Somehow, lowering the tax bracket (which they were already avoiding completely according to you) lowers the price of tax preparation advisers' services or the time it takes them to do their job?
Yes.
Getting 20% off on your taxes from 90% is only 70%, but a same cut from 70% means you're now paying ONLY half.
No. 20% of 90% taxes is 18% of your marginal income. 20% of 70% taxes is 14% of your marginal income. That means the tax prep guy is delivering more than 20% less value than they were before. So it's likely that they're getting paid that much less as well.
Or if that's confusing, take 20% off of different tax brackets and watch as the difference goes down - you get less and less for the same cut the lower you go.
So the rich guy gets the money without having to pay the tax prep guy. What makes this so hard for you to understand?
3 - being needed regardless of the current tax bracket, tax prep advisers have no reason to lower the price of their services.
You wanna keep your millions, give them thousands. Only thing that matters in lowering their prices is competition.
Lower demand for their services and that competition. Supply and demand works in the tax prep market just like anywhere else.
5 - full price of services is based on the input and complexity of one's tax situation.
It's NOT about the current maximum tax bracket, but about HOW MUCH IS there to be TAXED.
Another pointless observation. Complexity of one's tax situation is in large part dependent on how much tax there is to avoid. A lot of tax to avoid can justify very complex and costly schemes. They're not going to say, create dozens of shell corporations just to avoid paying $10 more in tax. Dropping the marginal tax rate by more than half greatly cut the incentive to create complex tax avoidance schemes.Simultaneously killing a lot of the exploitable loopholes helped reduce that complexity further.
But about this blimp, how many 50 cal rounds do you think it can take before floating down to the ground? Everyone is talking about missiles, I'm think anti-aircraft guns or a planes 50 cal machine guns, simple but effective. As others have said as well, the US fights a lot of wars where our enemy has inferior technology, so a bullet would probably be the best weapon they have.
It probably can take quite a few 50 cal rounds. These balloons have small pressure differences between inside and outside. I'd wager it would drift down slowly once hit. The equipment carried, would of course be more susceptible to that sort of thing.
I've heard a story of the Canadian airforce trying to shoot down a balloon that was just above the upper ceiling at which their aircraft could fly. Oh, google found the story. Turns out both Canadian and UK aircraft (possibly the US too) took a lot of shots at a 25 story balloon.
The balloon also remained aloft after two Canadian air force CF-18 fighters fired more than 1,000 rounds of cannon shells into it off the coast of Newfoundland
I imagine the balloon was a lot higher than 20,000 feet too.
The anti-air weapons seems more likely to be effective since it's a combination of explosion and shrapnel, the balloon is as unarmored as you can get, and it's a slow moving target relative to the gunner. But all you have to do is raise the height of the balloon. If it's above 50,000 feet, there's not much that can touch it. For what it's worth, you can fly balloons past 100,000 feet relatively easily.
To researchers surprise the waters nearest waste treatment plants and large populations did not show the highest concentration of caffeine. High levels were found in Carl Washburn State Park, for example, an area not near any potential pollution sources.
I don't think the story backs your assertion. Plus I think it's a bad error to attribute caffeine to humans when there are natural sources for it and no way currently to distinguish between the two. We may well find that most northwest caffeine found in water comes from undiscovered plants or fungi growing in the area rather than humans.
US response should have been proportional (strategic rather than emotional).
Who says it wasn't? Al Qaeda wasn't just some crooks hiding in a secret lair. They were a significant ally of the Taliban, maintaining a fair-sized militia in Northern Afghanistan. In turn, the Taliban provided them with significant support. A "strategic" response which didn't also take out the Taliban somehow wouldn't have been effective.
It is an awful big threat for someone who wasn't even breaking UK law aside from evading the extradition to Sweden. And I must wonder what got Ecuador to grant asylum.
I think you'll find more American civilians were killed by fellow Americans than any aggressor before or since.
But that wasn't a FOREIGN aggressor. And frankly, more Americans (and more people in general) have been killed by Kansas swine than any American aggressors.
And it can fly at 20,000 feet. Sitting duck for a SAM.
While that does seem low altitude for such a large blimp, there are several things to note. First, it doesn't have that much of a radar signature and no thermal signature. Second, what's a SAM going to do to it? Pop a few cells? Just pick it up when it lands, fix the bag, replace whatever got broke, and refly it.
Frankly, I'd be more concerned about what would happen if they lost control of the vehicle. If it went into China or Iran (and perhaps Russia too) before it landed, then that would be yet another free technology gift from the US. Not such a big deal, if it's using off the shelf components, but a big deal, if it happens to be carrying hundreds of millions of dollars of specialized espionage gear.
Huh, that's pretty low. I thought they'd have it up to 60,000 feet or higher. Maybe that will happen to a future prototype. They do need to figure out other issues such as reliably launching something that massive in moderately poor weather.
there was a story recently about a marked increase in the amount of caffeine in waterways, likely from human waste.
Likely from plants, which is where caffeine comes from in the first place. And it wasn't a "marked increase", but just detection of caffeine. I imagine some regions especially deserts would see an increase in caffeine due to more plants and water from human agriculture and landscaping.
Substitute the words car and drive for flying car and fly and you'll see why. A terrorist could just as easily and with as much success load up a pedophile van with explosives and drive at 90mph into a building tomorrow.
Not most federal buildings. They have placed obstacles around entrances to that sort of attack these days. A similar thing could be done with regular buildings should that become necessary. But it takes a lot more effort to harden buildings against attacks from the air.
And one can drop stuff from a flying car. A bunch of bowling balls dropped from high altitude or a unguided bomb can do quite a bit of damage.
I also might add here that my "small bubble" accounts for expanding existing businesses with loans. There was no "weaselly shift", just a misunderstanding on your part about what I was talking about.
As to company founders taking a loan proposal to a bank, perhaps you ought to read this other reply to my original post. I think he explains the key problem pretty well.
They exist simply to sniff out information about other bids that they shouldn't have.
And once again, no mechanism by which they do it, that is, gain this alleged information. HFT just magically pulls it out.
Anyone claiming that this provides real liquidity (it only provides the illusion of liquidity) is being dishonest and is probably profiting from this scam by working for one of the HFT firms.
There's a simpler explanation. Namely, that I am right. HFT does provide liquidity. Unlike your claim above, it isn't magic, but just a natural consequence of trading in that frequency domain.
Frankly, I don't think you have any understanding of HFT.
HFT Traders take a percentage of a company w/o ever actually owning it.
Doesn't work that way. You don't magically own a portion of a company just because you trade in milliseconds instead of minutes. It's amazing the claims that are made about HFT.
Look, you're going to pieces here. It's not at all complicated. Most rich like anyone else want to pay less for what they get. In the 50s, they did it by paying a middle man, the tax preparer, to come up with schemes to legally avoid paying those infamously high taxes. Now they pay similar though lower taxes, but the tax preparer doesn't contribute as much and hence, the rich tend to pay less in tax preparation as well as in taxes.
So there it is. The rich want to pay less. The tax preparers on the other hand, want the rich to have to jump through profitable hoops to avoid paying taxes legally. You could have just thought about it for a few minutes and get this far.
Market makers are required to guarantee liquidity in certain exchanges.
Remember I said "trading for the sake of generating liquidity"? That's an example.
Also, people buy and sell for other reason than short term trading.
Mostly irrelevant, except of course, they're going to be more reluctant to invest in markets where it is very hard to divest from.
The point being that when there is sufficient liquidity for HFT to exist there is very little value left in additional liquidity that HFT can provide.
Why do you think that? There's short term traders and they'd appreciate the liquidity that HFT provides. Short term traders in turn provide liquidity that long term investors can appreciate.
And when it would be very valuable for HFT to provide additional liquidity they provide no additional liquidity at all, sometimes proceeded by amplifying volatility before ceasing thier trading.
Nobody likes giving away free money. It's be very valuable for you to just give me money, for example.
So what? When one speaks of "profit without risk", as kqs had, then that's the ideal scenario for leverage. There isn't risk where there shouldn't be risk.
We see plenty of flaming wreckage indicating that the ideal scenario didn't happen. The explanation can't be that ratings were incorrect because there's no connection between wealth and the value of such assets that aren't part of that wealth.
Merely, expanding a business doesn't qualify to me as " new substantial business ventures [which] got off the ground or went public". Sure it can be, if the expansion is ambitious or novel enough. The original poster seemed to be speaking more of creating novel businesses rather expanding existing ones.
It still remains that these banks supposedly were operating like supply shops for a gold rush.Somebody else was supposedly taking most of the risks.
They should have been able to dump what currently was in the pipeline and take the proceeds elsewhere. The massive fail indicates that the banks were either leveraged up to their eyeballs (well we do know that was the case for a lot of them) or they were using their own product (well, we do know that was going on as well).
jhoegl's story is of banks that could do no wrong (well ignoring bailing out). But that simply doesn't agree with what happened.
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Somehow, lowering the tax bracket (which they were already avoiding completely according to you) lowers the price of tax preparation advisers' services or the time it takes them to do their job?
Yes.
Getting 20% off on your taxes from 90% is only 70%, but a same cut from 70% means you're now paying ONLY half.
No. 20% of 90% taxes is 18% of your marginal income. 20% of 70% taxes is 14% of your marginal income. That means the tax prep guy is delivering more than 20% less value than they were before. So it's likely that they're getting paid that much less as well.
Or if that's confusing, take 20% off of different tax brackets and watch as the difference goes down - you get less and less for the same cut the lower you go.
So the rich guy gets the money without having to pay the tax prep guy. What makes this so hard for you to understand?
3 - being needed regardless of the current tax bracket, tax prep advisers have no reason to lower the price of their services. You wanna keep your millions, give them thousands. Only thing that matters in lowering their prices is competition.
Lower demand for their services and that competition. Supply and demand works in the tax prep market just like anywhere else.
5 - full price of services is based on the input and complexity of one's tax situation. It's NOT about the current maximum tax bracket, but about HOW MUCH IS there to be TAXED.
Another pointless observation. Complexity of one's tax situation is in large part dependent on how much tax there is to avoid. A lot of tax to avoid can justify very complex and costly schemes. They're not going to say, create dozens of shell corporations just to avoid paying $10 more in tax. Dropping the marginal tax rate by more than half greatly cut the incentive to create complex tax avoidance schemes.Simultaneously killing a lot of the exploitable loopholes helped reduce that complexity further.
But about this blimp, how many 50 cal rounds do you think it can take before floating down to the ground? Everyone is talking about missiles, I'm think anti-aircraft guns or a planes 50 cal machine guns, simple but effective. As others have said as well, the US fights a lot of wars where our enemy has inferior technology, so a bullet would probably be the best weapon they have.
It probably can take quite a few 50 cal rounds. These balloons have small pressure differences between inside and outside. I'd wager it would drift down slowly once hit. The equipment carried, would of course be more susceptible to that sort of thing.
I've heard a story of the Canadian airforce trying to shoot down a balloon that was just above the upper ceiling at which their aircraft could fly. Oh, google found the story. Turns out both Canadian and UK aircraft (possibly the US too) took a lot of shots at a 25 story balloon.
The balloon also remained aloft after two Canadian air force CF-18 fighters fired more than 1,000 rounds of cannon shells into it off the coast of Newfoundland
I imagine the balloon was a lot higher than 20,000 feet too.
The anti-air weapons seems more likely to be effective since it's a combination of explosion and shrapnel, the balloon is as unarmored as you can get, and it's a slow moving target relative to the gunner. But all you have to do is raise the height of the balloon. If it's above 50,000 feet, there's not much that can touch it. For what it's worth, you can fly balloons past 100,000 feet relatively easily.
To researchers surprise the waters nearest waste treatment plants and large populations did not show the highest concentration of caffeine. High levels were found in Carl Washburn State Park, for example, an area not near any potential pollution sources.
I don't think the story backs your assertion. Plus I think it's a bad error to attribute caffeine to humans when there are natural sources for it and no way currently to distinguish between the two. We may well find that most northwest caffeine found in water comes from undiscovered plants or fungi growing in the area rather than humans.
but the top damn sure will unless they fly a super huge umbrella over it.
So will the ground. Paint the ship so it has a similar heat signature as the ground and/or clouds.
US response should have been proportional (strategic rather than emotional).
Who says it wasn't? Al Qaeda wasn't just some crooks hiding in a secret lair. They were a significant ally of the Taliban, maintaining a fair-sized militia in Northern Afghanistan. In turn, the Taliban provided them with significant support. A "strategic" response which didn't also take out the Taliban somehow wouldn't have been effective.
It is an awful big threat for someone who wasn't even breaking UK law aside from evading the extradition to Sweden. And I must wonder what got Ecuador to grant asylum.
I suppose they're looking for parasites and such. Many parasites leave obvious traces in feces.
I think you'll find more American civilians were killed by fellow Americans than any aggressor before or since.
But that wasn't a FOREIGN aggressor. And frankly, more Americans (and more people in general) have been killed by Kansas swine than any American aggressors.
And it can fly at 20,000 feet. Sitting duck for a SAM.
While that does seem low altitude for such a large blimp, there are several things to note. First, it doesn't have that much of a radar signature and no thermal signature. Second, what's a SAM going to do to it? Pop a few cells? Just pick it up when it lands, fix the bag, replace whatever got broke, and refly it.
Frankly, I'd be more concerned about what would happen if they lost control of the vehicle. If it went into China or Iran (and perhaps Russia too) before it landed, then that would be yet another free technology gift from the US. Not such a big deal, if it's using off the shelf components, but a big deal, if it happens to be carrying hundreds of millions of dollars of specialized espionage gear.
Why is it bouyed with helium, which is incredibly expensive?
Well, in part because helium is not incredibly expensive.
Huh, that's pretty low. I thought they'd have it up to 60,000 feet or higher. Maybe that will happen to a future prototype. They do need to figure out other issues such as reliably launching something that massive in moderately poor weather.
there was a story recently about a marked increase in the amount of caffeine in waterways, likely from human waste.
Likely from plants, which is where caffeine comes from in the first place. And it wasn't a "marked increase", but just detection of caffeine. I imagine some regions especially deserts would see an increase in caffeine due to more plants and water from human agriculture and landscaping.
I thought the whole car thing was dying because we're running out of oil.
What makes you think that is an issue?
Substitute the words car and drive for flying car and fly and you'll see why. A terrorist could just as easily and with as much success load up a pedophile van with explosives and drive at 90mph into a building tomorrow.
Not most federal buildings. They have placed obstacles around entrances to that sort of attack these days. A similar thing could be done with regular buildings should that become necessary. But it takes a lot more effort to harden buildings against attacks from the air.
And one can drop stuff from a flying car. A bunch of bowling balls dropped from high altitude or a unguided bomb can do quite a bit of damage.
I also might add here that my "small bubble" accounts for expanding existing businesses with loans. There was no "weaselly shift", just a misunderstanding on your part about what I was talking about.
As to company founders taking a loan proposal to a bank, perhaps you ought to read this other reply to my original post. I think he explains the key problem pretty well.
They exist simply to sniff out information about other bids that they shouldn't have.
And once again, no mechanism by which they do it, that is, gain this alleged information. HFT just magically pulls it out.
Anyone claiming that this provides real liquidity (it only provides the illusion of liquidity) is being dishonest and is probably profiting from this scam by working for one of the HFT firms.
There's a simpler explanation. Namely, that I am right. HFT does provide liquidity. Unlike your claim above, it isn't magic, but just a natural consequence of trading in that frequency domain.
Frankly, I don't think you have any understanding of HFT.
This has already been discussed. They provide liquidity, narrow the spread, generate some cool spinoffs, all that.
HFT Traders take a percentage of a company w/o ever actually owning it.
Doesn't work that way. You don't magically own a portion of a company just because you trade in milliseconds instead of minutes. It's amazing the claims that are made about HFT.
Imagine if you did have VTOL personal transports.
Helicopters. VTOL personal transport has been around a while.
Most people are intimidated by the amount it costs to *drive* somewhere.
I doubt it. They're probably more intimidated by the time it takes to drive somewhere.
Look, you're going to pieces here. It's not at all complicated. Most rich like anyone else want to pay less for what they get. In the 50s, they did it by paying a middle man, the tax preparer, to come up with schemes to legally avoid paying those infamously high taxes. Now they pay similar though lower taxes, but the tax preparer doesn't contribute as much and hence, the rich tend to pay less in tax preparation as well as in taxes.
So there it is. The rich want to pay less. The tax preparers on the other hand, want the rich to have to jump through profitable hoops to avoid paying taxes legally. You could have just thought about it for a few minutes and get this far.
Market makers are required to guarantee liquidity in certain exchanges.
Remember I said "trading for the sake of generating liquidity"? That's an example.
Also, people buy and sell for other reason than short term trading.
Mostly irrelevant, except of course, they're going to be more reluctant to invest in markets where it is very hard to divest from.
The point being that when there is sufficient liquidity for HFT to exist there is very little value left in additional liquidity that HFT can provide.
Why do you think that? There's short term traders and they'd appreciate the liquidity that HFT provides. Short term traders in turn provide liquidity that long term investors can appreciate.
And when it would be very valuable for HFT to provide additional liquidity they provide no additional liquidity at all, sometimes proceeded by amplifying volatility before ceasing thier trading.
Nobody likes giving away free money. It's be very valuable for you to just give me money, for example.
So you had risk where there shouldn't be risk
So what? When one speaks of "profit without risk", as kqs had, then that's the ideal scenario for leverage. There isn't risk where there shouldn't be risk.
We see plenty of flaming wreckage indicating that the ideal scenario didn't happen. The explanation can't be that ratings were incorrect because there's no connection between wealth and the value of such assets that aren't part of that wealth.
Merely, expanding a business doesn't qualify to me as " new substantial business ventures [which] got off the ground or went public". Sure it can be, if the expansion is ambitious or novel enough. The original poster seemed to be speaking more of creating novel businesses rather expanding existing ones.
It still remains that these banks supposedly were operating like supply shops for a gold rush.Somebody else was supposedly taking most of the risks.
They should have been able to dump what currently was in the pipeline and take the proceeds elsewhere. The massive fail indicates that the banks were either leveraged up to their eyeballs (well we do know that was the case for a lot of them) or they were using their own product (well, we do know that was going on as well).
jhoegl's story is of banks that could do no wrong (well ignoring bailing out). But that simply doesn't agree with what happened.