I can't afford though if the price of my meals or gas goes up 300-400% over a few short months.
In the case of the McDonalds example: if the price of the ingredients triples, the price of the finished product at your local McDonalds only goes up a fraction of that. When the potato harvest failed here in northwestern Europe, potato prices doubled & the price of french fries at fast food retaurants went up 5-10%. Most of the costs of the product are in transport, location, wages, advertising, etc, which depend on land value, local average income, distance from the places where it is produced, etc. For the people who buy the ingredients directly at the source the price really triples.
This apparently explains the greater acceptance of CFLs here in the Netherlands, the home market of Philips. They are near monopolists here for things like lightbulbs: most retail chains only have the Philips series. I have never seen a non-Philips one. Besides three Philips 5W 'night light' lightbulbs connected to motion sensors, I only have Philips CFLs.
Are volcanic islands the only ones that count? As I understand it the shoals on the Dutch coast appear, move, and disappear all the time, if human activity doesn't make them stay where they are. The most wellknown newly recorded ones (both 17th century) are Tiengemeten and Noorderhaaks, modest compensation for recorded losses of inhabited islands like Orisant, Koezand, Schoneveld, Griend, Wulpen, etc. over the last millenium. So the "birth of an island" is hardly an interesting event, at least for continental islands.
And you should look up the history of the name "Greenland". It's a good example of what can be done with a dishonest marketing campaign. The Vikings that fell for it and settled there ended up all dying some time later, leaving behind only a few interesting archaeological sites. The smarter ones settled further south, despite the name "Iceland", so their descendants are still alive today.
IMO the major difference is that Greenland became unreachable from Scandinavia because of sea ice at some point. Greenland does seem to have better soil than Iceland, which offsets the disadvantage of having a slightly shorter growing season. Both places are equally unattractive for farming. Iceland has the advantage of the warm north atlantic current, and the possibility of trade with Northern Europe. Both places are only attractive if some very profitable trade (ivory, whale oil) is possible.
Sometimes creating a new traffic jam will relieve pressure somewhere more important downstream, making the road network as a whole more efficient. Sometimes even closing lanes works.
Yet while they're getting better, we're offsetting their improvements by 200W sucking PVRs that are on 24 hours a day, PCs that are on throughout the day, massive power sucking plasma screens, etc.
I use a speedstep notebook in a cradle as PVR and always-on central file server with a rack of USB HDs. The two PCs are off if nobody is using them. The PCs + peripherals and the TV + peripherals are on master-slave power strips. The technology is there, but it is more expensive and requires some thinking.
I have also been using CFLs for years. I for instance use a total of 32W (4*5W and 2*6W) to light my u-shaped living/diner/kitchen area, and specifically planned for this when I bought and placed my lamps. There is plenty of light. I don't use CFLs on lights that go on and off a lot: motion detector lamps, one in a hallway and two outside, the toilet light and a light in a storage room.
Yet to be fair it should be mentioned that power hogs do help in heating the home.
I have heard this argument before. I live in a part of the world where only heating is an issue, so any additional heating is a plus. I have my central natural gas heating unit next to my study (which is otherwise unheated) on the ground floor. The backside of the fridge also vents on the study, and I have a computer (nominally 500W) running when I am there. They do a pretty lousy job of heating the study, as I have cold feet and fingers right now while the rest of the house is warm. The gas heating unit is more efficient than I anticipated.
We also have regulation for Dutch, by a international treaty organization of Dutch speaking countries. The organization does have the power to decide what constitutes proper Dutch, and the government does have the power to require proper Dutch in its jurisdiction whenever it likes, or only to purchase a proper Dutch version for instance. A company like Microsoft should take them seriously if they want to do business with a localized version in the jurisdiction and call it Dutch, or must ship it with a Dutch manual for instance. Many countries have such organizations. For English it is needed less, because it is the biggest market and will be treated with due respect anyway.
This has little to do with ownership. The Mapuche are fighting a proxy fight with their government over local autonomy. They obviously have no leverage against Microsoft. It is about the rights of small nations. They just hope Microsoft will help them by recognizing that the Mapuche should have had a voice in the project.
Do You Own Your Native Language? You can, if you have the power to enforce it.
The best argument in my view for proportional voting is that it at least gives more dimensions to the political compass. One dimension is very poor.
Here you can distinguish right-left, individualist-collectivist, conservative-progressive, nationalist-internationalist, religious-secular. A left, collectivist, conservative, internationalist, religious person could for instance vote CU (a winner), a left, collectivist, conservative, nationalist, secular person instance vote SP (the biggest winner), a right, individualist, conservative, internationalist, secular person for instance VVD (a big loser), etc. It doesn't help against demonization of the others, though. The aforementioned two for instance probably cannot exist in one coalition, even though they are compatible in social-economic policy.
The notion that these web sites changed the outcome of the election significantly is nonsense, and not representative of what the Dutch media are saying. The political parties also have no relation to them: they just get the opportunity to decide what position they take on the issues. There are similar sites for the US elections, but they are just less significant because there are much less parties that really matter (2 vs. 11 in parliament). The move to far right and far left is a consequence of increasing polarization in society: it just means that people are fed up with coalitions with parties from the other side of the political spectrum and vote tactically to achieve that. The left and the right simply hate each other very much right now, just like in the US. In a proportional representation system this shows more in the election result.
the one interesting bit of the books --- The Scouring of The Shire --- wasn't filmed anyway.
This was a huge disappointment to me. The Shire is Tolkien's greatest creation, and the Scouring of The Shire is essential to the story he was trying to tell.
It's a little more complicated than that: you can't just judge the robustness of a landscape by the amount of water available. And the droughts are real.
Here in the Netherlands we also had severe "drought problems" a few years ago, which is admittedly odd for a country largely below sea level with some of Europe's major rivers running through it, and that normally pumps sweet water out continually. Some of the symptoms: two floodings caused by failure of dehydrated dikes that were simply no longer capable of holding the body of water pushing against them, and long term salinization damage to agriculture caused by sea water pumped into the country to restore the water level and prevent further dike failures.
Recurrent droughts would also eventually cause problems with salinization of dune aquifers, which is a problem because the plentiful river water we get from Germany and Belgium is not easily made suitable for consumption. Furthermore drought causes dehydration and increased rotting of peat (the major type of landscape here), which turns it into a CO2 source instead of a CO2 sink, and most houses have foundations on wooden stakes below the water level that also start rotting as soon as they are exposed to air.
Anyway we may also be interested in desalination in some locations, while using reverse electro dialysis to generate energy from the difference in the salt concentration between seawater and river water when water levels are as usual.
The reason why privatized water and energy companies (who can get brownouts because of insufficient cooling water) complain, is that they feel only responsible for selling the metered water/electricity they have available, and not for the consequences of having a fragile infrastructure that fails in rare circumstances: that's the taxpayer's problem as far as they are concerned.
Yet, the government definitely has a right to decide what is tax-excempt, and what is not, of course as well.
Deciding that "a religion" is tax exempt is contrary to freedom of religion. Only things sufficiently similar to christianity will be considered religion, which means that the taxpayer sponsors christianity. Best way to avoid criticism of privileging one religion over another is to ignore them in the first place.
The problem with scientology is that they can not prove that their sole purpose is religious in nature.
I think I can make a convincing case against, let's say, Roman Catholicism as well. Here in the Netherlands Roman Catholic higher clergy have been prohibited up to 1853. They are obviously dangerous political subversives who disrespect the rule of law, and they definitely have considerable business interests.
Well. Let's just say that we tried that. It's been a failure. Catastrophic, as you might be aware of. We won't try that again. Well, I hope so. See how well it works? No world wars caused again, as of yet.
This doesn't convince me at all. I see no relation between being particularly liberal on freedom of speech and starting wars, and I don't believe that the lack of censorship in the Weimar republic caused a world war.
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater theory comes to mind here.
This is a concrete behaviour, not an organization or an idea. In the case of Scientology it is for instance possible to prohibit morally reprehensible sales techniques they use, and I see valid applications for things like criminal libel and defamation per se as well.
Criminalizing opinions, symbols, and organizations only gives a false sense of security. You can take away legal personality from an organization, but you cannot make an organization without legal personality responsible for criminal behaviour, and you also cannot make it disappear.
Ah, nice twist by the Scientology spin doctors. Scientology is not considered to be a "religion" in Germany. Therefore there can't be any "persecution of religious minorities". They're a company with any rights and duties each other company has in Germany.
The government has no business deciding what is and what is not a religion, of course. Not that I am positively disposed towards Scientology, but if awarding status as a religion is apparently problematic, then maybe religion has a privileged status it shouldn't have. Criticism by NGOs is justified.
Their goals are against our constitution.
So? We even have a religious political party in parliament that refuses to admit women as members and is fundamentally undemocratic in nature. In Germany lots of political organizations (milli gorus is one I can think of) are prohibited that are allowed in the surrounding countries.
People sometimes do learn from history, though the knowledge probably gets diluted with time and distance.
The fear of politicians and government of being perceived as nationalist sometimes has perverse results. Here in the Netherlands we used to have a historical curriculum that identified tolerance as a key part of national identity, but the reluctance of government to prescribe historical dogma about "our ancestors" gives license to for instance schools with a majority of muslim pupils to gloss over impopular subjects like the holocaust and the eighty years' war (1568-1648), where "our protestant ancestors" are the ones being persecuted.
Teaching children about the attack by the resistance in 1943 on the population register in Amsterdam, with the intent to burn it down in order to frustrate Nazi bureaucracy, is the best way to instill respect for privacy. Reference to this event that most people know about is a powerful antidote to suggestions that "you have nothing to fear if you are innocent": it was the Dutch government that, in better days, compiled the data that allowed the Nazis to trace most jews (population register) and gave them few places to hide (cadastral maps). What to remember and what to forget is still a policy choice.
The US and continental Europe have different experiences of, and therefore perspectives on, WWII. For the US, WWII is a license to interfere militarily in perceived Nazi regimes abroad (as they did in WWII), while formerly occupied countries, and Germany itself, are busy simply not being a Nazi regime.
In addition to having hate speech law, Germany has also been accused of persecution of religious minorities. Other continental European countries (for instance the Netherlands, where I come from) still have archaic crimes like lese majeste, libelous blasphemy, and criminal libel in the books. Apparently this does not prevent most of these countries from ending up higher (shared #1 for the Netherlands) in press freedom rankings than the US, which imprisons journalists for not revealing sources and generally frustrates investigative journalism.
Firewood harvesters preferably target dead trees and fallen timber as these burn well and produce less smoke. You can grow a lot of biomass, and only the dead part puts CO2 back into the atmosphere. If you carefully manage this, biomass can be a formidable CO2 sink and produce some energy at the same time. But you don't want too much fast-growing stuff like hemp.
Seems that people use all encyclopedias to avoid thinking. That iself is wrong.
It's not wrong. It's "standing on the shoulders of giants". What is starting to go wrong is that we cannot tell the giants from the dwarves anymore, because storing and exchanging information is so cheap that we no longer have to make choices. There is no problem with trusting experts instead of reinventing the wheel yourself, but you do have to make the effort to choose what sources to trust.
Maybe Russia, with its shrinking population and ancient, polluting industry, calculated that it gains from the carbon credit system? I know my energy provider in the Netherlands invests in modernizing Eastern European power plants and stuff like that to get cheap carbon credits, which can then be sold in the form of 'green energy' to the consumers here. Some people consider this morally wrong for some reason, but it makes perfectly good sense to invest the money wherever it is most efficient in reducing CO2 emissions. Reducing it at home is much harder, since we already have one of the smallest 'ecological footprints' per capita in Europe, and things like planting trees is hardly a viable policy in the most densely populated country in Europe.
We still have to stop adding more sequestered CO2 into the air, and moving to a closed cycle using biomass is definitely an improvement. Over time we will also be able to reduce the amount of CO2, by increasing sequestration in construction. For now, the storage of huge amounts excess lumber is not a problem: we are in fact still clearing old-growth forest at an alarming rate for construction.
It means that you pay 52% on the amount earned in the highest bracket, and less on the money earned in the brackets below that. Tax bracket means the same here as it means in the US. "Losing half of your paycheck to taxes" is impossible, and just cheap rhetoric for dumb people who don't understand taxation and will probably never earn money in the highest bracket anyway.
As I also pointed out, the actual amount paid on average on income and profit (capital yield) is 9.9% in the Netherlands, making it actually a fairly attractive place to live for wealthy people. The tax pressure just isn't distributed very fairly, as it feels more like 30% for the average middle income, just like anywhere else. This is unfortunately hard to avoid, since it is harder to evade taxes for employees than it is for billionaires.
The third thing I pointed out is that if you count the various ways in which governments tax their citizens (when you earn something, make profit, buy something, sell something, live in a house, drive on a road, take a shit, etc. etc.), and compare it to what you pay in the private market for the basket of comparable services (mostly various insurances, etc.) you get back for it, the differences between western countries are not as big as they sometimes seem. They are roughly equally good (or bad, if you prefer) in delivering things in return for the amount of taxes paid. They just make different political choices on whom to tax, what services to provide in return, and how and in what direction to misrepresent how much of your income they actually take.
Not the Netherlands, but we used to have it. Tax brackets, with all social security payments (unemployment, disability, pension arrangement, widow and orphan pension arrangement, child rearing benefit, collective health insurance for disproportionate risks) included, are:
0 to 16,893 = 33.55% (15,65% for 65+) 16,893 to 30,357 = 40.50% (22,60% for 65+) 30,357 to 51,762 = 42.00% 51,762 and up = 52.00%
Interest paid on mortgage loans is deducted from your income first (people who rent a home get a benefit dependent on taxable income, and profit from very generous government price controls). And from the resulting amount you subtract 1895.
This results in an effective tax pressure of 9.9% on income and profits, compared to 10.9% in the US and 14% EU 15 average (and in all of them it is the rich and the very poor that pay very little at the expense of the middle incomes).
The real extortion is in consumption taxes, for instance fuel, resulting in 38.8% of GDP as tax revenue (compared to US 25.4% and EU 15 40.6%). People in the US on average spend nearly 10% of GDP more on privately financed health care, and need more additional insurance to have a similar level of protection against risks. When you factor this out, the real difference between most western countries is within a 3% of GDP margin.
Actually, the amount of wealth relative to others is what determines your freedom. Poverty is generally measured, not by how little you have, but by how much less you have than average.
The market is not the only solution to scarcity, or to put it differently: the wealth, power, and freedom dimensions are different things, and societies differ in what aspects of power and freedom are tradable on the market. To give a simple example: a society consisting of a million subsistence farmers that eat their own produce and never exchange anything as a matter of principle, strictly speaking has a GDP of $0 but a lot of freedom. If the government prohibits eating your own crops because it wants to have a tax base, the GDP suddenly grows to whatever the world market value of the produced crops is, but freedom decreases. They not only have to start paying taxes, but they also lost their immunity to competitors in the world market. An embellishment: in this society land may be considered untradable (for instance because everyone holds it in fief from the king), and the people with the biggest parcel of land will always have the biggest parcel of land, and therefore usually the biggest crop.
A lot of countries in the world are actually "wealthier" relative to the US than their GDP suggests, in the sense that they could boost their GDP at the expense of existing methods of distribution of power and freedom. The existing methods are not necessarily more equitable, but they usually are more static and give some relief from the rat race. I don't think this really has much to do with being "more socialist".
Unless the circle was ridiculously large (probably the size of a continent or better), you're not going to be able to get up to escape velocity before you'd (as a human being) would be crushed by the effects of the centripetal acceleration.
What if a dead weight (cargo) is hurled into space by the magnetic ring while a capsule containing human beings is connected to it with with a strong, but very elastic wire.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't afford though if the price of my meals or gas goes up 300-400% over a few short months.
In the case of the McDonalds example: if the price of the ingredients triples, the price of the finished product at your local McDonalds only goes up a fraction of that. When the potato harvest failed here in northwestern Europe, potato prices doubled & the price of french fries at fast food retaurants went up 5-10%. Most of the costs of the product are in transport, location, wages, advertising, etc, which depend on land value, local average income, distance from the places where it is produced, etc. For the people who buy the ingredients directly at the source the price really triples.
I have found that Phillips is the best brand.
This apparently explains the greater acceptance of CFLs here in the Netherlands, the home market of Philips. They are near monopolists here for things like lightbulbs: most retail chains only have the Philips series. I have never seen a non-Philips one. Besides three Philips 5W 'night light' lightbulbs connected to motion sensors, I only have Philips CFLs.
Are volcanic islands the only ones that count? As I understand it the shoals on the Dutch coast appear, move, and disappear all the time, if human activity doesn't make them stay where they are. The most wellknown newly recorded ones (both 17th century) are Tiengemeten and Noorderhaaks, modest compensation for recorded losses of inhabited islands like Orisant, Koezand, Schoneveld, Griend, Wulpen, etc. over the last millenium. So the "birth of an island" is hardly an interesting event, at least for continental islands.
And you should look up the history of the name "Greenland". It's a good example of what can be done with a dishonest marketing campaign. The Vikings that fell for it and settled there ended up all dying some time later, leaving behind only a few interesting archaeological sites. The smarter ones settled further south, despite the name "Iceland", so their descendants are still alive today.
IMO the major difference is that Greenland became unreachable from Scandinavia because of sea ice at some point. Greenland does seem to have better soil than Iceland, which offsets the disadvantage of having a slightly shorter growing season. Both places are equally unattractive for farming. Iceland has the advantage of the warm north atlantic current, and the possibility of trade with Northern Europe. Both places are only attractive if some very profitable trade (ivory, whale oil) is possible.
Sometimes creating a new traffic jam will relieve pressure somewhere more important downstream, making the road network as a whole more efficient. Sometimes even closing lanes works.
Yet while they're getting better, we're offsetting their improvements by 200W sucking PVRs that are on 24 hours a day, PCs that are on throughout the day, massive power sucking plasma screens, etc.
I use a speedstep notebook in a cradle as PVR and always-on central file server with a rack of USB HDs. The two PCs are off if nobody is using them. The PCs + peripherals and the TV + peripherals are on master-slave power strips. The technology is there, but it is more expensive and requires some thinking.
I have also been using CFLs for years. I for instance use a total of 32W (4*5W and 2*6W) to light my u-shaped living/diner/kitchen area, and specifically planned for this when I bought and placed my lamps. There is plenty of light. I don't use CFLs on lights that go on and off a lot: motion detector lamps, one in a hallway and two outside, the toilet light and a light in a storage room.
Yet to be fair it should be mentioned that power hogs do help in heating the home.
I have heard this argument before. I live in a part of the world where only heating is an issue, so any additional heating is a plus. I have my central natural gas heating unit next to my study (which is otherwise unheated) on the ground floor. The backside of the fridge also vents on the study, and I have a computer (nominally 500W) running when I am there. They do a pretty lousy job of heating the study, as I have cold feet and fingers right now while the rest of the house is warm. The gas heating unit is more efficient than I anticipated.
It depends on what you want to do in France.
We also have regulation for Dutch, by a international treaty organization of Dutch speaking countries. The organization does have the power to decide what constitutes proper Dutch, and the government does have the power to require proper Dutch in its jurisdiction whenever it likes, or only to purchase a proper Dutch version for instance. A company like Microsoft should take them seriously if they want to do business with a localized version in the jurisdiction and call it Dutch, or must ship it with a Dutch manual for instance. Many countries have such organizations. For English it is needed less, because it is the biggest market and will be treated with due respect anyway.
This has little to do with ownership. The Mapuche are fighting a proxy fight with their government over local autonomy. They obviously have no leverage against Microsoft. It is about the rights of small nations. They just hope Microsoft will help them by recognizing that the Mapuche should have had a voice in the project.
Do You Own Your Native Language? You can, if you have the power to enforce it.
The best argument in my view for proportional voting is that it at least gives more dimensions to the political compass. One dimension is very poor.
Here you can distinguish right-left, individualist-collectivist, conservative-progressive, nationalist-internationalist, religious-secular. A left, collectivist, conservative, internationalist, religious person could for instance vote CU (a winner), a left, collectivist, conservative, nationalist, secular person instance vote SP (the biggest winner), a right, individualist, conservative, internationalist, secular person for instance VVD (a big loser), etc. It doesn't help against demonization of the others, though. The aforementioned two for instance probably cannot exist in one coalition, even though they are compatible in social-economic policy.
The notion that these web sites changed the outcome of the election significantly is nonsense, and not representative of what the Dutch media are saying. The political parties also have no relation to them: they just get the opportunity to decide what position they take on the issues. There are similar sites for the US elections, but they are just less significant because there are much less parties that really matter (2 vs. 11 in parliament). The move to far right and far left is a consequence of increasing polarization in society: it just means that people are fed up with coalitions with parties from the other side of the political spectrum and vote tactically to achieve that. The left and the right simply hate each other very much right now, just like in the US. In a proportional representation system this shows more in the election result.
the one interesting bit of the books --- The Scouring of The Shire --- wasn't filmed anyway.
This was a huge disappointment to me. The Shire is Tolkien's greatest creation, and the Scouring of The Shire is essential to the story he was trying to tell.
It's a little more complicated than that: you can't just judge the robustness of a landscape by the amount of water available. And the droughts are real.
Here in the Netherlands we also had severe "drought problems" a few years ago, which is admittedly odd for a country largely below sea level with some of Europe's major rivers running through it, and that normally pumps sweet water out continually. Some of the symptoms: two floodings caused by failure of dehydrated dikes that were simply no longer capable of holding the body of water pushing against them, and long term salinization damage to agriculture caused by sea water pumped into the country to restore the water level and prevent further dike failures.
Recurrent droughts would also eventually cause problems with salinization of dune aquifers, which is a problem because the plentiful river water we get from Germany and Belgium is not easily made suitable for consumption. Furthermore drought causes dehydration and increased rotting of peat (the major type of landscape here), which turns it into a CO2 source instead of a CO2 sink, and most houses have foundations on wooden stakes below the water level that also start rotting as soon as they are exposed to air.
Anyway we may also be interested in desalination in some locations, while using reverse electro dialysis to generate energy from the difference in the salt concentration between seawater and river water when water levels are as usual.
The reason why privatized water and energy companies (who can get brownouts because of insufficient cooling water) complain, is that they feel only responsible for selling the metered water/electricity they have available, and not for the consequences of having a fragile infrastructure that fails in rare circumstances: that's the taxpayer's problem as far as they are concerned.
Yet, the government definitely has a right to decide what is tax-excempt, and what is not, of course as well.
Deciding that "a religion" is tax exempt is contrary to freedom of religion. Only things sufficiently similar to christianity will be considered religion, which means that the taxpayer sponsors christianity. Best way to avoid criticism of privileging one religion over another is to ignore them in the first place.
The problem with scientology is that they can not prove that their sole purpose is religious in nature.
I think I can make a convincing case against, let's say, Roman Catholicism as well. Here in the Netherlands Roman Catholic higher clergy have been prohibited up to 1853. They are obviously dangerous political subversives who disrespect the rule of law, and they definitely have considerable business interests.
Well. Let's just say that we tried that. It's been a failure. Catastrophic, as you might be aware of. We won't try that again. Well, I hope so. See how well it works? No world wars caused again, as of yet.
This doesn't convince me at all. I see no relation between being particularly liberal on freedom of speech and starting wars, and I don't believe that the lack of censorship in the Weimar republic caused a world war.
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater theory comes to mind here.
This is a concrete behaviour, not an organization or an idea. In the case of Scientology it is for instance possible to prohibit morally reprehensible sales techniques they use, and I see valid applications for things like criminal libel and defamation per se as well.
Criminalizing opinions, symbols, and organizations only gives a false sense of security. You can take away legal personality from an organization, but you cannot make an organization without legal personality responsible for criminal behaviour, and you also cannot make it disappear.
Ah, nice twist by the Scientology spin doctors. Scientology is not considered to be a "religion" in Germany. Therefore there can't be any "persecution of religious minorities". They're a company with any rights and duties each other company has in Germany.
The government has no business deciding what is and what is not a religion, of course. Not that I am positively disposed towards Scientology, but if awarding status as a religion is apparently problematic, then maybe religion has a privileged status it shouldn't have. Criticism by NGOs is justified.
Their goals are against our constitution.
So? We even have a religious political party in parliament that refuses to admit women as members and is fundamentally undemocratic in nature. In Germany lots of political organizations (milli gorus is one I can think of) are prohibited that are allowed in the surrounding countries.
People sometimes do learn from history, though the knowledge probably gets diluted with time and distance.
The fear of politicians and government of being perceived as nationalist sometimes has perverse results. Here in the Netherlands we used to have a historical curriculum that identified tolerance as a key part of national identity, but the reluctance of government to prescribe historical dogma about "our ancestors" gives license to for instance schools with a majority of muslim pupils to gloss over impopular subjects like the holocaust and the eighty years' war (1568-1648), where "our protestant ancestors" are the ones being persecuted.
Teaching children about the attack by the resistance in 1943 on the population register in Amsterdam, with the intent to burn it down in order to frustrate Nazi bureaucracy, is the best way to instill respect for privacy. Reference to this event that most people know about is a powerful antidote to suggestions that "you have nothing to fear if you are innocent": it was the Dutch government that, in better days, compiled the data that allowed the Nazis to trace most jews (population register) and gave them few places to hide (cadastral maps). What to remember and what to forget is still a policy choice.
The US and continental Europe have different experiences of, and therefore perspectives on, WWII. For the US, WWII is a license to interfere militarily in perceived Nazi regimes abroad (as they did in WWII), while formerly occupied countries, and Germany itself, are busy simply not being a Nazi regime.
In addition to having hate speech law, Germany has also been accused of persecution of religious minorities. Other continental European countries (for instance the Netherlands, where I come from) still have archaic crimes like lese majeste, libelous blasphemy, and criminal libel in the books. Apparently this does not prevent most of these countries from ending up higher (shared #1 for the Netherlands) in press freedom rankings than the US, which imprisons journalists for not revealing sources and generally frustrates investigative journalism.
When biomass dies, it either rots or is burnt.
Firewood harvesters preferably target dead trees and fallen timber as these burn well and produce less smoke. You can grow a lot of biomass, and only the dead part puts CO2 back into the atmosphere. If you carefully manage this, biomass can be a formidable CO2 sink and produce some energy at the same time. But you don't want too much fast-growing stuff like hemp.
Is organizing elections really a responsibility of the state? Why not just average the outcomes of randomly selected opinion polls?
Seems that people use all encyclopedias to avoid thinking. That iself is wrong.
It's not wrong. It's "standing on the shoulders of giants". What is starting to go wrong is that we cannot tell the giants from the dwarves anymore, because storing and exchanging information is so cheap that we no longer have to make choices. There is no problem with trusting experts instead of reinventing the wheel yourself, but you do have to make the effort to choose what sources to trust.
Maybe Russia, with its shrinking population and ancient, polluting industry, calculated that it gains from the carbon credit system? I know my energy provider in the Netherlands invests in modernizing Eastern European power plants and stuff like that to get cheap carbon credits, which can then be sold in the form of 'green energy' to the consumers here. Some people consider this morally wrong for some reason, but it makes perfectly good sense to invest the money wherever it is most efficient in reducing CO2 emissions. Reducing it at home is much harder, since we already have one of the smallest 'ecological footprints' per capita in Europe, and things like planting trees is hardly a viable policy in the most densely populated country in Europe.
We still have to stop adding more sequestered CO2 into the air, and moving to a closed cycle using biomass is definitely an improvement. Over time we will also be able to reduce the amount of CO2, by increasing sequestration in construction. For now, the storage of huge amounts excess lumber is not a problem: we are in fact still clearing old-growth forest at an alarming rate for construction.
First post funny. Sun goes nova.
A summary:
It means that you pay 52% on the amount earned in the highest bracket, and less on the money earned in the brackets below that. Tax bracket means the same here as it means in the US. "Losing half of your paycheck to taxes" is impossible, and just cheap rhetoric for dumb people who don't understand taxation and will probably never earn money in the highest bracket anyway.
As I also pointed out, the actual amount paid on average on income and profit (capital yield) is 9.9% in the Netherlands, making it actually a fairly attractive place to live for wealthy people. The tax pressure just isn't distributed very fairly, as it feels more like 30% for the average middle income, just like anywhere else. This is unfortunately hard to avoid, since it is harder to evade taxes for employees than it is for billionaires.
The third thing I pointed out is that if you count the various ways in which governments tax their citizens (when you earn something, make profit, buy something, sell something, live in a house, drive on a road, take a shit, etc. etc.), and compare it to what you pay in the private market for the basket of comparable services (mostly various insurances, etc.) you get back for it, the differences between western countries are not as big as they sometimes seem. They are roughly equally good (or bad, if you prefer) in delivering things in return for the amount of taxes paid. They just make different political choices on whom to tax, what services to provide in return, and how and in what direction to misrepresent how much of your income they actually take.
Which European country has 70% income taxes!?
Not the Netherlands, but we used to have it. Tax brackets, with all social security
payments (unemployment, disability, pension arrangement, widow and orphan pension
arrangement, child rearing benefit, collective health insurance for disproportionate
risks) included, are:
0 to 16,893 = 33.55% (15,65% for 65+)
16,893 to 30,357 = 40.50% (22,60% for 65+)
30,357 to 51,762 = 42.00%
51,762 and up = 52.00%
Interest paid on mortgage loans is deducted from your income first (people who rent
a home get a benefit dependent on taxable income, and profit from very generous
government price controls). And from the resulting amount you subtract 1895.
This results in an effective tax pressure of 9.9% on income and profits, compared to
10.9% in the US and 14% EU 15 average (and in all of them it is the rich and the
very poor that pay very little at the expense of the middle incomes).
The real extortion is in consumption taxes, for instance fuel, resulting in 38.8%
of GDP as tax revenue (compared to US 25.4% and EU 15 40.6%). People in the US on
average spend nearly 10% of GDP more on privately financed health care, and need
more additional insurance to have a similar level of protection against risks.
When you factor this out, the real difference between most western countries is
within a 3% of GDP margin.
Actually, the amount of wealth relative to others is what determines your freedom. Poverty is generally measured, not by how little you have, but by how much less you have than average.
The market is not the only solution to scarcity, or to put it differently: the wealth, power, and freedom dimensions are different things, and societies differ in what aspects of power and freedom are tradable on the market. To give a simple example: a society consisting of a million subsistence farmers that eat their own produce and never exchange anything as a matter of principle, strictly speaking has a GDP of $0 but a lot of freedom. If the government prohibits eating your own crops because it wants to have a tax base, the GDP suddenly grows to whatever the world market value of the produced crops is, but freedom decreases. They not only have to start paying taxes, but they also lost their immunity to competitors in the world market. An embellishment: in this society land may be considered untradable (for instance because everyone holds it in fief from the king), and the people with the biggest parcel of land will always have the biggest parcel of land, and therefore usually the biggest crop.
A lot of countries in the world are actually "wealthier" relative to the US than their GDP suggests, in the sense that they could boost their GDP at the expense of existing methods of distribution of power and freedom. The existing methods are not necessarily more equitable, but they usually are more static and give some relief from the rat race. I don't think this really has much to do with being "more socialist".
Unless the circle was ridiculously large (probably the size of a continent or better), you're not going to be able to get up to escape velocity before you'd (as a human being) would be crushed by the effects of the centripetal acceleration.
What if a dead weight (cargo) is hurled into space by the magnetic ring while a capsule containing human beings is connected to it with with a strong, but very elastic wire.