Just so. Google "is working behind the scenes" to get CISPA enacted. I wonder if that isn't because they maybe think they can exempt themselves from something by getting involved, or perhaps they were threatened elsewhere for their embarrassing (to its proponents) public opposition to SOPA. Another reason -- as explained in this Lifehacker story -- is that CISPA pushes the role of censor onto the state expressly, where SOPA would have required Google et al. to take on that task themselves, and at the behest of any copyright holder. CISPA is much broader and gives the government all sorts of powers it really shouldn't have under any rational reading of the Bill of Rights (the first and fourth amendments, particularly).
A couple of points about this. First, if the recent Wired article on the under-construction Utah data center is accurate, mass spying is already underway with increasing volumes being planned. So I think it is fair to say that this is a reflection of Total Information Awareness and the post-Admiral Poindexter philosophy of spying: build it and let 'em try and take it away later. CISPA, then, is best thought of as a legal framework around existing and planned hardware buildouts. While I do not expect the Obama White House to be forthcoming with its real reasoning for threatening a veto, I presume that the real reason is that CISPA does not go far enough so far as the executive branch is concerned.
It's this sneering trope -- "reality has a well known liberal bias", a quote of Stephen Colbert, whose work I generally admire -- that gets hauled out every single time this subject comes up. And its point, so far as I can tell, is actually to stifle debate on legitimate politicization that the left has done, particularly with anthropogenic global warming, especially within the scope of the IGCC. When "scientists" start playing politically-minded games with data, engage in semantic and legalistic games to prevent its dissemination, and then complain that they are being treated unfairly or for political reasons -- well, they only have themselves to blame.
If there were a real business case for this, we would already be switching over to it.
This is no "myth", it is a real consequence of energy diffuseness and intermittance. All pitches for renewables for baseload always end in the punchline, "And we could do it today, if only we find the political will." N.b., the key word "political". That is, the author wishes to force their ineffective, uneconomic solution upon everyone else.
Hidden from view, of course, is the fact that switching to these energy sources will impoverish anyone dumb enough to use them.
Reserve is always carried because even nuke and coal and gas plants go off line unexpectedly: I think our (near) biggest nuke in the UK may be running at a capacity factor of ~60% over the last couple of years having tripped out again very recently; only twice as much as wind for example. We don't cover every nuke plant with 100% gas backup.
But you have to cover wind with 100% backup capability, full stop.
Wind is diffuse and intermittent. If it really were "cheap", there would be a sound business case for it. As it is, the costs of storage are forever elided.
It is hard to imagine just how much this embraces the opposite of "Don't be evil". Bringing in someone from DARPA is pretty much a conduit to everything that is wrong and broken about American political life right now.
Theodor Seuss Geisel was good at condensing something to a caricature of reality, and environmentalism was no exception. Like his World War 2 cartoons, which in the case of the Japanese were unremittingly racist, the Lorax's enemy became unrecognizable. Who, really, needs a "thneed"? This was obvious to me even as a child. I knew that people built houses and published newspapers from forest products. By eliding those things, Seuss managed to condense an entire string of arguments down to one easy-to-digest -- but wholly false -- narrative. For that reason, I have always rated The Lorax as the least of his children's books.
Exactly. It's why I despise the arguments against the recent Citizens United Supreme Court decision that begin with "But corporations aren't people!" So what?
... argues against it. This is why I am perpetually skeptical of all solar, wind, and tidal energy schemes: they inevitably and always elide crucial details about the economic availability of storage, or of the energy/dollar cost (the latter reflecting the former) of buildout, frequently demanding subsidy to bring them to parity with fossil fuel systems. Biofuels have even worse things to contend with, including biologic sequestration from competing species (expensive containment), and corresponding reduction in productivity that strains capable of living in open ponds.
I have stopped reading his blog because it is too depressing, but Robert Rapier is a very good source for this kind of material, and a good counterweight to the all-too-rosy scenarios coming out of academia and elsewhere. While he does not agree with me on everything (he has been a proponent of solar where I think it makes no sense at all), his comments on biofuels come from an area of expertise and go a long way to skewer much of the unsubstantiated talk in this area.
In the current environment, the next thing you know, this would be MANDATED, so the state could disable your computer by requiring its registration. PASS.
I have my doubts about the long-term viability of Radio Shack; they're too small to carry much, they compete with with dedicated cellular carrier stores on phones and plans, and tend to be full retail pricing on everything. So that leaves Fry's or nobody.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
Which of course is why they went to the trouble of amending the Constitution in the first place.
Re:Ok so figure out a way to not screw other peopl
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
Its not a wealth tax. You are never taxed on the value of your assets or how much you own.
Let us go back to the top. From TFA (emboldening is all mine):
Our tax system is based on the concept of “realization.” Individuals are not taxed until they actually sell property and realize their gains. But this system makes less sense for the publicly traded stocks of the superwealthy. A drastic change is necessary to fix this fundamental flaw in our tax system and finally require people like Warren E. Buffett, Mr. Ellison and others to pay at least a little income tax on their unsold shares. The fix is called mark-to-market taxation.
For individuals and married couples who earn, say, more than $2.2 million in income, or own $5.7 million or more in publicly traded securities (representing the top 0.1 percent of families), the appreciation in their publicly traded stock and securities would be “marked to market” and taxed annually as if they had sold their positions at year’s end, regardless of whether the securities were actually sold. The tax could be imposed at long-term capital gains rates so tax rates would stay as they were.
So what he proposes is a wealth tax, full stop.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Alternatively, anything that allows the wealthiest to dodge their tax obligations should be looked at as a bug, not a feature. The founding fathers had a lot to say about the accumulation of wealth and the corrosive effect it has on society.
The Founding Fathers also wrote the Constitution with a prohibition on income taxes, a stricture that was removed with the 16th Amendment.
Calling this "mark to market" is horribly misleading, not only for the reason I cited above (it's actually a wealth tax, not an income tax) but also because a wealth tax would demand a substantial fraction of assets would have to be shed each year, thus diluting the market for that asset class. It becomes an Heisenbergian problem.
A wealth tax assumes liquidity: for instruments such as REITs where the underlying asset is not itself terribly liquid (imagine, for instance, owning a shopping mall outright), how does one go about liquidating such a thing in part? Finding another partner? And then the next year, when the same thing has to happen again?
Slashdot Mirror
Just so. Google "is working behind the scenes" to get CISPA enacted. I wonder if that isn't because they maybe think they can exempt themselves from something by getting involved, or perhaps they were threatened elsewhere for their embarrassing (to its proponents) public opposition to SOPA. Another reason -- as explained in this Lifehacker story -- is that CISPA pushes the role of censor onto the state expressly, where SOPA would have required Google et al. to take on that task themselves, and at the behest of any copyright holder. CISPA is much broader and gives the government all sorts of powers it really shouldn't have under any rational reading of the Bill of Rights (the first and fourth amendments, particularly).
A couple of points about this. First, if the recent Wired article on the under-construction Utah data center is accurate, mass spying is already underway with increasing volumes being planned. So I think it is fair to say that this is a reflection of Total Information Awareness and the post-Admiral Poindexter philosophy of spying: build it and let 'em try and take it away later. CISPA, then, is best thought of as a legal framework around existing and planned hardware buildouts. While I do not expect the Obama White House to be forthcoming with its real reasoning for threatening a veto, I presume that the real reason is that CISPA does not go far enough so far as the executive branch is concerned.
If this were news for nerds, maybe someone would have researched this before posting?
Forget it, Jake. It's Slashdot.
It's this sneering trope -- "reality has a well known liberal bias", a quote of Stephen Colbert, whose work I generally admire -- that gets hauled out every single time this subject comes up. And its point, so far as I can tell, is actually to stifle debate on legitimate politicization that the left has done, particularly with anthropogenic global warming, especially within the scope of the IGCC. When "scientists" start playing politically-minded games with data, engage in semantic and legalistic games to prevent its dissemination, and then complain that they are being treated unfairly or for political reasons -- well, they only have themselves to blame.
Okay, I've read enough. He doesn't really have a good argument for this.
How did this lame article get promoted?
If there were a real business case for this, we would already be switching over to it.
This is no "myth", it is a real consequence of energy diffuseness and intermittance. All pitches for renewables for baseload always end in the punchline, "And we could do it today, if only we find the political will." N.b., the key word "political". That is, the author wishes to force their ineffective, uneconomic solution upon everyone else.
Hidden from view, of course, is the fact that switching to these energy sources will impoverish anyone dumb enough to use them.
But you have to cover wind with 100% backup capability, full stop.
cheap, clean, renewable wind energy
Won't. Happen.
Wind is diffuse and intermittent. If it really were "cheap", there would be a sound business case for it. As it is, the costs of storage are forever elided.
It is hard to imagine just how much this embraces the opposite of "Don't be evil". Bringing in someone from DARPA is pretty much a conduit to everything that is wrong and broken about American political life right now.
And so what?
The combination of storage costs plus manufacturing/deployment/maintenance costs will kill solar.
It's the hidden costs that are terrible, and why I wouldn't bet on solar taking over for anything except very niche markets.
Wake me when you have the problem of energy storage solved. #kthxbai
Just ask anyone relying on Social Security's solvency in 20 years.
It was called "common law".
Theodor Seuss Geisel was good at condensing something to a caricature of reality, and environmentalism was no exception. Like his World War 2 cartoons, which in the case of the Japanese were unremittingly racist, the Lorax's enemy became unrecognizable. Who, really, needs a "thneed"? This was obvious to me even as a child. I knew that people built houses and published newspapers from forest products. By eliding those things, Seuss managed to condense an entire string of arguments down to one easy-to-digest -- but wholly false -- narrative. For that reason, I have always rated The Lorax as the least of his children's books.
Exactly. It's why I despise the arguments against the recent Citizens United Supreme Court decision that begin with "But corporations aren't people!" So what?
... argues against it. This is why I am perpetually skeptical of all solar, wind, and tidal energy schemes: they inevitably and always elide crucial details about the economic availability of storage, or of the energy/dollar cost (the latter reflecting the former) of buildout, frequently demanding subsidy to bring them to parity with fossil fuel systems. Biofuels have even worse things to contend with, including biologic sequestration from competing species (expensive containment), and corresponding reduction in productivity that strains capable of living in open ponds.
I have stopped reading his blog because it is too depressing, but Robert Rapier is a very good source for this kind of material, and a good counterweight to the all-too-rosy scenarios coming out of academia and elsewhere. While he does not agree with me on everything (he has been a proponent of solar where I think it makes no sense at all), his comments on biofuels come from an area of expertise and go a long way to skewer much of the unsubstantiated talk in this area.
Here, let me introduce you to regulatory capture.
A lot of people haven't heard of Slashdot. Would that make it right if it were taken offline on the arbitrary say-so of some government functionary?
In the current environment, the next thing you know, this would be MANDATED, so the state could disable your computer by requiring its registration. PASS.
there is nothing the oppressed wish to become so much as the oppressor.
I have my doubts about the long-term viability of Radio Shack; they're too small to carry much, they compete with with dedicated cellular carrier stores on phones and plans, and tend to be full retail pricing on everything. So that leaves Fry's or nobody.
Which of course is why they went to the trouble of amending the Constitution in the first place.
Let us go back to the top. From TFA (emboldening is all mine):
So what he proposes is a wealth tax, full stop.
The Founding Fathers also wrote the Constitution with a prohibition on income taxes, a stricture that was removed with the 16th Amendment.
Calling this "mark to market" is horribly misleading, not only for the reason I cited above (it's actually a wealth tax, not an income tax) but also because a wealth tax would demand a substantial fraction of assets would have to be shed each year, thus diluting the market for that asset class. It becomes an Heisenbergian problem.
A wealth tax assumes liquidity: for instruments such as REITs where the underlying asset is not itself terribly liquid (imagine, for instance, owning a shopping mall outright), how does one go about liquidating such a thing in part? Finding another partner? And then the next year, when the same thing has to happen again?
Finally, the issue remains of incentives. France has a wealth tax, and the net result of this is that while it has collected $2.6 billion (equivalent), it has resulted in $125 billion in capital flight since 1998.