Saying that a free market transaction benefits both parties does contribute to a meaningful debate on economics, because people are so caught up with the few real externalities that they lose track of the AMAZING GROWTH IN GLOBAL WEALTH that have been driven by free market exchanges.
Externalities are important. Free market exchanges are much more important to the fact that you are reading this on a computer right now, and not a subsitance farmer barely able to feed yourself.
If this was true, please explain why global wealth is increasing?
Thermodynamics doesn't limit the benefits of free market exhanges any more than it limits evolution.
Obviously you cannot create energy (or energy-matter), but intelligence (or evolution) can certainly mix up matter into enhanced levels of organization, as long as there is an energy input, which we get from the Sun both directly and in the form of store solar energy in oil, and stored end-life star energy in uranium and other fissionable materials.
The real rate of return to Social Security for those in the top 20% incomes born after 1970 is 0% or negative.
The real rate of return for those in the middle 20% of incomes for those born after 1960 is about 1%. Most Slashdot readers will fall into those two categories.
The real rate of return for those in the bottom 20% of incomes for those born after 1960 is 4%.
This doesn't count someone "saving Social Security" which will further cut your rate of return (for example, indexing to prices instead of wages, or raising the retirement age).
It also doesn't count the income taxes you will be paying after 2018 to pay back the bonds in the Social Security "trust fund."
OK, give welfare to poor retirees, as opposed to Social Security, which takes money from poor people and rich people and gives it to middle class retirees.
-The EU's massive agriculture subsidies vs. The US large but less massive agriculture subsidies, both keep down developing nations
-China plans on building enough new coal power plants to make up for Kyoto Treaty CO2 savings
-France and Germany have had a decade of much lower GDP growth than the US (France just had a 0% growth quarter), as well as record unemployment at around 10%
Of course, Airbus and Boeing still both collect severe monopoly rents from the EU and US government...without which, there would be greater competition and cheaper planes.
there is often a strong negative effect on non-consenting third parties
My personal viewpoint is that the biggest problem with the world is that corrupt and/or inept governments apply regulations in the name of "externalities" which achieve monopoly rents for the powerful through regulations, while neither actually solving externalities and also dramatically reducing economic growth.
That is why so many people are still living on under $1/day.
More importantly, free market exchanges are win-win scenarios. If not, one side or the other would not involve themselves in the exchange.
The win-win of free market exchanges increase global wealth. It is kind of amazing when you think about it. But it explains how humanity went from berries and stones to computers and space ships.
Let me describe an outage at a mission-critical technical facility (millions of viewers) that I am faimilar with.
Local power goes out. UPS comes on seemlessly. Unfortunately, it is so seemless that the operations folks don't even know the power is off. Evidently the UPS doesn't have an audio alarm...
When the power goes off, the generator should come on. The "signal" to the operations folks that the power is out is the loud sound of the generator starting. But the generator doesn't come on...
After a while, the UPS drains, and the lights go off. Millions of viewers see black.
Someone runs out to the generator...the battery to start the generator was dead! Someone had kicked a switch that charges the battery from 12V to 6V. The switch is near the floor level...
A quick jumpstart from a car gets the big generator going again...
I would suggest that people seeking fast, standard ways to deliver binary data look at SMPTE KLV (key, length, value) coding. It is SMPTE 336M, and is the standard for metadata coding in television, video, and digital cinema.
I have some non-technical friends (recent Central American immigrants to the US), whose computer basically came to a halt because of all the malware they picked up online. The only cure was a complete OS re-install.
So some people might "give up" on the Internet, others may just have their computer become basically useless.
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I came to my faith, not early on in my childhood, but much later in adulthood.
There is increasing evidence that religion is something that humans are predisposed to, along the lines of language. All humans have language, but acquire different languages. Similarly, most humans have religion, but acquire different ones. All human language is made from a finite group of phonemes and grammars, but each language chooses a slightly different group. Similarly, all human religions draw from a group of finite themes.
There are certain brain regions which have been correlated with "mystical" feelings, and stimulation of these areas (with high powered magnetic fields, for instance) can induce the ability to feel "the infinite," "God", etc. The circuitry for religion is inside our brains.
Religion is probably is an evolved behavior, like language or love. Religions often help to encourage personal behaviors for individual survival and interpersonal behaviors for group survival.
I think as humans, we need to accept our spiritual tendencies, the way we accept our (often irrational) feelings of love, but not to be blinded by them to reality.
Glass and plastic highly attenuate the lowest IR frequencies. CO2 lasers, for instance, generally need a special kind of crystal for an optical window.
Near IR might pass though (semiconductor laser, for example).
A Q-switched pulsed laser has pulses so short that, for all practical purposes, they will deliver their entire power in a signle place even if the laser is being scanned rapidly in a 2D grid (apparently looking like a 2D grid of spote).
Even with a few miliradian divergence, the spot size will be about 10 feet wide a few thousand feet away.
I don't think a "man portable" laser could be truly dangerous to pilots, but one that is "pickup-truck portable" with the appropriate scanner could be.
Sorry! I misunderstood your scenario. If you have a market-clearing price of $70, and pay an additional $30 in taxes, then if the tax is removed, you are correct that you will be back at $70.
Sorry - basic economics show that the burden of wage taxes are split between the employer and the employee. If the 30% tax was removed, the market clearing price for your labor would still be $100. Moreover, reducing wage taxes increases overall employment. Studies have proven out both of these theories.
Please see this link so you are not to economics what creationists are to biology, then read this study which shows that lower labor taxes decreases unemployment.
The data does not rule out other non-choice causes (in-womb developmental hormones, chance, etc.) Of course, without evidence of these it is hard to say one way or the other.
I think that the Kinsey findings of different levels of homosexuality and bisexuality may indicate that it is more of a choice for some, and not a choice for others.
I really doubt that the vote fraud was larger than the margin of voter error. The country is closely divided, near 50/50, plus or minus just a few percentage points. Most pre-election polls (not to mention the Iowa Electronic Market) indicate that.
Besides, dictatorship is not by itself and indication of failure of a society or country. South Korea and Taiwan had tremendous increases in GDP and broad personal wealth under near-dictatorships, and have only become highly democratic recently.
On the other hand, India spent nearly 40 years as a democracy, with extremely low GDP growth and poverty reduction, until free-market reforms began in the 1980's.
Slashdot Mirror
Saying that a free market transaction benefits both parties does contribute to a meaningful debate on economics, because people are so caught up with the few real externalities that they lose track of the AMAZING GROWTH IN GLOBAL WEALTH that have been driven by free market exchanges.
Externalities are important. Free market exchanges are much more important to the fact that you are reading this on a computer right now, and not a subsitance farmer barely able to feed yourself.
If this was true, please explain why global wealth is increasing?
Thermodynamics doesn't limit the benefits of free market exhanges any more than it limits evolution.
Obviously you cannot create energy (or energy-matter), but intelligence (or evolution) can certainly mix up matter into enhanced levels of organization, as long as there is an energy input, which we get from the Sun both directly and in the form of store solar energy in oil, and stored end-life star energy in uranium and other fissionable materials.
Just FYI...
The real rate of return to Social Security for those in the top 20% incomes born after 1970 is 0% or negative.
The real rate of return for those in the middle 20% of incomes for those born after 1960 is about 1%. Most Slashdot readers will fall into those two categories.
The real rate of return for those in the bottom 20% of incomes for those born after 1960 is 4%.
This doesn't count someone "saving Social Security" which will further cut your rate of return (for example, indexing to prices instead of wages, or raising the retirement age).
It also doesn't count the income taxes you will be paying after 2018 to pay back the bonds in the Social Security "trust fund."
OK, give welfare to poor retirees, as opposed to Social Security, which takes money from poor people and rich people and gives it to middle class retirees.
Let's also add:
-The EU's massive agriculture subsidies vs. The US large but less massive agriculture subsidies, both keep down developing nations
-China plans on building enough new coal power plants to make up for Kyoto Treaty CO2 savings
-France and Germany have had a decade of much lower GDP growth than the US (France just had a 0% growth quarter), as well as record unemployment at around 10%
Globalization is good!
Of course, Airbus and Boeing still both collect severe monopoly rents from the EU and US government...without which, there would be greater competition and cheaper planes.
there is often a strong negative effect on non-consenting third parties
My personal viewpoint is that the biggest problem with the world is that corrupt and/or inept governments apply regulations in the name of "externalities" which achieve monopoly rents for the powerful through regulations, while neither actually solving externalities and also dramatically reducing economic growth.
That is why so many people are still living on under $1/day.
More importantly, free market exchanges are win-win scenarios. If not, one side or the other would not involve themselves in the exchange.
The win-win of free market exchanges increase global wealth. It is kind of amazing when you think about it. But it explains how humanity went from berries and stones to computers and space ships.
There are gyro-stabilized high-gain antennas for use on aircraft, boats, and RVs...
Let me describe an outage at a mission-critical technical facility (millions of viewers) that I am faimilar with.
Local power goes out. UPS comes on seemlessly. Unfortunately, it is so seemless that the operations folks don't even know the power is off. Evidently the UPS doesn't have an audio alarm...
When the power goes off, the generator should come on. The "signal" to the operations folks that the power is out is the loud sound of the generator starting. But the generator doesn't come on...
After a while, the UPS drains, and the lights go off. Millions of viewers see black.
Someone runs out to the generator...the battery to start the generator was dead! Someone had kicked a switch that charges the battery from 12V to 6V. The switch is near the floor level...
A quick jumpstart from a car gets the big generator going again...
I would suggest that people seeking fast, standard ways to deliver binary data look at SMPTE KLV (key, length, value) coding. It is SMPTE 336M, and is the standard for metadata coding in television, video, and digital cinema.
I have some non-technical friends (recent Central American immigrants to the US), whose computer basically came to a halt because of all the malware they picked up online. The only cure was a complete OS re-install.
So some people might "give up" on the Internet, others may just have their computer become basically useless.
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I came to my faith, not early on in my childhood, but much later in adulthood.
There is increasing evidence that religion is something that humans are predisposed to, along the lines of language. All humans have language, but acquire different languages. Similarly, most humans have religion, but acquire different ones. All human language is made from a finite group of phonemes and grammars, but each language chooses a slightly different group. Similarly, all human religions draw from a group of finite themes.
There are certain brain regions which have been correlated with "mystical" feelings, and stimulation of these areas (with high powered magnetic fields, for instance) can induce the ability to feel "the infinite," "God", etc. The circuitry for religion is inside our brains.
Religion is probably is an evolved behavior, like language or love. Religions often help to encourage personal behaviors for individual survival and interpersonal behaviors for group survival.
I think as humans, we need to accept our spiritual tendencies, the way we accept our (often irrational) feelings of love, but not to be blinded by them to reality.
Glass and plastic highly attenuate the lowest IR frequencies. CO2 lasers, for instance, generally need a special kind of crystal for an optical window.
Near IR might pass though (semiconductor laser, for example).
A Q-switched pulsed laser has pulses so short that, for all practical purposes, they will deliver their entire power in a signle place even if the laser is being scanned rapidly in a 2D grid (apparently looking like a 2D grid of spote).
Even with a few miliradian divergence, the spot size will be about 10 feet wide a few thousand feet away.
I don't think a "man portable" laser could be truly dangerous to pilots, but one that is "pickup-truck portable" with the appropriate scanner could be.
I can assure you that far more children are killed by cars than cellphones...yet I don't see anyone suggesting that children don't ride in cars.
Mah bitches and ho's
Dig my black holes,
Which I infer
from the way the plasma blows
out magnetic poles
beaming neutrinos
I aint no sucka WIMP
or little neutrino
I got mah dark matter going on
cause I am so MACHO
If you want to try this yourself, check out DNA Hack, the website for Amateur Genetic Engineering
That's what some Iraqi bloggers are doing...
Sorry! I misunderstood your scenario. If you have a market-clearing price of $70, and pay an additional $30 in taxes, then if the tax is removed, you are correct that you will be back at $70.
However, overall employment would increase...
Sorry - basic economics show that the burden of wage taxes are split between the employer and the employee. If the 30% tax was removed, the market clearing price for your labor would still be $100. Moreover, reducing wage taxes increases overall employment. Studies have proven out both of these theories.
Please see this link so you are not to economics what creationists are to biology, then read this study which shows that lower labor taxes decreases unemployment.
The data does not rule out other non-choice causes (in-womb developmental hormones, chance, etc.) Of course, without evidence of these it is hard to say one way or the other.
I think that the Kinsey findings of different levels of homosexuality and bisexuality may indicate that it is more of a choice for some, and not a choice for others.
I really doubt that the vote fraud was larger than the margin of voter error. The country is closely divided, near 50/50, plus or minus just a few percentage points. Most pre-election polls (not to mention the Iowa Electronic Market) indicate that.
Besides, dictatorship is not by itself and indication of failure of a society or country. South Korea and Taiwan had tremendous increases in GDP and broad personal wealth under near-dictatorships, and have only become highly democratic recently.
On the other hand, India spent nearly 40 years as a democracy, with extremely low GDP growth and poverty reduction, until free-market reforms began in the 1980's.
How is "our capitalist republic is failing"?
What are the metrics? Life expectancy? Home ownership? GDP per capita?
The data clearly shows that homosexuality, especially male homosexuality, is significantly influenced by genetics...
Bailey and Pillard (1991): occurrence of homosexuality among brothers
52% of identical (monozygotic) twins of homosexual men were likewise homosexual
22% of fraternal (dizygotic) twins were likewise homosexual
11% of adoptive brothers of homosexual men were likewise homosexual
J.M. Bailey and R.C. Pillard, "A genetic study of male sexual orientation," Archives of General Psychiatry, vol. 48:1089-1096, December 1991.
Bailey and Pillard (1993): occurrence of homosexuality among sisters
48% of identical (monozygotic) twins of homosexual women were likewise homosexual (lesbian)
16% of fraternal (dizygotic) twins were likewise homosexual
6% of adoptive sisters of homosexual women were likewise homosexual
Bailey, J. M. and D. S. Benishay (1993), "Familial Aggregation of Female Sexual Orientation," American Journal of Psychiatry 150(2): 272-277.