I can't concede that because I have been presented no evidence of that. If we're seriously going to go down this path of discussing the economic damage of air pollution, let's talk about some of the positive aspects of air pollution as well, and how they weigh against the negatives...
You asserted that air pollution causes economic damages totaling $1600 per person per year and that the people who caused that economic damage should pay for it. You also implied that $1600 per person per year is a significant enough problem to need a government-enforced corrective action, though there is not enough context given to support that implication.
What's the difference between $0, $0.01, $1, and $1600? Proportion. Your later arguments have expanded your implication to state that any value of economic damages above $0 requires government-enforced corrective action. I do not accept such a premise. This is a shade of grey, not black-and-white. I want to see some information that shows not only that the problem exists, but also that the problem is BOTH statistically significant enough to need action AND that the action being proposed will make enough of a difference proportional to its total cost to be a better alternative than maintaining the status quo.
It would be fair to say that what you just said has nothing to do with what I said. It would also be fair to say that the post I responded to pointed out a study for SoCal as evidence that there's "a problem" without acknowledging that the study doesn't cover the 99% of the United States that is not SoCal. I'm willing to bet that the air quality here is very different from that in SoCal, in large part due to comparatively sparse population density. You put the assertion of "the cost of air pollution is exactly $0.00" which is a straw man argument. Do you have a study that leads to the same rough conclusions that your original source does, but that is also more representative of the country as a whole (or even regions that are not a relatively small portion of one state?)
I am curious about this. How would the redistribution be performed? Obviously if we take the money away and then hand it right back, the original point of the fuel tax is largely negated, so I assume that's not what you meant.
On the contrary, I know quite a few people that currently and formerly live(d) in Massachusetts, though none of them live or work in or very close to Boston. I didn't want to get into the composition details of Massachusetts, though; the larger point is that while people in some places in the United States can afford to use fuel-saving transportation, the majority of places in the US are not those types of places. Most of the land in the US is rural; most of the people in those areas can't just hop on a bicycle or drive an electric car to get where they need to go. That also brings another point to mind: a $7/gal. fuel tax will hit local farmers and significantly increase the cost of food throughout the country, though imported food from countries with no such tax would not suffer the same impact. We could just get all of our vegetables from South America, I suppose.
I never said that low income Americans are the only people who end up being taxed. I said that individuals are the only people who end up paying taxes because all taxes charged to companies and other entities that individuals must make purchases from will ultimately be rolled into the final cost to those individuals at the grocery store checkout or on the plumber's service invoice. What I said is that low income Americans end up being the hardest hit. Let me clarify that statement: for the same base level of consumption required to maintain the existence of a person or family (a base level which ALL people participating in the economy must consume to meet basic human needs, not just poor people) the added taxation represents a disproportionately larger percentage of each paycheck. If you make $300 a week in take-home pay and you have to drive 30 minutes each way to work in a 30 MPG vehicle with a $7 per gallon fuel tax and $3 per gallon pre-tax fuel cost, you're spending $100 per week (33.333% of your entire paycheck) to get to your job and back. Contrast this with the $3 per gallon amount of $30 per week (10% of your entire paycheck) and the difference is clear.
Sure, you may object to the example I'm using. Here are a couple of possible objections and their answers. "Why would you work that far away?" Sometimes you don't have enough local jobs. "Why not move closer to work?" What, and pay the extra $280 a month in rent instead of fuel? Who'll pay the moving costs and the security deposit if the person is already practically broke?
I could think of more but I think you get my general point by now.
SoCal doesn't automatically extrapolate out to the entire United States of America. California is the only state with its own set of special emissions requirements for vehicles that force manufacturers to produce "California models" of everything they sell there. If that study is methodologically sound and built on solid premises (I lack the time or motivation to review it right now), sure, find a way to get SoCal residents to stop killing themselves, but keep laws meant to deal with SoCal issues away from my coast.
Germany is not the United States. Everyone pointing at Europe seems to miss one large difference: there's a whole hell of a lot more room between people and places they need to go in most the United States than in Europe. If you live in Massachusetts, half an hour is a "long drive," but if you live in North Carolina it can easily be how far away Charlotte or Raleigh or Greensboro is. If I want to visit an area with a lot of large shops and restaurants, I'm looking at a 30-mile drive at a minimum; 40 miles if I want to go somewhere that actually has American corporate icons like Barnes & Noble, Starbucks, Best Buy, etc. Taxing fuel at such an astronomical rate will certainly lower the amount of fuel use, but how many businesses will have to shut down because customers can't afford to blow $14 on fuel that they weren't spending before just to patronize those businesses? How much will the cost of items on eBay, Amazon, and other e-commerce sites increase? Someone who lives 30 miles from work because they can't afford housing any closer than that could be paying an extra $70 or more a week in fuel costs just to get to and from their jobs. The worst part is that people who would be considered "poor" are the hardest hit by this sort of feel-good taxation. In a country with a dismal record of low economic upward mobility, the last thing we need is to punch everyone in the financial face while they're already struggling to move up the ladder at all.
How about the effects of such a tax on, say, diesel fuel for the carriers to bring stuff from west coast ports to this side of the country. None of this deals with the serious problems we have in this country with rampant abuse of tax money. $7 per gallon worth of fuel tax that the corrupt politicians get to freely play around with? No thank you. Perhaps if our election cycles were not so widely spaced out so that we could throw the bums out faster, it'd be different.
Prosperous in what ways? What are the positive and negative aspects of this policy? Do you have any sources available for that information that you can share?
With a policy like that in place, there won't be an economy left to worry about within a few years. The ultimate payer of ALL taxes is the individual; $7 per gallon charged to a business will be computed into costs of products and passed on to the purchasers of such products. The weight of such insane taxation would be colossal. Sounds like you want people to make rafts and abandon the country.
Diversity is not based on the color of skin or the genitals a person possesses. The focus on gender is irrelevant to diversity of thought; it is a modo hoc fallacy. Creating a monoculture is a tendency of human nature and happens regardless of superficial composition.
Every high school counselor in the country as well as a fuckton of parents believe otherwise. College is the new high school. Try getting a so-called "entry-level job" without a degree and without multiple years of experience you can't get without already having the job. Granted, it can happen, but there's a reason that lots of people have been unemployed for months or even years. Employers want employees that require zero training, despite the harsh reality that employees can't do the job from day one without having already received training from an employer anyway.
How many people really care about "counterfeit chips" if they generally function as expected when FTDI isn't running a routine called BrickClonedDevices to intentionally damage them? FTDI cares, sure. I have no reason to care at all.
Your post already provided the necessary context and the links in that post are references that refute what you've said. Declaring that it's not valid or is "a crappy post" doesn't make it so.
There is no excuse for this being modded down Troll, especially sinec i kan reed's three-link reference post is Informative. Agenda execution detected.
Exactly. This is textbook identity theft. Law enforcement does not obtain any rights to use someone's cell phone photos or identity outside of the actual prosecutorial process just because that person is being or was successfully prosecuted. The fact that the DOJ argues this is totally okay reflects how absurdly fucked up the US government is.
You can't fork everything (unless you're insane) and you damn sure can't maintain all those forks once you've made them. One person cannot write an entire modern operating system, even if that is the only thing they do with their time. If 5 important programs require systemd, your choices are to fork everything and perform major surgery (could take months), code something like uselessd as an empty surrogate, or welcome systemd as your new overlord.
Or go back to your Amiga, which is what we all should be doing anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that you just said the same thing as the parent post.
I can't concede that because I have been presented no evidence of that. If we're seriously going to go down this path of discussing the economic damage of air pollution, let's talk about some of the positive aspects of air pollution as well, and how they weigh against the negatives...
You asserted that air pollution causes economic damages totaling $1600 per person per year and that the people who caused that economic damage should pay for it. You also implied that $1600 per person per year is a significant enough problem to need a government-enforced corrective action, though there is not enough context given to support that implication.
What's the difference between $0, $0.01, $1, and $1600? Proportion. Your later arguments have expanded your implication to state that any value of economic damages above $0 requires government-enforced corrective action. I do not accept such a premise. This is a shade of grey, not black-and-white. I want to see some information that shows not only that the problem exists, but also that the problem is BOTH statistically significant enough to need action AND that the action being proposed will make enough of a difference proportional to its total cost to be a better alternative than maintaining the status quo.
It would be fair to say that what you just said has nothing to do with what I said. It would also be fair to say that the post I responded to pointed out a study for SoCal as evidence that there's "a problem" without acknowledging that the study doesn't cover the 99% of the United States that is not SoCal. I'm willing to bet that the air quality here is very different from that in SoCal, in large part due to comparatively sparse population density. You put the assertion of "the cost of air pollution is exactly $0.00" which is a straw man argument. Do you have a study that leads to the same rough conclusions that your original source does, but that is also more representative of the country as a whole (or even regions that are not a relatively small portion of one state?)
I am curious about this. How would the redistribution be performed? Obviously if we take the money away and then hand it right back, the original point of the fuel tax is largely negated, so I assume that's not what you meant.
On the contrary, I know quite a few people that currently and formerly live(d) in Massachusetts, though none of them live or work in or very close to Boston. I didn't want to get into the composition details of Massachusetts, though; the larger point is that while people in some places in the United States can afford to use fuel-saving transportation, the majority of places in the US are not those types of places. Most of the land in the US is rural; most of the people in those areas can't just hop on a bicycle or drive an electric car to get where they need to go. That also brings another point to mind: a $7/gal. fuel tax will hit local farmers and significantly increase the cost of food throughout the country, though imported food from countries with no such tax would not suffer the same impact. We could just get all of our vegetables from South America, I suppose.
I never said that low income Americans are the only people who end up being taxed. I said that individuals are the only people who end up paying taxes because all taxes charged to companies and other entities that individuals must make purchases from will ultimately be rolled into the final cost to those individuals at the grocery store checkout or on the plumber's service invoice. What I said is that low income Americans end up being the hardest hit. Let me clarify that statement: for the same base level of consumption required to maintain the existence of a person or family (a base level which ALL people participating in the economy must consume to meet basic human needs, not just poor people) the added taxation represents a disproportionately larger percentage of each paycheck. If you make $300 a week in take-home pay and you have to drive 30 minutes each way to work in a 30 MPG vehicle with a $7 per gallon fuel tax and $3 per gallon pre-tax fuel cost, you're spending $100 per week (33.333% of your entire paycheck) to get to your job and back. Contrast this with the $3 per gallon amount of $30 per week (10% of your entire paycheck) and the difference is clear.
Sure, you may object to the example I'm using. Here are a couple of possible objections and their answers. "Why would you work that far away?" Sometimes you don't have enough local jobs. "Why not move closer to work?" What, and pay the extra $280 a month in rent instead of fuel? Who'll pay the moving costs and the security deposit if the person is already practically broke?
I could think of more but I think you get my general point by now.
SoCal doesn't automatically extrapolate out to the entire United States of America. California is the only state with its own set of special emissions requirements for vehicles that force manufacturers to produce "California models" of everything they sell there. If that study is methodologically sound and built on solid premises (I lack the time or motivation to review it right now), sure, find a way to get SoCal residents to stop killing themselves, but keep laws meant to deal with SoCal issues away from my coast.
Germany is not the United States. Everyone pointing at Europe seems to miss one large difference: there's a whole hell of a lot more room between people and places they need to go in most the United States than in Europe. If you live in Massachusetts, half an hour is a "long drive," but if you live in North Carolina it can easily be how far away Charlotte or Raleigh or Greensboro is. If I want to visit an area with a lot of large shops and restaurants, I'm looking at a 30-mile drive at a minimum; 40 miles if I want to go somewhere that actually has American corporate icons like Barnes & Noble, Starbucks, Best Buy, etc. Taxing fuel at such an astronomical rate will certainly lower the amount of fuel use, but how many businesses will have to shut down because customers can't afford to blow $14 on fuel that they weren't spending before just to patronize those businesses? How much will the cost of items on eBay, Amazon, and other e-commerce sites increase? Someone who lives 30 miles from work because they can't afford housing any closer than that could be paying an extra $70 or more a week in fuel costs just to get to and from their jobs. The worst part is that people who would be considered "poor" are the hardest hit by this sort of feel-good taxation. In a country with a dismal record of low economic upward mobility, the last thing we need is to punch everyone in the financial face while they're already struggling to move up the ladder at all.
How about the effects of such a tax on, say, diesel fuel for the carriers to bring stuff from west coast ports to this side of the country. None of this deals with the serious problems we have in this country with rampant abuse of tax money. $7 per gallon worth of fuel tax that the corrupt politicians get to freely play around with? No thank you. Perhaps if our election cycles were not so widely spaced out so that we could throw the bums out faster, it'd be different.
Prosperous in what ways? What are the positive and negative aspects of this policy? Do you have any sources available for that information that you can share?
With a policy like that in place, there won't be an economy left to worry about within a few years. The ultimate payer of ALL taxes is the individual; $7 per gallon charged to a business will be computed into costs of products and passed on to the purchasers of such products. The weight of such insane taxation would be colossal. Sounds like you want people to make rafts and abandon the country.
Certain people have embraced "diversity" and "equality" as a cover for discrimination as well.
Diversity is not based on the color of skin or the genitals a person possesses. The focus on gender is irrelevant to diversity of thought; it is a modo hoc fallacy. Creating a monoculture is a tendency of human nature and happens regardless of superficial composition.
Jokes are never funny after they're examined out of context anyway.
Every high school counselor in the country as well as a fuckton of parents believe otherwise. College is the new high school. Try getting a so-called "entry-level job" without a degree and without multiple years of experience you can't get without already having the job. Granted, it can happen, but there's a reason that lots of people have been unemployed for months or even years. Employers want employees that require zero training, despite the harsh reality that employees can't do the job from day one without having already received training from an employer anyway.
Parent needs to be modded +5!
How many people really care about "counterfeit chips" if they generally function as expected when FTDI isn't running a routine called BrickClonedDevices to intentionally damage them? FTDI cares, sure. I have no reason to care at all.
Your post already provided the necessary context and the links in that post are references that refute what you've said. Declaring that it's not valid or is "a crappy post" doesn't make it so.
There is no excuse for this being modded down Troll, especially sinec i kan reed's three-link reference post is Informative. Agenda execution detected.
Perhaps you didn't ever hear the wise advice passed down since the dawn of the modern Internet: "Don't feed the trolls."
When Australis becomes optional, those people who left Firefox because of it will then have your suggested option available.
If the website is the browser itself, you have sound logic. If not...
http://www.palemoon.org/palemo...
64-bit and rock solid and steadily improving. I have no complaints.
Exactly. This is textbook identity theft. Law enforcement does not obtain any rights to use someone's cell phone photos or identity outside of the actual prosecutorial process just because that person is being or was successfully prosecuted. The fact that the DOJ argues this is totally okay reflects how absurdly fucked up the US government is.
You can't fork everything (unless you're insane) and you damn sure can't maintain all those forks once you've made them. One person cannot write an entire modern operating system, even if that is the only thing they do with their time. If 5 important programs require systemd, your choices are to fork everything and perform major surgery (could take months), code something like uselessd as an empty surrogate, or welcome systemd as your new overlord.
Or go back to your Amiga, which is what we all should be doing anyway.