You get exactly the situation that we've ended up in today, only quicker. The majority votes for no tax, and a larger military budget and universal healthcare and a freaking pony. The best case scenario is that you'll end up with endless debate over budget line items because a deficit is focusing people's minds. The worst case scenario is that you don't get the debate, the "magic" money is just spent.
In practical terms, consensus is meaningless, it will have to be an arbitrary threshold over which implementation of a policy goes ahead because there will ALWAYS be a group that will reject ANYTHING. So you'll have a tyranny of the majority, who'll spend everything and still have a sense of entitlement and bugger the ones saying "think about tomorrow". Basically, the same as we have now, except with all the brakes off.
If you think that this kind of research is done to create jobs you're so wrong you'll need an atlas to get back.
This is expensive and difficult with a massive chance that there will be absolutely no return of any kind (because the probe melts, or the engines misfile and it ends up in the sun rather than going around it or whatever). In other words, this is exactly the type of stuff that private enterprise won't do because the risk vs return is really poor (high risk vs unknown return). So governments get convinced to try it by scientists who are doing it to try and understand our home star better in the hopes that we'll learn something from it. We might even learn something useful that betters our lot as a race, or leads to useful technological advances.
Governments _should_ spend. They should spend to cover the gaps that private enterprise won't, but that will have effects on their people or the future of their country or the world. What they should not do is privatise gains and socialise losses in the way that's happened over the last few years.
The difference being that Libyans in Tripoli have said that they wish NATO to keep it up and would prefer an escalation, even at the cost of more lives.
There are other greenhouse gases than CO2, and two that exhibit the strongest greenhouse effect (trapping heat) are methane and water vapour. Clouds are water vapour. The difference is the long term effect - water vapour isn't particularly long lived in the atmosphere, methane lasts longer but is still a long way short of CO2 which lasts the longest.
Mankind has increased all of these gases: Methane from farming, both livestock and decaying plants create it. Farming is a major industry, so it contributes a LOT. Water vapour from irrigation and flight. Airplane exhaust contains tiny particulates which seed clouds. This affects two things - the clouds don't form where they would naturally, and there's more of them. Some interesting research on this came out in the aftermath of 9/11 when there were no flights, and in the aftermath of the Superbowl where there were far more than usual in a concentrated area. CO2 - this needs no explanation, I hope. The thing is that there are 13 currently active volcanoes spewing CO2 is massive quantities as well, so the measurable anthropogenic effect has been repeatedly called into question.
or high speed rail to make any sense at Europe-to-China distances, it'd have to go about as fast as planes fly. I fail to see how it could be any cheaper to operate such a system on the ground than in the air. Even at Shinkansen speeds, it'd make no sense to travel, say, from Beijing to Berlin. That's 7500 km -- at 300 km/h (top Shinkansen speed, thus unrealistic), it'd take 25 hours. Now compare this to a direct flight taking about 9.5 hours on average. Even with connecting travel the factor doesn't improve.
Actually, the purpose of the high speed railways is largely for freight. It inserts a layer between "expensive and fast" (air) and "cheap and slow" (shipping). there's also the advantage that rail can stop along the way easier.
Bear in mind that China has significant mineral investments in Mongolia and the iStan's along the southern Russian border, and the planned rail brings all that closer too. It's as much a political tool as it is an economic one.
As to the bubble comments - China's economy is showing some signs of overheating, the gaps between rich and poor are worrying even for the central party and there are the beginning of rumblings about workers rights. There are also serious demographic problems that have the potential to slow China significantly. I don't think it's unfair to be skeptical about the ability of the Chinese to sustain ~10% growth rates in the medium to long term!
Roundabouts work really well when you have more-or-less even traffic leaving at each exit. If you don't, for instance if there's one primary route that always leaves at the second or higher exit, it can really jam up. In Ireland there was a real roundabout craze for a while so there's loads of them and many drivers just don't bother to indicate correctly, which makes them very dangerous. Should be a flogging offense, dammit!
Actually,that's one of the few things I'd like Valve to change - I'd like them to prominently note what other DRM is going to be used on the store page, particularly for Games For Windows Live.
Well, you could go the whole hog and have a global currency, I suppose. It would require a total rethink of macro-economics. It would make currency a promise that it can be redeemed for a certain amount of energy, so it has to be backed by something. International trade would have some adjustments to do.
If you don't re-think the macro-economics entirely and you allowed countries to issue their currency based on their energy generation capacity other questions arise. How do you deflate without removing energy generation capacity? If you allow the governments to arbitrarily change the exchange rate of currency to energy then you've got the same situation that exists now where money is largely fictional and is sustained entirely by our trust in government. (No, really. It doesn't have any intrinsic value so it's only worth what you can exchange it for, which means that we have to trust the issuing authority).
This is made even worse by the fact that the system has to be rolled out at once, otherwise global commerce falls apart as I can see no real way to convert the current, arbitrarily valued currencies into energy credits.
Not really, you'd just have to define exchange rates (which would then fluctuate like crazy and be an irresistible attraction to speculators, but that's another matter).
Where does he say anything like that? There isn't a red under your bed, son.
What he's proposed is a single world currency backing standard that translates directly into units of energy - the new Gold Standard, if you will. Since we can recycle most things given enough energy and in the end the major cost of EVERYTHING boils down to energy it means that you'd pay for what you use. Individual currencies then are backed only by the energy generated in the country so and exchange rates are fixed at the ratio of one country's generation capacity vs another country's generation capacity.
I would guess that it would expose externalities in the supply chain that aren't currently factored in to price, which is one of the reasons that we're in the mess that we're in at the moment. It's a surprisingly workable idea, if the political will was there (which it isn't, and probably will never be barring some major changes)
Maybe. Or maybe Japan would've surrendered to Stalin in a few weeks otherwise. In any case, it's utterly beside the point - every war crime ever was committed in the interests of "shortening the war" (by ensuring your side wins, of course). They're still war crimes.
Nonsense. The invasion of Okinawa and the resultant casualties on both sides as well as the ferocious no-surrender attitude of the defenders is what justified the dropping of the bomb on Japan. The American high command reckoned that the battle for any the Japanese home islands (which have ample defensive terrain - the whole place is essentially a volcanic mountain range) would cost millions of lives and require the slaughter of Japanese which they really didn't want. The decision was to shock the Japanese into surrender. While there were other implications such as demonstrating nuclear weapons to the Russians, these were secondary.
Unlike the fire-bombing of Dresden, which had pretty much no strategic or tactical purpose this was necessary in the context of the time. The subsequent treatment of both the Japanese and the Germans by the Americans (who stomped rather firmly on talk of massive World War I style reparations) shows that as a nation they were not overly vicious or vindictive. Second guessing the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is ridiculous.
The second and third scenarios mentioned are genuine worries, but the first really isn't. The worst case scenario sees sea levels rise something in the region of four feet in a century, while the expected case is between 1 and 2 feet. All major cities can handle that. More worrisome is increased acidification of the oceans and the disruption of oceanic food chains which would put even more pressure on food prices which are already increasing very rapidly.
If you file patents on any GM product that has the capacity to cross-contaminate natural organisms with your patented gene thereby giving you the opportunity to sue people for growing crop with your contaminated gene then you should be thrown in the same pool as Monsanto.
That's a failure of law, surely. There can be no implicit contract in the case of cross-pollination - it's not a case of stealing. If anything the farmers should be able to sue Monsanto for polluting their crops, because the cross-pollination means that you're not growing what you thought you were and it's unlikely that farmers would be too happy about not being able to guarantee the quality of their crop. It's like someone from General Motors sneaking into a Ford factory, replacing the templates on their machines with General motors patented designs, and then suing them for using the designs while admitting what they did. Nuts!
Besides, I thought that GM crops had to be sterile to prevent them usurping their non-GM base stock?
I'm not comfortable with GM foods and I'm definitely not comfortable with the ability to patent modified strains of crops - the idea of anyone "owning" corn, for instance (a possible scenario should a GM strain prove more resilient in the wild than normal corn) is ludicrous.
I dislike this story, though. It's a form of eco-terrorism and this kind of thing (damage against property) often descends into violence against people which is much more serious.
Actually the scale is not about damage to the plant either. The International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) considers three factors [PDF]. The first factor refers to the effects on people and the release of radioactive materials, the second to the plant itself and the third to the failure of safety systems.
Obviously, the Fukushima accident (that's a INES term, by the way) is very high on the second and third factors, and it remains to be seen how high on the first factor.
In any case, if you believe that economic rationality generates the optimum distribution of resources, it makes no sense to incent anything one way or the other.
Who believes in economic rationality? The recent bubble (and the ones before it ad nauseum, and in particular the famous Dutch Tulip bubble) show that relying on economic rationality is futile, because people are "dumb, panicky herd animals", which is precisely what got us into the current problem in the first place.
The thing is, as you say "The closest thing anybody does to keeping huge piles of cash in a mattress is being too risk averse, tending to put your resources in safe investments that are easy to get out of." but one of the reasons for this is because treating it as income means a significantly higher tax rate, and deposit rates are low, and deposit interest is taxed too.
Lastly, having people re-invest is a net gain for the economy because it allows business that needs capital to expand to find that capital, with the attendant gains in economic performance and assets (such as employees) which all feeds back into more tax.
Simply put, the Federal Government has grown too large from over promising everyone something.
This is a general problem with democracy - people will vote for all cake, all of the time without considering costs, and the costs start to balloon. The candidate that says "I'm going to cut spending and raise taxes to reduce the deficit" doesn't get elected, certainly not without promising something like "social welfare will not be cut, medicaid will be increased" or "defense will not be cut" which immediately starts to water down the first commitments.
The flat rate tax might be fair, but it doesn't wash. It's called a poll tax, and the history of the poll tax is checkered, to say the least. Consumption taxes always affect the poorer more than the wealthy, because a greater proportion of income in poorer households goes into consumable items, particularly food.
I totally agree with you about real tax costs. Sit down and work out what you end up paying. When you include consumption taxes such as fuel excises and VAT the number becomes quite appalling. It's true that (certainly here in Ireland) we're actually paying slightly less than we were 10 years ago per person. That's going to change soon though.
So it currently makes sense for the rich to buy shares that tend to generate capital gains in favour of shares that tend to generate income - especially if there intention would have been to reinvest the dividends anyway.
This is not a bug, this is intended. And if it isn't, it really should be. It makes sense that that taxation regimes should be designed to encourage the re-investment of surplus wealth into economic activities. After all, you might lose the 22-32% on income tax, but this is expected to be beaten by the increase in tax take from the recipients of the investment in the form of corporation tax, VAT where applicable and the income tax on employees of the organisation that was invested in. Having anyone simply sitting on huge piles of cash benefits no-one.
could not at least acknowledge the tragedy that has happened
I do, the tragedy was a massive earthquake leading to a tsunami wiping out a number of cities on Japan's north-east coast with the associated deaths and displacements.
especially since this disaster has released radiation that will likely cause cancer and birth defects
That is speculation - read the reports into Chernobyl and the birth defects and cancer rates nearby. We all KNOW nuclear is dangerous, because television and comic books have been telling us for years, and the spectre of nuclear war during the cold war is still embedded in our psyche's. We all KNOW that radiation causes cancer. We know lots of things, but most of them are wrong. Nuclear power is dangerous - so are coal, oil, gas, hydro, solar, and wind. Their sole purpose is to generate energy after all. The damage from an individual event may be higher with nuclear but the overall risk of an event is lower. The side benefits of nuclear power in areas from environmental effects to medicine are way better than any other form of power generation. The safety limits are so low that long distance airline passengers can get in one trip a fifth of the annual radiation release levels of an entire nuclear PLANT. The normal annual background radiation dose for a person is 16 times the annual release level allowed for a nuclear plant. If you live in Aberdeen or Cornwall or anywhere a lot of granite was used to build you may as well be living between two nuclear plants.
The unreasoning fear that nuclear generates has led to a form of stasis where new plants cannot get approval but no replacements are forthcoming so old and much less safe plants are left running - for instance the Fukushima Daichi 1 reactor was 40 years old and Chernobyl continued operating for 14 years after the meltdown and fire. New designs don't get used, so old designs which were intended to create waste that could be further processed into weapon components keep going and going. Research into better fuel sources than uranium has slowed significantly. The state of engineering, materials and electronics now are more advanced than they were 40 years ago but improvements can only be retrofitted to plants not designed for them so much of the benefit are wasted. For crying out loud, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance scans had to be rename to Magnetic Resonance Imaging scans because the word nuclear was putting people off.
We need to step back from this and look at it dispassionately (unlike my post!). If we can generate the energy and get the other useful nuclear byproducts better, we should. I just don't see how it's possible currently. Renewables are NOT READY for base load, even such ideas as solar molten salt have not been proven (and would be absolutely useless here in Ireland). Until they are, in say 50 years (the fusion enthusiasts have established this as the basic time unit for energy advancement!) we will still need energy. Nuclear is simply the best proved base load power generator we have available.
There are people who understand the risks. These people don't want nuclear power.
That's a bit wild - many of the people who want nuclear power are exactly those who do understand the risks better than anyone else as far as I can tell. Nuclear engineers and scientists, for instance. These people know what's happening in the core of the reactor, and most will acknowledge that further work on nuclear reactor designs and nuclear safety is required, but feel that it's the best source of relatively clean reliable energy. The sheer amount of energy required by us means that it will be some time before renewable energy generation will cover it, certainly for base loads, and that compared to the fossil fuels that most of the world runs on at the moment nuclear is the most attractive option until and unless we improve energy storage beyond all recognition.
One that we use here is "give a tricky semantic (if the job is for a specific language) and/or logical problem and not nearly enough time to work it out". If they know it and can answer questions - great. If they don't know it, see do they ask about it and how many jumps they can make when going through a solution. It indicates a level of interest that's difficult to fake.
Making your hobby into your job is a sure-fire way to lose it as a hobby by the way, all the managerial crap that comes with a work environment is not something you want to asociate with your hobby
That's just juvenile rhetorical bullshit. You don't even know what you are saying here. The only people who get to dismiss all that "managerial" crap are artists. You are not an artist and you are not being paid to be an artist. You are an engineer that does a specific job to solve someone's problem with software and get paid for it. That involves management because it is necessary. If you think you it is, you are a lousy engineer. Doesn't matter how much you like to code, you won't do what you like for a living until you understand and work around this fact.
Talk about missing his point - in any work environment there's some kind of administrative/managerial overhead. You might not mind it at work while acknowledging its necessity, but who on earth wants to do the paperwork as part of a hobby. Hobbies are meant to be fun, and relaxing. Even if coding for fun, you're unlikely to work on it the same way you work on your job because you don't have the "corporate overhead" (as it's termed in my workplace) or the time pressures associated with a job. That's one of the major reasons it stays fun!
You're assuming an absolute universal frame of reference. What the GP is saying is that there is no such thing, everything is relative to an observer. (This really reminds me of Leibniz's monads, actually). That means that there is no universal base value for "time".
So the relative effects are all that matter - the fact that things occur "in order" in any arbitrary scale (i.e. time) to any arbitrary observer (i.e. from Earth) is irrelevant. In this case, if you travel in a super luminal fashion from A -> B you (the cause) arrive at B before the effect (light) does. Because there is no universal frame of reference, if you now travel from B -> A you arrive before you left (because you're leaving B before you left A, relatively).
Slashdot Mirror
You get exactly the situation that we've ended up in today, only quicker. The majority votes for no tax, and a larger military budget and universal healthcare and a freaking pony. The best case scenario is that you'll end up with endless debate over budget line items because a deficit is focusing people's minds. The worst case scenario is that you don't get the debate, the "magic" money is just spent.
In practical terms, consensus is meaningless, it will have to be an arbitrary threshold over which implementation of a policy goes ahead because there will ALWAYS be a group that will reject ANYTHING. So you'll have a tyranny of the majority, who'll spend everything and still have a sense of entitlement and bugger the ones saying "think about tomorrow". Basically, the same as we have now, except with all the brakes off.
If you think that this kind of research is done to create jobs you're so wrong you'll need an atlas to get back.
This is expensive and difficult with a massive chance that there will be absolutely no return of any kind (because the probe melts, or the engines misfile and it ends up in the sun rather than going around it or whatever). In other words, this is exactly the type of stuff that private enterprise won't do because the risk vs return is really poor (high risk vs unknown return). So governments get convinced to try it by scientists who are doing it to try and understand our home star better in the hopes that we'll learn something from it. We might even learn something useful that betters our lot as a race, or leads to useful technological advances.
Governments _should_ spend. They should spend to cover the gaps that private enterprise won't, but that will have effects on their people or the future of their country or the world. What they should not do is privatise gains and socialise losses in the way that's happened over the last few years.
The difference being that Libyans in Tripoli have said that they wish NATO to keep it up and would prefer an escalation, even at the cost of more lives.
Then you haven't been reading very closely.
There are other greenhouse gases than CO2, and two that exhibit the strongest greenhouse effect (trapping heat) are methane and water vapour. Clouds are water vapour. The difference is the long term effect - water vapour isn't particularly long lived in the atmosphere, methane lasts longer but is still a long way short of CO2 which lasts the longest.
Mankind has increased all of these gases:
Methane from farming, both livestock and decaying plants create it. Farming is a major industry, so it contributes a LOT.
Water vapour from irrigation and flight. Airplane exhaust contains tiny particulates which seed clouds. This affects two things - the clouds don't form where they would naturally, and there's more of them. Some interesting research on this came out in the aftermath of 9/11 when there were no flights, and in the aftermath of the Superbowl where there were far more than usual in a concentrated area.
CO2 - this needs no explanation, I hope. The thing is that there are 13 currently active volcanoes spewing CO2 is massive quantities as well, so the measurable anthropogenic effect has been repeatedly called into question.
Where's the link?!!?!?!!one
or high speed rail to make any sense at Europe-to-China distances, it'd have to go about as fast as planes fly. I fail to see how it could be any cheaper to operate such a system on the ground than in the air. Even at Shinkansen speeds, it'd make no sense to travel, say, from Beijing to Berlin. That's 7500 km -- at 300 km/h (top Shinkansen speed, thus unrealistic), it'd take 25 hours. Now compare this to a direct flight taking about 9.5 hours on average. Even with connecting travel the factor doesn't improve.
Actually, the purpose of the high speed railways is largely for freight. It inserts a layer between "expensive and fast" (air) and "cheap and slow" (shipping). there's also the advantage that rail can stop along the way easier.
Bear in mind that China has significant mineral investments in Mongolia and the iStan's along the southern Russian border, and the planned rail brings all that closer too. It's as much a political tool as it is an economic one.
As to the bubble comments - China's economy is showing some signs of overheating, the gaps between rich and poor are worrying even for the central party and there are the beginning of rumblings about workers rights. There are also serious demographic problems that have the potential to slow China significantly. I don't think it's unfair to be skeptical about the ability of the Chinese to sustain ~10% growth rates in the medium to long term!
Roundabouts work really well when you have more-or-less even traffic leaving at each exit. If you don't, for instance if there's one primary route that always leaves at the second or higher exit, it can really jam up. In Ireland there was a real roundabout craze for a while so there's loads of them and many drivers just don't bother to indicate correctly, which makes them very dangerous. Should be a flogging offense, dammit!
Actually ,that's one of the few things I'd like Valve to change - I'd like them to prominently note what other DRM is going to be used on the store page, particularly for Games For Windows Live.
Well, you could go the whole hog and have a global currency, I suppose. It would require a total rethink of macro-economics. It would make currency a promise that it can be redeemed for a certain amount of energy, so it has to be backed by something. International trade would have some adjustments to do.
If you don't re-think the macro-economics entirely and you allowed countries to issue their currency based on their energy generation capacity other questions arise. How do you deflate without removing energy generation capacity? If you allow the governments to arbitrarily change the exchange rate of currency to energy then you've got the same situation that exists now where money is largely fictional and is sustained entirely by our trust in government. (No, really. It doesn't have any intrinsic value so it's only worth what you can exchange it for, which means that we have to trust the issuing authority).
This is made even worse by the fact that the system has to be rolled out at once, otherwise global commerce falls apart as I can see no real way to convert the current, arbitrarily valued currencies into energy credits.
Not really, you'd just have to define exchange rates (which would then fluctuate like crazy and be an irresistible attraction to speculators, but that's another matter).
Where does he say anything like that? There isn't a red under your bed, son.
What he's proposed is a single world currency backing standard that translates directly into units of energy - the new Gold Standard, if you will. Since we can recycle most things given enough energy and in the end the major cost of EVERYTHING boils down to energy it means that you'd pay for what you use. Individual currencies then are backed only by the energy generated in the country so and exchange rates are fixed at the ratio of one country's generation capacity vs another country's generation capacity.
I would guess that it would expose externalities in the supply chain that aren't currently factored in to price, which is one of the reasons that we're in the mess that we're in at the moment. It's a surprisingly workable idea, if the political will was there (which it isn't, and probably will never be barring some major changes)
Maybe. Or maybe Japan would've surrendered to Stalin in a few weeks otherwise. In any case, it's utterly beside the point - every war crime ever was committed in the interests of "shortening the war" (by ensuring your side wins, of course). They're still war crimes.
Nonsense. The invasion of Okinawa and the resultant casualties on both sides as well as the ferocious no-surrender attitude of the defenders is what justified the dropping of the bomb on Japan. The American high command reckoned that the battle for any the Japanese home islands (which have ample defensive terrain - the whole place is essentially a volcanic mountain range) would cost millions of lives and require the slaughter of Japanese which they really didn't want. The decision was to shock the Japanese into surrender. While there were other implications such as demonstrating nuclear weapons to the Russians, these were secondary.
Unlike the fire-bombing of Dresden, which had pretty much no strategic or tactical purpose this was necessary in the context of the time. The subsequent treatment of both the Japanese and the Germans by the Americans (who stomped rather firmly on talk of massive World War I style reparations) shows that as a nation they were not overly vicious or vindictive. Second guessing the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is ridiculous.
And we know now where Putin's right arm is...
The second and third scenarios mentioned are genuine worries, but the first really isn't. The worst case scenario sees sea levels rise something in the region of four feet in a century, while the expected case is between 1 and 2 feet. All major cities can handle that. More worrisome is increased acidification of the oceans and the disruption of oceanic food chains which would put even more pressure on food prices which are already increasing very rapidly.
If you file patents on any GM product that has the capacity to cross-contaminate natural organisms with your patented gene thereby giving you the opportunity to sue people for growing crop with your contaminated gene then you should be thrown in the same pool as Monsanto.
That's a failure of law, surely. There can be no implicit contract in the case of cross-pollination - it's not a case of stealing. If anything the farmers should be able to sue Monsanto for polluting their crops, because the cross-pollination means that you're not growing what you thought you were and it's unlikely that farmers would be too happy about not being able to guarantee the quality of their crop. It's like someone from General Motors sneaking into a Ford factory, replacing the templates on their machines with General motors patented designs, and then suing them for using the designs while admitting what they did. Nuts!
Besides, I thought that GM crops had to be sterile to prevent them usurping their non-GM base stock?
I'm not comfortable with GM foods and I'm definitely not comfortable with the ability to patent modified strains of crops - the idea of anyone "owning" corn, for instance (a possible scenario should a GM strain prove more resilient in the wild than normal corn) is ludicrous.
I dislike this story, though. It's a form of eco-terrorism and this kind of thing (damage against property) often descends into violence against people which is much more serious.
Actually the scale is not about damage to the plant either. The International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) considers three factors [PDF]. The first factor refers to the effects on people and the release of radioactive materials, the second to the plant itself and the third to the failure of safety systems.
Obviously, the Fukushima accident (that's a INES term, by the way) is very high on the second and third factors, and it remains to be seen how high on the first factor.
That's not a very catchy headline, though.
In any case, if you believe that economic rationality generates the optimum distribution of resources, it makes no sense to incent anything one way or the other.
Who believes in economic rationality? The recent bubble (and the ones before it ad nauseum, and in particular the famous Dutch Tulip bubble) show that relying on economic rationality is futile, because people are "dumb, panicky herd animals", which is precisely what got us into the current problem in the first place.
The thing is, as you say "The closest thing anybody does to keeping huge piles of cash in a mattress is being too risk averse, tending to put your resources in safe investments that are easy to get out of." but one of the reasons for this is because treating it as income means a significantly higher tax rate, and deposit rates are low, and deposit interest is taxed too.
Lastly, having people re-invest is a net gain for the economy because it allows business that needs capital to expand to find that capital, with the attendant gains in economic performance and assets (such as employees) which all feeds back into more tax.
Simply put, the Federal Government has grown too large from over promising everyone something.
This is a general problem with democracy - people will vote for all cake, all of the time without considering costs, and the costs start to balloon. The candidate that says "I'm going to cut spending and raise taxes to reduce the deficit" doesn't get elected, certainly not without promising something like "social welfare will not be cut, medicaid will be increased" or "defense will not be cut" which immediately starts to water down the first commitments.
The flat rate tax might be fair, but it doesn't wash. It's called a poll tax, and the history of the poll tax is checkered, to say the least.
Consumption taxes always affect the poorer more than the wealthy, because a greater proportion of income in poorer households goes into consumable items, particularly food.
I totally agree with you about real tax costs. Sit down and work out what you end up paying. When you include consumption taxes such as fuel excises and VAT the number becomes quite appalling. It's true that (certainly here in Ireland) we're actually paying slightly less than we were 10 years ago per person. That's going to change soon though.
So it currently makes sense for the rich to buy shares that tend to generate capital gains in favour of shares that tend to generate income - especially if there intention would have been to reinvest the dividends anyway.
This is not a bug, this is intended. And if it isn't, it really should be. It makes sense that that taxation regimes should be designed to encourage the re-investment of surplus wealth into economic activities. After all, you might lose the 22-32% on income tax, but this is expected to be beaten by the increase in tax take from the recipients of the investment in the form of corporation tax, VAT where applicable and the income tax on employees of the organisation that was invested in. Having anyone simply sitting on huge piles of cash benefits no-one.
could not at least acknowledge the tragedy that has happened
I do, the tragedy was a massive earthquake leading to a tsunami wiping out a number of cities on Japan's north-east coast with the associated deaths and displacements.
especially since this disaster has released radiation that will likely cause cancer and birth defects
That is speculation - read the reports into Chernobyl and the birth defects and cancer rates nearby. We all KNOW nuclear is dangerous, because television and comic books have been telling us for years, and the spectre of nuclear war during the cold war is still embedded in our psyche's. We all KNOW that radiation causes cancer. We know lots of things, but most of them are wrong. Nuclear power is dangerous - so are coal, oil, gas, hydro, solar, and wind. Their sole purpose is to generate energy after all. The damage from an individual event may be higher with nuclear but the overall risk of an event is lower. The side benefits of nuclear power in areas from environmental effects to medicine are way better than any other form of power generation. The safety limits are so low that long distance airline passengers can get in one trip a fifth of the annual radiation release levels of an entire nuclear PLANT. The normal annual background radiation dose for a person is 16 times the annual release level allowed for a nuclear plant. If you live in Aberdeen or Cornwall or anywhere a lot of granite was used to build you may as well be living between two nuclear plants.
The unreasoning fear that nuclear generates has led to a form of stasis where new plants cannot get approval but no replacements are forthcoming so old and much less safe plants are left running - for instance the Fukushima Daichi 1 reactor was 40 years old and Chernobyl continued operating for 14 years after the meltdown and fire. New designs don't get used, so old designs which were intended to create waste that could be further processed into weapon components keep going and going. Research into better fuel sources than uranium has slowed significantly. The state of engineering, materials and electronics now are more advanced than they were 40 years ago but improvements can only be retrofitted to plants not designed for them so much of the benefit are wasted. For crying out loud, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance scans had to be rename to Magnetic Resonance Imaging scans because the word nuclear was putting people off.
We need to step back from this and look at it dispassionately (unlike my post!). If we can generate the energy and get the other useful nuclear byproducts better, we should. I just don't see how it's possible currently. Renewables are NOT READY for base load, even such ideas as solar molten salt have not been proven (and would be absolutely useless here in Ireland). Until they are, in say 50 years (the fusion enthusiasts have established this as the basic time unit for energy advancement!) we will still need energy. Nuclear is simply the best proved base load power generator we have available.
There are people who understand the risks. These people don't want nuclear power.
That's a bit wild - many of the people who want nuclear power are exactly those who do understand the risks better than anyone else as far as I can tell. Nuclear engineers and scientists, for instance. These people know what's happening in the core of the reactor, and most will acknowledge that further work on nuclear reactor designs and nuclear safety is required, but feel that it's the best source of relatively clean reliable energy. The sheer amount of energy required by us means that it will be some time before renewable energy generation will cover it, certainly for base loads, and that compared to the fossil fuels that most of the world runs on at the moment nuclear is the most attractive option until and unless we improve energy storage beyond all recognition.
One that we use here is "give a tricky semantic (if the job is for a specific language) and/or logical problem and not nearly enough time to work it out". If they know it and can answer questions - great. If they don't know it, see do they ask about it and how many jumps they can make when going through a solution. It indicates a level of interest that's difficult to fake.
Making your hobby into your job is a sure-fire way to lose it as a hobby by the way, all the managerial crap that comes with a work environment is not something you want to asociate with your hobby
That's just juvenile rhetorical bullshit. You don't even know what you are saying here. The only people who get to dismiss all that "managerial" crap are artists. You are not an artist and you are not being paid to be an artist. You are an engineer that does a specific job to solve someone's problem with software and get paid for it. That involves management because it is necessary. If you think you it is, you are a lousy engineer. Doesn't matter how much you like to code, you won't do what you like for a living until you understand and work around this fact.
Talk about missing his point - in any work environment there's some kind of administrative/managerial overhead. You might not mind it at work while acknowledging its necessity, but who on earth wants to do the paperwork as part of a hobby. Hobbies are meant to be fun, and relaxing. Even if coding for fun, you're unlikely to work on it the same way you work on your job because you don't have the "corporate overhead" (as it's termed in my workplace) or the time pressures associated with a job. That's one of the major reasons it stays fun!
Law? Last I checked, c is still a theory, along with most of the stuff we know that are wrongfully labelled "laws".
Nope, c, the speed of light in a vacuum is measurable, so it's accurate to the limit of our technical ability to measure it.
People always cite collider experiments as proof, but as any good scientist should know, correlation does not mean causation.
This tired and weary bit of "wisdom" ignores the fact that causation implies correlation, so correlation is a good place to start.
You're assuming an absolute universal frame of reference. What the GP is saying is that there is no such thing, everything is relative to an observer. (This really reminds me of Leibniz's monads, actually). That means that there is no universal base value for "time".
So the relative effects are all that matter - the fact that things occur "in order" in any arbitrary scale (i.e. time) to any arbitrary observer (i.e. from Earth) is irrelevant. In this case, if you travel in a super luminal fashion from A -> B you (the cause) arrive at B before the effect (light) does. Because there is no universal frame of reference, if you now travel from B -> A you arrive before you left (because you're leaving B before you left A, relatively).
It's tricky enough concept for our monkey brains.