Current legal liability is split between drivers and their insurers, with a little left over for governments (eg, bad road maintenance/design) and manufacturers (mechanical defects). Driverless cars could move this liability around, pushing it from drivers and their insurers and onto manufacturers and their insurers, but won't actually overall increase it unless the driverless cars crash more (and, of course, we all hope for the opposite). So, the price of the cars might go up but they'll still be attractive (especially to the riskiest drivers with the most expensive cars) because the driver will save more than the extra cost on his own insurance.
Well....maybe maths rather than science. And both are subjects of study, not kinds of people. Nothing in CS or SE is secret. It's not sugery, or orchestral conducting, or flying. Nothing needs access to special knowledge, or special resources, or special people. You don't need cadavers or supervised training, nor an orchestra, or an aeroplane. Any competent developer should be able to learn enough computer science to do his job (and more, out of curiosity), just as he's expected to learn new tools, languages and problem domains. To expect a big difference in the skills and capabilities of two people many years of working in industry after they've graduated from CS vs SE courses is foolish.
People respond to incentives - including price incentives. If the price of using fossil fuels is held below its cost (ie, with extraction, refining, distribution, safety and local and global pollution costs included) then decisions such as which car to buy, how many warehouses and what size vehicles a retailer should use, which mode of transport to use, how to design industrial processes, how to build and many others will be affected. (Don't underestimate the non-CO2 costs of pollution...really....they're very serious and yet have been pushed aside in the public debate). Supply-side, decisions on types of generating capacity, energy research and political intervention (subsidies and planning, for example) will be taken, too. Some of these decisions will have fuel-use implications for decades.
If every country in the world were to impose carbon taxes which approximate the extra costs then it wouldn't be a problem. If the US were to impose those taxes and limit production (and imports) to its own needs and those of other countries with similar rules maybe it would be mitigated a great deal. But I'm sure this is politically impossible, nationally and internationally.
The politics of the US virtually guarantee that the US can't use this fuel responsibly. The politics of anywhere virtually guarantee it, but in the US it's worse, and is more serious because of the size of US pollution. It's access to it will cause it to harm its current and future self, and the rest of humanity. But there'll be good aspects, too - using less oil from dodgy places is good (and oil revenues in dodgy places often cause political problems, too, by making politics the way to get rich, by gaining access to oil revenues, rather than business). So is using gas instead of oil.
It's a coordination problem in an oligopolistic market. They might all have liked to charge more, but without collusion they can't all increase their prices at once in an agreed way. Once something happens that lets them increase prices in a coordinated way then there isn't an incentive to reduce them again - each company may know it would benefit from reducing its prices if it could guarantee no response from its competitors, but they all know that their competitors will match them, wiping out the benefit to them. And so prices can remain high, close to the monopolistic price (but not higher). The fewer companies there are the worse it gets - if there were dozens and many potential new entrants it'd be almost certain that someone else would reduce their prices anyway (or gradually 'cheat'), so any one player might as well do so immediately to try and grab an advantage.
I suppose we have to hope that this implicit cooperation will break down or be eroded eventually. By inflation, say, or the introduction of new products that are slightly cheaper each time. Or, maybe more likely, that it'll be disrupted by SSDs.
There are tighter rules concerning the CVV. Merchants are never allowed to store, and don't need it to process refunds or continuing payments. Possibly it's not on the swipe, either, I'm not sure. So you could obtain the 16 digits from a stolen merchant database/backup or a sneaky swipe under the table, but not the CVV. That's the theory, anyway. It's never seemed like the strongest security measure on earth....
TFA is claiming that there isn't a correlation, not that there is one. That's sort of the point - that, having looked, there's no real sign that reducing top marginal tax rates will increase GDP growth (or reduce it). (There's actually a small correlation between higher top tax rates and growth, but not a significant one). This does rather question whether taking the cost of increased inequality in the hope of it increasing growth is a sensible strategy.
Usually the reasonning is that since they will have more money, they will consume more and that will help the economy.
This reasoning doesn't work. On the one hand, if you don't tax, the money remains with them (rich or poor) and they spend all of it (at best). On the other the government takes it and spends all of it. It's still spent. Directly, taking money away and spending could be argued to stimulate the economy, not the opposite, because it's guaranteed to all be spent.
The potential positive effect of cutting taxes is through changing incentives to work and getting rid of dead-weight losses. eg, you'd pay $15 to have your house cleaned, a cleaner would accept $10, but there'd be taxes of $6 so it doesn't happen.
Now.....compare raising taxes by taxing the rich (so a few people are subject to these discintives) to raising taxes by taxing the poor (so a lot of people are subject to them). If you assume that someone's contribution is genuinely proportionate to their income then maybe it wouldn't make much difference (assuming rich and poor respond to a certain percentage change in the same way....which is a bit doubtful). The rich might work less and we'd lose their highly valuable output. But if not, if you assume that rich people get a lot of their income from rent-seeking and don't really create what their salaries suggest they do....welll....then taxing the poor instead is going to have a much bigger negative impact on the economy because far more economic activity is distorted by the taxes.
If only news publishers had some means to widely distribute small pieces of information such as URLs. Then they wouldn't have to pay telephone companies to publish their websites in phone books, and life would be so much better.
Sue? Well, hopefully, but it's not enough. Policemen and security guards should risk prison for this sort of thing. It's assault and robbery. And it's very important that police face very serious consequences, so that people photographing corrupt/criminal/prejudiced/abusive police are a little less at risk.
What IS wrong (and definitely not market oriented) is limited a visa-holder's ability to change employer. Employers must love visa restrictions (or, better still for dodgy employers, employees breaking immigration law who can't find legitimate work) on their staff because it stops them having to compete with other employers in conditions and wages. Then, in turn, local employees not subject to the restrictions have to compete with people who are and can be pushed around easily by employers. Visa restrictions are too often used as a sop to nationalists and anti-immigrant types, but they only make employing immigrants more attractive...
If your feelings get hurt every time someone calls you out on your religious convictions, either you're not confident enough of your religion or you need to stop believing in fantasies.
I think this neglects the transmission mechanism for religion. New believers don't believe because they're persuaded by argument. They're indoctrinated through social and moral mechanisms - a lot of serious and important people around them take their belief very seriously, the beliefs are treated with reference and respect, and there's a strong 'belief in belief', a sense that belief is the morally right thing to do. The environment to which impressionable people (children especially, but maybe adults with less predisposition for religious belief) are exposed is important. Religions which survive are religions which are good at tending to this transmission mechanism, and some do this by being good at making people feel disgust towards attacks on it. And, so, it's no surprise that there are people who get unreasonably upset and angry when this environment is polluted.
For the same reason it's very important that access to competing material is preserved. Indoctrinating others this way is an abuse of a person's position, one which goes on to cause its victims to abuse their position in turn. Keeping genuine discussion and exposure to alternative views available is vital in breaking this cycle of abuse.
By the way, you are missing part of the formula for GDP, it's the deflator that they are supposed to apply to discount inflation. Of-course their deflators are ridiculously low, I have an 'informative' post with many numbers and links in it here, which shows a few things about inflation and GDP.
The GDP deflater is not part of the calculation of a given years GDP expressed in that years price level. It's only used if you need to express it in another year's price level, as is necessary for calculating growth.
AFAIC GDP has been shrinking for a long time now in 2 ways.
1. The 'production' part of GDP is shrinking all the time. Look at the trade deficit numbers, here is a page with history on it in PDF or text. For the year 2011 the trade deficit was 559Billion dollars and it's growing all he time. Of-course the total personal consumption in USA is mostly on services, not on goods, in fact 2/3 of all consumption is services and only 1/3 is goods. 11Trillion was spent by US consumers in 2011, so about 3 Trillion was spent on goods and the rest was energy, food and services (like healthcare and education for example), so in that sense US consumer consumes mostly 'US' service. However if you look at the goods (go to Walmart and compare how many things are made in USA vs foreign made, like China), you'll find that most of the goods bought and sold (and even food, 90% of sea food comes from Asia) is made elsewhere.
All of GDP is the 'production' part. It's a measure of production within a given geographical area. If US consumers spend, say, $1tr more on imports then that makes no difference to the GDP figure. Remember: GDP=c+g+i+x-m.....adding $1tr to c (consumption) and $1tr to m (imports) leaves it unchanged.
2. The deflator that is used is reverse engineered to fit the propaganda. With the nominal and pre-deflator GDP being 2.9%, the deflator is set to be 1.6. (read the linked comment, I give quotes and links there), that's GDP revised down from 1.7% to 1.3% (post deflator) for the second quarter.
GDP is not a percentage. You can, of course, dispute the inflation statistics and hence the real growth rate, although you don't appear to have any good reason for doing so other than 'by my theory there damn well ought to be more inflation than there is'. This does not affect the percentage of GDP which is domestic consumption of domestically produced goods and services (the c-m figure). Nor does it make the statement I'm disputing ('GDP is 70% consumption of mostly foreign goods') make any sense.
70% of GDP could very well be consumption, at least in countries with unusually low government spending
- I am sorry, this sentence makes no sense. 70% of GDP is consumption, that's not because of low gov't consumption, the exact opposite is the case, that's because of very high consumption stimulated by gov't (especially non-existing interest rates and free money allocated by the Fed to the member banks, who then buy T-bills and bonds and allow gov't to keeps spending).
Percentages add to 100%. GDP is c+g+i+x-m. If c, consumption, is 70% of GDP and x-m is, say, -5% (about right for the US) then government spending, g, can't be higher than 35% of GDP and is almost certainly rather lower. 20%, say, which sounds reasonable for the US (given that g doesn't include pure transfers and that the US has relatively low government spending for a rich country).
You've conflated 'gov't consumption' (whatever that may be) with 'consumption stimulated by gov't'. Consumption of domestic goods by consumers is consumption of domestic goods by consumers, even if it's the indirect result of a government fiscal stimulus or central bank monetary stimulus. It still represents production in the US, and
Your guess is wrong (and by the way, GDP is 70% consumption of mostly foreign goods).
GDP is, by definition, equal to consumption of domestically produced goods, plus government spending, plus investment, plus exports, minus imports. 70% of GDP could very well be consumption, at least in countries with unusually low government spending, but perhaps you could explain how it could be mostly of foreign goods? Consuming foreign goods reduces GDP. It doesn't increase it. GDP is a production measure, not a consumption one. It's quite possible to have your population living in poverty despite enormous GDP - if you're investing or exporting all of it.
Or, alternatively, perhaps the judge is fully aware that he can't control information flow on the Internet, and that the case will only draw attention to it, but has been asked to enforce a local law and is doing so. If the law says 'this is illegal and this is the punishment' and a prosecutor prosecutes it, and the facts put before him show that the prosecutor is right, what is he supposed to do?
You don't even have to go that far. Criminalizing downloading is insane. It doesn't make sense, it cannot work. Example: someone posts a picture of their cat on any website, without mentioning distribution terms, anybody who downloads that picture is automatically at fault.
Erm, why? It's quite obvious that whoever uploaded their picture intended it to be available to the public. There's an implied licence. That's entirely different to downloading something which you know is created by someone for commercial gain, you know is sold by them for money, and doing so from a source you know to be illicit.
Taxes should indeed be used to modify behavior I don't like. High taxes on energy, tobacco and alcohol makes perfect sense to me, since I don't approve of their use
FTFY. And since we're taxing things we're not particularly fond of, let's lay some taxation on bibles, iPads, tofu, and fart tube mufflers. Who else wants in?
None of which are reasonably well established to cause harm to others. It makes sense to tax something when the cost to everyone from its consumption is more than the price the buyer pays. There will, of course, be a lot of political argument....but there is already. Just look at the list of VAT exemptions and reductions where I live (the UK), which cover things like books, domestic energy and children's clothes for purely political and income-redistribution reasons. Something like energy (or, rather, the emissions from power plants) is a good thing to tax because the harm to others is well established and it's quite non-specific in what it discourages (and so harder to use for imposing your views on others in the way that, say, a tax on evolution textbooks might be).
All taxes modify behaviour. It's one of the reasons taxes generally have an economic cost (the other being the cost of collecting them). You have to pay your taxes somehow, and yet most taxes are levied on things like income or sales which are generally desirable, or least not a bad thing per se. That then distorts behaviour in ways which are bad. It makes sense to levy taxes on things which have a social cost beyond that paid by the buyer so that taxes on everything else can be reduced. That means anything that emits pollution, anything which generates undesirable noise, anything which reduces the value of landscapes (and cityscapes) for others, anything which imposes accident risks on others and so on.
The difficult bit, of course, is measuring the costs and correcting for the difference in distribution the changes would make. But you don't necessarily have to get it exactly right just to do better.
(Actually, there's one tax which doesn't affect behaviour: one which is purely random. Or, at least, it provides no incentive to change economic behaviour....I doubt that wouldn't extend to political behaviour).
Maybe it's hard to imagine something that leads to an arrest in itself....but consider articles on explosives, drugs or poisons that might be either additional evidence or trigger monitoring of an individual. I'd be more worried about the latter (because of the lack of some other evidence).....the UK police have not been above, for example, putting car number plates on a 'stop this whenever you see it' list because they've been seen at demonstrations.
So an author can do the work 'for hire' for his own corporation and get preferential treatment? It's not a line you can easily draw. Nor is it obvious that there's any utility in creating a 'you must be paid up front or via a corporation for you children to inherit what you earn' rule has. It'll just result in either avoidance or (especially older/ill) authors getting ripped off when their works happen to become super-successful. Leave it up to authors and publishers (or record labels, or whatever) to decide how to split the financial risks - or if you're going to tip the scales, at least tip them in the author's direction and shorten the total length of copyright instead.
Ending copyright on the author's death comes with a lot of problems. Suppose you commission a new website for your company and your web designer dies the next week. Is your site now out of copyright, free to be copied or impersonated by others? Also consider the elderly author looking for a publisher who will now be discriminated against compared to a younger author of an equally good work.
Copyright serves various purposes, not just to protect music. Personal correspondence, for example, is protected by it, even if there's no intention of commercial use by the author. And the paying of royalties may be the only way to resolve the inevitable dispute between an author who thinks his work is marvellous and worth millions and a publisher who says it's terrible and he'll only pay a little. And why would it be OK for children to inherit an author's estate if the author were paid up-front, but not OK if the work was paid for through royalties? It sounds like you have a more general problem with the idea of inheritance. The length of copyright is worth arguing with, but a changing the fundamentals is not an easy thing to get right.
Yes. London is heavily overcrowded, the housing is tiny and very expensive, the transport infrastructure expensive and congested (including trains). Trying to start a new cluster of an industry there is insane at all, especially one full of startups that can and do benefit a great deal from a very low cost environment.
But businesses like London because there's a big pool of employees to choose from, and a big pool of suppliers, accountants, lawyers, banks and so on. And it's the people at the top who earn higher salaries who choose the location, including older people who are encumbent housing-stock owners, and they don't suffer as much from London misery. Employees can benefit because there are plenty of employers to choose from, and because spouses are likely to be able to find work in their own fields, too. It's a network effect.
Some people love the urban environment, especially amongst the young, but others utterly hate it, especially if you need space for a family. From a quality of life perspective it's a mess if you're not in the first group, or just need some space. And pretty much anyone whose non-work life revolves around what they do at home or in a natural environment rather than shopping, drinking and the arts is likely to find themselves in the second group. There isn't enough housing in London to house someone for every job, so at least some people are always going to have miserable commutes. Despite the high prices there are still a lot of poor people (often in state sponsored housing), and so also the crime and dodgy behaviour that comes with that (because those people usually end up poor, not the other way round). The air quality is terrible, it's noisy, dirty, traffic-choked and everywhere is perpetually busy.
IMO, it'd be much more sensible to encourage a cluster somewhere else - and to encourage whole industries to relocate, as the BBC is doing to some extent by moving a lot of production elsewhere. There's already a cluster around Cambridge that could be built on (Cambridge isn't cheap, but it's not as expensive or out-of-reach of less expensive areas than London). Outside the South East entirely might be even better. It's just not sustainable to keep on adding industries in London. There isn't enough transport infrastructure or building space. Even the water supply is constrained.
Nonsense. You can easily have all three if the office is put somewhere where there isn't the level of competition for space there is in London. If 'close to the centre of a globally reknowned metropolitan city centre' were in the list you'd have a point, but it isn't. It doesn't need to be in a city at all to meet that list.
Yes. Human feelings about the situation will almost certainly never be reconciled to reality.
A human mind is something which drops out of the operation of a human brain, and it's the presence of a human mind that makes possible immoral acts against that entity (counting mutilation of corpses, etc., to be immoral acts against surviving family members and suchlike). It's not murder to turn off a life support machine attached to a human body with no brain function. It's not murder to destroy a corpse.
But...a human mind doesn't pop in to existence at some well defined point. You could pinpoint pretty much any time between the first neurons firing and the late teenaged years if you stretch it far enough. It's not, itself, a well defined entity in any case (there's no way you locate the first ape, sometime in the past, who has a human mind but whose parents do not).
I suspect that any logically and scientifically coherent point will end up either being wildly socially unacceptable (eg, 2 years after birth), or require treating non-human animals like pigs as being as deserving of protection as young children. And I suspect that any sort of gradations of person-ness will also be forever socially unacceptable, at least as applied to humans.
The boundaries could maybe narrow very slightly - pretending that a foetus without a single neuron is a person is as daft as pretending a corpse's fingernail is a person - but the distinction will remain forever a social concept, fuzzy and argued over.
Slashdot Mirror
Current legal liability is split between drivers and their insurers, with a little left over for governments (eg, bad road maintenance/design) and manufacturers (mechanical defects). Driverless cars could move this liability around, pushing it from drivers and their insurers and onto manufacturers and their insurers, but won't actually overall increase it unless the driverless cars crash more (and, of course, we all hope for the opposite). So, the price of the cars might go up but they'll still be attractive (especially to the riskiest drivers with the most expensive cars) because the driver will save more than the extra cost on his own insurance.
Well....maybe maths rather than science. And both are subjects of study, not kinds of people. Nothing in CS or SE is secret. It's not sugery, or orchestral conducting, or flying. Nothing needs access to special knowledge, or special resources, or special people. You don't need cadavers or supervised training, nor an orchestra, or an aeroplane. Any competent developer should be able to learn enough computer science to do his job (and more, out of curiosity), just as he's expected to learn new tools, languages and problem domains. To expect a big difference in the skills and capabilities of two people many years of working in industry after they've graduated from CS vs SE courses is foolish.
Oh, they're meta-shills. People paid by the shills to accuse everyone in sight of being a shill, thus destroying the credibility of shill accusations.
People respond to incentives - including price incentives. If the price of using fossil fuels is held below its cost (ie, with extraction, refining, distribution, safety and local and global pollution costs included) then decisions such as which car to buy, how many warehouses and what size vehicles a retailer should use, which mode of transport to use, how to design industrial processes, how to build and many others will be affected. (Don't underestimate the non-CO2 costs of pollution...really....they're very serious and yet have been pushed aside in the public debate). Supply-side, decisions on types of generating capacity, energy research and political intervention (subsidies and planning, for example) will be taken, too. Some of these decisions will have fuel-use implications for decades.
If every country in the world were to impose carbon taxes which approximate the extra costs then it wouldn't be a problem. If the US were to impose those taxes and limit production (and imports) to its own needs and those of other countries with similar rules maybe it would be mitigated a great deal. But I'm sure this is politically impossible, nationally and internationally.
The politics of the US virtually guarantee that the US can't use this fuel responsibly. The politics of anywhere virtually guarantee it, but in the US it's worse, and is more serious because of the size of US pollution. It's access to it will cause it to harm its current and future self, and the rest of humanity. But there'll be good aspects, too - using less oil from dodgy places is good (and oil revenues in dodgy places often cause political problems, too, by making politics the way to get rich, by gaining access to oil revenues, rather than business). So is using gas instead of oil.
It's a coordination problem in an oligopolistic market. They might all have liked to charge more, but without collusion they can't all increase their prices at once in an agreed way. Once something happens that lets them increase prices in a coordinated way then there isn't an incentive to reduce them again - each company may know it would benefit from reducing its prices if it could guarantee no response from its competitors, but they all know that their competitors will match them, wiping out the benefit to them. And so prices can remain high, close to the monopolistic price (but not higher). The fewer companies there are the worse it gets - if there were dozens and many potential new entrants it'd be almost certain that someone else would reduce their prices anyway (or gradually 'cheat'), so any one player might as well do so immediately to try and grab an advantage.
I suppose we have to hope that this implicit cooperation will break down or be eroded eventually. By inflation, say, or the introduction of new products that are slightly cheaper each time. Or, maybe more likely, that it'll be disrupted by SSDs.
There are tighter rules concerning the CVV. Merchants are never allowed to store, and don't need it to process refunds or continuing payments. Possibly it's not on the swipe, either, I'm not sure. So you could obtain the 16 digits from a stolen merchant database/backup or a sneaky swipe under the table, but not the CVV. That's the theory, anyway. It's never seemed like the strongest security measure on earth....
Correlation doesn't imply causation.
TFA is claiming that there isn't a correlation, not that there is one. That's sort of the point - that, having looked, there's no real sign that reducing top marginal tax rates will increase GDP growth (or reduce it). (There's actually a small correlation between higher top tax rates and growth, but not a significant one). This does rather question whether taking the cost of increased inequality in the hope of it increasing growth is a sensible strategy.
Usually the reasonning is that since they will have more money, they will consume more and that will help the economy.
This reasoning doesn't work. On the one hand, if you don't tax, the money remains with them (rich or poor) and they spend all of it (at best). On the other the government takes it and spends all of it. It's still spent. Directly, taking money away and spending could be argued to stimulate the economy, not the opposite, because it's guaranteed to all be spent.
The potential positive effect of cutting taxes is through changing incentives to work and getting rid of dead-weight losses. eg, you'd pay $15 to have your house cleaned, a cleaner would accept $10, but there'd be taxes of $6 so it doesn't happen.
Now.....compare raising taxes by taxing the rich (so a few people are subject to these discintives) to raising taxes by taxing the poor (so a lot of people are subject to them). If you assume that someone's contribution is genuinely proportionate to their income then maybe it wouldn't make much difference (assuming rich and poor respond to a certain percentage change in the same way....which is a bit doubtful). The rich might work less and we'd lose their highly valuable output. But if not, if you assume that rich people get a lot of their income from rent-seeking and don't really create what their salaries suggest they do....welll....then taxing the poor instead is going to have a much bigger negative impact on the economy because far more economic activity is distorted by the taxes.
If only news publishers had some means to widely distribute small pieces of information such as URLs. Then they wouldn't have to pay telephone companies to publish their websites in phone books, and life would be so much better.
Sue? Well, hopefully, but it's not enough. Policemen and security guards should risk prison for this sort of thing. It's assault and robbery. And it's very important that police face very serious consequences, so that people photographing corrupt/criminal/prejudiced/abusive police are a little less at risk.
What IS wrong (and definitely not market oriented) is limited a visa-holder's ability to change employer. Employers must love visa restrictions (or, better still for dodgy employers, employees breaking immigration law who can't find legitimate work) on their staff because it stops them having to compete with other employers in conditions and wages. Then, in turn, local employees not subject to the restrictions have to compete with people who are and can be pushed around easily by employers. Visa restrictions are too often used as a sop to nationalists and anti-immigrant types, but they only make employing immigrants more attractive...
If your feelings get hurt every time someone calls you out on your religious convictions, either you're not confident enough of your religion or you need to stop believing in fantasies.
I think this neglects the transmission mechanism for religion. New believers don't believe because they're persuaded by argument. They're indoctrinated through social and moral mechanisms - a lot of serious and important people around them take their belief very seriously, the beliefs are treated with reference and respect, and there's a strong 'belief in belief', a sense that belief is the morally right thing to do. The environment to which impressionable people (children especially, but maybe adults with less predisposition for religious belief) are exposed is important. Religions which survive are religions which are good at tending to this transmission mechanism, and some do this by being good at making people feel disgust towards attacks on it. And, so, it's no surprise that there are people who get unreasonably upset and angry when this environment is polluted.
For the same reason it's very important that access to competing material is preserved. Indoctrinating others this way is an abuse of a person's position, one which goes on to cause its victims to abuse their position in turn. Keeping genuine discussion and exposure to alternative views available is vital in breaking this cycle of abuse.
By the way, you are missing part of the formula for GDP, it's the deflator that they are supposed to apply to discount inflation. Of-course their deflators are ridiculously low, I have an 'informative' post with many numbers and links in it here, which shows a few things about inflation and GDP.
The GDP deflater is not part of the calculation of a given years GDP expressed in that years price level. It's only used if you need to express it in another year's price level, as is necessary for calculating growth.
AFAIC GDP has been shrinking for a long time now in 2 ways.
1. The 'production' part of GDP is shrinking all the time. Look at the trade deficit numbers, here is a page with history on it in PDF or text. For the year 2011 the trade deficit was 559Billion dollars and it's growing all he time. Of-course the total personal consumption in USA is mostly on services, not on goods, in fact 2/3 of all consumption is services and only 1/3 is goods. 11Trillion was spent by US consumers in 2011, so about 3 Trillion was spent on goods and the rest was energy, food and services (like healthcare and education for example), so in that sense US consumer consumes mostly 'US' service. However if you look at the goods (go to Walmart and compare how many things are made in USA vs foreign made, like China), you'll find that most of the goods bought and sold (and even food, 90% of sea food comes from Asia) is made elsewhere.
All of GDP is the 'production' part. It's a measure of production within a given geographical area. If US consumers spend, say, $1tr more on imports then that makes no difference to the GDP figure. Remember: GDP=c+g+i+x-m.....adding $1tr to c (consumption) and $1tr to m (imports) leaves it unchanged.
2. The deflator that is used is reverse engineered to fit the propaganda. With the nominal and pre-deflator GDP being 2.9%, the deflator is set to be 1.6. (read the linked comment, I give quotes and links there), that's GDP revised down from 1.7% to 1.3% (post deflator) for the second quarter.
GDP is not a percentage. You can, of course, dispute the inflation statistics and hence the real growth rate, although you don't appear to have any good reason for doing so other than 'by my theory there damn well ought to be more inflation than there is'. This does not affect the percentage of GDP which is domestic consumption of domestically produced goods and services (the c-m figure). Nor does it make the statement I'm disputing ('GDP is 70% consumption of mostly foreign goods') make any sense.
70% of GDP could very well be consumption, at least in countries with unusually low government spending
- I am sorry, this sentence makes no sense. 70% of GDP is consumption, that's not because of low gov't consumption, the exact opposite is the case, that's because of very high consumption stimulated by gov't (especially non-existing interest rates and free money allocated by the Fed to the member banks, who then buy T-bills and bonds and allow gov't to keeps spending).
Percentages add to 100%. GDP is c+g+i+x-m. If c, consumption, is 70% of GDP and x-m is, say, -5% (about right for the US) then government spending, g, can't be higher than 35% of GDP and is almost certainly rather lower. 20%, say, which sounds reasonable for the US (given that g doesn't include pure transfers and that the US has relatively low government spending for a rich country).
You've conflated 'gov't consumption' (whatever that may be) with 'consumption stimulated by gov't'. Consumption of domestic goods by consumers is consumption of domestic goods by consumers, even if it's the indirect result of a government fiscal stimulus or central bank monetary stimulus. It still represents production in the US, and
Your guess is wrong (and by the way, GDP is 70% consumption of mostly foreign goods).
GDP is, by definition, equal to consumption of domestically produced goods, plus government spending, plus investment, plus exports, minus imports. 70% of GDP could very well be consumption, at least in countries with unusually low government spending, but perhaps you could explain how it could be mostly of foreign goods? Consuming foreign goods reduces GDP. It doesn't increase it. GDP is a production measure, not a consumption one. It's quite possible to have your population living in poverty despite enormous GDP - if you're investing or exporting all of it.
Or, alternatively, perhaps the judge is fully aware that he can't control information flow on the Internet, and that the case will only draw attention to it, but has been asked to enforce a local law and is doing so. If the law says 'this is illegal and this is the punishment' and a prosecutor prosecutes it, and the facts put before him show that the prosecutor is right, what is he supposed to do?
You don't even have to go that far. Criminalizing downloading is insane. It doesn't make sense, it cannot work. Example: someone posts a picture of their cat on any website, without mentioning distribution terms, anybody who downloads that picture is automatically at fault.
Erm, why? It's quite obvious that whoever uploaded their picture intended it to be available to the public. There's an implied licence. That's entirely different to downloading something which you know is created by someone for commercial gain, you know is sold by them for money, and doing so from a source you know to be illicit.
Taxes should indeed be used to modify behavior I don't like. High taxes on energy, tobacco and alcohol makes perfect sense to me, since I don't approve of their use
FTFY. And since we're taxing things we're not particularly fond of, let's lay some taxation on bibles, iPads, tofu, and fart tube mufflers. Who else wants in?
None of which are reasonably well established to cause harm to others. It makes sense to tax something when the cost to everyone from its consumption is more than the price the buyer pays. There will, of course, be a lot of political argument....but there is already. Just look at the list of VAT exemptions and reductions where I live (the UK), which cover things like books, domestic energy and children's clothes for purely political and income-redistribution reasons. Something like energy (or, rather, the emissions from power plants) is a good thing to tax because the harm to others is well established and it's quite non-specific in what it discourages (and so harder to use for imposing your views on others in the way that, say, a tax on evolution textbooks might be).
All taxes modify behaviour. It's one of the reasons taxes generally have an economic cost (the other being the cost of collecting them). You have to pay your taxes somehow, and yet most taxes are levied on things like income or sales which are generally desirable, or least not a bad thing per se. That then distorts behaviour in ways which are bad. It makes sense to levy taxes on things which have a social cost beyond that paid by the buyer so that taxes on everything else can be reduced. That means anything that emits pollution, anything which generates undesirable noise, anything which reduces the value of landscapes (and cityscapes) for others, anything which imposes accident risks on others and so on.
The difficult bit, of course, is measuring the costs and correcting for the difference in distribution the changes would make. But you don't necessarily have to get it exactly right just to do better.
(Actually, there's one tax which doesn't affect behaviour: one which is purely random. Or, at least, it provides no incentive to change economic behaviour....I doubt that wouldn't extend to political behaviour).
And, ummm, are there many people with BitCoins who would prefer Pesos instead? If not, who are you going to trade with?
Maybe it's hard to imagine something that leads to an arrest in itself....but consider articles on explosives, drugs or poisons that might be either additional evidence or trigger monitoring of an individual. I'd be more worried about the latter (because of the lack of some other evidence).....the UK police have not been above, for example, putting car number plates on a 'stop this whenever you see it' list because they've been seen at demonstrations.
So an author can do the work 'for hire' for his own corporation and get preferential treatment? It's not a line you can easily draw. Nor is it obvious that there's any utility in creating a 'you must be paid up front or via a corporation for you children to inherit what you earn' rule has. It'll just result in either avoidance or (especially older/ill) authors getting ripped off when their works happen to become super-successful. Leave it up to authors and publishers (or record labels, or whatever) to decide how to split the financial risks - or if you're going to tip the scales, at least tip them in the author's direction and shorten the total length of copyright instead.
Ending copyright on the author's death comes with a lot of problems. Suppose you commission a new website for your company and your web designer dies the next week. Is your site now out of copyright, free to be copied or impersonated by others? Also consider the elderly author looking for a publisher who will now be discriminated against compared to a younger author of an equally good work.
Copyright serves various purposes, not just to protect music. Personal correspondence, for example, is protected by it, even if there's no intention of commercial use by the author. And the paying of royalties may be the only way to resolve the inevitable dispute between an author who thinks his work is marvellous and worth millions and a publisher who says it's terrible and he'll only pay a little. And why would it be OK for children to inherit an author's estate if the author were paid up-front, but not OK if the work was paid for through royalties? It sounds like you have a more general problem with the idea of inheritance. The length of copyright is worth arguing with, but a changing the fundamentals is not an easy thing to get right.
Yes. London is heavily overcrowded, the housing is tiny and very expensive, the transport infrastructure expensive and congested (including trains). Trying to start a new cluster of an industry there is insane at all, especially one full of startups that can and do benefit a great deal from a very low cost environment.
But businesses like London because there's a big pool of employees to choose from, and a big pool of suppliers, accountants, lawyers, banks and so on. And it's the people at the top who earn higher salaries who choose the location, including older people who are encumbent housing-stock owners, and they don't suffer as much from London misery. Employees can benefit because there are plenty of employers to choose from, and because spouses are likely to be able to find work in their own fields, too. It's a network effect.
Some people love the urban environment, especially amongst the young, but others utterly hate it, especially if you need space for a family. From a quality of life perspective it's a mess if you're not in the first group, or just need some space. And pretty much anyone whose non-work life revolves around what they do at home or in a natural environment rather than shopping, drinking and the arts is likely to find themselves in the second group. There isn't enough housing in London to house someone for every job, so at least some people are always going to have miserable commutes. Despite the high prices there are still a lot of poor people (often in state sponsored housing), and so also the crime and dodgy behaviour that comes with that (because those people usually end up poor, not the other way round). The air quality is terrible, it's noisy, dirty, traffic-choked and everywhere is perpetually busy.
IMO, it'd be much more sensible to encourage a cluster somewhere else - and to encourage whole industries to relocate, as the BBC is doing to some extent by moving a lot of production elsewhere. There's already a cluster around Cambridge that could be built on (Cambridge isn't cheap, but it's not as expensive or out-of-reach of less expensive areas than London). Outside the South East entirely might be even better. It's just not sustainable to keep on adding industries in London. There isn't enough transport infrastructure or building space. Even the water supply is constrained.
Nonsense. You can easily have all three if the office is put somewhere where there isn't the level of competition for space there is in London. If 'close to the centre of a globally reknowned metropolitan city centre' were in the list you'd have a point, but it isn't. It doesn't need to be in a city at all to meet that list.
Yes. Human feelings about the situation will almost certainly never be reconciled to reality.
A human mind is something which drops out of the operation of a human brain, and it's the presence of a human mind that makes possible immoral acts against that entity (counting mutilation of corpses, etc., to be immoral acts against surviving family members and suchlike). It's not murder to turn off a life support machine attached to a human body with no brain function. It's not murder to destroy a corpse.
But...a human mind doesn't pop in to existence at some well defined point. You could pinpoint pretty much any time between the first neurons firing and the late teenaged years if you stretch it far enough. It's not, itself, a well defined entity in any case (there's no way you locate the first ape, sometime in the past, who has a human mind but whose parents do not).
I suspect that any logically and scientifically coherent point will end up either being wildly socially unacceptable (eg, 2 years after birth), or require treating non-human animals like pigs as being as deserving of protection as young children. And I suspect that any sort of gradations of person-ness will also be forever socially unacceptable, at least as applied to humans.
The boundaries could maybe narrow very slightly - pretending that a foetus without a single neuron is a person is as daft as pretending a corpse's fingernail is a person - but the distinction will remain forever a social concept, fuzzy and argued over.