg, after the UK Hatfield rail crash) and terrorism prevention when spending a lot of it on healthcare and road safety would save more lives. eg, according to this http://www.theguardian.com/uk/... the UK government was prepared to spend three times as much (~£3m) per life saved on rail compared to road, and more like £15m in an expensive system after the crash - in effect letting 15 people die to save each one.
You can also recognize that we're not talking about certain death, we're talking about risks to life - and people implicitly put a value on risks to life all the time. Car vs train, one car vs another, a dangerous job vs a safe one, driving further to buy something more cheaply or commute from somewhere different. You can come to estimates based on how much they're prepared to spend to avoid risk. But, of course, people are quite irrational about risk and you get widely varying numbers.
And, as another commenter has said, you can estimate from economic output lost, but that's not very satisfactory. In theory it produces a minimum value (assuming that the economy isn't overproducing, spending people's time on producing things less valuable than the time). But it confuses the purpose of an economy - to give people the best quality of life it can, not to produce as much stuff as it can.
Re:And this is the same for copyrights.
on
Patents That Kill
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· Score: 1
If someone has built a bridge, how does letting him collect tolls from that one thing for its entire life encourage them to continue to do more work? Well....the same way they were encourage to build the first one, because they'll get paid for it. You think people don't consider the possibility of ongoing income from something when deciding if it's worth doing (or worth handing an author an advance for, or investing in research for)?
Russia is in some danger of wrecking its own economy. Putin is a clever guy who employs a lot of other clever guys, and will certainly know the risks, the question is more about what he can and can't do to improve matters without compromising his own position. Russia has actually been moving up the ease of doing business index, which might surprise people who only ever look at the less boring media. But it has a lot of other problems as well.
Oil and gas is great for centralized states. It's easy for governments and oligarchs to control compare to, say, a well diversified manufacturing base full of new products. But Russia's oil output is compromised by a lack of investment, taxes are very very high on oil profits and you always face the danger of having your assets seized. There's going to be a big questions over whether the Russian government is going to divert money it'd like to spend on popularity in to its own oil investment, and/or whether it can attract foreign investment (and possibly expertise). This is the same sort of problem Venezuela had, except Hugo Chavez was far more stupid about it (he took so much money from the state oil company to buy popularity that its output fell through lack of investment, and he sacked a huge chunk of his oil expertise out of spite after a strike).
Meanwhile, a centrally controlled economy run by governments, oligarchs and local pet thugs who steal what they can is never going to be too good at innovating with new products and methods. The current war is making Putin very popular, and so presumably less dependent on other support and more able to do something about this....for now.
A strong oil industry can make life hard for other industries if you have an open economy - local manufacturers can find themselves producing products which can be obtained much more easily by digging up a little oil and swapping it internationally for foreign goods. Oil sanctions would certainly help other industries develop more quickly....but I suspect those industries wouldn't operate very well.
It's certainly naive to write off the Russian economy, it's amazing how well problematic economies can product....but it's always going to be limited by its dysfunctional politics and state, which will never be tackled as long as Putin (or his heirs) is there.
If you're competently operating an air defence system you don't just 'expect' civil aviation to avoid you as your only way of avoiding killing hundreds of civilians and pissing off a lot of governments. It isn't difficult to check, it isn't difficult to notice constant overflying traffic heading to or from Russian airspace on your radar and wonder what it is, it isn't difficult to listen in on air band radios, it probably wouldn't have been so hard to get a question to civilian air traffic controllers in Russia and it would hardly have been impossible to issue a warning.
The people involved were clearly too incompetent to have been given access to air defence missiles.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe commercial pressure - someone whose job or career will be at risk if diesel development is cut back.
Health care is generally a better bet than road safety, with many interventions saving money rather than costing it, but road safety is certainly near the top. Here's an impressively comprehensive list (but, sadly, rather old): http://www.ce.cmu.edu/~hsm/bca...
You maximize profit. the amount of tax you pay on profit is irrelevant to the process of maximizing it.
Not true. First, it affects debt vs equity decisions (and location decisions). Second, think about decisions on how much to invest. The tax reduces the return on investments in equities, pushing investment in to other locations and types of investment (government debt, say, or property) or reducing it in total. Corporate taxes are thought to reduce growth this way - by reducing the amount of capital and research.
All taxes are ultimately paid by people....maybe shareholders, or employees, or customers, but always people even if via a corporate proxy. For corporate taxes it seems to be employees that pay the most
A much better answer would be to abolish corporate taxes and instead tax dividends through existing income tax systems. It'd get rid of a whole layer of distortion and bureaucracy, increase investment, reduce the destabilizing debt-over-equity preference (if the same tax was applied to debt interest) and it'd be a lot harder to avoid because, unlike profits, dividend payments are mostly an easily determined amount going to a shareholder in an easily determined country. Oh, and international tax competition would work less well: few shareholders will move to make their dividends cheaper.
Taxes on profits affect quite a few bad things, but mostly not related to prices.
First, they reduce wage payments (75% of the amount of tax changes paid for that way according to http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/ideas-... but estimates vary).
Second, they reduce investment (https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/263560/4069_CT_Dynamic_effects_paper_20130312_IW_v2.pdf guesses at a 2.5-4.5% change from the 28% to 20% reduction in the UK - and about £500 more per household per year in wages).
Finally, they distort stuff. Companies borrow more and raise less in equity (no corporate tax in interest), and become less stable. They distort their operations and do pointless paperwork to exploit tax loopholes. This is waste.
To back this up, here's a paper on the effect of corporate taxes on wages: http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/ideas-...
It says that a $1 increase in corporate taxes reduces the wage bill by $0.75.
However, exactly where the taxes fall is quite opaque and estimates vary a lot. That's one reason politicians can't/won't get rid of the taxes: everybody thinks someone else pays them.
Presumably those would already be deducted from taxable profits. And in the UK they should be taxed as employment income (which is generally a much higher total tax rate than on profits and dividends).
You can encrypt with two public keys, and for decryption send it off to your two key-holding machines in turn.
Or you can go one step further and encrypt the card number with two one-time pads, store the encrypted card number and encrypted one time pads, and do the decryption by sending the pads off to be decrypted by the separately-controlled systems. Then the key-holding machines don't have access to any card data themselves.
PCI DSS even requires that no one person can have a 'key component' which gives them any knowledge of the full key. So you can't just split a key in to two halves, even if you could do the decryption. I can't help thinking that whoever wrote it really wanted to write 'just by an HSM'.
Symmetrically encrypted credit cards, OK, I can see it, though it's far from a silver bullet.
Symmetrically encrypting credit card numbers is tough to do within the rules unless you have a hardware security module. Under PCI DSS, the complete key used for decryption is not allowed to be within the control of one person, including the sysadmin. So, you can't have the complete key on one machine because then the sysadmin can get it (except HSMs, which prevent even the administrator from getting at the keys). You can, however, have two physically separately controlled machines, with no overlapping access rights, and use keys in both.
Then, to reduce latency, load, failure risk, etc., you can have a public key on your server and use it for encrypting card numbers during payments, and use a much more expensive and complicated process for decrypting them when you need to make refunds.
If someone has hacked your database layer, they probably have your decryption keys from the app layer too.
That's one reason for the rule. The other is to stop someone (including a sysadmin) running off with the complete key - instead, they'd have to send the encrypted data through the online decryption process. Not only is that logged (and possibly limited), it may be something that you don't have access to if, say, you've stolen a backup or decommissioned disk.
For a software architect type of position you're going to need a good overview of the techniques available for solving a business and technical problem. You don't need to know what commands to use, you certainly don't need to know the maths behind RSA, but not knowing of the existence of public key cryptography is not a good sign. It's not a difficult thing to know, it can occasionally allow you to think of design solutions you'd never have otherwise thought of, and is surely totally standard in a CS degree.
On its own maybe it's not a fatal flaw - it's never going to be hard to find a question you know the answer to but your interviewer doesn't and so it's an easy trap to overstate the importance of something like that. Probably someone else would thing the same thing about never having heard of XA distributed transactions, or Spring, or sed or somesuch. And I don't think it's a good interview technique to fish for a very specific answer; better, I think, to pose a higher level technical or business problem and interactively sketch out design decisions.
But, still, someone making high level design decisions about software should be someone curious enough to want to know what it is once they've heard of it.
An American company can make a profit in Norway using Danish workers and pay it out to a shareholder in Brazil, and yet pay US taxes. Also, you might think that corporate taxes are paid by shareholders, but mostly they come out of wages. This paper comes to a figure of 75% out of wages: http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/ideas-... . Why should Danish workers and Brazilian shareholders pay US taxes on work done in Norway?
Defining 'profit', never mind 'profit in country x', is difficult and this is easy to abuse. It's not progressive (it doesn't depend on the income of whoever pays it) and is one of the easier taxes to avoid.
A better system would be to use your income tax system to tax the dividends received by your residents and scrap corporate taxes. It removes a whole layer of bureaucracy, avoidance and international tax competition. With a very small number of exceptions, most people will not emigrate to avoid tax in the way that companies do. And it's fairer: labour income is far more heavily taxed than other kinds and there should be some equalization (it should, of course, be combined with equalization with taxes on interest, capital gains and so on).
Intercept (wiretap) evidence is not admissible in UK courts. (I think there are some exceptions when it comes from other governments, but not if the UK government asked for it).
Damn, I'm slightly out with the first number. It should be £12074. To spend 30k on an employee you make the official salary be £26362, you pay as the employer 13.8% (£3638) on employers' national insurance contributions, then the employee pays 12% employee's national insurance and 20% income tax (£8436) on that.
What's ridiculous is that the amount in your contract (26,362) isn't equal to any of the amounts of money involved. It's not what it costs the employer to pay you (30k), it's not what you receive.
It doesn't have to be done that way, an alternative is to tax corporate profits entirely as personal income when they become dividends, and not tax them at the corporate level at all. Then it's much less ambiguous which country and rate applies.
Suppose a UK company has £30k it wants to pay to you and you're already in the standard tax bracket. The total tax paid can be:
See how it's employees who get screwed the most? And how much variation there can be between companies?
Instead of trying to make an impossible system work, I think it'd be better to charge about 30% on all (middle level) incomes (except maybe pensions) and scrap all the other taxes, including the corporate ones.
It's where we'll end up anyway if countries continue to compete on corporate tax rate.
Because the objective of price matching policies is to convert a competitors sale to your sale. If the competitor can't fulfill the order then you haven't lost a customer to them and don't need to price match.
Only partly. Traditionally, price matching was an anti-competitive measure to support prices. It says to your competitors 'don't both trying to compete on price because we'll just match you and we'll both lose'.
An increase in extreme weather, on the other hand, makes gardening and farming a whole lot harder. A frost or drought at the wrong time can completely destroy your crop. You can adapt to changing conditions by growing different crops, but only if you know what the weather is likely to be like. Otherwise your frost tolerant plants get killed by drought one year and then your drought tolerant plants get killed by floods the next.
If Russia cut off gas supplies to Europe then leaving more gas (or electricity) spare to export could be a very good move. Aside from supporting economies with which Denmark trades and making money from the sales, it'd surely give Denmark some diplomatic leverage, too.
Indeed. I suspect that he couldn't sue them, because if he'd used his IP whilst working for them he'd be implicitly giving them a licence, but that it could still cause them problems because he could withdraw the licence when he feels like it.
The situation surely shouldn't be that much different to someone who'd patented something for a previous employer, just that your employer in this case was effectively your own small business. You can't use it in your new job, and you shouldn't try to sell your old employer's stuff to them because you're supposed to be doing your job only in the interests of your new employer.
So, your living costs are something very approximating twice what the monthly car cost would be, and I presume you'd be paying it for something like 5 years. That gives you a choice between 1: accelerating very fast for a few tens of seconds per day, instead of rather slower and 2: having two and a half years off work (or retiring earlier) and doing something important to you instead.
There's nothing actually illogical about preferring the first. But I think it's reasonable to call it an extreme preference.
The Royal Bank of Scotland is not Scottish? It is not clear who owns it, since it is publicly traded
Isn't RBS 64% owned by the UK government? I know it was 81% earlier this year, but I think UKFI sold some.
but I don't think they would close down their HQ in Edinburgh, just because Scotland is now an independent country.
They've said they will: http://www.heraldscotland.com/...
I honestly think the EU would be fully willing to integrate Scotland from day one.
I'm sure the EU will let Scotland in. I don't think that's really the question (I really wouldn't take those who say that Scotland will be blocked seriously) - it's more about what other countries will want in return, and whether other countries with secessionist movements will want it to do it the hard way or the easy way. Countries in international bodies don't tend to agree to anything without getting something they want, even if it's not related. So, Scotland may find it hard to get all the exemptions the UK has and the budget will be up for negotiation. In theory new states are supposed to join the Euro and Schengen (which I would like but would drive UKIPers and the UK Conservatives insane), but I'm sure they'll be able to avoid that if they give something else up and take longer over it. But I imagine that the worst part for Scotland will the uncertainty whilst it's negotiated. Businesses will hate that.
I would think that the UK government would not believe that an invader in Scotland would stop at the border. As such, it'd be far more likely to provoke a nuclear response to a conventional attack than, say, an invasion of Turkey (though, one would hope, NATO conventional forces would be a different matter).
$89 billion is surely false precision, but it's not unreasonable to put a value on lives when you have an economic decision to make. None of them work all that well, but it's better than just flailing in the dark which is the alternative.
For example, you can look at how much it would cost to save those lives another way (eg, through spending on road or rail safety or other, known, healthcare spending). This might give you a figure of a few million. But you tend to find huge discrepancies between spending in different areas - eg, much more in air and rail safety or terrorism prevention than in road safety - depending on how the public responds to those things. Refusing to put a cost on lives this way kills - governments spend huge sums on rail (eg, after the UK Hatfield rail crash) and terrorism prevention when spending a lot of it on healthcare and road safety would save more lives. eg, according to this http://www.theguardian.com/uk/... the UK government was prepared to spend three times as much (~£3m) per life saved on rail compared to road, and more like £15m in an expensive system after the crash - in effect letting 15 people die to save each one.
You can also recognize that we're not talking about certain death, we're talking about risks to life - and people implicitly put a value on risks to life all the time. Car vs train, one car vs another, a dangerous job vs a safe one, driving further to buy something more cheaply or commute from somewhere different. You can come to estimates based on how much they're prepared to spend to avoid risk. But, of course, people are quite irrational about risk and you get widely varying numbers.
And, as another commenter has said, you can estimate from economic output lost, but that's not very satisfactory. In theory it produces a minimum value (assuming that the economy isn't overproducing, spending people's time on producing things less valuable than the time). But it confuses the purpose of an economy - to give people the best quality of life it can, not to produce as much stuff as it can.
If someone has built a bridge, how does letting him collect tolls from that one thing for its entire life encourage them to continue to do more work? Well....the same way they were encourage to build the first one, because they'll get paid for it. You think people don't consider the possibility of ongoing income from something when deciding if it's worth doing (or worth handing an author an advance for, or investing in research for)?
Russia is in some danger of wrecking its own economy. Putin is a clever guy who employs a lot of other clever guys, and will certainly know the risks, the question is more about what he can and can't do to improve matters without compromising his own position. Russia has actually been moving up the ease of doing business index, which might surprise people who only ever look at the less boring media. But it has a lot of other problems as well.
Oil and gas is great for centralized states. It's easy for governments and oligarchs to control compare to, say, a well diversified manufacturing base full of new products. But Russia's oil output is compromised by a lack of investment, taxes are very very high on oil profits and you always face the danger of having your assets seized. There's going to be a big questions over whether the Russian government is going to divert money it'd like to spend on popularity in to its own oil investment, and/or whether it can attract foreign investment (and possibly expertise). This is the same sort of problem Venezuela had, except Hugo Chavez was far more stupid about it (he took so much money from the state oil company to buy popularity that its output fell through lack of investment, and he sacked a huge chunk of his oil expertise out of spite after a strike).
Meanwhile, a centrally controlled economy run by governments, oligarchs and local pet thugs who steal what they can is never going to be too good at innovating with new products and methods. The current war is making Putin very popular, and so presumably less dependent on other support and more able to do something about this....for now.
A strong oil industry can make life hard for other industries if you have an open economy - local manufacturers can find themselves producing products which can be obtained much more easily by digging up a little oil and swapping it internationally for foreign goods. Oil sanctions would certainly help other industries develop more quickly....but I suspect those industries wouldn't operate very well.
It's certainly naive to write off the Russian economy, it's amazing how well problematic economies can product....but it's always going to be limited by its dysfunctional politics and state, which will never be tackled as long as Putin (or his heirs) is there.
If you're competently operating an air defence system you don't just 'expect' civil aviation to avoid you as your only way of avoiding killing hundreds of civilians and pissing off a lot of governments. It isn't difficult to check, it isn't difficult to notice constant overflying traffic heading to or from Russian airspace on your radar and wonder what it is, it isn't difficult to listen in on air band radios, it probably wouldn't have been so hard to get a question to civilian air traffic controllers in Russia and it would hardly have been impossible to issue a warning.
The people involved were clearly too incompetent to have been given access to air defence missiles.