No, that's not really the question; it's just posed that way to incite an emotional response.
I do agree that companies are under no obligation to provide websites for free. However, if a company does provide a website, I don't feel there is any reasonable assumption that someone visiting a site will request any particular resource or follow any particular link on that website. So crying foul if someone visits a site but doesn't request some ad resource is a little disingenuous.
If a site really wants either a subscription or ad-supported model that is fine, but don't scream if you are willing to respond to an HTTP request and people make that HTTP request.
I guess my assertion there is, in order to import those goods at lower prices, the other country has to want the local currency - either to buy goods or to invest. So it's not clear how a living wage would affect import-export balance.
That also doesn't account for non-importable goods and services such as rent. Housing cannot be imported, so if everyone has more money to spend, rents (and home purchase prices) are likely to increase to consume the universal income unless rent controls are imposed or more housing is constructed.
I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say - can you elaborate?
For instance, are you saying that giving everyone in Finland extra Finnish currency will somehow increase Finland's exports or encourage foreign investment, which can then increase the overall standard of living of everyone in Finland faster than the increase in Finnish wage base due to the universal income?
I'm not saying that's not possible - I'm just saying I don't understand how that would occur. Especially if there are examples, I'm honestly very interested in this general topic.
Tell me how basic income will prevent prices of basic goods and services from rising to the point where just having basic income still means you're "poor", and I might think basic income is a good idea.
Put another way: you can't solve the problem just by addressing supply of money; you also have to address supply of goods and services. In fact, if you addressed the actual supply of goods and services, the money aspect of it wouldn't be an issue in the first place.
There is no philosophical (or mathematical) argument that supports the notion that "opening" source code is necessary for the software it represents to be secure. Both proprietary and "open" software have examples of both "secure" and "insecure" software.
It's all about the validation process; not who performs it.
You are seriously concerned that you might have an emergency, and need to drive more than 600 miles, and having to stop and re-charge for an hour would just make the emergency worse?
It's not the need to drive 600 miles - it's the need to drive any reasonable distance with minimal delay. Consider a drive that takes only 1 hour, and you just got home from your commute so your car's energy reserve is almost empty. With a gas car, that 1 hour drive takes you 1 hour and 5 minutes, plus you can have reserve to take you farther. With an electric, that 1 hour drive takes 1 hour 30 minutes.
The argument that "if it's a real emergency, use uber" posted also makes no sense - how long does it take for a taxi to arrive? Not everyone lives where there is a low-latency taxi service.
The simple fact is, current state-of-the-art electric cars are more restrictive than hydrocarbon-fueled vehicles and the current hydrocarbon refueling infrastructure. Do electric cars have benefits over liquid fuel? Yes, they do, but I do not buy arguments that they are not more restrictive.
In the future, perhaps these restrictions will be lifted, or hydro-fuels will get more restrictive. But I would argue that, as a society, having more restrictive transportation technology is hardly an "advance".
You're forgetting the loss of freedom there though, which has a cost. Consider a gasoline car with 5 miles fuel remaining. Consider an electric car with 5 miles charge remaining.
How long must either car wait before embarking on a trip? Say, because there is an emergency situation? The gasoline car has maybe a 5 minute delay to refuel the tank to full capacity. The electric - best case maybe is you can get to a car rental place, but that's still probably a 30 minute or more delay and much higher cost.
That "convenience factor" of hydrocarbon fuels is a real thing, and it's a real value. Going to an electric vehicle really does need to include that worst-case" trip initiation lag cost.
If you can get electric cars to charge at 50 miles/minute (instead of the current best, what, 5 miles per minute?) you will solve this problem and everyone will readily accept electric vehicles.
I would take a 250 mile range electric at 50 miles/minute recharge over a 600 mile range electric at 5 miles/minute recharge without hesitation.
You have the correct thesis, I think, but some poor examples:
Pollution - everyone bears the cost but only the polluter benefits.
Overfishing...
Not exactly; the people who pay low cost for the goods/services provided by the polluter/overfisher also benefit.
The examples of credit cards are better. MBSs, I'm not so sure - I don't think there was "tricking" there so much as an artifact of booking rules associated with unrealized gains and losses. Add to that the hot-potato nature of financial instruments, and it's unsurprising, really.
Insurance is a different beast - I've come to realize that insurance isn't about reducing total societal costs at all but it really is about socializing the cost. So large pools of people pay a total higher cost for potentially lower out-of-pocket costs per individual. Insurance by itself cannot ever reduce costs, especially health care costs - the providers have all the power, because sick people are basically willing to pay whatever it costs to be made well.
So the only way health care costs can come down is if people are more healthy, there are more providers, or there is regulation imposed to cap prices (e.g., all the recent hoopla about pharma companies buying rights to drugs and increasing prices because "that's what the market will bear").
The current regulatory framework almost guarantees fewer - not more - providers, so there is really very little hope for reduced health care costs from that aspect. So the only hope is that the socialized preventive care really does effect the desired increase in overall population health - but we won't know that for probably a decade or two.
But giving people income does not remove scarcity (artificial or otherwise). Scarcity is only removed if production increases.
All money can do is change the allocation of what already exists.
I do admit there is an indirect effect - changing the allocation of what exists can result in new wealth if the allocation change results in new production (e.g., someone uses the money to buy a tool to build some new things). But simply allowing someone to buy something doesn't guarantee more wealth.
Rather than trying to give people more money, I would rather see an approach that starts incentivizing production and reducing barriers to entry to all markets. Consumption taxes don't do this - I hate the "Fair Tax" idea because taxing consumption does nothing to encourage production and the resulting reduction in scarcity. Our current regulations don't help either - the ACA for example cannot fundamentally reduce costs because it puts up even more barriers to entry to providing health care than we had before.
The big problem with addressing global warming is that the ability (and cost) associated with mitigating global warming is not located in the same places that are most likely to be adversely affected by global warming.
Asking individuals to change their behavior (or pay a tax) for social programs even in their own backyard is hard enough, yet the climate change folks want to impose costs for people literally on the other side of the globe.
Now I'm not saying that trying to mitigate effects of climate change isn't worthy - it's just that the way people go about trying to get people to make changes is missing the boat as far as how to convince people to make a difference goes. Instead of encouraging, educating, and unifying people, mostly what we see is almost-dictatorial decrees about "you must stop X" and is very vilifying and divisive. Even the jabs thrown between the "deniers" and "supporters" don't actually get anything done.
Make efforts that are appealing now (both personally and economically) without vilifying people, and we'll get some traction. Saying "we're doomed, and you're evil because you don't want to change X in your life!" isn't a helpful approach.
I'd say insulation is your best bang for the buck. Rather than replacing windows (yes, very expensive) you should consider just putting in heavy curtains or blinds; the air barrier they provide can be quite effective. Yes, this affects lighting, but if you do it selectively, such as in rooms that aren't often occupied, you can get a big impact for little cost. Even closing AC registers in little-used rooms helps.
We are in the process of switching to LEDs, but generally we do it when an existing bulb burns out. But that said, lighting is probably maybe 10% of our electrical budget. Number 1 is AC, number 2 is most likely our 20-year-old refrigerator which needs replacing anyway since its seals are going and it's just got an inconvenient internal layout.
Biggest thing though: we have about 1800 sq.ft, and we are only cooling from the mid-high 80s (F) to about 74. When I was a kid and lived in a warmer area, we cooled in the summer from mid-high 90s down to the low 80s; humidity control was more important than the temperature. Minimizing the temperature differential is a huge factor in energy cost.
Of course this past month has been pretty high, with the AC running all the time, but we used 4,189 kWh last month.
I was feeling really bad about the 780kW-hr or so we used at my house last month, but now I don't feel bad about that at all. Anything over about 20kW-hr/day makes me think we need to conserve more*. But an average of well over 100kW-hr/day? Wow.
*I'm always running around the house turning off lights in rooms that are unoccupied, ceiling fans running when nobody's home, stuff like that.
I've often thought along these lines - something like "your tax rate is a function of your wealth percentile" coupled with all income being taxable and provisions to avoid "hiding" income (e.g., you can't say "this income went to this company, not to me.")
A simple example would be something like, "Income tax rate is your wealth percentile squared." So if you were in the top 1% (99th percentile), your tax rate would be 98%, but if you were in the 50th percentile, your tax rate would be 25%.
This would essentially prevent concentration of wealth into the hands of a few, because at some point the diminishing returns mean the uber-rich wouldn't have any income left with which to purchase new property.
Note the de-coupling here: the tax is on income but the tax rate is based on wealth. So if you basically own nothing but suddenly make $1M, you pay very little tax. Then the next year, say, you have zero income but have that $1M in the bank (as wealth). You pay zero tax - your tax rate would be higher (due to having $1M assets) but zero income.
This mechanism would be simple (aside from trying to address the attribution of wealth to particular individuals and defining income. Easy, right?) and would "naturally" (as naturally as you can get with only force of law) address the pesky wealth distribution issue. It would also appeal to those who want to get rid of estate taxes; you would be free to live off your estate, tax free, so long as you had no additional income. But as soon as you generate income, it's taxed based on the size of the estate.
There would also need to be some reconsideration of municipal taxes which are currently property-value based; those might be better instead changed to actually be a per-capita tax since most municipal costs (education, police, fire, roads) scale with population, not with property value.
Five letters generally prevent most of the software *coding* issues found in critical automotive software: MISRA.
Failures that happen in automotive software are almost never coding issues, but rather design issues. For instance, even the "infamous" Toyota brake control issues were due to design, not faulty coding.
Switching languages is actually more likely to introduce more errors than reduce them, since you've now likely added coding errors on top of the design issues.
(And I second the other poster mentioning things like compile-time allocation of all objects. I have never seen a dynamically-allocated anything in any of the embedded programs on which I've worked in the main code stream; closest we came was in a data logger which wrote to a dedicated area of flash, on a separate chip even from the main micro.)
Humanity moved beyond pictogram-based languages for a reason, and now the internet - that paragon of human achievement - is moving us back to pictograms again. WTF?
That someone provided him with all the equipment and capabilities to do the research why the hell should he be awarded the patent?
And herein lies the great virtue and vice of capitalism: the assignment of profits to the owner of capital, rather than the one who made the capital useful.
It doesn't have anything to do with fairness - it's just the way capitalism is set up. There are many good and bad things with this setup; most of the good came about during the time of physical wealth; most of the bad is showing up with the "intangible" wealth.
Let's say you own the lab in which the guy who invented LEDs (original, not just blue). Should (economically? morally? how do you avoid rent-seeking?) the guy who invented LEDs get income from every single LED ever produced, or every device inspired by the LED? Should the lab? How do you fairly allocate possibly infinite income to any individual or corporation? When does an inventor's or capital-owner's interest (and share) get exhausted? Should this interest be exhausted in the first place?
It's sadly not as simple as "without patents there would be no incentive to invent" or "all patents should be abolished."
I had a slight error - I shouldn't have said "supply and demand for currency" but rather "supply and demand for things purchased by currency".
That is - as long as currency is separate from actual goods and services, if you don't balance the demand for those goods and services, a "basic income" is almost futile because the value of goods and services relative to that currency is always going to be a moving target.
If all you do is give people currency, but don't actually give people more of the things that are useful to buy with that currency, it's only an accounting exercise.
It doesn't help that it's a very multi-variable problem. Sometimes there is incentive to increase supply when prices increase, thus helping mitigate price increases - but only in instances with low barriers to entry to increase supply. Sometimes - especially in situations where there is a physical or legal constraint on supply (such as housing, or professional sports say) - there is incentive to keep supply low and simply extract higher rent. Basic income alone cannot ameliorate that type of situation.
I think I generally agree with what you're saying, but let me paraphrase to make sure: Basic income would work, so long as there wasn't such a thing as supply and demand for currency.
The only way I can see "basic income" working is if we also mandate that prices cannot be raised; to make (more) profit this would mean production must be increased, rather than just make profit based on increased demand for a scarce good.
Something tells me the problem thus isn't a technical one related to the existence of basic income or welfare, but rather a social one.
Shipping as well as cruise ships also are major polluters
Yup. Something like 4.5% of all direct CO2 emissions, give or take. So about twice as bad as air travel, but probably 10 times simpler to fix than for aircraft because of easier constraints on weight and much less stringent safety requirements, etc.
Of course, aircraft are basically going to be switching to carbon-neutral* bio-kerosene in the next two decades or so anyway, so the argument against air travel is kind of moot.
*Assuming the energy used to make it is not carbon-combustion based.
But the net is hugely negative. 1/3 of the world's people are close enough to a coast that they will have to do something when sea levels rise.
So why don't people move now before they're underwater? Put another way - have all the people who are proclaiming coming disaster started moving their assets away from the coasts? Why are we focusing on emissions rather than moving people now? Surely moving people is cheaper (and more direct - that is, localized) than trying to control emissions. Such a thing would avoid depending on other people to fix their behaviors - it would also guarantee an outcome, rather than a probabilistic estimate of what happens if we curb emission X.
People must really place a huge time preference on things to delay moving in spite of the proposed huge future costs. Or, they just don't believe it... or the "speed" of things isn't really as fast enough for people to care.
Climate Change is happening too fast for much life to cope. The speed of the change is all negative.
This is both defeatist and probably more political than technical. If political will is high enough, humans can do crazy things in short (e.g., decade-span) timeframes, especially when we don't have to invent anything but just have to move people inland or build hydroponics or desalination plants etc. It's all political, not technical. If we want to reduce the cost of sea level rise, why not tax people closer to the coast, and reduce tax away from the coast? Rhetoric talks, but money walks. And hitting the individual harder (rather than corporations) will motivate people much faster than not. Hell if you think the future disaster is high enough, you should ask your governments to build everyone living within X of a coast a brand new house inland and giving it to them (and personally be willing to be taxed for it), because that will cost less than the future cost of disaster mitigation later.
I guess, at the end of the day, the focus is too one-sided on emissions, rather than on relocation or adaptability. I know if I lived close to a coast, I would move inland rather than rely on some disparate group of companies and nations to reduce their emissions which will maybe prevent my land from eroding away or getting hit with bad weather in my or my child's lifetime.
I would rather put in policies to avoid turning inland (midwest US for instance) farmland into subdivisions - I hate to see our local farmland turning into cookie-cutter homes; reducing farmland seems to make us more sensitive, not more robust.
So that's what I mean by too narrow focus, in tech, in media, etc - everyone is focused on emissions, not on adaptation. If we don't adapt, we die - trying to refuse to adapt is actually worse in my mind.
And, at the same time, it was the coldest year in Chicago's recorded history. Who knew?
Well, yes, because "global" warming isn't really global - a global average is kind of meaningless for determining the local effects in any given region.
The problem I have with global climate change "debate" is not that climate is changing, but that there is an assumption that the net effect will be negative. Some regions will surely become less hospitable, and some will become more hospitable. I'm disappointed that more studies haven't shown which will prevail (or if there will be a net neutral effect). Instead we just get fear mongering about famine and war.
Also, I still believe the focus is on the wrong thing: rather than try and stop climate change (after all, if it doesn't change because of CO2, it may change due to something else) we should try and work on technologies so we can survive - no, thrive - regardless of the climate. (Isn't that what humanity has done for most of its existence anyway?)
If A and B have to decide whether to make a transaction, while C will be harmed if the transaction happens but has no say in whether it happens, that's an externality and market forces do not account for it under any economic model I've ever heard of.
Except with the environment, it's a little murky, because A, B, and C are all affected (perhaps not equally or at the same time, I'll admit). So it's not a "pure" externality at least.
...pretty much all economists agree that a carbon price is the most market-efficient way of doing that...
But what price do you pick? There's no "free market" way to do this. Cap-and-trade will result in a free market price for the available credits or whatever, except the amount of credits is arbitrary. If there was a way for the "market" to determine the available credits, that would be one thing - but there isn't; it's all done by decree. (Kind of a reverse externality if you will - groups A and B decide that this is the level of emissions that's allowed, C's opinion or needs be damned.)
That said, yes, an artificial price on emissions may result in people reducing consumption of those things that emit, depending on the elasticity of demand for those things.
This is one place I wish market purists would get on board--put a price on carbon, and solutions will come out of the woodwork and plummet in price.
Except market purists balk at this because "putting a price on carbon" is an artificial thing - it's screwing around with the markets. The markets have already spoken: the externalities of climate change (relocation costs, war, health costs) have a lower cost than trying to develop alternatives. These costs are already really accounted for, even though they aren't necessarily applied at the source of "carbon" emission.
Are you sure tons per capita is the appropriate metric?
Personally, I would do tons per capita normalized by standard of living. That is, how much is emitted per person to maintain a given standard of living.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's not really the question; it's just posed that way to incite an emotional response.
I do agree that companies are under no obligation to provide websites for free. However, if a company does provide a website, I don't feel there is any reasonable assumption that someone visiting a site will request any particular resource or follow any particular link on that website. So crying foul if someone visits a site but doesn't request some ad resource is a little disingenuous.
If a site really wants either a subscription or ad-supported model that is fine, but don't scream if you are willing to respond to an HTTP request and people make that HTTP request.
I guess my assertion there is, in order to import those goods at lower prices, the other country has to want the local currency - either to buy goods or to invest. So it's not clear how a living wage would affect import-export balance.
That also doesn't account for non-importable goods and services such as rent. Housing cannot be imported, so if everyone has more money to spend, rents (and home purchase prices) are likely to increase to consume the universal income unless rent controls are imposed or more housing is constructed.
I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say - can you elaborate?
For instance, are you saying that giving everyone in Finland extra Finnish currency will somehow increase Finland's exports or encourage foreign investment, which can then increase the overall standard of living of everyone in Finland faster than the increase in Finnish wage base due to the universal income?
I'm not saying that's not possible - I'm just saying I don't understand how that would occur. Especially if there are examples, I'm honestly very interested in this general topic.
Tell me how basic income will prevent prices of basic goods and services from rising to the point where just having basic income still means you're "poor", and I might think basic income is a good idea.
Put another way: you can't solve the problem just by addressing supply of money; you also have to address supply of goods and services. In fact, if you addressed the actual supply of goods and services, the money aspect of it wouldn't be an issue in the first place.
There is no philosophical (or mathematical) argument that supports the notion that "opening" source code is necessary for the software it represents to be secure. Both proprietary and "open" software have examples of both "secure" and "insecure" software.
It's all about the validation process; not who performs it.
It's not the need to drive 600 miles - it's the need to drive any reasonable distance with minimal delay. Consider a drive that takes only 1 hour, and you just got home from your commute so your car's energy reserve is almost empty. With a gas car, that 1 hour drive takes you 1 hour and 5 minutes, plus you can have reserve to take you farther. With an electric, that 1 hour drive takes 1 hour 30 minutes.
The argument that "if it's a real emergency, use uber" posted also makes no sense - how long does it take for a taxi to arrive? Not everyone lives where there is a low-latency taxi service.
The simple fact is, current state-of-the-art electric cars are more restrictive than hydrocarbon-fueled vehicles and the current hydrocarbon refueling infrastructure. Do electric cars have benefits over liquid fuel? Yes, they do, but I do not buy arguments that they are not more restrictive.
In the future, perhaps these restrictions will be lifted, or hydro-fuels will get more restrictive. But I would argue that, as a society, having more restrictive transportation technology is hardly an "advance".
You're forgetting the loss of freedom there though, which has a cost. Consider a gasoline car with 5 miles fuel remaining. Consider an electric car with 5 miles charge remaining.
How long must either car wait before embarking on a trip? Say, because there is an emergency situation? The gasoline car has maybe a 5 minute delay to refuel the tank to full capacity. The electric - best case maybe is you can get to a car rental place, but that's still probably a 30 minute or more delay and much higher cost.
That "convenience factor" of hydrocarbon fuels is a real thing, and it's a real value. Going to an electric vehicle really does need to include that worst-case" trip initiation lag cost.
If you can get electric cars to charge at 50 miles/minute (instead of the current best, what, 5 miles per minute?) you will solve this problem and everyone will readily accept electric vehicles.
I would take a 250 mile range electric at 50 miles/minute recharge over a 600 mile range electric at 5 miles/minute recharge without hesitation.
You have the correct thesis, I think, but some poor examples:
Not exactly; the people who pay low cost for the goods/services provided by the polluter/overfisher also benefit.
The examples of credit cards are better. MBSs, I'm not so sure - I don't think there was "tricking" there so much as an artifact of booking rules associated with unrealized gains and losses. Add to that the hot-potato nature of financial instruments, and it's unsurprising, really.
Insurance is a different beast - I've come to realize that insurance isn't about reducing total societal costs at all but it really is about socializing the cost. So large pools of people pay a total higher cost for potentially lower out-of-pocket costs per individual. Insurance by itself cannot ever reduce costs, especially health care costs - the providers have all the power, because sick people are basically willing to pay whatever it costs to be made well.
So the only way health care costs can come down is if people are more healthy, there are more providers, or there is regulation imposed to cap prices (e.g., all the recent hoopla about pharma companies buying rights to drugs and increasing prices because "that's what the market will bear").
The current regulatory framework almost guarantees fewer - not more - providers, so there is really very little hope for reduced health care costs from that aspect. So the only hope is that the socialized preventive care really does effect the desired increase in overall population health - but we won't know that for probably a decade or two.
But giving people income does not remove scarcity (artificial or otherwise). Scarcity is only removed if production increases.
All money can do is change the allocation of what already exists.
I do admit there is an indirect effect - changing the allocation of what exists can result in new wealth if the allocation change results in new production (e.g., someone uses the money to buy a tool to build some new things). But simply allowing someone to buy something doesn't guarantee more wealth.
Rather than trying to give people more money, I would rather see an approach that starts incentivizing production and reducing barriers to entry to all markets. Consumption taxes don't do this - I hate the "Fair Tax" idea because taxing consumption does nothing to encourage production and the resulting reduction in scarcity. Our current regulations don't help either - the ACA for example cannot fundamentally reduce costs because it puts up even more barriers to entry to providing health care than we had before.
The big problem with addressing global warming is that the ability (and cost) associated with mitigating global warming is not located in the same places that are most likely to be adversely affected by global warming.
Asking individuals to change their behavior (or pay a tax) for social programs even in their own backyard is hard enough, yet the climate change folks want to impose costs for people literally on the other side of the globe.
Now I'm not saying that trying to mitigate effects of climate change isn't worthy - it's just that the way people go about trying to get people to make changes is missing the boat as far as how to convince people to make a difference goes. Instead of encouraging, educating, and unifying people, mostly what we see is almost-dictatorial decrees about "you must stop X" and is very vilifying and divisive. Even the jabs thrown between the "deniers" and "supporters" don't actually get anything done.
Make efforts that are appealing now (both personally and economically) without vilifying people, and we'll get some traction. Saying "we're doomed, and you're evil because you don't want to change X in your life!" isn't a helpful approach.
I'd say insulation is your best bang for the buck. Rather than replacing windows (yes, very expensive) you should consider just putting in heavy curtains or blinds; the air barrier they provide can be quite effective. Yes, this affects lighting, but if you do it selectively, such as in rooms that aren't often occupied, you can get a big impact for little cost. Even closing AC registers in little-used rooms helps.
We are in the process of switching to LEDs, but generally we do it when an existing bulb burns out. But that said, lighting is probably maybe 10% of our electrical budget. Number 1 is AC, number 2 is most likely our 20-year-old refrigerator which needs replacing anyway since its seals are going and it's just got an inconvenient internal layout.
Biggest thing though: we have about 1800 sq.ft, and we are only cooling from the mid-high 80s (F) to about 74. When I was a kid and lived in a warmer area, we cooled in the summer from mid-high 90s down to the low 80s; humidity control was more important than the temperature. Minimizing the temperature differential is a huge factor in energy cost.
I was feeling really bad about the 780kW-hr or so we used at my house last month, but now I don't feel bad about that at all. Anything over about 20kW-hr/day makes me think we need to conserve more*. But an average of well over 100kW-hr/day? Wow.
*I'm always running around the house turning off lights in rooms that are unoccupied, ceiling fans running when nobody's home, stuff like that.
I've often thought along these lines - something like "your tax rate is a function of your wealth percentile" coupled with all income being taxable and provisions to avoid "hiding" income (e.g., you can't say "this income went to this company, not to me.")
A simple example would be something like, "Income tax rate is your wealth percentile squared." So if you were in the top 1% (99th percentile), your tax rate would be 98%, but if you were in the 50th percentile, your tax rate would be 25%.
This would essentially prevent concentration of wealth into the hands of a few, because at some point the diminishing returns mean the uber-rich wouldn't have any income left with which to purchase new property.
Note the de-coupling here: the tax is on income but the tax rate is based on wealth. So if you basically own nothing but suddenly make $1M, you pay very little tax. Then the next year, say, you have zero income but have that $1M in the bank (as wealth). You pay zero tax - your tax rate would be higher (due to having $1M assets) but zero income.
This mechanism would be simple (aside from trying to address the attribution of wealth to particular individuals and defining income. Easy, right?) and would "naturally" (as naturally as you can get with only force of law) address the pesky wealth distribution issue. It would also appeal to those who want to get rid of estate taxes; you would be free to live off your estate, tax free, so long as you had no additional income. But as soon as you generate income, it's taxed based on the size of the estate.
There would also need to be some reconsideration of municipal taxes which are currently property-value based; those might be better instead changed to actually be a per-capita tax since most municipal costs (education, police, fire, roads) scale with population, not with property value.
Five letters generally prevent most of the software *coding* issues found in critical automotive software: MISRA.
Failures that happen in automotive software are almost never coding issues, but rather design issues. For instance, even the "infamous" Toyota brake control issues were due to design, not faulty coding.
Switching languages is actually more likely to introduce more errors than reduce them, since you've now likely added coding errors on top of the design issues.
(And I second the other poster mentioning things like compile-time allocation of all objects. I have never seen a dynamically-allocated anything in any of the embedded programs on which I've worked in the main code stream; closest we came was in a data logger which wrote to a dedicated area of flash, on a separate chip even from the main micro.)
Humanity moved beyond pictogram-based languages for a reason, and now the internet - that paragon of human achievement - is moving us back to pictograms again. WTF?
It's not about "covering" the 5% cost - it's about the fact that it's a fixed percentage and independent of the total amount of revenue.
And herein lies the great virtue and vice of capitalism: the assignment of profits to the owner of capital, rather than the one who made the capital useful.
It doesn't have anything to do with fairness - it's just the way capitalism is set up. There are many good and bad things with this setup; most of the good came about during the time of physical wealth; most of the bad is showing up with the "intangible" wealth.
Let's say you own the lab in which the guy who invented LEDs (original, not just blue). Should (economically? morally? how do you avoid rent-seeking?) the guy who invented LEDs get income from every single LED ever produced, or every device inspired by the LED? Should the lab? How do you fairly allocate possibly infinite income to any individual or corporation? When does an inventor's or capital-owner's interest (and share) get exhausted? Should this interest be exhausted in the first place?
It's sadly not as simple as "without patents there would be no incentive to invent" or "all patents should be abolished."
I had a slight error - I shouldn't have said "supply and demand for currency" but rather "supply and demand for things purchased by currency".
That is - as long as currency is separate from actual goods and services, if you don't balance the demand for those goods and services, a "basic income" is almost futile because the value of goods and services relative to that currency is always going to be a moving target.
If all you do is give people currency, but don't actually give people more of the things that are useful to buy with that currency, it's only an accounting exercise.
It doesn't help that it's a very multi-variable problem. Sometimes there is incentive to increase supply when prices increase, thus helping mitigate price increases - but only in instances with low barriers to entry to increase supply. Sometimes - especially in situations where there is a physical or legal constraint on supply (such as housing, or professional sports say) - there is incentive to keep supply low and simply extract higher rent. Basic income alone cannot ameliorate that type of situation.
I think I generally agree with what you're saying, but let me paraphrase to make sure: Basic income would work, so long as there wasn't such a thing as supply and demand for currency.
The only way I can see "basic income" working is if we also mandate that prices cannot be raised; to make (more) profit this would mean production must be increased, rather than just make profit based on increased demand for a scarce good.
Something tells me the problem thus isn't a technical one related to the existence of basic income or welfare, but rather a social one.
Yup. Something like 4.5% of all direct CO2 emissions, give or take. So about twice as bad as air travel, but probably 10 times simpler to fix than for aircraft because of easier constraints on weight and much less stringent safety requirements, etc.
Of course, aircraft are basically going to be switching to carbon-neutral* bio-kerosene in the next two decades or so anyway, so the argument against air travel is kind of moot.
*Assuming the energy used to make it is not carbon-combustion based.
So why don't people move now before they're underwater? Put another way - have all the people who are proclaiming coming disaster started moving their assets away from the coasts? Why are we focusing on emissions rather than moving people now? Surely moving people is cheaper (and more direct - that is, localized) than trying to control emissions. Such a thing would avoid depending on other people to fix their behaviors - it would also guarantee an outcome, rather than a probabilistic estimate of what happens if we curb emission X.
People must really place a huge time preference on things to delay moving in spite of the proposed huge future costs. Or, they just don't believe it... or the "speed" of things isn't really as fast enough for people to care.
This is both defeatist and probably more political than technical. If political will is high enough, humans can do crazy things in short (e.g., decade-span) timeframes, especially when we don't have to invent anything but just have to move people inland or build hydroponics or desalination plants etc. It's all political, not technical. If we want to reduce the cost of sea level rise, why not tax people closer to the coast, and reduce tax away from the coast? Rhetoric talks, but money walks. And hitting the individual harder (rather than corporations) will motivate people much faster than not. Hell if you think the future disaster is high enough, you should ask your governments to build everyone living within X of a coast a brand new house inland and giving it to them (and personally be willing to be taxed for it), because that will cost less than the future cost of disaster mitigation later.
I guess, at the end of the day, the focus is too one-sided on emissions, rather than on relocation or adaptability. I know if I lived close to a coast, I would move inland rather than rely on some disparate group of companies and nations to reduce their emissions which will maybe prevent my land from eroding away or getting hit with bad weather in my or my child's lifetime.
I would rather put in policies to avoid turning inland (midwest US for instance) farmland into subdivisions - I hate to see our local farmland turning into cookie-cutter homes; reducing farmland seems to make us more sensitive, not more robust.
So that's what I mean by too narrow focus, in tech, in media, etc - everyone is focused on emissions, not on adaptation. If we don't adapt, we die - trying to refuse to adapt is actually worse in my mind.
Well, yes, because "global" warming isn't really global - a global average is kind of meaningless for determining the local effects in any given region.
The problem I have with global climate change "debate" is not that climate is changing, but that there is an assumption that the net effect will be negative. Some regions will surely become less hospitable, and some will become more hospitable. I'm disappointed that more studies haven't shown which will prevail (or if there will be a net neutral effect). Instead we just get fear mongering about famine and war.
Also, I still believe the focus is on the wrong thing: rather than try and stop climate change (after all, if it doesn't change because of CO2, it may change due to something else) we should try and work on technologies so we can survive - no, thrive - regardless of the climate. (Isn't that what humanity has done for most of its existence anyway?)
Except with the environment, it's a little murky, because A, B, and C are all affected (perhaps not equally or at the same time, I'll admit). So it's not a "pure" externality at least.
But what price do you pick? There's no "free market" way to do this. Cap-and-trade will result in a free market price for the available credits or whatever, except the amount of credits is arbitrary. If there was a way for the "market" to determine the available credits, that would be one thing - but there isn't; it's all done by decree. (Kind of a reverse externality if you will - groups A and B decide that this is the level of emissions that's allowed, C's opinion or needs be damned.)
That said, yes, an artificial price on emissions may result in people reducing consumption of those things that emit, depending on the elasticity of demand for those things.
Except market purists balk at this because "putting a price on carbon" is an artificial thing - it's screwing around with the markets. The markets have already spoken: the externalities of climate change (relocation costs, war, health costs) have a lower cost than trying to develop alternatives. These costs are already really accounted for, even though they aren't necessarily applied at the source of "carbon" emission.
Personally, I would do tons per capita normalized by standard of living. That is, how much is emitted per person to maintain a given standard of living.