Bush proposed repealing the dividend tax, but didn't succeed in doing so. His 2003 tax cuts did end up cutting dividend tax rates for most people by reclassifying qualified dividends as capital gains instead of ordinary income, but they didn't eliminate the tax.
For example, they do most of the Zimbra development, created and maintain the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library, contribute a reasonable stream of patches to Apache and MySQL, and employ the creator of PHP. The projects will all no doubt outlast Yahoo's contributions, but a major stream of revenue and employment suddenly drying up would slow things down.
Yahoo Mail has many more users than Gmail, and tends to have a more mass-market (less techie) demographic, especially if you consider Yahoo Groups sort of related. Yahoo Messenger is of course orders of magnitude more popular than Google Talk.
That's a public-private partnership at best. If the U.S. government is paying $2 billion to subsidize something, there's no way you can call it "free-market".
Just about all "commercial" launchers either had their development directly funded by the government, or are relatively minor updates of an earlier rocket in the same family that was funded by the government. A combination of missile repurposing and direct funding from NASA, the US Air Force, and the Department of Defense accounts for the Atlas, Delta, Titan, and Centaur rocket families. In many cases even the minor updates are directly funded by the government, such as through the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program.
There are a handful of completely private launch systems, like the Falcon being developed by SpaceX, but they seem to still be in the test stage.
The "etc." these days is pretty small. There's Boeing, Lockheed, and then a handful of more specialized companies. And they don't operate on a very free-market basis with government contracts either: Generally the government provides up-front money to pay for development and so on, rather than just buying a product. The reason is that it costs too much to develop a product that the government might or might not buy, so nobody would do it. So you don't have privately-developed products, and therefore don't have a market.
What do you think hotel tax surcharges, rental car taxes, etc., etc. are?
If indeed it's lots of visitors paying the congestion charges rather than locals, I can't see anything happening except them getting even more popular. And the visitors should read up before barging their way into somewhere they shouldn't be driving.
If you live in S.F., you can take Muni pretty much anywhere. If you live outside S.F., you can commute to one of BART's plentiful parking garages instead of into downtown.
My job is fairly flexible on work hours, as long as I get stuff done. If I can sync my email before and after my commute and spend an hour of my commute on a train or bus responding to emails, that's an hour of work I don't have to do in the evening after I get home, or an hour I can leave the office earlier, depending on workload. If I were to drive, that time would be 100% wasted, because I couldn't get any work done.
The only U.S. city seriously considering adding congestion charges (at least seriously enough that it's likely to happen in the forseeable future) is New York City, and even there only for lower Manhattan. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the demographics and transit of New York City, but poor people there generally do not drive to work. A large proportion of poor (and even lower-middle-class) people don't even own cars at all. So a congestion charge is not going to hit them---it'll hit the generally well-off people who insisting on driving into lower Manhattan for work instead of taking the subway like everyone else.
New York City is, as far as I'm aware, the only city considering adding congestion pricing, and it's only considering it for lower Manhattan. Lower Manhattan, and NYC generally, is quite well served by public transit.
The first major city to introduce congestion charges, London, did so under its mayor Ken Livingstone, otherwise best known for belonging to the hard-left "Old Labour" faction of the Labour Party, and his nickname "Red Ken". His reasoning is that driving into a congested area during peak times, when you could instead take the tube or commuter rail, is a scarce luxury good, and should be taxed accordingly. The result is both an increase in quality of life for everyone else, and extra income to fund better public transport alternatives.
"Dumping" is the practice of selling products at a large loss. The classic dumping strategy (that caused the passage of anti-dumping laws) is for a large company with deep pockets to lose large amounts of money basically giving products away for nearly nothing for long enough that their competitors go bankrupt, then raise the prices back up when they successfully bankrupt them.
If you were to take gasoline, for example, an anti-dumping law would say that if your production cost is $2/gallon, and you're selling for $1/gallon, and a competitor who sues can show that you're selling it for a loss for predatory purposes, then what you're doing is illegal. But saying "everyone must sell gasoline for exactly $3.25 a gallon" or "everyone must sell gasoline for between $3.22 and $3.29 a gallon" is not an anti-dumping law, nor even close to it. That's just a price-fixing law---the sort of thing that would actually be illegal if oil companies got together and agreed to do it. That's more or less what's going on here---book sellers have price-fixed, only the government's blessed that arrangement, and indeed enforces it.
I can see why rhetorically you'd want to link them, but this has very little to do with anti-dumping laws; mandatory minimum pricing is a completely different beast from selling at huge losses in order to purposely bankrupt a competitor.
How is mandating price-fixing something that "causes competition"? If everyone is legally required to sell at more or less the same price, how will that benefit the consumer?
I can see anti-dumping laws, but prohibiting price variation entirely is not very similar.
Most countries have, especially in the past two decades, rationalized their copyrights under the (by now quite established) Berne Convention and Universal Copyright Convention. The U.S. recognizes other countries' copyrights as agreed in the treaty, and they recognize ours similarly. The treaties don't require countries to recognize weird-ass special cases other countries might establish.
For example, the UK claims a perpetual copyright on the King James Edition of the Bible. The US does not recognize this copyright, and considers the KJV, first published in 1611, to have long since entered the public domain. But this doesn't mean all US copyrights are invalid in the UK or something; the US and UK recognize each others' normal copyrights under the various international conventions, and the US just ignores the special-case KJV weirdness. I expect it will similarly ignore Egypt's special-case pyramid weirdness.
Even when film is "preserved", it degrades significantly over time. There are a lot of older films where copies exist but are nearly unwatchable. The more expensive digital preservation has the extra benefit of actually preserving the film intact.
The government apparently doesn't care if I waste all sorts of electricity by running my A/C down to 68 F in the summer instead of something more reasonable, doesn't care if I have some ridiculous 1500-Watt computer setup, etc., etc., but they get all upset if I have a 60-Watt incandescent bulb in my house?
I could see taxing total electricity usage, but this sort of micromanagement is ridiculous, especially when it starts from the really minor stuff. Of all the things in my house I could save energy on, fucking light bulbs aren't even in the top-10 list. I could get rid of all my light bulbs and I'd use about the same total amount of energy---my computers, A/C, and electric oven/stove account for nearly all my electricity usage.
The right way to do it would be to mandate total energy usage, either through an electricity tax or outright limits. Then people could decide if they want to run their A/C more, or get more efficient lighting, or whatever it is they want to do.
This legislation takes the stupid step of regulating residential lighting, a nearly negligible source of electricity usage (about 3% of the total), while doing nothing for the big sources of electric usage, like A/C.
The government may have an interest in reducing total electricity usage, but it shouldn't be the government's business how people allocate their electricity, and it certainly shouldn't try to start mandating stupid things about the minor electricity usages while ignoring the big ones.
Residential lighting accounts for around 3% of total U.S. electricity usage. You could completely ban all light bulbs of any kind and you would have only a marginal effect on energy loads and on the environment.
By far a bigger issue than incandescent bulbs is air conditioning, especially because it tends to define peak electric loads, which are a bigger problem than off-peak loads. Why not mandate more efficient air conditioning? Or at least mandate that government-owned buildings keep the temperature at something reasonable (not 72 F)? Or at least stick to regulating commercial lighting?
I'm not against government regulation in all cases, but there's a tradeoff between regulating what someone does in their own home versus the benefit of regulating it. In this case the benefit is so small that I wouldn't say it's worth the intrusion.
Among American companies, EA is the giant in the industry, with net annual income of around $225 million. Compare to Disney's net annual income of just under $3 billion, and the amount of cash on available to grease politicians' palms isn't even in the same ballpark.
I had clicked "reply" and was about to comment that no online post of this length on such a matter should fail to promote Ron Paul. I had not of course read the whole post at that time since this is Slashdot, but fortunately before I actually posted my witty reply I noticed that you promote Ron Paul at the end. Then I posted this reply anyway.
The Typ-1h is a plug-in hybrid, and Aptera's numbers are starting with a full wall charge. Their own site (click on "Performance") admits that the actual long-run mileage "after 350-400 miles" "eventually plummets to around 130 mpg at highway speeds where it will stay all day until you plug it back in and charge it up". The 300 mpg figure, from their chart, looks like it's for a 100-mile trip after a wall charge. A 50-mile trip after a wall charge is 1000 mpg, so we could quote that too, but neither is total energy usage, whereas 130 mpg is (still impressive, but not 300).
I'm not sure what the result would be, but in your calculations with plug-in hybrids, you really should add the cost of electric charging. The 300mpg figure is average over a single trip of 120 miles after starting with a fully-charged battery, not the mileage you would get if you ran it as a pure hybrid with no wall-socket charging. By those standards, all-electric cars get infinite mpg, and are therefore "free", if you get magic free electricity.
Modern x86 chips have had fairly non-x86 internals for quite some time. I believe in Intel's line the Pentium Pro marked a shift away from fairly-literal implementations of the ISA to more or less translation: although the x86 ISA is thoroughly CISC, the Pentium Pro is mostly a RISC design.
They can't be completely decoupled of course, but it's hardly like x86 chips are designed by taking the ISA and literally implementing it in silicon.
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Bush proposed repealing the dividend tax, but didn't succeed in doing so. His 2003 tax cuts did end up cutting dividend tax rates for most people by reclassifying qualified dividends as capital gains instead of ordinary income, but they didn't eliminate the tax.
For example, they do most of the Zimbra development, created and maintain the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library, contribute a reasonable stream of patches to Apache and MySQL, and employ the creator of PHP. The projects will all no doubt outlast Yahoo's contributions, but a major stream of revenue and employment suddenly drying up would slow things down.
Yahoo Mail has many more users than Gmail, and tends to have a more mass-market (less techie) demographic, especially if you consider Yahoo Groups sort of related. Yahoo Messenger is of course orders of magnitude more popular than Google Talk.
That's a public-private partnership at best. If the U.S. government is paying $2 billion to subsidize something, there's no way you can call it "free-market".
Just about all "commercial" launchers either had their development directly funded by the government, or are relatively minor updates of an earlier rocket in the same family that was funded by the government. A combination of missile repurposing and direct funding from NASA, the US Air Force, and the Department of Defense accounts for the Atlas, Delta, Titan, and Centaur rocket families. In many cases even the minor updates are directly funded by the government, such as through the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program.
There are a handful of completely private launch systems, like the Falcon being developed by SpaceX, but they seem to still be in the test stage.
The "etc." these days is pretty small. There's Boeing, Lockheed, and then a handful of more specialized companies. And they don't operate on a very free-market basis with government contracts either: Generally the government provides up-front money to pay for development and so on, rather than just buying a product. The reason is that it costs too much to develop a product that the government might or might not buy, so nobody would do it. So you don't have privately-developed products, and therefore don't have a market.
What do you think hotel tax surcharges, rental car taxes, etc., etc. are?
If indeed it's lots of visitors paying the congestion charges rather than locals, I can't see anything happening except them getting even more popular. And the visitors should read up before barging their way into somewhere they shouldn't be driving.
If you live in S.F., you can take Muni pretty much anywhere. If you live outside S.F., you can commute to one of BART's plentiful parking garages instead of into downtown.
My job is fairly flexible on work hours, as long as I get stuff done. If I can sync my email before and after my commute and spend an hour of my commute on a train or bus responding to emails, that's an hour of work I don't have to do in the evening after I get home, or an hour I can leave the office earlier, depending on workload. If I were to drive, that time would be 100% wasted, because I couldn't get any work done.
The only U.S. city seriously considering adding congestion charges (at least seriously enough that it's likely to happen in the forseeable future) is New York City, and even there only for lower Manhattan. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the demographics and transit of New York City, but poor people there generally do not drive to work. A large proportion of poor (and even lower-middle-class) people don't even own cars at all. So a congestion charge is not going to hit them---it'll hit the generally well-off people who insisting on driving into lower Manhattan for work instead of taking the subway like everyone else.
New York City is, as far as I'm aware, the only city considering adding congestion pricing, and it's only considering it for lower Manhattan. Lower Manhattan, and NYC generally, is quite well served by public transit.
The first major city to introduce congestion charges, London, did so under its mayor Ken Livingstone, otherwise best known for belonging to the hard-left "Old Labour" faction of the Labour Party, and his nickname "Red Ken". His reasoning is that driving into a congested area during peak times, when you could instead take the tube or commuter rail, is a scarce luxury good, and should be taxed accordingly. The result is both an increase in quality of life for everyone else, and extra income to fund better public transport alternatives.
"Dumping" is the practice of selling products at a large loss. The classic dumping strategy (that caused the passage of anti-dumping laws) is for a large company with deep pockets to lose large amounts of money basically giving products away for nearly nothing for long enough that their competitors go bankrupt, then raise the prices back up when they successfully bankrupt them.
If you were to take gasoline, for example, an anti-dumping law would say that if your production cost is $2/gallon, and you're selling for $1/gallon, and a competitor who sues can show that you're selling it for a loss for predatory purposes, then what you're doing is illegal. But saying "everyone must sell gasoline for exactly $3.25 a gallon" or "everyone must sell gasoline for between $3.22 and $3.29 a gallon" is not an anti-dumping law, nor even close to it. That's just a price-fixing law---the sort of thing that would actually be illegal if oil companies got together and agreed to do it. That's more or less what's going on here---book sellers have price-fixed, only the government's blessed that arrangement, and indeed enforces it.
I can see why rhetorically you'd want to link them, but this has very little to do with anti-dumping laws; mandatory minimum pricing is a completely different beast from selling at huge losses in order to purposely bankrupt a competitor.
How is mandating price-fixing something that "causes competition"? If everyone is legally required to sell at more or less the same price, how will that benefit the consumer?
I can see anti-dumping laws, but prohibiting price variation entirely is not very similar.
Most countries have, especially in the past two decades, rationalized their copyrights under the (by now quite established) Berne Convention and Universal Copyright Convention. The U.S. recognizes other countries' copyrights as agreed in the treaty, and they recognize ours similarly. The treaties don't require countries to recognize weird-ass special cases other countries might establish.
For example, the UK claims a perpetual copyright on the King James Edition of the Bible. The US does not recognize this copyright, and considers the KJV, first published in 1611, to have long since entered the public domain. But this doesn't mean all US copyrights are invalid in the UK or something; the US and UK recognize each others' normal copyrights under the various international conventions, and the US just ignores the special-case KJV weirdness. I expect it will similarly ignore Egypt's special-case pyramid weirdness.
Even when film is "preserved", it degrades significantly over time. There are a lot of older films where copies exist but are nearly unwatchable. The more expensive digital preservation has the extra benefit of actually preserving the film intact.
The government apparently doesn't care if I waste all sorts of electricity by running my A/C down to 68 F in the summer instead of something more reasonable, doesn't care if I have some ridiculous 1500-Watt computer setup, etc., etc., but they get all upset if I have a 60-Watt incandescent bulb in my house?
I could see taxing total electricity usage, but this sort of micromanagement is ridiculous, especially when it starts from the really minor stuff. Of all the things in my house I could save energy on, fucking light bulbs aren't even in the top-10 list. I could get rid of all my light bulbs and I'd use about the same total amount of energy---my computers, A/C, and electric oven/stove account for nearly all my electricity usage.
The right way to do it would be to mandate total energy usage, either through an electricity tax or outright limits. Then people could decide if they want to run their A/C more, or get more efficient lighting, or whatever it is they want to do.
This legislation takes the stupid step of regulating residential lighting, a nearly negligible source of electricity usage (about 3% of the total), while doing nothing for the big sources of electric usage, like A/C.
The government may have an interest in reducing total electricity usage, but it shouldn't be the government's business how people allocate their electricity, and it certainly shouldn't try to start mandating stupid things about the minor electricity usages while ignoring the big ones.
Residential lighting accounts for around 3% of total U.S. electricity usage. You could completely ban all light bulbs of any kind and you would have only a marginal effect on energy loads and on the environment.
By far a bigger issue than incandescent bulbs is air conditioning, especially because it tends to define peak electric loads, which are a bigger problem than off-peak loads. Why not mandate more efficient air conditioning? Or at least mandate that government-owned buildings keep the temperature at something reasonable (not 72 F)? Or at least stick to regulating commercial lighting?
I'm not against government regulation in all cases, but there's a tradeoff between regulating what someone does in their own home versus the benefit of regulating it. In this case the benefit is so small that I wouldn't say it's worth the intrusion.
Among American companies, EA is the giant in the industry, with net annual income of around $225 million. Compare to Disney's net annual income of just under $3 billion, and the amount of cash on available to grease politicians' palms isn't even in the same ballpark.
I had clicked "reply" and was about to comment that no online post of this length on such a matter should fail to promote Ron Paul. I had not of course read the whole post at that time since this is Slashdot, but fortunately before I actually posted my witty reply I noticed that you promote Ron Paul at the end. Then I posted this reply anyway.
The Typ-1h is a plug-in hybrid, and Aptera's numbers are starting with a full wall charge. Their own site (click on "Performance") admits that the actual long-run mileage "after 350-400 miles" "eventually plummets to around 130 mpg at highway speeds where it will stay all day until you plug it back in and charge it up". The 300 mpg figure, from their chart, looks like it's for a 100-mile trip after a wall charge. A 50-mile trip after a wall charge is 1000 mpg, so we could quote that too, but neither is total energy usage, whereas 130 mpg is (still impressive, but not 300).
Basically everyone under 40 in Scandinavia speaks good english. Better english than many Americans, in fact.
I'm not sure what the result would be, but in your calculations with plug-in hybrids, you really should add the cost of electric charging. The 300mpg figure is average over a single trip of 120 miles after starting with a fully-charged battery, not the mileage you would get if you ran it as a pure hybrid with no wall-socket charging. By those standards, all-electric cars get infinite mpg, and are therefore "free", if you get magic free electricity.
Modern x86 chips have had fairly non-x86 internals for quite some time. I believe in Intel's line the Pentium Pro marked a shift away from fairly-literal implementations of the ISA to more or less translation: although the x86 ISA is thoroughly CISC, the Pentium Pro is mostly a RISC design.
They can't be completely decoupled of course, but it's hardly like x86 chips are designed by taking the ISA and literally implementing it in silicon.