So your argument boils down to everyone you disagree with has to give up electricity and become invisible to you before you will even consider what they're saying? Because unless you can't see or hear them, they're hypocrites?
$5 a kWh hour is ridiculous, the current rates here are around $0.10 a kWh, shifting to mostly renewable power sources seems unlikely to increase power costs by 5000%. Gasoline is going to go to $10 USD a gallon regardless of whether you support it or not. And frankly $10 USD a gallon would be fine if cars used 1/10th the gasoline they use now (or none at all).
I suggest you take a closer look at the people who oppose these things, the majority of them do not believe that AGW exists or that it will be a problem.
I think I would blame the people who won't allow the loopholes to be closed. For example, Grover Norquist is the chief architect of the Republican inability to close tax loop holes. Almost all of the currently elected Republicans have signed his pledge that they will never raise taxes even by closing an obviously abused loophole in the tax code*.
I imagine you would fire any personal accountant who didnt get you the highest legally allowable return; why are people expecting business accountants to do otherwise?
Generally speaking, I might be upset that certain corporations are getting away with paying less than their fair share, however, I don't blame them for (ab)using the rules. Unless, of course, their lobbyists are responsible for creating the loophole and/or maintaining it, in which case they obviously should share the blame with their bought politicians.
* They are only allowed to close tax loopholes if the overall level of taxation stays constant or goes lower (for example, they can offset the closing of a tax loophole by lowering the base tax rate)
You MIGHT have a point if you mentioned tax havens.
My point wasn't that these specific tax loopholes exist, but that they are examples of things that would be loop holes. The point being that tax loop holes exist and pretending that "tax loophole" is a meaningless label is dishonest.
If the legislation allowed it, no, that wouldnt be a loophole
The whole point of a loophole is that the rules allow it, but a reasonable person would think the results are a bad idea. For example, having the government pay more than the work you're doing is worth should be clearly a bad idea. That's why if you could do that, it would be the result of a loophole.
Not true, because if they had not placed a charity giving limit (which they did), it would be clear that they were trying to encourage as much charitable giving as possible.
Absolutely true. Tax deductions for charity are supposed to encourage donations by defraying some of the cost. If you're getting more than the donation cost back, the government is paying you to make inferior donations to charity. They might as well cut the middle-man out and donate the money directly. For example, if you tax rate is 33%, tax deductions for charitable giving should generate twice as much in donations as they cost. Flipping it around so that the deductions are larger than the donations should be an obvious perversion of what the system is supposed to do. Now instead of generating 3 dollars in donation for every dollar in tax breaks, you're generating less than 1 dollar in donations for every dollar in tax breaks.
You must be playing intentionally thick, no one is that stupid. A law that gives you the option of "doing activity B" and paying lower taxes would seem to be intentionally offering the choice, hence not "a loophole". The whole point of calling it "a loophole" is to identify it as an unintentional consequence. Here's another example of a tax loophole:
Microsoft often donates copies of Microsoft Windows and Office to charitable organisations. They then write off the retail price of the software as a donation, despite the fact that the normal price for charities is much lower than the retail price and actually the only things donated were a CD, a manual and a set of licenses. Sure, they have forgone revenue but they might never have earned that anyway and the donation actually helps to crowd out alternatives to Windows.
With this loophole Microsoft could turn a donation that cost the company $50 into a $1 million dollar donation for a net saving of $349,950 on taxes. If you want to include the opportunity cost, you would need to calculate the likelihood that the charity would purchase licenses and the price differential between retail and charitable purchase price. If the charitable price is 10% the regular price and the charity had a 50% chance of purchasing new copies of Windows, that cost works out to $50,000, and it would still net them around $300,000 in tax savings for almost no real cost.
It's not the donating to charity that's a loophole. It's the law that allows them to count the donation at retail price instead of manufacturer's cost (thus creating the $1 million versus $50 dollar discrepancy). This loop hole probably exists because the law is older than the rise of software licensing schemes, the situation would have been almost impossible to imagine before the rise of computers and the Internet.
Actually, I think they're using one of the standard English definitions. From dictionary.com:
a means of escape or evasion; a means or opportunity of evading a rule, law, etc.: There are a number of loopholes in the tax laws whereby corporations can save money.
Generally a tax loophole is a deduction that can be abused to generate larger than intended deductions. For example, if you could reduce your taxes by more than the value of you donation to goodwill, that would clearly be a tax loophole. Similarly, if you could install energy efficient windows in other people's houses for less than the tax deduction that would also be a loophole. If you can directly invest all of your life's earnings into a retirement account and then borrow money against the the principle and deduct the interest you pay on that loan from your earnings in such a way that you pay a much lower tax rate than normal, that's a tax loophole.
It's true the word can be abused by people who don't like specific deductions, but in the GP, it's most likely used properly. Romney's tax accountants are most certainly using and abusing the tax laws to allow him to pay the least amount legally possible.
Would the tax folks have a problem if you were to get a bank loan on good terms by using those stocks as collateral, then sell them a year later to pay off the loan?
Actually, I remember reading an article that said that's a common trick that sufficiently wealthy people pull off. Plus, if I remember correctly, the interest you pay on the loan against the stocks that you haven't paid tax on is tax-deductible.
I expect about 50% of the voting population will take that approach, it's the other 50% that may not want to know in case there is actually something improper that's the problem.
He's talking about our secret Muslim Mexican Paling-around-with-Polygamists Mormon-extremist Presidential Wannabe. Sources have confirmed to me that Mitt's real name may be "Miguel Santos Rodriguez".
On the contrary, I thought it was a very effective rebuttal. He demonstrated very clearly why you're supposed to consider the lawyers' arguments and not what you believe is probably true. If the case revolves around a gun being fired underwater and neither side argues that guns can't be fired underwater, you should not be deciding the case on whether or not you believe a gun can be fired underwater.
It's true it may be a failing of the judge, however, it is also be a failing of the jury foreman. It's his job to communicate to the judge the questions that the jury has. Instead of asking for clarification on what prior art is, he presented his own opinion as fact to the rest of the jury. Additionally, according to the jury foreman, he based his opinion on the fact that he owns patents and if he had Apple's patents, he would want to pursue a case against Samsung.
This is appears to be a serious breach of the jury foreman's duties.
Funny I thought acceptance without proof was acceptance.
Belief without proof is Faith.
I accept my memory as mostly reliable because there's nothing that can be done if it is not. If my memory changes every night as do my circumstances in a perpetual and perfect experiment like those performed on the people in Dark City, there is nothing that I can be done about it. It's not faith because I do not believe that my memory is infallible. Even worse, the possibility exists that our memory is continually invented on the spot. However, that's the same as the evil homunculus problem, and the answer is the same if my memory is a fraud then the fraud is so good that I have never seen evidence of it and probably never will, and thus makes no difference to me. The fraud appears to be as reliable as the real thing.
Ironically, a lot of pickup/SUV owners aren't necessarily "cowboy posers", but just people who think that if they ever do get in an accident, they'd rather be driving the bigger car when it happens.
Yeah, a few years ago there was an article on Slashdot about that. If I remember correctly, someone leaked a Ford internal customer profile that found that SUV purchasers tended to be short, insecure and a bit cowardly. The biggest selling point was how "safe" it felt to tower over everyone else on the road.
So smaller cars are more dangerous because there are so many big trucks on the road because so many people are afraid of getting hit by big trucks, thus perpetuating the problem.
Even worse, SUVs tend to make driving for both the driver and everyone else more dangerous. People in SUVs have a statistically significant greater risk of death from accidents (higher centre of mass means more roll overs) and they deal more damage to other vehicles when involved in accidents (because they are larger, heavier and take more momentum into the accident).
The Freakonomics guys, looked at that data and came to a different conclusion. They think that the side that's going to win spends the most money. It's a subtle difference but important. Their hypothesis is that the side that is going to win has an easier time raising money, and thus has more money to spend. It's an interesting possibility for the correlation between money spend and victory.
The most important result was that Steve Levitt found that if you double spending on an election (and everything else holds the same), you can expect to capture an additional 1% of the popular vote. If that's right, then you can buy an election, but it's very expensive unless you're already a contender.
Just to let you know what the realy threat is. During at least two of five great extinction events that have reshaped all life on this planet, a change in the climate has played a role in the extinction event. In at least one, a small rise in the average temperature (about 4 degrees) appears to have killed off about 90% of all the species on the planet. Photosynthesis is temperature dependant, and the theory is that the change in temperature rendered the leaves on most of the plants unable to properly photsynthesize because they were too warm. A massive plant die off started and then the terrestial animals starved. The warming appears to be caused by CO2 which simultaneously increased the acidity in the oceans to the point where most (around 90%) of the marine species also died off. Terrestial life didn't recover until new plants evolved with differently shaped leaves that were better able to disapate heat.
The threat is less today because we do not have Pangaea so we have more varied climates, but we still face the potential problem that our major crop lands will become unsuitable for growing food. This means much more expensive food and the potential that the global poor will starve (and potentially wage war/terrorist campaigns for access to food).
July 28 at 11:15 am If you are my friend, you deserve to know the truth. This world is secretly run by a shadow organization of people who among other things enjoy raping children. some of the leaders were involved with the bombing of the twin towers. It was a sacrifice and a complete inside job. Also the Bush's are very sick twisted problems. I believe they have a secret Castle in Colorado where they have been raping and sacrificing children for many years. Think I'm crazy? Think again.
I'm entirely unconvinced that a few degrees warmer climate equals disaster, famine and mass extinction.
Just for reference, an average temperature climb of a few degrees Celsius over a relatively short period may have caused one of the great extinction events, the Permian Extinction. Over 90% of the earth's biomass died during that event. As I understand it, a large part of the problem was that photosynthesis became unsustainable in the plants at the time. Photosynthesis is temperature sensitive and one hypothesis is that the leaves on the plants that flourished at the time were unable to dissipate enough heat to continue the process. Most of these plants died (and then everything that ate those plants died), until new plants with thinner and narrower leaves (which dissipated heat more efficiently) were able to replace them.
It won't necessarily cause famine or mass extinction, because we might not hit the extinction threshold before we run out of profitable fuels to burn and even if we do, the genetic engineering companies like Monsanto might take pity on the poorest nations in the world and give away their patented crop seed that is adapted to grow in the world's new climate, but it is a serious risk which must be considered.
First we're currently in a "warm period" (interglacial) that began around 11,500-13,300 years ago (the last ice age began around 26,000 years ago). From the Wikipedia article on Global Cooling:
As for the prospects of the end of the current interglacial (again, valid only in the absence of human perturbations), it isn't true that interglacials have previously only lasted about 10,000 years; and Milankovitch-type calculations indicate that the present interglacial would probably continue for tens of thousands of years naturally. Other estimates (Loutre and Berger, based on orbital calculations) put the unperturbed length of the present interglacial at 50,000 years.
The strong inference from all this is that the late-Triassic mass-extinction was, indeed, caused by CO2-induced global warming. Things simply got too hot for most plants to photosynthesise.
To put it in perspective, the estimate is that it would cost between 1-2% of world GDP (roughly equal to cost of sewer systems) to stabilise CO2 levels. And that estimate doesn't take into account technological innovation that might be spurred by the process. As I understand it, the estimates of the costs related to reducing sulphur oxide (SO) and Nitrous Oxide (NOx) levels turned out to be vastly over estimated by the industries involved. Both of those substances are currently regulated in the U.S. using cap and trade systems.
Slashdot Mirror
So your argument boils down to everyone you disagree with has to give up electricity and become invisible to you before you will even consider what they're saying? Because unless you can't see or hear them, they're hypocrites?
$5 a kWh hour is ridiculous, the current rates here are around $0.10 a kWh, shifting to mostly renewable power sources seems unlikely to increase power costs by 5000%. Gasoline is going to go to $10 USD a gallon regardless of whether you support it or not. And frankly $10 USD a gallon would be fine if cars used 1/10th the gasoline they use now (or none at all).
I suggest you take a closer look at the people who oppose these things, the majority of them do not believe that AGW exists or that it will be a problem.
Then blame the government.
I think I would blame the people who won't allow the loopholes to be closed. For example, Grover Norquist is the chief architect of the Republican inability to close tax loop holes. Almost all of the currently elected Republicans have signed his pledge that they will never raise taxes even by closing an obviously abused loophole in the tax code*.
I imagine you would fire any personal accountant who didnt get you the highest legally allowable return; why are people expecting business accountants to do otherwise?
Generally speaking, I might be upset that certain corporations are getting away with paying less than their fair share, however, I don't blame them for (ab)using the rules. Unless, of course, their lobbyists are responsible for creating the loophole and/or maintaining it, in which case they obviously should share the blame with their bought politicians.
* They are only allowed to close tax loopholes if the overall level of taxation stays constant or goes lower (for example, they can offset the closing of a tax loophole by lowering the base tax rate)
Ah, you are that stupid. You're another "anything that's legal is ethical" moron.
You MIGHT have a point if you mentioned tax havens.
My point wasn't that these specific tax loopholes exist, but that they are examples of things that would be loop holes. The point being that tax loop holes exist and pretending that "tax loophole" is a meaningless label is dishonest.
If the legislation allowed it, no, that wouldnt be a loophole
The whole point of a loophole is that the rules allow it, but a reasonable person would think the results are a bad idea. For example, having the government pay more than the work you're doing is worth should be clearly a bad idea. That's why if you could do that, it would be the result of a loophole.
Not true, because if they had not placed a charity giving limit (which they did), it would be clear that they were trying to encourage as much charitable giving as possible.
Absolutely true. Tax deductions for charity are supposed to encourage donations by defraying some of the cost. If you're getting more than the donation cost back, the government is paying you to make inferior donations to charity. They might as well cut the middle-man out and donate the money directly. For example, if you tax rate is 33%, tax deductions for charitable giving should generate twice as much in donations as they cost. Flipping it around so that the deductions are larger than the donations should be an obvious perversion of what the system is supposed to do. Now instead of generating 3 dollars in donation for every dollar in tax breaks, you're generating less than 1 dollar in donations for every dollar in tax breaks.
You can't seriously be this obtuse.
You must be playing intentionally thick, no one is that stupid. A law that gives you the option of "doing activity B" and paying lower taxes would seem to be intentionally offering the choice, hence not "a loophole". The whole point of calling it "a loophole" is to identify it as an unintentional consequence. Here's another example of a tax loophole:
Microsoft often donates copies of Microsoft Windows and Office to charitable organisations. They then write off the retail price of the software as a donation, despite the fact that the normal price for charities is much lower than the retail price and actually the only things donated were a CD, a manual and a set of licenses. Sure, they have forgone revenue but they might never have earned that anyway and the donation actually helps to crowd out alternatives to Windows.
With this loophole Microsoft could turn a donation that cost the company $50 into a $1 million dollar donation for a net saving of $349,950 on taxes. If you want to include the opportunity cost, you would need to calculate the likelihood that the charity would purchase licenses and the price differential between retail and charitable purchase price. If the charitable price is 10% the regular price and the charity had a 50% chance of purchasing new copies of Windows, that cost works out to $50,000, and it would still net them around $300,000 in tax savings for almost no real cost.
It's not the donating to charity that's a loophole. It's the law that allows them to count the donation at retail price instead of manufacturer's cost (thus creating the $1 million versus $50 dollar discrepancy). This loop hole probably exists because the law is older than the rise of software licensing schemes, the situation would have been almost impossible to imagine before the rise of computers and the Internet.
Actually, I think they're using one of the standard English definitions. From dictionary.com:
Generally a tax loophole is a deduction that can be abused to generate larger than intended deductions. For example, if you could reduce your taxes by more than the value of you donation to goodwill, that would clearly be a tax loophole. Similarly, if you could install energy efficient windows in other people's houses for less than the tax deduction that would also be a loophole. If you can directly invest all of your life's earnings into a retirement account and then borrow money against the the principle and deduct the interest you pay on that loan from your earnings in such a way that you pay a much lower tax rate than normal, that's a tax loophole.
It's true the word can be abused by people who don't like specific deductions, but in the GP, it's most likely used properly. Romney's tax accountants are most certainly using and abusing the tax laws to allow him to pay the least amount legally possible.
Would the tax folks have a problem if you were to get a bank loan on good terms by using those stocks as collateral, then sell them a year later to pay off the loan?
Actually, I remember reading an article that said that's a common trick that sufficiently wealthy people pull off. Plus, if I remember correctly, the interest you pay on the loan against the stocks that you haven't paid tax on is tax-deductible.
I expect about 50% of the voting population will take that approach, it's the other 50% that may not want to know in case there is actually something improper that's the problem.
Woosh! Poe's law claims another victim.
He's talking about our secret Muslim Mexican Paling-around-with-Polygamists Mormon-extremist Presidential Wannabe.
Sources have confirmed to me that Mitt's real name may be "Miguel Santos Rodriguez".
Funny, the second bullet point here says that sometimes more than one person can be assigned the same SSN.
I suspect that is what we humans call "an error".
On the contrary, I thought it was a very effective rebuttal. He demonstrated very clearly why you're supposed to consider the lawyers' arguments and not what you believe is probably true. If the case revolves around a gun being fired underwater and neither side argues that guns can't be fired underwater, you should not be deciding the case on whether or not you believe a gun can be fired underwater.
It's true it may be a failing of the judge, however, it is also be a failing of the jury foreman. It's his job to communicate to the judge the questions that the jury has. Instead of asking for clarification on what prior art is, he presented his own opinion as fact to the rest of the jury. Additionally, according to the jury foreman, he based his opinion on the fact that he owns patents and if he had Apple's patents, he would want to pursue a case against Samsung.
This is appears to be a serious breach of the jury foreman's duties.
Funny I thought acceptance without proof was acceptance.
Belief without proof is Faith.
I accept my memory as mostly reliable because there's nothing that can be done if it is not. If my memory changes every night as do my circumstances in a perpetual and perfect experiment like those performed on the people in Dark City, there is nothing that I can be done about it. It's not faith because I do not believe that my memory is infallible. Even worse, the possibility exists that our memory is continually invented on the spot. However, that's the same as the evil homunculus problem, and the answer is the same if my memory is a fraud then the fraud is so good that I have never seen evidence of it and probably never will, and thus makes no difference to me. The fraud appears to be as reliable as the real thing.
Ironically, a lot of pickup/SUV owners aren't necessarily "cowboy posers", but just people who think that if they ever do get in an accident, they'd rather be driving the bigger car when it happens.
Yeah, a few years ago there was an article on Slashdot about that. If I remember correctly, someone leaked a Ford internal customer profile that found that SUV purchasers tended to be short, insecure and a bit cowardly. The biggest selling point was how "safe" it felt to tower over everyone else on the road.
So smaller cars are more dangerous because there are so many big trucks on the road because so many people are afraid of getting hit by big trucks, thus perpetuating the problem.
Even worse, SUVs tend to make driving for both the driver and everyone else more dangerous. People in SUVs have a statistically significant greater risk of death from accidents (higher centre of mass means more roll overs) and they deal more damage to other vehicles when involved in accidents (because they are larger, heavier and take more momentum into the accident).
The Freakonomics guys, looked at that data and came to a different conclusion. They think that the side that's going to win spends the most money. It's a subtle difference but important. Their hypothesis is that the side that is going to win has an easier time raising money, and thus has more money to spend. It's an interesting possibility for the correlation between money spend and victory.
The most important result was that Steve Levitt found that if you double spending on an election (and everything else holds the same), you can expect to capture an additional 1% of the popular vote. If that's right, then you can buy an election, but it's very expensive unless you're already a contender.
Just to let you know what the realy threat is. During at least two of five great extinction events that have reshaped all life on this planet, a change in the climate has played a role in the extinction event. In at least one, a small rise in the average temperature (about 4 degrees) appears to have killed off about 90% of all the species on the planet. Photosynthesis is temperature dependant, and the theory is that the change in temperature rendered the leaves on most of the plants unable to properly photsynthesize because they were too warm. A massive plant die off started and then the terrestial animals starved. The warming appears to be caused by CO2 which simultaneously increased the acidity in the oceans to the point where most (around 90%) of the marine species also died off. Terrestial life didn't recover until new plants evolved with differently shaped leaves that were better able to disapate heat.
The threat is less today because we do not have Pangaea so we have more varied climates, but we still face the potential problem that our major crop lands will become unsuitable for growing food. This means much more expensive food and the potential that the global poor will starve (and potentially wage war/terrorist campaigns for access to food).
No, he's too rich to be crazy, he's therefore "just" eccentric.
Provide citation or retract the libel.
He posted that it on his facebook page:
I'm entirely unconvinced that a few degrees warmer climate equals disaster, famine and mass extinction.
Just for reference, an average temperature climb of a few degrees Celsius over a relatively short period may have caused one of the great extinction events, the Permian Extinction. Over 90% of the earth's biomass died during that event. As I understand it, a large part of the problem was that photosynthesis became unsustainable in the plants at the time. Photosynthesis is temperature sensitive and one hypothesis is that the leaves on the plants that flourished at the time were unable to dissipate enough heat to continue the process. Most of these plants died (and then everything that ate those plants died), until new plants with thinner and narrower leaves (which dissipated heat more efficiently) were able to replace them.
It won't necessarily cause famine or mass extinction, because we might not hit the extinction threshold before we run out of profitable fuels to burn and even if we do, the genetic engineering companies like Monsanto might take pity on the poorest nations in the world and give away their patented crop seed that is adapted to grow in the world's new climate, but it is a serious risk which must be considered.
The sewage comparison originally comes from Earth: the Operators Manual, but I read about it on Skeptical Science. They also have a cost estimate page.
First we're currently in a "warm period" (interglacial) that began around 11,500-13,300 years ago (the last ice age began around 26,000 years ago). From the Wikipedia article on Global Cooling:
Additional references:
Eight glacial cycles from an Antarctic ice core
An Exceptionally Long Interglacial Ahead?
There's only 5 mass extinctions in the geological record and at least one may have been caused by an episode of global warming:
Purely hypothetical, of course.
To put it in perspective, the estimate is that it would cost between 1-2% of world GDP (roughly equal to cost of sewer systems) to stabilise CO2 levels. And that estimate doesn't take into account technological innovation that might be spurred by the process. As I understand it, the estimates of the costs related to reducing sulphur oxide (SO) and Nitrous Oxide (NOx) levels turned out to be vastly over estimated by the industries involved. Both of those substances are currently regulated in the U.S. using cap and trade systems.