You seem not to understand how insurance works. Insurance companies carefully calculate the cost of insuring certain market segments, and they base their premium rates on those. That's how they avoid going out of business.
Offering lower rates to a certain group will indeed attract more business for that group, but it will mean losing money, which companies in general don't like to do. It isn't going to attract much business to other groups. When I talk to an agent, I want to know how much I'll be paying, not how much somebody else would be paying.
If an insurance company offers a reduced rate to a group, it is because they have figured that that group is lesser risk.
Driving skill or safety? I don't think my driving skills are up to average. On the other hand, I get into sufficiently few accidents that I get the maximum safety discount on my insurance. I allow for my lack of skill (and possibly overcompensate), and don't do anything likely to cause an accident.
I see drivers doing stupid things also. I also see many more drivers driving well. I remember the stupid ones better, since (a) they're the ones I have to watch for, (b) they're the ones who probably inconvenienced me, and (c) they're the ones I address comments to from the privacy of my vehicle. However, almost every time I see a driver do a boneheaded maneuver, I see many more people just driving like they should.
The 97% consensus is real and valid. Other studies have shown the same thing. They were explicitly to demonstrate the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming.
Could you provide a more specific cite for the climate models being wrong? The IPCC wrote a lot of stuff, and I couldn't easily find it. It also seems odd that you rely on the IPCC for one thing and disregard their findings for other things.
There's already a good many problems in the world that appear to be caused by global warming, and I'd rather they didn't get too much worse.
So why are you uncomfortable? Is it because you keep thinking about other people's genitals? If you're in the men's room, you're not going to be uncomfortable because a vagina goes in. You're going to be uncomfortable if someone who appears to be a woman comes in. The old idea that you go to the rest room you fit into still works.
I'd really rather not go into the men's room and have you staring at my crotch wondering what secrets are in there.
The idea behind the carbon tax is to internalize an externality and let the market decide what to do. If nuclear power plants are then the cheapest, we get nukes. If solar power and wind are the cheapest, we get solar and wind. The market is far better at optimizing than you or I are.
The reason we're in this situation is that burning fossil fuel is a cheap way of generating energy, and fossil fuels are a very convenient way to create mobile energy sources for use on vehicles. The government is not involved in making that so. The market fails because the people making the decisions pay only a small amount of some of the costs they generate. People chose to pollute because it was the cheapest thing to do. We have seen that time and time again, and the only effective way to stop that is government action.
I fail to see why reducing taxes on certain people, or letting the market do things, is supposed to cause dependence on the government.
The Japanese government in 1941 did not intend to sign a suicide pact. They had a strategy, which they screwed up on December 7, 1941. Kim knows what would happen if he attacks out, and he's a psychopath, not suicidal or honor-driven. North Korea is still at war legally, but not practically. The peace holds.
For purposes of terrorism, there isn't that tremendous amount of difference between Pakistan having nukes (which they so) or North Korea. Muslim terrorism isn't the only threat here, but it's the biggest one.
You might want to take another look at universities, but first either stopping the hallucinogens or starting anti-psychotics. I've been in academia and seen how it works. Some of it is ugly, but it's not nearly as bad as you say.
What I most want out of taxpayer-funded research grants is good research. Responding to FOIA requests is not doing research. If FOIA requests take up a significant amount of research time and effort, somebody's wasting my tax money, and it isn't the researchers.
You do realize what happens if the exchange mixes up your Bitcoin so it's impossible to keep track of it, and the IRS wants to tax you on your Bitcoin transaction. You will have no way of telling the IRS how much tax you should pay, and they're likely to make some assumptions and charge you more than you would have paid with decent records.
Question: if I pay for something from ten wallets, are the transaction fees different from if I use one? One problem with Bitcoin right now is that individual transactions are expensive.
Attempts by the government to tax Bitcoin will either make it harder to transact Bitcoin or land people in debt or jail. Currently, it's taxed as a commodity. However, if you do deals in it, buying something essentially counts as cashing out, so you have to keep track of which bitcoin you're using in what purchase and what its basis value was.
They aren't completely arbitrary, and can't be manipulated on a whim.
A bond is a promise to pay me money at a given time. As long as the issuer doesn't go out of business, and you can buy bond funds to smooth out the risk, you get money. Stocks are ownership in a company, and as long as the company is profitable somebody's going to want to buy your stocks. Stocks often pay dividends. Options are the ability to buy or sell X for $Y at some point in the future. If X has real value, the option has real value. Unlike stocks and bonds, options are very likely to be useless. If I buy the ability to sell X for $Y next year, and next year it's selling for $Y+$Z, I can just throw away the option and sell at a higher price. They're a lot more speculative. I'm not going to say anything about CDRs.
Bitcoin doesn't promise anything. It doesn't provide a claim on anything. It doesn't promise anything in the future.
You can do that with a pyramid scheme, if you're fast enough. You buy 100 shares in South Seas for $10 each, take your dividends from the peopel who bought in after you, and sell them for $100 each. You do have to get the timing right.
Since an infinite dollar bill is equal in value to two infinite dollar bills, the merchant would make an infinite amount of money on each transaction. The merchant does need to send someone to the bank with an infinite dollar bill to get enough to make change.
Sure. However, my house is good for keeping stuff around, inviting friends and family over, showering, using the toilet, sleeping, etc. It's also a permanently scarce resource that is in demand for its practical use. USD in the US are good for paying off the government. Moreover, since I'm required to have some accounting in USD, I may as well just do my accounting in USD. All merchants in the country will accept my dollars. (Paper money is not an IOU from the government. It used to be; an old silver certificate would say that the government would pay you a dollar in exchange for the piece of paper. A modern federal reserve note is that money.)
Bitcoin is absolutely useless except as a currency or speculative vehicle. There's nothing I have to do in bitcoin. Few merchants in the country will accept bitcoin (Steam just dropped it).
You have just listed things that have real value. You can read books, drive cars, ride on trains, fly in airplanes, listen to radio and TV broadcasts, and Facebook and do on-line banking. Okay, mostly listed things that have real value. If you want to toss in my prediction that this web thing wouldn't catch on, feel free.
Bitcoin has no value except as a vehicle for speculation, and limited use as a currency. Right now, its use as a currency is seriously limited by high transaction fees and tremendous volatility. If Bitcoin goes down hard, there's no reason why it should come back up.
It would mean imports would become more expensive, and other countries would find our exports cheaper. That means that the US standard of living would decline. If people from other countries wanted to invest in the US, they'd get more for their money.
It would be a fairly gentle way to force some austerity and stimulate the economy. If we didn't need austerity or economic stimulation, it would just mean we got less stuff, depressing our standard of living.
The South Korean army is about half a million strong, and I'd expect them to be much more competent than the North Korean army. Add a small but significant contingent of the US Army, and I'd expect the north to lose.
Um, when did Seoul get leveled by North Korean artillery? If the answer is "it hasn't been", then the ceasefire has worked for sixty-four years. We can live with saber-rattling.
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You seem not to understand how insurance works. Insurance companies carefully calculate the cost of insuring certain market segments, and they base their premium rates on those. That's how they avoid going out of business.
Offering lower rates to a certain group will indeed attract more business for that group, but it will mean losing money, which companies in general don't like to do. It isn't going to attract much business to other groups. When I talk to an agent, I want to know how much I'll be paying, not how much somebody else would be paying.
If an insurance company offers a reduced rate to a group, it is because they have figured that that group is lesser risk.
Driving skill or safety? I don't think my driving skills are up to average. On the other hand, I get into sufficiently few accidents that I get the maximum safety discount on my insurance. I allow for my lack of skill (and possibly overcompensate), and don't do anything likely to cause an accident.
I see drivers doing stupid things also. I also see many more drivers driving well. I remember the stupid ones better, since (a) they're the ones I have to watch for, (b) they're the ones who probably inconvenienced me, and (c) they're the ones I address comments to from the privacy of my vehicle. However, almost every time I see a driver do a boneheaded maneuver, I see many more people just driving like they should.
Elected left-wing and right-wing crazies do tend to cancel each other out, although not quietly. It has to be good for popcorn stocks.
The 97% consensus is real and valid. Other studies have shown the same thing. They were explicitly to demonstrate the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming.
Could you provide a more specific cite for the climate models being wrong? The IPCC wrote a lot of stuff, and I couldn't easily find it. It also seems odd that you rely on the IPCC for one thing and disregard their findings for other things.
There's already a good many problems in the world that appear to be caused by global warming, and I'd rather they didn't get too much worse.
So why are you uncomfortable? Is it because you keep thinking about other people's genitals? If you're in the men's room, you're not going to be uncomfortable because a vagina goes in. You're going to be uncomfortable if someone who appears to be a woman comes in. The old idea that you go to the rest room you fit into still works.
I'd really rather not go into the men's room and have you staring at my crotch wondering what secrets are in there.
So something can be fraud if the alleged fraudster tells the truth and you misinterpret it?
The idea behind the carbon tax is to internalize an externality and let the market decide what to do. If nuclear power plants are then the cheapest, we get nukes. If solar power and wind are the cheapest, we get solar and wind. The market is far better at optimizing than you or I are.
The reason we're in this situation is that burning fossil fuel is a cheap way of generating energy, and fossil fuels are a very convenient way to create mobile energy sources for use on vehicles. The government is not involved in making that so. The market fails because the people making the decisions pay only a small amount of some of the costs they generate. People chose to pollute because it was the cheapest thing to do. We have seen that time and time again, and the only effective way to stop that is government action.
I fail to see why reducing taxes on certain people, or letting the market do things, is supposed to cause dependence on the government.
The Japanese government in 1941 did not intend to sign a suicide pact. They had a strategy, which they screwed up on December 7, 1941. Kim knows what would happen if he attacks out, and he's a psychopath, not suicidal or honor-driven. North Korea is still at war legally, but not practically. The peace holds.
For purposes of terrorism, there isn't that tremendous amount of difference between Pakistan having nukes (which they so) or North Korea. Muslim terrorism isn't the only threat here, but it's the biggest one.
You might want to take another look at universities, but first either stopping the hallucinogens or starting anti-psychotics. I've been in academia and seen how it works. Some of it is ugly, but it's not nearly as bad as you say.
What I most want out of taxpayer-funded research grants is good research. Responding to FOIA requests is not doing research. If FOIA requests take up a significant amount of research time and effort, somebody's wasting my tax money, and it isn't the researchers.
You do realize what happens if the exchange mixes up your Bitcoin so it's impossible to keep track of it, and the IRS wants to tax you on your Bitcoin transaction. You will have no way of telling the IRS how much tax you should pay, and they're likely to make some assumptions and charge you more than you would have paid with decent records.
Question: if I pay for something from ten wallets, are the transaction fees different from if I use one? One problem with Bitcoin right now is that individual transactions are expensive.
Attempts by the government to tax Bitcoin will either make it harder to transact Bitcoin or land people in debt or jail. Currently, it's taxed as a commodity. However, if you do deals in it, buying something essentially counts as cashing out, so you have to keep track of which bitcoin you're using in what purchase and what its basis value was.
They aren't completely arbitrary, and can't be manipulated on a whim.
A bond is a promise to pay me money at a given time. As long as the issuer doesn't go out of business, and you can buy bond funds to smooth out the risk, you get money. Stocks are ownership in a company, and as long as the company is profitable somebody's going to want to buy your stocks. Stocks often pay dividends. Options are the ability to buy or sell X for $Y at some point in the future. If X has real value, the option has real value. Unlike stocks and bonds, options are very likely to be useless. If I buy the ability to sell X for $Y next year, and next year it's selling for $Y+$Z, I can just throw away the option and sell at a higher price. They're a lot more speculative. I'm not going to say anything about CDRs.
Bitcoin doesn't promise anything. It doesn't provide a claim on anything. It doesn't promise anything in the future.
You can do that with a pyramid scheme, if you're fast enough. You buy 100 shares in South Seas for $10 each, take your dividends from the peopel who bought in after you, and sell them for $100 each. You do have to get the timing right.
Since an infinite dollar bill is equal in value to two infinite dollar bills, the merchant would make an infinite amount of money on each transaction. The merchant does need to send someone to the bank with an infinite dollar bill to get enough to make change.
Sure. However, my house is good for keeping stuff around, inviting friends and family over, showering, using the toilet, sleeping, etc. It's also a permanently scarce resource that is in demand for its practical use. USD in the US are good for paying off the government. Moreover, since I'm required to have some accounting in USD, I may as well just do my accounting in USD. All merchants in the country will accept my dollars. (Paper money is not an IOU from the government. It used to be; an old silver certificate would say that the government would pay you a dollar in exchange for the piece of paper. A modern federal reserve note is that money.)
Bitcoin is absolutely useless except as a currency or speculative vehicle. There's nothing I have to do in bitcoin. Few merchants in the country will accept bitcoin (Steam just dropped it).
The book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" is still applicable, also.
You have just listed things that have real value. You can read books, drive cars, ride on trains, fly in airplanes, listen to radio and TV broadcasts, and Facebook and do on-line banking. Okay, mostly listed things that have real value. If you want to toss in my prediction that this web thing wouldn't catch on, feel free.
Bitcoin has no value except as a vehicle for speculation, and limited use as a currency. Right now, its use as a currency is seriously limited by high transaction fees and tremendous volatility. If Bitcoin goes down hard, there's no reason why it should come back up.
It would mean imports would become more expensive, and other countries would find our exports cheaper. That means that the US standard of living would decline. If people from other countries wanted to invest in the US, they'd get more for their money.
It would be a fairly gentle way to force some austerity and stimulate the economy. If we didn't need austerity or economic stimulation, it would just mean we got less stuff, depressing our standard of living.
Ah yes, the cherry-picking of studies to find a very few among what has to be tens of thousands that sound stupid out of context.
We did that in the Cold War. It's expensive and hard on the aircraft, but we could do it again.
The South Korean army is about half a million strong, and I'd expect them to be much more competent than the North Korean army. Add a small but significant contingent of the US Army, and I'd expect the north to lose.
Um, when did Seoul get leveled by North Korean artillery? If the answer is "it hasn't been", then the ceasefire has worked for sixty-four years. We can live with saber-rattling.
How about no significant attacks? I don't really care about border incidents. I care about war. As long as Seoul is intact, the status quo is working.