They do realize that people use Hulu because they do not want to buy cable at home.
It's pretty simple.
I know a lot of people who pay for Hulu and would probably pay more.
But they won't buy cable to watch Hulu. Not a chance. They'll take their business elsewhere.
Oh, well. If they are strict about this authentication, a number of people will simply find a new competitor of theirs. No big loss (except to the cable companies)
Local charities used to allow 3 in 10 infants die before the age of 5 due to malnutrition. (real stat from Philly in 1850)
I'm not sure that's a good target....
Now, I agree with you on certain components of community, but there is a real hole in the argument, unfortunately. When did a non government source ever pick up the slack on the scale that would be necessary to provide modern standards of health and living?
I would argue, never.
Perhaps we're doomed to have "community" but high poverty and apparent starvation.... or we can be rid of both. Isn't there a middle ground?
Does it bother anyone else that, they obtained a waiver to exempt them from reporting ALL illegal activity except for two keywords, which they decided they MUST search for to fulfil legal requirements.
It's worth pointing out that it's only a preliminary committee. It being voted down in this committee won't necessarily prevent it from seeing the floor the full parliament, but it won't come along with the backing of the special committee.
There was a member of the Swedish Pirate Party in the committee and he's been the one agitating for a re-vote. The frightening thing about this is that there are only 24 members on this committee and one was absent, so with 23 possible votes, the final vote was 12-14.
BUT, if 12 people actually voted in favour of the bill, that would leave only 11 against.
Keep in mind, this isn't highly corrosive stuff.
The bill is talking about "orphaned works" which are those works that will never again see the light of day because no owner claims them. It is likely that when the copyright expires in 70 years, with nobody to preserve them, or assign their rights to a publisher who can, these works will be completely lost to humanity. This legislation would seek to prevent this and increase the overall value to humanity with NO money lost by putting them in public domain.
Nobody is arguing that this is a bad idea, but the recording industry lobbies see it as the "sharp end of the sword" when it comes to copyright reform, so they will fight against it vehemently.
If you live in Europe, write to your MEP. Vote fraud is no joke.
And that's where we disagree, but you have to admit the disagreement is very subtle.
One thing I will point out is that the government's stated goal is "make life better for the people".
A corporations stated goal is "make profit by any means possible".
Governments can be corrupted, but corporations don't even have to be corrupted. They can be pretty evil simply being exactly forthright about what their goals are.
Well, this is a very old comment, but WCCP works by forcing all traffic on 80 and 443 to transit a transparent proxy device. Some businesses do MITM everything, others may pass HTTPS traffic, but only to approved sites. It is quite seldom that you would bother to implement web filtering and then simply leave web ports wide open for anyone to bypass easily, although I'm sure it's done out of sheer administrative malaise sometimes.:-)
One of the problems in the US and UK (and to some extent, Australia and Canada) is that they have privatized prisons, which has lead to BILLIONS of dollars in lobbying made to increase sentencing and decrease judicial and police discretion about "minor crimes".
Your faith in (and I may be putting words in your mouth here) "privatize everything" is misplaced. People in power, by their nature, are corruptable and seek to increase their power.
I am just as frightened by it being financial and business hegemons OR government untouchables. The difference is that in our system of government, we can remove those in power, we can demand (and even vote for) transparency in their actions and we can lawfully pursue justice where they fail to do it.
In business, many of those recourses are lost. I'm all for small business, but in an anarcho-libertarian society (the obvious extreme example of your position), global multinationals would become de-facto islands of government, just as they began to do in the 1880s, before the US federal government asserted the people's desire to put controls in place to regulate gross misuse of marketplace domination and monopoly. Things improved for almost all people (except the handful at the top of the business) when those businesses were regulated so they could no longer take gross advantage of the workers, the economy and the environment.
So I just caution you that your particular tollway, also, may be paved by your best intentions, but I assert it doesn't necessary avoid taking us to a the same destination any less directly.
You do realize that the most common configuration for "web-proxy-only" Internet is to use WCCP to redirect all port 80 and port 443 traffic to the proxy server and/or block them all and require all web traffic to go through your magic proxy via Browser-configured proxy server.
Using port 443 is neat and all, but won't work in most locked-down environments I've seen.
As to the economist, you should read it more often then. I used to subscribe.
I'll leave this alone. It's a stupid argument. They've always supported "safety net" programs. They criticized the Torries in the UK in the 80s for wanting to dismantle them. They're still right-of-center globally. In a European grid, they might be called "neo-liberal", which is a "socially liberal, economically conservative" stance but the Americans have turned "liberal" into a bad word, so you will probably freak out at that label, I gather.
As to Obama moving to the right of bob dole? He's an advocate of social medicine. Are you saying bob dole would advocate a stronger government backed system?
And you call us insane? You're crazy.
WHAT?! YES!! Prior to "Obamacare" Bob Dole himself (released through his think tank, the "Bipartisan Policy Center") released a draft legislation that was modelled after Mitt Romney's solution is Mass. He actually lobbied for its passage.... This ended up being almost identical to the plan passed under Obama. I can't believe you would pull this argument out of your ass, since it's not only false, it's arrogantly false. Are you for real? Bob Dole helped WRITE the damn legislation. And you're calling me crazy for claiming he supported it?!?
The "Institute for Policy Studies" think tank has written that Obama is probably to the right of Ronald Reagan as well on many issues. It's insane that he's called a socialist. He's also far right of the "Conservative Party" Prime Ministers of Canada and the UK who are proponents of single-payer healthcare as it is enacted in both countries and have both proposed tax increases and further economic regulatory structures.
As to not wanting to live in the US anymore, the world is full of socialist countries. Go join one. We have no where else to go.
Yeah, I did, thanks, I have more freedom here and I find much less rancor in both political and social discussions. The crime rate is half, my small business has much lower overhead, thanks to not having to carry health insurance for workers, massive liability insurance for crazy ass tort laws and unemployment insurance for stupid state-run systems that don't buy much. It's quite nice. The slightly higher marginal tax rate I pay here is far less than the extra cost of those services, plus, I know if my business were to fail, I wouldn't be destitute. It's actually really great. You should try it.
As to the change the in the slope, it wasn't the shortfall in revenue that is killing you it's the expansion in spending. If we repealed all the bush tax cuts your deficits would be similar.
I didn't say the only cause of the deficit issues were revenues. But more than half were (around 60% by most estimates) and almost any independent analysis acknowledges this. Countries like Canada, Sweden, France and Germany have not suffered the depths of unemployment and GDP stagnation that the US and the UK have, much due stronger social safety nets, unemployment rules and education systems as well as due to greater regulation in the financial sectors. Additionally, they all ran a surplus at some point during the "boom" years so do not have the crippling deficits that the US is dealing with. The US was running a surplus in 2000 but Bush said in a speech that it was "wrong" for the government to run a surplus and he gave it all back in a big rebate. I remember getting that cheque in 2003.
However, spending, itself, is an issue, certainly. Nobody denies that. It shouldn't be ignored, but most Democrats, according to polls, support decreases in spending provided they are also accompanied by increase in revenue. Bringing the US tax reciepts *back up* to the long-run average of 21% of GDP would be a good start, but that would require expiring the Bush tax cuts. Like I pointed out before, at 21%, the US would STILL have the lowest tax rates of all OECD countries (
The Economist is certainly right of center, economically. They are downright "right-wing" by European standards and slightly right of center by US standards.
Of course, they don't often speak highly of the Republican party because of all the other crazy fringes like the moralistic religious wing, or the libertarian kooks who think the EPA is wasted space.
It's NOT the Economist who has shifted positions in the last 15 years. If you read back, they have been very very consistent.
It's the Republican party who has gone completely insane. Frankly, Obama is to the RIGHT of Bob Dole and quite a bit further to the right from Ronald Reagan.
I don't live in the US anymore. While you may find some of the crazy nuts on the left wing to be a little bit nuts (as do I), Most of the world sees the Republican "base" as completely insane... often even not too far behind some of the crazier Islamic regimes. I mean.. seriously, 68% of republicans don't believe that evolution is a scientifically sound theory. 32% answer surveys saying that Obama is "definitely a Muslim". 51% believe that he wasn't born in the US.
That's pretty damn insane too.
Your commentary on ideal taxation rates not being strictly related to maximum income collection is reasonable, but it is worth pointing out that I might argue the small change in slope of the curve between 19% and 20% (the differences in federal tax rate as a portion of GDP between the Bush tax cuts and Clinton rates) hardly justifies the estimated $1.2 trillion deficits that it likely causes. Additionally, we are NOWHERE NEAR the range where the slope starts to change dramatically.
It's very very hard to argue that at the rate of between 22-26% of GDP, the overall US taxation rate is too high. In fact, it's lower than ANY OTHER developed nation already, as a fraction of GDP (unless you count Korea and Lithuania)... and that data is according to a study conducted by the Conservative "Heritage Foundation", so it's hard to question the source as "liberally biased" as so many like to do when they don't like the conclusions it points to.
I'm not sure what your point is other than you are angry some people aren't well versed in economics. But it is important to remember that arguments about the Laffer curve is almost completely irrelevant because we are, by every study I've ever heard of, not only left of the peak, but possibly left of even the linear part of the curve and into the area where government cutbacks begin to drag down infrastructure and research investment, actually HURTING productivity, rather than increasing it. (This is the reason the bottom part of the Laffer curve is likely logarithmic, rather than linear)
And I do want to point out that the Laffer curve is a hypothetical theory that is essentially based on nothing more than a thought experiment. While it MUST be true from a sheer economic sentiment, the actual shape of it is highly theoretical and probably not even consistent across various cultures and countries. Despite this, most evidence indicates it would probably take the shape similar to a negative-skew lognormal distribution with a peak at around 70-80% taxation as a portion of GDP.
I do feel obligated to point out that the "fall off" in productivity you mention as the curve begins to inflect is probably not significant in the types of rates we are talking about (20-26% of GDP).
The ONLY other countries in the world (excluding the artificially stimulated economies of Dubai and Singapore) rivalling the US in per-capita GDP output (the best approximation of "productivity" we have) are all very high taxation countries. In fact, the majority of the top 10 regions in "productivity" are also
Very few economists deny the Laffer curve completely, although it's a gross simplification and a theory with no real empirical evidence. However, Laffer himself (and most economists who research the topic) have said the "top" point on the curve for income taxes was at around 65-70% marginal rate. Everywhere in the world is on the "left" side of that curve. For certain types of taxes, such as capitol gains taxes or corporate taxes, the rate may be more like 20-40%.
The idea that reducing taxes from 23% to 19% would INCREASE revenues is completely insane. Holy shit. Even "The Economist", a fiscally conservative rag, has said that the Bush tax cuts were the largest contributor to the current deficits.
The concept of international minimum taxes has very little to do with a Laffer curve and certainly can't be interpreted strictly as there are a lot of other factors. I hear Nigeria has a very low corporate tax rate, but I don't see companies running off there to do business. Concepts like international minimum taxes are insane anyway and will never happen. They're just rhetorical memes used to hold down one side of an argument without making concessions on other points.
It might be worth pointing out that your casting "Democrats" in a single light, being completely ignorant of all topics remotely related to economics.... is an ideology, and a bit of a shallow one at that. Your last sentence is grossly smug yet bald on its face.
The Oort Cloud is just a theory and is yet untested. It is certainly not unscientific, unless you claim that it certainly does exist. The idea of atoms and molecules were completely theoretical for hundreds of years. Sure, they followed from all observable phenomena, but we didn't actually IMAGE the shape of an atom until the 1980s. That really honestly doesn't' make it unscientific to have believed in during the 1980s. The same goes for the shape of electron clouds in various energy states. They were inferred by some unexplained phenomena again, but weren't actually imaged until LAST YEAR.
The fact that the existence of the Oort Cloud is not yet POSSIBLE to verify does not disprove anything. It merely makes it slightly less certain.
So now, rather than a 99.999993% chance that the Earth is 6.5 billion years old, it's 99.999992%. Congrats, you have discovered the scientific method. What the scientific method DOES NOT do is throw out hundreds of millions of observations of the Earth being ancient on the force of a single phenomenon that doesn't have an obvious and readily testable model. That would be INSANE. Unless of course, you WANT it to be false (which you clearly do).
As for climate science. The Earth CERTAINLY is warming. Why is not completely understood, but it appears to be strongly correlated with human activity. This is unproven, but the data is striking. Rather than the numbers above for evolution (admittedly, a random guess at probability), "global climate change" is probably 95-98% certain to be primarily human caused according to data I've seen. It's within the orders of magnitude that would normally cause a scientist to draw a conclusion from data. There is some reasonable chance that every single gallon of gas we burn is speeding us toward oblivion. Or perhaps it's less severe and there is a chance that every single gallon of gas we burn is merely going to cause an extremely expensive and socially damaging future. Or perhaps it will simply move the temperate zones north and Canada will become a nice place to live and the US will be primarily a giant desert akin to Northern Africa today. It seems possible that Europe will actually get colder, though it's definitely not certain and Africa may go back to being the tropical temperate area that Asia is today.
Who knows... But if there is a 50% chance that something you're doing to today will end civilization as we know it, don't you think it's prudent to discuss how to avoid this?
LOL, by that measure, I came from a Scottish orphanage and was shipped to Canada to work on a collective farm at the age of 12 (yeah, seriously my great-grandfathers story).
See, does copyright law really specify the intent of the person who violates the copyright?
Are you really claiming that this is important? If I saw the same photo and merely thought to myself "cool idea, i should try it" and came up with the same thing... that this is somehow different?
I'm really angry about you calling this groupthink. I don't fucking care what the OP or the GP or whoever said... I THINK that it is BS. I don't frankly care what YOU THINK.
Slashdot Mirror
They do realize that people use Hulu because they do not want to buy cable at home.
It's pretty simple.
I know a lot of people who pay for Hulu and would probably pay more.
But they won't buy cable to watch Hulu. Not a chance. They'll take their business elsewhere.
Oh, well. If they are strict about this authentication, a number of people will simply find a new competitor of theirs. No big loss (except to the cable companies)
I don't have points
But this needs +1 Brilliant.
Thanks
Local charities used to allow 3 in 10 infants die before the age of 5 due to malnutrition. (real stat from Philly in 1850)
I'm not sure that's a good target....
Now, I agree with you on certain components of community, but there is a real hole in the argument, unfortunately. When did a non government source ever pick up the slack on the scale that would be necessary to provide modern standards of health and living?
I would argue, never.
Perhaps we're doomed to have "community" but high poverty and apparent starvation.... or we can be rid of both. Isn't there a middle ground?
Except the US still fingerprints, photographs and is trying to pass legislation to get DNA samples from every single visitor.
Uncle Sam IS Big Brother.
Do you not love your country, citizen?
How dare you threaten our safety for your selfish goals. Freedom... posh...
Does it bother anyone else that, they obtained a waiver to exempt them from reporting ALL illegal activity except for two keywords, which they decided they MUST search for to fulfil legal requirements.
Those keywords were "rape" and "older man".
Really? WTF?
Our society's priorities are fucked.
>So is wanting to punch someone in the face when they do something to make you angry. Doesn't mean I have to actually punch people in the face.
Actually, if your sparring partner consents, you may, ABSOLUTELY, punch them in the face and people might even pay to watch you.
People do it often. It's called a sport when both people want to do it.
The analogy you made is more akin to rape. That's already illegal and isn't changing, even when it's two gays.
Thanks for playing.
There are a lot of albums where I enjoy a single song, but the remainder is terrible.
Maybe our taste differs, but I find myself often buying 1-3 songs from an album and skipping the rest.
Apparently, a quantum computer allows slashdot editors to see backwards in time.
Since this article was posted.....
5/17/2011 @ 2:34PM
Right, that's almost a year ago that this "announcement" took place.
Whoops!
As someone pointed out below, the actual legislation passed by a vote of 22-0-1.
There is perhaps some amendment that failed under unusual circumstances, but I can't find it anywhere in the documentation.
It's worth pointing out that it's only a preliminary committee. It being voted down in this committee won't necessarily prevent it from seeing the floor the full parliament, but it won't come along with the backing of the special committee.
There was a member of the Swedish Pirate Party in the committee and he's been the one agitating for a re-vote. The frightening thing about this is that there are only 24 members on this committee and one was absent, so with 23 possible votes, the final vote was 12-14.
BUT, if 12 people actually voted in favour of the bill, that would leave only 11 against.
Keep in mind, this isn't highly corrosive stuff.
The bill is talking about "orphaned works" which are those works that will never again see the light of day because no owner claims them. It is likely that when the copyright expires in 70 years, with nobody to preserve them, or assign their rights to a publisher who can, these works will be completely lost to humanity. This legislation would seek to prevent this and increase the overall value to humanity with NO money lost by putting them in public domain.
Nobody is arguing that this is a bad idea, but the recording industry lobbies see it as the "sharp end of the sword" when it comes to copyright reform, so they will fight against it vehemently.
If you live in Europe, write to your MEP. Vote fraud is no joke.
And a video...
And that's where we disagree, but you have to admit the disagreement is very subtle.
One thing I will point out is that the government's stated goal is "make life better for the people".
A corporations stated goal is "make profit by any means possible".
Governments can be corrupted, but corporations don't even have to be corrupted. They can be pretty evil simply being exactly forthright about what their goals are.
Well, this is a very old comment, but WCCP works by forcing all traffic on 80 and 443 to transit a transparent proxy device. Some businesses do MITM everything, others may pass HTTPS traffic, but only to approved sites. It is quite seldom that you would bother to implement web filtering and then simply leave web ports wide open for anyone to bypass easily, although I'm sure it's done out of sheer administrative malaise sometimes. :-)
Non sequitor.
One of the problems in the US and UK (and to some extent, Australia and Canada) is that they have privatized prisons, which has lead to BILLIONS of dollars in lobbying made to increase sentencing and decrease judicial and police discretion about "minor crimes".
Your faith in (and I may be putting words in your mouth here) "privatize everything" is misplaced. People in power, by their nature, are corruptable and seek to increase their power.
I am just as frightened by it being financial and business hegemons OR government untouchables. The difference is that in our system of government, we can remove those in power, we can demand (and even vote for) transparency in their actions and we can lawfully pursue justice where they fail to do it.
In business, many of those recourses are lost. I'm all for small business, but in an anarcho-libertarian society (the obvious extreme example of your position), global multinationals would become de-facto islands of government, just as they began to do in the 1880s, before the US federal government asserted the people's desire to put controls in place to regulate gross misuse of marketplace domination and monopoly. Things improved for almost all people (except the handful at the top of the business) when those businesses were regulated so they could no longer take gross advantage of the workers, the economy and the environment.
So I just caution you that your particular tollway, also, may be paved by your best intentions, but I assert it doesn't necessary avoid taking us to a the same destination any less directly.
You do realize that the most common configuration for "web-proxy-only" Internet is to use WCCP to redirect all port 80 and port 443 traffic to the proxy server and/or block them all and require all web traffic to go through your magic proxy via Browser-configured proxy server.
Using port 443 is neat and all, but won't work in most locked-down environments I've seen.
As to the economist, you should read it more often then. I used to subscribe.
I'll leave this alone. It's a stupid argument. They've always supported "safety net" programs. They criticized the Torries in the UK in the 80s for wanting to dismantle them. They're still right-of-center globally. In a European grid, they might be called "neo-liberal", which is a "socially liberal, economically conservative" stance but the Americans have turned "liberal" into a bad word, so you will probably freak out at that label, I gather.
As to Obama moving to the right of bob dole? He's an advocate of social medicine. Are you saying bob dole would advocate a stronger government backed system?
And you call us insane? You're crazy.
WHAT?! YES!! Prior to "Obamacare" Bob Dole himself (released through his think tank, the "Bipartisan Policy Center") released a draft legislation that was modelled after Mitt Romney's solution is Mass. He actually lobbied for its passage.... This ended up being almost identical to the plan passed under Obama. I can't believe you would pull this argument out of your ass, since it's not only false, it's arrogantly false. Are you for real? Bob Dole helped WRITE the damn legislation. And you're calling me crazy for claiming he supported it?!?
The "Institute for Policy Studies" think tank has written that Obama is probably to the right of Ronald Reagan as well on many issues. It's insane that he's called a socialist. He's also far right of the "Conservative Party" Prime Ministers of Canada and the UK who are proponents of single-payer healthcare as it is enacted in both countries and have both proposed tax increases and further economic regulatory structures.
As to not wanting to live in the US anymore, the world is full of socialist countries. Go join one. We have no where else to go.
Yeah, I did, thanks, I have more freedom here and I find much less rancor in both political and social discussions. The crime rate is half, my small business has much lower overhead, thanks to not having to carry health insurance for workers, massive liability insurance for crazy ass tort laws and unemployment insurance for stupid state-run systems that don't buy much. It's quite nice. The slightly higher marginal tax rate I pay here is far less than the extra cost of those services, plus, I know if my business were to fail, I wouldn't be destitute. It's actually really great. You should try it.
As to the change the in the slope, it wasn't the shortfall in revenue that is killing you it's the expansion in spending. If we repealed all the bush tax cuts your deficits would be similar.
I didn't say the only cause of the deficit issues were revenues. But more than half were (around 60% by most estimates) and almost any independent analysis acknowledges this. Countries like Canada, Sweden, France and Germany have not suffered the depths of unemployment and GDP stagnation that the US and the UK have, much due stronger social safety nets, unemployment rules and education systems as well as due to greater regulation in the financial sectors. Additionally, they all ran a surplus at some point during the "boom" years so do not have the crippling deficits that the US is dealing with. The US was running a surplus in 2000 but Bush said in a speech that it was "wrong" for the government to run a surplus and he gave it all back in a big rebate. I remember getting that cheque in 2003.
However, spending, itself, is an issue, certainly. Nobody denies that. It shouldn't be ignored, but most Democrats, according to polls, support decreases in spending provided they are also accompanied by increase in revenue. Bringing the US tax reciepts *back up* to the long-run average of 21% of GDP would be a good start, but that would require expiring the Bush tax cuts. Like I pointed out before, at 21%, the US would STILL have the lowest tax rates of all OECD countries (
Sorry, I meant to say "with a peak around 70-80% marginal rate", which would generally imply about a 50-60% share of GDP.
And no, I'm not arguing for those kind of taxes, although top marginal rates in the most "productive" country in the world (Norway) are that high.
The Economist is certainly right of center, economically. They are downright "right-wing" by European standards and slightly right of center by US standards.
Of course, they don't often speak highly of the Republican party because of all the other crazy fringes like the moralistic religious wing, or the libertarian kooks who think the EPA is wasted space.
It's NOT the Economist who has shifted positions in the last 15 years. If you read back, they have been very very consistent.
It's the Republican party who has gone completely insane. Frankly, Obama is to the RIGHT of Bob Dole and quite a bit further to the right from Ronald Reagan.
I don't live in the US anymore. While you may find some of the crazy nuts on the left wing to be a little bit nuts (as do I), Most of the world sees the Republican "base" as completely insane... often even not too far behind some of the crazier Islamic regimes. I mean.. seriously, 68% of republicans don't believe that evolution is a scientifically sound theory. 32% answer surveys saying that Obama is "definitely a Muslim". 51% believe that he wasn't born in the US.
That's pretty damn insane too.
Your commentary on ideal taxation rates not being strictly related to maximum income collection is reasonable, but it is worth pointing out that I might argue the small change in slope of the curve between 19% and 20% (the differences in federal tax rate as a portion of GDP between the Bush tax cuts and Clinton rates) hardly justifies the estimated $1.2 trillion deficits that it likely causes. Additionally, we are NOWHERE NEAR the range where the slope starts to change dramatically.
It's very very hard to argue that at the rate of between 22-26% of GDP, the overall US taxation rate is too high. In fact, it's lower than ANY OTHER developed nation already, as a fraction of GDP (unless you count Korea and Lithuania)... and that data is according to a study conducted by the Conservative "Heritage Foundation", so it's hard to question the source as "liberally biased" as so many like to do when they don't like the conclusions it points to.
I'm not sure what your point is other than you are angry some people aren't well versed in economics. But it is important to remember that arguments about the Laffer curve is almost completely irrelevant because we are, by every study I've ever heard of, not only left of the peak, but possibly left of even the linear part of the curve and into the area where government cutbacks begin to drag down infrastructure and research investment, actually HURTING productivity, rather than increasing it. (This is the reason the bottom part of the Laffer curve is likely logarithmic, rather than linear)
And I do want to point out that the Laffer curve is a hypothetical theory that is essentially based on nothing more than a thought experiment. While it MUST be true from a sheer economic sentiment, the actual shape of it is highly theoretical and probably not even consistent across various cultures and countries. Despite this, most evidence indicates it would probably take the shape similar to a negative-skew lognormal distribution with a peak at around 70-80% taxation as a portion of GDP.
In case you aren't familiar with a lognormal, here is a picture: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b3/Skewness_Statistics.svg/446px-Skewness_Statistics.svg.png
I do feel obligated to point out that the "fall off" in productivity you mention as the curve begins to inflect is probably not significant in the types of rates we are talking about (20-26% of GDP).
The ONLY other countries in the world (excluding the artificially stimulated economies of Dubai and Singapore) rivalling the US in per-capita GDP output (the best approximation of "productivity" we have) are all very high taxation countries. In fact, the majority of the top 10 regions in "productivity" are also
a 1 degree difference does not itself point to human activity... Now, if it had gone up (or down) by 2 degrees ... that would be a different thing.
What makes you a climatologist qualified to make this assertion? because it sounds completely arbitrary and made up... frankly.
Very few economists deny the Laffer curve completely, although it's a gross simplification and a theory with no real empirical evidence. However, Laffer himself (and most economists who research the topic) have said the "top" point on the curve for income taxes was at around 65-70% marginal rate. Everywhere in the world is on the "left" side of that curve. For certain types of taxes, such as capitol gains taxes or corporate taxes, the rate may be more like 20-40%.
The idea that reducing taxes from 23% to 19% would INCREASE revenues is completely insane. Holy shit. Even "The Economist", a fiscally conservative rag, has said that the Bush tax cuts were the largest contributor to the current deficits.
The concept of international minimum taxes has very little to do with a Laffer curve and certainly can't be interpreted strictly as there are a lot of other factors. I hear Nigeria has a very low corporate tax rate, but I don't see companies running off there to do business. Concepts like international minimum taxes are insane anyway and will never happen. They're just rhetorical memes used to hold down one side of an argument without making concessions on other points.
It might be worth pointing out that your casting "Democrats" in a single light, being completely ignorant of all topics remotely related to economics.... is an ideology, and a bit of a shallow one at that. Your last sentence is grossly smug yet bald on its face.
The Oort Cloud is just a theory and is yet untested. It is certainly not unscientific, unless you claim that it certainly does exist. The idea of atoms and molecules were completely theoretical for hundreds of years. Sure, they followed from all observable phenomena, but we didn't actually IMAGE the shape of an atom until the 1980s. That really honestly doesn't' make it unscientific to have believed in during the 1980s. The same goes for the shape of electron clouds in various energy states. They were inferred by some unexplained phenomena again, but weren't actually imaged until LAST YEAR.
The fact that the existence of the Oort Cloud is not yet POSSIBLE to verify does not disprove anything. It merely makes it slightly less certain.
So now, rather than a 99.999993% chance that the Earth is 6.5 billion years old, it's 99.999992%. Congrats, you have discovered the scientific method. What the scientific method DOES NOT do is throw out hundreds of millions of observations of the Earth being ancient on the force of a single phenomenon that doesn't have an obvious and readily testable model. That would be INSANE. Unless of course, you WANT it to be false (which you clearly do).
As for climate science. The Earth CERTAINLY is warming. Why is not completely understood, but it appears to be strongly correlated with human activity. This is unproven, but the data is striking. Rather than the numbers above for evolution (admittedly, a random guess at probability), "global climate change" is probably 95-98% certain to be primarily human caused according to data I've seen. It's within the orders of magnitude that would normally cause a scientist to draw a conclusion from data. There is some reasonable chance that every single gallon of gas we burn is speeding us toward oblivion. Or perhaps it's less severe and there is a chance that every single gallon of gas we burn is merely going to cause an extremely expensive and socially damaging future. Or perhaps it will simply move the temperate zones north and Canada will become a nice place to live and the US will be primarily a giant desert akin to Northern Africa today. It seems possible that Europe will actually get colder, though it's definitely not certain and Africa may go back to being the tropical temperate area that Asia is today.
Who knows... But if there is a 50% chance that something you're doing to today will end civilization as we know it, don't you think it's prudent to discuss how to avoid this?
LOL, by that measure, I came from a Scottish orphanage and was shipped to Canada to work on a collective farm at the age of 12 (yeah, seriously my great-grandfathers story).
No, they were dicks who refused to bow to the king and worship the Anglican church and were ostracized such.
Later, they didn't want to pay taxes and have rules foist upon them by some halfwits in a fancy building thousands of miles away.
The latter is the same reason I left the USA. :-)
See, does copyright law really specify the intent of the person who violates the copyright?
Are you really claiming that this is important? If I saw the same photo and merely thought to myself "cool idea, i should try it" and came up with the same thing... that this is somehow different?
I'm really angry about you calling this groupthink. I don't fucking care what the OP or the GP or whoever said... I THINK that it is BS. I don't frankly care what YOU THINK.