Certainly the WBC has the right to say what they like. But that doesn't mean that anyone has to sit there and politely listen to them; counter protesters have just as much of a right to say what they like, and if the volume of the counter protesters drowns out the WBC, I'm not sure that I see the problem, or at least a problem to which there is a solution that protects both groups.
If the counter protesters can convince the WBC to change their minds, or shame them into silence, or simply make it clear that WBC protests won't work, causing them to change their tactics, then the end result is that they're silenced, but so long as they were not forcibly compelled, is that bad?
The usual online tactics of Anonymous seems to be DDOSing. This isn't a very hostile attack and it doesn't necessarily silence the target. It's not hard to see parallels between that and, say, protesters surrounding a building, or holding a sit-in. And WBC can always mount a similar attack right back.
We'll have to see how this all shakes out, of course. But just because you support free speech, that doesn't mean you can't have an opinion, and can't aggressively exercise that freedom yourself.
You seem to forget that the reason that Amtrak was created in the first place is because the private passenger rail industry collapsed. Pullman went bankrupt. Penn went bankrupt. No one else was making money at passenger rail, and in fact, passenger rail had been a money loser for decades.
Amtrak was set up as an optional program; the railroads did not have to sell their passenger operations to it, but virtually all of them did. Of those that did not, they either did later, shut down, or were very small (or became so).
If we had not had Amtrak passenger rail in the US would have basically vanished 40 years ago. Amtrak doesn't do a great job, hobbled as it is in many respects, but at least it has been serving as a pilot light.
Now, if you want to discuss how the government interfered with rail by doing things like subsidizing automotive and air transport, or taking away their mail contracts, or imposing overly strict safety standards without assisting railroads in modernizing so as to lessen their negative impact, etc., that's fine.
Or if you'd like to discuss how the government could spur a renaissance in private passenger rail by, e.g. building a high speed passenger rail network, seizing and improving existing rail networks and rights-of-way so as to build regional and local passenger rail that can operate at higher speeds than today, and coexist with freight, and licensing anyone who meets standards to operate passenger and freight trains over the national network, that would be fine too.
But just getting rid of Amtrak would be unproductive. You'd kill off the last bit of passenger service, in an era when people are clamoring for it, and you'd do nothing to see that void filled or that service provided.
Markets can and do fail, and this one has.
(And freight is not as deregulated as you seem to imagine, either)
What puzzles me is how can the US (or any country) make a law that can possibly apply to what a citizen of another country does outside the US?
No, any country can declare anything, anywhere illegal, if it wants to. I don't understand why that would not be so.
The US has had laws like that for a very long time, such as the Alien Tort Claims Act from 1789, which is still on the books, and still used at times. Of course, enforcing such a law can be rather tricky. Just because something is made illegal worldwide by one country, there's no obligation for any other country to recognize that or to cooperate.
A fee for retrivering (out of copyright) content from the registry is a good idea.
I'm torn. On the one hand, I'm concerned about the costs involved if everyone streamed / downloaded everything over a modest age free from the Library of Congress. On the other hand, providing information to people for free is basically a core function of a public library (and in fact, the LoC does provide at least some interesting stuff for free).
A fee for registering works is not, it would turn the power more into the hands of corporations, and less into the hands of the people.
The idea is that there are numerous incentives to authors to create and publish works. Copyright is one of them, but only one, and often not even the most important one. If an author would create and publish a work regardless of copyright (i.e. the other incentives were adequate), then ideally no copyright would be granted, as it would impose a detriment to the public which would not be outweighed by any greater benefit to the public. If, OTOH, an author would not create and publish a work unless copyright were available, and the public enjoys a net benefit (i.e. the harm done by having a copyright is outweighed by the benefit of having the work created and published; this is mostly relevant in weighing one copyright regime against another), and the grant of copyright is the least it can be while still working as an incentive for the author, so as to maximize the public benefit, then a copyright should be granted.
As copyrights are only an economic incentive (a copyright won't make you famous, get you laid, help you to express yourself, etc.) an author should consider whether or not to seek one on economic terms. That is, is the benefit to the author of getting a copyright greater than the cost to the author of getting a copyright? If a copyright is free, other than the opportunity cost of actually filling out the form (copyright forms are not difficult to fill out, btw), then the answer will usually be yes.
However, we only want to grant copyrights when necessary. If there's a very modest fee involved, the author will have to consider whether he will ever be able to use the copyright to recover that cost or even make a profit. If so, he should register, but if not, he may as well not bother, which happens to benefit the public maximally and immediately, so long as the work is still created and published. If the fee is low but real, I suspect that it will not discourage the creation and publication of works, but will discourage the copyrighting of works where a copyright is not actually necessary.
I think your concern is that with deeper pockets, a large business might routinely have everything it produces copyrighted. I think that for a lot of its output, this is unlikely, but I'll agree that for some materials at some businesses, it could happen. In that case, perhaps a sliding scale of fees based on whether the author or registrant is a natural person or not; the number of registrations made; etc.?
It could all work quite well if there were no registration fee for digital works.
Well, the purpose of a registration fee isn't to finance the system (though it doesn't hurt, and archiving data so that it is usable more or less forever isn't actually cheap) but more to prevent frivolous copyrights, which can happen if they're free. At least some token fee should be imposed so that an author has to think at least a little as to whether or not they actually care about a copyright.
The current basic fee is $35.
since just uploading the data somewhere is easy enough to do every year.
Well, remember that the point of archiving materials is twofold: 1) to establish just what the work for which a copyright is claimed is, so as to minimize disputes later on (patent and trademark filings serve the same purpose, as do registrations of deeds for real property); 2) to allow people to study and learn from them during the copyright term, and to preserve them for any sort of use in the future.
That last point means that the Copyright Office will need to establish rules as to what formats of data are acceptable, and what additional material, if any, must be submitted. In the case of a book, the book itself will do nicely, though they traditionally require that the copies deposited be of the best quality that are made by the copyright holder. In the case of software, binaries are not enough; a binary is not really all that useful. Source code will be needed, adequate comments in that source code to allow other programmers of ordinary skill to understand how it works, information as to the intended platform, how it is to be compiled, etc. Rough drafts OTOH are probably not needed (unless they're being separately registered). Patents work this way, and where a creative work is not of a nature that it discloses itself, as it were, copyrights should too.
Also, the registry should publish the registered works once the copyrights expires.
Well, they should make the work available for patrons of the Library of Congress to read, even during the term. Once the term has expired, it ought to be possible to request a copy (probably for a fee). I'm concerned about the costs, however, of having the government host every video, every piece of music, every book, every program, and having people constantly downloading directly from it, rather than through a third party that can absorb some of those costs, and perhaps even make a profit.
Not having authorial copyright at all worked pretty well from prehistory to 1710 in the UK, and later elsewhere. I don't think that we should necessarily abolish copyright, but not having it did work far longer than copyright ever has. So let's not dismiss reform ideas so out of hand, okay?
Well, the main question is this: Suppose there were such a requirement. Would it stop you from writing software, or would you either 1) live with it, and follow the rules, or 2) not bother to seek copyrights?
The goal of copyright is to encourage the most creation and publication of works, while restricting the public as little as possible. The encouragement of copyright comes at a cost to the public. That cost should be as minimal as possible, while getting the most public gain possible. The preferences of authors aren't really of much interest, so long as they still create and publish. And even if they don't, that can be acceptable if the cost to the public of getting those works would be greater than the benefit of having them.
In any event, the US had a registration and renewal formality for copyright for a very very long time. They're traditional features of American copyright, and they've worked well. Better than the current system, certainly.
I can't imagine if I needed to individually register a copyright every piece of code I write and then go and update it every year.
It's not really a big problem. For example, with photographs, each photograph is a separate work. However, the Copyright Office accepts group registrations, where a photographer can submit many photographs at once, with only one filing and one fee, provided certain requirements are met. (E.g. all created during the same calendar year) If individualized registrations for software would be burdensome, I'd imagine something like this could be set up fairly easily.
And what if it is something in development? Are you not covered by copyright until you are done and have registered?!
I'd suggest that a limited amount of copyright protection would attach to a work whilst under development (lest we encourage people to copy manuscripts). There would be an eventual time limit, in order to encourage at least some sort of publication, however. The public doesn't benefit from a work being stuck in development forever. As Steve Jobs once said, real artists ship.
Once a work was published (i.e. made available to the public by any means, including performance or display), the limited rights would expire in, say, a year from the date of first publication. Registering the work and complying with any other copyright formalities (such as submitting a copy to the Library of Congress, in a form they found acceptable, and with such supplemental material as they requested -- in the case of software, think of complete and reasonably commented source code, binaries, compilation instructions, etc.) would cause a proper copyright to issue, backdated to the date that the registration was filed. (So that paperwork backlogs don't harm the copyright holder) The rights and remedies of a proper copyright would be such, compared to the minimal automatic right, that anyone who cared would seek a proper copyright. We might also consider things like the current requirement that no one can bring a lawsuit over an unregistered copyright, in order to encourage copyright holders to either register or abandon protection.
Then the copyright term would be fairly short, requiring the copyright holder to file a renewal periodically. If he doesn't bother to file, the work enters the public domain, which presumably, he is okay with. If he does file (along with updated contact information if he's changed addresses, or for the new copyright holder if the rights were assigned away), the rights are renewed for another term. Eventually no more renewal terms are permitted, and the work falls into the public domain if it hasn't already.
A book is personal property that contains intellectual property.
That's not really accurate, and in fact, you contradict yourself later in the same paragraph with the more accurate statement:
the intellectual property, that is the right to create more licenses.
"Intellectual property" is really a nonsensical term, full of inaccuracies, and slanted toward a particular point of view. Personally, I try not to use it. But if any sense can be made out of it at all, it must be that as an intangible creative work is not property at all, and as a tangible object in which that creative work is fixed is ordinary personal property, the "intellectual property" is the copyright which pertains to the creative work.
A paperback book is a material object in which a creative work (the actual story) is fixed. It doesn't also contain the copyright to the work; that right is held separately, and it is the right to prohibit other people from doing certain things in regard to the intangible work.
Possession of it as personal property implies a license to access it as intellectual property.
Nope. If you go to the bookstore and buy a copy of, say, Rocket Science for Dummies, there's no license involved, implicit or otherwise. This is because a copyright is only a right to prohibit other people from doing certain, specific things. Anything that doesn't fall within the bounds of the copyright, the copyright holder has no right to prohibit. And a license is merely a promise by the rights holder not to sue you if you do the things which he could prohibit, but which are covered by the license.
Copyright includes the right to prohibit other people from making copies, from making derivative works, from distributing the work, etc. But it does not include a right to prohibit other people from reading or accessing a work. Therefore, since the copyright holder cannot prohibit someone from reading his book by virtue of his copyright, he cannot license people to read it. Such a license would be meaningless.
You have a right to sell it as personal property, and with that the same license you had
The GPL is not really how things work most of the time. Copyright holders have a right to prohibit the distribution of their work. When they sell a copy of that work for the first time, however, they lose most or all of their rights over further distribution of that particular copy. (There are of course a lot of little details; if you buy a book or a video from the store, you can rent them, but if you buy a music CD or a computer program, you can't)
Buying a copy of a book is no different from buying a brick. There is no license. They're just ordinary personal property, and the person who owns them can dispose of them however they like. The copyright holder isn't involved. For this to be different, either copyright law would have to be changed a lot, or else there might have to be an unusual contract that had to be agreed to in order to just buy the thing in the first place. It wouldn't be an implied contract in an ordinary consumer transaction. It would basically have to be an express contract, and you'd know one if you saw one. Software is the only field where this practice is common (for no good reason) and EULAs are made quite visible. And even then, there is an unsettled dispute as to whether or not they're even enforceable. Personally, I blame the software industry for confusing people into thinking that licenses are more important or more common than they really are.
I've never bothered to buy an e-book, but I would expect that there is some manner of contract that must be agreed to first.
And there's a reason for that. One of the rights the copyright holder has is the right to prohibit other people from making copies of a work, i.e. from fixing an intangible work into a tangible object. You cannot download a tangible object -- at least not yet -- so whenever you download anyt
That seems fair in the way that it emulates the rights I have for physical property I own.
Of course, it's not physical property, and there's no actual need to ape physical property. Your proposal reminds me of how early mechanized tractors had reins, and early cars had tillers.
With a paper book, it is an unavoidable fact of the way the universe works that for you to lend that actual material object to someone else, you can't have it. With an ebook, there's no such requirement of rivalry. Why should we artificially create rivalry if we don't have to?
Of course, remember that it would have to be a photographic scan. No one is likely to go through the trouble of typesetting these books all over again. OCR based on the scan would be nice, but you'd still need the raw pictures in case of OCR errors or to handle any sorts of illustrations (e.g. graphs, plates).
The main stumbling blocks, probably, are 1) the expected return is fairly low, so they have higher priorities; 2) the contracts they made with the copyright holders may not have been written with the possibility of publishing them in an electronic format, or may have already terminated for one reason or another, in which case the rights would be with the author or the author's estate, which might not know, or care.
Chalk up another reason for requiring copyright registrations and frequent renewals (so that the rights holders can be tracked down easily, if they continue to have an interest in the work) and short terms (so that rights don't last longer than the rightsholder's active interest in keeping them).
And make copyrights and patents non-transferable and only licenseable for a year at a time
I don't know. If they can't be assigned, or even licensed for a substantial period of time in one go, why would a third party ever invest more than a token amount in a work? And investment can be important. There are plenty of significant creative works and inventions that would not have amounted to much if some third party business (such as a publisher) had not made significant investments in it over the long term.
Your proposal reminds me a lot of the fee tail, a sort of real property right which has long been abolished or treated as something else. Basically A would obtain a piece of land and would entail it to his heirs. Any heir who gained ownership of the land could sell it, but upon his death, it would then go to his heir automatically, due to the way that A (long dead by this point) set it up. And no one could ever change it. Therefore, no one would ever pay much, if anything, to buy it, since it would inevitably go to someone else automatically and unpredictably. This led to the phenomenon of land-poor aristocrats, who had sizable real estate holdings but couldn't sell any of it to raise capital to put the rest to use. The land became an albatross around their necks.
I think we're better off allowing copyright and patent holders the right to sell or license their rights however they see fit. If they want to license it on annual terms as you think they should, no one is stopping them. They only need to find an interested licensee. If no one is interested, perhaps they are demanding too much for the rights. In any case, they're responsible adults, and should be treated as such. Whether they make a good deal or a bad deal is up to them. No one is ever twisting their arm, forcing them to give up something valuable. It's not the buyer's fault if the seller didn't have a good idea of the worth of the right, or if the right later becomes valuable (possibly due to luck, possibly due to the efforts of the buyer seeking to recoup his investment).
if it's about fairness for you, then the most fair thing is to tax everybody the same percentage wise.
No, that sounds fair, but it isn't fair in practice. A poor person can't afford to pay even a small percentage of his income for taxes; a wealthy person could easily afford to pay even a very large percentage. If your annual income is $10,000, a mere 1% of that -- $100 -- could mean that you don't get to eat. If your annual income is $10,000,000, you could probably spare a good 90% of that before your lifestyle was severely impacted, and you'd still be living luxuriously.
It's more fair for everyone to pay an amount that is reasonable and which they personally can afford, even if this happens to differ from person to person due to their individual circumstances. Otherwise the amount taken will always be an unfair burden on the poor, while to the rich it's but a trifle.
Why are those who create more wealth and make more money doing it are taxed more via this progressive ladder? It's unfair! They are already adding MORE to the economy than your average 9-5 worker. They are adding MUCH more - organization of capital and labor that the society obviously needs, otherwise they wouldn't be rich.
Oh, I very much doubt that. The heart of our economy in this country is the middle class, and small business. There are certainly some areas where economies of scale make a big business useful, but just as often large businesses can be so large as to be unwieldy and dangerous to a competitive market. Most jobs and most of our GDP come from small businesses and farms.
Also, there are ways of getting rich without contributing a damn thing. Or would you support a 100% inheritance tax, so as to ensure that an heir doesn't get rich from the labor of some industrious family member, and can only achieve material success on his own merits?
Another point is though that today, US 'rich' already pay most of taxes.
Though that doesn't mean that they are paying their fair share.
Are the 'rich' using many times the resources?
Yes, actually. They've got more to lose, and they consume resources in protecting those things. If I own nothing more than the clothes on my back, I can get by on my own pretty well. But if I own a lot of money in bank accounts, a lot of publicly traded stock in businesses, a lot of real and personal property, I need an entire society and orderly government to make sure that the banks don't go under, that the stock market isn't full of people engaging in fraud, police to safeguard property, courts to handle dispute resolution, an army to keep someone from invading, etc. Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. If we followed your suggestions, and suffered through the societal and governmental breakdowns that would assuredly result, what would stop us from just killing wealthy people and taking their stuff? It's happened before. If we hadn't had the New Deal, it could've happened here in the 30s. It could happen again.
this person takes a RISK and society rips the reward IF he succeeds.
The trick is to limit the amount of the tax to the absolute maximum amount possible while still encouraging the investor to take more risks like that in the future. Any more than than that would diminish investment; any less would be wasteful.
Given that we had much higher amounts of taxation in the not-too-distant past, and nevertheless had a great economy, it seems likely that we're undertaxing the wealthy (and probably overtaxing the poor and middle classes).
eventually end up with HUGE disparity of wealth between the rich and poor
And yet there was a greater disparity during the Gilded Age, before we had a nationwide progressive income tax, and less disparity afterward. Of course, we've been moving toward more disparity again for a while, thanks to bone-headed conservative polici
It's amazing but not really, that most of/. participants have not a clue about economics.
Neither do a lot of economists. Practitioners of the dismal science never seem to come to much agreement about anything.
The only correct way to fund a government is through consumption taxes.
I.E. you want government to be funded by the poor and the middle classes, who not only consume far more than the wealthy do, but who also consume a larger proportion of their overall income, keeping them in their place. The wealthy only consume a small proportion of their income, and you'd allow them to not only enjoy their wealth, but by freeing up the bulk of it from taxation, they can grow it further for their own benefit.
We've more or less been doing this in the US for several decades now, and if we continue, we will wind up without a middle class, without class mobility, and if those come to pass, hopefully a bloody revolution so that the wealthy can enjoy the terminal fruits of their, and your, agenda.
Personally, I'd just as soon avoid that end by avoiding its beginning, and by having a society without great wealth disparity.
But funding government from PRODUCTION or INCOME taxes is going to lead to a total disaster
Well we've been doing it for nearly a century now. That must be one very slow disaster.
Obama and Biden are just going to build 'high speed rail' even though US has no money and in fact USA used to have rail system that was the biggest in the world and that system was destroyed during the New Deal because of all the new roads that were put, while the rail was torn down and airlines were taxed - gov't made sure to totally annihilate profitability of those 3 modes of transportation, making sure it's all subsidized forever and thus controlled forever. Now they are going to build rail? With what money? Where is the profit that would at least indicate that the endeavor is the right move? They are going to build rail in US with all parts and all railroad cars built in US. USA has no production capacity for this, USA made rail road will be extremely expensive if compared to just buying the parts and cars from countries that already manufacture them. The end user tickets will have to be subsidized, they'll be monstrously expensive.
Rather than break that up, here's six points:
1. If you mean the US economy as a whole, we've got plenty of money. A lot of it is being sat on right now, because investments are being viewed as risky, but it could be freed up were the government willing to rattle its saber at the financial sector in order to bring them into line. Or if you mean the federal government, they also have plenty of money. We could finance construction by diverting some of the funding for the military, for example. (It's not as though they're capable of winning any of the wars we find ourselves actually fighting any more, anyway, so the money is wasted on them)
2. The New Deal didn't dismantle the railroads. In fact, the biggest years for rail ever were WW2, just afterward. Unfortunately, they suffered from the lack of investment and maintenance during the war (e.g. rationing and labor shortages preventing them from building anything new of note), from our ill-conceived, ill-fated national love affair with the automobile which was mostly realized after the war, and from the longstanding general hostility toward the rail industry, as they had been some of the biggest and baddest businesses around for decades. The rise of domestic air travel also didn't help much.
3. We've had transportation infrastructure subsidies in this country since before we were a country. The Constitution expressly granted the federal government the power to create roads for the postal service (which obviously could be used by anyone), though a number of them had been created by the various colonies before independence. George Washington himself was in
There is no such thing as "a raise". There is no such thing as "being a success". There is no success. No matter what you do, you can never get any better. You can never advance. There is nothing better to advance to. How bleak.
You think that success can only be measured in terms of money? That advancement is strictly a matter of one's pay? I don't think that most people would agree with you. We need some money to live reasonably on, and luxuries are nice, I'll grant you. But there's a lot more to life than money.
Additionally, as I keep pointing out, society has already tried that economic system many times, and it keeps failing as it is contrary to human nature (on the large scale). It's called communism.
No, communism is considerably different. All we're talking about is a tax system implemented on a fairly generic regulated capitalist economy.
And in any event, you seem to think that I'm in favor of a seriously progressive sales tax. In fact, I think it would be unworkable. I'd rather abolish the sales tax altogether, and have a seriously progressive tax on wealth and income.
the vast majority saved their money instead of spending it, and invested it.
Which is fine with me.
Since when has spending less than you make been viewed as a BAD thing?!
I think that spending less than you make is a good thing. But I think that it's a bad thing to save more money than is reasonable and responsible to save. Excess saved money, stashed in a mattress or buried in the backyard, does no good for anyone. It should be used in some sort of productive manner.
So, you would suggest that rich people should pay sales tax in relation to their income?
Maybe he is suggesting that we abolish the sales tax, and increase income taxes in the high tax brackets, while also closing loopholes on personal and corporate income taxes.
A progressive sales tax seems like it would be pretty difficult to manage if it were implemented per person. I suppose we could have bracketed sales taxes, or different sales taxes on different goods.
So if the poor person buys a pair of shoes and pays $3 sales tax on them, the same pair of shoes should rack up $300 for the rich person? In what world does that seem fair to you?
In the world where $3 to a poor person is an equal proportion of wealth to $300 to a rich person. A person who only makes $3000 a year (number chosen arbitrarily for ease of math) is paying 1/1000th of their annual income in sales tax right there. If you have $300,000 in income, and pay 1/1000th of that, the pain felt is no better and no worse. That seems pretty fair. Why would it be more fair for the wealthy person to pay so little in taxes, compared to his wealth, that he doesn't even notice, while the poor person has to be extremely conscious of their tax situation, because it is so big to them? If anyone should have to worry more about taxes, it should be the rich; they can afford to pay someone to handle the worry for them.
The whole idea of making more money is that you get to keep more of it, so your expenses are lower relative to what you earn.
What are you, a miser? Holding on to money without doing anything productive with it does no good for anyone. It's prudent to save some money away in case it's needed, but generally money should either be spent or invested.
Amen to that. It amazes me how some people think a flat tax is worse for the "poor". Um, if taxes were higher for the rich they would likely buy a little less. Less goods sold = less jobs provided. It's called trickle-down. And that kind of thinking does hurt the poor as they are the class usually employed in production lines.
No, not really. Rich people don't buy very much stuff, in proportion to their income, as it is. There's a limit to how many things a person wants, or needs, or is prepared to deal with. A rich person might have a nice tv or two, but they won't have a thousand of them; a billionaire could afford a different car for every day of the year, but will likely only drive one on a day to day basis. No one really needs more than one cellphone or PC; some people might have more than one, but it really becomes a hassle to deal with. Even if you could afford to buy a thousand iPhones, you'd only ever carry around one, so why bother?
In short, give wealthy people more money, and they probably will not spend it on goods, because they already have all the goods they want. And trickle-down economics have never, ever worked. (Well, except to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, but that's not a good thing)
Plenty of Republicans and other conservatives back things like construction of new nuclear power plants, a form of renewable energy that actually makes sense.
Nuclear isn't renewable. You're probably thinking of breeder reactors, but they're merely more efficient than other designs. Eventually you run out of fissile material anyway, and there's only so much of it in accessible places on the planet.
Nuclear also has major problems with regard to hazardous waste -- not just spent fuel but also contaminated equipment, materials, and mine tailings. There still isn't a good plan for dealing with this stuff that anyone can get agreement on and put into practice.
Plus, in order to be implemented worldwide, there are serious security concerns. Breeder reactors tend to present a proliferation risk, but even without that, radioactive material could be used in dirty bombs. And for some reactor designs, there are very dangerous failure modes; if you're going to have tens of thousands of nuclear power plants around the world, we're probably bound for some nasty problems, whether accidental or deliberate.
At least with things like wind or thermal solar, there's a real abundance of available energy, no significant pollution concerns, no reliance on energy sources that may be controlled by hostile powers, and little danger of a catastrophic accident or deliberate attack on large numbers of people. There are issues with power transmission and and storage, but I bet these are a lot easier to overcome, especially if we can reduce our energy consumption as well.
Problem is, nobody lives in Boston. Most people live in Cambridge, Somerville, Newton, Brighton, etc, etc.
While most of the people in the Metro Boston area don't live in Boston itself, Boston is nevertheless the most populous city in New England. The next-most-populous city in the metro area is Cambridge, and it's only about 1/5th the population of Boston.
Also, Brighton has been part of Boston since the 1870s.
The Mass DCR (Dept of Conservation & Resources) is legally free of any liability for damage to cars due to road disrepair, and it is clearly evident.
DCR mainly only runs the parkways, which admittedly are some pretty major roads. But most of the roads in the city don't fall under DCR; the city's own Department of Public Works maintains them. Or that's the hope, at least.
The problem you see is people concentrating into poorly-planned, densely-packed megalopolises. The answer for those cities to put more money into their transportation infrastructure. The answer for people who want to spend less time in traffic, have better-maintained roads, etc. is to move away from the cities, to a place where space is not a scarce commodity.
What is this, opposite day?
Dense cities reduce the need for transportation because most of the things anyone needs are within walking distance. If you need to go further, it's thanks to the density that mass transit is effective, allowing quick, cheap trips across and around the city.
I live in a dense urban area, and I don't spend time in traffic at all; I got rid of my car, and can walk, bike, or take the subway wherever I need to go. It saves me money, trips don't take longer, I never need to look for parking (which is expensive as hell), I don't need to pay for insurance, etc.
America does not want trains for regular transit. America can not afford trains for regular transit. Trains are a terribly inefficient, unmanageable, inferior option for regular transit.
Trains helped make this country great, and we never should have dismissed them in favor of cars. Cars are far less efficient than trains, less safe, and will not be sustainable in the future. Better that we get rid of the cars, and revive the trains now, while we can do so comfortably, than later, when we won't have a choice.
Don't you recall where Amtrak came from? Numerous private rail companies went bankrupt, while others canceled their passenger rail services. Amtrak was created to keep passenger rail from dying out decades ago. It has its problems, but privatization won't solve them.
Most likely they are not going to build a second set of tracks. Someone down the line will say "Hey, we can cut the costs in half if we just upgrade the existing tracks"
Yeah, this would not permit for high speed rail. Freight is too heavy; it would damage the tracks enough to require low-speed operation, and it couldn't go fast enough anyway, requiring everyone else to slow down lest they collide.
We will need to create an entirely new high speed passenger only infrastructure (and maybe light cargo, like mail), while also improving the old infrastructure so that it can handle more freight and the return of passenger trains to areas that would not be efficient to serve with a direct connection to the high speed rail.
But in the US it would be a 12 hour rail ride cross country (even at 250 mph) vs. a 4-5 hour plane ride.
Hm. BOS-SFO is a pretty long distance, and a direct flight is about 6.75 hours. I agree that the train would take considerably longer, but if the train has sleeper compartments, the bulk of it could be done overnight. I'd be willing to get on a train at 8pm, eat dinner, sleep in a bed, have breakfast, and get off at 8am.
Working a good schedule for an entire network would be tricky, but I bet it's doable with a combination of short-medium distance day trains and long distance night trains.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno.
Certainly the WBC has the right to say what they like. But that doesn't mean that anyone has to sit there and politely listen to them; counter protesters have just as much of a right to say what they like, and if the volume of the counter protesters drowns out the WBC, I'm not sure that I see the problem, or at least a problem to which there is a solution that protects both groups.
If the counter protesters can convince the WBC to change their minds, or shame them into silence, or simply make it clear that WBC protests won't work, causing them to change their tactics, then the end result is that they're silenced, but so long as they were not forcibly compelled, is that bad?
The usual online tactics of Anonymous seems to be DDOSing. This isn't a very hostile attack and it doesn't necessarily silence the target. It's not hard to see parallels between that and, say, protesters surrounding a building, or holding a sit-in. And WBC can always mount a similar attack right back.
We'll have to see how this all shakes out, of course. But just because you support free speech, that doesn't mean you can't have an opinion, and can't aggressively exercise that freedom yourself.
You seem to forget that the reason that Amtrak was created in the first place is because the private passenger rail industry collapsed. Pullman went bankrupt. Penn went bankrupt. No one else was making money at passenger rail, and in fact, passenger rail had been a money loser for decades.
Amtrak was set up as an optional program; the railroads did not have to sell their passenger operations to it, but virtually all of them did. Of those that did not, they either did later, shut down, or were very small (or became so).
If we had not had Amtrak passenger rail in the US would have basically vanished 40 years ago. Amtrak doesn't do a great job, hobbled as it is in many respects, but at least it has been serving as a pilot light.
Now, if you want to discuss how the government interfered with rail by doing things like subsidizing automotive and air transport, or taking away their mail contracts, or imposing overly strict safety standards without assisting railroads in modernizing so as to lessen their negative impact, etc., that's fine.
Or if you'd like to discuss how the government could spur a renaissance in private passenger rail by, e.g. building a high speed passenger rail network, seizing and improving existing rail networks and rights-of-way so as to build regional and local passenger rail that can operate at higher speeds than today, and coexist with freight, and licensing anyone who meets standards to operate passenger and freight trains over the national network, that would be fine too.
But just getting rid of Amtrak would be unproductive. You'd kill off the last bit of passenger service, in an era when people are clamoring for it, and you'd do nothing to see that void filled or that service provided.
Markets can and do fail, and this one has.
(And freight is not as deregulated as you seem to imagine, either)
Well, they're usually idiots. Most of the guarantees of rights in the Constitution apply to 'people' or 'persons' and not merely citizens.
What puzzles me is how can the US (or any country) make a law that can possibly apply to what a citizen of another country does outside the US?
No, any country can declare anything, anywhere illegal, if it wants to. I don't understand why that would not be so.
The US has had laws like that for a very long time, such as the Alien Tort Claims Act from 1789, which is still on the books, and still used at times. Of course, enforcing such a law can be rather tricky. Just because something is made illegal worldwide by one country, there's no obligation for any other country to recognize that or to cooperate.
A fee for retrivering (out of copyright) content from the registry is a good idea.
I'm torn. On the one hand, I'm concerned about the costs involved if everyone streamed / downloaded everything over a modest age free from the Library of Congress. On the other hand, providing information to people for free is basically a core function of a public library (and in fact, the LoC does provide at least some interesting stuff for free).
A fee for registering works is not, it would turn the power more into the hands of corporations, and less into the hands of the people.
The idea is that there are numerous incentives to authors to create and publish works. Copyright is one of them, but only one, and often not even the most important one. If an author would create and publish a work regardless of copyright (i.e. the other incentives were adequate), then ideally no copyright would be granted, as it would impose a detriment to the public which would not be outweighed by any greater benefit to the public. If, OTOH, an author would not create and publish a work unless copyright were available, and the public enjoys a net benefit (i.e. the harm done by having a copyright is outweighed by the benefit of having the work created and published; this is mostly relevant in weighing one copyright regime against another), and the grant of copyright is the least it can be while still working as an incentive for the author, so as to maximize the public benefit, then a copyright should be granted.
As copyrights are only an economic incentive (a copyright won't make you famous, get you laid, help you to express yourself, etc.) an author should consider whether or not to seek one on economic terms. That is, is the benefit to the author of getting a copyright greater than the cost to the author of getting a copyright? If a copyright is free, other than the opportunity cost of actually filling out the form (copyright forms are not difficult to fill out, btw), then the answer will usually be yes.
However, we only want to grant copyrights when necessary. If there's a very modest fee involved, the author will have to consider whether he will ever be able to use the copyright to recover that cost or even make a profit. If so, he should register, but if not, he may as well not bother, which happens to benefit the public maximally and immediately, so long as the work is still created and published. If the fee is low but real, I suspect that it will not discourage the creation and publication of works, but will discourage the copyrighting of works where a copyright is not actually necessary.
I think your concern is that with deeper pockets, a large business might routinely have everything it produces copyrighted. I think that for a lot of its output, this is unlikely, but I'll agree that for some materials at some businesses, it could happen. In that case, perhaps a sliding scale of fees based on whether the author or registrant is a natural person or not; the number of registrations made; etc.?
It could all work quite well if there were no registration fee for digital works.
Well, the purpose of a registration fee isn't to finance the system (though it doesn't hurt, and archiving data so that it is usable more or less forever isn't actually cheap) but more to prevent frivolous copyrights, which can happen if they're free. At least some token fee should be imposed so that an author has to think at least a little as to whether or not they actually care about a copyright.
The current basic fee is $35.
since just uploading the data somewhere is easy enough to do every year.
Well, remember that the point of archiving materials is twofold: 1) to establish just what the work for which a copyright is claimed is, so as to minimize disputes later on (patent and trademark filings serve the same purpose, as do registrations of deeds for real property); 2) to allow people to study and learn from them during the copyright term, and to preserve them for any sort of use in the future.
That last point means that the Copyright Office will need to establish rules as to what formats of data are acceptable, and what additional material, if any, must be submitted. In the case of a book, the book itself will do nicely, though they traditionally require that the copies deposited be of the best quality that are made by the copyright holder. In the case of software, binaries are not enough; a binary is not really all that useful. Source code will be needed, adequate comments in that source code to allow other programmers of ordinary skill to understand how it works, information as to the intended platform, how it is to be compiled, etc. Rough drafts OTOH are probably not needed (unless they're being separately registered). Patents work this way, and where a creative work is not of a nature that it discloses itself, as it were, copyrights should too.
Also, the registry should publish the registered works once the copyrights expires.
Well, they should make the work available for patrons of the Library of Congress to read, even during the term. Once the term has expired, it ought to be possible to request a copy (probably for a fee). I'm concerned about the costs, however, of having the government host every video, every piece of music, every book, every program, and having people constantly downloading directly from it, rather than through a third party that can absorb some of those costs, and perhaps even make a profit.
Not having authorial copyright at all worked pretty well from prehistory to 1710 in the UK, and later elsewhere. I don't think that we should necessarily abolish copyright, but not having it did work far longer than copyright ever has. So let's not dismiss reform ideas so out of hand, okay?
Well, the main question is this: Suppose there were such a requirement. Would it stop you from writing software, or would you either 1) live with it, and follow the rules, or 2) not bother to seek copyrights?
The goal of copyright is to encourage the most creation and publication of works, while restricting the public as little as possible. The encouragement of copyright comes at a cost to the public. That cost should be as minimal as possible, while getting the most public gain possible. The preferences of authors aren't really of much interest, so long as they still create and publish. And even if they don't, that can be acceptable if the cost to the public of getting those works would be greater than the benefit of having them.
In any event, the US had a registration and renewal formality for copyright for a very very long time. They're traditional features of American copyright, and they've worked well. Better than the current system, certainly.
I can't imagine if I needed to individually register a copyright every piece of code I write and then go and update it every year.
It's not really a big problem. For example, with photographs, each photograph is a separate work. However, the Copyright Office accepts group registrations, where a photographer can submit many photographs at once, with only one filing and one fee, provided certain requirements are met. (E.g. all created during the same calendar year) If individualized registrations for software would be burdensome, I'd imagine something like this could be set up fairly easily.
And what if it is something in development? Are you not covered by copyright until you are done and have registered?!
I'd suggest that a limited amount of copyright protection would attach to a work whilst under development (lest we encourage people to copy manuscripts). There would be an eventual time limit, in order to encourage at least some sort of publication, however. The public doesn't benefit from a work being stuck in development forever. As Steve Jobs once said, real artists ship.
Once a work was published (i.e. made available to the public by any means, including performance or display), the limited rights would expire in, say, a year from the date of first publication. Registering the work and complying with any other copyright formalities (such as submitting a copy to the Library of Congress, in a form they found acceptable, and with such supplemental material as they requested -- in the case of software, think of complete and reasonably commented source code, binaries, compilation instructions, etc.) would cause a proper copyright to issue, backdated to the date that the registration was filed. (So that paperwork backlogs don't harm the copyright holder) The rights and remedies of a proper copyright would be such, compared to the minimal automatic right, that anyone who cared would seek a proper copyright. We might also consider things like the current requirement that no one can bring a lawsuit over an unregistered copyright, in order to encourage copyright holders to either register or abandon protection.
Then the copyright term would be fairly short, requiring the copyright holder to file a renewal periodically. If he doesn't bother to file, the work enters the public domain, which presumably, he is okay with. If he does file (along with updated contact information if he's changed addresses, or for the new copyright holder if the rights were assigned away), the rights are renewed for another term. Eventually no more renewal terms are permitted, and the work falls into the public domain if it hasn't already.
A book is personal property that contains intellectual property.
That's not really accurate, and in fact, you contradict yourself later in the same paragraph with the more accurate statement:
the intellectual property, that is the right to create more licenses.
"Intellectual property" is really a nonsensical term, full of inaccuracies, and slanted toward a particular point of view. Personally, I try not to use it. But if any sense can be made out of it at all, it must be that as an intangible creative work is not property at all, and as a tangible object in which that creative work is fixed is ordinary personal property, the "intellectual property" is the copyright which pertains to the creative work.
A paperback book is a material object in which a creative work (the actual story) is fixed. It doesn't also contain the copyright to the work; that right is held separately, and it is the right to prohibit other people from doing certain things in regard to the intangible work.
Possession of it as personal property implies a license to access it as intellectual property.
Nope. If you go to the bookstore and buy a copy of, say, Rocket Science for Dummies, there's no license involved, implicit or otherwise. This is because a copyright is only a right to prohibit other people from doing certain, specific things. Anything that doesn't fall within the bounds of the copyright, the copyright holder has no right to prohibit. And a license is merely a promise by the rights holder not to sue you if you do the things which he could prohibit, but which are covered by the license.
Copyright includes the right to prohibit other people from making copies, from making derivative works, from distributing the work, etc. But it does not include a right to prohibit other people from reading or accessing a work. Therefore, since the copyright holder cannot prohibit someone from reading his book by virtue of his copyright, he cannot license people to read it. Such a license would be meaningless.
You have a right to sell it as personal property, and with that the same license you had
The GPL is not really how things work most of the time. Copyright holders have a right to prohibit the distribution of their work. When they sell a copy of that work for the first time, however, they lose most or all of their rights over further distribution of that particular copy. (There are of course a lot of little details; if you buy a book or a video from the store, you can rent them, but if you buy a music CD or a computer program, you can't)
Buying a copy of a book is no different from buying a brick. There is no license. They're just ordinary personal property, and the person who owns them can dispose of them however they like. The copyright holder isn't involved. For this to be different, either copyright law would have to be changed a lot, or else there might have to be an unusual contract that had to be agreed to in order to just buy the thing in the first place. It wouldn't be an implied contract in an ordinary consumer transaction. It would basically have to be an express contract, and you'd know one if you saw one. Software is the only field where this practice is common (for no good reason) and EULAs are made quite visible. And even then, there is an unsettled dispute as to whether or not they're even enforceable. Personally, I blame the software industry for confusing people into thinking that licenses are more important or more common than they really are.
I've never bothered to buy an e-book, but I would expect that there is some manner of contract that must be agreed to first.
And there's a reason for that. One of the rights the copyright holder has is the right to prohibit other people from making copies of a work, i.e. from fixing an intangible work into a tangible object. You cannot download a tangible object -- at least not yet -- so whenever you download anyt
Well, you can also sue them, and they could also be prosecuted.
That seems fair in the way that it emulates the rights I have for physical property I own.
Of course, it's not physical property, and there's no actual need to ape physical property. Your proposal reminds me of how early mechanized tractors had reins, and early cars had tillers.
With a paper book, it is an unavoidable fact of the way the universe works that for you to lend that actual material object to someone else, you can't have it. With an ebook, there's no such requirement of rivalry. Why should we artificially create rivalry if we don't have to?
Of course, remember that it would have to be a photographic scan. No one is likely to go through the trouble of typesetting these books all over again. OCR based on the scan would be nice, but you'd still need the raw pictures in case of OCR errors or to handle any sorts of illustrations (e.g. graphs, plates).
The main stumbling blocks, probably, are 1) the expected return is fairly low, so they have higher priorities; 2) the contracts they made with the copyright holders may not have been written with the possibility of publishing them in an electronic format, or may have already terminated for one reason or another, in which case the rights would be with the author or the author's estate, which might not know, or care.
Chalk up another reason for requiring copyright registrations and frequent renewals (so that the rights holders can be tracked down easily, if they continue to have an interest in the work) and short terms (so that rights don't last longer than the rightsholder's active interest in keeping them).
And make copyrights and patents non-transferable and only licenseable for a year at a time
I don't know. If they can't be assigned, or even licensed for a substantial period of time in one go, why would a third party ever invest more than a token amount in a work? And investment can be important. There are plenty of significant creative works and inventions that would not have amounted to much if some third party business (such as a publisher) had not made significant investments in it over the long term.
Your proposal reminds me a lot of the fee tail, a sort of real property right which has long been abolished or treated as something else. Basically A would obtain a piece of land and would entail it to his heirs. Any heir who gained ownership of the land could sell it, but upon his death, it would then go to his heir automatically, due to the way that A (long dead by this point) set it up. And no one could ever change it. Therefore, no one would ever pay much, if anything, to buy it, since it would inevitably go to someone else automatically and unpredictably. This led to the phenomenon of land-poor aristocrats, who had sizable real estate holdings but couldn't sell any of it to raise capital to put the rest to use. The land became an albatross around their necks.
I think we're better off allowing copyright and patent holders the right to sell or license their rights however they see fit. If they want to license it on annual terms as you think they should, no one is stopping them. They only need to find an interested licensee. If no one is interested, perhaps they are demanding too much for the rights. In any case, they're responsible adults, and should be treated as such. Whether they make a good deal or a bad deal is up to them. No one is ever twisting their arm, forcing them to give up something valuable. It's not the buyer's fault if the seller didn't have a good idea of the worth of the right, or if the right later becomes valuable (possibly due to luck, possibly due to the efforts of the buyer seeking to recoup his investment).
if it's about fairness for you, then the most fair thing is to tax everybody the same percentage wise.
No, that sounds fair, but it isn't fair in practice. A poor person can't afford to pay even a small percentage of his income for taxes; a wealthy person could easily afford to pay even a very large percentage. If your annual income is $10,000, a mere 1% of that -- $100 -- could mean that you don't get to eat. If your annual income is $10,000,000, you could probably spare a good 90% of that before your lifestyle was severely impacted, and you'd still be living luxuriously.
It's more fair for everyone to pay an amount that is reasonable and which they personally can afford, even if this happens to differ from person to person due to their individual circumstances. Otherwise the amount taken will always be an unfair burden on the poor, while to the rich it's but a trifle.
Why are those who create more wealth and make more money doing it are taxed more via this progressive ladder? It's unfair! They are already adding MORE to the economy than your average 9-5 worker. They are adding MUCH more - organization of capital and labor that the society obviously needs, otherwise they wouldn't be rich.
Oh, I very much doubt that. The heart of our economy in this country is the middle class, and small business. There are certainly some areas where economies of scale make a big business useful, but just as often large businesses can be so large as to be unwieldy and dangerous to a competitive market. Most jobs and most of our GDP come from small businesses and farms.
Also, there are ways of getting rich without contributing a damn thing. Or would you support a 100% inheritance tax, so as to ensure that an heir doesn't get rich from the labor of some industrious family member, and can only achieve material success on his own merits?
Another point is though that today, US 'rich' already pay most of taxes.
Though that doesn't mean that they are paying their fair share.
Are the 'rich' using many times the resources?
Yes, actually. They've got more to lose, and they consume resources in protecting those things. If I own nothing more than the clothes on my back, I can get by on my own pretty well. But if I own a lot of money in bank accounts, a lot of publicly traded stock in businesses, a lot of real and personal property, I need an entire society and orderly government to make sure that the banks don't go under, that the stock market isn't full of people engaging in fraud, police to safeguard property, courts to handle dispute resolution, an army to keep someone from invading, etc. Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society. If we followed your suggestions, and suffered through the societal and governmental breakdowns that would assuredly result, what would stop us from just killing wealthy people and taking their stuff? It's happened before. If we hadn't had the New Deal, it could've happened here in the 30s. It could happen again.
this person takes a RISK and society rips the reward IF he succeeds.
The trick is to limit the amount of the tax to the absolute maximum amount possible while still encouraging the investor to take more risks like that in the future. Any more than than that would diminish investment; any less would be wasteful.
Given that we had much higher amounts of taxation in the not-too-distant past, and nevertheless had a great economy, it seems likely that we're undertaxing the wealthy (and probably overtaxing the poor and middle classes).
eventually end up with HUGE disparity of wealth between the rich and poor
And yet there was a greater disparity during the Gilded Age, before we had a nationwide progressive income tax, and less disparity afterward. Of course, we've been moving toward more disparity again for a while, thanks to bone-headed conservative polici
It's amazing but not really, that most of /. participants have not a clue about economics.
Neither do a lot of economists. Practitioners of the dismal science never seem to come to much agreement about anything.
The only correct way to fund a government is through consumption taxes.
I.E. you want government to be funded by the poor and the middle classes, who not only consume far more than the wealthy do, but who also consume a larger proportion of their overall income, keeping them in their place. The wealthy only consume a small proportion of their income, and you'd allow them to not only enjoy their wealth, but by freeing up the bulk of it from taxation, they can grow it further for their own benefit.
We've more or less been doing this in the US for several decades now, and if we continue, we will wind up without a middle class, without class mobility, and if those come to pass, hopefully a bloody revolution so that the wealthy can enjoy the terminal fruits of their, and your, agenda.
Personally, I'd just as soon avoid that end by avoiding its beginning, and by having a society without great wealth disparity.
But funding government from PRODUCTION or INCOME taxes is going to lead to a total disaster
Well we've been doing it for nearly a century now. That must be one very slow disaster.
Obama and Biden are just going to build 'high speed rail' even though US has no money and in fact USA used to have rail system that was the biggest in the world and that system was destroyed during the New Deal because of all the new roads that were put, while the rail was torn down and airlines were taxed - gov't made sure to totally annihilate profitability of those 3 modes of transportation, making sure it's all subsidized forever and thus controlled forever. Now they are going to build rail? With what money? Where is the profit that would at least indicate that the endeavor is the right move? They are going to build rail in US with all parts and all railroad cars built in US. USA has no production capacity for this, USA made rail road will be extremely expensive if compared to just buying the parts and cars from countries that already manufacture them. The end user tickets will have to be subsidized, they'll be monstrously expensive.
Rather than break that up, here's six points:
1. If you mean the US economy as a whole, we've got plenty of money. A lot of it is being sat on right now, because investments are being viewed as risky, but it could be freed up were the government willing to rattle its saber at the financial sector in order to bring them into line. Or if you mean the federal government, they also have plenty of money. We could finance construction by diverting some of the funding for the military, for example. (It's not as though they're capable of winning any of the wars we find ourselves actually fighting any more, anyway, so the money is wasted on them)
2. The New Deal didn't dismantle the railroads. In fact, the biggest years for rail ever were WW2, just afterward. Unfortunately, they suffered from the lack of investment and maintenance during the war (e.g. rationing and labor shortages preventing them from building anything new of note), from our ill-conceived, ill-fated national love affair with the automobile which was mostly realized after the war, and from the longstanding general hostility toward the rail industry, as they had been some of the biggest and baddest businesses around for decades. The rise of domestic air travel also didn't help much.
3. We've had transportation infrastructure subsidies in this country since before we were a country. The Constitution expressly granted the federal government the power to create roads for the postal service (which obviously could be used by anyone), though a number of them had been created by the various colonies before independence. George Washington himself was in
There is no such thing as "a raise". There is no such thing as "being a success". There is no success. No matter what you do, you can never get any better. You can never advance. There is nothing better to advance to. How bleak.
You think that success can only be measured in terms of money? That advancement is strictly a matter of one's pay? I don't think that most people would agree with you. We need some money to live reasonably on, and luxuries are nice, I'll grant you. But there's a lot more to life than money.
Additionally, as I keep pointing out, society has already tried that economic system many times, and it keeps failing as it is contrary to human nature (on the large scale). It's called communism.
No, communism is considerably different. All we're talking about is a tax system implemented on a fairly generic regulated capitalist economy.
And in any event, you seem to think that I'm in favor of a seriously progressive sales tax. In fact, I think it would be unworkable. I'd rather abolish the sales tax altogether, and have a seriously progressive tax on wealth and income.
the vast majority saved their money instead of spending it, and invested it.
Which is fine with me.
Since when has spending less than you make been viewed as a BAD thing?!
I think that spending less than you make is a good thing. But I think that it's a bad thing to save more money than is reasonable and responsible to save. Excess saved money, stashed in a mattress or buried in the backyard, does no good for anyone. It should be used in some sort of productive manner.
So, you would suggest that rich people should pay sales tax in relation to their income?
Maybe he is suggesting that we abolish the sales tax, and increase income taxes in the high tax brackets, while also closing loopholes on personal and corporate income taxes.
A progressive sales tax seems like it would be pretty difficult to manage if it were implemented per person. I suppose we could have bracketed sales taxes, or different sales taxes on different goods.
So if the poor person buys a pair of shoes and pays $3 sales tax on them, the same pair of shoes should rack up $300 for the rich person? In what world does that seem fair to you?
In the world where $3 to a poor person is an equal proportion of wealth to $300 to a rich person. A person who only makes $3000 a year (number chosen arbitrarily for ease of math) is paying 1/1000th of their annual income in sales tax right there. If you have $300,000 in income, and pay 1/1000th of that, the pain felt is no better and no worse. That seems pretty fair. Why would it be more fair for the wealthy person to pay so little in taxes, compared to his wealth, that he doesn't even notice, while the poor person has to be extremely conscious of their tax situation, because it is so big to them? If anyone should have to worry more about taxes, it should be the rich; they can afford to pay someone to handle the worry for them.
The whole idea of making more money is that you get to keep more of it, so your expenses are lower relative to what you earn.
What are you, a miser? Holding on to money without doing anything productive with it does no good for anyone. It's prudent to save some money away in case it's needed, but generally money should either be spent or invested.
Amen to that. It amazes me how some people think a flat tax is worse for the "poor". Um, if taxes were higher for the rich they would likely buy a little less. Less goods sold = less jobs provided. It's called trickle-down. And that kind of thinking does hurt the poor as they are the class usually employed in production lines.
No, not really. Rich people don't buy very much stuff, in proportion to their income, as it is. There's a limit to how many things a person wants, or needs, or is prepared to deal with. A rich person might have a nice tv or two, but they won't have a thousand of them; a billionaire could afford a different car for every day of the year, but will likely only drive one on a day to day basis. No one really needs more than one cellphone or PC; some people might have more than one, but it really becomes a hassle to deal with. Even if you could afford to buy a thousand iPhones, you'd only ever carry around one, so why bother?
In short, give wealthy people more money, and they probably will not spend it on goods, because they already have all the goods they want. And trickle-down economics have never, ever worked. (Well, except to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, but that's not a good thing)
Plenty of Republicans and other conservatives back things like construction of new nuclear power plants, a form of renewable energy that actually makes sense.
Nuclear isn't renewable. You're probably thinking of breeder reactors, but they're merely more efficient than other designs. Eventually you run out of fissile material anyway, and there's only so much of it in accessible places on the planet.
Nuclear also has major problems with regard to hazardous waste -- not just spent fuel but also contaminated equipment, materials, and mine tailings. There still isn't a good plan for dealing with this stuff that anyone can get agreement on and put into practice.
Plus, in order to be implemented worldwide, there are serious security concerns. Breeder reactors tend to present a proliferation risk, but even without that, radioactive material could be used in dirty bombs. And for some reactor designs, there are very dangerous failure modes; if you're going to have tens of thousands of nuclear power plants around the world, we're probably bound for some nasty problems, whether accidental or deliberate.
At least with things like wind or thermal solar, there's a real abundance of available energy, no significant pollution concerns, no reliance on energy sources that may be controlled by hostile powers, and little danger of a catastrophic accident or deliberate attack on large numbers of people. There are issues with power transmission and and storage, but I bet these are a lot easier to overcome, especially if we can reduce our energy consumption as well.
If the pothole is bad enough, they're encouraging people to drive into the pothole so that the car itself fills it.
Problem is, nobody lives in Boston. Most people live in Cambridge, Somerville, Newton, Brighton, etc, etc.
While most of the people in the Metro Boston area don't live in Boston itself, Boston is nevertheless the most populous city in New England. The next-most-populous city in the metro area is Cambridge, and it's only about 1/5th the population of Boston.
Also, Brighton has been part of Boston since the 1870s.
The Mass DCR (Dept of Conservation & Resources) is legally free of any liability for damage to cars due to road disrepair, and it is clearly evident.
DCR mainly only runs the parkways, which admittedly are some pretty major roads. But most of the roads in the city don't fall under DCR; the city's own Department of Public Works maintains them. Or that's the hope, at least.
No, this is for detecting potholes in Boston. Most of the swerves will be for other reasons, or no reason at all.
The problem you see is people concentrating into poorly-planned, densely-packed megalopolises. The answer for those cities to put more money into their transportation infrastructure. The answer for people who want to spend less time in traffic, have better-maintained roads, etc. is to move away from the cities, to a place where space is not a scarce commodity.
What is this, opposite day?
Dense cities reduce the need for transportation because most of the things anyone needs are within walking distance. If you need to go further, it's thanks to the density that mass transit is effective, allowing quick, cheap trips across and around the city.
I live in a dense urban area, and I don't spend time in traffic at all; I got rid of my car, and can walk, bike, or take the subway wherever I need to go. It saves me money, trips don't take longer, I never need to look for parking (which is expensive as hell), I don't need to pay for insurance, etc.
America does not want trains for regular transit.
America can not afford trains for regular transit.
Trains are a terribly inefficient, unmanageable, inferior option for regular transit.
Trains helped make this country great, and we never should have dismissed them in favor of cars. Cars are far less efficient than trains, less safe, and will not be sustainable in the future. Better that we get rid of the cars, and revive the trains now, while we can do so comfortably, than later, when we won't have a choice.
Don't you recall where Amtrak came from? Numerous private rail companies went bankrupt, while others canceled their passenger rail services. Amtrak was created to keep passenger rail from dying out decades ago. It has its problems, but privatization won't solve them.
Most likely they are not going to build a second set of tracks. Someone down the line will say "Hey, we can cut the costs in half if we just upgrade the existing tracks"
Yeah, this would not permit for high speed rail. Freight is too heavy; it would damage the tracks enough to require low-speed operation, and it couldn't go fast enough anyway, requiring everyone else to slow down lest they collide.
We will need to create an entirely new high speed passenger only infrastructure (and maybe light cargo, like mail), while also improving the old infrastructure so that it can handle more freight and the return of passenger trains to areas that would not be efficient to serve with a direct connection to the high speed rail.
But in the US it would be a 12 hour rail ride cross country (even at 250 mph) vs. a 4-5 hour plane ride.
Hm. BOS-SFO is a pretty long distance, and a direct flight is about 6.75 hours. I agree that the train would take considerably longer, but if the train has sleeper compartments, the bulk of it could be done overnight. I'd be willing to get on a train at 8pm, eat dinner, sleep in a bed, have breakfast, and get off at 8am.
Working a good schedule for an entire network would be tricky, but I bet it's doable with a combination of short-medium distance day trains and long distance night trains.