Linux benefited from the competition among distros, and Windows would benefit in the same way if different companies were making different compatible versions. Linux has also suffered from the competition, e.g. the rival.deb and.rpm repository formats, which make it more difficult to produce a program that will run on all common distros.
There is a basis for natural OS monopolies from the network effect. The value to me of running a particular OS increases with the number of people who use that OS, because of better vendor and community support, and the fact that the OS is simply a more attractive platform to produce software for. Most people do not in fact share my tastes (which, among other things, justify a nice Ubuntu box), and if they need a desktop/laptop OS are best off with MS Windows. The ones that aren't geeks like me who I'd recommend Linux for over Windows are better served by Android or iOS nowadays.
No lottery is deceitful unless it's deceitful, and the rules of rollover lotteries are well known. I'm not at all keen on raising money with lotteries, since they tend to prey on people who don't need to be preyed on, but as long as they exist I'll buy a ticket or two now and then, just to have a little extra support while daydreaming of being rich.
The EM Drive is supposed to convert energy into momentum, without reaction mass. That means that it's possible to get more energy out of it than was put into it. Momentum is mass times velocity. A unit increment of momentum, given constant mass, means a unit increment of velocity. Kinetic energy is one-half mass times the square of the velocity, so if you double the energy input, and hence the momentum increase, you increase kinetic energy by a factor of four. If putting in N joules results in a 1 joule increase in kinetic energy, then putting in N squared units results in N squared joules in kinetic energy, and after that you're making energy. Assuming Special Relativity holds, there can't be diminishing returns from putting more energy in as speed rises. This is an objective, verifiable fact. If the EM drive works as I described, we've basically got to rewrite physics from the ground up, and I consider the probability of that to be vanishingly small.
When I said the claims for EM drive thrust are much higher than what you can get with using photons as reaction mass-equivalent, I was referring to the basic physics, not any implementation. Flashlights have recoil, you know. We can figure how much. You're certainly not going to notice the recoil by holding it in your hand. It is not possible for a photon rocket to come anywhere near the efficiency reported. This applies to any explanation based on masslessness rather than reactionlessness.
It's conceivable that it could be remotely transferring momentum to the planet or something like that, which would be startling new physics that wouldn't violate conservation laws or relativity, but would require some sort of action at a distance, which would keep physicists busy for some time dealing with the consequences. More likely this is experimental error or pushing at the Earth's magnetic field or doing some directed outgassing or something like that. It is certainly possible to investigate it scientifically.
Guilty as charged of following Slashdot tradition. I replied to your summary.
The link goes to a not-entirely-coherent account of researchers who have observations that show that, in a large sample of spiral and irregular galaxies, the rotation curves are explained by non-dark matter. That part is clear, and the reporter seems to have not understood what else the scientists said. Since this is a new result, not yet published, we'll have to see how it holds up to examination. In cases where new observations disagree with lots of older observations, we need to be cautious about drawing conclusions.
It also doesn't explain the other things explained by dark matter, including gravitational lensing. Exactly what causes the lens around the Bullet Cluster? How does this compare to the theoretical limit of baryonic matter? Galactic rotation curves are not the strongest evidence for dark matter any more.
We can create a legal "shortcut" like a marriage without calling it a marriage if we wanted to.
Technically, this is true. As a matter of practice, same-sex couples want to be legally considered as family in the US, not just in one state. For this to happen, we'd have to define a marriage replacement in all fifty states (plus any other parts of the US that need to), and I don't see that happening in the foreseeable future. "Marriage" is a magic word because that's what the law says.
My Christian upbringing taught me to be kind to others, including the "sinners" among us. If these people are getting aggressive with a church then it is not "in return".
While I approve of your brand of Christianity, it isn't universal. There are lots of Christian churches that are dead set against homosexuality, and are very open about their hostility. Many are in favor of "gay conversion therapy", which is essentially torturing gays until they claim to be straight and can fake it to the church's satisfaction. There's bakers like that. That $118K award in the Oregon case? The bakers launched an internet harassment campaign. My take is that, if your religion tells you to hate or hurt people, you're doing it wrong, which puts me at odds with churches that serve tens of millions of people in the US.
What I'd like to see is the government get out of the marriage business
I completely agree. However, I don't see that changing any time soon.
For most of the history I'm aware of, there isn't a big social stigma for men getting sex outside marriage. A lot of the rules come from the desire to make sure a man knows who his children are, and so the big no-no is screwing another guy's wife. It's also not good to screw a woman who's going to become a wife. Other than that, it's open season. Heck, I live in a pretty liberal state, and adultery is legally defined as a wife having sex with another guy (not that that law is enforceable).
I know a lesbian couple who I will refer to as T and F. They wanted a child. They got donated sperm (I think from a close relative of T, but that's a guess), used one of F's eggs, and T was the host mother. Parenthood is more complicated than it used to be.
There is no demarcation line for religious vs. civil marriage, unfortunately. There is, as far as I know, no alternative means to get the legal benefits of marriage. There's going to be some hard feelings between same-sex couples and some churches, and some same-sex couples are going to get aggressive in return.
Evidence is what we've got. Do you think protons are made up of three quarks? The evidence for that is pretty indirect. We had this neat quark theory, and we found that there are three things in a proton. AFAIK, there's not much more, if any, than that.
I'm not disagreeing with anything you said, but at what point does a placeholder turn into an observation? Quarks were a nice theoretical concept until deep inelastic scattering showed that there were three things in a baryon and two in a meson, so people started calling them observed and accepting their existence. One might consider dark matter as a nice theoretical concept to explain galactic rotation curves, and then we observed gravitational lensing. Why don't you consider this finding dark matter when you apparently consider finding that protons have three points of deflection finding a quark?
So there's a galaxy without dark matter? Is this supposed to be a problem? It's probably interesting why it doesn't have significant dark matter, and a subject for study, but saying that this galaxy doesn't have dark matter is like saying there aren't any earthworms in my car. There are earthworms elsewhere in the neighborhood, and dark matter in other galaxies.
If the EM Drive works as stated, it violates those conservation laws. That's an objective, verifiable, fact. It has nothing to do with religious beliefs.
If those conservation laws are violated, it means the laws of physics vary significantly over space and time. That's also an objective, verifiable fact.
We've been bouncing microwaves around cavities for a long time, and we've never come up with something like this. Violations of physical theories that are accepted enough to be called "Laws" usually involves some sort of exotic condition, and this isn't one.
In other words, I'm perfectly comfortable saying that the EM Drive is not a reactionless drive. I'm not saying that it's not worth looking into, because there's obviously something we don't understand going on (unless it's experimental error, which is something we pretty well understand). The chance that it turns out to be interesting new physics is pretty darn low, but it wouldn't hurt to see.
BTW, electromagnetic waves can generate a force. The claims for EM drive thrust are much higher than that, though.
If you have a same sex couple with one "playing dad" and the other "playing mom" then this can create conflicting signals for the child.
[Citation needed]
Seriously, I don't see any reason to believe this is true. Nor have the same-sex couples I know gone into traditional gender roles, so I suspect you really don't know what you're talking about.
If the people advocating for same sex marriage stopped at the civil matter then I'd have no problems
That's not an option right now. There is something called "marriage" between two people that has a reasonably consistent legal definition across the US and in most or all other countries. My wife and I will be considered married wherever we go, and we will be legally treated as a married couple. If there were a thing called "civil union" that legally worked like marriage does now across the world, and "marriage" had no legal effect (presumably church weddings would set up both a religiously defined marriage and a civil union), not a problem.
As it is, if we have same-sex couples in a "civil union" or "civil partnership" or something, that doesn't necessarily mean anything anywhere else.
To be specific, consider my friend Ruth and her wife Lise who live in California. Suppose they go to Missouri and Lise gets gravely injured. Since they're married, Ruth has the right to see Lise and have a voice in her care. Then they settle down. Without further ado, they're still each other's default heir. There's various other considerations here. Now, suppose they have a California civil union, not a marriage. Does Missouri have "civil union" laws? Can Ruth visit Lise in the hospital? If Lise dies of her injuries, what stuff does Ruth get?
Unless and until there is a legal state not called marriage but which works legally like marriage all over the world, same-sex couples have to be able to get married.
Since these people are using the legal status of same sex marriage to force churches to marry them this has become a problem.
I'm not aware that any couple has a legal right to force a particular church to marry them.
Marriage is a way of defining someone as family. There have been cases of same-sex lovers who wanted to get married, and when one was gravely ill or injured the partner had no right to see their loved one or find out about their loved one's status, let alone have any input into care.
What's the difference between a sexbot and a prostitute here? Why would the prevalence of sexbots make men behave better than a prevalence of prostitutes? Men do not typically rape because they can't find a street corner or cough up however much money it would cost.
While there are some ways in which marriage and dating work to a woman's advantage, I'd really rather hear from women to see if they think marriage and dating can work to a man's advantage also. Getting insight from only one side seems prone to error.
I'm not aware of times when it was impossible for a guy to get laid without either marriage or harsh penalties. There have always been prostitutes, and so sex has always been available for cash. Typically throughout the history I'm familiar with, while there's social stigma to being a prostitute, there is little or none for patronizing one. Socially acceptable sex has never been the force driving men to marry. As far as superficial attributes, a lot of women have accepted marriage proposals based on them.
Religion is not useful for instructing people on how to live. It's a set of beliefs that are in addition to morality, and can mess it up. Most people have moral principles that are not founded on religion. Even if you ask religious people a question like "Is murder evil because God forbids it, or does God forbid it because it's evil?" you'll get different answers from different people. Non-religious people are often moral; indeed, I've read that people in prison tend to be more religious than the general population.
The "insane leftists" you describe do not exist. Cross-dressers aren't usually transsexuals. Transsexuals are people who have a body of one gender and a mind of the other, basically, and we can change a person's body easier than we can transform a person's mind. We're taking an unhappy person and making that person less unhappy, and people don't get the surgery without a lot of evaluation to see if that's the right thing to do for that person.
My observation is that people don't think themselves miserable cunts and find religion so much as the reverse, but my observation is limited to about the last half century. Religion used to be the opiate of the masses, and a way of solidifying the control of the upper class over the lower classes.
In the US, I don't think the reproduction rate is up to replacement level, but this is masked by immigration. If we want to hit replacement level, we have to make parenthood more attractive, not less.
1, Corporations have different profit margins. For example, grocery stores buy a lot of stuff and sell it for just a little over what they pay for it. If you can get 2% profit on turnover each week, you get the equivalent of 104% profit for the year. If you buy things and have them sit for (on the average) a year on the shelves before selling them for twice what you paid (the traditional bookstore model), you get about the same return on initial investment, but you're getting far less revenue. Alternatively, a company like Cargill makes money by selling commodities like corn syrup for a little less than the competition can (note: my personal Cargill connection lapsed about twenty years ago, so I may not be up to date), while a company that sells items that are distinct in the marketplace can make much higher profit margins (Apple, say).
What this means is that a revenue tax that would barely touch a bookstore or Apple will be devastating to a grocery store or Cargill, and would force them to raise prices dramatically or go out of business.
2. How do you regulate the market cap? It isn't a real thing, it's issued shares times share price, not the price of buying or selling the company. It depends on what investors think at a given time, and isn't under the control of the company or pretty much anyone else. Also, market cap is partly based on expected growth, which means that, given two companies of the same size, the one with better growth prospects would have a higher market cap. Look at the P/E ratings of companies, because that pretty accurately shows what investors think about the growth prospects. You'd be stomping on companies just because they're being successfully growing.
I was working as a contractor for GMAC-RFC (the home mortgage arm of General Motors) at a very interesting time. I worked on financial prediction software, and noticed some things.
There were columns in the database for Stated Assets and Stated Income, meaning that there was no verification that the mortgagee had a prayer of paying the bank back. In what universe is this supposed to be a good idea? (The Bizarro Universe from the Superman comics, I suppose.) Combinations of mortgages that include good and bad mortgages will be lower than ones that include most of the good mortgages and only a few of the bad, which is simple mathematics as well as common sense.
The model had a parameter of how fast house prices would go up, minimum zero. The model didn't cover the possibility of housing prices going down.
The model was based on statistical analysis of recent mortgages. This meant that it could be counted on only as long as significant things didn't change. For example, the model had nothing to say about what borrowers do when upside-down on their mortgages, since that happened only rarely in the data used.
Credit agencies were definitely deficient, but you'd think a self-respecting bank would look carefully before making big investments. I've heard "due diligence" tossed around as a phrase.
Realtors can only sell property to people who can get mortgages. There were plenty of mortgage companies that sold off every mortgage they issued. They were able to do this because banks would buy them, including NINJA loans (No INcome, Job, or Assets). The banks bought bad investments like there was no tomorrow, sliced them into tranches, sold them off, and pretended it wasn't all a house of cards.
It seems likely that people who buy mortgages they can't afford aren't good with money or investments, and so it seems unproductive to blame them. We've had people who will make bad financial decisions around for a long time, and banks and mortgage companies avoided problems by simply not giving them mortgages. The people didn't change, the system did, because lending institutions were greedy and shortsighted.
Banks are supposed to invest their depositors' money to make money, not lose it. They aren't supposed to issue mortgages that will lose them money as a general rule.
We didn't bring the whole thing onto ourselves by doing anything different ourselves. What changed is that investment companies (including banks) made bad decisions and credit rating companies made worse.
Microsoft's products are generally of good quality. Windows is a pretty solid operating system (pity about the UI changes from 7). Office is generally easy to use (possibly disregarding the controversial ribbon), and works well. I don't like the design decisions as much as I like those of Linux distros and F/OS software, but there's really not that much that I can point to objectively. I'm annoyed that VC++ lags well behind g++ and clang in standards conformance, but it does catch up eventually (is there part of C++11 that VS2015 misses?), and Visual Studio is a decent development environment.
You can deduct gambling losses up to the extent of gambling winnings, so I'd suspect you're only on the IRS hook for the profit. For the average person who buys ten tickets and gets real lucky, this isn't important, but if you're covering all possible combinations you definitely want to save the receipts.
Also, if I were running that lottery, I would certainly change the rules to penalize that strategy as some form of cheating.
How and why? How are you going to prevent someone from buying hundreds of millions of tickets and just presenting the ones that win? Why would you prevent your customers from buying hundreds of millions of dollars of stuff that's cheap to produce?
What Microsoft Windows has that Linux largely doesn't is network effects. Since most people run it, most vendors provide software for it, and so people buy MS Windows to run the software they bought. Problems that show up in MS Windows happen to a lot of people, so community web support is very good. Moreover, MS has a reputation for making good enough software. (Microsoft - it's not just good, it's just good enough.)
Linux doesn't attract anywhere near the amount of vendors, and it has the problem that some distros like.rpm and some like.deb. If you're running a business, you know that you can pay a certain amount to MS for Windows and Office licenses and things will work well enough - and, if they don't, it isn't your fault. If you' go all-Linux, you'll pay less, but there's many fewer people interested in making sure it's good enough, and if things go bad it is your fault. Most businesses pay Microsoft in much the same way they'd pay insurance, spending money to reduce risks.
Microsoft is innovative, which is sometimes unfortunate. Their post-7 UIs have been innovative, all right.
Almost all software vendors disclaim liability to the maximum extent possible. Commercial ones tend to do it with the EULA, and F/OS ones do it with the license. MS is nothing out of the ordinary here.
Lots of MS sales are to individual home users, which are not controlled by anything upstream. As far as businesses go, there's considerable advantages in having everyone use the same software when possible, and in most (not all) cases there's benefits for making the decision upstream.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux benefited from the competition among distros, and Windows would benefit in the same way if different companies were making different compatible versions. Linux has also suffered from the competition, e.g. the rival .deb and .rpm repository formats, which make it more difficult to produce a program that will run on all common distros.
There is a basis for natural OS monopolies from the network effect. The value to me of running a particular OS increases with the number of people who use that OS, because of better vendor and community support, and the fact that the OS is simply a more attractive platform to produce software for. Most people do not in fact share my tastes (which, among other things, justify a nice Ubuntu box), and if they need a desktop/laptop OS are best off with MS Windows. The ones that aren't geeks like me who I'd recommend Linux for over Windows are better served by Android or iOS nowadays.
No lottery is deceitful unless it's deceitful, and the rules of rollover lotteries are well known. I'm not at all keen on raising money with lotteries, since they tend to prey on people who don't need to be preyed on, but as long as they exist I'll buy a ticket or two now and then, just to have a little extra support while daydreaming of being rich.
The EM Drive is supposed to convert energy into momentum, without reaction mass. That means that it's possible to get more energy out of it than was put into it. Momentum is mass times velocity. A unit increment of momentum, given constant mass, means a unit increment of velocity. Kinetic energy is one-half mass times the square of the velocity, so if you double the energy input, and hence the momentum increase, you increase kinetic energy by a factor of four. If putting in N joules results in a 1 joule increase in kinetic energy, then putting in N squared units results in N squared joules in kinetic energy, and after that you're making energy. Assuming Special Relativity holds, there can't be diminishing returns from putting more energy in as speed rises. This is an objective, verifiable fact. If the EM drive works as I described, we've basically got to rewrite physics from the ground up, and I consider the probability of that to be vanishingly small.
When I said the claims for EM drive thrust are much higher than what you can get with using photons as reaction mass-equivalent, I was referring to the basic physics, not any implementation. Flashlights have recoil, you know. We can figure how much. You're certainly not going to notice the recoil by holding it in your hand. It is not possible for a photon rocket to come anywhere near the efficiency reported. This applies to any explanation based on masslessness rather than reactionlessness.
It's conceivable that it could be remotely transferring momentum to the planet or something like that, which would be startling new physics that wouldn't violate conservation laws or relativity, but would require some sort of action at a distance, which would keep physicists busy for some time dealing with the consequences. More likely this is experimental error or pushing at the Earth's magnetic field or doing some directed outgassing or something like that. It is certainly possible to investigate it scientifically.
Guilty as charged of following Slashdot tradition. I replied to your summary.
The link goes to a not-entirely-coherent account of researchers who have observations that show that, in a large sample of spiral and irregular galaxies, the rotation curves are explained by non-dark matter. That part is clear, and the reporter seems to have not understood what else the scientists said. Since this is a new result, not yet published, we'll have to see how it holds up to examination. In cases where new observations disagree with lots of older observations, we need to be cautious about drawing conclusions.
It also doesn't explain the other things explained by dark matter, including gravitational lensing. Exactly what causes the lens around the Bullet Cluster? How does this compare to the theoretical limit of baryonic matter? Galactic rotation curves are not the strongest evidence for dark matter any more.
Technically, this is true. As a matter of practice, same-sex couples want to be legally considered as family in the US, not just in one state. For this to happen, we'd have to define a marriage replacement in all fifty states (plus any other parts of the US that need to), and I don't see that happening in the foreseeable future. "Marriage" is a magic word because that's what the law says.
While I approve of your brand of Christianity, it isn't universal. There are lots of Christian churches that are dead set against homosexuality, and are very open about their hostility. Many are in favor of "gay conversion therapy", which is essentially torturing gays until they claim to be straight and can fake it to the church's satisfaction. There's bakers like that. That $118K award in the Oregon case? The bakers launched an internet harassment campaign. My take is that, if your religion tells you to hate or hurt people, you're doing it wrong, which puts me at odds with churches that serve tens of millions of people in the US.
I completely agree. However, I don't see that changing any time soon.
For most of the history I'm aware of, there isn't a big social stigma for men getting sex outside marriage. A lot of the rules come from the desire to make sure a man knows who his children are, and so the big no-no is screwing another guy's wife. It's also not good to screw a woman who's going to become a wife. Other than that, it's open season. Heck, I live in a pretty liberal state, and adultery is legally defined as a wife having sex with another guy (not that that law is enforceable).
I know a lesbian couple who I will refer to as T and F. They wanted a child. They got donated sperm (I think from a close relative of T, but that's a guess), used one of F's eggs, and T was the host mother. Parenthood is more complicated than it used to be.
There is no demarcation line for religious vs. civil marriage, unfortunately. There is, as far as I know, no alternative means to get the legal benefits of marriage. There's going to be some hard feelings between same-sex couples and some churches, and some same-sex couples are going to get aggressive in return.
Evidence is what we've got. Do you think protons are made up of three quarks? The evidence for that is pretty indirect. We had this neat quark theory, and we found that there are three things in a proton. AFAIK, there's not much more, if any, than that.
I'm not disagreeing with anything you said, but at what point does a placeholder turn into an observation? Quarks were a nice theoretical concept until deep inelastic scattering showed that there were three things in a baryon and two in a meson, so people started calling them observed and accepting their existence. One might consider dark matter as a nice theoretical concept to explain galactic rotation curves, and then we observed gravitational lensing. Why don't you consider this finding dark matter when you apparently consider finding that protons have three points of deflection finding a quark?
So there's a galaxy without dark matter? Is this supposed to be a problem? It's probably interesting why it doesn't have significant dark matter, and a subject for study, but saying that this galaxy doesn't have dark matter is like saying there aren't any earthworms in my car. There are earthworms elsewhere in the neighborhood, and dark matter in other galaxies.
If the EM Drive works as stated, it violates those conservation laws. That's an objective, verifiable, fact. It has nothing to do with religious beliefs.
If those conservation laws are violated, it means the laws of physics vary significantly over space and time. That's also an objective, verifiable fact.
We've been bouncing microwaves around cavities for a long time, and we've never come up with something like this. Violations of physical theories that are accepted enough to be called "Laws" usually involves some sort of exotic condition, and this isn't one.
In other words, I'm perfectly comfortable saying that the EM Drive is not a reactionless drive. I'm not saying that it's not worth looking into, because there's obviously something we don't understand going on (unless it's experimental error, which is something we pretty well understand). The chance that it turns out to be interesting new physics is pretty darn low, but it wouldn't hurt to see.
BTW, electromagnetic waves can generate a force. The claims for EM drive thrust are much higher than that, though.
[Citation needed]
Seriously, I don't see any reason to believe this is true. Nor have the same-sex couples I know gone into traditional gender roles, so I suspect you really don't know what you're talking about.
That's not an option right now. There is something called "marriage" between two people that has a reasonably consistent legal definition across the US and in most or all other countries. My wife and I will be considered married wherever we go, and we will be legally treated as a married couple. If there were a thing called "civil union" that legally worked like marriage does now across the world, and "marriage" had no legal effect (presumably church weddings would set up both a religiously defined marriage and a civil union), not a problem.
As it is, if we have same-sex couples in a "civil union" or "civil partnership" or something, that doesn't necessarily mean anything anywhere else.
To be specific, consider my friend Ruth and her wife Lise who live in California. Suppose they go to Missouri and Lise gets gravely injured. Since they're married, Ruth has the right to see Lise and have a voice in her care. Then they settle down. Without further ado, they're still each other's default heir. There's various other considerations here. Now, suppose they have a California civil union, not a marriage. Does Missouri have "civil union" laws? Can Ruth visit Lise in the hospital? If Lise dies of her injuries, what stuff does Ruth get?
Unless and until there is a legal state not called marriage but which works legally like marriage all over the world, same-sex couples have to be able to get married.
I'm not aware that any couple has a legal right to force a particular church to marry them.
Marriage is a way of defining someone as family. There have been cases of same-sex lovers who wanted to get married, and when one was gravely ill or injured the partner had no right to see their loved one or find out about their loved one's status, let alone have any input into care.
What's the difference between a sexbot and a prostitute here? Why would the prevalence of sexbots make men behave better than a prevalence of prostitutes? Men do not typically rape because they can't find a street corner or cough up however much money it would cost.
While there are some ways in which marriage and dating work to a woman's advantage, I'd really rather hear from women to see if they think marriage and dating can work to a man's advantage also. Getting insight from only one side seems prone to error.
I'm not aware of times when it was impossible for a guy to get laid without either marriage or harsh penalties. There have always been prostitutes, and so sex has always been available for cash. Typically throughout the history I'm familiar with, while there's social stigma to being a prostitute, there is little or none for patronizing one. Socially acceptable sex has never been the force driving men to marry. As far as superficial attributes, a lot of women have accepted marriage proposals based on them.
Religion is not useful for instructing people on how to live. It's a set of beliefs that are in addition to morality, and can mess it up. Most people have moral principles that are not founded on religion. Even if you ask religious people a question like "Is murder evil because God forbids it, or does God forbid it because it's evil?" you'll get different answers from different people. Non-religious people are often moral; indeed, I've read that people in prison tend to be more religious than the general population.
The "insane leftists" you describe do not exist. Cross-dressers aren't usually transsexuals. Transsexuals are people who have a body of one gender and a mind of the other, basically, and we can change a person's body easier than we can transform a person's mind. We're taking an unhappy person and making that person less unhappy, and people don't get the surgery without a lot of evaluation to see if that's the right thing to do for that person.
My observation is that people don't think themselves miserable cunts and find religion so much as the reverse, but my observation is limited to about the last half century. Religion used to be the opiate of the masses, and a way of solidifying the control of the upper class over the lower classes.
In the US, I don't think the reproduction rate is up to replacement level, but this is masked by immigration. If we want to hit replacement level, we have to make parenthood more attractive, not less.
1, Corporations have different profit margins. For example, grocery stores buy a lot of stuff and sell it for just a little over what they pay for it. If you can get 2% profit on turnover each week, you get the equivalent of 104% profit for the year. If you buy things and have them sit for (on the average) a year on the shelves before selling them for twice what you paid (the traditional bookstore model), you get about the same return on initial investment, but you're getting far less revenue. Alternatively, a company like Cargill makes money by selling commodities like corn syrup for a little less than the competition can (note: my personal Cargill connection lapsed about twenty years ago, so I may not be up to date), while a company that sells items that are distinct in the marketplace can make much higher profit margins (Apple, say).
What this means is that a revenue tax that would barely touch a bookstore or Apple will be devastating to a grocery store or Cargill, and would force them to raise prices dramatically or go out of business.
2. How do you regulate the market cap? It isn't a real thing, it's issued shares times share price, not the price of buying or selling the company. It depends on what investors think at a given time, and isn't under the control of the company or pretty much anyone else. Also, market cap is partly based on expected growth, which means that, given two companies of the same size, the one with better growth prospects would have a higher market cap. Look at the P/E ratings of companies, because that pretty accurately shows what investors think about the growth prospects. You'd be stomping on companies just because they're being successfully growing.
I was working as a contractor for GMAC-RFC (the home mortgage arm of General Motors) at a very interesting time. I worked on financial prediction software, and noticed some things.
There were columns in the database for Stated Assets and Stated Income, meaning that there was no verification that the mortgagee had a prayer of paying the bank back. In what universe is this supposed to be a good idea? (The Bizarro Universe from the Superman comics, I suppose.) Combinations of mortgages that include good and bad mortgages will be lower than ones that include most of the good mortgages and only a few of the bad, which is simple mathematics as well as common sense.
The model had a parameter of how fast house prices would go up, minimum zero. The model didn't cover the possibility of housing prices going down.
The model was based on statistical analysis of recent mortgages. This meant that it could be counted on only as long as significant things didn't change. For example, the model had nothing to say about what borrowers do when upside-down on their mortgages, since that happened only rarely in the data used.
Credit agencies were definitely deficient, but you'd think a self-respecting bank would look carefully before making big investments. I've heard "due diligence" tossed around as a phrase.
Realtors can only sell property to people who can get mortgages. There were plenty of mortgage companies that sold off every mortgage they issued. They were able to do this because banks would buy them, including NINJA loans (No INcome, Job, or Assets). The banks bought bad investments like there was no tomorrow, sliced them into tranches, sold them off, and pretended it wasn't all a house of cards.
It seems likely that people who buy mortgages they can't afford aren't good with money or investments, and so it seems unproductive to blame them. We've had people who will make bad financial decisions around for a long time, and banks and mortgage companies avoided problems by simply not giving them mortgages. The people didn't change, the system did, because lending institutions were greedy and shortsighted.
Banks are supposed to invest their depositors' money to make money, not lose it. They aren't supposed to issue mortgages that will lose them money as a general rule.
We didn't bring the whole thing onto ourselves by doing anything different ourselves. What changed is that investment companies (including banks) made bad decisions and credit rating companies made worse.
Microsoft's products are generally of good quality. Windows is a pretty solid operating system (pity about the UI changes from 7). Office is generally easy to use (possibly disregarding the controversial ribbon), and works well. I don't like the design decisions as much as I like those of Linux distros and F/OS software, but there's really not that much that I can point to objectively. I'm annoyed that VC++ lags well behind g++ and clang in standards conformance, but it does catch up eventually (is there part of C++11 that VS2015 misses?), and Visual Studio is a decent development environment.
You can deduct gambling losses up to the extent of gambling winnings, so I'd suspect you're only on the IRS hook for the profit. For the average person who buys ten tickets and gets real lucky, this isn't important, but if you're covering all possible combinations you definitely want to save the receipts.
How and why? How are you going to prevent someone from buying hundreds of millions of tickets and just presenting the ones that win? Why would you prevent your customers from buying hundreds of millions of dollars of stuff that's cheap to produce?
What Microsoft Windows has that Linux largely doesn't is network effects. Since most people run it, most vendors provide software for it, and so people buy MS Windows to run the software they bought. Problems that show up in MS Windows happen to a lot of people, so community web support is very good. Moreover, MS has a reputation for making good enough software. (Microsoft - it's not just good, it's just good enough.)
Linux doesn't attract anywhere near the amount of vendors, and it has the problem that some distros like .rpm and some like .deb. If you're running a business, you know that you can pay a certain amount to MS for Windows and Office licenses and things will work well enough - and, if they don't, it isn't your fault. If you' go all-Linux, you'll pay less, but there's many fewer people interested in making sure it's good enough, and if things go bad it is your fault. Most businesses pay Microsoft in much the same way they'd pay insurance, spending money to reduce risks.
Microsoft is innovative, which is sometimes unfortunate. Their post-7 UIs have been innovative, all right.
Almost all software vendors disclaim liability to the maximum extent possible. Commercial ones tend to do it with the EULA, and F/OS ones do it with the license. MS is nothing out of the ordinary here.
Lots of MS sales are to individual home users, which are not controlled by anything upstream. As far as businesses go, there's considerable advantages in having everyone use the same software when possible, and in most (not all) cases there's benefits for making the decision upstream.