So do you think it is right that some companies manage to dodge taxation while some other can not afford the legal fees to enter a tax privileged status ?
I think this: the focus on this above question is leading to over a million deaths every year (in 2000, it was estimated at 875,000); a focus on *other* *problems* eliminates nearly 100% of those deaths.
To me, this circle-jerk is akin to standing around stroking your meat while you watch a teenager get raped, then claiming absolution because you didn't *do* anything. The problem is exactly that: you *should* have done something.
It does not matter how you organize taxation or society in general. If there is a rule, you want it to be followed and not avoided by some technicality that enable ones to dodge the taxation.
The current tax-dodging behavior is a stable system: businesses, rich people, poor people, and the middle-class are all trying to minimize their tax burdens. As the system stands now, appreciable increases in tax avoidance among the rich and big businesses are NOT CAPABLE OF BREAKING A SYSTEM WHICH 100% TOTALLY ELIMINATES POVERTY.
Not. Capable.
That means I can implement this system, end homelessness, end hunger, get 29% more money into the hands of single mothers, get 27% more money into the hands of families, get 48% more money into the hands of single-adult minimum-wage households, REDUCE BUSINESS TAXES TO 35% (currently 40%), eliminate 6.2% of payroll taxes, and IT STILL WORKS (just barely) if businesses find a way to avoid paying 100% of the income taxes they're paying now. If they offshore 100% of their taxes, it's a little rougher, but it still actually works.
The other upshot is wealth increases with technical progress, meaning 17% of the income represents (a lot) more buying power 10 years from now than it does today; and population can't outgrow that increase, and doesn't (we've recovered from the most recent dip). The purchasing-power parity or GDP-per-capita here shows that, per population, there is more money. In other words: taking any fixed percentage of all the income and dividing it among all the people gives each of those people enough money to buy more stuff year after year.
In practice, it took about 35% (or more?) taxes to implement the system I describe in 1950--which would have collapsed the economy if you'd attempted it. In 2013, the systems this obsoletes cost 17.2% of the income, and the new system costs 17%, so it's actually cheaper, thus viable (you don't disrupt the economy by switching over, if you transition carefully).
All of that means the "it would be rough" part quickly becomes "it would not matter at all." By 2028, it's possible to not tax the businesses for the Dividend at all and have the system behave as it would if implemented today; by 2039, the United States revenue position would be identical to today's if the businesses paid 0 tax.
By contrast, the upper 10% of PERSONAL INCOMES makes up 48% of ALL INCOME in the United States. I want to use a progressive tax system to hold high-income earners's taxes stable while steadily lowering the taxes on the lower- and middle-classes as the income gap widens; however, at some point, we are going to want to start pulling those top-tier taxes down a little. You want to attract rich people with big personal incomes to stay here in the U.S. and pay U.S. income taxes, not offshore their personal wealth by becoming citizens of another country.
France charges around 40% to high-income earners; the United States has a 30% overall income tax rate, and shouldn't charge more than 4/3 that to the upper-income earners (i.e. 40%), *and* will have trouble dialing that down unless we get our Federal spending down to lower levels. As a long-
Here's the uncomfortable truth about automating cars to drive themselves. People are going to die.
Here's an uncomfortable truth: If someone shows you a picture of a 9-year-old who's going to die because of your actions and so you abort those actions, the 10,000 people who you just saved don't outweigh the 1,000,000 whose lives depended on your planned action, and you have 990,000 people's blood on your hands.
You cannot absolve yourself of guilt by standing by and doing nothing.
1 in a 100 million will still result in hundreds of deaths a year considering how often a car is used..
That would be even safer than being a police officer!
Currently, police die in the line of duty at a rate of around 60 per year (27 in 2013, 51 in 2014) or about 12 per 100,000. Automobile deaths are approximately 92 per day or 31,000 per year, or around 15 deaths per 100,0000 licensed drivers. 100 deaths per year would put automobile deaths well below police deaths in the line of duty, making driving less dangerous than being a police officer.
So 1 in 2.1 million failures per year would be almost 31,000 fewer deaths, eliminating 99.7% of current automobile fatalities.
The balance is the incidents in which the human is likely to be worse than the car are 50% as likely to occur in population across long time frames.
It's like saying you don't want pedophiles being babysitters of 11-year-old girls, but if the babysitter had been your 45-year-old pedo neighbor instead of the 15-year-old high school girl that day then the person who broke into your house to rob it wouldn't have murdered her and your kid (since the old-man neighbor carries a gun and knows how to respond to a home invasion). That's great and all, but it happens a hell of a lot less than *other* bad stuff that happens when you freely leave child sex offenders alone with small children, so where's the balance? It's right there: you take the risk of hiring someone less-competent at defending your house from a terrorist attack to avoid leaving your kid in a pederast lion's den.
People believe what their eyes see. If Barrack Obama got on TV and started talking about "too many white niggers in America", do you think people would point and laugh at the funny joke the President made?
But what you need to remember is that France is a highly touristic country. A significant fraction of the sales tax comes from tourists. It is hard to get good numbers on that, but a few percent of the sales tax collection is from tourists.
With companies that are offshoring their profits, sales tax maybe the only opportunity the government has on taxing that section of the market.
So with over 90% of their money going to employee wages in-country, they can't just tax the income of those employees?
That's the thing: a small amount of the income trickles up to the top (it doesn't trickle down). It's not negligible, and it's not large; it's a relatively tiny proportion. Tourism means local businesses hiring local labor sell things, pay their labor, and run off with 4%-12% of the money (averaging 10%). Maybe they hide that 10% offshore; you get to tax the other 90% immediately, and the local employees take the rest of their wages and spend it.
So you raised wages, and you found that your employment went down because people don't "have more money to spend, so buy more things"; things cost more, and that "more money to spend" buys less stuff, and so does everyone else's (middle-class etc.) spending money, and that means fewer jobs. So what in the fuck is going on above with that last statement, if increased wage income doesn't go back into the economy?
The money isn't coming out of your economy and being fed to *others* in your economy.
In a tourism country, those wages are taken from the American or German or British economy, and they're poured into the French economy.
A $10 billion tourism industry that loses $1 billion to off-shoring and fails to take a 33.3% cut on that isn't losing $333 million to tax havening; it's losing $1 billion, in theory, assuming that money was ever going to be spent. That same tourism industry has $9,000 million flowing into the hands of wage workers interacting with tourists, which is of course getting taxed (15% in France, or $1,350 million), and also spent. That's money that wasn't in France before, but is now; and it's jobs that didn't exist in France before, but do now, at no cost to France's economy.
You really need a sales tax to capture the tourism industry? Your economy must be based on some weird, alternate universe where mathematics just works differently.
I'm an optimizer, not a feelings-obsessed git. Fairness is secondary. Essentially, I don't take the idea that X is more important because of moral imperative when either A) X actively causes an increase in the amount of sickness, suffering, and death; or B) X has less of an impact than Y. It gets scaled, to a degree; lawsuits are important for re-establishing fairness, even though what really happens is money transfers from down the line (i.e. you sued the auto manufacturer for making a defective part that lead to your hospitalization? Great! All their other customers get a touch poorer, you get your $350,000 back, and your life is un-destroyed).
Either business income tax is useful, and there is no reason to let shady companies dodge them. Or they are not useful and no company should pay them.
You could also say either paracetamol is an important pain control drug and everyone should take lots of it, or it's a liver toxin and its manufacture and possession should be illegal. You'd be wrong both ways.
you seem to assume that the Spanish tax code is somewhat the same as the US tax code. I don't know the Spanish tax code, but in France, companies pay a non negligible amount of taxes.
It's non-negligible here; it's just a small proportion, and not overall important compared to other tax sources. In my Citizen's Dividend (the thing I was referring to), I keep the funding source stable by using a 17% flat tax source, which captures business and personal taxable income (the general fund is still a progressive tax system, from 0% to 24%).
My point was over 90% of all business revenue directly filters down to employee wages (as in: businesses buy from other businesses, who pay employees and buy from other businesses, etc.). Some 10% goes to profits in total across the board, which is either paid out as dividend (mostly to rich people, who bank a lot of it), spent in the next year, or flatly banked. That means, yes, money flows upwards and gets stuck there; and that flow is a small stream, not a roaring monsoon.
This is actually an incomplete analysis, because it ignores the broken concept of money as wealth (more money doesn't mean more wealth; money only represents the output of all labor applied in the economy). That's actually a really complex consideration as well.
To be brief: we have 5.6% UE4, which includes both the job-seeking unemployed (UE3) and everyone else who would take a job if it were available (mostly, discouraged workers who have given up looking because they perceive a lack of jobs). In theory, moving the banked income down from the top increases consumer spending; in reality, the absolute limit of that increase is the 5.6% unemployment base; and in practice, dropping below ~4% unemployment causes localized labor shortages and damages your economy.
You can solve excess employment by making people poorer: cut their working hours. In practice, that means people *are* poorer: they get less of the income (if their yearly salary stays the same, the extra 20% wages going into all products means they all get 20% more expensive), hence can't buy as much stuff, reducing the job demand an increasing unemployment to a stable level. Honestly, if it worked any other way, cutting working hours wouldn't reduce employment. (The second option is to leave it to sort itself out, which results in a population spike until you create a *lot* more poor people. This leads to more-rapid consumption of physically scarce resources, meaning they run out earlier relative to when we create replacement technology to allieviate their scarcity.)
All told, there's proportionally little to grab from the top. Not just less, but *little*. Other optimizations can reduce top-tier taxes and still increase consumer buying power--to dangerous levels, resulting in employment shortages. We can moderate those optimizations to such a degree that we flatly eliminate homelessness and hunger; and there are other
It looked to me like you;'re claiming more than that there are certain specific things that people can learn to do a whole lot better.
Those "specific things" are "learning", "analyzing", and "thinking critically".
As far as the math program example, I was discussing children who studied hard and were found to have less potential than some children who studied a lot less hard.
Some idiot neighbor spent 6 days trying to move concrete blocks into his yard, but they were heavy and hard to drag.
I used a lever to elevate those blocks onto a trolly with wheels, and moved them very easily.
The neighbor is a lot stronger than me and has greater potential for moving great big things, yet I can move great big things better than he can because I am some sort of special god.
... no, it's because I've used a different technique, just like brute-force attempts at math or string searching are slow and shitty.
Put it another way: your computer might have a 3GHz processor, but it will still take 4 days to search a 600-page legal brief for a simple phrase. My 33MHz 486-SX can do it in 1/3 of a second, because I'm using a Knuth-Pratt-Morris string search and doing 1/3000th as many character comparisons.
Still, I'm perfectly capable of constructing logical arguments (which may be erroneous, but we all make mistakes), so I can argue with you (high inherent intelligence helps here, to alliterate), and I don't believe that a random idiot off the street can come anywhere near to matching me in my strong points.
When I was younger, I had the analytical capacity to believe everything Sean Hannity said. Logical propositions and analogous thinking weren't things for me; entertainment and distraction were what drove me. Video games. I did good at simple things like math, but less-good at complex things requiring the analysis of a lot of data and secondary effects. For example: I understood that raising minimum wage just results in all other wages going up (this is false), and that doubling the wages of a McDonalds cashier would make a hamburger cost $10 (also false).
I've got an IQ of like 160, man. It's learned. I taught myself that shit. I am, inherently, the kind of person you have to carefully explain things to, and I determine those things are complex and stupid because they don't make sense. I REWROTE THAT PART.
You think your construction of logical arguments is just something your brain does specially? I learned about the fallacy of whole-body analogy, and started finding the boundaries of comparisons, and became capable of thinking and understanding in ways I couldn't before. You think your reasoning ability is actually any good? Your reasoning ability is garbage; you're standing here reasoning that there's only one way to do something, and that any amount of applied effort is of the same quality as any other applied effort, and that someone can study by brute-force and not learn PROVES that other techniques of study don't exist, because otherwise we'd all magically know about them.
You're arguing that all technology which can be invented has been invented, because man can't NOT know about technology.
It does. So does alcohol. These are also regressive taxes, although gas less-so. In the case of alcohol, it's a tax per liter, and you can really only drink so much; in the case of fuel, your private jet does indeed burn more than my Mazda 3.
Pretty much. We're trying to fix it, and that's raising some complexity issues (tracking sales tax is hard).
The real problem is businesses are supposed to report sales taxes; out-of-jurisdiction businesses have no reason to care, and you have no way to audit people's purchases. That's on top of the basic issue of higher-income-earners sending proportionally less of their money to purchases, thus less-taxable (a sales tax is a much steeper tax exemption for the rich than current deductions).
Holy shit, the video doesn't just claim to be supported by the organization; it contains zero hint that it's a parody, at all. It looks very authentic, and it's on Youtube with a very non-parody title. Seeing this video, examining it frame-by-frame, and studying the quality and the transcript, I would say it's authentic.
That's a negative income tax with a sales tax funding source. It poses a simple problem: you have to get the rebate before you can spend it.
People who earn more and put their money into a savings account to grow are able to gain more money without paying taxes on it. They don't pay taxes on what they put into savings (just like you don't pay taxes on what you put into 401k), and they don't pay taxes on the interest. For people with a *lot* of income, they can negotiate high-interest savings with the bank (loan rates are 4.25%? I can easily go to Well's Fargo and Bank of America with $30M and have them fight over who gets to hold it, eventually getting maybe 3.5% interest rate so they can lend money at 4.25%-19% depending on if they're supporting a low-interest car loan or a credit card--just need someone to let me hold $30M for a bit).
Again: the US national tax rate is 30%. You're talking about a 30% sales tax just to replace income tax (not any other tax).
Also who really pays sales tax anymore? Maybe if you're a poor black kid and want some gum or potato chips--we'll penalize you for buying junk food or anything not in the narrow range of exempt purchases (including clothes--why would you need shoes?). Middle-classers import everything to bypass sales tax. Warehouse logistics have made shipping and distribution cheap by breaking up a few hundred dollars among several thousand units of product per truckload; stuff I buy that would cost $60 in-store costs me $53 online, with free shipping if I take the slow (5-7 business day) tier. Sales tax on $60 is $3.60 here, and the cost to actually move that stuff is around 20-80 cents (depending on if it's a fancy pen or a 16-piece dinner set). Electronics are huge for this: $350 phone is not taking up much size or weight in the shipping system, and is packed in with thousands of other objects on the long-haul truck and hundreds on the last-mile truck.
So far, people who earn more pay less, and people who earn a lot more pay a lot less.
People greatly overestimate the economic impact of business tax shenanigans. An enormous amount of business activity goes to wages, and very little to profits. Even Apple, an outlier in Cupertino, has $28 billion of operational costs and $38 billion of revenue; in Cupertino, their 13,000+ employees gain $2 billion in income, which Cupertino would like to tax at 8%, taking $800,000, which is somehow less than the money rolling into the local economy already.
Business income taxes have the potential to make up less than 1/10 of the tax revenue; I can raise the amount of money floating around in consumer pockets by twice as much just by fiddling with the tax system, without taxing the rich enormously (~41%, and that would come down in a few years--or never materialize, if we incrementally adjust the system over 3-5 years), and with a reduction of 4.5% marginal (~11% proportional) in business taxes.
Of course nobody wants to do that. Stabilize HUD families? Greatly improve the financial standing of single-mother households? Make the middle-class 25% more wealthy? Get the homeless off the street, and get food to the 50 million Americans experiencing hunger? No, no, no! We want to attack the rich instead; screw the poor!
Sales taxes are only capable of collecting taxes from the purchaser on purchases. Money that doesn't get spent doesn't get taxed, and sales tax increases affect the poorest the most.
The impacts of a sales tax are tantamount to increasing prices of goods through any other mechanism: the consumer is capable of purchasing fewer goods (thus poorer), and not as many goods are produced, thus jobs are reduced.
Sales taxes can't be progressive, so can't respond to an increase in income spread. For example: in the United States, our flat-tax rate would be a 30% income tax. With the top bracket paying 1/3 higher, the highest bracket would be 40%. If that's the upper 10%, then the lower 90% of income earners would pay a combined total of 20%; the concept recurses (the upper middle class may pay 25% while the lower middle class pay 15%; the top portion of them may pay 20% while the lower earners pay 10%; etc.). As the income gap spreads, that top tax bracket represents a bigger proportion of money, and so the lower tax brackets can shrink without raising taxes on anyone else, thus improving the buying power of the broad consumer market (either by increasing the take-home pay, reducing wage growth so prices grow more slowly relative to income, or a combination of both) and creating more jobs.
No it isn't. Malice has a rather specific definition. Malice is causing pain or damage for the pleasure of doing so. It's doing harm because you enjoy the harm itself.
Let me ask my cats, Merriam and Webster.
1. the intention or desire to do evil; ill will. 2.wrongful intention, especially as increasing the guilt of certain offenses.
So, malice means doing something by intent. It is a characteristic of an action whereby the wrongness of the action was understood when the decision to perpetrate the action was made.
VW ran massive ads about how clean their diesel cars were - even one with the cast from Mythbusters
VW's "Clean Diesel" marketing references the low heavy-particulate emissions. Diesel engines produce thick, harsh chunks of soot that blacken everything and burn your lungs; the Jetta TDi has a device in the tailpipe which captures this carbon, then gets real hot and burns it into smaller particulate and CO2 every 500 miles. They weren't marketing low emissions of all sorts; they were specifically marketing a lack of black clouds rolling off the back like a coal factory.
The original claim was that anyone can learn to do anything. Now, you say that people are doing very successfully on specific things given improved instruction techniques. Those aren't the same things.
No, you don't get to do that. I said people can learn to have improved memory. I showed "specific things" like REMEMBERING THINGS THEY ARE STUDYING using mnemonics techniques. That's an application of a general thing.
If there were ways to turn out people as good at software engineering as I am, without having unusual potential, somebody would apply those ways and get a reputation, then more students, and then copycats.
If there were ways to make a car corner better than a Model T, somebody would notice, and apply those things.... They did, by lowering the car's center of gravity, using better suspension platforms, and so forth.
Again: The population at large may go on not noticing what's happening with a few hobbyists and specialists. People aren't magically granted the knowledge of the highest technology physical law allows.
My guess is that the Oriental kids had had a better math education, likely with high parental support, so they excelled in their classes disproportionately to their raw ability.
So I'm saying people can learn things better, you're saying no they can't, except when they do?
I don't see any real need for human calculators.
It's useful to be able to do math in your head; but my point was more that you can learn to do math in your head. That's a thing.
Think about arithmetic. You can try to multiply 37 x 26. 30 * 26 = 30*20 + 30*6 = 600 + 180; 7 * 26 = 20*7 + 6*7 = etc etc etc. Lots of counting up numbers. You're counting on your fingers and trying to track numbers (6, 12, 18... 180). It's a mess.
You could instead memorize 1x1 through 9x9, and you see 3x2=6, 3x6=18, 7x2=14, 7x6=42. That's still a mess unless you've trained yourself to handle numbers positionally, so you put down 6, 18, 14, and 42 as 6xx, 18x, 14x, and x42. Add them straight: 6+1+1 (8), 8+4+4 (16) [A:96], and 2 [A:962] and you get 962 as 37 x 26... which is correct.
That's a bunch of chatter to talk about (most simple things are), so here's the point: I didn't do any finger counting or number transformations. 8 is in the set {8,2}, and 4 is greater than 2, so I know I've got 4-2 = 2, thus 12. Add another 4 for 16. I have that memorized, so it clicks instantly at a glance. The single-digit multiplication is all memorized, too, and I can stream each of the high-order sets and accumulate numbers to add left-to-right, propagating overflow leftward. That means I can glance at a couple big numbers like 1,173 * 246.7 and do the right thing as a mechanical reflex.
That's not mathematical aptitude; it's a skill you learn. It takes effort and, as you observe, is boring and annoying. I'm 100% certain you could memorize your multiplication tables if you wanted, and also pretty sure you're not going to bother with 5 minutes a day scribbling them onto a paper as practice.
If there were ways to turn out people as good at software engineering as I am, without having unusual potential
You'd have to lower the energy required first, or reframe it. You're *interested* in software engineering; for most people, it's torturous and boring. Something goes wrong and people don't go, "Oh no! What did I do wrong?" They go, "Fuck, can't this stupid shit just go away? Programming is ballsacks for retard nerds who can't get laid!" and proceed to look at cat videos on Youtube before prodding at their code to try and make it pretend to work.
I'm no good at software engineering. I've been picking it up, and am far enough along to see defects in *other* people's approach, but not to formulate a good approach. I went way back to beginning computer science and am g
"I'm greedy, so I'll look the other way and give hints that this bad thing should be done, and wave money to get greedy people to do bad things" is malice.
I suggest the executives didn't know what was going on, and the engineers didn't think it was a big deal because the car actually has emissions like other cars, except when it's on the test bench. If car A gets 40mpg and has 0.42ppm NOx on the highway, and car B gets 40mpg and has 0.42ppm on the highway *but* can't get under 0.08ppm on the artificial test bench, are you doing anything wrong by tweaking the car to get 0.08ppm on the test bench without sacrificing its performance and efficiency in the real world?
You're still doing nothing but opening with insults, insulting respondents, and then continuing to hurl insults. Did you have a point, or were you just looking to call people idiots?
Yes, and your response was about air pollution from all sources, while the question was about marginal increases in air pollution, in the context of increases in air pollution from VW TDi emissions. Even putting context aside, the question asked about *increases*, while you made a statement about *all*.
It wasn't a theory on how this happened; I more intended to show how people think about their actions. What you evaluate as deliberate malice or oversight might not fit into what the appropriate parties evaluated; this is approximately 100% of human behavior--yours included, at this moment, as you're accusing certain parties of malice in the full belief that you're 100% correct about all that.
The test code doesn't actually send fake data out the OBD2; it sends real data, but changes the engine's operating mode. When disabled, the engine runs differently. A tail-pipe test shows compliant emissions during test mode.
Your analogy is... poor. I get the point, although I like to use more-complete analogies; whole-body analogy is a big defect in human thinking, and humans tend to take bad analogies in full and run with it. As I said: VW didn't send fake data to anyone; this is more like a meat packer washing down the line the morning before an inspector is coming so everything looks clean and shiny.
Your large numbers are cute, and don't address the impact of half a million cars on atmospheric concentrations of NOx.
My point was that the *entire* fleet of vehicles in the world pumping out elevated levels of NOx would *still* have difficulty nudging us toward danger levels. When I said "Our entire infrastructure," that included coal power plants, oil power plants, gigantic factories, air and sea travel, oil refineries... our entire infrastructure.
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So do you think it is right that some companies manage to dodge taxation while some other can not afford the legal fees to enter a tax privileged status ?
I think this: the focus on this above question is leading to over a million deaths every year (in 2000, it was estimated at 875,000); a focus on *other* *problems* eliminates nearly 100% of those deaths.
To me, this circle-jerk is akin to standing around stroking your meat while you watch a teenager get raped, then claiming absolution because you didn't *do* anything. The problem is exactly that: you *should* have done something.
It does not matter how you organize taxation or society in general. If there is a rule, you want it to be followed and not avoided by some technicality that enable ones to dodge the taxation.
The current tax-dodging behavior is a stable system: businesses, rich people, poor people, and the middle-class are all trying to minimize their tax burdens. As the system stands now, appreciable increases in tax avoidance among the rich and big businesses are NOT CAPABLE OF BREAKING A SYSTEM WHICH 100% TOTALLY ELIMINATES POVERTY.
Not. Capable.
That means I can implement this system, end homelessness, end hunger, get 29% more money into the hands of single mothers, get 27% more money into the hands of families, get 48% more money into the hands of single-adult minimum-wage households, REDUCE BUSINESS TAXES TO 35% (currently 40%), eliminate 6.2% of payroll taxes, and IT STILL WORKS (just barely) if businesses find a way to avoid paying 100% of the income taxes they're paying now. If they offshore 100% of their taxes, it's a little rougher, but it still actually works.
The other upshot is wealth increases with technical progress, meaning 17% of the income represents (a lot) more buying power 10 years from now than it does today; and population can't outgrow that increase, and doesn't (we've recovered from the most recent dip). The purchasing-power parity or GDP-per-capita here shows that, per population, there is more money. In other words: taking any fixed percentage of all the income and dividing it among all the people gives each of those people enough money to buy more stuff year after year.
In practice, it took about 35% (or more?) taxes to implement the system I describe in 1950--which would have collapsed the economy if you'd attempted it. In 2013, the systems this obsoletes cost 17.2% of the income, and the new system costs 17%, so it's actually cheaper, thus viable (you don't disrupt the economy by switching over, if you transition carefully).
All of that means the "it would be rough" part quickly becomes "it would not matter at all." By 2028, it's possible to not tax the businesses for the Dividend at all and have the system behave as it would if implemented today; by 2039, the United States revenue position would be identical to today's if the businesses paid 0 tax.
By contrast, the upper 10% of PERSONAL INCOMES makes up 48% of ALL INCOME in the United States. I want to use a progressive tax system to hold high-income earners's taxes stable while steadily lowering the taxes on the lower- and middle-classes as the income gap widens; however, at some point, we are going to want to start pulling those top-tier taxes down a little. You want to attract rich people with big personal incomes to stay here in the U.S. and pay U.S. income taxes, not offshore their personal wealth by becoming citizens of another country.
France charges around 40% to high-income earners; the United States has a 30% overall income tax rate, and shouldn't charge more than 4/3 that to the upper-income earners (i.e. 40%), *and* will have trouble dialing that down unless we get our Federal spending down to lower levels. As a long-
Here's the uncomfortable truth about automating cars to drive themselves. People are going to die.
Here's an uncomfortable truth: If someone shows you a picture of a 9-year-old who's going to die because of your actions and so you abort those actions, the 10,000 people who you just saved don't outweigh the 1,000,000 whose lives depended on your planned action, and you have 990,000 people's blood on your hands.
You cannot absolve yourself of guilt by standing by and doing nothing.
1 in a 100 million will still result in hundreds of deaths a year considering how often a car is used..
That would be even safer than being a police officer!
Currently, police die in the line of duty at a rate of around 60 per year (27 in 2013, 51 in 2014) or about 12 per 100,000. Automobile deaths are approximately 92 per day or 31,000 per year, or around 15 deaths per 100,0000 licensed drivers. 100 deaths per year would put automobile deaths well below police deaths in the line of duty, making driving less dangerous than being a police officer.
So 1 in 2.1 million failures per year would be almost 31,000 fewer deaths, eliminating 99.7% of current automobile fatalities.
The balance is the incidents in which the human is likely to be worse than the car are 50% as likely to occur in population across long time frames.
It's like saying you don't want pedophiles being babysitters of 11-year-old girls, but if the babysitter had been your 45-year-old pedo neighbor instead of the 15-year-old high school girl that day then the person who broke into your house to rob it wouldn't have murdered her and your kid (since the old-man neighbor carries a gun and knows how to respond to a home invasion). That's great and all, but it happens a hell of a lot less than *other* bad stuff that happens when you freely leave child sex offenders alone with small children, so where's the balance? It's right there: you take the risk of hiring someone less-competent at defending your house from a terrorist attack to avoid leaving your kid in a pederast lion's den.
People believe what their eyes see. If Barrack Obama got on TV and started talking about "too many white niggers in America", do you think people would point and laugh at the funny joke the President made?
But what you need to remember is that France is a highly touristic country. A significant fraction of the sales tax comes from tourists. It is hard to get good numbers on that, but a few percent of the sales tax collection is from tourists.
With companies that are offshoring their profits, sales tax maybe the only opportunity the government has on taxing that section of the market.
So with over 90% of their money going to employee wages in-country, they can't just tax the income of those employees?
That's the thing: a small amount of the income trickles up to the top (it doesn't trickle down). It's not negligible, and it's not large; it's a relatively tiny proportion. Tourism means local businesses hiring local labor sell things, pay their labor, and run off with 4%-12% of the money (averaging 10%). Maybe they hide that 10% offshore; you get to tax the other 90% immediately, and the local employees take the rest of their wages and spend it.
So you raised wages, and you found that your employment went down because people don't "have more money to spend, so buy more things"; things cost more, and that "more money to spend" buys less stuff, and so does everyone else's (middle-class etc.) spending money, and that means fewer jobs. So what in the fuck is going on above with that last statement, if increased wage income doesn't go back into the economy?
The money isn't coming out of your economy and being fed to *others* in your economy.
In a tourism country, those wages are taken from the American or German or British economy, and they're poured into the French economy.
A $10 billion tourism industry that loses $1 billion to off-shoring and fails to take a 33.3% cut on that isn't losing $333 million to tax havening; it's losing $1 billion, in theory, assuming that money was ever going to be spent. That same tourism industry has $9,000 million flowing into the hands of wage workers interacting with tourists, which is of course getting taxed (15% in France, or $1,350 million), and also spent. That's money that wasn't in France before, but is now; and it's jobs that didn't exist in France before, but do now, at no cost to France's economy.
You really need a sales tax to capture the tourism industry? Your economy must be based on some weird, alternate universe where mathematics just works differently.
I'm an optimizer, not a feelings-obsessed git. Fairness is secondary. Essentially, I don't take the idea that X is more important because of moral imperative when either A) X actively causes an increase in the amount of sickness, suffering, and death; or B) X has less of an impact than Y. It gets scaled, to a degree; lawsuits are important for re-establishing fairness, even though what really happens is money transfers from down the line (i.e. you sued the auto manufacturer for making a defective part that lead to your hospitalization? Great! All their other customers get a touch poorer, you get your $350,000 back, and your life is un-destroyed).
Either business income tax is useful, and there is no reason to let shady companies dodge them. Or they are not useful and no company should pay them.
You could also say either paracetamol is an important pain control drug and everyone should take lots of it, or it's a liver toxin and its manufacture and possession should be illegal. You'd be wrong both ways.
you seem to assume that the Spanish tax code is somewhat the same as the US tax code. I don't know the Spanish tax code, but in France, companies pay a non negligible amount of taxes.
It's non-negligible here; it's just a small proportion, and not overall important compared to other tax sources. In my Citizen's Dividend (the thing I was referring to), I keep the funding source stable by using a 17% flat tax source, which captures business and personal taxable income (the general fund is still a progressive tax system, from 0% to 24%).
My point was over 90% of all business revenue directly filters down to employee wages (as in: businesses buy from other businesses, who pay employees and buy from other businesses, etc.). Some 10% goes to profits in total across the board, which is either paid out as dividend (mostly to rich people, who bank a lot of it), spent in the next year, or flatly banked. That means, yes, money flows upwards and gets stuck there; and that flow is a small stream, not a roaring monsoon.
This is actually an incomplete analysis, because it ignores the broken concept of money as wealth (more money doesn't mean more wealth; money only represents the output of all labor applied in the economy). That's actually a really complex consideration as well.
To be brief: we have 5.6% UE4, which includes both the job-seeking unemployed (UE3) and everyone else who would take a job if it were available (mostly, discouraged workers who have given up looking because they perceive a lack of jobs). In theory, moving the banked income down from the top increases consumer spending; in reality, the absolute limit of that increase is the 5.6% unemployment base; and in practice, dropping below ~4% unemployment causes localized labor shortages and damages your economy.
You can solve excess employment by making people poorer: cut their working hours. In practice, that means people *are* poorer: they get less of the income (if their yearly salary stays the same, the extra 20% wages going into all products means they all get 20% more expensive), hence can't buy as much stuff, reducing the job demand an increasing unemployment to a stable level. Honestly, if it worked any other way, cutting working hours wouldn't reduce employment. (The second option is to leave it to sort itself out, which results in a population spike until you create a *lot* more poor people. This leads to more-rapid consumption of physically scarce resources, meaning they run out earlier relative to when we create replacement technology to allieviate their scarcity.)
All told, there's proportionally little to grab from the top. Not just less, but *little*. Other optimizations can reduce top-tier taxes and still increase consumer buying power--to dangerous levels, resulting in employment shortages. We can moderate those optimizations to such a degree that we flatly eliminate homelessness and hunger; and there are other
It looked to me like you;'re claiming more than that there are certain specific things that people can learn to do a whole lot better.
Those "specific things" are "learning", "analyzing", and "thinking critically".
As far as the math program example, I was discussing children who studied hard and were found to have less potential than some children who studied a lot less hard.
Some idiot neighbor spent 6 days trying to move concrete blocks into his yard, but they were heavy and hard to drag.
I used a lever to elevate those blocks onto a trolly with wheels, and moved them very easily.
The neighbor is a lot stronger than me and has greater potential for moving great big things, yet I can move great big things better than he can because I am some sort of special god.
Put it another way: your computer might have a 3GHz processor, but it will still take 4 days to search a 600-page legal brief for a simple phrase. My 33MHz 486-SX can do it in 1/3 of a second, because I'm using a Knuth-Pratt-Morris string search and doing 1/3000th as many character comparisons.
Still, I'm perfectly capable of constructing logical arguments (which may be erroneous, but we all make mistakes), so I can argue with you (high inherent intelligence helps here, to alliterate), and I don't believe that a random idiot off the street can come anywhere near to matching me in my strong points.
When I was younger, I had the analytical capacity to believe everything Sean Hannity said. Logical propositions and analogous thinking weren't things for me; entertainment and distraction were what drove me. Video games. I did good at simple things like math, but less-good at complex things requiring the analysis of a lot of data and secondary effects. For example: I understood that raising minimum wage just results in all other wages going up (this is false), and that doubling the wages of a McDonalds cashier would make a hamburger cost $10 (also false).
I've got an IQ of like 160, man. It's learned. I taught myself that shit. I am, inherently, the kind of person you have to carefully explain things to, and I determine those things are complex and stupid because they don't make sense. I REWROTE THAT PART.
You think your construction of logical arguments is just something your brain does specially? I learned about the fallacy of whole-body analogy, and started finding the boundaries of comparisons, and became capable of thinking and understanding in ways I couldn't before. You think your reasoning ability is actually any good? Your reasoning ability is garbage; you're standing here reasoning that there's only one way to do something, and that any amount of applied effort is of the same quality as any other applied effort, and that someone can study by brute-force and not learn PROVES that other techniques of study don't exist, because otherwise we'd all magically know about them.
You're arguing that all technology which can be invented has been invented, because man can't NOT know about technology.
It does. So does alcohol. These are also regressive taxes, although gas less-so. In the case of alcohol, it's a tax per liter, and you can really only drink so much; in the case of fuel, your private jet does indeed burn more than my Mazda 3.
Pretty much. We're trying to fix it, and that's raising some complexity issues (tracking sales tax is hard).
The real problem is businesses are supposed to report sales taxes; out-of-jurisdiction businesses have no reason to care, and you have no way to audit people's purchases. That's on top of the basic issue of higher-income-earners sending proportionally less of their money to purchases, thus less-taxable (a sales tax is a much steeper tax exemption for the rich than current deductions).
Holy shit, the video doesn't just claim to be supported by the organization; it contains zero hint that it's a parody, at all. It looks very authentic, and it's on Youtube with a very non-parody title. Seeing this video, examining it frame-by-frame, and studying the quality and the transcript, I would say it's authentic.
Dunno. The way the summary is written, it sounds a lot like impersonation.
That's a negative income tax with a sales tax funding source. It poses a simple problem: you have to get the rebate before you can spend it.
People who earn more and put their money into a savings account to grow are able to gain more money without paying taxes on it. They don't pay taxes on what they put into savings (just like you don't pay taxes on what you put into 401k), and they don't pay taxes on the interest. For people with a *lot* of income, they can negotiate high-interest savings with the bank (loan rates are 4.25%? I can easily go to Well's Fargo and Bank of America with $30M and have them fight over who gets to hold it, eventually getting maybe 3.5% interest rate so they can lend money at 4.25%-19% depending on if they're supporting a low-interest car loan or a credit card--just need someone to let me hold $30M for a bit).
Again: the US national tax rate is 30%. You're talking about a 30% sales tax just to replace income tax (not any other tax).
Also who really pays sales tax anymore? Maybe if you're a poor black kid and want some gum or potato chips--we'll penalize you for buying junk food or anything not in the narrow range of exempt purchases (including clothes--why would you need shoes?). Middle-classers import everything to bypass sales tax. Warehouse logistics have made shipping and distribution cheap by breaking up a few hundred dollars among several thousand units of product per truckload; stuff I buy that would cost $60 in-store costs me $53 online, with free shipping if I take the slow (5-7 business day) tier. Sales tax on $60 is $3.60 here, and the cost to actually move that stuff is around 20-80 cents (depending on if it's a fancy pen or a 16-piece dinner set). Electronics are huge for this: $350 phone is not taking up much size or weight in the shipping system, and is packed in with thousands of other objects on the long-haul truck and hundreds on the last-mile truck.
So far, people who earn more pay less, and people who earn a lot more pay a lot less.
People greatly overestimate the economic impact of business tax shenanigans. An enormous amount of business activity goes to wages, and very little to profits. Even Apple, an outlier in Cupertino, has $28 billion of operational costs and $38 billion of revenue; in Cupertino, their 13,000+ employees gain $2 billion in income, which Cupertino would like to tax at 8%, taking $800,000, which is somehow less than the money rolling into the local economy already.
Business income taxes have the potential to make up less than 1/10 of the tax revenue; I can raise the amount of money floating around in consumer pockets by twice as much just by fiddling with the tax system, without taxing the rich enormously (~41%, and that would come down in a few years--or never materialize, if we incrementally adjust the system over 3-5 years), and with a reduction of 4.5% marginal (~11% proportional) in business taxes.
Of course nobody wants to do that. Stabilize HUD families? Greatly improve the financial standing of single-mother households? Make the middle-class 25% more wealthy? Get the homeless off the street, and get food to the 50 million Americans experiencing hunger? No, no, no! We want to attack the rich instead; screw the poor!
Sales taxes are only capable of collecting taxes from the purchaser on purchases. Money that doesn't get spent doesn't get taxed, and sales tax increases affect the poorest the most.
The impacts of a sales tax are tantamount to increasing prices of goods through any other mechanism: the consumer is capable of purchasing fewer goods (thus poorer), and not as many goods are produced, thus jobs are reduced.
Sales taxes can't be progressive, so can't respond to an increase in income spread. For example: in the United States, our flat-tax rate would be a 30% income tax. With the top bracket paying 1/3 higher, the highest bracket would be 40%. If that's the upper 10%, then the lower 90% of income earners would pay a combined total of 20%; the concept recurses (the upper middle class may pay 25% while the lower middle class pay 15%; the top portion of them may pay 20% while the lower earners pay 10%; etc.). As the income gap spreads, that top tax bracket represents a bigger proportion of money, and so the lower tax brackets can shrink without raising taxes on anyone else, thus improving the buying power of the broad consumer market (either by increasing the take-home pay, reducing wage growth so prices grow more slowly relative to income, or a combination of both) and creating more jobs.
No it isn't. Malice has a rather specific definition. Malice is causing pain or damage for the pleasure of doing so. It's doing harm because you enjoy the harm itself.
Let me ask my cats, Merriam and Webster.
1. the intention or desire to do evil; ill will. 2.wrongful intention, especially as increasing the guilt of certain offenses.
So, malice means doing something by intent. It is a characteristic of an action whereby the wrongness of the action was understood when the decision to perpetrate the action was made.
VW ran massive ads about how clean their diesel cars were - even one with the cast from Mythbusters
VW's "Clean Diesel" marketing references the low heavy-particulate emissions. Diesel engines produce thick, harsh chunks of soot that blacken everything and burn your lungs; the Jetta TDi has a device in the tailpipe which captures this carbon, then gets real hot and burns it into smaller particulate and CO2 every 500 miles. They weren't marketing low emissions of all sorts; they were specifically marketing a lack of black clouds rolling off the back like a coal factory.
That doesn't seem relevant to anything I've said. You're prattling on angry about everything.
The original claim was that anyone can learn to do anything. Now, you say that people are doing very successfully on specific things given improved instruction techniques. Those aren't the same things.
No, you don't get to do that. I said people can learn to have improved memory. I showed "specific things" like REMEMBERING THINGS THEY ARE STUDYING using mnemonics techniques. That's an application of a general thing.
If there were ways to turn out people as good at software engineering as I am, without having unusual potential, somebody would apply those ways and get a reputation, then more students, and then copycats.
If there were ways to make a car corner better than a Model T, somebody would notice, and apply those things. ... They did, by lowering the car's center of gravity, using better suspension platforms, and so forth.
Again: The population at large may go on not noticing what's happening with a few hobbyists and specialists. People aren't magically granted the knowledge of the highest technology physical law allows.
My guess is that the Oriental kids had had a better math education, likely with high parental support, so they excelled in their classes disproportionately to their raw ability.
So I'm saying people can learn things better, you're saying no they can't, except when they do?
I don't see any real need for human calculators.
It's useful to be able to do math in your head; but my point was more that you can learn to do math in your head. That's a thing.
Think about arithmetic. You can try to multiply 37 x 26. 30 * 26 = 30*20 + 30*6 = 600 + 180; 7 * 26 = 20*7 + 6*7 = etc etc etc. Lots of counting up numbers. You're counting on your fingers and trying to track numbers (6, 12, 18 ... 180). It's a mess.
You could instead memorize 1x1 through 9x9, and you see 3x2=6, 3x6=18, 7x2=14, 7x6=42. That's still a mess unless you've trained yourself to handle numbers positionally, so you put down 6, 18, 14, and 42 as 6xx, 18x, 14x, and x42. Add them straight: 6+1+1 (8), 8+4+4 (16) [A:96], and 2 [A:962] and you get 962 as 37 x 26... which is correct.
That's a bunch of chatter to talk about (most simple things are), so here's the point: I didn't do any finger counting or number transformations. 8 is in the set {8,2}, and 4 is greater than 2, so I know I've got 4-2 = 2, thus 12. Add another 4 for 16. I have that memorized, so it clicks instantly at a glance. The single-digit multiplication is all memorized, too, and I can stream each of the high-order sets and accumulate numbers to add left-to-right, propagating overflow leftward. That means I can glance at a couple big numbers like 1,173 * 246.7 and do the right thing as a mechanical reflex.
That's not mathematical aptitude; it's a skill you learn. It takes effort and, as you observe, is boring and annoying. I'm 100% certain you could memorize your multiplication tables if you wanted, and also pretty sure you're not going to bother with 5 minutes a day scribbling them onto a paper as practice.
If there were ways to turn out people as good at software engineering as I am, without having unusual potential
You'd have to lower the energy required first, or reframe it. You're *interested* in software engineering; for most people, it's torturous and boring. Something goes wrong and people don't go, "Oh no! What did I do wrong?" They go, "Fuck, can't this stupid shit just go away? Programming is ballsacks for retard nerds who can't get laid!" and proceed to look at cat videos on Youtube before prodding at their code to try and make it pretend to work.
I'm no good at software engineering. I've been picking it up, and am far enough along to see defects in *other* people's approach, but not to formulate a good approach. I went way back to beginning computer science and am g
"I'm greedy, so I'll look the other way and give hints that this bad thing should be done, and wave money to get greedy people to do bad things" is malice.
I suggest the executives didn't know what was going on, and the engineers didn't think it was a big deal because the car actually has emissions like other cars, except when it's on the test bench. If car A gets 40mpg and has 0.42ppm NOx on the highway, and car B gets 40mpg and has 0.42ppm on the highway *but* can't get under 0.08ppm on the artificial test bench, are you doing anything wrong by tweaking the car to get 0.08ppm on the test bench without sacrificing its performance and efficiency in the real world?
You're still doing nothing but opening with insults, insulting respondents, and then continuing to hurl insults. Did you have a point, or were you just looking to call people idiots?
What are you babbling about now? Your response seems to be in the vein of "be a huge asshole to feel superior."
Yes, and your response was about air pollution from all sources, while the question was about marginal increases in air pollution, in the context of increases in air pollution from VW TDi emissions. Even putting context aside, the question asked about *increases*, while you made a statement about *all*.
It wasn't a theory on how this happened; I more intended to show how people think about their actions. What you evaluate as deliberate malice or oversight might not fit into what the appropriate parties evaluated; this is approximately 100% of human behavior--yours included, at this moment, as you're accusing certain parties of malice in the full belief that you're 100% correct about all that.
The test code doesn't actually send fake data out the OBD2; it sends real data, but changes the engine's operating mode. When disabled, the engine runs differently. A tail-pipe test shows compliant emissions during test mode.
Your analogy is... poor. I get the point, although I like to use more-complete analogies; whole-body analogy is a big defect in human thinking, and humans tend to take bad analogies in full and run with it. As I said: VW didn't send fake data to anyone; this is more like a meat packer washing down the line the morning before an inspector is coming so everything looks clean and shiny.
Your large numbers are cute, and don't address the impact of half a million cars on atmospheric concentrations of NOx.
My point was that the *entire* fleet of vehicles in the world pumping out elevated levels of NOx would *still* have difficulty nudging us toward danger levels. When I said "Our entire infrastructure," that included coal power plants, oil power plants, gigantic factories, air and sea travel, oil refineries... our entire infrastructure.
Maryland.