Read up on the murder of babies by the Nazis in the concentration camps, it is evil.
Sure, but using some utilitarian models for morality some Nazi activities actually come out fine (well, their implementations were poor, but you can justify some things that most of us would consider horrific). Suppose human experimentation were reasonably likely to yield a medical advance? Would it be ethical? If you treated 1000 people like lab rats (vivsections and all), and it helped advance medicine to the benefit of millions of others, would that be wrong?
I'm not saying it is right. I'm saying that it is actually hard to come up with models of morality that cover situations like this in a way most would accept.
Accellerating at 1G you could probably make the NYC-LAX trip in 30-60 minutes.
More like 15.
Of course, you might have a bit of a bumpy landing as you leapt for the platform from the speeding train, which would at that point be closing on 9km/s. So, yeah, 30 minutes if you wanted to walk off at the other end.
You'll want to factor in a bit more time for everybody to reverse their chairs or whatever so that they're not thrown out of the seat when you switch to deceleration.:) But yes, it has been a while since I ran the numbers bit it is somewhere around 30min, which is pretty impressive. It wouldn't even require all that much energy to make the trip.
The person being tortured will tell you whatever you want to hear to get you to stop torturing them. Torture rarely works and is always immoral.
Sure, but this is a thought problem. The question is if inflicting pain on some people can bring benefit to many more, is it ethical to inflict pain? Maybe torture is a bad example. Or maybe not. Suppose you need a recording of somebody's voice in order to play it over a phone and deceive their partners in a terrorist action. Would it be ethical to torture somebody to obtain their cooperation, given that in this situation you can actually know whether they've cooperated or not (you're just asking them to read a script).
I have no doubts that you can answer the question. The problem is that many will disagree with your answer, whatever it might be.
Then every car (and the tunnel itself!) needs to be a pressure vessel and you need oxygen masks if there is a leak. Plus you have to turn every station into an airlock. Depressurizing the tunnel is a lot of extra work.
It would certainly need to be a pressure vessel. If there were a leak you could use supplemental oxygen or you could just repressurize the tunnel. Agree that the stations would need locks.
I'd wonder if it would almost make sense to make it 100% tunnels and have it in a vacuum.
Probably tripling the cost.
Agree that it would only make sense over large distances. I could see it for a NYC-LAX maglev, maybe with a stop in the midwest somewhere. Maybe have the stops at airports for easy connection.
Accellerating at 1G you could probably make the NYC-LAX trip in 30-60 minutes.
I don't think an AI would qualify as intelligent unless it can realize that human beings are the entire problem and the world would be better off without them. So its obvious that any AI, advanced enough, will try to kill us all.
One thing that I don't understand about this type of self-hate: if the person is so convinced of his view that he is a member of an absolutely bad species, why doesn't he do the honorable thing and end his existence on this planet? Or maybe is he the possibly only exception to the stereotyping?
Well, for somebody who is part of a wholly-dishonorable species to do something honorable would require them to be the exception in the first place. So, anybody capable of doing what you ask, wouldn't have to.:)
To whom should the AI be beneficial toward? The owner of the platform? or to the vendor of the
package?
Heck, we can't even agree on that stuff when it comes to human behavior, let alone expressing it in a way such that it can be designed into a machine.
Given a choice between A and B, which is more right? If you could save one life at the cost of crippling (but not killing) a million people, would it be right to do so? Is it ok to torture somebody if you could be certain it would save lives (setting aside the effectiveness of torture, assuming it is effective, is it moral)? If we can't answer questions like these objectively, how are you going to get an AI to be "beneficial?"
If you're putting 80% through tunnels, I'd wonder if it would almost make sense to make it 100% tunnels and have it in a vacuum. You could reach absurd speeds with such a design, though only if your stops are sufficiently distant (you would want a hub/spoke model).
Not every condition is life threatening, where humans would be willing to risk unknown side effects. And even if humans are willing to take that risk, there are bigger ethical concerns, like the potential for vulnerable people to be coerced into trials.
The other risk is that nobody would be willing to volunteer for trials, and thus the drug doesn't get researched. That means that a potential treatment doesn't get developed. Even if all the treatment is supposed to do is cure a headache, at some point a certain number of headaches adds up to a single cancer treatment in the whole quality-adjusted years-of-life thing.
There are plenty of animals that don't suffer the same was a chimps to, such as mice, that can be used for a lot of the tests.
The only reason you'd test in a chimp in the first place is because other animals are inadequate. They're expensive, and far more heavily regulated.
Suppose you're testing a medication that could cause cognitive impairment, or which otherwise targets the brain. Just what animal are you going to test it on? The only animals that have brains remotely similar to humans are all animals that have the same ethical issues as chimps, because they ARE so similar to humans.
Drugs aren't tested on higher primates until they're as sure as they can be that they're safe. At that point, it is either test on non-human primates, or just skip that and go straight to humans. How is the latter more ethical than the former?
10 cents might be a bit excessive, even if it was just 2 or 3 cents.
I suspect telemarketers are already paying something on that order of magnitude already. I doubt anybody gives them "unlimited" phone plans - at least not the $20/month kind. Most of them are probably using VoIP providers. I couldn't tell you how low the rates go in bulk, but most seem to be a few cents per minute for outgoing calls.
In pretty much every single other business, what Uber calls "surge pricing" is referred to as "price gouging," and is illegal.
What's the difference between what Uber is doing today and what a handful of gas stations tried to pull on 9\11\2001? The fact Uber is getting away with it?
Cite? If it is illegal, then you can reference the law.
In any case, making demand-based pricing (or gouging if you prefer) is often counter-productive. If a resource is scarce, you WANT people to change their behavior. If there is a hurricane and gas is scarce, then you want people to stop driving to the movie theater or whatever, and then there is gas available when people need to buy necessities or whatever. If you have to drive to the hospital, you're not going to care if gas is $10/gallon. However, that $10/gallon gas will prevent you from driving to your friend's house to hang out 25 miles away.
The alternative is that everybody runs out of gas, and then people with connections get their cheap gas, or you have wasteful activities like driving 100 miles to buy gas (thus wasting quite a bit of gas vs just tankering it in). During Hurricane Sandy there was quite a bit of scandal where people with connections got cheap gas from FEMA depots, and then everybody else just did without.
The exception should be situations where there isn't much competition, and there should of course not be collusion. That is just antitrust law.
It's the other way around buddy. If he builds the tools to pen-test an aircraft system with his own money he is under NO obligation to share that information.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that he's free to use those tools in an operational aircraft.
He can of course mess with an aircraft with the permission of the owner on the ground. Legally he probably can't mess with any aircraft in the air, since that would be a violation of its type certificate (it was certified with one set of software, and he introducing another).
You can't legally fly within 60nm of the center of DC without taking an online training course. If you want to fly to an airport right on the edge of the restricted area it is probably complicated, but for the most part you just need to stay outside of a certain distance and you're fine. If I were operating anywhere near that area i'd probably request flight following as well - then you're broadcasting a transponder code and talking to somebody who can tell you you're wandering towards trouble before they are scrambling jets.
Isn't that odd how during 9/11 NORAD went some two hours without scrambling a single jet, despite the normal response time measured in minutes they aim for and we have witnessed in every other instance of a flight going so far astray?
Every other instance before or after 9/11? A lot of attitudes changed after 9/11.
However, this wasn't a commercial flight. In general small aircraft can go from anywhere to anywhere and nobody takes notice. The exception is controlled interface and ADIZs, and the SFRA around DC is even more of an exception. Any aircraft that enters that airspace is subject to interception, or possibly even being shot down.
Google is moving more and more utilities to Play Services, which is not open source. Play Services is not only about Google-related services, it is also about OAuth for instance. Unknowing developers rely on Play Services, making their apps incompatible with pure-Android devices.
I get that they want to make the framework updateable without a full OS update. I think that is a great idea. They should make an "Android Frameworks" app and release it as open source. Mandate that it be pre-installed on any device that passes their QA, and recommend that everybody else use it as well. Why wouldn't they - it is FOSS and just makes the device better.
Then limit Play Services to, well, Play Services. It might handle authentication to your Google Account, verify that paid apps are legit, and so on. If you remove it then you might not be able to use your Google account with the device, or use the Play Store, but otherwise Android works just fine. This can be proprietary.
Honestly, though, I'd actually like the Google Account stuff to be FOSS. I should be able to sign into my own server and have contacts/etc sync and backups and all that. It is great that you don't HAVE to use Google's services, but it would be better if you also had the option of rolling your own.
He failed to register the LSA. If everyone who did this were locked up for 3 years there would be a lot of harmless aviation enthusiasts in federal prison.
From my experience with regulators from several countries, they tend to not sweat the small stuff until it is obvious that you aren't paying attention to the big stuff. Then they go through everything with a fine-toothed comb and throw the book at you.
The guy flew into the DC SFRA. If the FAA doesn't ruin his life, then everybody and their uncle will be doing it, and then they don't really have a buffer zone in which to shoot down aircraft that are potentially threatening.
The fuel tank issue is a bit like citing somebody for worn wipers in a vehicular homicide investigation. They're just padding the charges.
Quite the contrary. He sent them a message a full hour in advance, saying that they should expect him.
The White House knew he was coming and expected him
You've got a lot of faith in Uncle Sam if you think the left hand (whomever reads info@barackobama.com) talks to the right hand (FAA, NORAD, USSS, and a few other agencies in the alphabet soup)
Heck, it's not even a Government address, it's BHO's campaign organization's address.
Agree. Can you imagine how much noise those addresses get?
This is a bit like explaining to the IRS that it shouldn't have been a problem that you filed your taxes late, because you told the postal delivery agent that you were running a few days behind when he was dropping off a package.
Pilot here. Even though this guy clearly did it intentionally, accidentally violating an airspace in a small plane without sophisticated navigation equipment is easier than you would think. Someone does it every once in a while. Don't get me wrong, it's still a big deal, but not a felony. I wouldn't ever fly near the D.C. area out of fear of doing exactly that. The airspace up there is pretty complicated.
You can't legally fly within 60nm of the center of DC without taking an online training course. If you want to fly to an airport right on the edge of the restricted area it is probably complicated, but for the most part you just need to stay outside of a certain distance and you're fine. If I were operating anywhere near that area i'd probably request flight following as well - then you're broadcasting a transponder code and talking to somebody who can tell you you're wandering towards trouble before they are scrambling jets.
Obviously flying IFR is the simplest solution. ATC tells you where to go and you follow the route and you're fine.
But, if you're just buzzing around sightseeing over the white house, then sure, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. They actually have lasers to illuminate aircraft to try to warn them off, so that shooting them down isn't their only recourse.
Companies work within existing tax laws, and they have nothing to be ashamed by abiding by current tax laws. If the government offers you a tax break for buying a new home, of course you are going to take the tax break - even if you think the tax break is total bullshit.
That sounds a bit like walking past somebody lying dying on the street, pointing out that there is no law that obligates you to help them, and then saying that there is nothing to be ashamed of when you refuse to do so.
If the government actually sets up a tax break to incentivize something, there is nothing dishonest from doing so. The problem with corporate tax avoidance is that it usually involves structuring one type of transaction as if it were a completely different type of transaction to claim a tax break that was never anticipated. That is why you find companies doing nonsense like buying municipal sewer systems in Europe and leasing them back to the government for free in perpetuity.
Or because as long as people are OK with that bit of intrusiveness every time they travel, they'll be more accepting of other restrictions on their freedom as well.
I think the other theory is more plausible. I don't think there is some massive conspiracy to increase government intrusion for its own sake, such that there are deliberate attempts to desensitize people to it. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of intrusion all the same, but the motive tends to be more directly tied to somebody with a stake. They don't want to monitor what you download just to do it - they want to monitor it because they get bribes from Hollywood and Hollywood wants to stop movie downloading, etc.
Whenever something bad happens there is ALWAYS a blame game. Actions that were perfectly reasonable get questioned if they were somehow tied to the chain of events. If somebody blows up a bus full of kids while it is stopped at a traffic light, some idiot is going to propose that school buses should have flashing lights and be able to drive through red lights to reduce the opportunity to attack them with RPGs.
It seems like a 100% certainty that at some point in time terrorists will attack another US airliner. Security can make that very difficult, and maybe it will happen in 10 years, or maybe it will happen in 50 years, but sooner or later somebody will figure out a way to do it. At that point, everybody is going to be pointing fingers at anybody who voted no when the bill came up that would have instituted some control that would have prevented that particular incident. Never mind that there are countless areas where you could tighten security and if you tightened them all we'd be flying naked on planes with our baggage in separate planes after having all gone through full body cavity searches.
You can call it "to the bottom" if you think you somehow benefit from high taxes. (I don't, because I work and pay taxes instead of sitting at home collecting a benefit check.)
Consider yourself lucky then. Many are born without the ability to work a single productive day in their life. Are you suggesting that they should be euthanized?
Let food-buyers pay for USDA inspections and medicine-buyers pay for FDA.
Yeah, that makes sense. If the poor can't afford taxes, just let them not eat.
The problem with these kinds of schemes is that they tend to be incredibly regressive. You can't have socialism without fairly high tax rates on the parts of the economy that actually produce wealth.
As Ms. Carnegie points out, if you want stuff taxed in your jurisdiction, change the law so that happens - dont wave the "spirit" of the law around as if it has any meaning other than a method of blackmail.
I think it would be far wiser to take the opposite approach.
The most effective form of enforcement is self-enforcement. You want to give companies incentive to just stick with boring accounting and to stop using schemes designed for tax avoidance. The best way to do that is not to create lots of well-defined rules to ban particular practices, because that means that companies can simply use different practices with relatively little risk. What you want to do is create a lot of uncertainty around whether a particular practice is legal or not. This means that companies are going to err on the side of caution, and minimize their use of tax avoidance schemes.
Any businessperson will tell you that the worst thing for a company is uncertainty in regulation. That means that in areas where you want business to grow, you want simple laws that get rid of the risk and allow companies to invest. On the other hand, in areas of the economy like derivatives and tax avoidance schemes that don't really create true value for the average citizen, you want there to be a LOT of uncertainty in risk. Make those CEOs find it impossible to sleep at night for fear that the FBI will kick down their doors while they're sleeping. Give them a reason to have their finances audited twice to make sure there isn't any activity that anybody might construe as a tax dodge. When somebody makes a minor mistake make their shareholders lose their retirement accounts. Then you'll see a return to simple accounting practices.
Slashdot Mirror
Read up on the murder of babies by the Nazis in the concentration camps, it is evil.
Sure, but using some utilitarian models for morality some Nazi activities actually come out fine (well, their implementations were poor, but you can justify some things that most of us would consider horrific). Suppose human experimentation were reasonably likely to yield a medical advance? Would it be ethical? If you treated 1000 people like lab rats (vivsections and all), and it helped advance medicine to the benefit of millions of others, would that be wrong?
I'm not saying it is right. I'm saying that it is actually hard to come up with models of morality that cover situations like this in a way most would accept.
Accellerating at 1G you could probably make the NYC-LAX trip in 30-60 minutes.
More like 15.
Of course, you might have a bit of a bumpy landing as you leapt for the platform from the speeding train, which would at that point be closing on 9km/s. So, yeah, 30 minutes if you wanted to walk off at the other end.
You'll want to factor in a bit more time for everybody to reverse their chairs or whatever so that they're not thrown out of the seat when you switch to deceleration. :) But yes, it has been a while since I ran the numbers bit it is somewhere around 30min, which is pretty impressive. It wouldn't even require all that much energy to make the trip.
The person being tortured will tell you whatever you want to hear to get you to stop torturing them. Torture rarely works and is always immoral.
Sure, but this is a thought problem. The question is if inflicting pain on some people can bring benefit to many more, is it ethical to inflict pain? Maybe torture is a bad example. Or maybe not. Suppose you need a recording of somebody's voice in order to play it over a phone and deceive their partners in a terrorist action. Would it be ethical to torture somebody to obtain their cooperation, given that in this situation you can actually know whether they've cooperated or not (you're just asking them to read a script).
I have no doubts that you can answer the question. The problem is that many will disagree with your answer, whatever it might be.
Then every car (and the tunnel itself!) needs to be a pressure vessel and you need oxygen masks if there is a leak. Plus you have to turn every station into an airlock. Depressurizing the tunnel is a lot of extra work.
It would certainly need to be a pressure vessel. If there were a leak you could use supplemental oxygen or you could just repressurize the tunnel. Agree that the stations would need locks.
I'd wonder if it would almost make sense to make it 100% tunnels and have it in a vacuum.
Probably tripling the cost.
Agree that it would only make sense over large distances. I could see it for a NYC-LAX maglev, maybe with a stop in the midwest somewhere. Maybe have the stops at airports for easy connection.
Accellerating at 1G you could probably make the NYC-LAX trip in 30-60 minutes.
I don't think an AI would qualify as intelligent unless it can realize that human beings are the entire problem and the world would be better off without them. So its obvious that any AI, advanced enough, will try to kill us all.
One thing that I don't understand about this type of self-hate: if the person is so convinced of his view that he is a member of an absolutely bad species, why doesn't he do the honorable thing and end his existence on this planet? Or maybe is he the possibly only exception to the stereotyping?
Well, for somebody who is part of a wholly-dishonorable species to do something honorable would require them to be the exception in the first place. So, anybody capable of doing what you ask, wouldn't have to. :)
The problem is definining "beneficial".
To whom should the AI be beneficial toward? The owner of the platform? or to the vendor of the
package?
Heck, we can't even agree on that stuff when it comes to human behavior, let alone expressing it in a way such that it can be designed into a machine.
Given a choice between A and B, which is more right? If you could save one life at the cost of crippling (but not killing) a million people, would it be right to do so? Is it ok to torture somebody if you could be certain it would save lives (setting aside the effectiveness of torture, assuming it is effective, is it moral)? If we can't answer questions like these objectively, how are you going to get an AI to be "beneficial?"
If you're putting 80% through tunnels, I'd wonder if it would almost make sense to make it 100% tunnels and have it in a vacuum. You could reach absurd speeds with such a design, though only if your stops are sufficiently distant (you would want a hub/spoke model).
Since they are now recognized will these freeloading bastards now pay taxes as well?
Sure. They can get that witheld from their disability payments, since they'd probably qualify as mentally disabled.
Looking forward to the new generation of Walmart greeters.
Not every condition is life threatening, where humans would be willing to risk unknown side effects. And even if humans are willing to take that risk, there are bigger ethical concerns, like the potential for vulnerable people to be coerced into trials.
The other risk is that nobody would be willing to volunteer for trials, and thus the drug doesn't get researched. That means that a potential treatment doesn't get developed. Even if all the treatment is supposed to do is cure a headache, at some point a certain number of headaches adds up to a single cancer treatment in the whole quality-adjusted years-of-life thing.
There are plenty of animals that don't suffer the same was a chimps to, such as mice, that can be used for a lot of the tests.
The only reason you'd test in a chimp in the first place is because other animals are inadequate. They're expensive, and far more heavily regulated.
Suppose you're testing a medication that could cause cognitive impairment, or which otherwise targets the brain. Just what animal are you going to test it on? The only animals that have brains remotely similar to humans are all animals that have the same ethical issues as chimps, because they ARE so similar to humans.
Drugs aren't tested on higher primates until they're as sure as they can be that they're safe. At that point, it is either test on non-human primates, or just skip that and go straight to humans. How is the latter more ethical than the former?
10 cents might be a bit excessive, even if it was just 2 or 3 cents.
I suspect telemarketers are already paying something on that order of magnitude already. I doubt anybody gives them "unlimited" phone plans - at least not the $20/month kind. Most of them are probably using VoIP providers. I couldn't tell you how low the rates go in bulk, but most seem to be a few cents per minute for outgoing calls.
In pretty much every single other business, what Uber calls "surge pricing" is referred to as "price gouging," and is illegal.
What's the difference between what Uber is doing today and what a handful of gas stations tried to pull on 9\11\2001? The fact Uber is getting away with it?
Cite? If it is illegal, then you can reference the law.
In any case, making demand-based pricing (or gouging if you prefer) is often counter-productive. If a resource is scarce, you WANT people to change their behavior. If there is a hurricane and gas is scarce, then you want people to stop driving to the movie theater or whatever, and then there is gas available when people need to buy necessities or whatever. If you have to drive to the hospital, you're not going to care if gas is $10/gallon. However, that $10/gallon gas will prevent you from driving to your friend's house to hang out 25 miles away.
The alternative is that everybody runs out of gas, and then people with connections get their cheap gas, or you have wasteful activities like driving 100 miles to buy gas (thus wasting quite a bit of gas vs just tankering it in). During Hurricane Sandy there was quite a bit of scandal where people with connections got cheap gas from FEMA depots, and then everybody else just did without.
The exception should be situations where there isn't much competition, and there should of course not be collusion. That is just antitrust law.
It's the other way around buddy. If he builds the tools to pen-test an aircraft system with his own money he is under NO obligation to share that information.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that he's free to use those tools in an operational aircraft.
He can of course mess with an aircraft with the permission of the owner on the ground. Legally he probably can't mess with any aircraft in the air, since that would be a violation of its type certificate (it was certified with one set of software, and he introducing another).
You can't legally fly within 60nm of the center of DC without taking an online training course. If you want to fly to an airport right on the edge of the restricted area it is probably complicated, but for the most part you just need to stay outside of a certain distance and you're fine. If I were operating anywhere near that area i'd probably request flight following as well - then you're broadcasting a transponder code and talking to somebody who can tell you you're wandering towards trouble before they are scrambling jets.
Isn't that odd how during 9/11 NORAD went some two hours without scrambling a single jet, despite the normal response time measured in minutes they aim for and we have witnessed in every other instance of a flight going so far astray?
Every other instance before or after 9/11? A lot of attitudes changed after 9/11.
However, this wasn't a commercial flight. In general small aircraft can go from anywhere to anywhere and nobody takes notice. The exception is controlled interface and ADIZs, and the SFRA around DC is even more of an exception. Any aircraft that enters that airspace is subject to interception, or possibly even being shot down.
Google is moving more and more utilities to Play Services, which is not open source.
Play Services is not only about Google-related services, it is also about OAuth for instance.
Unknowing developers rely on Play Services, making their apps incompatible with pure-Android devices.
To solve this problem, an Open Source implementation of Google Play Services is being developed:
http://softwarerecs.stackexcha...
Google really needs to split Play Services.
I get that they want to make the framework updateable without a full OS update. I think that is a great idea. They should make an "Android Frameworks" app and release it as open source. Mandate that it be pre-installed on any device that passes their QA, and recommend that everybody else use it as well. Why wouldn't they - it is FOSS and just makes the device better.
Then limit Play Services to, well, Play Services. It might handle authentication to your Google Account, verify that paid apps are legit, and so on. If you remove it then you might not be able to use your Google account with the device, or use the Play Store, but otherwise Android works just fine. This can be proprietary.
Honestly, though, I'd actually like the Google Account stuff to be FOSS. I should be able to sign into my own server and have contacts/etc sync and backups and all that. It is great that you don't HAVE to use Google's services, but it would be better if you also had the option of rolling your own.
He failed to register the LSA. If everyone who did this were locked up for 3 years there would be a lot of harmless aviation enthusiasts in federal prison.
From my experience with regulators from several countries, they tend to not sweat the small stuff until it is obvious that you aren't paying attention to the big stuff. Then they go through everything with a fine-toothed comb and throw the book at you.
The guy flew into the DC SFRA. If the FAA doesn't ruin his life, then everybody and their uncle will be doing it, and then they don't really have a buffer zone in which to shoot down aircraft that are potentially threatening.
The fuel tank issue is a bit like citing somebody for worn wipers in a vehicular homicide investigation. They're just padding the charges.
Quite the contrary. He sent them a message a full hour in advance, saying that they should expect him.
The White House knew he was coming and expected him
You've got a lot of faith in Uncle Sam if you think the left hand (whomever reads info@barackobama.com) talks to the right hand (FAA, NORAD, USSS, and a few other agencies in the alphabet soup)
Heck, it's not even a Government address, it's BHO's campaign organization's address.
Agree. Can you imagine how much noise those addresses get?
This is a bit like explaining to the IRS that it shouldn't have been a problem that you filed your taxes late, because you told the postal delivery agent that you were running a few days behind when he was dropping off a package.
Pilot here. Even though this guy clearly did it intentionally, accidentally violating an airspace in a small plane without sophisticated navigation equipment is easier than you would think. Someone does it every once in a while. Don't get me wrong, it's still a big deal, but not a felony. I wouldn't ever fly near the D.C. area out of fear of doing exactly that. The airspace up there is pretty complicated.
You can't legally fly within 60nm of the center of DC without taking an online training course. If you want to fly to an airport right on the edge of the restricted area it is probably complicated, but for the most part you just need to stay outside of a certain distance and you're fine. If I were operating anywhere near that area i'd probably request flight following as well - then you're broadcasting a transponder code and talking to somebody who can tell you you're wandering towards trouble before they are scrambling jets.
Obviously flying IFR is the simplest solution. ATC tells you where to go and you follow the route and you're fine.
But, if you're just buzzing around sightseeing over the white house, then sure, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. They actually have lasers to illuminate aircraft to try to warn them off, so that shooting them down isn't their only recourse.
it's not like a government has ever lowered taxes because they had "too much revenue".
That is hardly true. US income taxes on the upper brackets are far lower than they used to be.
Companies work within existing tax laws, and they have nothing to be ashamed by abiding by current tax laws. If the government offers you a tax break for buying a new home, of course you are going to take the tax break - even if you think the tax break is total bullshit.
That sounds a bit like walking past somebody lying dying on the street, pointing out that there is no law that obligates you to help them, and then saying that there is nothing to be ashamed of when you refuse to do so.
If the government actually sets up a tax break to incentivize something, there is nothing dishonest from doing so. The problem with corporate tax avoidance is that it usually involves structuring one type of transaction as if it were a completely different type of transaction to claim a tax break that was never anticipated. That is why you find companies doing nonsense like buying municipal sewer systems in Europe and leasing them back to the government for free in perpetuity.
Or because as long as people are OK with that bit of intrusiveness every time they travel, they'll be more accepting of other restrictions on their freedom as well.
I think the other theory is more plausible. I don't think there is some massive conspiracy to increase government intrusion for its own sake, such that there are deliberate attempts to desensitize people to it. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of intrusion all the same, but the motive tends to be more directly tied to somebody with a stake. They don't want to monitor what you download just to do it - they want to monitor it because they get bribes from Hollywood and Hollywood wants to stop movie downloading, etc.
Whenever something bad happens there is ALWAYS a blame game. Actions that were perfectly reasonable get questioned if they were somehow tied to the chain of events. If somebody blows up a bus full of kids while it is stopped at a traffic light, some idiot is going to propose that school buses should have flashing lights and be able to drive through red lights to reduce the opportunity to attack them with RPGs.
It seems like a 100% certainty that at some point in time terrorists will attack another US airliner. Security can make that very difficult, and maybe it will happen in 10 years, or maybe it will happen in 50 years, but sooner or later somebody will figure out a way to do it. At that point, everybody is going to be pointing fingers at anybody who voted no when the bill came up that would have instituted some control that would have prevented that particular incident. Never mind that there are countless areas where you could tighten security and if you tightened them all we'd be flying naked on planes with our baggage in separate planes after having all gone through full body cavity searches.
You can call it "to the bottom" if you think you somehow benefit from high taxes. (I don't, because I work and pay taxes instead of sitting at home collecting a benefit check.)
Consider yourself lucky then. Many are born without the ability to work a single productive day in their life. Are you suggesting that they should be euthanized?
Let food-buyers pay for USDA inspections and medicine-buyers pay for FDA.
Yeah, that makes sense. If the poor can't afford taxes, just let them not eat.
The problem with these kinds of schemes is that they tend to be incredibly regressive. You can't have socialism without fairly high tax rates on the parts of the economy that actually produce wealth.
As Ms. Carnegie points out, if you want stuff taxed in your jurisdiction, change the law so that happens - dont wave the "spirit" of the law around as if it has any meaning other than a method of blackmail.
I think it would be far wiser to take the opposite approach.
The most effective form of enforcement is self-enforcement. You want to give companies incentive to just stick with boring accounting and to stop using schemes designed for tax avoidance. The best way to do that is not to create lots of well-defined rules to ban particular practices, because that means that companies can simply use different practices with relatively little risk. What you want to do is create a lot of uncertainty around whether a particular practice is legal or not. This means that companies are going to err on the side of caution, and minimize their use of tax avoidance schemes.
Any businessperson will tell you that the worst thing for a company is uncertainty in regulation. That means that in areas where you want business to grow, you want simple laws that get rid of the risk and allow companies to invest. On the other hand, in areas of the economy like derivatives and tax avoidance schemes that don't really create true value for the average citizen, you want there to be a LOT of uncertainty in risk. Make those CEOs find it impossible to sleep at night for fear that the FBI will kick down their doors while they're sleeping. Give them a reason to have their finances audited twice to make sure there isn't any activity that anybody might construe as a tax dodge. When somebody makes a minor mistake make their shareholders lose their retirement accounts. Then you'll see a return to simple accounting practices.