You get the same problems with state-owned industries as with private ones. It's not a 'government vs private' problem. It's a problem of having the same people who benefit be the same people who have to decide whether the damage to others is large enough to stop the project. Neither private corporations nor governments should regulate themselves.
An interesting parallel would be people in the US who allow seditious comments harmful to public order in China (or so they'll say) to be posted on their websites, which are then accessed by Chinese people. Will China now feel a whole lot happier about arresting Americans for this should they go anywhere where China has enough influence, or have their flights diverted? Or, indeed, just accuse Americans of stuff to keep them out or stop them selling stuff there.
Not being able to disable them does come with a few problems, though - enough that the 'cautious' thing for a force to do is allow it. Police come in to contact with a lot of people who really don't want their identities, locations or information disclosed for very good reasons - from informants to domestic violence victims. Compulsory cameras does risk getting more 'I don't know nuffink' answers and fewer crime reports, not to mention the potential shitstorm if pictures of a celebrity, politician or victim get leaked or sold to the more dodgy media or other criminals.
I don't think this works well as an argument (especially when it invokes the Nazis) because most people dismiss the possibility of a really bad government like the Nazis getting in to power in their own countries. It's not the only one, though. Government powers are exercised through those who make them up. Those individuals can do bad things. In the UK, animal rights activists at the DVLA used driving licence records to locate a target (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1475082/DVLA-mole-jailed-for-aiding-guinea-pig-farm-activists.html), and police have a history of selling information to journalists and criminals (eg, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8713194/Hundreds-of-police-officers-caught-illegally-accessing-criminal-records-computer.html). People are just more convinced by low-level everyday corruption and misuse by untrustworthy individuals than by by statements such as 'what if the Nazis come back?'. At least they are in the UK, anyway
That tends to come with another problem: the government who should be regulating the industry also runs it. That can lead to governments using laws to maintain revenue, and not using laws which would be good for the functioning of those industries but would lead to political embarrassment. No government will pass tough environmental or consumer protection laws covering their industry, for example, if they're worried they're only going to be embarrassed later by failing to meet them themselves.
This seems to be being pushed by rather conservative types, not by the UK population or government coalition as a whole. Bear in mind that the Conservative party here is feeling under pressure from the even more conservative anti-EU UKIP, and have a lot of unhappy backbenchers currently busy being revolting over gay marriage. Also bear in mind that there's quite a big generational attitude difference to things like this, with younger people being a lot more liberal but not well represented politically. There's been a lot of conflation of child abuse, child porn and adult porn in debate and reporting, which only makes me think even more that this is as much about older generations dislike of younger generations sexual attitudes as it is about child porn or online 'safety'.
Do you have a good reason for believing that? I've heard the same about UK housing repeatedly, and a quick search finds this as an example: http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/as/cebe/projects/towards_sustainable_housing.pdf (try page 16). I think that UK building conventions (ie, bricks and tiles) and government campaigns have convinced the UK public that the difference between a well and poorly insulated building is putting a think layer of foam between two existing brick walls, shoving a couple of feet of loft insulation in and putting in double glazing made out of bog standard glass. It's possible to do a LOT better than that.
Also, don't write off wood (though, personally, I don't like it aesthetically compared to brick/stone). You can put a LOT more insulation between two layers of wood than you'll get in a UK brick wall cavity. And I once measured the outside surface temperatures on the least well insulated and constructed part of my house (an extension which is part a thin looking wooden wall, and part apparently solid brick wall - no cavity, but thicker than the wood). The wooden part had the lower outside temperature.
The politics must be fantastic.......break up an asteroid heading for New York and send some of the pieces to China/Russia/somewhere that could moan with violence. Or, of course, vice versa if the US legitimizes it.
There will eventually be few people to choose from who don't have something in their online histories that can be used against - the lack of an online history being one of them. People, especially people recruiting for a position like their own, have a natural tendency to recruit in their own image. People value the things they value in themselves, and try to minimize the importance of things they don't have themselves. And they accept the mistakes they've made themselves. This could become just another way we get cultural homogeneity in organizations. The socially dominant compulsive binge drinker with a dozen driving convictions will accept someone a little like himself, but maybe not the former bullying victim with a shoplifting conviction, or the one who appears to have done nothing but study.
Wouldn't it make more sense to avoid it looking like India even though Pakistan will blame India, thus making Pakistan's government/army look even more like a bunch of paranoid loons who'd compromise their own politics and security for the sake of being militant over India? Pakistan seem to prefer risking losing territory to the Taliban (by prioritizing India) and doing deals with militants who wish them harm to bait India, rather than actually trying to stabilize their own country. I think it makes no sense for India to encourage an unstable Pakistan (and it's certainly illegitimate), but it's hardly difficult....
Sometimes those sites might access an API by talking to a single shared API endpoint for the group, which might then not work well at all. It's possible to make it work (with proxies, or by not using cookies at the cost of making your site annoyingly forgetful for a user, or by using some JS to fetch the cookie value over the API and store it as a first-party cookie then pass it to each API call as a parameter), but there must be existing sites that weren't written with this in mind. They'll probably be broken already with Safari, though
There's no 'value added' to tax here (except for the stockbrokers services). VAT is not charged on sales of second-hand assets of all kinds, which includes houses, cars and shares, for this reason. The seller has not added any value. It sounds like what you want is really just a capital gains tax. I'd agree with you: you should pay the same on capital gains as on any other kind of income. But this should be individuals only, not companies (because the companies gain will either be a loss somewhere else, or become an individual's income someday).
The problem with a VAT system is that it is a flat tax, which means all individuals are taxes equally on what they buy irrespective of income.
The structure of corporate taxes isn't better in this regard, and is often worse. The poor pensioner with a few stocks gets her dividends with corporate taxes taken off (assuming they're actually paid in the first place...), and so does the wealthy investor. In the UK at least, owners of businesses are likely to pay less tax than typical employees overall because they can manipulate the structure much more than an employee can. In the UK that might mean receiving their income as dividends, which have a lower income tax rate and don't attract NI (a 'payroll tax'), or for the adventurous it might mean tax avoidance structures involving tax havens. I imagine it's similar elsewhere: extra flexibility enables avoidance.
My opinion is that corporate taxes are just too hard to define well to be worth doing anyway. eg, I work for a (very) small company with shareholders in the UK, US and Brazil, people working for it in the UK, US, Argentina, India and the Ukraine and custom/potential custom in various places in South America. Which government should collect the corporate taxes? Whose rules do you apply? Defining profit as a whole is hard enough, physically locating it can be an exercise in futility. Instead, I think it'd be better to tax profit when it becomes an individual's income (and to tax all kinds of income the same - salary, royalties, dividends, interest, capital gains, whatever). Far fewer individuals have an ambiguous location, it's ultimately individuals who benefit from government services, it's easier to define an individual's income and it's possible to make the tax rates progressive. And, of course, if you eliminate a whole layer of taxation you can eliminate a whole layer of avoidance, distorted behaviour and bureaucracy.
Just because it's always possible someone is behaving illegally doesn't mean that people should accept this and not use legal means to attack it and those who do it.
It would be like sending a message on a post card then getting mad that people can see what you wrote, copy it, and do whatever they want with the copy.
Or, how about getting mad when you walk down the street without so much as basic body-armour and someone shoots you? None of this excuses illegal behaviour.
That's one reason the EU was created. Must be harder still in the US, with so many states. However, you can probably miss some jurisdictions. You probably only need to worry about those places you have a presence, plus maybe the local bullies (eg, the US in much of the 'West', possibly Russia if you're somewhere like Ukraine or Belarus). A western Internet company which isn't targeting or operating in China probably doesn't need to care about Chinese laws.
I think that if you did do that, at least in certain countries, you'd discover it to be a very good way of making yourself the target of the next extrajudicial killing by the US state. Unless you think you could do all that without it being obvious to surveillance or any nearby intelligence services?
Consider breastfeeding. (Eww, no, not like that). Very young babies have to be fed VERY frequently - like every few hours, 24 hours a day. That's one thing the father can't do so well, not without sacrificing the benefits of breast feeding.
In the UK new mothers can have a whole year off work, and fathers much less (something like two weeks). The disruption and costs to employers is actually one of the drivers of discrimination against women. There's been talk of parents being able to share the leave however they like, which sounds like a much better principal to me, but I suspect it'll still be mostly women who take it.
Consider a company which owns dairy farms, a cheesemaker and shops. They'd pay 5% of the final selling price (which would, of course, ultimately come from customers). Now consider a set of independent farmers, selling to a number of independent cheesemakers, selling to a number of different shops. Those people don't pay 5% of the final selling price, they pay more because they pay several times, and need to collect the extra from customers. So, you've just created a competitive pressure which favours large vertically integrated businesses over small or horizontally integrated businesses. I don't think that's a good thing. This is why VAT is charged on value added, not sale prices.
I have actually carried each week's grocery shopping home from a shop for several years, and I did indeed sometimes weigh it and get weights close to that. It's possible, though not so nice and you have to be very careful what you buy, and most people wouldn't attempt it (although I'd still encourage people not to drive short distances like that). The big problem, however, is not weight, it's damage to what you're carrying. Try buying a few kg of fruit, several litres of milk in plastic bottles, lettuces, bunches of spinach, bags of flour, boxes of chocolates, herbs growing in pots, fish fillets, bunches of cut flowers and assorted other things which shouldn't be compressed, squeezed, stretched, punctured, turned upside down or generally mistreated. You have to limit how much soft stuff you buy, and you have to plan things so that you don't end up having to buy, say, three different types of flour in one week's trip.
Things you product yourself are just as much a part of economic output as things someone else makes for you. Subsistence farming, for example, is recognized by economists as part of an economy's output, and one of the known problems with GDP statistics is that they typically don't include it because it's hard to measure. 'Imputed rent' - effectively, rent you pay to yourself to use the house you own - usually IS included in GDP statistics, by the way: http://www.bea.gov/faq/?faq_id=488
You'll probably find that if I DID accept your carpentry in payment for my gardening it would, technically, be just as subject to income taxes whether we use money to mediate our exchange or not. You can't avoid taxes just by accepting payment in kind (although can often evade them, because the authorities would be unlikely to bother us over an informal arrangement like that).
I deliberately left money out of my example to keep it simple, and because people tend to get hung up on money when thinking about economics and not look beneath it. An economy - money included - is a control system for individual decisions about economic activity, and it should be judged on the quality of those decisions. Whether we do our own carpentry/gardening or each others is one of the outputs of that control system. Most of the time when an exchange like that is considered (or, usually, a much more complex exchange spreading across many people interacting in many markets across time) it will be mediated by money. And when it IS mediated by money - and markets, and tax systems - the behaviour that the economy spits out will be what I described. We won't exchange tasks, it'll be the WRONG behaviour efficiency-wise, and it'll be because of taxation.
Say a company needs their office lawn mowing and rather than pay a gardening company they do it in-house. They will need an new employee as no-one else has any spare time, but say they have a lot of lawn and from a purely material view it works out as efficient as having the gardening company do it. Tax benefit? Not really. They may save a small amount of money but the amount they save will go towards their before-tax profits and they will end up having to pay the same amount of taxes as if they outsourced. By the end of it the only way to save money is if they can do it more efficiently than the other company.
This isn't really relevant to my example. The two situations (employee or outsourced) would, of course, be equally efficient if the decisions the economy spits out are the same - the same person doing the same task. It obviously doesn't matter if the money moves around one way or another if the physical outcome is identical.
To fit my example in to your scenario, suppose that an office would like their lawn mowing and that it's worth up to $300 to them. And suppose the employee/company would do it for $250. With no tax the exchange takes place. With a tax of 25% it doesn't, and that's the wrong decision for an economy (not an individual manager) to make. This does, of course, leave out certain problems....such as that it makes no sense to say that an office or company would like anything. I should also point out that in real life the company could find ways to do it less efficiently whilst saving money. eg, they could pressure their salaried sysadmins (who, shall we say, are not good at lawn mowing) in to doing it for free as unpaid overtime. This would use MORE resources (labour) for the same outcome, but has the side-effect of moving consumption from lawn mowing employee to shareholders. It would be an economically suboptimal decision, and a failure of the economic system.
Not only is no-one good at everything, and not only might a mix of skills be helpful in itself, but also IIRC teams with a mix of people who think differently perform better (there's some research on this sort of thing, but I don't really know or remember it very well, so do your own searches if you care about it). It might not be so great to have an algorithm - or a person, for that matter - which always picks similar people. I guess that's a downside of the friend-of-a-friend approach to hiring, too.
Becoming a competent bioengineer or aero engineer is likely to require special equipment and a lot of practical experience that's hard to come by. Software developers don't generally need that. 'Self taught' doesn't mean that someone hasn't read the same books and papers, or learnt the same material, as someone might have done following an official course. Mostly what the course adds is third-party validation. Also, think about just how much of that knowledge is really retained by the typical graduate, and just how applicable what they've learnt really is. Personally, I wouldn't trust a graduate straight out of university to design a plane, either....I'd rather have someone well respected by their peers and with a history of good work.
And again, oddly enough, some of the best indicators were clear, intelligent, structured English and an interest in music.
Those would be good correlates. The English skills are an indication that they can read very well (useful for background research) and communicate (also really useful), and music skills are often associated with ability in math and logic; they appear to use the same area of the brain.
English skills could also be about attention to detail and caring about the quality of what you do. And both, but especially music, could be about not just being able to focus for long periods on one, solitary task, building it up a little at a time until it works, but of actually getting satisfaction from it. ie, it could be substantially an indicator of introversion.
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You get the same problems with state-owned industries as with private ones. It's not a 'government vs private' problem. It's a problem of having the same people who benefit be the same people who have to decide whether the damage to others is large enough to stop the project. Neither private corporations nor governments should regulate themselves.
An interesting parallel would be people in the US who allow seditious comments harmful to public order in China (or so they'll say) to be posted on their websites, which are then accessed by Chinese people. Will China now feel a whole lot happier about arresting Americans for this should they go anywhere where China has enough influence, or have their flights diverted? Or, indeed, just accuse Americans of stuff to keep them out or stop them selling stuff there.
Not being able to disable them does come with a few problems, though - enough that the 'cautious' thing for a force to do is allow it. Police come in to contact with a lot of people who really don't want their identities, locations or information disclosed for very good reasons - from informants to domestic violence victims. Compulsory cameras does risk getting more 'I don't know nuffink' answers and fewer crime reports, not to mention the potential shitstorm if pictures of a celebrity, politician or victim get leaked or sold to the more dodgy media or other criminals.
I don't think this works well as an argument (especially when it invokes the Nazis) because most people dismiss the possibility of a really bad government like the Nazis getting in to power in their own countries. It's not the only one, though. Government powers are exercised through those who make them up. Those individuals can do bad things. In the UK, animal rights activists at the DVLA used driving licence records to locate a target (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1475082/DVLA-mole-jailed-for-aiding-guinea-pig-farm-activists.html), and police have a history of selling information to journalists and criminals (eg, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8713194/Hundreds-of-police-officers-caught-illegally-accessing-criminal-records-computer.html). People are just more convinced by low-level everyday corruption and misuse by untrustworthy individuals than by by statements such as 'what if the Nazis come back?'. At least they are in the UK, anyway
That tends to come with another problem: the government who should be regulating the industry also runs it. That can lead to governments using laws to maintain revenue, and not using laws which would be good for the functioning of those industries but would lead to political embarrassment. No government will pass tough environmental or consumer protection laws covering their industry, for example, if they're worried they're only going to be embarrassed later by failing to meet them themselves.
This seems to be being pushed by rather conservative types, not by the UK population or government coalition as a whole. Bear in mind that the Conservative party here is feeling under pressure from the even more conservative anti-EU UKIP, and have a lot of unhappy backbenchers currently busy being revolting over gay marriage. Also bear in mind that there's quite a big generational attitude difference to things like this, with younger people being a lot more liberal but not well represented politically. There's been a lot of conflation of child abuse, child porn and adult porn in debate and reporting, which only makes me think even more that this is as much about older generations dislike of younger generations sexual attitudes as it is about child porn or online 'safety'.
Do you have a good reason for believing that? I've heard the same about UK housing repeatedly, and a quick search finds this as an example: http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/as/cebe/projects/towards_sustainable_housing.pdf (try page 16). I think that UK building conventions (ie, bricks and tiles) and government campaigns have convinced the UK public that the difference between a well and poorly insulated building is putting a think layer of foam between two existing brick walls, shoving a couple of feet of loft insulation in and putting in double glazing made out of bog standard glass. It's possible to do a LOT better than that.
Also, don't write off wood (though, personally, I don't like it aesthetically compared to brick/stone). You can put a LOT more insulation between two layers of wood than you'll get in a UK brick wall cavity. And I once measured the outside surface temperatures on the least well insulated and constructed part of my house (an extension which is part a thin looking wooden wall, and part apparently solid brick wall - no cavity, but thicker than the wood). The wooden part had the lower outside temperature.
The politics must be fantastic.......break up an asteroid heading for New York and send some of the pieces to China/Russia/somewhere that could moan with violence. Or, of course, vice versa if the US legitimizes it.
There will eventually be few people to choose from who don't have something in their online histories that can be used against - the lack of an online history being one of them. People, especially people recruiting for a position like their own, have a natural tendency to recruit in their own image. People value the things they value in themselves, and try to minimize the importance of things they don't have themselves. And they accept the mistakes they've made themselves. This could become just another way we get cultural homogeneity in organizations. The socially dominant compulsive binge drinker with a dozen driving convictions will accept someone a little like himself, but maybe not the former bullying victim with a shoplifting conviction, or the one who appears to have done nothing but study.
Wouldn't it make more sense to avoid it looking like India even though Pakistan will blame India, thus making Pakistan's government/army look even more like a bunch of paranoid loons who'd compromise their own politics and security for the sake of being militant over India? Pakistan seem to prefer risking losing territory to the Taliban (by prioritizing India) and doing deals with militants who wish them harm to bait India, rather than actually trying to stabilize their own country. I think it makes no sense for India to encourage an unstable Pakistan (and it's certainly illegitimate), but it's hardly difficult....
Sometimes those sites might access an API by talking to a single shared API endpoint for the group, which might then not work well at all. It's possible to make it work (with proxies, or by not using cookies at the cost of making your site annoyingly forgetful for a user, or by using some JS to fetch the cookie value over the API and store it as a first-party cookie then pass it to each API call as a parameter), but there must be existing sites that weren't written with this in mind. They'll probably be broken already with Safari, though
There's no 'value added' to tax here (except for the stockbrokers services). VAT is not charged on sales of second-hand assets of all kinds, which includes houses, cars and shares, for this reason. The seller has not added any value. It sounds like what you want is really just a capital gains tax. I'd agree with you: you should pay the same on capital gains as on any other kind of income. But this should be individuals only, not companies (because the companies gain will either be a loss somewhere else, or become an individual's income someday).
There are already flat taxes on share purchases (eg, in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/tax-buying-selling-shares/buying-shares ... I think the HFT people avoid it somehow, though).
The problem with a VAT system is that it is a flat tax, which means all individuals are taxes equally on what they buy irrespective of income.
The structure of corporate taxes isn't better in this regard, and is often worse. The poor pensioner with a few stocks gets her dividends with corporate taxes taken off (assuming they're actually paid in the first place...), and so does the wealthy investor. In the UK at least, owners of businesses are likely to pay less tax than typical employees overall because they can manipulate the structure much more than an employee can. In the UK that might mean receiving their income as dividends, which have a lower income tax rate and don't attract NI (a 'payroll tax'), or for the adventurous it might mean tax avoidance structures involving tax havens. I imagine it's similar elsewhere: extra flexibility enables avoidance.
My opinion is that corporate taxes are just too hard to define well to be worth doing anyway. eg, I work for a (very) small company with shareholders in the UK, US and Brazil, people working for it in the UK, US, Argentina, India and the Ukraine and custom/potential custom in various places in South America. Which government should collect the corporate taxes? Whose rules do you apply? Defining profit as a whole is hard enough, physically locating it can be an exercise in futility. Instead, I think it'd be better to tax profit when it becomes an individual's income (and to tax all kinds of income the same - salary, royalties, dividends, interest, capital gains, whatever). Far fewer individuals have an ambiguous location, it's ultimately individuals who benefit from government services, it's easier to define an individual's income and it's possible to make the tax rates progressive. And, of course, if you eliminate a whole layer of taxation you can eliminate a whole layer of avoidance, distorted behaviour and bureaucracy.
Just because it's always possible someone is behaving illegally doesn't mean that people should accept this and not use legal means to attack it and those who do it.
It would be like sending a message on a post card then getting mad that people can see what you wrote, copy it, and do whatever they want with the copy.
Or, how about getting mad when you walk down the street without so much as basic body-armour and someone shoots you? None of this excuses illegal behaviour.
That's one reason the EU was created. Must be harder still in the US, with so many states. However, you can probably miss some jurisdictions. You probably only need to worry about those places you have a presence, plus maybe the local bullies (eg, the US in much of the 'West', possibly Russia if you're somewhere like Ukraine or Belarus). A western Internet company which isn't targeting or operating in China probably doesn't need to care about Chinese laws.
I think that if you did do that, at least in certain countries, you'd discover it to be a very good way of making yourself the target of the next extrajudicial killing by the US state. Unless you think you could do all that without it being obvious to surveillance or any nearby intelligence services?
Consider breastfeeding. (Eww, no, not like that). Very young babies have to be fed VERY frequently - like every few hours, 24 hours a day. That's one thing the father can't do so well, not without sacrificing the benefits of breast feeding.
In the UK new mothers can have a whole year off work, and fathers much less (something like two weeks). The disruption and costs to employers is actually one of the drivers of discrimination against women. There's been talk of parents being able to share the leave however they like, which sounds like a much better principal to me, but I suspect it'll still be mostly women who take it.
Consider a company which owns dairy farms, a cheesemaker and shops. They'd pay 5% of the final selling price (which would, of course, ultimately come from customers). Now consider a set of independent farmers, selling to a number of independent cheesemakers, selling to a number of different shops. Those people don't pay 5% of the final selling price, they pay more because they pay several times, and need to collect the extra from customers. So, you've just created a competitive pressure which favours large vertically integrated businesses over small or horizontally integrated businesses. I don't think that's a good thing. This is why VAT is charged on value added, not sale prices.
I have actually carried each week's grocery shopping home from a shop for several years, and I did indeed sometimes weigh it and get weights close to that. It's possible, though not so nice and you have to be very careful what you buy, and most people wouldn't attempt it (although I'd still encourage people not to drive short distances like that). The big problem, however, is not weight, it's damage to what you're carrying. Try buying a few kg of fruit, several litres of milk in plastic bottles, lettuces, bunches of spinach, bags of flour, boxes of chocolates, herbs growing in pots, fish fillets, bunches of cut flowers and assorted other things which shouldn't be compressed, squeezed, stretched, punctured, turned upside down or generally mistreated. You have to limit how much soft stuff you buy, and you have to plan things so that you don't end up having to buy, say, three different types of flour in one week's trip.
Things you product yourself are just as much a part of economic output as things someone else makes for you. Subsistence farming, for example, is recognized by economists as part of an economy's output, and one of the known problems with GDP statistics is that they typically don't include it because it's hard to measure. 'Imputed rent' - effectively, rent you pay to yourself to use the house you own - usually IS included in GDP statistics, by the way: http://www.bea.gov/faq/?faq_id=488
You'll probably find that if I DID accept your carpentry in payment for my gardening it would, technically, be just as subject to income taxes whether we use money to mediate our exchange or not. You can't avoid taxes just by accepting payment in kind (although can often evade them, because the authorities would be unlikely to bother us over an informal arrangement like that).
I deliberately left money out of my example to keep it simple, and because people tend to get hung up on money when thinking about economics and not look beneath it. An economy - money included - is a control system for individual decisions about economic activity, and it should be judged on the quality of those decisions. Whether we do our own carpentry/gardening or each others is one of the outputs of that control system. Most of the time when an exchange like that is considered (or, usually, a much more complex exchange spreading across many people interacting in many markets across time) it will be mediated by money. And when it IS mediated by money - and markets, and tax systems - the behaviour that the economy spits out will be what I described. We won't exchange tasks, it'll be the WRONG behaviour efficiency-wise, and it'll be because of taxation.
Say a company needs their office lawn mowing and rather than pay a gardening company they do it in-house. They will need an new employee as no-one else has any spare time, but say they have a lot of lawn and from a purely material view it works out as efficient as having the gardening company do it. Tax benefit? Not really. They may save a small amount of money but the amount they save will go towards their before-tax profits and they will end up having to pay the same amount of taxes as if they outsourced. By the end of it the only way to save money is if they can do it more efficiently than the other company.
This isn't really relevant to my example. The two situations (employee or outsourced) would, of course, be equally efficient if the decisions the economy spits out are the same - the same person doing the same task. It obviously doesn't matter if the money moves around one way or another if the physical outcome is identical.
To fit my example in to your scenario, suppose that an office would like their lawn mowing and that it's worth up to $300 to them. And suppose the employee/company would do it for $250. With no tax the exchange takes place. With a tax of 25% it doesn't, and that's the wrong decision for an economy (not an individual manager) to make. This does, of course, leave out certain problems....such as that it makes no sense to say that an office or company would like anything. I should also point out that in real life the company could find ways to do it less efficiently whilst saving money. eg, they could pressure their salaried sysadmins (who, shall we say, are not good at lawn mowing) in to doing it for free as unpaid overtime. This would use MORE resources (labour) for the same outcome, but has the side-effect of moving consumption from lawn mowing employee to shareholders. It would be an economically suboptimal decision, and a failure of the economic system.
Not if the reason you're doing it is because you don't own a car, and yet live within walking distance.
Not only is no-one good at everything, and not only might a mix of skills be helpful in itself, but also IIRC teams with a mix of people who think differently perform better (there's some research on this sort of thing, but I don't really know or remember it very well, so do your own searches if you care about it). It might not be so great to have an algorithm - or a person, for that matter - which always picks similar people. I guess that's a downside of the friend-of-a-friend approach to hiring, too.
Becoming a competent bioengineer or aero engineer is likely to require special equipment and a lot of practical experience that's hard to come by. Software developers don't generally need that. 'Self taught' doesn't mean that someone hasn't read the same books and papers, or learnt the same material, as someone might have done following an official course. Mostly what the course adds is third-party validation. Also, think about just how much of that knowledge is really retained by the typical graduate, and just how applicable what they've learnt really is. Personally, I wouldn't trust a graduate straight out of university to design a plane, either....I'd rather have someone well respected by their peers and with a history of good work.
And again, oddly enough, some of the best indicators were clear, intelligent, structured English and an interest in music.
Those would be good correlates. The English skills are an indication that they can read very well (useful for background research) and communicate (also really useful), and music skills are often associated with ability in math and logic; they appear to use the same area of the brain.
English skills could also be about attention to detail and caring about the quality of what you do. And both, but especially music, could be about not just being able to focus for long periods on one, solitary task, building it up a little at a time until it works, but of actually getting satisfaction from it. ie, it could be substantially an indicator of introversion.