> The Pac-Man simulation is a very simplified version of a case where, due to ethical considerations it is necessary to avoid the locally optimal solution.
The Pac Man doesn't avoid any optimal solution. It simply defines optimum as not to include not touching ghosts - ghosts are bad. In the classic version of the game, touching a ghost is bad. Unless you've eaten a Power Pellet in the last few seconds. They trained the AIto NOT learn the "unless you've eaten a pellet". It just does "touching ghosts is bad".
There's nothing moral, or even interesting, about "in Pac-Man, touching ghosts is bad". Essentially, just one too stupid to know that Power Pellets do anything.
Apple is, of course, the greatest company in the world. So I'm sure they aren't lying when they say "we may collect data about how you use your device and applications".
Being amazing, I'm sure they aren't pulling your leg when they say in App store terms and conditions "You agree that Licensor may collect and use technical data and related informationâ"including but not limited to technical information about your device, system and application software, and peripherals".
"We may collect information such as occupation, language, zip code, area code, unique device identifier, referrer URL, location, and the time zone where an Apple product is used so that we can better understand customer behavior and improve our products, services, and ADVERTISING."
"We may collect and store details of how you use our services, including search queries.... we may collect data about how you use your device and applications in order to help app developers improve their apps"
"Apple and its affiliates may share this personal information with each other and use it consistent with this Privacy Policy. They may also combine it with other information to provide and improve our products, services, content, and advertising." https://www.apple.com/legal/pr...
"most of the apps, 88.4 percent, COULD share data with companies owned by Google parent Alphabet... Microsoft (22.75 percent), and Amazon (17.91 percent). [I]nformation shared by these third-party apps CAN include age... which COULD include inferences about shopping habits, socio-economic class or likely political opinions"
Did they do a study, or just get stoned and ponder what COULD happen?
Apparently in the video, as she covers the iPhone with a piece of paper she states she's not allowed to be seen using one, due to the contract. So she knew. She might have an overriding sense that rules don't apply to her, though. She is a politician, after all.
A ten year treasury note is 3.12%. That's a very low risk investment. The difference between 3% and the 9%-10% long term average return of the stock market is risk. Essentially, you get paid 3% for investing (waiting), and 6% for risking.
Minus the long term average inflation rate of 3.22%, the real risk-free investment return is negative 0.10%. With a very low risk risk investment you will, on average, lose 0.1% annually. Making it so that you lose 1.1% or 5.1% every year doesn't encourage more investment.
That last sentence should say they take advantage of the AWS *APIs* to warn you immediately of insecure configurations. Under the hood it's just a script that checks things like "is this bucket public", so the cost is low.
Amazon has an AWS security training course on their site. It wouldn't be a bad idea to say anyone allowed to create or change things on AWS needs to take and pass the course first. That'll reduce, but not eliminate, things like this.
There are a few security companies which will check all of your AWS (and other systems) for security problems like this, at very reasonable prices. They write scripts that intergrate with AWS to watch for things like people are public buckets, and other more complex issues. Since it's all scripted, it's pretty affordable. You can set it up right there in the AWS marketplace.
One such company that is integrated with AWS (and also does non-AWS security) is Alert Logic. Full disclosure, I happen to work for another part of Alert Logic. If I didn't work for them, I'd check out their AWS related products. There are other companies too, but Alert Logic has some very AWS-focused offerings which take advantage of all of the AWS offerings to catch stuff immediately, and cheaply.
> This assumption is only valid if that equipment is sitting idle. That $100 million isn't sitting there idle so you don't have to sell the equipment to pay the tax rather you would pay the tax out of the revenue/profits.
You realize Tesla isn't profitable, right? It's been in operation for fifteen years trying to build a car company. 5% per year for 15% years = 75%. OP's proposal is that Tesla would have sold off 75% of their equipment and other assets so far in order to pay taxes on "having equipment".
> there's a disproportionate risk of attacks, fraud, and other hostile actions. I expect the payment services we use flag traffic from Tor exit nodes as being higher risk, for example, which might make it more difficult to buy things online.
They denied it, then denied it more fully, then followed up with a more clear and forceful denial. If it turns out to be true, the SEC will decide which executives they want to put in prison for material false statements.
The amount and type of denials aren't necessary and wouldn't be appropriate if the story was actually true. The executives have no reason put themselves at risk denying it in the *manner* that they have. If it were true, they'd very much want to use more Clintonian statements like "we have no knowledge of China installing a surveillance chip". That statement is technically true if they know *someone* installed a surveillance chip, but don't know that China did it. That denial would be true if they know that China installed a rogue chip, but don't know that it's necessarily a surveillance chip.
If it were true, I'd expect a detail like ""we have no knowledge of China installing a surveillance chip", something that is technically true so they'd at least have some negotiating room when the SEC comes after them for material false statements.
Seen as guidelines for interaction *within the project* , chastity makes perfect sense to me. In other words "don't try to get laid on the project mailing list, hitting on another developer".
That's not the purpose of project communications, and nerds are notoriously awkward at flirting, often saying the wrong thing. To avoid saying the wrong thing while trying to hook up with the QA lady, just don't try to hook up with anyone on the project.
> I have heard that less that 50% of the population vote, since the "middle of the road" people feel there simply is no point to vote.
Also, less than 50% of them know who the vice president is.
They are more interested in biking, playing soccer, video games, or whatever their interest is, and have very little interest in civics. Not enough to even know who the VP or the Speaker of the House are. Given they have roughly zero relevant information or understanding to draw from, when asked which candidates they support, they give reasons like "because she's a woman, so she'll support women's issues. I think. Beto is a woman, right?"
Personally, I prefer for important decisions to be made by people who have at least a very minimal understanding of the basics of the topic. I personally think that decisions about national economic policy should mostly be made by people who have read page 1 of the Economcs 101 book, so they know what the two main branches of economics are. If someone doesn't know what economics is, how can they possibly make informed decisions weighing the benefits and drawbacks of one set of economic policy proposals vs another? They can't, obviously. Their vote can be decided only by the manipulative tweets of orgainzations who stand to gain from one policy or the other.
I'm not sure if my explanation was clear, so let me mention a conversation I heard yesterday.
If you're trying to calculate the revenue-optimum sales tax on big screen televisions, it's not easy. Too high and you'll hurt revenue by drastically reducing how many people buy new large TVs. Too low and you've left potential revenue on the table. That's the concept you mentioned.
Some things are less murky, more clear. Last night I was at a friend's house and on the television was the Dallas Cowboys football game. One guy made rhe comment "to beat the Cowboys, the Redskins will have to outscore them".* That drew some laughter because duh, you win football games by outscoring the opponent. That's always the case, it's a competition.
Same here - Germany is competing, on the numbers, with other EU countries. The *precise* optimum rate is debatable within a few percentage points, but clearly if they aren't close to their competition, they will lose.
One can guess how many points will be needed to win a football game, but you can't argue the fact that scoring much worse than your opponent will lose.
* What he meant was defense wouldn't win the game, the Cowboys would put up significant points, so the Redskins would need a high score, as opposed to trying to limit thr Cowboys to a low score.
Also, we know that businesses make these decisions largely based on accountants and other nerds doing the math, to maximize after-tax profit. We're not comparing Germany with Cambodia, but rather two EU nation's. When Apple does $50 billion in EU sales each year, a ten percent difference in tax rates between two EU countries is probably going to be enough make the decision for them.
The way the math works out, until the tax rate of country A is close to the tax rate of similar competing country B, country A will have a net benefit by moving toward a competitive tax rate.
If you're competing on something OTHER THAN tax rate, the optimal revenue-generating tax rate can be very different. Germany can attract businesses in preference to Afghanistan in ways other than tax rate. Versus Ireland, they have to come close to matching the tax rate or else MOST or ALL multinationals will choose Ireland over Germany. You're guaranteed to lose the multi-national game when most or all multi-nationals stay away.
Am I explaining that where it makes sense? You have to fine tune up or down for maximum revenue when you're balancing "how many* multinationals your country has vs the rate they pay. When the rate is so high that you don't attract ANY large multi-nationals, revenue from them is zero and you need to reduce your rate until you attract some. In the case of an EU country, the rate which will attract some will be near the rate of the competing country which currently attracts some.
Similarly for the US and Canada. The two countries are similar enough that if one of them had a tax rate four times as high as the other, approximately all multinationals would choose the lower rate country. Therefore in order to attract any significant amount, the rates must be competitive.
There are two types of income. There's income produced by labor, and income produced by investment.
Income gained by labor is called wages. Income gained by re-investing the fruits of your labor is called profit.
A tax on profit is a tax on investment.
It's almost universally recognized, by every developed nation, that investment is key to a country's success, so heavy taxes on it are a bad idea.
There are two or three other major categories of things a country can tax. When people get money, they can either use it for investment or for consumption - either spend it on things that continue to bring value (houses, businesses), or on things that dissapear within a few years (lattes, Halloween costumes). Investment increases a nation's wealth, consumption decreases a nation's wealth, so most tax consumption, in order to encourage investment. A particular type of consumption tax is the sin tax - taxing particularly unhealthy consumption such as alcohol and tobacco.
Occasionally those who have been exposed to too much Lenin propaganda propose taxing wealth itself. This is not only on indirect tax on investment (wealth comes from investment), but worse, when the primary goal is to build a wealthy nation, directly taxing (discouraging) the goal is insane.
* For simplicity we'll momentarily ignore cases where the two are blended together, ie doctors invest in medical school, then labor.
** Another topic is non-tax revenue sources, which don't generally bring in enough revenue to matter much. Yesterday I saw a scratch-off lottery ticket that cost $50/ticket. This has been called "a tax on people who can't do math", but it is of course completely voluntary, so not actually a tax. Just a very sad thing.
While I agree with the basic facts of your overall argument, I believe this particular sentence could stand to be expanded:
> Because to own the "means of production", you have to fucking TAKE it from the current owners - which requires an authoritarian state to accomplish.
The current owners, the people who own the means of production, are primarily all the people who checked the box saying yes, they do want to participate in their employer 's 401k. Together they own about $4 trillion of "means of production".
If you want to own the means of production, you CAN get a machine gun and go join up with your local copy of Juan Bautista Fuenmayor to fight in the revolution. A much easier, and generally more effective, way is to simply email HR and ask them how to sign up for the 401k plan. You can start with 3% of your pay and set it to increase by 1% each year - less than the raise you'll probably get. Bonus here is that you're aquiring the measurements of production using *pretax* money - basically the for every $3 you use, the government buys you another $1 of ownership, free. The revolutionary machine gun has to be bought with whatever money is left after taxes, so the 401K is cheaper overall.
I really wish people would stop spending so much time *arguing* with socialists and communists and instead try to understand what they want, then help them get it. They want "the people", everyone, to own the means of production. Okay, Lenin aside, that's a reasonable thing to want. They just don't realize that about half of "the people" already DOES own the means of production, but it's a voluntary choice in the US. You get to decide whether you'd rather own the means of production, or own another latte.
A long time ago, really rich guys owned companies. That was individual ownership. Now, big companies are owned by a collective of thousands or millions of people. Your co-workers actually own companies. One antonym (opposite) of "individual" is "corporate". It means "a bunch of people, together". A corporation is a company owned by a bunch of people, by whoever wants to be part of it. All you gotta do is choose to join by checking the yes box for the 401k.
> I also propose a 5% gross wealth tax on accrued resources to incentivize reinvestment. This will also prevent the own a billion in stock but never sold
So suppose you wanted to invest $100 milion to build a next-generation battery development complex and factory, and perhaps a factory to build electric cars. You get some other investors together and would set up an electric car company; perhaps you'd call it Alset.
You'd all own the company, each having a certain amount of stock. If the company spends your $100 million on equipment, for the first few years the company is worth about $100 million. If it has four equal investors, each has stock worth about $25 million as you try to develop the product and establish the company.
You propose to tax that $100 million of accrued resources at 5% per year, so every year the new company needs to sell off 5% of their equipment, building, and furniture, in order to pay the tax. You've proposed an orderly method of deconstructing a nation, of unbuilding civilization and returning to the stone age over a period of 100 years or so.
Ideally, what you want people to do with their resources (money) is two major things. First, you want them to feed themselves, to provide for their own family's needs. A nation of cannibals soon starves, obviously. That may seem obvious, and perhaps it is, but there's one thing some people forget - that's still true over age 60 - you want people living off their own savings, not cannibalizing their children's production. Second, you want them to put any extra resources to work producing more resources. You want any extra money to buy tractors, factories, laboratories, and semiconductor fabs, not lattes and other things that dissapear. Investment, not consumption.
So your ideal situation is for people to first take care of their family's needs. Then invest resources so your country can have things like fabs and labs, leaving that investment out producing more until they retire, then using the gains to continue to take care of their needs and not cannibalize the production of current workers.
Economists call this the "savings rate" and it's one of the best predictors of success for a country. Countries where people save and invest do well. Countries where people consume rather than save go broke.
Every developed nation in the world, save one, recognizes this and strongly encourages investment. One developed nation used to strongly recognize it and to some extent still does, but also has a large group of uneducated populace currently being fed a bunch of recycled Lenin propaganda and starting to believe that the United States should follow the path that worked out so well for the Soviet Union.
With the super block at the begining, you can't accidentally mount one component device rather than the array, therefore throwing the array out of sync. It's normally a mistake to do that, so it's good to make it not easy to do by accident. If you want to mount a filesystem that starts at an offset into the device, you have to do that *on purpose*. That's one reason it's not the default for mdadm.
For installation scripts, it's a good idea to do that on/boot only by default.
> But what happens when Ireland responds to this act by...
Right, if Ireland is smart, they'll keep doing what they've been doing - complying with the letter of the agreements, while arranging for very low taxes to attract business. Then Germany will complain some more. Rinse and repeat. There's one major way this can end, and another minor option. Eventually Germany could get tired of it and say "fine - two can play that game!" and reduce their own tax rates on production. Then they'd be shocked to find that production moves to their country, and they end up with higher tax revenue as the end result of lower tax rates - something Ireland figured out a long time ago.
The other thing that could happen would be a diplomatic deal in which Ireland raises rates in exchange for Germany and others doing something for Ireland. There are lots of things that could be bargained, but they'd find something that is good for Ireland, but Germany doesn't want to do because it's not so good for them. Whatever the details, that would boil down to "okay we'll agree to be stupid about our tax rates if you give us a billion dollars a year".
Obviously the first option is a lot better for Germany, but it would involve German leaders admitting they were mistaken. That can be tough to do.
> And if Ireland doesn't do it, then someone else will. Because of governments' ability to create corporate incentives -- there's literally no way to ban tax havens
Right. More specifically, because the tax code is tens of thousands of pages long, some clever lawyers will always find a way for lawmakers to put in loopholes that attract businesses. Anything nearly that complex has hundreds of places it can be manipulated, playing chapter 4, section 27,paragraph b against chapter 8, section 112, paragraph d.
The only way to change that is to make the tax law vastly simpler, deleting 99.9% of it. BUT that's not likely to happen because the ability to add bits and pieces to the tax code is a big part of politicians' power. Want to help electric car companies, either because you're a greenie or because your brother owns one? Add a tax incentive. Want to help solar panel research centers, either because you believe in it or because your mentor and largest donor owns one? Add some credits to the tax code. The politicians are unlikely to give up their power to keep adding crap to the tax laws unless and until the people as a whole are absolutely fed up and clearly demand it.
Germany is complaining about countries with LOW corporate tax rates. The US has HIGH corporate tax rates.
Germany's corporate tax rate is about 15%.
The US corporate tax rate was 35% federal plus average 5% state = 40%, among the highest in the developed world. That's why most large "American" companies have their official tax headquarters and much of their operations in Europe - they'd rather pay 15% tax rather than 40%.
The tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) reduced the U.S. rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Plus 5% state, so now it's 26%, still almost double the German rate.
The target of this is Ireland. Though their nominal rate is 12.5%, they allow BER that results in an effective rate around 1%.
The US would LOVE for Europe to have higher rates, similar to the US, so that "American" companies like Dell, Apple and Amazon would have less incentive to pay their taxes in Ireland, instead paying them in (and to) the US.
The problem is, most every country other than the US recognizes that receiving tax revenue is a good thing, and having people invest in factories, fabs, etc is good for your country. As Barak Obama said "if you want people to do less of something, tax it". The US taxes investment. They have high taxes on factories, fabs, development centers - companies - because apparently they want people to do less building of companies in the US. Other countries aren't so stupid. They WANT companies like Dell, Google, and Apple to put their operations in their countries, so they don't tax the hell of that like the US does.
Raid on the boot partition "just works", reliably no matter what, if you use mdadm --metadata=1.0 when you create it
What that does is put the raid metadata at the end of the device. Anything that isn't raid-aware (your bios) just sees a standard filesystem, and doesn't care about the other parititions or whatever else comes AFTER the filesystem. Once the kernel launches and starts mounting filesystems, it session the raid metadata and treats it as raid.
That works because the things that don't understand raid, such as your bios, only read the data, they don't write to it. Therefore there's no worries about writing the same thing to both copies. It's only written to after the raid is mounted.
If you test that out, check to see if both drives are marked as bootable in the partition table.
If both are already marked bootable, you're good to go.
If they aren't currently and you change that, making that change could change which drive ends up being called sda.
If they aren't currently both bootable and you do not mark the other one bootable, you'd need to do so if the bootable drive fails.
I just read that and I see only a few professions aren't allowed to work more than 48 hours. Including:
Any worker on ships or boats
What the heck? If you're stuck ok a fishing boat for two weeks with nothing better to do than work, not allowed. You have to sit there don't nothing. Most anyone ELSE can work as much as they want, but not someone who has absolutely nothing better to do.
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> The Pac-Man simulation is a very simplified version of a case where, due to ethical considerations it is necessary to avoid the locally optimal solution.
The Pac Man doesn't avoid any optimal solution. It simply defines optimum as not to include not touching ghosts - ghosts are bad. In the classic version of the game, touching a ghost is bad. Unless you've eaten a Power Pellet in the last few seconds. They trained the AIto NOT learn the "unless you've eaten a pellet". It just does "touching ghosts is bad".
There's nothing moral, or even interesting, about "in Pac-Man, touching ghosts is bad". Essentially, just one too stupid to know that Power Pellets do anything.
Apple is, of course, the greatest company in the world. So I'm sure they aren't lying when they say "we may collect data about how you use your device and applications".
Being amazing, I'm sure they aren't pulling your leg when they say in App store terms and conditions "You agree that Licensor may collect and use technical data and related informationâ"including but not limited to technical information about your device, system and application software, and peripherals".
From Apple's web site:
"We may collect information such as occupation, language, zip code, area code, unique device identifier, referrer URL, location, and the time zone where an Apple product is used so that we can better understand customer behavior and improve our products, services, and ADVERTISING."
"We may collect and store details of how you use our services, including search queries. ... we may collect data about how you use your device and applications in order to help app developers improve their apps"
"Apple and its affiliates may share this personal information with each other and use it consistent with this Privacy Policy. They may also combine it with other information to provide and improve our products, services, content, and advertising."
https://www.apple.com/legal/pr...
"most of the apps, 88.4 percent, COULD share data with companies owned by Google parent Alphabet ... Microsoft (22.75 percent), and Amazon (17.91 percent). [I]nformation shared by these third-party apps CAN include age ... which COULD include inferences about shopping habits, socio-economic class or likely political opinions"
Did they do a study, or just get stoned and ponder what COULD happen?
Apparently in the video, as she covers the iPhone with a piece of paper she states she's not allowed to be seen using one, due to the contract. So she knew. She might have an overriding sense that rules don't apply to her, though. She is a politician, after all.
A ten year treasury note is 3.12%. That's a very low risk investment. The difference between 3% and the 9%-10% long term average return of the stock market is risk. Essentially, you get paid 3% for investing (waiting), and 6% for risking.
Minus the long term average inflation rate of 3.22%, the real risk-free investment return is negative 0.10%. With a very low risk risk investment you will, on average, lose 0.1% annually. Making it so that you lose 1.1% or 5.1% every year doesn't encourage more investment.
That last sentence should say they take advantage of the AWS *APIs* to warn you immediately of insecure configurations. Under the hood it's just a script that checks things like "is this bucket public", so the cost is low.
Amazon has an AWS security training course on their site.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to say anyone allowed to create or change things on AWS needs to take and pass the course first. That'll reduce, but not eliminate, things like this.
There are a few security companies which will check all of your AWS (and other systems) for security problems like this, at very reasonable prices. They write scripts that intergrate with AWS to watch for things like people are public buckets, and other more complex issues. Since it's all scripted, it's pretty affordable. You can set it up right there in the AWS marketplace.
One such company that is integrated with AWS (and also does non-AWS security) is Alert Logic. Full disclosure, I happen to work for another part of Alert Logic. If I didn't work for them, I'd check out their AWS related products. There are other companies too, but Alert Logic has some very AWS-focused offerings which take advantage of all of the AWS offerings to catch stuff immediately, and cheaply.
> This assumption is only valid if that equipment is sitting idle. That $100 million isn't sitting there idle so you don't have to sell the equipment to pay the tax rather you would pay the tax out of the revenue/profits.
You realize Tesla isn't profitable, right? It's been in operation for fifteen years trying to build a car company. 5% per year for 15% years = 75%. OP's proposal is that Tesla would have sold off 75% of their equipment and other assets so far in order to pay taxes on "having equipment".
> The government might not like it
The government created Tor.
> there's a disproportionate risk of attacks, fraud, and other hostile actions. I expect the payment services we use flag traffic from Tor exit nodes as being higher risk, for example, which might make it more difficult to buy things online.
True.
They denied it, then denied it more fully, then followed up with a more clear and forceful denial. If it turns out to be true, the SEC will decide which executives they want to put in prison for material false statements.
The amount and type of denials aren't necessary and wouldn't be appropriate if the story was actually true. The executives have no reason put themselves at risk denying it in the *manner* that they have. If it were true, they'd very much want to use more Clintonian statements like "we have no knowledge of China installing a surveillance chip". That statement is technically true if they know *someone* installed a surveillance chip, but don't know that China did it. That denial would be true if they know that China installed a rogue chip, but don't know that it's necessarily a surveillance chip.
If it were true, I'd expect a detail like ""we have no knowledge of China installing a surveillance chip", something that is technically true so they'd at least have some negotiating room when the SEC comes after them for material false statements.
Seen as guidelines for interaction *within the project* , chastity makes perfect sense to me. In other words "don't try to get laid on the project mailing list, hitting on another developer".
That's not the purpose of project communications, and nerds are notoriously awkward at flirting, often saying the wrong thing. To avoid saying the wrong thing while trying to hook up with the QA lady, just don't try to hook up with anyone on the project.
> I have heard that less that 50% of the population vote, since the "middle of the road" people feel there simply is no point to vote.
Also, less than 50% of them know who the vice president is.
They are more interested in biking, playing soccer, video games, or whatever their interest is, and have very little interest in civics. Not enough to even know who the VP or the Speaker of the House are. Given they have roughly zero relevant information or understanding to draw from, when asked which candidates they support, they give reasons like "because she's a woman, so she'll support women's issues. I think. Beto is a woman, right?"
Personally, I prefer for important decisions to be made by people who have at least a very minimal understanding of the basics of the topic. I personally think that decisions about national economic policy should mostly be made by people who have read page 1 of the Economcs 101 book, so they know what the two main branches of economics are. If someone doesn't know what economics is, how can they possibly make informed decisions weighing the benefits and drawbacks of one set of economic policy proposals vs another? They can't, obviously. Their vote can be decided only by the manipulative tweets of orgainzations who stand to gain from one policy or the other.
I'm not sure if my explanation was clear, so let me mention a conversation I heard yesterday.
If you're trying to calculate the revenue-optimum sales tax on big screen televisions, it's not easy. Too high and you'll hurt revenue by drastically reducing how many people buy new large TVs. Too low and you've left potential revenue on the table. That's the concept you mentioned.
Some things are less murky, more clear.
Last night I was at a friend's house and on the television was the Dallas Cowboys football game. One guy made rhe comment "to beat the Cowboys, the Redskins will have to outscore them".* That drew some laughter because duh, you win football games by outscoring the opponent. That's always the case, it's a competition.
Same here - Germany is competing, on the numbers, with other EU countries. The *precise* optimum rate is debatable within a few percentage points, but clearly if they aren't close to their competition, they will lose.
One can guess how many points will be needed to win a football game, but you can't argue the fact that scoring much worse than your opponent will lose.
* What he meant was defense wouldn't win the game, the Cowboys would put up significant points, so the Redskins would need a high score, as opposed to trying to limit thr Cowboys to a low score.
What you said is true.
Also, we know that businesses make these decisions largely based on accountants and other nerds doing the math, to maximize after-tax profit. We're not comparing Germany with Cambodia, but rather two EU nation's. When Apple does $50 billion in EU sales each year, a ten percent difference in tax rates between two EU countries is probably going to be enough make the decision for them.
The way the math works out, until the tax rate of country A is close to the tax rate of similar competing country B, country A will have a net benefit by moving toward a competitive tax rate.
If you're competing on something OTHER THAN tax rate, the optimal revenue-generating tax rate can be very different. Germany can attract businesses in preference to Afghanistan in ways other than tax rate. Versus Ireland, they have to come close to matching the tax rate or else MOST or ALL multinationals will choose Ireland over Germany. You're guaranteed to lose the multi-national game when most or all multi-nationals stay away.
Am I explaining that where it makes sense? You have to fine tune up or down for maximum revenue when you're balancing "how many* multinationals your country has vs the rate they pay. When the rate is so high that you don't attract ANY large multi-nationals, revenue from them is zero and you need to reduce your rate until you attract some. In the case of an EU country, the rate which will attract some will be near the rate of the competing country which currently attracts some.
Similarly for the US and Canada. The two countries are similar enough that if one of them had a tax rate four times as high as the other, approximately all multinationals would choose the lower rate country. Therefore in order to attract any significant amount, the rates must be competitive.
There are two types of income. There's income produced by labor, and income produced by investment.
Income gained by labor is called wages.
Income gained by re-investing the fruits of your labor is called profit.
A tax on profit is a tax on investment.
It's almost universally recognized, by every developed nation, that investment is key to a country's success, so heavy taxes on it are a bad idea.
There are two or three other major categories of things a country can tax. When people get money, they can either use it for investment or for consumption - either spend it on things that continue to bring value (houses, businesses), or on things that dissapear within a few years (lattes, Halloween costumes). Investment increases a nation's wealth, consumption decreases a nation's wealth, so most tax consumption, in order to encourage investment. A particular type of consumption tax is the sin tax - taxing particularly unhealthy consumption such as alcohol and tobacco.
Occasionally those who have been exposed to too much Lenin propaganda propose taxing wealth itself. This is not only on indirect tax on investment (wealth comes from investment), but worse, when the primary goal is to build a wealthy nation, directly taxing (discouraging) the goal is insane.
* For simplicity we'll momentarily ignore cases where the two are blended together, ie doctors invest in medical school, then labor.
** Another topic is non-tax revenue sources, which don't generally bring in enough revenue to matter much. Yesterday I saw a scratch-off lottery ticket that cost $50/ticket. This has been called "a tax on people who can't do math", but it is of course completely voluntary, so not actually a tax. Just a very sad thing.
While I agree with the basic facts of your overall argument, I believe this particular sentence could stand to be expanded:
> Because to own the "means of production", you have to fucking TAKE it from the current owners - which requires an authoritarian state to accomplish.
The current owners, the people who own the means of production, are primarily all the people who checked the box saying yes, they do want to participate in their employer 's 401k. Together they own about $4 trillion of "means of production".
If you want to own the means of production, you CAN get a machine gun and go join up with your local copy of Juan Bautista Fuenmayor to fight in the revolution. A much easier, and generally more effective, way is to simply email HR and ask them how to sign up for the 401k plan. You can start with 3% of your pay and set it to increase by 1% each year - less than the raise you'll probably get. Bonus here is that you're aquiring the measurements of production using *pretax* money - basically the for every $3 you use, the government buys you another $1 of ownership, free. The revolutionary machine gun has to be bought with whatever money is left after taxes, so the 401K is cheaper overall.
I really wish people would stop spending so much time *arguing* with socialists and communists and instead try to understand what they want, then help them get it. They want "the people", everyone, to own the means of production. Okay, Lenin aside, that's a reasonable thing to want. They just don't realize that about half of "the people" already DOES own the means of production, but it's a voluntary choice in the US. You get to decide whether you'd rather own the means of production, or own another latte.
A long time ago, really rich guys owned companies. That was individual ownership. Now, big companies are owned by a collective of thousands or millions of people. Your co-workers actually own companies. One antonym (opposite) of "individual" is "corporate". It means "a bunch of people, together". A corporation is a company owned by a bunch of people, by whoever wants to be part of it. All you gotta do is choose to join by checking the yes box for the 401k.
> I also propose a 5% gross wealth tax on accrued resources to incentivize reinvestment. This will also prevent the own a billion in stock but never sold
So suppose you wanted to invest $100 milion to build a next-generation battery development complex and factory, and perhaps a factory to build electric cars. You get some other investors together and would set up an electric car company; perhaps you'd call it Alset.
You'd all own the company, each having a certain amount of stock. If the company spends your $100 million on equipment, for the first few years the company is worth about $100 million. If it has four equal investors, each has stock worth about $25 million as you try to develop the product and establish the company.
You propose to tax that $100 million of accrued resources at 5% per year, so every year the new company needs to sell off 5% of their equipment, building, and furniture, in order to pay the tax. You've proposed an orderly method of deconstructing a nation, of unbuilding civilization and returning to the stone age over a period of 100 years or so.
Ideally, what you want people to do with their resources (money) is two major things. First, you want them to feed themselves, to provide for their own family's needs. A nation of cannibals soon starves, obviously. That may seem obvious, and perhaps it is, but there's one thing some people forget - that's still true over age 60 - you want people living off their own savings, not cannibalizing their children's production. Second, you want them to put any extra resources to work producing more resources. You want any extra money to buy tractors, factories, laboratories, and semiconductor fabs, not lattes and other things that dissapear. Investment, not consumption.
So your ideal situation is for people to first take care of their family's needs. Then invest resources so your country can have things like fabs and labs, leaving that investment out producing more until they retire, then using the gains to continue to take care of their needs and not cannibalize the production of current workers.
Economists call this the "savings rate" and it's one of the best predictors of success for a country. Countries where people save and invest do well. Countries where people consume rather than save go broke.
Every developed nation in the world, save one, recognizes this and strongly encourages investment. One developed nation used to strongly recognize it and to some extent still does, but also has a large group of uneducated populace currently being fed a bunch of recycled Lenin propaganda and starting to believe that the United States should follow the path that worked out so well for the Soviet Union.
Germany taxes production, so more production means more tax revenue, until their rate approaches that of Ireland.
Problem:
Your country's taxes on production are higher than other countries, so businesses don't put their production in your country.
Solution:
Raise your taxes even higher, to make extra sure no business happens there.
Yes, some people really do think that way, so I'm not sure if you're a parody or a liberal.
With the super block at the begining, you can't accidentally mount one component device rather than the array, therefore throwing the array out of sync. It's normally a mistake to do that, so it's good to make it not easy to do by accident. If you want to mount a filesystem that starts at an offset into the device, you have to do that *on purpose*. That's one reason it's not the default for mdadm.
For installation scripts, it's a good idea to do that on /boot only by default.
> But what happens when Ireland responds to this act by ...
Right, if Ireland is smart, they'll keep doing what they've been doing - complying with the letter of the agreements, while arranging for very low taxes to attract business. Then Germany will complain some more. Rinse and repeat. There's one major way this can end, and another minor option. Eventually Germany could get tired of it and say "fine - two can play that game!" and reduce their own tax rates on production. Then they'd be shocked to find that production moves to their country, and they end up with higher tax revenue as the end result of lower tax rates - something Ireland figured out a long time ago.
The other thing that could happen would be a diplomatic deal in which Ireland raises rates in exchange for Germany and others doing something for Ireland. There are lots of things that could be bargained, but they'd find something that is good for Ireland, but Germany doesn't want to do because it's not so good for them. Whatever the details, that would boil down to "okay we'll agree to be stupid about our tax rates if you give us a billion dollars a year".
Obviously the first option is a lot better for Germany, but it would involve German leaders admitting they were mistaken. That can be tough to do.
> And if Ireland doesn't do it, then someone else will. Because of governments' ability to create corporate incentives -- there's literally no way to ban tax havens
Right. More specifically, because the tax code is tens of thousands of pages long, some clever lawyers will always find a way for lawmakers to put in loopholes that attract businesses. Anything nearly that complex has hundreds of places it can be manipulated, playing chapter 4, section 27 ,paragraph b against chapter 8, section 112, paragraph d.
The only way to change that is to make the tax law vastly simpler, deleting 99.9% of it. BUT that's not likely to happen because the ability to add bits and pieces to the tax code is a big part of politicians' power. Want to help electric car companies, either because you're a greenie or because your brother owns one? Add a tax incentive. Want to help solar panel research centers, either because you believe in it or because your mentor and largest donor owns one? Add some credits to the tax code. The politicians are unlikely to give up their power to keep adding crap to the tax laws unless and until the people as a whole are absolutely fed up and clearly demand it.
Germany is complaining about countries with LOW corporate tax rates. The US has HIGH corporate tax rates.
Germany's corporate tax rate is about 15%.
The US corporate tax rate was 35% federal plus average 5% state = 40%, among the highest in the developed world. That's why most large "American" companies have their official tax headquarters and much of their operations in Europe - they'd rather pay 15% tax rather than 40%.
The tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) reduced the U.S. rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Plus 5% state, so now it's 26%, still almost double the German rate.
The target of this is Ireland. Though their nominal rate is 12.5%, they allow BER that results in an effective rate around 1%.
The US would LOVE for Europe to have higher rates, similar to the US, so that "American" companies like Dell, Apple and Amazon would have less incentive to pay their taxes in Ireland, instead paying them in (and to) the US.
The problem is, most every country other than the US recognizes that receiving tax revenue is a good thing, and having people invest in factories, fabs, etc is good for your country. As Barak Obama said "if you want people to do less of something, tax it". The US taxes investment. They have high taxes on factories, fabs, development centers - companies - because apparently they want people to do less building of companies in the US. Other countries aren't so stupid. They WANT companies like Dell, Google, and Apple to put their operations in their countries, so they don't tax the hell of that like the US does.
Raid on the boot partition "just works", reliably no matter what, if you use mdadm --metadata=1.0 when you create it
What that does is put the raid metadata at the end of the device. Anything that isn't raid-aware (your bios) just sees a standard filesystem, and doesn't care about the other parititions or whatever else comes AFTER the filesystem. Once the kernel launches and starts mounting filesystems, it session the raid metadata and treats it as raid.
That works because the things that don't understand raid, such as your bios, only read the data, they don't write to it. Therefore there's no worries about writing the same thing to both copies. It's only written to after the raid is mounted.
If you test that out, check to see if both drives are marked as bootable in the partition table.
If both are already marked bootable, you're good to go.
If they aren't currently and you change that, making that change could change which drive ends up being called sda.
If they aren't currently both bootable and you do not mark the other one bootable, you'd need to do so if the bootable drive fails.
I just read that and I see only a few professions aren't allowed to work more than 48 hours. Including:
Any worker on ships or boats
What the heck? If you're stuck ok a fishing boat for two weeks with nothing better to do than work, not allowed. You have to sit there don't nothing. Most anyone ELSE can work as much as they want, but not someone who has absolutely nothing better to do.