The fed doesn't favor investment over work. What does that even mean? When a company invests in a new technology, that means more work. When a city invests in new infrastructure, it means more work. When farmers plant more crops, it means more work. Investment facilitates work. Without it, people wouldn't have jobs, and nothing would get done. The fed does not "favor investment over work", they favor investment because it leads to work.
The fed works to mediate the economy so that people with money will continue to invest it. If new investment stops, people lose their jobs. If no one is working, no one is building new houses, no one is growing food. That is a really bad thing.
"1) It's one thing to "stop increasing how much we emit per year"."
Yeah, it eliminates new entries market, and makes the construction on new infrastructure impossible. As the population in the US grows, we each have less to make due with. Banks will stop issuing loans, due to the flat economic growth outlook. You're telling me that this won't be a problem. You think that the subprime lending fiasco is bad? You haven't seen anything. It would cause a major economic recession.
"2) It's another thing to "stop emitting anything beyond what we've already omitted".
The goal should be eliminating greenhouse gas emissions. If we continue to emit greenhouse gasses at the present rate, we'll still have a problem.
If we want to eliminate greenhouse emissions, we could do so by building $2 trillion worth of nuclear power stations or $10 trillion worth of windmills, replacing all of our transportation infrastructure with electric trains (god knows how expensive that is), and replacing all of our metal production with electro-refining (again, not cheap). If we were going to do all this new construction with traditional technology, it would require an enormous amount of new greenhouse gas emissions. If we want "offset" all this development by scaling back other greenhouse emissions, it will mean hardship and death and economic collapse. If we don't don't do it, there's no point making new sources illegal, since the problem will persist and nothing will be accomplished.
The government always takes this (wrong) approach to environmental protection. The real goal should be proper distribution of liability, not the arbitrary reduction of pollution. After all, if polluting is beneficial enough to society, it may be better to allow it (see the above example). If your facility emits toxic substances that kill people or cause adverse health effects, the government should charge you the approximate cost, and use the money to pay the people you're hurting (pay their medical bills, or the liability associated with lost family members). I think you'd find that the cost would be high enough to discourage polluters from polluting unless it was absolutely necessary. You should never "grandfather" old equipment or facilities, this gives established industry a huge advantage in the marketplace, and does nothing to stop pollution. Politicians like to grandfather existing industry, because it hides the cost of environmental regulations from the voting public (you'll lose you're job eventually, but not right away).
80% of the US' electrical power is generated from fossil fuels, and almost all of our transportation is powered by fossil fuels. How could banning new carbon emissions do anything but devastate the economy? You wouldn't be able to build new cars, trucks, concrete structures, conventional power plants, oil refineries, anything made of virgin steel or do anything else that would release carbon dioxide. That would have a huge effect on the economy.
But it means the the correlation between CO2 and global temperature on Gore's graph is caused by the absorption of CO2 into the ocean. That means that you can't use the correlation to estimate the temperature rise that would be caused by increased atmospheric CO2 levels.
"Global warming theories aren't based on correlations, they're based on fundamental principles of science."
Yes, but global warming predictions are based on correlations. The fundamental principles of science tell us that since CO2 effectively insulates the planet, increasing the concentration of CO2 will increase the surface temperature of the earth. But the earth is such a complicated and vast system that global temperatures can not be modeled based on fundamental principles alone. So we know it will go up, but we don't know how much.
If the current temperatures are a result of CO2 concentration (and they don't really correlate very well) then we don't have much to worry about. Ocean levels may rise 3 feet over the next 100 years, but people will be able to move out of the way, or adapt in other ways. Rivers under the influence of glaciers will experience more flooding, but those rives can be damed and mediated (doing so would increase agricultural output as well). The temperature increase itself will do little to make the earth less habitable to humans, and there's always air conditioning if we need it. On the other hand, devastating the world's economy in order to reduce (not eliminate) growth in CO2 production will cause millions to die, and everyone else to live at a significantly reduced quality of life. And it will do little or nothing to stem the continued build up of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I think the point is that you don't have to torture the person being interrogated. You can simply tell whether or not they are lying to to you.
"fear the government and agree to anything"
Ah, but the government will know that you don't really agree, and then they'll lock you up for not agreeing with them and for lying to them. It's a loose - loose situation.
"1) How to get a mu-metal shilding of adequate size in place. Currently these are small cubes in the 10-20 metric ton range. Without them you have massice amounts of jung magnetic fields that prevent reading anything."
You'll note that I was careful to use the words "sort of" and "theoretically"
"2) How to monitor more than one neuron?"
How could you not (unless you cut up the persons brain and took out a single neuron). Right now they use arrays of SQUIDs and signal processing to arrive at an approximation of the brain activity. Hopefully, this would be adequate to make inferences about intentions.
"3) how to interpret what was monitored?"
Like I said, you'd have to collect field data and match a persons apparent intentions with their pattern of brain-activity.
The extreme sensitivity of SQUIDs makes them ideal for studies in biology. Magnetoencephalography (MEG), for example, uses measurements from an array of SQUIDs to make inferences about neural activity inside brains.
I'm not saying that you could use MEG remotely right now, but it is passive and noninvasive. It is theoretically possible to monitor brain activity remotely. Obviously the technology doesn't exist today, if it did DARPA wouldn't be trying to develop it. All I'm saying is that it's possible.
Actually, modern technology can detect the magnetic fields that your firing neurons produce right now. This is where you get all those images of "brain activity" that you see. It is very much a non-invasive and passive technology, and could, theoretically, be carried out remotely. If studies are carried out in real situations, they could correlate the patterns of brain activity with the the apparent intent of the individual (assuming that similar intentions make similar patterns). The result is they could tell what you are thinking (in a rudimentary way). It's not really that far fetched.
Many of the "companies" you are citing are or were principally owned by government organizations, and are/were immune from litigation. In the cases where they weren't, they were situated in countries where the law does not provide any kind of protection or possible recourse for the poor.
For all you people who complain about litigation, this is why we have it. If your actions adversely affect others, they can seek financial compensation and punitive damages. This has the effect of correcting negative eternalitys if and when they are discovered, and giving people good reason to be careful in determining all the effects of their actions.
Those are all made using modern manufacturing processes. Like I said, it's not appreciably cheaper than what is in the "$100" laptop right now. It simply wouldn't make sense to sell it for $175 instead of $185, but give up most of it's functionality (7/8 of the ram, 3/4 of the flash memory). $175 is still nowhere near the $100 target. That tradeoff is worth it to make a $20 cell phone rather than a $30 one, especially given how much less useful extra ram and flash memory are in cellphones.
How much do you think the 1GB flash and 256MB or ram are adding to the cost of this machine? I could buy them (not in bulk) for about $30. Do you honesty think it would be appreciably cheaper to use 256 and 32? It would cost a few dollars less at most (the cost of ram is not proportional to the amount purchased, as ram must be built in modules), and dramatically limit the functionality of the machine.
"One of the nice things with older hardware is that the factories already have everything in place to produce it."
No, in the case of 32MB ram chips, the factories are not set up to produce it at all, because no one uses it. They've all moved on the more modern, cost effective technologies. Moreover the majority of the cost here is coming from the actual cost of assembling the machine. The ram and flash memory are inexpensive.
Apple should release a $200 iPod touch with increased functionality and reduced specs for children in third world countries. It could easily compete with OLPC at that price.
"We know that specially tailored linux distributions can run on very old (and very cheap) hardware, but Windows and OSX can't."
The OLPC has 256 MB of ram, and 1GB of flash memory. It can't run either of those operating systems. If they were trying to make it run these operating systems, they did a really poor job.
"The issue is that OLPC are pressured into running Windows by American and other rich Western schools that like the idea of buying a cheap PC and don't care that much if the price is $100 or $190 as a result."
That is speculation and it probably isn't true. I'd doubt reducing the hardware specs would make the laptop any cheaper. It just costs a certain amount to money to put a laptop together, and there's no amount of spec and feature reduction that can change that. The truth is that OLPC was largely unaware of the difficulties this kind of project would face. OLPC set an unreasonable goal for the price, and now they're coming to terms with the reality of the situation. Initially OLPC had said that the market wouldn't produce an inexpensive laptop because the profits weren't there. It turns out that the market wasn't making them because it's not possible.
Just put the computer in an open place, like the living room. Check on it once and a while. Getting caught watching porn (and presumably masturbating) is on of the most embarrassing experiences a young man can encounter.
So what if not everyone can work hard and become a billionaire. You can still make a very nice living for yourself just by working hard and advocating yourself. That's something that just isn't true in countries that try to stop people from becoming billionaires. I don't care if someone else has a 767 "party plane" if living in a society that allows that means that I can live in a nice house, work reasonable hours and never go to bed hungry.
"the amount of effort/money/etc going into anti-abortion advertising could be better spent curing diseases"
That's kind of like saying "well, very few murders are carried out, so instead of trying to prevent it, we should focus on automotive safety, which would save more lives". The point is that abortion is unjust and immoral.
"to try and ascribe self-awareness qualities to something that couldn't possibly be self aware"
How could you possibly know whether or not something else is self-aware? If a newborn baby is self-aware, how come a fetus that is about to be born is not self-aware? If a newborn baby is not self-aware, is it okay to carry out a post-birth termination? I think you're made a lot of assumptions here with out really thinking them through. The anti-abortion crowd is not as unreasonable as you make them out to be.
Since all this information is readily available to anyone one with internet access, I don't think it's reasonable to call it spying. Seriously, if you post information on a message board where anyone in the whole entire fucking wold can read it, maybe you should expect that government officials and corporations can look at it a well!!!
Free speech and other fundamental rights aren't just about the laws congress can write, they are a statement of the fundamental values that the majority of U.S. Citizens hold. An amendment overturning the first amendment could be passed if it hand popular support. One would hope that a website that claims to be a place for free social interaction would respect the fundamental right of free speech, even though they are not bound to do so by law. If the general public demands that speech like this not be allowed, and forces the website to take down the inflammatory speech, then the general public does not respect the right to speak freely, and laws infringing on that right can and will be written by congress.
Honestly, I have never seen a streetlight that is not equipped with a reflector to direct the light downward. Where are you seeing these streetlights?
It is not getting hard to see the stars in rural areas, but areas that were once rural are not rural anymore. I've spent a lot of nights in rural areas where I could see the stars just as well as when I'd backpacked 50 miles into the wilderness in central Idaho. You only have to be 50-100 miles from town in order to get away from the light pollution.
The object of security lighting is to bathe otherwise dark places in light so that criminals will not feel secure in their ability to commit crime unseen.
"Nobody's suggesting we get rid of streetlights, by the way: just make them illuminate straight downwards."
Streetlights already employ reflectors to direct their light downward, they just let it arc over many degrees so that fewer lights will need to be installed, and so that some lights can be turned off to cool while not leaving the street dark. I think they're talking about installing a larger number of smaller lights. I don't know that that would be a worthwhile investment (and it wouldn't reduce the wattage installed in lit parking-lots).
I hate to have to tell you this, but it is much more likely that you father's vision is deteriorating. The atmosphere is very thin at 55 thousand feet, and contains even less particulate matter, so there is no way that air pollution is affecting the view from that altitude.
What about people WALKING at night? they don't experience glair (no windshield) how do you propose they walk without streetlights? Streetlights were intended to reduce crime, and I'd say they do a pretty good job of that. Do you want people to carry a flashlight that would be like a lit sign saying "MUG ME!!!". And the benefit of turning off the lights is what? People in cities will be able to see the stars better? If you want to see the stars, move out to the country!
It's not unreasonable to think that a substance may be able to extract dissolved heavy metals from water (crown ethers are widely known to be able to pull this off). I'm not sure if this extraction technique would be better suited to clean-up than conventional means (ion exchange/distillation), but I'd assume that it must have the potential to be easier/cleaner/ceaper/more selective or they wouldn't be touting its potential.
I'm sure that most legislators understand basic economics. They are just taking advantage of the ignorance and jealousy of the general public to raise taxes.
You don't know what a citizen nominally owes on a corporate tax. The voting public does not care what a corporation owes, that's the problem. They care what they owe. But taxes on corporations are passed onto the public. The only reason you'd tax a corporation rather than private citizens is to conceal the tax from the paying public. That is unfair, and dishonest.
"Why don't they know? Is the corporate tax rate so obscure? And what is the economic incidence of corporate taxes on corporate employees?"
It's very hard to determine how much each person ends up paying on any tax. If there were no sales tax, sellers would raise prices. If there were no income tax, employers would pay less. If there were no property tax, real-estate prices would rise. If there were no corporate taxes, wages and dividends would rise and prices would fall. In every case the amount of price increase is determined by the supply and demand curves. Of course supply and demand curves are hypothetical, so you can't really calculate it except by experimentation. But at least with sales and income tax, you know how much you are nominally paying, and you know that if the nominal rate goes up, so does the real amount you are paying.
Slashdot Mirror
The fed doesn't favor investment over work. What does that even mean? When a company invests in a new technology, that means more work. When a city invests in new infrastructure, it means more work. When farmers plant more crops, it means more work. Investment facilitates work. Without it, people wouldn't have jobs, and nothing would get done. The fed does not "favor investment over work", they favor investment because it leads to work.
The fed works to mediate the economy so that people with money will continue to invest it. If new investment stops, people lose their jobs. If no one is working, no one is building new houses, no one is growing food. That is a really bad thing.
"1) It's one thing to "stop increasing how much we emit per year"."
Yeah, it eliminates new entries market, and makes the construction on new infrastructure impossible. As the population in the US grows, we each have less to make due with. Banks will stop issuing loans, due to the flat economic growth outlook. You're telling me that this won't be a problem. You think that the subprime lending fiasco is bad? You haven't seen anything. It would cause a major economic recession.
"2) It's another thing to "stop emitting anything beyond what we've already omitted".
The goal should be eliminating greenhouse gas emissions. If we continue to emit greenhouse gasses at the present rate, we'll still have a problem.
If we want to eliminate greenhouse emissions, we could do so by building $2 trillion worth of nuclear power stations or $10 trillion worth of windmills, replacing all of our transportation infrastructure with electric trains (god knows how expensive that is), and replacing all of our metal production with electro-refining (again, not cheap). If we were going to do all this new construction with traditional technology, it would require an enormous amount of new greenhouse gas emissions. If we want "offset" all this development by scaling back other greenhouse emissions, it will mean hardship and death and economic collapse. If we don't don't do it, there's no point making new sources illegal, since the problem will persist and nothing will be accomplished.
The government always takes this (wrong) approach to environmental protection. The real goal should be proper distribution of liability, not the arbitrary reduction of pollution. After all, if polluting is beneficial enough to society, it may be better to allow it (see the above example). If your facility emits toxic substances that kill people or cause adverse health effects, the government should charge you the approximate cost, and use the money to pay the people you're hurting (pay their medical bills, or the liability associated with lost family members). I think you'd find that the cost would be high enough to discourage polluters from polluting unless it was absolutely necessary. You should never "grandfather" old equipment or facilities, this gives established industry a huge advantage in the marketplace, and does nothing to stop pollution. Politicians like to grandfather existing industry, because it hides the cost of environmental regulations from the voting public (you'll lose you're job eventually, but not right away).
80% of the US' electrical power is generated from fossil fuels, and almost all of our transportation is powered by fossil fuels. How could banning new carbon emissions do anything but devastate the economy? You wouldn't be able to build new cars, trucks, concrete structures, conventional power plants, oil refineries, anything made of virgin steel or do anything else that would release carbon dioxide. That would have a huge effect on the economy.
But it means the the correlation between CO2 and global temperature on Gore's graph is caused by the absorption of CO2 into the ocean. That means that you can't use the correlation to estimate the temperature rise that would be caused by increased atmospheric CO2 levels.
"Global warming theories aren't based on correlations, they're based on fundamental principles of science."
Yes, but global warming predictions are based on correlations. The fundamental principles of science tell us that since CO2 effectively insulates the planet, increasing the concentration of CO2 will increase the surface temperature of the earth. But the earth is such a complicated and vast system that global temperatures can not be modeled based on fundamental principles alone. So we know it will go up, but we don't know how much.
If the current temperatures are a result of CO2 concentration (and they don't really correlate very well) then we don't have much to worry about. Ocean levels may rise 3 feet over the next 100 years, but people will be able to move out of the way, or adapt in other ways. Rivers under the influence of glaciers will experience more flooding, but those rives can be damed and mediated (doing so would increase agricultural output as well). The temperature increase itself will do little to make the earth less habitable to humans, and there's always air conditioning if we need it. On the other hand, devastating the world's economy in order to reduce (not eliminate) growth in CO2 production will cause millions to die, and everyone else to live at a significantly reduced quality of life. And it will do little or nothing to stem the continued build up of CO2 in the atmosphere.
"this technology is usable for torture"
I think the point is that you don't have to torture the person being interrogated. You can simply tell whether or not they are lying to to you.
"fear the government and agree to anything"
Ah, but the government will know that you don't really agree, and then they'll lock you up for not agreeing with them and for lying to them. It's a loose - loose situation.
"1) How to get a mu-metal shilding of adequate size in place. Currently these are small cubes in the 10-20 metric ton range. Without them you have massice amounts of jung magnetic fields that prevent reading anything."
You'll note that I was careful to use the words "sort of" and "theoretically"
"2) How to monitor more than one neuron?"
How could you not (unless you cut up the persons brain and took out a single neuron). Right now they use arrays of SQUIDs and signal processing to arrive at an approximation of the brain activity. Hopefully, this would be adequate to make inferences about intentions.
"3) how to interpret what was monitored?"
Like I said, you'd have to collect field data and match a persons apparent intentions with their pattern of brain-activity.
Actually, modern technology can detect the magnetic fields that your firing neurons produce right now. This is where you get all those images of "brain activity" that you see. It is very much a non-invasive and passive technology, and could, theoretically, be carried out remotely. If studies are carried out in real situations, they could correlate the patterns of brain activity with the the apparent intent of the individual (assuming that similar intentions make similar patterns). The result is they could tell what you are thinking (in a rudimentary way). It's not really that far fetched.
Many of the "companies" you are citing are or were principally owned by government organizations, and are/were immune from litigation. In the cases where they weren't, they were situated in countries where the law does not provide any kind of protection or possible recourse for the poor.
For all you people who complain about litigation, this is why we have it. If your actions adversely affect others, they can seek financial compensation and punitive damages. This has the effect of correcting negative eternalitys if and when they are discovered, and giving people good reason to be careful in determining all the effects of their actions.
Those are all made using modern manufacturing processes. Like I said, it's not appreciably cheaper than what is in the "$100" laptop right now. It simply wouldn't make sense to sell it for $175 instead of $185, but give up most of it's functionality (7/8 of the ram, 3/4 of the flash memory). $175 is still nowhere near the $100 target. That tradeoff is worth it to make a $20 cell phone rather than a $30 one, especially given how much less useful extra ram and flash memory are in cellphones.
"How about 256 flash and 32MB ram"
How much do you think the 1GB flash and 256MB or ram are adding to the cost of this machine? I could buy them (not in bulk) for about $30. Do you honesty think it would be appreciably cheaper to use 256 and 32? It would cost a few dollars less at most (the cost of ram is not proportional to the amount purchased, as ram must be built in modules), and dramatically limit the functionality of the machine.
"One of the nice things with older hardware is that the factories already have everything in place to produce it."
No, in the case of 32MB ram chips, the factories are not set up to produce it at all, because no one uses it. They've all moved on the more modern, cost effective technologies. Moreover the majority of the cost here is coming from the actual cost of assembling the machine. The ram and flash memory are inexpensive.
Apple should release a $200 iPod touch with increased functionality and reduced specs for children in third world countries. It could easily compete with OLPC at that price.
"We know that specially tailored linux distributions can run on very old (and very cheap) hardware, but Windows and OSX can't."
The OLPC has 256 MB of ram, and 1GB of flash memory. It can't run either of those operating systems. If they were trying to make it run these operating systems, they did a really poor job.
"The issue is that OLPC are pressured into running Windows by American and other rich Western schools that like the idea of buying a cheap PC and don't care that much if the price is $100 or $190 as a result."
That is speculation and it probably isn't true. I'd doubt reducing the hardware specs would make the laptop any cheaper. It just costs a certain amount to money to put a laptop together, and there's no amount of spec and feature reduction that can change that. The truth is that OLPC was largely unaware of the difficulties this kind of project would face. OLPC set an unreasonable goal for the price, and now they're coming to terms with the reality of the situation. Initially OLPC had said that the market wouldn't produce an inexpensive laptop because the profits weren't there. It turns out that the market wasn't making them because it's not possible.
Just put the computer in an open place, like the living room. Check on it once and a while. Getting caught watching porn (and presumably masturbating) is on of the most embarrassing experiences a young man can encounter.
So what if not everyone can work hard and become a billionaire. You can still make a very nice living for yourself just by working hard and advocating yourself. That's something that just isn't true in countries that try to stop people from becoming billionaires. I don't care if someone else has a 767 "party plane" if living in a society that allows that means that I can live in a nice house, work reasonable hours and never go to bed hungry.
"the amount of effort/money/etc going into anti-abortion advertising could be better spent curing diseases"
That's kind of like saying "well, very few murders are carried out, so instead of trying to prevent it, we should focus on automotive safety, which would save more lives". The point is that abortion is unjust and immoral.
"to try and ascribe self-awareness qualities to something that couldn't possibly be self aware"
How could you possibly know whether or not something else is self-aware? If a newborn baby is self-aware, how come a fetus that is about to be born is not self-aware? If a newborn baby is not self-aware, is it okay to carry out a post-birth termination? I think you're made a lot of assumptions here with out really thinking them through. The anti-abortion crowd is not as unreasonable as you make them out to be.
Since all this information is readily available to anyone one with internet access, I don't think it's reasonable to call it spying. Seriously, if you post information on a message board where anyone in the whole entire fucking wold can read it, maybe you should expect that government officials and corporations can look at it a well!!!
Free speech and other fundamental rights aren't just about the laws congress can write, they are a statement of the fundamental values that the majority of U.S. Citizens hold. An amendment overturning the first amendment could be passed if it hand popular support. One would hope that a website that claims to be a place for free social interaction would respect the fundamental right of free speech, even though they are not bound to do so by law. If the general public demands that speech like this not be allowed, and forces the website to take down the inflammatory speech, then the general public does not respect the right to speak freely, and laws infringing on that right can and will be written by congress.
Honestly, I have never seen a streetlight that is not equipped with a reflector to direct the light downward. Where are you seeing these streetlights?
It is not getting hard to see the stars in rural areas, but areas that were once rural are not rural anymore. I've spent a lot of nights in rural areas where I could see the stars just as well as when I'd backpacked 50 miles into the wilderness in central Idaho. You only have to be 50-100 miles from town in order to get away from the light pollution.
The object of security lighting is to bathe otherwise dark places in light so that criminals will not feel secure in their ability to commit crime unseen.
"Nobody's suggesting we get rid of streetlights, by the way: just make them illuminate straight downwards."
Streetlights already employ reflectors to direct their light downward, they just let it arc over many degrees so that fewer lights will need to be installed, and so that some lights can be turned off to cool while not leaving the street dark. I think they're talking about installing a larger number of smaller lights. I don't know that that would be a worthwhile investment (and it wouldn't reduce the wattage installed in lit parking-lots).
I hate to have to tell you this, but it is much more likely that you father's vision is deteriorating. The atmosphere is very thin at 55 thousand feet, and contains even less particulate matter, so there is no way that air pollution is affecting the view from that altitude.
What about people WALKING at night? they don't experience glair (no windshield) how do you propose they walk without streetlights? Streetlights were intended to reduce crime, and I'd say they do a pretty good job of that. Do you want people to carry a flashlight that would be like a lit sign saying "MUG ME!!!". And the benefit of turning off the lights is what? People in cities will be able to see the stars better? If you want to see the stars, move out to the country!
It's not unreasonable to think that a substance may be able to extract dissolved heavy metals from water (crown ethers are widely known to be able to pull this off). I'm not sure if this extraction technique would be better suited to clean-up than conventional means (ion exchange/distillation), but I'd assume that it must have the potential to be easier/cleaner/ceaper/more selective or they wouldn't be touting its potential.
I'm sure that most legislators understand basic economics. They are just taking advantage of the ignorance and jealousy of the general public to raise taxes.
You don't know what a citizen nominally owes on a corporate tax. The voting public does not care what a corporation owes, that's the problem. They care what they owe. But taxes on corporations are passed onto the public. The only reason you'd tax a corporation rather than private citizens is to conceal the tax from the paying public. That is unfair, and dishonest.
"Why don't they know? Is the corporate tax rate so obscure? And what is the economic incidence of corporate taxes on corporate employees?"
It's very hard to determine how much each person ends up paying on any tax. If there were no sales tax, sellers would raise prices. If there were no income tax, employers would pay less. If there were no property tax, real-estate prices would rise. If there were no corporate taxes, wages and dividends would rise and prices would fall. In every case the amount of price increase is determined by the supply and demand curves. Of course supply and demand curves are hypothetical, so you can't really calculate it except by experimentation. But at least with sales and income tax, you know how much you are nominally paying, and you know that if the nominal rate goes up, so does the real amount you are paying.