With all the stories of robots invented by Japanese over time, I am surprised they weren't doing this on day 2 after the event. I just assumed that if they were inventing sex robots and elder-care robots and dancing robots which all do things which humans could already do pretty well, that they had run out of things humans couldn't do, like industrial robots and disaster explorer robots. I've lost a lot of respect for Japanese robotics after the length of this delay.
Special interests cut both ways. When Congress was applauding a Texan who was advocating a major wind network and a power grid upgrade despite making his millions in oil, they conveniently didn't mention that T. Boone Pickens had bought up large swaths of land that would be claimed by that wind network and power grid. He hasn't reformed one bit; he just is lining up for the money in advance of all you guys. I would bet that similar stories exist in the hybrid car (rare earths mining) and passenger rail (land ownership, right of way, steel/construction) stories as well. None of these ideas are bad just because someone's out to make a mint, but do keep in mind that special interests are pushing for the changes just as much as they're pushing against them.
You have no future in politics. Too many of your ideas sound too sensible. You'd be doomed for sure if you said that Medicare was not for the latest and greatest surgeries and drugs (people cannot live forever, even if you want to spend $500K/year on end of life care), or that welfare benefits would be better given in a FDR-style Civilian Conservation Corps (do you want your $300/week? you need to put in 10-20 hours painting graffiti and picking litter and maybe fixing the picnic areas. or tutor those kids so they don't drop out of school and land in prison).
The Senator probably knows that if you're using an internet storefront, odds are it hits a computer database, meaning that the additional record-keeping overhead is only to save that database through tax season, and to keep copies of the cancelled checks you sent to the various jurisdictions (which any decent bank does for business accounts already) as proof of remittance of taxes.
Sales taxes are to help pay the state for overall services related to businesses in the community or state. But the state has provided zero services to the online merchant I purchased from.
Could you cite a piece or two of tax legislation where the legislators stated this was their purpose? Around here, it's things like "we want more money for mass transit that is losing money left and right because very few people ride it" and "we want more money because we are in tough times in part because of the lavish commitments we made in good times" and "we want more money to provide slightly-below-average public education." I have never heard an argument for raising taxes that said "We want to raise your sales taxes so we can help local businesses." So if you have an example or ten, I'd like to see them.
I agree with much of what you wrote. The online stores have broader selection since they are stocking a few warehouses, instead of many storefronts. When online stores can amass economies of scale, they can negotiate lower prices from the manufacturers. Some online places do not charge such wonderful prices, largely because they don't push the volume to do so.
That said, local stores will hold three strengths: time, visual inspection, and shipping costs. There will always be people who can't or don't plan ahead, so they can't place an order and wait days for delivery. There will be things that you want to examine in person before buying, like used cars and fresh produce. I hate to think how many things I would return to the hardware store if I had to make my purchasing decision based on a stock image and sparse marketing text. Finally, since shipping is never truly free, when the local store orders 500 of something and you only order 1, the shipping cost to them is much lower than the cost to you. And my cost to return something to a local store is less as well.
Overall, some products will be best purchased at local stores, and others will be best purchased online.
This will be a very good thing due to its elimination of the use tax scenario. Compared to the dollars involved, it is incredibly burdensome for me to keep track of which purchases I make online that are taxed or are not, and if they are not, whether I owe use tax to the state or not. So I suspect a lot of folks don't even make an effort to figure it out or pay it. This is a win for consumers who want to remain legally above-board and minimize audit risk.
On the business side, while it will be challenging for some retailers to keep up with the various tax regulations and rates in different areas, I think this challenge is overstated. First, someone will develop an app for it, and second, most online businesses are not selling many of the products which are taxed in some states and not taxed in others. TFA cites bottled water being untaxed and soda being taxed; who buys bottled water online across state lines? Don't start me on the mink coats versus mink handbags.
As statistics improve and long-term health prediction improves, each individual will be asked to pay more and more of the cost that they generate. This is great if you're rich, where you're doing that already anyway. It blows if you're poor.
Wrong. It's great if you're in good health and tough if you're in poor health. Look, somebody has to pay the cost of health care. It could be you, or your employer, or your parents, or their employer, or all taxpayers nationwide (via the federal government), or all taxpayers within a region (for state and municipal health care), or a combination therein. The money has to come from somewhere, and many people are blissfully oblivious to it.
I agree it could be abused, and depending on your theory of economics and markets, we could see situations where insurance costs go up to pad profit margins of the insurance companies. I also see that if they are able to generate this information, they have an ethical obligation to share it with the individuals in question. This puts greater responsibility on you to take care of your health, and greater incentive to do so as well. Frankly, I would value the information of "based on x and y, we think you're headed toward z, and here's how to take action now and get to z' instead."
It's interesting to say that mortgages and health insurance can't be cut. If you mean, we can't entirely cut out spending on housing and health, then I absolutely agree with you. If on the other hand, you consider how our expectations for houses and for health care have changed from 30 years ago (or 50, 75, 100), then we see ways we could cut. You may not like linoleum floors and Formica countertops; you may prefer hardwood and granite. Only one bathroom and 60 amp electric service may seem terribly limited to you. But you could live with it; people did. That goes double for health care, where costs have risen in some cases because we've developed new methods that work somewhat better but are significantly more expensive. Many people expect to take pills and have elective surgery rather than make lifestyle changes, get bed rest,and recover slowly. This costs much more, and we see it in insurance costs, since the tab has to be paid somehow. Is it overconsuming? I think so.
Foo Restaurant doesn't even have to inflate their bill at all under most circumstances. Their pricing already includes the variable cost of the food, plus some to go toward the overhead. If the average restaurant tab contributes at least $10 to the overhead, Foo doesn't lose anything by offering a $10 coupon. I see three major risks with the coupon: 1) they need to hire more help to serve all the coupon-users, thus changing their variable costs. 2) the crowd of hoi polloi coupon-users drives away better-paying customers (longer wait time, no available tables, changed atmosphere). 3) the spike in volume due to the coupon offer overwhelms the restaurant's abilities to serve folks, and its reputation suffers -- this has happened with other Groupon offers, and a couple Denny's/IHOP/KFC offers that were widely advertised, but is not normally a risk with printed newspaper coupons. 4) In the long run, everyone associates Foo with coupons, and refuses to pay full price, so nobody is covering the overhead anymore. In these four cases, Foo loses money or has to inflate their prices to keep up. In other cases, no problem.
Please provide a mechanism whereby small changes can not eventually lead to large-scale changes. 'Cause your acceptance of the small-scale changes via evolution inherently requires acceptance of large-scale changes via evolution Time makes a lot of small changes into big changes.
Non sequitor. I fully agree that small changes can lead to large changes. Sometimes this happens in ways I could never predict, such as a flaming fruit vendor leading to the toppling of the Tunisian government. But it is quite a heady extrapolation to equate, as Xest does, the repeated selection of one option from many viable ones (the seedlings and the flowers) with the mechanism by which many diverse complex species are created from simple atoms and molecules. These are different scales (micro and micro), and different directions (from many down to one vs from one up to many).
We have microscopes and telescopes, which help us see different things in different ways, so we made different words with the similar root "scope". I think if we regularly used different words for micro-evolution versus macro-evolution, and for one-from-many versus many-from-one, it would help the cause of science by promoting clarity and eliminate the need for threads of discussion like this one.
I for one would like to see unemployment structured more like the WPA and CCC from FDR's era. There are many able-bodied folks who could, in exchange for their government check, work even part-time to clean up graffiti on buildings, plant flowers in the parks, tutor kids who are behind in school, et cetera. I'm sure we'd need exceptions for some categories of people, and we'd need to transform the existing bureaucracy which would be a lot of work and possibly involve hiring persons to manage and supervise these painters, planters, tutors. All of that would create jobs as well. Plus, judging by how much trash I see alongside the roads I drive daily, I think we would be able to employ people in this line of work for the long term.
Perhaps we need two words: one for small-scale evolutionary change due to a shift in the frequency of two competing genes (light versus dark moths) and one for global descent of all living things from non-living things. Your cross-pollination (lantana is a great choice here) demonstrates the former very nicely but does nothing to prove the latter, which is the point of contention. It is too bad that speakers of the English language in its sloppiness uses one word for these two very different things, the micro and the macro.
You make a good point. There may not be a Ctrl-Z Undo Button for mankind's actions to the earth. We have worked to change what we dump in rivers, but certain fish populations are gone for good already. We are working to clean up what mess we've left there, but now we have interesting questions that are much more difficult than a simple Undo command, like "Will we hurt fish more by scooping up the mercury-laden river sediment (and stirring up some into the stream) than simply not touching the sediment (which may have nicely covered over the mercury with more recent stuff)?" I find it difficult to grasp the ease at which folks make some very broad statements about our mortal obligations to do certain things to save the earth, when they show so little of the thoughtful consideration of the facts which you made above. For example, when anyone who talks to me stridently about climate change, without considering that they might be wrong or uninformed, I dismiss as a religious fanatic in the church of Climate Change.
Thanks, Riverat1, but that doesn't solve the question above, which was about mercury pollution. What are the mercury pollution statistics on the operation of internal combustion engines and electric vehicles, and on the manufacturing processes for ICEs versus electric vehicles? Are there also stats on the mercury pollution of gasoline extraction and refining, versus coal mining and burning? Same story for solar, wind, nuclear, including production of the solar panels from China...
Mercury alone is not the whole equation, but every time someone throws out one marketing factoid about why X is better than Y, I want to know the rest of the story. If you know where I can find it, I'd appreciate it.
I can tell them all why I'm not paying $18 per album: there's a thriving secondhand market and format conversion is easier than it used to be. I used to spend $1000/year on CDs. Now I'm mostly buying vinyl at thrift shops for a buck a disk. Someone's parents died and they don't have a turntable, so off it goes, and I find it. Granted, I don't always know if it's good before I buy it, but for a buck, I no longer need to; it becomes a great adventure. For the albums I really like, that's 10 MP3s for the price of one iTune. This won't work for those who need the latest releases or artists, but if you like classical, folk, or oldies, it's probably out there waiting for you.
If you have determined that a law is unjust or has bad side effects, then in addition to your civil disobedience, I would submit that you have a civic duty to press for the law to be changed. The details of the law and of your circumstances will define what that civic duty looks like in action, but merely disobeying is not civil, it's immature.
That coal plant also powers the Electric Vehicles which claim to be ULEV or PZEV or orther wonderful statuses... can we get the environmentalists to acknowledge that by using electric vehicles, they're still polluting massively?
Ah -- I was operating under a different design assumption. I would place the sensors near known faults so that we could get the earliest possible detection to warn the hospitals and fire departments and other critical facilities in surrounding regions of what is coming. I expect the reports would be of most benefit in urban areas, since city-dwellers are on average less prepared for seismic events than residents of rural areas. You're right that if the fault line runs thru the urban center, it may diminish the time-benefit of the warning.
Absolutely agree. Furthermore, if you're in the SF Bay Area, some of the most populated areas are not on bedrock. The bay has been partially landfilled, and many areas that are not direct landfill are still liquifaction zones. Early warning can help these areas which are not directly on faults, but close enough to feel the impact.
(2) is not entirely true. The Loma Prieta quake of 1989 did little damage at its epicenter, because it was in the middle of a state park. Nothing but trees and trails at the center. 15 miles away at my parents' home, a few bookshelves emptied their contents and a drill press fell over. They live on bedrock. 40 miles away in San Francisco, a baseball game was in process in an area that was partially bay landfill. One of the stadium balconies partially broke off. The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge had a section collapse, crushing persons in their cars. So it is not just distance that matters; the structure you are in and the composition of the ground underneath your structure are highly relevant. San Francisco for one would benefit if this system works well.
And if anyone reads the articles you linked to, they will see that Irgun was officially categorized as a terrorist organization by the State of Israel upon its inception. One month later, Irgun forces and IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) clashed in military battles with casualties. Irgun has ceased to exist, and its ways have been denounced by the Israeli government. Implying otherwise requires more proof than you have given here.
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With all the stories of robots invented by Japanese over time, I am surprised they weren't doing this on day 2 after the event. I just assumed that if they were inventing sex robots and elder-care robots and dancing robots which all do things which humans could already do pretty well, that they had run out of things humans couldn't do, like industrial robots and disaster explorer robots. I've lost a lot of respect for Japanese robotics after the length of this delay.
Get off my lawn!!
And do it at a leisurely and efficient speed of your choice.
When I was a kid, we took onions from our belt and planted them in lawns as we moseyed off of them.
Special interests cut both ways. When Congress was applauding a Texan who was advocating a major wind network and a power grid upgrade despite making his millions in oil, they conveniently didn't mention that T. Boone Pickens had bought up large swaths of land that would be claimed by that wind network and power grid. He hasn't reformed one bit; he just is lining up for the money in advance of all you guys. I would bet that similar stories exist in the hybrid car (rare earths mining) and passenger rail (land ownership, right of way, steel/construction) stories as well. None of these ideas are bad just because someone's out to make a mint, but do keep in mind that special interests are pushing for the changes just as much as they're pushing against them.
You have no future in politics. Too many of your ideas sound too sensible. You'd be doomed for sure if you said that Medicare was not for the latest and greatest surgeries and drugs (people cannot live forever, even if you want to spend $500K/year on end of life care), or that welfare benefits would be better given in a FDR-style Civilian Conservation Corps (do you want your $300/week? you need to put in 10-20 hours painting graffiti and picking litter and maybe fixing the picnic areas. or tutor those kids so they don't drop out of school and land in prison).
The Senator probably knows that if you're using an internet storefront, odds are it hits a computer database, meaning that the additional record-keeping overhead is only to save that database through tax season, and to keep copies of the cancelled checks you sent to the various jurisdictions (which any decent bank does for business accounts already) as proof of remittance of taxes.
Sales taxes are to help pay the state for overall services related to businesses in the community or state. But the state has provided zero services to the online merchant I purchased from.
Could you cite a piece or two of tax legislation where the legislators stated this was their purpose? Around here, it's things like "we want more money for mass transit that is losing money left and right because very few people ride it" and "we want more money because we are in tough times in part because of the lavish commitments we made in good times" and "we want more money to provide slightly-below-average public education." I have never heard an argument for raising taxes that said "We want to raise your sales taxes so we can help local businesses." So if you have an example or ten, I'd like to see them.
My zipcode has three different tax jurisdictions in it.
Four if you count the levee district, but that one doesn't do sales taxes....
How about your zip+4? Other commenters have described software that tracks all this at the zip+4 level.
I agree with much of what you wrote. The online stores have broader selection since they are stocking a few warehouses, instead of many storefronts. When online stores can amass economies of scale, they can negotiate lower prices from the manufacturers. Some online places do not charge such wonderful prices, largely because they don't push the volume to do so.
That said, local stores will hold three strengths: time, visual inspection, and shipping costs. There will always be people who can't or don't plan ahead, so they can't place an order and wait days for delivery. There will be things that you want to examine in person before buying, like used cars and fresh produce. I hate to think how many things I would return to the hardware store if I had to make my purchasing decision based on a stock image and sparse marketing text. Finally, since shipping is never truly free, when the local store orders 500 of something and you only order 1, the shipping cost to them is much lower than the cost to you. And my cost to return something to a local store is less as well.
Overall, some products will be best purchased at local stores, and others will be best purchased online.
This will be a very good thing due to its elimination of the use tax scenario. Compared to the dollars involved, it is incredibly burdensome for me to keep track of which purchases I make online that are taxed or are not, and if they are not, whether I owe use tax to the state or not. So I suspect a lot of folks don't even make an effort to figure it out or pay it. This is a win for consumers who want to remain legally above-board and minimize audit risk.
On the business side, while it will be challenging for some retailers to keep up with the various tax regulations and rates in different areas, I think this challenge is overstated. First, someone will develop an app for it, and second, most online businesses are not selling many of the products which are taxed in some states and not taxed in others. TFA cites bottled water being untaxed and soda being taxed; who buys bottled water online across state lines? Don't start me on the mink coats versus mink handbags.
HSA beats FSA, hands-down (unless federal healthcare regulations change things in the future). However, not all employers offer HSA options.
As statistics improve and long-term health prediction improves, each individual will be asked to pay more and more of the cost that they generate. This is great if you're rich, where you're doing that already anyway. It blows if you're poor.
Wrong. It's great if you're in good health and tough if you're in poor health. Look, somebody has to pay the cost of health care. It could be you, or your employer, or your parents, or their employer, or all taxpayers nationwide (via the federal government), or all taxpayers within a region (for state and municipal health care), or a combination therein. The money has to come from somewhere, and many people are blissfully oblivious to it.
I agree it could be abused, and depending on your theory of economics and markets, we could see situations where insurance costs go up to pad profit margins of the insurance companies. I also see that if they are able to generate this information, they have an ethical obligation to share it with the individuals in question. This puts greater responsibility on you to take care of your health, and greater incentive to do so as well. Frankly, I would value the information of "based on x and y, we think you're headed toward z, and here's how to take action now and get to z' instead."
It's interesting to say that mortgages and health insurance can't be cut. If you mean, we can't entirely cut out spending on housing and health, then I absolutely agree with you. If on the other hand, you consider how our expectations for houses and for health care have changed from 30 years ago (or 50, 75, 100), then we see ways we could cut. You may not like linoleum floors and Formica countertops; you may prefer hardwood and granite. Only one bathroom and 60 amp electric service may seem terribly limited to you. But you could live with it; people did. That goes double for health care, where costs have risen in some cases because we've developed new methods that work somewhat better but are significantly more expensive. Many people expect to take pills and have elective surgery rather than make lifestyle changes, get bed rest,and recover slowly. This costs much more, and we see it in insurance costs, since the tab has to be paid somehow. Is it overconsuming? I think so.
Foo Restaurant doesn't even have to inflate their bill at all under most circumstances. Their pricing already includes the variable cost of the food, plus some to go toward the overhead. If the average restaurant tab contributes at least $10 to the overhead, Foo doesn't lose anything by offering a $10 coupon. I see three major risks with the coupon: 1) they need to hire more help to serve all the coupon-users, thus changing their variable costs. 2) the crowd of hoi polloi coupon-users drives away better-paying customers (longer wait time, no available tables, changed atmosphere). 3) the spike in volume due to the coupon offer overwhelms the restaurant's abilities to serve folks, and its reputation suffers -- this has happened with other Groupon offers, and a couple Denny's/IHOP/KFC offers that were widely advertised, but is not normally a risk with printed newspaper coupons. 4) In the long run, everyone associates Foo with coupons, and refuses to pay full price, so nobody is covering the overhead anymore. In these four cases, Foo loses money or has to inflate their prices to keep up. In other cases, no problem.
Please provide a mechanism whereby small changes can not eventually lead to large-scale changes. 'Cause your acceptance of the small-scale changes via evolution inherently requires acceptance of large-scale changes via evolution Time makes a lot of small changes into big changes.
Non sequitor. I fully agree that small changes can lead to large changes. Sometimes this happens in ways I could never predict, such as a flaming fruit vendor leading to the toppling of the Tunisian government. But it is quite a heady extrapolation to equate, as Xest does, the repeated selection of one option from many viable ones (the seedlings and the flowers) with the mechanism by which many diverse complex species are created from simple atoms and molecules. These are different scales (micro and micro), and different directions (from many down to one vs from one up to many).
We have microscopes and telescopes, which help us see different things in different ways, so we made different words with the similar root "scope". I think if we regularly used different words for micro-evolution versus macro-evolution, and for one-from-many versus many-from-one, it would help the cause of science by promoting clarity and eliminate the need for threads of discussion like this one.
I for one would like to see unemployment structured more like the WPA and CCC from FDR's era. There are many able-bodied folks who could, in exchange for their government check, work even part-time to clean up graffiti on buildings, plant flowers in the parks, tutor kids who are behind in school, et cetera. I'm sure we'd need exceptions for some categories of people, and we'd need to transform the existing bureaucracy which would be a lot of work and possibly involve hiring persons to manage and supervise these painters, planters, tutors. All of that would create jobs as well. Plus, judging by how much trash I see alongside the roads I drive daily, I think we would be able to employ people in this line of work for the long term.
Perhaps we need two words: one for small-scale evolutionary change due to a shift in the frequency of two competing genes (light versus dark moths) and one for global descent of all living things from non-living things. Your cross-pollination (lantana is a great choice here) demonstrates the former very nicely but does nothing to prove the latter, which is the point of contention. It is too bad that speakers of the English language in its sloppiness uses one word for these two very different things, the micro and the macro.
You make a good point. There may not be a Ctrl-Z Undo Button for mankind's actions to the earth. We have worked to change what we dump in rivers, but certain fish populations are gone for good already. We are working to clean up what mess we've left there, but now we have interesting questions that are much more difficult than a simple Undo command, like "Will we hurt fish more by scooping up the mercury-laden river sediment (and stirring up some into the stream) than simply not touching the sediment (which may have nicely covered over the mercury with more recent stuff)?" I find it difficult to grasp the ease at which folks make some very broad statements about our mortal obligations to do certain things to save the earth, when they show so little of the thoughtful consideration of the facts which you made above. For example, when anyone who talks to me stridently about climate change, without considering that they might be wrong or uninformed, I dismiss as a religious fanatic in the church of Climate Change.
Thanks, Riverat1, but that doesn't solve the question above, which was about mercury pollution. What are the mercury pollution statistics on the operation of internal combustion engines and electric vehicles, and on the manufacturing processes for ICEs versus electric vehicles? Are there also stats on the mercury pollution of gasoline extraction and refining, versus coal mining and burning? Same story for solar, wind, nuclear, including production of the solar panels from China ...
Mercury alone is not the whole equation, but every time someone throws out one marketing factoid about why X is better than Y, I want to know the rest of the story. If you know where I can find it, I'd appreciate it.
I can tell them all why I'm not paying $18 per album: there's a thriving secondhand market and format conversion is easier than it used to be. I used to spend $1000/year on CDs. Now I'm mostly buying vinyl at thrift shops for a buck a disk. Someone's parents died and they don't have a turntable, so off it goes, and I find it. Granted, I don't always know if it's good before I buy it, but for a buck, I no longer need to; it becomes a great adventure. For the albums I really like, that's 10 MP3s for the price of one iTune. This won't work for those who need the latest releases or artists, but if you like classical, folk, or oldies, it's probably out there waiting for you.
If you have determined that a law is unjust or has bad side effects, then in addition to your civil disobedience, I would submit that you have a civic duty to press for the law to be changed. The details of the law and of your circumstances will define what that civic duty looks like in action, but merely disobeying is not civil, it's immature.
That coal plant also powers the Electric Vehicles which claim to be ULEV or PZEV or orther wonderful statuses... can we get the environmentalists to acknowledge that by using electric vehicles, they're still polluting massively?
Ah -- I was operating under a different design assumption. I would place the sensors near known faults so that we could get the earliest possible detection to warn the hospitals and fire departments and other critical facilities in surrounding regions of what is coming. I expect the reports would be of most benefit in urban areas, since city-dwellers are on average less prepared for seismic events than residents of rural areas. You're right that if the fault line runs thru the urban center, it may diminish the time-benefit of the warning.
Absolutely agree. Furthermore, if you're in the SF Bay Area, some of the most populated areas are not on bedrock. The bay has been partially landfilled, and many areas that are not direct landfill are still liquifaction zones. Early warning can help these areas which are not directly on faults, but close enough to feel the impact.
(2) is not entirely true. The Loma Prieta quake of 1989 did little damage at its epicenter, because it was in the middle of a state park. Nothing but trees and trails at the center. 15 miles away at my parents' home, a few bookshelves emptied their contents and a drill press fell over. They live on bedrock. 40 miles away in San Francisco, a baseball game was in process in an area that was partially bay landfill. One of the stadium balconies partially broke off. The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge had a section collapse, crushing persons in their cars. So it is not just distance that matters; the structure you are in and the composition of the ground underneath your structure are highly relevant. San Francisco for one would benefit if this system works well.
And if anyone reads the articles you linked to, they will see that Irgun was officially categorized as a terrorist organization by the State of Israel upon its inception. One month later, Irgun forces and IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) clashed in military battles with casualties. Irgun has ceased to exist, and its ways have been denounced by the Israeli government. Implying otherwise requires more proof than you have given here.