Our attempts to overthrow dictators in Iraq, Libya and Syria (and our coup of elected president in Iran) haven't worked out too well. Maybe we should try something different.
the only source for this story appear to be a Spanish language tweet with three seismic channels snippets displayed without scales on any axis, or other identifying information, and with a red and a green line drawn on it.
That tweet was from the official account of the seismology department of the Institute of Geological and Atmospheric Research. They also wrote a more detailed explanation, with more clearly-marked images, in their blog.
Who wants to bet their next paycheck that Google's recruiters have never darkened the door at a career fair at a HBC?
I would take that bet, but it wouldn't be fair because I already know the answer. Google absolutely recruits at HBCUs, aggressively. Because many of them have weak CompSci programs, Google also contributes faculty to them... Google employees can apply to spend a year (or more) teaching at an HBCU, paid by Google at their regular salary.
Subsidizing existing nuclear power plants may be a cost effective way of reducing CO2 emissions. I am not saying it is (or isn't) but it should be evaluated along with all of the other options. Even building new nuclear power plants should be considered - but cost-effectiveness should be the ruling criterion.
And we should avoid having politicians or bureaucrats trying to make those cost-effectiveness decisions. They're bad at it, always have been, likely always will be. Instead, we should impose a carbon tax on every industry that releases CO2 into the atmosphere and let the market sort out the impact on which industries expand and which contract. We should do the same for other greenhouse gases, like methane.
That wouldn't actually help nuclear energy to flourish, because the ridiculous regulatory regime under which nuclear plants operate makes solar and wind energy more cost-effective than nuclear energy. But it would push the transition away from fossil fuels. If you want nuclear to compete, you first need to rationalize the regulations. Without that, it's better to simply let the industry die than to subsidize it.
Government handouts are A-Ok as long as they are given to the rich, large corporations, or defense contractors. Just like Jesus taught.
Or old people. Social Security and Medicare are the third rail of American politics.
Government handouts to individuals actually account for the largest chunk of the federal budget, not to mention state budgets. Note that I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but claiming that the US only gives money to the rich, large corporations or defense contractors is just false. Also, it mostly doesn't give money to the rich or large corporations; it just allows them to avoid paying much in taxes.
In other words nuclear power is brittle and the very high safety standards needed to keep it safe can massively increase costs.
Except it's really not clear that the insanely high safety standards are actually required. The regulations have created an industry that is orders of magnitude safer than any other large scale power generation industry. That indicates significant over-engineering. And given that regulatory-based engineering is never efficient in the sense of minimizing cost for a given level of effectiveness, looking only at the safety record almost certainly underestimates the excess.
The fact that Congress has to approve any design changes is mind-boggling. In any reasonably-regulated industry, Congress creates an agency and directs it to do the job of rulemaking and enforcement, then lets it do its job. There is absolutely no reason for Congress to get involved beyond that... it's not like the politicians can evaluate the design changes in any meaningful way. The only reason for that requirement is to place arbitrary bureaucratic and political obstacles in the way of construction.
Ultimately ALL taxes are paid by the working people. Either directly or indirectly.
Ultimately all the costs of adapting to a warmer planet will be paid by the working people, either directly or indirectly. The goal of good government should be to minimize that total cost by figuring out how much to pay now in order to reduce the future cost. Carbon taxes are the most market-friendly way to internalize this particular externality. Though they really need to be applied globally and we have no mechanism to do that. Still, if everyone refuses to do it because others might not, no one will and we'll maximize the long-term cost.
Almost none of what you said is true, but since you (a) don't appear to have actually read the post you replied to and (b) didn't bother to offer any support for any of your assertions, I'm not going to bother refuting your claims in detail.
Logic lesson for today: When someone says "One of the reasons", they are telling you that the thing they're about to describe is a reason, but that there are others as well. This in no way implies that the reason described would produce the same decision if it were the only reason.
You need to go back to Truman to get a "poor" president, as in net worth under 1 million. No president since I've been alive has been anywhere near that poor.
It would be very surprising to me that we would elect a poor president. We want our presidents to be highly-capable people, and highly-capable people tend to rise to well-compensated leadership positions and to manage their money well. $1M is a pretty low bar, too. You should have quite a bit more than that saved by retirement age, and since most presidents are at least in their 50s not being worth at least $1M would be a pretty big red flag that they don't think about the future and/or don't know how to live within a budget. It would disqualify them for my vote, absent some rather unusual circumstances.
AOSP is free to use. Android has strings and costs attached.
Android is completely free to use, no strings attached. But note that Android really isn't a codebase, it's a standard. Think POSIX. In this case it's a standard, or series of standards, defined by Google. Using Google's code (AOSP, also completely free) is neither necessary nor sufficient to make your device "Android".
To be Android, your device must pass the Compatibility Test Suite and comply with the terms of the Compatibility Definition Document. There are no dependencies on any Google services or apps. I don't believe you have to go through any process to prove to Google that your device meets these requirements, either. If it meets the requirements, you may call it "Android" -- and your users may be confident that Android apps will run on it, though they'll have to get them somewhere other than Google Play.
If you want to give your users access to Google Play and ship the Google apps, however, you must also sign the Mobile Application Distribution Agreement and make sure your device passes the GMS Test Suite (GTS). There are strings attached, though AFAIK, no costs.
So where's the quantum hardware to making this all work?
I was confused by this point too, till I did some reading. "Post-quantum cryptography" is NOT the same thing as "Quantum cryptography". The former merely refers to cryptographic algorithms for which there are no known algorithms for quantum computers which can break them. So, RSA would not be considered post-quantum, because Shore's algorithm can break it.
All of our current asymmetric algorithms are vulnerable to Shor's (note spelling) algorithm, assuming a sufficiently-large quantum computer. Grover's algorithm can solve any problem that requires searching a solution space of size N in sqrt(N) time. The first means we need new asymmetric algorithms (public/private key algorithms, like RSA and ECC) that are quantum resistant. The second means that our symmetric algorithms and hashes (like AES and SHA-256) have effectively half the bits of security that we thought, so we may need to reach for larger sizes.
Note that at this point all of these issues are theoretical, because no quantum computers large enough to make these attacks practical exist. With respect to Grover's algorithm, the quantum computers not only have to be sufficiently large, they also have to be quite fast because, for example, finding an AES-128 key will require 2^64 operations which is still a lot. However, it seems unwise to assume that we will never have sufficiently large/fast quantum computers and that these attacks will always remain impractical. Cryptographers like to say "attacks always get better", because they almost always do. If you see a vulnerability that might become practial in two or three decades, then you should start thinking about how to address it now, because the attacks may improve more than you expect, faster than you expect, and changing cryptosystems is going to take at least one of those decades.
We have no real way of predicting how fast progress in quantum computing will move, so we should experiment with post-quantum algorithms now, and begin trying to move to them seriously in the near future.
I still stand my argument that if your business offers enough money (and stability), you'll eventually have more than enough recruits. My suspicion is that your HR department is what's fscking you over? Is that the case?
Our recruiters do a pretty good job at finding and getting candidates for us, but we want top talent, and only small percentage of candidates do well enough in interviews to get a job offer. They get rejected not by "HR" (which really has no role in recruiting or hiring) but by the engineers who interview them and the committees of engineers who evaluate the interview results.
I think you're making a "Don't look at how the sausage is made" argument
Not really. You asked about the philosophy underlying the existing tax code, and I'm arguing that there is no such thing. There are many competing visions, all partially expressed, plus many rationales that don't qualify for the term "vision" because they're just tweaks made to favor some group or other, for purely political reasons.
This isn't to say that reasons don't matter, or to say that no attempt should be made to define an overarching philosophy with supporting rationale, and to reorganize the code to implement that philosophy. Indeed that's the only way to do it... and the way it's done (except for the special-interest carveouts). But even in the most wildly successful case, the philosophy will not be fully and perfectly implemented. Which is, again, not a reason not to do it.
Perhaps what you really want to ask is: What are the dominant philosophies of taxation expressed in the current tax code?
Of course, that's a question I can't answer, because I'm not expert enough. I have some ideas about how I think it should be done, based on some axioms I hold, primarily a belief that free markets are highly effective (not perfect, but extremely good) when all issues are priced in, and a belief that democracy only works if the voters can actually see what their government is doing (though narrow and isolated exceptions are needed).
a simple video decoder that can recognise blobs moving to the left or to the right.
Sure. But ML would be the easiest way (in terms of developer time) to construct that video decoder. Which is exactly what this guy did. He could probably have increased accuracy by adding a clear tube and pointing the camera at the tube (I think that's what hcs_$reboot was suggesting), but on the other hand what he's really interested in are trends, not absolute numbers, so it's likely that his solution is good enough. And he avoided having to modify the hive in a way that might disturb the bees.
This is typical of many uses of ML these days, where it's used to do something that could be done with simpler tools but with more human brainpower and/or effort. But why bother? If the general-purpose tool does the job adequately and with less effort, use it.
To use a construction analogy, sure there's no reason to screw drywall, nails are perfectly effective at holding it and hammers and nails are much simpler mechanically and cheaper than a battery-powered driver and screws. But it's faster and easier to drive screws than pound nails. For non-experts, at least; really experienced drywallers are crazy fast at driving nails -- tap, boom, next. I guess that part of the analogy holds up as well... if you are an engineer with a great deal of experience at writing custom video decoders you can probably write one faster than you can train a neural network to do the same job.
If you can provide a cohesive philosophic explanation of how tax-related things are working now, I would greatly respect you for it.
If you're looking for consistent, cohesive philosophy behind any element of the legal code, especially tax law, you're going to be disappointed. Laws are built from compromises between parties with different visions and philosophies.
Sorry, but private property owners do very much trump your right to carry.
You make this claim, then go on to talk about brandishing, not carrying. Carry is usually concealed, and in that form guruevi is right and you're wrong -- private property does not trump the legal right to carry. In most states.
A point I was not making about concealed carry.
Okay, so you were changing the topic from "carry" (which is most often concealed) to its narrow subset "open carry". Fair enough, but you should say that's what you're doing if you do it, and probably shouldn't use broad phrases like "absolutely does".
My point is that if I see another's brandishment, they will be encouraged strongly to stop by my brandishment
Be careful, there. You're using the word "brandish" to refer to two different things, I think. If I walk in with an openly-carried pistol on my hip (or even a slung rifle on my back), and you draw your gun in order to deter me (your phrasing seems to imply some sort of action on your part... unless you are also carrying openly so all you have to do is rotate your hip toward me, or similar?) then many states would consider you to have committed assault with a deadly weapon. I could call the police and have you arrested. States that have a statute covering "brandishing" as a separate crime might consider you to have done that, rather than assault, but most states do not have a brandishing statute and would just consider your action to be a threat, which is what "assault" means (technically, in "assault and battery", "assault" is the part where you threaten to batter and "battery" is the part where you do it. Many states don't bother with this distinction in their legal codes and just use "assault" to refer to either threats or actions).
my announcement that any further trespass is not allowed
Until you ask the person to leave, no trespass has occurred, assuming we're talking about a business that's open to the public. Once you ask them to leave, and give them a reasonable time to do so, then if they fail to leave they are trespassing.
Considering that people have legally shot unarmed people in the back, I suspect someone coming at another person with an openly carried piece will have even less protection if the owner believes he or his family are in imminent danger.
That depends on whether the belief is reasonable, unless some form of Castle Doctrine applies. It's hard to predict what a jury would find reasonable, but I doubt that most would think a holstered sidearm or slung rifle provides a basis for a reasonable belief that deadly force is needed to prevent serious injury or death. If you shot someone for walking in with an openly-carried gun, I think you'd go to prison. Perhaps even if Castle Doctrine does apply, since it only gives you a legal presumption of reasonableness, and I think that a good prosecutor could prove that your actions were unreasonable.
I think the most promising solution approach would be progressive taxes on corporate taxes based on market share.
Interesting idea. In general I'm opposed to all corporate income taxes. Their primary effect is to tax individuals in a way that hides the bill from the voters, making it hard for them to evaluate their return on the taxes they pay. However, I think taxes are a useful tool for internalizing externalities so that the market can factor them in, including at the corporate level.
One challenge is quantifying the social cost of monopolies. Obviously, any specific rate schedule you choose and publish will be wrong, since some monopolies are more harmful than others. But can we even pick some reasonable average schedule that doesn't badly distort the market? Another problem is how to deal with startups in entirely new industries. They have a total monopoly at the beginning, but the market will be tiny and imposing heavy taxes on startups will just kill them and their fledgling industries.
Another challenge is how to prevent collusion. This is the typical anti-trust problem, but I think your idea would make it both more common and harder to police. It would provide motivation for companies with large market share to fission, but to do so in ways that allow them to avoid actually competing. Since the fissioning process would mean that both companies are staffed with people with a common market approach and vision (at least initially), it would be pretty hard to prove that they're actually colluding rather than just both continuing their business as before.
There are lots of obvious jurisdiction-shopping dodges as well, especially for corporations that are heavily IP-based. Move the monopolistic corporation to another country and have them sell in the US through a network of small, non-monopoly resellers who all buy/license the same goods/services from the overseas operation for the same monopolistic price, for example.
I don't think any of these problems are insuperable, but implementing the idea effectively wouldn't necessarily be easy. It is interesting, though.
Sorry, but private property owners do very much trump your right to carry.
You make this claim, then go on to talk about brandishing, not carrying. Carry is usually concealed, and in that form guruevi is right and you're wrong -- private property does not trump the legal right to carry. In most states.
Property owners can ask you to leave and if you refuse you're trespassing, but if the gun is concealed they can't know to ask. In a minority of states, signs that ban guns from the premises do have legal force, meaning that carrying in violation of the owner's wishes is a crime. In most, though, it's perfectly legal to ignore the owner's wishes.
IMO "no guns" signs should have legal force, but with the understanding that the property owner is accepting responsibility for the safety of the people on the premises, since they're being denied tools of self defense.
Slashdot Mirror
Our attempts to overthrow dictators in Iraq, Libya and Syria (and our coup of elected president in Iran) haven't worked out too well. Maybe we should try something different.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em?
the only source for this story appear to be a Spanish language tweet with three seismic channels snippets displayed without scales on any axis, or other identifying information, and with a red and a green line drawn on it.
That tweet was from the official account of the seismology department of the Institute of Geological and Atmospheric Research. They also wrote a more detailed explanation, with more clearly-marked images, in their blog.
Who wants to bet their next paycheck that Google's recruiters have never darkened the door at a career fair at a HBC?
I would take that bet, but it wouldn't be fair because I already know the answer. Google absolutely recruits at HBCUs, aggressively. Because many of them have weak CompSci programs, Google also contributes faculty to them... Google employees can apply to spend a year (or more) teaching at an HBCU, paid by Google at their regular salary.
Subsidizing existing nuclear power plants may be a cost effective way of reducing CO2 emissions. I am not saying it is (or isn't) but it should be evaluated along with all of the other options. Even building new nuclear power plants should be considered - but cost-effectiveness should be the ruling criterion.
And we should avoid having politicians or bureaucrats trying to make those cost-effectiveness decisions. They're bad at it, always have been, likely always will be. Instead, we should impose a carbon tax on every industry that releases CO2 into the atmosphere and let the market sort out the impact on which industries expand and which contract. We should do the same for other greenhouse gases, like methane.
That wouldn't actually help nuclear energy to flourish, because the ridiculous regulatory regime under which nuclear plants operate makes solar and wind energy more cost-effective than nuclear energy. But it would push the transition away from fossil fuels. If you want nuclear to compete, you first need to rationalize the regulations. Without that, it's better to simply let the industry die than to subsidize it.
Government handouts are A-Ok as long as they are given to the rich, large corporations, or defense contractors. Just like Jesus taught.
Or old people. Social Security and Medicare are the third rail of American politics.
Government handouts to individuals actually account for the largest chunk of the federal budget, not to mention state budgets. Note that I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but claiming that the US only gives money to the rich, large corporations or defense contractors is just false. Also, it mostly doesn't give money to the rich or large corporations; it just allows them to avoid paying much in taxes.
In other words nuclear power is brittle and the very high safety standards needed to keep it safe can massively increase costs.
Except it's really not clear that the insanely high safety standards are actually required. The regulations have created an industry that is orders of magnitude safer than any other large scale power generation industry. That indicates significant over-engineering. And given that regulatory-based engineering is never efficient in the sense of minimizing cost for a given level of effectiveness, looking only at the safety record almost certainly underestimates the excess.
The fact that Congress has to approve any design changes is mind-boggling. In any reasonably-regulated industry, Congress creates an agency and directs it to do the job of rulemaking and enforcement, then lets it do its job. There is absolutely no reason for Congress to get involved beyond that... it's not like the politicians can evaluate the design changes in any meaningful way. The only reason for that requirement is to place arbitrary bureaucratic and political obstacles in the way of construction.
If you look at the list of references for this Nature article, they ignored the NASA paper.
It's #74 in the references.
I like your proposal, but it would be unconstitutional. To fix that, you need to put a time limit on it. It can be a very long time limit, though.
Ultimately ALL taxes are paid by the working people. Either directly or indirectly.
Ultimately all the costs of adapting to a warmer planet will be paid by the working people, either directly or indirectly. The goal of good government should be to minimize that total cost by figuring out how much to pay now in order to reduce the future cost. Carbon taxes are the most market-friendly way to internalize this particular externality. Though they really need to be applied globally and we have no mechanism to do that. Still, if everyone refuses to do it because others might not, no one will and we'll maximize the long-term cost.
Almost none of what you said is true, but since you (a) don't appear to have actually read the post you replied to and (b) didn't bother to offer any support for any of your assertions, I'm not going to bother refuting your claims in detail.
He quit because of Net Neutrality?
Logic lesson for today: When someone says "One of the reasons", they are telling you that the thing they're about to describe is a reason, but that there are others as well. This in no way implies that the reason described would produce the same decision if it were the only reason.
You need to go back to Truman to get a "poor" president, as in net worth under 1 million. No president since I've been alive has been anywhere near that poor.
It would be very surprising to me that we would elect a poor president. We want our presidents to be highly-capable people, and highly-capable people tend to rise to well-compensated leadership positions and to manage their money well. $1M is a pretty low bar, too. You should have quite a bit more than that saved by retirement age, and since most presidents are at least in their 50s not being worth at least $1M would be a pretty big red flag that they don't think about the future and/or don't know how to live within a budget. It would disqualify them for my vote, absent some rather unusual circumstances.
there is a new dawn in America: the jobs are through the roof, the economy has reached 4.8% growth
Trump's trade war will end this.
Android is free to use.
No, it isn't.
AOSP is free to use. Android has strings and costs attached.
Android is completely free to use, no strings attached. But note that Android really isn't a codebase, it's a standard. Think POSIX. In this case it's a standard, or series of standards, defined by Google. Using Google's code (AOSP, also completely free) is neither necessary nor sufficient to make your device "Android".
To be Android, your device must pass the Compatibility Test Suite and comply with the terms of the Compatibility Definition Document. There are no dependencies on any Google services or apps. I don't believe you have to go through any process to prove to Google that your device meets these requirements, either. If it meets the requirements, you may call it "Android" -- and your users may be confident that Android apps will run on it, though they'll have to get them somewhere other than Google Play.
If you want to give your users access to Google Play and ship the Google apps, however, you must also sign the Mobile Application Distribution Agreement and make sure your device passes the GMS Test Suite (GTS). There are strings attached, though AFAIK, no costs.
So where's the quantum hardware to making this all work?
I was confused by this point too, till I did some reading. "Post-quantum cryptography" is NOT the same thing as "Quantum cryptography". The former merely refers to cryptographic algorithms for which there are no known algorithms for quantum computers which can break them. So, RSA would not be considered post-quantum, because Shore's algorithm can break it.
All of our current asymmetric algorithms are vulnerable to Shor's (note spelling) algorithm, assuming a sufficiently-large quantum computer. Grover's algorithm can solve any problem that requires searching a solution space of size N in sqrt(N) time. The first means we need new asymmetric algorithms (public/private key algorithms, like RSA and ECC) that are quantum resistant. The second means that our symmetric algorithms and hashes (like AES and SHA-256) have effectively half the bits of security that we thought, so we may need to reach for larger sizes.
Note that at this point all of these issues are theoretical, because no quantum computers large enough to make these attacks practical exist. With respect to Grover's algorithm, the quantum computers not only have to be sufficiently large, they also have to be quite fast because, for example, finding an AES-128 key will require 2^64 operations which is still a lot. However, it seems unwise to assume that we will never have sufficiently large/fast quantum computers and that these attacks will always remain impractical. Cryptographers like to say "attacks always get better", because they almost always do. If you see a vulnerability that might become practial in two or three decades, then you should start thinking about how to address it now, because the attacks may improve more than you expect, faster than you expect, and changing cryptosystems is going to take at least one of those decades.
We have no real way of predicting how fast progress in quantum computing will move, so we should experiment with post-quantum algorithms now, and begin trying to move to them seriously in the near future.
I still stand my argument that if your business offers enough money (and stability), you'll eventually have more than enough recruits. My suspicion is that your HR department is what's fscking you over? Is that the case?
Our recruiters do a pretty good job at finding and getting candidates for us, but we want top talent, and only small percentage of candidates do well enough in interviews to get a job offer. They get rejected not by "HR" (which really has no role in recruiting or hiring) but by the engineers who interview them and the committees of engineers who evaluate the interview results.
But if something happens that requires you to draw your gun, your job is the least of your concerns.
Until the next day anyway.
True, tomorrow is not a problem if you're dead.
I think you're making a "Don't look at how the sausage is made" argument
Not really. You asked about the philosophy underlying the existing tax code, and I'm arguing that there is no such thing. There are many competing visions, all partially expressed, plus many rationales that don't qualify for the term "vision" because they're just tweaks made to favor some group or other, for purely political reasons.
This isn't to say that reasons don't matter, or to say that no attempt should be made to define an overarching philosophy with supporting rationale, and to reorganize the code to implement that philosophy. Indeed that's the only way to do it... and the way it's done (except for the special-interest carveouts). But even in the most wildly successful case, the philosophy will not be fully and perfectly implemented. Which is, again, not a reason not to do it.
Perhaps what you really want to ask is: What are the dominant philosophies of taxation expressed in the current tax code?
Of course, that's a question I can't answer, because I'm not expert enough. I have some ideas about how I think it should be done, based on some axioms I hold, primarily a belief that free markets are highly effective (not perfect, but extremely good) when all issues are priced in, and a belief that democracy only works if the voters can actually see what their government is doing (though narrow and isolated exceptions are needed).
a simple video decoder that can recognise blobs moving to the left or to the right.
Sure. But ML would be the easiest way (in terms of developer time) to construct that video decoder. Which is exactly what this guy did. He could probably have increased accuracy by adding a clear tube and pointing the camera at the tube (I think that's what hcs_$reboot was suggesting), but on the other hand what he's really interested in are trends, not absolute numbers, so it's likely that his solution is good enough. And he avoided having to modify the hive in a way that might disturb the bees.
This is typical of many uses of ML these days, where it's used to do something that could be done with simpler tools but with more human brainpower and/or effort. But why bother? If the general-purpose tool does the job adequately and with less effort, use it.
To use a construction analogy, sure there's no reason to screw drywall, nails are perfectly effective at holding it and hammers and nails are much simpler mechanically and cheaper than a battery-powered driver and screws. But it's faster and easier to drive screws than pound nails. For non-experts, at least; really experienced drywallers are crazy fast at driving nails -- tap, boom, next. I guess that part of the analogy holds up as well... if you are an engineer with a great deal of experience at writing custom video decoders you can probably write one faster than you can train a neural network to do the same job.
If you can provide a cohesive philosophic explanation of how tax-related things are working now, I would greatly respect you for it.
If you're looking for consistent, cohesive philosophy behind any element of the legal code, especially tax law, you're going to be disappointed. Laws are built from compromises between parties with different visions and philosophies.
Not at all.
Company policy doesn't trump your legal right.
Sorry, but private property owners do very much trump your right to carry.
You make this claim, then go on to talk about brandishing, not carrying. Carry is usually concealed, and in that form guruevi is right and you're wrong -- private property does not trump the legal right to carry. In most states.
A point I was not making about concealed carry.
Okay, so you were changing the topic from "carry" (which is most often concealed) to its narrow subset "open carry". Fair enough, but you should say that's what you're doing if you do it, and probably shouldn't use broad phrases like "absolutely does".
My point is that if I see another's brandishment, they will be encouraged strongly to stop by my brandishment
Be careful, there. You're using the word "brandish" to refer to two different things, I think. If I walk in with an openly-carried pistol on my hip (or even a slung rifle on my back), and you draw your gun in order to deter me (your phrasing seems to imply some sort of action on your part... unless you are also carrying openly so all you have to do is rotate your hip toward me, or similar?) then many states would consider you to have committed assault with a deadly weapon. I could call the police and have you arrested. States that have a statute covering "brandishing" as a separate crime might consider you to have done that, rather than assault, but most states do not have a brandishing statute and would just consider your action to be a threat, which is what "assault" means (technically, in "assault and battery", "assault" is the part where you threaten to batter and "battery" is the part where you do it. Many states don't bother with this distinction in their legal codes and just use "assault" to refer to either threats or actions).
my announcement that any further trespass is not allowed
Until you ask the person to leave, no trespass has occurred, assuming we're talking about a business that's open to the public. Once you ask them to leave, and give them a reasonable time to do so, then if they fail to leave they are trespassing.
Considering that people have legally shot unarmed people in the back, I suspect someone coming at another person with an openly carried piece will have even less protection if the owner believes he or his family are in imminent danger.
That depends on whether the belief is reasonable, unless some form of Castle Doctrine applies. It's hard to predict what a jury would find reasonable, but I doubt that most would think a holstered sidearm or slung rifle provides a basis for a reasonable belief that deadly force is needed to prevent serious injury or death. If you shot someone for walking in with an openly-carried gun, I think you'd go to prison. Perhaps even if Castle Doctrine does apply, since it only gives you a legal presumption of reasonableness, and I think that a good prosecutor could prove that your actions were unreasonable.
I think the most promising solution approach would be progressive taxes on corporate taxes based on market share.
Interesting idea. In general I'm opposed to all corporate income taxes. Their primary effect is to tax individuals in a way that hides the bill from the voters, making it hard for them to evaluate their return on the taxes they pay. However, I think taxes are a useful tool for internalizing externalities so that the market can factor them in, including at the corporate level.
One challenge is quantifying the social cost of monopolies. Obviously, any specific rate schedule you choose and publish will be wrong, since some monopolies are more harmful than others. But can we even pick some reasonable average schedule that doesn't badly distort the market? Another problem is how to deal with startups in entirely new industries. They have a total monopoly at the beginning, but the market will be tiny and imposing heavy taxes on startups will just kill them and their fledgling industries.
Another challenge is how to prevent collusion. This is the typical anti-trust problem, but I think your idea would make it both more common and harder to police. It would provide motivation for companies with large market share to fission, but to do so in ways that allow them to avoid actually competing. Since the fissioning process would mean that both companies are staffed with people with a common market approach and vision (at least initially), it would be pretty hard to prove that they're actually colluding rather than just both continuing their business as before.
There are lots of obvious jurisdiction-shopping dodges as well, especially for corporations that are heavily IP-based. Move the monopolistic corporation to another country and have them sell in the US through a network of small, non-monopoly resellers who all buy/license the same goods/services from the overseas operation for the same monopolistic price, for example.
I don't think any of these problems are insuperable, but implementing the idea effectively wouldn't necessarily be easy. It is interesting, though.
the IRS should be abolished and a flat tax with a graph that gets steeper
That's not a flat tax, it's a progressive tax
Also, what is your plan for how to collect the taxes after you've abolished the IRS?
Company policy doesn't trump your legal right.
Sorry, but private property owners do very much trump your right to carry.
You make this claim, then go on to talk about brandishing, not carrying. Carry is usually concealed, and in that form guruevi is right and you're wrong -- private property does not trump the legal right to carry. In most states.
Property owners can ask you to leave and if you refuse you're trespassing, but if the gun is concealed they can't know to ask. In a minority of states, signs that ban guns from the premises do have legal force, meaning that carrying in violation of the owner's wishes is a crime. In most, though, it's perfectly legal to ignore the owner's wishes.
IMO "no guns" signs should have legal force, but with the understanding that the property owner is accepting responsibility for the safety of the people on the premises, since they're being denied tools of self defense.