There is a difference between harping on someone and expressing concern. No doctor has been harping on me to lose weight, but I've been informed that losing some would be a good thing for me to do.
In my experience, there are plenty of people who like to hate on fat people, and that is a problem for lots of fat people. I haven't had a fat friend claim that fat was perfectly healthy, probably because they're smarter than that. (I have one who told his doctor that he'd go on any weight loss program that had better than a 5% success rate over five years. I think he pretty much gave up on his weight, but he knows it isn't healthy.)
I'd like the fat shaming to stop, because then maybe some of my friends could stop feeling defensive and start addressing their weight issue more rationally.
The only skydiver I ever knew well broke his back. Fortunately, he appears to have completely recovered from that, but I was watching his toes move carefully when I first got to the hospital to visit him. He's not a careless person, but he made a mistake he couldn't recover from.
There's plenty of cultures, past and present, that do not require covering the female breast. I'm not sure how large-scale they were or are. I'm also not familiar with all that many cultures.
Boobs aren't inherently sexual. They're secondary sexual characteristics, but so is facial hair, and I was never asked to cover up my mustache when I had it (or told it was sexy, actually).
if you could have an erection on demand, then nobody would ever buy Viagra.
You seem to be starting with the fact that a bodily function can be disabled by various medical conditions, and concluding that said bodily function is involuntary. I know a guy who can't wiggle all his toes (nerve damage during cancer surgery); does that mean that toe-wiggling is an involuntary function?
In fact, lots of guys can get an erection by thinking appropriate (inappropriate?) thoughts, and can think other things to lose one.
If Tesla stock were cheap, lots of people would buy it for its potential of going up a lot, and the price would go up, which is what is happening here. By buying Tesla stock, you're making the bet that the company is going to do much better in the not-too-distant future. The market price (and hence market cap) depends heavily on what people expect out of the company in the not-too-distant future.
Suppose that, in three years, Tesla was going to sell lots and lots of cars and have profits similar to Ford's. Other things being equal (think spherical corporations of uniform density in a frictionless vacuum), it stock would be two-thirds higher than its current value, and that's a really good rate of return. If people in general expected this, Tesla's stock price would go up to the point where it was a decent investment and not spectacular.
If you don't think Tesla's going to do THAT well, don't buy. If you think it's going to exceed expectations, buy. Personally, I tend to stay away from the highly speculative stocks with the high P/E ratios, but then I'm on the old side so I'm not interested in adding risk to my portfolio.
Wages will be pushed down, suppliers will be paid less, prices will be pushed up.
You do realize that prices are normally set for maximum profit, and the price to maximize profit with no corporate tax is the one to maximize profit after 50% taxes, right? And that paying suppliers less doesn't quite go along with pushing up prices (since presumably the supplier sees the same corporate tax change)?
Corporate income taxes will make it harder to attract investment, but I fail to see how they affect the bond rating. That's based largely on how confident the lender is about being paid back, and repaying bonds is, IIRC, business expenses like everything else.
Your "overall norm" of corporate profit ratios is subject to variation. There is no percentage blasted into the New York Stock Exchange by divine lightning; it's the ratio that typical corporations get. If that goes down, there's less money going into the market, but nothing else changes. An overall change in corporate income tax will hit all the corps in the country.
There are downsides to corporate income tax, like all taxes, but not the ones you're most emphatic about. If this is from Sowell, it would appear that Sowell provides beautifully simple, lucid, and wrong explanations of market mechanics.
GP's logic is pretty good. You see, corporations are not charities. They set their prices to get the maximum profit, not some stupid cost-plus scheme. Corporate taxes are on profit, and maximizing profit yields the same results no matter what positive multiplier you put on profit. (This applies to all situations, monpolies included.)
Corporate taxes can only reduce profits, not eliminate them. Corporations are not like individuals, in that corporations don't pay taxes on what they need to keep going. A corporation with zero profit can continue indefinitely. (This is not true of a partnership or sole proprietorship, but they don't pay corporate taxes.) Corporations generally don't shut down lines of business because they're not profitable enough, and if they do other people tend to fill the need.
What increased corporate taxes do is make it harder to raise capital by selling equity (basically, issuing stock), so it probably does hurt startups disproportionately.
Corporate pricing is done by supply and demand, and is determined by the marginal cost of selling an additional unit and the demand curve. The marginal costs are virtually all tax-deductible, so the supply curve and the demand curve remain the same with or without corporate taxes, and the price stays the same.
Ever heard of business expenses? The plumber doesn't pay $21 on the $70 you pay, since a large chunk of that $70 will be materials and transportation and stuff like that, which are tax-deductible. Heck, if the plumbing you needed was business-related, you deduct it on your income taxes.
By paying $70, you get $70 of plumbing, according to the normal rates. If the plumber suddenly didn't have to pay income tax, do you think the rates would go down proportionally?
What do you mean, "a questionable path to a livable retirement based on stock or mutual fund investments"? Got a better idea? Defined-benefit pensions are pretty rare now (although I'm getting a small one when I retire). Most people have to save up, and stocks (directly or in mutual funds) are part of the best investment plans. If someone has a 401(k) or IRA, there's probably stocks involved.
I've got a lot less in the market than Gates, but there's a lot more people financially similar to me than financially similar to Gates. If the market tanks, he loses a lot more in absolute numbers than I do, but we lose the same proportionately. You can make a good argument that Gates could live quite happily after a 20% loss of assets, but that kind of loss would cramp my retirement plans a bit.
I'm not arguing that the ultra-rich should be protected from market downturns, or that we should worry about them. I'm arguing that there's a lot of middle-class people like me who would get hurt as well.
Human evolution isn't the issue here. Humans will survive. Human civilization is the issue, and it's going to take a serious hit. The best conditions for civilization are at least similar to the ones it was created in.
In general, you're right, but there are other factors. Paranoid dictators are more likely to go along with the experts to achieve their goals, and late in the war this wasn't going to happen with Germany without extreme risks.
Hitler knew there wasn't going to be a negotiated peace, unlike his subordinates, and he was correct in that. Therefore, there was no real difference between losing in 1943 and losing in 1946, and he consistently went for the big risks because they were the only ones that could pay off. The Ardennes Offensive (Battle of the Bulge) could have been modified to try to destroy the US First Army, which German generals though possible, but that would not have seriously affected the outcome of the war. Hitler's grandiose scheme, although very unlikely to succeed, might have. (He was also seriously deluded about Western Allied determination to prosecute the war.)
Invading the Soviet Union was the whole point of waging the war, the war in the West being something of an unwelcome distraction. By attacking when he did, he caught the Red Army when it was extremely vulnerable, and likely had his best chance of winning.
Theoretically, ideas can't be patented, but actual machines and processes can be. Hence, the requirement (not always enforced) that the description in a patent contain enough information to allow other people to implement what it purports to do. If you could have cut out Dick Tracy comics and sent them in with twenty-five cents to receive working plans for a two-way wrist radio, they would be patentable, and obvious derivations of them would not be.
A lot of his "increasingly unwise decisions" later in the war were due to his conflicts with top Army officers. They kept acting like it would be possible to negotiate a peace, and were doing their best to lose the war slowly to make Germany's diplomatic position better. Hitler realized that, given what Germany had done under him, an honorable negotiated peace was not going to happen, and that losing slowly was just losing. Therefore, Hitler and his generals were distrustful and didn't understand each other. Hitler wanted to take increasingly dire risks to win, while his subordinates didn't want to risk the collapse of the German position. Not that Hitler was a particularly good general in the first place, and he was definitely irrational later in the war, but many of his decisions made some sort of sense.
The surviving generals pushed a narrative in which Hitler was responsible for most things that went wrong, and kept claiming that Hitler had prevented them from winning the war.
He doesn't get all the credit for starting the First World War. The Great Powers had maneuvered themselves into a situation where almost anything could touch off a war, and some of them were in political situations where backing down in a confrontation seemed more politically dangerous than starting a war.
Essentially:
Princip killed the Archduke Ferdinand
Germany offered full support to Austria-Hungary
France almost certainly offered full support for Russia
Austria-Hungary issued demands to Serbia that look like they were intended to be unacceptable
Serbia caved in on almost all points
Austria-Hungary declared that the conciliatory response was not acceptable
Russia notified Austria-Hungary that they would go to war if Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia
Germany notified Russia that they would go to war if Russia continued mobilizing against Austria-Hungary
(FWIW, the British were making half-hearted efforts at keeping the peace, and had very little effect on the situation)
France and Germany lobbed threats at each other, although this didn't matter all that much because the German plan in case of war with Russia was to invade Belgium and attack France
When Germany invaded Belgium, Britain delivered an ultimatum, and Italy started looking for ways of profiting from the situation
Overall, I'd rate Princip's contribution as significantly less than the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and German contributions.
The wedding cake issue appears to have started badly and escalated from there. The findings of fact in the judgment described what appears to be extreme rudeness from the bakers, including publicizing the affair on Facebook, causing the lesbians further difficulties.
My take on this: if you're running a business, serve the public and obey the rules. If you have problems with that, reconsider starting a business.
I'm a white male leftist. I must have missed the memo on this one.
There are circumstances in which I'd be very reluctant to disagree with a black woman: when she's describing life as a black, a woman, or a black woman, or more generally when she's talking about something that she knows a lot about and I don't. Unfortunately, it would appear that some white males like to tell black females what their lives are like, and that may be where the idea got started.
Scientists tend to be conservative in their projections, so we'd expect the current situation to be worse than the general predictions of twenty years ago.
The market would do a pretty good job of regulating things if the price people paid for things was roughly equal to the total cost of those things. If fossil fuel users had to pay for all the harm the fuels are causing, people would use less, and society would have adapted over time to use less fossil fuel. The market simply can't adjust for factors that are not reflected in prices.
This is the real advantage of carbon taxes: they use market forces to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, rather than regulations.
Earth doesn't care, sorry. Humans care. Other animals could conceivably care, but they don't appear to have the intellectual capacity to understand what's going on.
Therefore, the only entities that care care about keeping fairly close to the climate civilization developed in.
Politicians are often smart, although not typically up on hard science. It's one of the more competitive pursuits, and stupid politicians are going to have trouble surviving.
You mean "hydrocarbons or coal" in your second paragraph. It really won't matter to the atmosphere whether we burn it all now, or relatively slowly, we're still screwed. We have to leave most of that stuff in the ground.
I believe (not that I've checked it myself) that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been going up less than our fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions, so there are feedback mechanisms. They aren't enough, and they have other issues (for example, the pH of the oceans has been changing significantly). You do realize that, since atmospheric CO2 levels have gone from 280ppm in 1850 to over 400ppm now, it should be clear that we are increasing the concentration significantly.
The climate is changing very fast, and it's changing to be well outside the normal variation that human civilization has developed in.
Mass really isn't that big an issue for mobile applications, since in practice the fuel weight is usually minor compared to other weight. (This is not true in multi-stage rockets.) Volume is important. The range of my car is limited by the volume of the gas tank, not the weight of the gasoline.
Hydrogen compressed to ten thousand psi has about a sixth of the energy density of gasoline. That's not something that's going away with better technology.
You seem to be arguing that we have the infrastructure, so all we have to do is replace all of it with much more expensive components. Except that we can't replace all of it: we currently do a lot of last-mile gasoline distribution with tanker trucks, and anything volume-limited like that is not going to transition to hydrogen at all well. At 10,000 pounds per square inch (700 bar), which has its own issues, it's got about a sixth the energy per volume of gasoline and similar fuels.
It's going to be easier for gas stations to convert to electric, by slowly adding supercharging stations and getting bigger and bigger power feeds from the electric company.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a difference between harping on someone and expressing concern. No doctor has been harping on me to lose weight, but I've been informed that losing some would be a good thing for me to do.
In my experience, there are plenty of people who like to hate on fat people, and that is a problem for lots of fat people. I haven't had a fat friend claim that fat was perfectly healthy, probably because they're smarter than that. (I have one who told his doctor that he'd go on any weight loss program that had better than a 5% success rate over five years. I think he pretty much gave up on his weight, but he knows it isn't healthy.)
I'd like the fat shaming to stop, because then maybe some of my friends could stop feeling defensive and start addressing their weight issue more rationally.
The only skydiver I ever knew well broke his back. Fortunately, he appears to have completely recovered from that, but I was watching his toes move carefully when I first got to the hospital to visit him. He's not a careless person, but he made a mistake he couldn't recover from.
There's plenty of cultures, past and present, that do not require covering the female breast. I'm not sure how large-scale they were or are. I'm also not familiar with all that many cultures.
Boobs aren't inherently sexual. They're secondary sexual characteristics, but so is facial hair, and I was never asked to cover up my mustache when I had it (or told it was sexy, actually).
You seem to be starting with the fact that a bodily function can be disabled by various medical conditions, and concluding that said bodily function is involuntary. I know a guy who can't wiggle all his toes (nerve damage during cancer surgery); does that mean that toe-wiggling is an involuntary function?
In fact, lots of guys can get an erection by thinking appropriate (inappropriate?) thoughts, and can think other things to lose one.
If Tesla stock were cheap, lots of people would buy it for its potential of going up a lot, and the price would go up, which is what is happening here. By buying Tesla stock, you're making the bet that the company is going to do much better in the not-too-distant future. The market price (and hence market cap) depends heavily on what people expect out of the company in the not-too-distant future.
Suppose that, in three years, Tesla was going to sell lots and lots of cars and have profits similar to Ford's. Other things being equal (think spherical corporations of uniform density in a frictionless vacuum), it stock would be two-thirds higher than its current value, and that's a really good rate of return. If people in general expected this, Tesla's stock price would go up to the point where it was a decent investment and not spectacular.
If you don't think Tesla's going to do THAT well, don't buy. If you think it's going to exceed expectations, buy. Personally, I tend to stay away from the highly speculative stocks with the high P/E ratios, but then I'm on the old side so I'm not interested in adding risk to my portfolio.
You do realize that prices are normally set for maximum profit, and the price to maximize profit with no corporate tax is the one to maximize profit after 50% taxes, right? And that paying suppliers less doesn't quite go along with pushing up prices (since presumably the supplier sees the same corporate tax change)?
Corporate income taxes will make it harder to attract investment, but I fail to see how they affect the bond rating. That's based largely on how confident the lender is about being paid back, and repaying bonds is, IIRC, business expenses like everything else.
Your "overall norm" of corporate profit ratios is subject to variation. There is no percentage blasted into the New York Stock Exchange by divine lightning; it's the ratio that typical corporations get. If that goes down, there's less money going into the market, but nothing else changes. An overall change in corporate income tax will hit all the corps in the country.
There are downsides to corporate income tax, like all taxes, but not the ones you're most emphatic about. If this is from Sowell, it would appear that Sowell provides beautifully simple, lucid, and wrong explanations of market mechanics.
GP's logic is pretty good. You see, corporations are not charities. They set their prices to get the maximum profit, not some stupid cost-plus scheme. Corporate taxes are on profit, and maximizing profit yields the same results no matter what positive multiplier you put on profit. (This applies to all situations, monpolies included.)
Corporate taxes can only reduce profits, not eliminate them. Corporations are not like individuals, in that corporations don't pay taxes on what they need to keep going. A corporation with zero profit can continue indefinitely. (This is not true of a partnership or sole proprietorship, but they don't pay corporate taxes.) Corporations generally don't shut down lines of business because they're not profitable enough, and if they do other people tend to fill the need.
What increased corporate taxes do is make it harder to raise capital by selling equity (basically, issuing stock), so it probably does hurt startups disproportionately.
Corporate pricing is done by supply and demand, and is determined by the marginal cost of selling an additional unit and the demand curve. The marginal costs are virtually all tax-deductible, so the supply curve and the demand curve remain the same with or without corporate taxes, and the price stays the same.
Ever heard of business expenses? The plumber doesn't pay $21 on the $70 you pay, since a large chunk of that $70 will be materials and transportation and stuff like that, which are tax-deductible. Heck, if the plumbing you needed was business-related, you deduct it on your income taxes.
By paying $70, you get $70 of plumbing, according to the normal rates. If the plumber suddenly didn't have to pay income tax, do you think the rates would go down proportionally?
What do you mean, "a questionable path to a livable retirement based on stock or mutual fund investments"? Got a better idea? Defined-benefit pensions are pretty rare now (although I'm getting a small one when I retire). Most people have to save up, and stocks (directly or in mutual funds) are part of the best investment plans. If someone has a 401(k) or IRA, there's probably stocks involved.
I've got a lot less in the market than Gates, but there's a lot more people financially similar to me than financially similar to Gates. If the market tanks, he loses a lot more in absolute numbers than I do, but we lose the same proportionately. You can make a good argument that Gates could live quite happily after a 20% loss of assets, but that kind of loss would cramp my retirement plans a bit.
I'm not arguing that the ultra-rich should be protected from market downturns, or that we should worry about them. I'm arguing that there's a lot of middle-class people like me who would get hurt as well.
Human evolution isn't the issue here. Humans will survive. Human civilization is the issue, and it's going to take a serious hit. The best conditions for civilization are at least similar to the ones it was created in.
In general, you're right, but there are other factors. Paranoid dictators are more likely to go along with the experts to achieve their goals, and late in the war this wasn't going to happen with Germany without extreme risks.
Hitler knew there wasn't going to be a negotiated peace, unlike his subordinates, and he was correct in that. Therefore, there was no real difference between losing in 1943 and losing in 1946, and he consistently went for the big risks because they were the only ones that could pay off. The Ardennes Offensive (Battle of the Bulge) could have been modified to try to destroy the US First Army, which German generals though possible, but that would not have seriously affected the outcome of the war. Hitler's grandiose scheme, although very unlikely to succeed, might have. (He was also seriously deluded about Western Allied determination to prosecute the war.)
Invading the Soviet Union was the whole point of waging the war, the war in the West being something of an unwelcome distraction. By attacking when he did, he caught the Red Army when it was extremely vulnerable, and likely had his best chance of winning.
Theoretically, ideas can't be patented, but actual machines and processes can be. Hence, the requirement (not always enforced) that the description in a patent contain enough information to allow other people to implement what it purports to do. If you could have cut out Dick Tracy comics and sent them in with twenty-five cents to receive working plans for a two-way wrist radio, they would be patentable, and obvious derivations of them would not be.
A lot of his "increasingly unwise decisions" later in the war were due to his conflicts with top Army officers. They kept acting like it would be possible to negotiate a peace, and were doing their best to lose the war slowly to make Germany's diplomatic position better. Hitler realized that, given what Germany had done under him, an honorable negotiated peace was not going to happen, and that losing slowly was just losing. Therefore, Hitler and his generals were distrustful and didn't understand each other. Hitler wanted to take increasingly dire risks to win, while his subordinates didn't want to risk the collapse of the German position. Not that Hitler was a particularly good general in the first place, and he was definitely irrational later in the war, but many of his decisions made some sort of sense.
The surviving generals pushed a narrative in which Hitler was responsible for most things that went wrong, and kept claiming that Hitler had prevented them from winning the war.
He doesn't get all the credit for starting the First World War. The Great Powers had maneuvered themselves into a situation where almost anything could touch off a war, and some of them were in political situations where backing down in a confrontation seemed more politically dangerous than starting a war.
Essentially:
Overall, I'd rate Princip's contribution as significantly less than the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and German contributions.
Using your definition of "right", there hasn't been a major party on the right since 1980.
The wedding cake issue appears to have started badly and escalated from there. The findings of fact in the judgment described what appears to be extreme rudeness from the bakers, including publicizing the affair on Facebook, causing the lesbians further difficulties.
My take on this: if you're running a business, serve the public and obey the rules. If you have problems with that, reconsider starting a business.
I'm a white male leftist. I must have missed the memo on this one.
There are circumstances in which I'd be very reluctant to disagree with a black woman: when she's describing life as a black, a woman, or a black woman, or more generally when she's talking about something that she knows a lot about and I don't. Unfortunately, it would appear that some white males like to tell black females what their lives are like, and that may be where the idea got started.
Scientists tend to be conservative in their projections, so we'd expect the current situation to be worse than the general predictions of twenty years ago.
The market would do a pretty good job of regulating things if the price people paid for things was roughly equal to the total cost of those things. If fossil fuel users had to pay for all the harm the fuels are causing, people would use less, and society would have adapted over time to use less fossil fuel. The market simply can't adjust for factors that are not reflected in prices.
This is the real advantage of carbon taxes: they use market forces to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, rather than regulations.
Earth doesn't care, sorry. Humans care. Other animals could conceivably care, but they don't appear to have the intellectual capacity to understand what's going on.
Therefore, the only entities that care care about keeping fairly close to the climate civilization developed in.
Politicians are often smart, although not typically up on hard science. It's one of the more competitive pursuits, and stupid politicians are going to have trouble surviving.
You mean "hydrocarbons or coal" in your second paragraph. It really won't matter to the atmosphere whether we burn it all now, or relatively slowly, we're still screwed. We have to leave most of that stuff in the ground.
I believe (not that I've checked it myself) that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been going up less than our fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions, so there are feedback mechanisms. They aren't enough, and they have other issues (for example, the pH of the oceans has been changing significantly). You do realize that, since atmospheric CO2 levels have gone from 280ppm in 1850 to over 400ppm now, it should be clear that we are increasing the concentration significantly.
The climate is changing very fast, and it's changing to be well outside the normal variation that human civilization has developed in.
Mass really isn't that big an issue for mobile applications, since in practice the fuel weight is usually minor compared to other weight. (This is not true in multi-stage rockets.) Volume is important. The range of my car is limited by the volume of the gas tank, not the weight of the gasoline.
Hydrogen compressed to ten thousand psi has about a sixth of the energy density of gasoline. That's not something that's going away with better technology.
You seem to be arguing that we have the infrastructure, so all we have to do is replace all of it with much more expensive components. Except that we can't replace all of it: we currently do a lot of last-mile gasoline distribution with tanker trucks, and anything volume-limited like that is not going to transition to hydrogen at all well. At 10,000 pounds per square inch (700 bar), which has its own issues, it's got about a sixth the energy per volume of gasoline and similar fuels.
It's going to be easier for gas stations to convert to electric, by slowly adding supercharging stations and getting bigger and bigger power feeds from the electric company.