If you want to play the extreme example game, it's a game two can play at in this discussion.
If all wealth were managed to be consumed tomorrow (apparently your ideal world), we'd have a really big party and then on the day after tomorrow life would suck horribly because we'd be in a rapid downward spiral to starvation for many.
No one has suggested no consumption. Obviously the point of growing wealth is later consumption. Ideally people decide for themselves how much investment vs consumption is useful in their life. They know their life better than others. So sure, I'd vote for absolutely no taxes to achieve that. They respond to market interest rates, which are the price accounting for the time value of consumption.
Your example is just criticizing Alice and Bob's time preferences for consumption. If Alice's excess is as "useless" as you claim, why does Bob constantly want it? What really happened is that Alice deferred her consumption in order to create something for other's to use so that she can have more consumption later. In turn, their preference was to consume that now in return for her deferred consumption of it. How much they pay for that privilege/preference is what we call interest. Without the interest, then Alice has no incentive to defer her consumption and thus Bob ends up with no place to live and both are ultimately worse off.
Bottom line, your proposed tax distorts the market for time preferenced consumption (by taxing it and thus resulting in less of it) and in the process makes the landlords and the renters both worse off. You can say you're fighting for the renters, but making it so they have to pay more in rent and/or otherwise have no place to live isn't going to feel like "help" to them!
The point is to encourage the increase of the overall level of wealth, i.e. have people on average be wealthier.
Your prescription is for the opposite, i.e. keeping people poor.
Distinguish between actions which create wealth, investment, and actions which consume wealth, hence the word consumption.
Any savings beyond a little cash in a mattress (i.e. real savings) is invested. Investments are what lead to wealth creation. For example, money is lent to a business to expand, equipment is purchased to make people more efficient, people are hired to work in an industry to create products or services. All of that is ultimately paid for from someone's savings.
When someone consumes a car, or food, or a shirt, or whatever, those resources are what don't return to the economy. Even if something is re-sold, it's typically worth less than it was purchased for, i.e. part was consumed and that part of the stock of wealth was destroyed.
You need to distinguish between actions which create wealth, investment, and actions which consume wealth, hence the word consumption. Don't confuse nominal money flows with the underlying reality of what happens.
Any savings beyond a little cash in a mattress (i.e. real savings) is invested. Investments are what lead to wealth creation. For example, money is lent to a business to expand, equipment is purchased to make people more efficient, people are hired to work in an industry to create products or services. All of that is ultimately paid for from someone's savings.
When someone consumes a car, or food, or a shirt, or whatever, those resources are what don't return to the economy. Even if something is re-sold, it's typically worth less than it was purchased for, i.e. part was consumed and that part of the stock of wealth was destroyed.
In terms of food, what you're trying to say is that low income earners spend a higher percentage of their income on consumption than higher income earners. What you aren't considering is that in order to get a benefit from their investments, at some point those higher income earners must consume that income. Ultimately, taxing consumption is the most fair system and the closest which corresponds to an individual's level of wealth.
Whenever someone start talking about Politifact, I just point to their contradiction of themselves. For them, the facts depend on if it's someone they like saying them or not. On the sites which rate fact-checking site bias, Politifact is on the slightly left-wing tilt, which is better that some out there, but to pretend their always neutral is easily shown to be false.
Also, what stories, or what angle on stories a news site chooses to cover tends to contain large amounts of bias. So you see CNN presenting how the Obama Administration wiretapping a Republican campaign staffer is evidence he was doing something wrong, while for the same story, Fox News is covering it as confirmation the Obama Administration wiretapped the campaign, but didn't actually find anything.
You should go look at the extensive studies done on all of those interventions when they've been tried in the past to see the minimal to no effect they actually have back in reality.
But for 40 years, people have claimed they were spending more money on schools to benefit the students. Now we are to believe that _this time_ it's true?
You'll have to do a better job of describing why you think "cheap ass voters" need to pay for even more. How about the school districts just take some of that non-beneficial spending and redirect it to your idea instead of going back to the taxpayers?
Yeah, it sucks that the school employees consider the bureaucrats their customers. But after all, that's who controls their funding and directs them in what to do, the rest of us just get to pay for it all.
So your school _already_ has two extra dark fiber lines, but you think the cost of running fiber is too expensive to have more than one line be run?
The obvious question about your other examples is that if it's soooo difficult for competitors to get going, why does the local government need to grant them a monopoly? Wouldn't they just naturally have one anyway? The existence of thousands of monopoly franchise agreements with local governments seems to contradict your analysis....
And yes, I've provisioned internet access for a K-8 school and written e-rate grants applications, etc... I'm sure in a different State than you are from, but this doesn't significantly affect that.
So your prediction would be that if we say, triple the inflation adjusted spending on schools, and also double the amount of staff, we'll have much better educational results?
Yeah, we tried that experiment over the last 40 years and found out that educational results continued unchanged, if anything got a little bit worse.
They also studied specific districts where funds were cut on average 20% over time. Again, no change in educational outcomes.
So because government regulations have distorted the market, we need to have yet another layer of government regulations to keep the market from being distorted? It's regulatory turtles all the way down.
Price caps = reduction in supply. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say because supply has been reduced, we need price caps. If anything, the economics argues for precisely the opposite. How do you expect competition to exist if there are price caps? With price caps, you're basically legislating reduced supply and competition only to provide the crappiest service possible for legislated price.
Don't even get me started on local government franchise monopolies....
The price controls are for the benefit of the utilities, not for the benefit of their customers.
They are part of the scheme where their buddies in the government prevent anyone from competing with them and ensure they have steady profits and don't have to worry too much about expenses (including lobbying money).
Yeah, assembly was the way to get the most out of those things. When I was 13 I took assembly for 8 bit processors at the local college. Gave me a much better understanding of what was happening under the covers, despite being mostly useless nowadays.:)
Yep, also TI 99/4a for me. With the add-on speech synthesizer module, but only a cassette tape for "permanent" storage.
Later we had a C-64 with cassette, then eventually added a floppy drive to that, then a C-128. That was also about the time we started using Trash 80s (TRS-80) and Apple IIe's at school.
The claim is so utterly at odds with the way Google operates.
Now try to keep that same skepticism when you hear similar claims by the government or some academic paper about places you don't know about directly (other companies, industries or the country as a whole) and you'll be closer to the truth than if you just believe them.
The confusion comes from the goal of these sorts of accusations not actually being to convince people to treat other people equally. If you can do the math on the statistics, then you'll realize: 1. Based on normal distributions, a significant number of companies will have these sorts of "problems" even when there is zero actual illegal discrimination. 2. The only way for a company to ensure it doesn't get labeled as discriminating by these people is to start discriminating against non-favored groups in order to make the numbers come out "right".
The whole premise is based on a false assumption, that the way to determine if taxes are high or low is by comparing levels between countries. Which is made doubly-ridiculous by not even comparing the total taxes, but just by picking some of them out. It's like saying, "Are you short? We compared your family's average height to the NBA and guess what, you're not that tall!" Not very meaningful.
When someone is cherry picking the data to exclude what's easily available online to anyone and include non-relevant factors for a fact, then you have to be just a little suspicious that they're motivations are something other than just informing people.
Are total taxes high or low? Relative to what? The same country in the past? United States vs. Europe? Vs. Venezuela? Vs. Japan? Who cares if they are high or low compared to say, South Africa. There are way too many other differences to make that comparison meaningful. The best comparison is to compare the same country to itself over time. That still excludes other changes locally over time, but at least the residents of that country are likely to at least understand those.
So what they're saying is that if you introduce a workaround to bypass government anti-competitive restrictions on the supply of something, people will be able to purchase more of it.
So, if you're a TV writer, why not negotiate a contract which takes into account the new reality of streaming and shorter seasons?
What's the big deal? Business conditions change all the time in all sorts of industries and small businesses (which is what most writers should be if they're working via contract and for various rights) adjust to it.
I mean, if they had some sort of big bureaucratic organization which they were forced to belong to and which controlled standard contract terms they might be screwed over while they waited and hoped for it to adjust to the new reality, but if they are free and work for themselves, then it's just business as usual.
Yeah! Look at all the office clerks sitting out of work because computers automated their jobs! Individual banks alone used to employ thousands of people who've all been replaced by computers automating their job. What will all those people ever be able to do? How will they survive!
You should stop using a computer and go back to hiring people to do the same work instead. Think of how much more benefit you'll have on society!
No need to respond to this post unless you decide it's actually just fine for you to automate the work involved in posting on/. with a computer instead of hiring real people to do the work for you...
So in summary, the FCC goes back to not regulating this, just like they didn't regulate this until oh... all of 6 months ago?
The rules Congress just disapproved were passed in October 2016. The Internet survived just fine for decades without the FCC's rules. Pretty sure the sky isn't going to fall as a result of these regulations only lasting a few months.
And if Facebook knows what issues you care about and what parties/politicians you support, they can easily put all that together in order to sell political advertising campaigns targeting you to specific politicians and give them the specific issues to put in the campaign.
So really, this is about Facebook improving their product (you) for their advertisers (political buyers, in this case). Happy data collection. I'm sure Google and the other big advertising companies will follow suit if they can.
The fact they can get additional less informed voters (those who don't vote currently are on average less informed than those who do vote) to show up at elections (which will make the average voter knowledge lower) is just the bonus cherry on top of their advertising Sundae. But hey, as long as that gets them more advertising money to propagandize those less informed voters, it's all good, right?
Surely this guy has noticed Amazon is already the leader in using robots for fulfillment work, going so far as to purchase their robot supplier (Kiva is now Amazon Robots) so they could ramp up production in order to purchase everything they could make...
Why can't you just use a different USB driver for your OS that filters, alerts on, requires additional permission for, or blocks whatever you want, rather than buying a new piece of hardware?
I mean, I get the voltage thing to fry a port, but that's a DOS attack no worse than someone who is physically there just smashing the port/computer. Why not just secure the USB device driver in the first place?
Yeah. We have a Netflix subscription, Amazon Prime and an expensive Dishnetwork bundle. You'd think with all that there'd never be a need to stream from anywhere else.... nope. DVR missed some episodes of a TV show a month or more ago and you just now noticed? You can keep recording the new ones, but no way to watch the old ones but to find an "illegal" stream online.
At some point the video content creators need to figure out that people who've paid for their content at least once just want to be able to consume it how and when it's convenient for them, not have to get the magical time and space incantation correct in order to make sure they don't miss something.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to play the extreme example game, it's a game two can play at in this discussion.
If all wealth were managed to be consumed tomorrow (apparently your ideal world), we'd have a really big party and then on the day after tomorrow life would suck horribly because we'd be in a rapid downward spiral to starvation for many.
No one has suggested no consumption. Obviously the point of growing wealth is later consumption. Ideally people decide for themselves how much investment vs consumption is useful in their life. They know their life better than others. So sure, I'd vote for absolutely no taxes to achieve that. They respond to market interest rates, which are the price accounting for the time value of consumption.
Short of that situation, the ideal tax from an economic perspective is a consumption tax, because that creates the least distortion and reduces ongoing wealth creation the least. In other words, over time it leads to the ability to consume more for everyone compared to an investment or income based tax system. If you doubt me, check with whatever economist you know.
Your example is just criticizing Alice and Bob's time preferences for consumption. If Alice's excess is as "useless" as you claim, why does Bob constantly want it? What really happened is that Alice deferred her consumption in order to create something for other's to use so that she can have more consumption later. In turn, their preference was to consume that now in return for her deferred consumption of it. How much they pay for that privilege/preference is what we call interest. Without the interest, then Alice has no incentive to defer her consumption and thus Bob ends up with no place to live and both are ultimately worse off.
Bottom line, your proposed tax distorts the market for time preferenced consumption (by taxing it and thus resulting in less of it) and in the process makes the landlords and the renters both worse off. You can say you're fighting for the renters, but making it so they have to pay more in rent and/or otherwise have no place to live isn't going to feel like "help" to them!
The point is to encourage the increase of the overall level of wealth, i.e. have people on average be wealthier.
Your prescription is for the opposite, i.e. keeping people poor.
Distinguish between actions which create wealth, investment, and actions which consume wealth, hence the word consumption.
Any savings beyond a little cash in a mattress (i.e. real savings) is invested. Investments are what lead to wealth creation. For example, money is lent to a business to expand, equipment is purchased to make people more efficient, people are hired to work in an industry to create products or services. All of that is ultimately paid for from someone's savings.
When someone consumes a car, or food, or a shirt, or whatever, those resources are what don't return to the economy. Even if something is re-sold, it's typically worth less than it was purchased for, i.e. part was consumed and that part of the stock of wealth was destroyed.
You need to distinguish between actions which create wealth, investment, and actions which consume wealth, hence the word consumption. Don't confuse nominal money flows with the underlying reality of what happens.
Any savings beyond a little cash in a mattress (i.e. real savings) is invested. Investments are what lead to wealth creation. For example, money is lent to a business to expand, equipment is purchased to make people more efficient, people are hired to work in an industry to create products or services. All of that is ultimately paid for from someone's savings.
When someone consumes a car, or food, or a shirt, or whatever, those resources are what don't return to the economy. Even if something is re-sold, it's typically worth less than it was purchased for, i.e. part was consumed and that part of the stock of wealth was destroyed.
In terms of food, what you're trying to say is that low income earners spend a higher percentage of their income on consumption than higher income earners. What you aren't considering is that in order to get a benefit from their investments, at some point those higher income earners must consume that income. Ultimately, taxing consumption is the most fair system and the closest which corresponds to an individual's level of wealth.
Economically, the "better" tax is a consumption tax.
Tax what people spend, not what they earn or they invest.
You want a Yacht or a Ferrari, great, add in the taxes. Your company wants a private jet,pay up. You want to live on the beach, pay up.
You can only afford a used car and an apartment? Pay much less.
You are going to save/invest your money, which will grow the economy so more can be consumed later. Great, we aren't going to penalize you for that.
Whenever someone start talking about Politifact, I just point to their contradiction of themselves. For them, the facts depend on if it's someone they like saying them or not. On the sites which rate fact-checking site bias, Politifact is on the slightly left-wing tilt, which is better that some out there, but to pretend their always neutral is easily shown to be false.
Also, what stories, or what angle on stories a news site chooses to cover tends to contain large amounts of bias. So you see CNN presenting how the Obama Administration wiretapping a Republican campaign staffer is evidence he was doing something wrong, while for the same story, Fox News is covering it as confirmation the Obama Administration wiretapped the campaign, but didn't actually find anything.
So you're saying it's objectively truthful that Descartes disproved objective facts?
There appears to be a gaping logical flaw in your argument...
You should go look at the extensive studies done on all of those interventions when they've been tried in the past to see the minimal to no effect they actually have back in reality.
But for 40 years, people have claimed they were spending more money on schools to benefit the students. Now we are to believe that _this time_ it's true?
You'll have to do a better job of describing why you think "cheap ass voters" need to pay for even more. How about the school districts just take some of that non-beneficial spending and redirect it to your idea instead of going back to the taxpayers?
Yeah, it sucks that the school employees consider the bureaucrats their customers. But after all, that's who controls their funding and directs them in what to do, the rest of us just get to pay for it all.
So your school _already_ has two extra dark fiber lines, but you think the cost of running fiber is too expensive to have more than one line be run?
The obvious question about your other examples is that if it's soooo difficult for competitors to get going, why does the local government need to grant them a monopoly? Wouldn't they just naturally have one anyway? The existence of thousands of monopoly franchise agreements with local governments seems to contradict your analysis....
And yes, I've provisioned internet access for a K-8 school and written e-rate grants applications, etc... I'm sure in a different State than you are from, but this doesn't significantly affect that.
So your prediction would be that if we say, triple the inflation adjusted spending on schools, and also double the amount of staff, we'll have much better educational results?
Yeah, we tried that experiment over the last 40 years and found out that educational results continued unchanged, if anything got a little bit worse.
They also studied specific districts where funds were cut on average 20% over time. Again, no change in educational outcomes.
So because government regulations have distorted the market, we need to have yet another layer of government regulations to keep the market from being distorted? It's regulatory turtles all the way down.
Price caps = reduction in supply. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say because supply has been reduced, we need price caps. If anything, the economics argues for precisely the opposite. How do you expect competition to exist if there are price caps? With price caps, you're basically legislating reduced supply and competition only to provide the crappiest service possible for legislated price.
Don't even get me started on local government franchise monopolies....
The price controls are for the benefit of the utilities, not for the benefit of their customers.
They are part of the scheme where their buddies in the government prevent anyone from competing with them and ensure they have steady profits and don't have to worry too much about expenses (including lobbying money).
Yeah, assembly was the way to get the most out of those things. When I was 13 I took assembly for 8 bit processors at the local college. Gave me a much better understanding of what was happening under the covers, despite being mostly useless nowadays. :)
Yep, also TI 99/4a for me. With the add-on speech synthesizer module, but only a cassette tape for "permanent" storage.
Later we had a C-64 with cassette, then eventually added a floppy drive to that, then a C-128. That was also about the time we started using Trash 80s (TRS-80) and Apple IIe's at school.
Now try to keep that same skepticism when you hear similar claims by the government or some academic paper about places you don't know about directly (other companies, industries or the country as a whole) and you'll be closer to the truth than if you just believe them.
The confusion comes from the goal of these sorts of accusations not actually being to convince people to treat other people equally. If you can do the math on the statistics, then you'll realize:
1. Based on normal distributions, a significant number of companies will have these sorts of "problems" even when there is zero actual illegal discrimination.
2. The only way for a company to ensure it doesn't get labeled as discriminating by these people is to start discriminating against non-favored groups in order to make the numbers come out "right".
The whole premise is based on a false assumption, that the way to determine if taxes are high or low is by comparing levels between countries. Which is made doubly-ridiculous by not even comparing the total taxes, but just by picking some of them out. It's like saying, "Are you short? We compared your family's average height to the NBA and guess what, you're not that tall!" Not very meaningful.
You can just as easily compare current tax revenues to the same country over time and look at total taxes being collected from people, but then you'd have to notice that total per capita inflation adjusted taxes have increased exponentially over time.
When someone is cherry picking the data to exclude what's easily available online to anyone and include non-relevant factors for a fact, then you have to be just a little suspicious that they're motivations are something other than just informing people.
Are total taxes high or low? Relative to what? The same country in the past? United States vs. Europe? Vs. Venezuela? Vs. Japan? Who cares if they are high or low compared to say, South Africa. There are way too many other differences to make that comparison meaningful. The best comparison is to compare the same country to itself over time. That still excludes other changes locally over time, but at least the residents of that country are likely to at least understand those.
So what they're saying is that if you introduce a workaround to bypass government anti-competitive restrictions on the supply of something, people will be able to purchase more of it.
What a shocking result....
So, if you're a TV writer, why not negotiate a contract which takes into account the new reality of streaming and shorter seasons?
What's the big deal? Business conditions change all the time in all sorts of industries and small businesses (which is what most writers should be if they're working via contract and for various rights) adjust to it.
I mean, if they had some sort of big bureaucratic organization which they were forced to belong to and which controlled standard contract terms they might be screwed over while they waited and hoped for it to adjust to the new reality, but if they are free and work for themselves, then it's just business as usual.
Yeah! Look at all the office clerks sitting out of work because computers automated their jobs! Individual banks alone used to employ thousands of people who've all been replaced by computers automating their job. What will all those people ever be able to do? How will they survive!
You should stop using a computer and go back to hiring people to do the same work instead. Think of how much more benefit you'll have on society!
No need to respond to this post unless you decide it's actually just fine for you to automate the work involved in posting on /. with a computer instead of hiring real people to do the work for you...
So in summary, the FCC goes back to not regulating this, just like they didn't regulate this until oh... all of 6 months ago?
The rules Congress just disapproved were passed in October 2016. The Internet survived just fine for decades without the FCC's rules. Pretty sure the sky isn't going to fall as a result of these regulations only lasting a few months.
Thanks for explaining what "Only 1,194 people had right to vote in the election." was apparently supposed to mean.
Maybe next time we can get the summary written in English.... I know, new here.
And if Facebook knows what issues you care about and what parties/politicians you support, they can easily put all that together in order to sell political advertising campaigns targeting you to specific politicians and give them the specific issues to put in the campaign.
So really, this is about Facebook improving their product (you) for their advertisers (political buyers, in this case). Happy data collection. I'm sure Google and the other big advertising companies will follow suit if they can.
The fact they can get additional less informed voters (those who don't vote currently are on average less informed than those who do vote) to show up at elections (which will make the average voter knowledge lower) is just the bonus cherry on top of their advertising Sundae. But hey, as long as that gets them more advertising money to propagandize those less informed voters, it's all good, right?
Surely this guy has noticed Amazon is already the leader in using robots for fulfillment work, going so far as to purchase their robot supplier (Kiva is now Amazon Robots) so they could ramp up production in order to purchase everything they could make...
Why can't you just use a different USB driver for your OS that filters, alerts on, requires additional permission for, or blocks whatever you want, rather than buying a new piece of hardware?
I mean, I get the voltage thing to fry a port, but that's a DOS attack no worse than someone who is physically there just smashing the port/computer. Why not just secure the USB device driver in the first place?
Yeah. We have a Netflix subscription, Amazon Prime and an expensive Dishnetwork bundle. You'd think with all that there'd never be a need to stream from anywhere else.... nope. DVR missed some episodes of a TV show a month or more ago and you just now noticed? You can keep recording the new ones, but no way to watch the old ones but to find an "illegal" stream online.
At some point the video content creators need to figure out that people who've paid for their content at least once just want to be able to consume it how and when it's convenient for them, not have to get the magical time and space incantation correct in order to make sure they don't miss something.