A bunch of good points, thanks for bringing them up.
I would guess that no matter what else, if a tax per mile is implemented, it will be on top of existing taxes, and applied punitively -- the more miles you drive the higher the tax.
Which again will hurt working folks the most -- the very people who are forced to live away from the city and commute longer distances due to high housing costs nearer the job market. They don't have a CHOICE of not driving, which this proposed tax seems to think everyone does.
I think that's a very good question... a survey of what they drive might be very enlightening. Anecdotally, I've observed they tend toward the Hummer Experience.
True enough, but the clunkers are a minority (in my observation, now largely confined to the welfare class), and the mudders are often upgraded salvage. But I was thinking of the very large chunk of working folks who can afford a Kia or Yugo or a bottom-end Toyota, and might even have bought it new, but can't afford much beyond that, and who typically depend on that car to get to work. Those bottom-end vehicles usually have very small engines, are lower in weight simply because they are "less car", and therefore are relatively fuel-efficient.
Such vehicles would be penalized by a per-mile tax, while the old guzzlers owned largely by the welfare and illegal-immigrant set would not. (Assuming that retrofitting would be required by law to make this notion work.)
Yet another symptom of how the government has forgotten it exists to SERVE We The People; contrary to the direction of current policies, We The People don't exist solely to be the government's revenue stream!!
There'd probably be a minor resurgence in the odometer-resetting industry, but fact is most people won't bother. Tying it to your annual vehicle licensing sounds good otherwise... until I had this thought:
When I buy gas with cash, I am absolutely anonymous. It doesn't matter if I drive 10 miles or 10,000 miles in a week. No one can know anything about my driving habits.
Now, recall that it is already commonly considered 'evidence of drug trafficking' if you are caught carrying a large amount of cash. What if 'driving a lot of miles' began garnering similar suspicions? I see the next step as confiscating cars (just as they presently do cash) without a hint of due process, just because your odometer mileage was outside of the norm.
"You drove 5,000 miles a week? Must have been running drugs. No one drives that far every week for any legitimate purpose."
It could go both ways, too.... for people like myself who drive very little (about 3,000 miles a year) -- that is ALSO suspicious: "No one who lives near [insert long-commute city here] drives so few miles, you must be getting your odometer reset!!"
So while it's an improvement over the GPS's invasive tracking, there are still problems that can impinge upon our freedoms, by encouraging scrutiny from looking-for-trouble Big Brother types.
Side effect: it becomes cheaper to drive a gas guzzler, and more expensive to drive an economy engine:
At current gas tax rates, that trip would cost my truck somewhere around $60 in existing gas taxes.
Existing gas tax would be about $10 in a fuel-efficient car.
Small fuel-efficient cars tend to be driven by lower-income people, who will therefore be hardest hit by this as their economy cars will pay a disproportionate amount of tax, based on per mile rather than per gallon.
From TFA: ============= New technology would require users to pay to download films, games and music, but "they will be able to make money" by sharing their files with other users, GGF chief executive Hans Pandeya said.
"And if you earn money by sharing your files, then maybe it's not that hard to pay for top quality," he told Swedish news agency TT. ========
This is exactly what I suggested a while back -- make filesharing a profit center where *users* can share in the profits BY DISTRIBUTING the files in question -- so the more you share the more you make. Less up-front money for the content owners, but tons more microsales to make up the difference.
Tho I agree TFA sounds too much like Slashvertizement, the concept is all too real. If it could be applied to a bunch of storyboards, why not to a novel??
So... next time you fly with an espionage novel in your luggage -- could you be the courier for The Bad Guys' Secret Plans??
Inbreeding doesn't *cause* genetic issues. It merely concentrates and thereby exposes those that are already present in a given gene pool, by increasing the chance of being homozygous for any given trait -- good OR bad.
I'm a little volume-deaf, which screws up hearing speech (I hear the words but they don't mean anything). I definitely hear better on the phone with my LEFT ear, which seems to have a different *range* of deafness than my right. My right is more sensitive to other sounds but hears *speech* less-clearly, at least on the phone.
[scratching head] Maybe I'm just put together backwards?? damned Chinese directions...
From the Wikipedia article: ===== Plants require carbon dioxide to conduct photosynthesis. Because of low current atmospheric concentration, carbon dioxide is practically the limiting factor of the Earth life, as compare to two other similarly important components - water and sun light. While plants "in wild" are optimized for this, plant-intense greenhouses may (and of large size - must) enrich their atmospheres with additional CO2 to sustain plant life and growth, because the low present-day atmosphere concentration of CO2 is just above the "suffocation" level for green plants. =====
So... maybe we don't WANT to remove it from the atmosphere, but rather should consider the needs of CO2-starved plants... which we grow to eat.
A degree or two of "global warming" means about 20% more arable land (areas presently with a too-short growing season), more rainfall, and now here's a way to get around a limiting factor for crops... all in one handy package!
Maybe they should be dumping CO2 into the atmosphere instead;) (Assuming that it really is a "greenhouse gas", which is debatable)
A policy of interference is certainly not doing us as Americans any favours either... look at the tax bill we'll be paying off til the end of time!!
If we're threatened directly, or an ally with whom we have a firm reciprocal agreement (not just "you cover our ass for us") is attacked, then it's justified and in our own best interests -- WW2 was a good example. But trying to micromanage some other country's politics for a more nebulous or questionable benefit (including "spreading democracy") has generally resulted in disasters like this one, and it doesn't matter if it's the US or the old USSR or India or China or Nigeria doing it.
I admit I'm becoming an isolationist in my old age...:)
"Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny."
-- Lloyd Biggle Jr.
Whether or not there are any foreign agents influencing things... (I suspect not, other than money promised to those already in power):
If you prevent people from killing each other, the moment your back is turned they resume the proscribed activity with greater zeal than before. Nothing is ever settled until they get a chance to simply duke it out. If one side loses and gets wiped out, that's tough luck, but at least matters are settled, rather than hostility continuing forever.
The American Revolution didn't have the mass starvation, but probably half the people were feeling the pinch to the point that it hurt -- frex, having to quarter troops is a VERY expensive undertaking for subsistence farmers and businesses, and there was also the problem of failure to protect big swaths of the Colonies from the effects of the French and Indian wars.
As to North Korea... here's what I see: when you have ONLY peasants, it doesn't matter how many peasants starve; they simply won't have the balls to do anything about it. As someone else pointed out, revolutions tend to be led by the wealthy discontent (such as younger sons who didn't inherit), using the peasants to further their own power-seeking and revenge on the system. Peasants don't lead revolutions, but they sure can be used to fuel them. At a guess, NK has exactly two strata -- starving peasants who can't or won't rebel, and the well-off who already have power so lack motivation to change anything (for good or ill).
As you say, it's more complex than just "half the people are starving" (or in some way so put-upon that they think about it and are reminded of it all the time, as with the American Rev.) But I think that IS a necessary trigger, without which you don't get a revolution.
Yes, but... there wouldn't have been a receptive audience without those starving masses.
Of course the real motivation was probably "younger son feels put out since he didn't inherit, and thinks 'the people' will give him power so he can grab back what he thinks is rightfully his" but the effect is the same -- massive upheaval not necessarily to anyone's benefit.
I'd say rather that politics is the only business where by default, the fox guards the henhouse, and the fox very often knows that business very well... of course, it's not the business you want experts in when the object is to maintain live hens.
Lawyers (the majority of politicians being of that ilk) making laws will not make them for everyday and the common man, but rather for the courts, and for the corner cases that lead to loopholes, rather than for real life.
In short, laws are made for lawyers, not for We The People.
An AC suggests, "Try with Javascript disabled. The browser makers quest for JS speed is probably to blame for these kind of web experience abominations."
I agree.... but the only reason I use SM at all is because of sites that won't function without JS and CSS, and those are typically the worst for every sort of performance issue, so you're doubly caught.:(
For sites that degrade gracefully, I still use old Netscape 3, with JS and images both disabled... who knew Slashdot pages could load so fast?!!
I use Seamonkey (I hate FF with a passion)... with no plugins except Prefbar. Main problem I run into isn't memory but CPU usage. -- My internet machine is a lowly P3-550 with 1GB RAM and Win98 (swapfile disabled), so it's noticeable:
As a quick experiment I just sent SM to the worst site I could think of offhand, realtor.com, opened a bunch of new windows (I never use tabs) and per sysmon, RAM usage increased by only about 10mb. Closed SM entirely and recovered about 150mb of RAM.
However, CPU usage jammed up at 100% for a while SM arrived at realtor.com, and did so again for each new window.
Personally I think devs should be forced to live with their creations on the MINIMUM hardware for a while, so they don't forget that not everyone has an employer buying them the latest and greatest whenever they want it.
This non-programmer understood every word of it, and came away with a much better feel for what's going on under there. And I agree -- use the jargon as needed, sensibly, and in context -- which allows the listener to LEARN what the jargon means, rather than remaining mystified.
That's something I've pointed out before -- you don't get revolution unless a significant part of the population (I'd guess about half) are actively starving, and have nothing left to lose. And that's why real revolutions have always been bloody, and haven't necessarily made things better for the starving (frex, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution).
America is nowhere near that point, and probably never will be. However, with the increasing interest in states' rights, secession is not out of the question, and in today's world it would be damned hard to justify a shooting war to prevent it -- it would be seen as imperial rule preventing the Will of the People from being expressed in their choice of government.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yeah, there is that... keep the people thinking they're fat and happy, while soaking them for all their future worth.
A bunch of good points, thanks for bringing them up.
I would guess that no matter what else, if a tax per mile is implemented, it will be on top of existing taxes, and applied punitively -- the more miles you drive the higher the tax.
Which again will hurt working folks the most -- the very people who are forced to live away from the city and commute longer distances due to high housing costs nearer the job market. They don't have a CHOICE of not driving, which this proposed tax seems to think everyone does.
I think that's a very good question... a survey of what they drive might be very enlightening. Anecdotally, I've observed they tend toward the Hummer Experience.
True enough, but the clunkers are a minority (in my observation, now largely confined to the welfare class), and the mudders are often upgraded salvage. But I was thinking of the very large chunk of working folks who can afford a Kia or Yugo or a bottom-end Toyota, and might even have bought it new, but can't afford much beyond that, and who typically depend on that car to get to work. Those bottom-end vehicles usually have very small engines, are lower in weight simply because they are "less car", and therefore are relatively fuel-efficient.
Such vehicles would be penalized by a per-mile tax, while the old guzzlers owned largely by the welfare and illegal-immigrant set would not. (Assuming that retrofitting would be required by law to make this notion work.)
Yet another symptom of how the government has forgotten it exists to SERVE We The People; contrary to the direction of current policies, We The People don't exist solely to be the government's revenue stream!!
There'd probably be a minor resurgence in the odometer-resetting industry, but fact is most people won't bother. Tying it to your annual vehicle licensing sounds good otherwise... until I had this thought:
When I buy gas with cash, I am absolutely anonymous. It doesn't matter if I drive 10 miles or 10,000 miles in a week. No one can know anything about my driving habits.
Now, recall that it is already commonly considered 'evidence of drug trafficking' if you are caught carrying a large amount of cash. What if 'driving a lot of miles' began garnering similar suspicions? I see the next step as confiscating cars (just as they presently do cash) without a hint of due process, just because your odometer mileage was outside of the norm.
"You drove 5,000 miles a week? Must have been running drugs. No one drives that far every week for any legitimate purpose."
It could go both ways, too.... for people like myself who drive very little (about 3,000 miles a year) -- that is ALSO suspicious: "No one who lives near [insert long-commute city here] drives so few miles, you must be getting your odometer reset!!"
So while it's an improvement over the GPS's invasive tracking, there are still problems that can impinge upon our freedoms, by encouraging scrutiny from looking-for-trouble Big Brother types.
Side effect: it becomes cheaper to drive a gas guzzler, and more expensive to drive an economy engine:
At current gas tax rates, that trip would cost my truck somewhere around $60 in existing gas taxes.
Existing gas tax would be about $10 in a fuel-efficient car.
Small fuel-efficient cars tend to be driven by lower-income people, who will therefore be hardest hit by this as their economy cars will pay a disproportionate amount of tax, based on per mile rather than per gallon.
So -- this is a regressive tax.
"None of the Wallenberg family to take him with seaweed."
WTF??
From TFA:
=============
New technology would require users to pay to download films, games and music, but "they will be able to make money" by sharing their files with other users, GGF chief executive Hans Pandeya said.
"And if you earn money by sharing your files, then maybe it's not that hard to pay for top quality," he told Swedish news agency TT.
========
This is exactly what I suggested a while back -- make filesharing a profit center where *users* can share in the profits BY DISTRIBUTING the files in question -- so the more you share the more you make. Less up-front money for the content owners, but tons more microsales to make up the difference.
Tho I agree TFA sounds too much like Slashvertizement, the concept is all too real. If it could be applied to a bunch of storyboards, why not to a novel??
So... next time you fly with an espionage novel in your luggage -- could you be the courier for The Bad Guys' Secret Plans??
Pretty far outside, since far as I know the nearest silo is over 100 miles away!
Inbreeding doesn't *cause* genetic issues. It merely concentrates and thereby exposes those that are already present in a given gene pool, by increasing the chance of being homozygous for any given trait -- good OR bad.
I'm a little volume-deaf, which screws up hearing speech (I hear the words but they don't mean anything). I definitely hear better on the phone with my LEFT ear, which seems to have a different *range* of deafness than my right. My right is more sensitive to other sounds but hears *speech* less-clearly, at least on the phone.
[scratching head] Maybe I'm just put together backwards?? damned Chinese directions...
From the Wikipedia article:
=====
Plants require carbon dioxide to conduct photosynthesis. Because of low current atmospheric concentration, carbon dioxide is practically the limiting factor of the Earth life, as compare to two other similarly important components - water
and sun light. While plants "in wild" are optimized for this, plant-intense greenhouses may (and of large size - must) enrich their atmospheres with additional CO2 to sustain plant life and growth, because the low present-day atmosphere concentration of CO2 is just above the "suffocation" level for green plants.
=====
So... maybe we don't WANT to remove it from the atmosphere, but rather should consider the needs of CO2-starved plants... which we grow to eat.
A degree or two of "global warming" means about 20% more arable land (areas presently with a too-short growing season), more rainfall, and now here's a way to get around a limiting factor for crops... all in one handy package!
Maybe they should be dumping CO2 into the atmosphere instead ;) (Assuming that it really is a "greenhouse gas", which is debatable)
A policy of interference is certainly not doing us as Americans any favours either... look at the tax bill we'll be paying off til the end of time!!
If we're threatened directly, or an ally with whom we have a firm reciprocal agreement (not just "you cover our ass for us") is attacked, then it's justified and in our own best interests -- WW2 was a good example. But trying to micromanage some other country's politics for a more nebulous or questionable benefit (including "spreading democracy") has generally resulted in disasters like this one, and it doesn't matter if it's the US or the old USSR or India or China or Nigeria doing it.
I admit I'm becoming an isolationist in my old age... :)
"Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny."
-- Lloyd Biggle Jr.
Whether or not there are any foreign agents influencing things... (I suspect not, other than money promised to those already in power):
If you prevent people from killing each other, the moment your back is turned they resume the proscribed activity with greater zeal than before. Nothing is ever settled until they get a chance to simply duke it out. If one side loses and gets wiped out, that's tough luck, but at least matters are settled, rather than hostility continuing forever.
The American Revolution didn't have the mass starvation, but probably half the people were feeling the pinch to the point that it hurt -- frex, having to quarter troops is a VERY expensive undertaking for subsistence farmers and businesses, and there was also the problem of failure to protect big swaths of the Colonies from the effects of the French and Indian wars.
As to North Korea... here's what I see: when you have ONLY peasants, it doesn't matter how many peasants starve; they simply won't have the balls to do anything about it. As someone else pointed out, revolutions tend to be led by the wealthy discontent (such as younger sons who didn't inherit), using the peasants to further their own power-seeking and revenge on the system. Peasants don't lead revolutions, but they sure can be used to fuel them. At a guess, NK has exactly two strata -- starving peasants who can't or won't rebel, and the well-off who already have power so lack motivation to change anything (for good or ill).
As you say, it's more complex than just "half the people are starving" (or in some way so put-upon that they think about it and are reminded of it all the time, as with the American Rev.) But I think that IS a necessary trigger, without which you don't get a revolution.
Yes, but... there wouldn't have been a receptive audience without those starving masses.
Of course the real motivation was probably "younger son feels put out since he didn't inherit, and thinks 'the people' will give him power so he can grab back what he thinks is rightfully his" but the effect is the same -- massive upheaval not necessarily to anyone's benefit.
I'd say rather that politics is the only business where by default, the fox guards the henhouse, and the fox very often knows that business very well... of course, it's not the business you want experts in when the object is to maintain live hens.
Lawyers (the majority of politicians being of that ilk) making laws will not make them for everyday and the common man, but rather for the courts, and for the corner cases that lead to loopholes, rather than for real life.
In short, laws are made for lawyers, not for We The People.
An AC suggests, "Try with Javascript disabled. The browser makers quest for JS speed is probably to blame for these kind of web experience abominations."
I agree.... but the only reason I use SM at all is because of sites that won't function without JS and CSS, and those are typically the worst for every sort of performance issue, so you're doubly caught. :(
For sites that degrade gracefully, I still use old Netscape 3, with JS and images both disabled... who knew Slashdot pages could load so fast?!!
Should I face north before I wave hello? :)
I agree with you entirely. When the gov't starts keeping secrets from the people, you're already long past being in trouble.
I use Seamonkey (I hate FF with a passion) ... with no plugins except Prefbar. Main problem I run into isn't memory but CPU usage. -- My internet machine is a lowly P3-550 with 1GB RAM and Win98 (swapfile disabled), so it's noticeable:
As a quick experiment I just sent SM to the worst site I could think of offhand, realtor.com, opened a bunch of new windows (I never use tabs) and per sysmon, RAM usage increased by only about 10mb.
Closed SM entirely and recovered about 150mb of RAM.
However, CPU usage jammed up at 100% for a while SM arrived at realtor.com, and did so again for each new window.
Personally I think devs should be forced to live with their creations on the MINIMUM hardware for a while, so they don't forget that not everyone has an employer buying them the latest and greatest whenever they want it.
Thanks for the info... we used RAMdisks for caching all the time in the DOS era, but the trick seems to have been forgotten!
This non-programmer understood every word of it, and came away with a much better feel for what's going on under there. And I agree -- use the jargon as needed, sensibly, and in context -- which allows the listener to LEARN what the jargon means, rather than remaining mystified.
That's something I've pointed out before -- you don't get revolution unless a significant part of the population (I'd guess about half) are actively starving, and have nothing left to lose. And that's why real revolutions have always been bloody, and haven't necessarily made things better for the starving (frex, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution).
America is nowhere near that point, and probably never will be. However, with the increasing interest in states' rights, secession is not out of the question, and in today's world it would be damned hard to justify a shooting war to prevent it -- it would be seen as imperial rule preventing the Will of the People from being expressed in their choice of government.