I don't gather your meaning, or maybe you are misinterpreting my argument. I don't really care whether it is toll booths or tax disbursements based on road usage. Gas tax collection is almost certainly more efficient, but probably less fair.
Toll booths collect a fee based on how often you pass through the toll lane.
Taxes collect from people who aren't passing through the toll lane, thus the per-individual payment is lower.
Gasoline taxes and tolls barely pay for a third of state and local road spending; today, less than half of Federal road spending comes from fuel taxes and road fees. Roads across the nation are paid for primarily by general tax funds--largely income taxes.
My last car incurred $52.99/year of fuel taxes. Federal spending includes about $1,100 per American per year for road-related spending. Where do you think the money comes from? Hint: it's generally not collected proportional to road use.
If one robot is worth 100 workers, then it means automating your entire workforce would increase the standard of living by 100x.
Only if your entire workforce keeps working. Technology increases the output of human labor (the only cost). To increase the output of human labor by 100 times, you create technology whereby the effort of 1 human labor hour produces the same output as previously requiring 100 human labor hours.
If you make a machine which runs itself and keeps running without maintenance or other human input (like fuel), it's incurring no cost. If it runs forever, the output is infinite. On the other hand, if it costs 1,000 human labor hours to make it, it replaces 10 human labor hour per thousand hours of run time, and it runs for one hundred thousand hours, you're breaking even. Think about solar street lights with LED bulbs.
That's such a huge increase that all sorts of welfare and UBI programs which are currently mathematically unsustainable (without amassing debt), becomes roundoff error.
Actually, we can do that today, without raising taxes. Add in healthcare and the blunt plans there are something like a 0.9% tax cut on the rich, and no corporate tax increases; although you need to do a little adjustment there (see further down). The Dividend isn't really a UBI, but something new--related, though.
I shoved the payroll tax for retirement and disability benefits up to the top tax bracket and got 43.7% instead of 39.6%, along with a bit of a mess along the way for effective tax rate in total. The ETR is higher in 2016 at $50,000, in that model; that changes rapidly, moving upwards and narrowing the gap between 2016 tax policy (ignore the TCJA; I'm repealing that) and the model. You can repair it in 2016 by raising the top tax rate in total to 45% and adjusting the income tax brackets to be more progressive--really a crucial step to clean up the mess I've made in all this restructuring.
With OASDI staying on payrolls, two things happen. First, payroll taxes get backshifted into wages, so you don't get the wage boost (or price cut, depending on who you ask and how you look at it long-term) and employment increase (always) of reducing the cost of employing people. Second, you have that 0.9% tax cut on the top income earners, which you can reclaim to help fix the slight increase in ETR. By 2022 (earliest this can actually happen--Trump will veto), you can have that scenario without actually raising anyone's taxes.
So... Dividend alone: no homelessness, no hunger, increases available jobs (probably full employment?), decreases cost of welfare (make people less-poor), trivial to pull off without increasing taxes in 2016. With universal healthcare: A little tougher to do without tax increases in total on someone, although probably can pull it off in 2022. Shunt OASDI payments entirely onto the rich: likely 45% top tax rate instead of 39.6%, higher wages at the low end, and lower unemployment (if we're not hitting permanent full employment already).
This plan practically requires cutting working hours to avoid a labor shortage. I'm looking for a 7-hour work day or a 4-day work week.
Wouldn't that be "obvious"? I have a socket wrench and an impact wrench, both of which can remove lug nuts. Now I've patented a method of removing lug nuts from a car's wheel, but using an impact wrench.
A method of achieving a certain outcome with a computer is novel if the usual way of achieving that outcome involved a different process. For example: if you were to mix paints, you would get colors. On a computer, you... can't do that. Somebody at some point worked out an algorithm for taking two colors and mixing them via mathematical computations not used when mixing physical paints, generating similar results--this would be a new process, and patentable.
When you walk into a physical store, you make a selection of products, take those products to a check-out, and then pay for them. A patent on an e-commerce store which allows a user to select products and then pay for them all in a single batch is analogous to this process. There's nothing actually special about doing this--it's all basic programming, tracking data objects and keeping state--and it attempts to allow the real-world task of "shopping" but on a computer. Nothing here is novel or interesting; it's all obvious, done in the most-obvious way. That's not patentable.
One-click was an odd patent. When I go to a vending machine, I put in money and buy one product in one go. I have to make another transaction to buy another product; I can't "fill a cart" and make one purchase. That looks like one-click. In the context of business, this was non-obvious (nobody did this during the years and years of many e-commerce stores); on the other hand, what's the invention here? We don't allow patenting of the way you do business, and One-Click doesn't create some kind of new tool or process aside from allowing users to instant-buy one thing without emptying their cart.
making sure to bust unions and reduce pay along the way.
Oddly enough, I'm looking at reworking the Federal labor laws, notably to rewrite 29 USC 164(b) so as to authorize union security clauses regardless of State and Local law. No closed shops, but they can require you to join the union after 30 days (this is already in the law). Currently, 29 USC 164(b) allows states to prohibit Union Security Clauses requiring full Union membership or the payment of core financial dues ("Agency Fee"), which weakens the power to collectively bargain by weakening the Union's capacity to finance itself in the pursuit of representing the worker (freeriders).
I've considered allowing States to pass laws about employers not being forced to fire or not admit someone unless they fail to pay core financial dues: you have to join the union if allowed, but you're exempt from that provision of the security clause if they refuse so long as you pay the required core financial dues. That means, yes, if they allow you to join, you have to pay full membership dues (this already excludes non-union-activity dues such as political activism funding: you can always opt out of those).
I call that a "Right to Work" law: you can be required to join the union and pay dues as a condition of employment, but the union can't enforce that provision so long as you pay dues and they deny membership. The moment they are ready to grant membership, you have to join the union or cease working for that employer. At no time can the Union deny employment to a dues-paying worker willing to become a member of the Union.
I'm also looking at allowing States to limit required union dues so long as the limit does not restrict regular required union dues to a proportion less than 2.5% of paychecks. That limit reflects 2 hours of a 40-hour work week, and less for part-time workers. This ensures dues are always affordable for the worker.
Neither of these provisions goes into Federal law. The provision authorizing State "Right to Work" legislation, replacing 29 USC 164(b), will obliterate union-weakening laws in 28 States and Guam, as well as a few weaker provisions such as seen in the state of Maryland. Instead, the States will be able to prohibit Unions from unilaterally excluding dues-paying employees willing to join the union from employment, so long as they continue paying dues. The States can also ensure those dues are not excessive, should they choose to.
This should reduce union-busting tactics and strengthen collective bargaining.
Generally, profits are about 8% average on commodities. It goes up where people think they can get away with it. There are businesses (notably healthcare suppliers--pharmaceutical research, medical equipment manufacturers, the high risk ones) which take 40% in some years and experience 25% losses in others, averaging 10%-12%.
When we get up to luxuries and such, we're seeing 20%+ profits. Small demand goods also have high profits. Barriers to entry are high. They have really high gross margin, too, but that's a matter of scaling; their net operating profits are high.
I favor lower taxes where fiscally, economically, and socially responsible; at the same time, I've considered a progressive tax on corporate profits. Big corporations are basically the same thing as a lot of small corporations making the same thing, as they're organizations of labor and assets to produce an output; whereas a rich person with a lot of income is fundamentally-different from a bunch of not-rich people with moderate income. A progressive corporate income tax would be based on tax-assessed net operating profits scaled by margin: 8% for normal taxes, then an 8%-12% bracket, then a 12%+ bracket, for example.
Not sure how that would pan out, but it's a thought.
Yes, of course. Thing is it's not that all of our infrastructure is "falling apart", and the example isn't infrastructure that went neglected and fell apart. The example is poorly-designed infrastructure--something we should actually audit before raising the general alarm of crumbling infrastructure everywhere.
There are reports of our water infrastructure needing some billions across the country just to ensure they keep going for the next decade or so, never mind the upgrades we need for added demand. Let's look into that.
By and large, America is not falling apart--at least not in visible places like decaying bridges.
Didn't Bush sign the law that raised the deficit so much in 2009, and then Obama had to hand out a (successful!) recovery stimulus in the middle of a 10% U3 unemployment economy to turn that around?
At 5% unemployment in a growing economy, why has this Congress chosen to make sweeping tax cuts and spending initiatives at the expense of enormous government deficit spending?
I've mostly worked on plans that don't necessitate tax increases nor create deficit spending, although I've extended that to make interesting adjustments, such as eliminating the OASDI payroll tax by shunting it to the top tax bracket (it's about 5%--not entirely certain yet).
Allison Galbraith is pretty much the candidate for government bidding process reform and general clean-up to make tax dollars go further so we spend fewer of them on the same things.
Some of us are actually trying to get in there and fix the disaster that is the United States budget and tax policy; we're counter-balanced by progressives who ignore the poor in favor of hating on the rich, and democratic socialists who want huge and expensive programs where a slimmer, low-cost program would achieve the same (or better) goals (like getting healthcare to every American without exception).
Then you have disasters like Coppola, who wants to severely damage healthcare access and implement a 23% flat tax (plus 9% if you want healthcare; plus OASDI at 6.2% and another 6.2% on payrolls getting back-shifted into wages) with a 5% maximum deduction, leaving the poor paying nearly 40% while the rich coast at about 18%. Yes, he's a Democrat, somehow.
Some of the new candidates are weird. Some are radicals. Some of our local democratic leadership is excited here, and one of them seemed ecstatic after fitting me into the mold of a "radical centrist" (I'm a bit left of Hillary, but I'm not Bernie by any stretch). If you don't like what's going on in Congress, start looking at the candidates--it's a different community, filled with people who have the same ideals as our current representatives and yet are unsatisfied with how those representatives pursue those ideals.
We have a lot of regular folks off the street, but that's not odd: there's always a few dozen new faces in Congress, people who have never held political office and just went straight to Washington. IronStache Randy Bryce is an iron worker who's just basically pissed off at Paul Ryan for being Paul Ryan. Elizabeth Warren was never a politician, then suddenly was a Senator. Allison Galbraith is a Federal program manager and a small business owner. I'm an IT Security guy. That doesn't even count the new faces at the local level all over the nation, or any Republicans because of course I'm not talking about Republicans.
I'm running for Maryland's 7th district because I know how to fix poverty and have fiscally-responsible tax policies in general.
I could use some funding, tbh; but if you want someone who can fix the mess that is government program bidding, donate to Allison Galbraith. Her day job is defense program management and she's quite well-aware of how to bring government contract costs down. Fixing the bidding rules is part of that, and of course her entire life right now (well, besides the campaign) revolves around the specific details of that.
It's going to take a lot of us to get the fiscals back in order after all this; they were messed up to begin with.
So, the entire executive board of AIG has cash compensation of some $128 per employee per year; when you include all the perks, it's around $520 per employee per year. For Home Depot, you're looking at $20 per employee per year to pay executive compensation.
Stocks and stock options don't come out of revenues; instead, the executives get to inflate the currency of issued stock, picking the pockets of shareholders just a tad. Think of it like printing money so every ten thousand dollars is worth 50 cents less, but you have a million dollars: the "money" is your corporate-issued stock.
The truth is corporations don't bleed a whole hell of a lot of money out through massive bonuses and high cash compensation salaries. They bleed money through inefficiencies (running below current technical progress, not the theoretical future technology people always argue should magically exist today). Some businesses also just aren't viable at the price they need to charge; others are subsidized because we want that passed onto the consumer.
Trains and public transportation (buses, light rail) are generally subsidized due to non-viability at cost. Food is generally subsidized to keep costs down (farmers aren't allowed to charge too much for things like wheat, and the Federal government pays pretty decently for every tonne of wheat produced to push farmers up to the 10% profitability they get).
So, what about airports? What about any other private corporation? Are they non-viable at the price they need to charge without subsidies? Do we subsidize them for an economic benefit, facilitating more travel and associated economic activity? Do we just subsidize them because they have good lobbyists?
Everyone keeps focusing on things that don't matter. People yammer about income inequality and demand CEO pay limitations under the assertion that the CEO's bonus could buy healthcare for everyone and pay higher wages... yet it's usually $20/year or so, maybe $100/year, and the most-egregious large businesses with millionaire executives (far and few between) barely scrape $1,000/year for the whole executive suite's entire cash and perk compensation package.
You can't buy health insurance for $1,000/year--if you could, we wouldn't have a dialogue about universal healthcare! $80/month helps the poorest of poor stabilize, but it's not a step up for people who aren't struggling to scrape their spare change together. Damned near 100% of employees are either not working for millionaire CEOs or their executives get a couple hundred dollars per employee.
The problem with income inequality is the poor: we need to bring them up, not drag the rich down and tell the poor it's now "fair" while they continue to rot in the same gutters as ever. The problem with corporate taxes is fiscal: we need funding to run the government (and to have a fair and progressive tax system).
Even that's an oversimplification. Taxes are complex tools, and the problems aren't people or businesses being taxed too much (that can be a problem) or not enough (that's never a problem unless you're trying to discourage a certain business, like coal), but rather the goals we're not meeting--like ending poverty.
I'm just tired of conservatives destroying our social safety nets, and progressives leaving the poor behind to engage in their blood-war against the rich. Is anyone trying to help people anymore?
There are no fees, tolls, or reservations for the Baltimore- Washington Parkway. Please obey the rules and regulations on the parkway. There are no commercial vehicles allowed on the parkway. People movers such as buses and limousines are allowed.
That's not censoring any more than a city is censoring your exposure to farms.
Censorship requires the intentional curation of content to remove certain elements. You can intentionally curate content without removing those elements (by portraying other elements more-strongly--propaganda), and you can unintentionally over-represent some content (by collecting information for a purpose and by a method, which incidentally ends up over-representing the view as per the collected data and under-representing anything else).
Think about climate change science. Climate change science generally involves discussions and papers written from the current methods and consensus views of climate change scientists in the broad field. A study of climate change generally won't take the time to point out emerging research methods, older research methods, other specifically-notable but not-mainstream science, or an enumeration of opposing views among a minority of climate scientists.
Why?
Because many of these support the current climate change consensus, some oppose it, and nobody is really asking about any of that.
When people read up on current climate change consensus and the state-of-the-art, they're asking about what we currently accept as climate change science, and how we generally reach those conclusions. They're not asking about leading-edge research methods or the minority of scientists who are detractors; they're asking about what we're confident in today.
Why would you waste time sticking that stuff into a general climate change discussion?
That's not censorship; it's education. You can educate yourself further by looking specifically for these other things and learning about them. If you want to discuss climate change today and make future projections, you use the mainstream research; if you want to discuss the future of climate change study, you look to the pioneers; and if you want to discuss flawed science, unanswered questions, or any other legitimate or illegitimate claims and research by detractors, you look to those detractors.
At any moment, you can only look at a subset of all information. The information most-agreed relevant--in Google, this is by an algorithm--generally shows up more than what is considered less-relevant. Nobody's gagging it; they're just typically not interested in that.
What Google doesn't want to do is suggest that search query because they feel a sizable number of users simply don't want to see those suggestions.
Who searches for "Hitler is"? Maybe "Adolf Hitler rise to power", "Hitler mein kampf", "Adolf hitler death", "was hitler jewish", etc. By the time you've gotten to "hitler is", you've excluded most things folks would search for. Now you're looking at the majority of a minority.
That part they can do for their own internal use by correlating any public data.
They have his location data, his Google Chat data (hangouts?), and other stuff.... what? Hold on, something is wrong here. People require some measure of privacy, and the capacity to peer into private conversations on other platforms is simply unacceptable.
We'll have to start a regulatory push to provide capacity for non-breakable end-to-end encryption in text messaging and private messenger applications, perhaps as a legally-recognized implication of using the words "secure", "private", or "privacy" to describe conversations over these mediums. So "Facebook Messenger" can tell Facebook everything you say, in plain text, on their servers, as long as it's not described by Facebook as "Secure" or "Private"; whereas a messenger such as WhatsApp using double-ratchet end-to-end can claim your conversations are "Private", so long as the application is designed with the good-faith intent (meaning yes, you have to use secure protocols and encryption algorithms) to ensure no entity besides the communicating parties can read the messages.
Poplars grow straight and 50 feet tall in 3 years sometimes.
We really need to regulate tree farms. There's a lot of cutting of useless forests down in Florida and Virginia--the wood is bent and hollow, no good for anything--and they pretty much use a poorly-written law to get government subsidies for treating the entire natural wetland as "waste product", selling biomass pellets to Europe, and replanting with pine. We should have Federal laws and regulators to ensure logging restores the original habitat (by cutting in patterns to allow natural fill-in) and require permits for tree farming (to avoid converting biodiverse American jungle into giant one-species pine forests).
Sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite seem eco-friendly enough: they're easily contained and recycled in practice (and NaOH is easily-neutralized). Even chicken manure is a disaster if washed into streams en masse.
Trees were the original environmental disaster. Lignin is nigh-impossible to digest; instead, one fungus developed a mechanism to bombard lignin with peroxide, eventually oxidizing a phenyl ring, creating a branched-chain starch. That's digestible via enzymes.
With a low enough moisture content, wood withstands all microbial assault. This stuff contains so little moisture it'll never rot away; and it's pressed in such a way as to avoid absorbing moisture. It's going to be more-persistent than plastic.
I wonder how hard it is to ignite. I bet it burns like anthracite if you can get it going. Might not be a great idea for wooden structures, unless we can prevent ignition.
Oh, hm. NORML scorecard for Elijah is actually B, for support of Medical Marijuana; but he doesn't seem to support full legalization for adults. Interesting... his position has changed over the last few years; he was listed as against medical marijuana a while back.
I'm already backing the full legalization of discretionary cannabis use: it's a harmless intoxicant--like khat (cathinone), salvia divinorum (salvinorin A), and a few others--and we're wasting resources and destroying lives with our current policies. These such things should just be legal--at least for those age 21 and up (potentially 18 and up).
Batteries are inefficient for this. CAES is a whole lot more economical.
The cost of all the solar power we'd require is somewhere on the order of a year's GDP--about $14 trillion--before you account for electric cars. We can get moving in that direction immediately; hitting the goal is going to take some effort and a lot of time.
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I don't gather your meaning, or maybe you are misinterpreting my argument. I don't really care whether it is toll booths or tax disbursements based on road usage. Gas tax collection is almost certainly more efficient, but probably less fair.
Toll booths collect a fee based on how often you pass through the toll lane.
Taxes collect from people who aren't passing through the toll lane, thus the per-individual payment is lower.
Gasoline taxes and tolls barely pay for a third of state and local road spending; today, less than half of Federal road spending comes from fuel taxes and road fees. Roads across the nation are paid for primarily by general tax funds--largely income taxes.
My last car incurred $52.99/year of fuel taxes. Federal spending includes about $1,100 per American per year for road-related spending. Where do you think the money comes from? Hint: it's generally not collected proportional to road use.
If one robot is worth 100 workers, then it means automating your entire workforce would increase the standard of living by 100x.
Only if your entire workforce keeps working. Technology increases the output of human labor (the only cost). To increase the output of human labor by 100 times, you create technology whereby the effort of 1 human labor hour produces the same output as previously requiring 100 human labor hours.
If you make a machine which runs itself and keeps running without maintenance or other human input (like fuel), it's incurring no cost. If it runs forever, the output is infinite. On the other hand, if it costs 1,000 human labor hours to make it, it replaces 10 human labor hour per thousand hours of run time, and it runs for one hundred thousand hours, you're breaking even. Think about solar street lights with LED bulbs.
That's such a huge increase that all sorts of welfare and UBI programs which are currently mathematically unsustainable (without amassing debt), becomes roundoff error.
Actually, we can do that today, without raising taxes. Add in healthcare and the blunt plans there are something like a 0.9% tax cut on the rich, and no corporate tax increases; although you need to do a little adjustment there (see further down). The Dividend isn't really a UBI, but something new--related, though.
I shoved the payroll tax for retirement and disability benefits up to the top tax bracket and got 43.7% instead of 39.6%, along with a bit of a mess along the way for effective tax rate in total. The ETR is higher in 2016 at $50,000, in that model; that changes rapidly, moving upwards and narrowing the gap between 2016 tax policy (ignore the TCJA; I'm repealing that) and the model. You can repair it in 2016 by raising the top tax rate in total to 45% and adjusting the income tax brackets to be more progressive--really a crucial step to clean up the mess I've made in all this restructuring.
With OASDI staying on payrolls, two things happen. First, payroll taxes get backshifted into wages, so you don't get the wage boost (or price cut, depending on who you ask and how you look at it long-term) and employment increase (always) of reducing the cost of employing people. Second, you have that 0.9% tax cut on the top income earners, which you can reclaim to help fix the slight increase in ETR. By 2022 (earliest this can actually happen--Trump will veto), you can have that scenario without actually raising anyone's taxes.
So... Dividend alone: no homelessness, no hunger, increases available jobs (probably full employment?), decreases cost of welfare (make people less-poor), trivial to pull off without increasing taxes in 2016. With universal healthcare: A little tougher to do without tax increases in total on someone, although probably can pull it off in 2022. Shunt OASDI payments entirely onto the rich: likely 45% top tax rate instead of 39.6%, higher wages at the low end, and lower unemployment (if we're not hitting permanent full employment already).
This plan practically requires cutting working hours to avoid a labor shortage. I'm looking for a 7-hour work day or a 4-day work week.
Unemployment rate in South Korea is pretty low. Cue the UBI crowd coming to yell about the sky falling, but eh.
Wouldn't that be "obvious"? I have a socket wrench and an impact wrench, both of which can remove lug nuts. Now I've patented a method of removing lug nuts from a car's wheel, but using an impact wrench.
A method of achieving a certain outcome with a computer is novel if the usual way of achieving that outcome involved a different process. For example: if you were to mix paints, you would get colors. On a computer, you ... can't do that. Somebody at some point worked out an algorithm for taking two colors and mixing them via mathematical computations not used when mixing physical paints, generating similar results--this would be a new process, and patentable.
When you walk into a physical store, you make a selection of products, take those products to a check-out, and then pay for them. A patent on an e-commerce store which allows a user to select products and then pay for them all in a single batch is analogous to this process. There's nothing actually special about doing this--it's all basic programming, tracking data objects and keeping state--and it attempts to allow the real-world task of "shopping" but on a computer. Nothing here is novel or interesting; it's all obvious, done in the most-obvious way. That's not patentable.
One-click was an odd patent. When I go to a vending machine, I put in money and buy one product in one go. I have to make another transaction to buy another product; I can't "fill a cart" and make one purchase. That looks like one-click. In the context of business, this was non-obvious (nobody did this during the years and years of many e-commerce stores); on the other hand, what's the invention here? We don't allow patenting of the way you do business, and One-Click doesn't create some kind of new tool or process aside from allowing users to instant-buy one thing without emptying their cart.
It sounds like a filtering proxy server. DansGuardian, Privoxy, etc. monitor a connection and modify the contents.
Here's the thing: you can pay $500, or 500 people can pay $1.
making sure to bust unions and reduce pay along the way.
Oddly enough, I'm looking at reworking the Federal labor laws, notably to rewrite 29 USC 164(b) so as to authorize union security clauses regardless of State and Local law. No closed shops, but they can require you to join the union after 30 days (this is already in the law). Currently, 29 USC 164(b) allows states to prohibit Union Security Clauses requiring full Union membership or the payment of core financial dues ("Agency Fee"), which weakens the power to collectively bargain by weakening the Union's capacity to finance itself in the pursuit of representing the worker (freeriders).
I've considered allowing States to pass laws about employers not being forced to fire or not admit someone unless they fail to pay core financial dues: you have to join the union if allowed, but you're exempt from that provision of the security clause if they refuse so long as you pay the required core financial dues. That means, yes, if they allow you to join, you have to pay full membership dues (this already excludes non-union-activity dues such as political activism funding: you can always opt out of those).
I call that a "Right to Work" law: you can be required to join the union and pay dues as a condition of employment, but the union can't enforce that provision so long as you pay dues and they deny membership. The moment they are ready to grant membership, you have to join the union or cease working for that employer. At no time can the Union deny employment to a dues-paying worker willing to become a member of the Union.
I'm also looking at allowing States to limit required union dues so long as the limit does not restrict regular required union dues to a proportion less than 2.5% of paychecks. That limit reflects 2 hours of a 40-hour work week, and less for part-time workers. This ensures dues are always affordable for the worker.
Neither of these provisions goes into Federal law. The provision authorizing State "Right to Work" legislation, replacing 29 USC 164(b), will obliterate union-weakening laws in 28 States and Guam, as well as a few weaker provisions such as seen in the state of Maryland. Instead, the States will be able to prohibit Unions from unilaterally excluding dues-paying employees willing to join the union from employment, so long as they continue paying dues. The States can also ensure those dues are not excessive, should they choose to.
This should reduce union-busting tactics and strengthen collective bargaining.
Generally, profits are about 8% average on commodities. It goes up where people think they can get away with it. There are businesses (notably healthcare suppliers--pharmaceutical research, medical equipment manufacturers, the high risk ones) which take 40% in some years and experience 25% losses in others, averaging 10%-12%.
When we get up to luxuries and such, we're seeing 20%+ profits. Small demand goods also have high profits. Barriers to entry are high. They have really high gross margin, too, but that's a matter of scaling; their net operating profits are high.
I favor lower taxes where fiscally, economically, and socially responsible; at the same time, I've considered a progressive tax on corporate profits. Big corporations are basically the same thing as a lot of small corporations making the same thing, as they're organizations of labor and assets to produce an output; whereas a rich person with a lot of income is fundamentally-different from a bunch of not-rich people with moderate income. A progressive corporate income tax would be based on tax-assessed net operating profits scaled by margin: 8% for normal taxes, then an 8%-12% bracket, then a 12%+ bracket, for example.
Not sure how that would pan out, but it's a thought.
Yes, of course. Thing is it's not that all of our infrastructure is "falling apart", and the example isn't infrastructure that went neglected and fell apart. The example is poorly-designed infrastructure--something we should actually audit before raising the general alarm of crumbling infrastructure everywhere.
There are reports of our water infrastructure needing some billions across the country just to ensure they keep going for the next decade or so, never mind the upgrades we need for added demand. Let's look into that.
By and large, America is not falling apart--at least not in visible places like decaying bridges.
Didn't Bush sign the law that raised the deficit so much in 2009, and then Obama had to hand out a (successful!) recovery stimulus in the middle of a 10% U3 unemployment economy to turn that around?
At 5% unemployment in a growing economy, why has this Congress chosen to make sweeping tax cuts and spending initiatives at the expense of enormous government deficit spending?
I've mostly worked on plans that don't necessitate tax increases nor create deficit spending, although I've extended that to make interesting adjustments, such as eliminating the OASDI payroll tax by shunting it to the top tax bracket (it's about 5%--not entirely certain yet).
Allison Galbraith is pretty much the candidate for government bidding process reform and general clean-up to make tax dollars go further so we spend fewer of them on the same things.
Some of us are actually trying to get in there and fix the disaster that is the United States budget and tax policy; we're counter-balanced by progressives who ignore the poor in favor of hating on the rich, and democratic socialists who want huge and expensive programs where a slimmer, low-cost program would achieve the same (or better) goals (like getting healthcare to every American without exception).
Then you have disasters like Coppola, who wants to severely damage healthcare access and implement a 23% flat tax (plus 9% if you want healthcare; plus OASDI at 6.2% and another 6.2% on payrolls getting back-shifted into wages) with a 5% maximum deduction, leaving the poor paying nearly 40% while the rich coast at about 18%. Yes, he's a Democrat, somehow.
Some of the new candidates are weird. Some are radicals. Some of our local democratic leadership is excited here, and one of them seemed ecstatic after fitting me into the mold of a "radical centrist" (I'm a bit left of Hillary, but I'm not Bernie by any stretch). If you don't like what's going on in Congress, start looking at the candidates--it's a different community, filled with people who have the same ideals as our current representatives and yet are unsatisfied with how those representatives pursue those ideals.
We have a lot of regular folks off the street, but that's not odd: there's always a few dozen new faces in Congress, people who have never held political office and just went straight to Washington. IronStache Randy Bryce is an iron worker who's just basically pissed off at Paul Ryan for being Paul Ryan. Elizabeth Warren was never a politician, then suddenly was a Senator. Allison Galbraith is a Federal program manager and a small business owner. I'm an IT Security guy. That doesn't even count the new faces at the local level all over the nation, or any Republicans because of course I'm not talking about Republicans.
Run for something.
I'm running for Maryland's 7th district because I know how to fix poverty and have fiscally-responsible tax policies in general.
I could use some funding, tbh; but if you want someone who can fix the mess that is government program bidding, donate to Allison Galbraith. Her day job is defense program management and she's quite well-aware of how to bring government contract costs down. Fixing the bidding rules is part of that, and of course her entire life right now (well, besides the campaign) revolves around the specific details of that.
It's going to take a lot of us to get the fiscals back in order after all this; they were messed up to begin with.
As stable as Kim Jong-Un.
No, competition brings prices down closer to costs. Costs come down with technical progress.
So, the entire executive board of AIG has cash compensation of some $128 per employee per year; when you include all the perks, it's around $520 per employee per year. For Home Depot, you're looking at $20 per employee per year to pay executive compensation.
Stocks and stock options don't come out of revenues; instead, the executives get to inflate the currency of issued stock, picking the pockets of shareholders just a tad. Think of it like printing money so every ten thousand dollars is worth 50 cents less, but you have a million dollars: the "money" is your corporate-issued stock.
The truth is corporations don't bleed a whole hell of a lot of money out through massive bonuses and high cash compensation salaries. They bleed money through inefficiencies (running below current technical progress, not the theoretical future technology people always argue should magically exist today). Some businesses also just aren't viable at the price they need to charge; others are subsidized because we want that passed onto the consumer.
Trains and public transportation (buses, light rail) are generally subsidized due to non-viability at cost. Food is generally subsidized to keep costs down (farmers aren't allowed to charge too much for things like wheat, and the Federal government pays pretty decently for every tonne of wheat produced to push farmers up to the 10% profitability they get).
So, what about airports? What about any other private corporation? Are they non-viable at the price they need to charge without subsidies? Do we subsidize them for an economic benefit, facilitating more travel and associated economic activity? Do we just subsidize them because they have good lobbyists?
Everyone keeps focusing on things that don't matter. People yammer about income inequality and demand CEO pay limitations under the assertion that the CEO's bonus could buy healthcare for everyone and pay higher wages... yet it's usually $20/year or so, maybe $100/year, and the most-egregious large businesses with millionaire executives (far and few between) barely scrape $1,000/year for the whole executive suite's entire cash and perk compensation package.
You can't buy health insurance for $1,000/year--if you could, we wouldn't have a dialogue about universal healthcare! $80/month helps the poorest of poor stabilize, but it's not a step up for people who aren't struggling to scrape their spare change together. Damned near 100% of employees are either not working for millionaire CEOs or their executives get a couple hundred dollars per employee.
The problem with income inequality is the poor: we need to bring them up, not drag the rich down and tell the poor it's now "fair" while they continue to rot in the same gutters as ever. The problem with corporate taxes is fiscal: we need funding to run the government (and to have a fair and progressive tax system).
Even that's an oversimplification. Taxes are complex tools, and the problems aren't people or businesses being taxed too much (that can be a problem) or not enough (that's never a problem unless you're trying to discourage a certain business, like coal), but rather the goals we're not meeting--like ending poverty.
I'm just tired of conservatives destroying our social safety nets, and progressives leaving the poor behind to engage in their blood-war against the rich. Is anyone trying to help people anymore?
There are no fees, tolls, or reservations for the Baltimore- Washington Parkway. Please obey the rules and regulations on the parkway. There are no commercial vehicles allowed on the parkway. People movers such as buses and limousines are allowed.
Tolls?
That's not censoring any more than a city is censoring your exposure to farms.
Censorship requires the intentional curation of content to remove certain elements. You can intentionally curate content without removing those elements (by portraying other elements more-strongly--propaganda), and you can unintentionally over-represent some content (by collecting information for a purpose and by a method, which incidentally ends up over-representing the view as per the collected data and under-representing anything else).
Think about climate change science. Climate change science generally involves discussions and papers written from the current methods and consensus views of climate change scientists in the broad field. A study of climate change generally won't take the time to point out emerging research methods, older research methods, other specifically-notable but not-mainstream science, or an enumeration of opposing views among a minority of climate scientists.
Why?
Because many of these support the current climate change consensus, some oppose it, and nobody is really asking about any of that.
When people read up on current climate change consensus and the state-of-the-art, they're asking about what we currently accept as climate change science, and how we generally reach those conclusions. They're not asking about leading-edge research methods or the minority of scientists who are detractors; they're asking about what we're confident in today. Why would you waste time sticking that stuff into a general climate change discussion?
That's not censorship; it's education. You can educate yourself further by looking specifically for these other things and learning about them. If you want to discuss climate change today and make future projections, you use the mainstream research; if you want to discuss the future of climate change study, you look to the pioneers; and if you want to discuss flawed science, unanswered questions, or any other legitimate or illegitimate claims and research by detractors, you look to those detractors.
At any moment, you can only look at a subset of all information. The information most-agreed relevant--in Google, this is by an algorithm--generally shows up more than what is considered less-relevant. Nobody's gagging it; they're just typically not interested in that.
What Google doesn't want to do is suggest that search query because they feel a sizable number of users simply don't want to see those suggestions.
Who searches for "Hitler is"? Maybe "Adolf Hitler rise to power", "Hitler mein kampf", "Adolf hitler death", "was hitler jewish", etc. By the time you've gotten to "hitler is", you've excluded most things folks would search for. Now you're looking at the majority of a minority.
That part they can do for their own internal use by correlating any public data.
They have his location data, his Google Chat data (hangouts?), and other stuff. ... what? Hold on, something is wrong here. People require some measure of privacy, and the capacity to peer into private conversations on other platforms is simply unacceptable.
We'll have to start a regulatory push to provide capacity for non-breakable end-to-end encryption in text messaging and private messenger applications, perhaps as a legally-recognized implication of using the words "secure", "private", or "privacy" to describe conversations over these mediums. So "Facebook Messenger" can tell Facebook everything you say, in plain text, on their servers, as long as it's not described by Facebook as "Secure" or "Private"; whereas a messenger such as WhatsApp using double-ratchet end-to-end can claim your conversations are "Private", so long as the application is designed with the good-faith intent (meaning yes, you have to use secure protocols and encryption algorithms) to ensure no entity besides the communicating parties can read the messages.
Poplars grow straight and 50 feet tall in 3 years sometimes.
We really need to regulate tree farms. There's a lot of cutting of useless forests down in Florida and Virginia--the wood is bent and hollow, no good for anything--and they pretty much use a poorly-written law to get government subsidies for treating the entire natural wetland as "waste product", selling biomass pellets to Europe, and replanting with pine. We should have Federal laws and regulators to ensure logging restores the original habitat (by cutting in patterns to allow natural fill-in) and require permits for tree farming (to avoid converting biodiverse American jungle into giant one-species pine forests).
Steel melts somewhere around 2,400 degrees, but loses 90% of its strength around the temperature of jet fuel fires.
Paper.
Sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite seem eco-friendly enough: they're easily contained and recycled in practice (and NaOH is easily-neutralized). Even chicken manure is a disaster if washed into streams en masse.
Trees were the original environmental disaster. Lignin is nigh-impossible to digest; instead, one fungus developed a mechanism to bombard lignin with peroxide, eventually oxidizing a phenyl ring, creating a branched-chain starch. That's digestible via enzymes.
With a low enough moisture content, wood withstands all microbial assault. This stuff contains so little moisture it'll never rot away; and it's pressed in such a way as to avoid absorbing moisture. It's going to be more-persistent than plastic.
I wonder how hard it is to ignite. I bet it burns like anthracite if you can get it going. Might not be a great idea for wooden structures, unless we can prevent ignition.
Oh, hm. NORML scorecard for Elijah is actually B, for support of Medical Marijuana; but he doesn't seem to support full legalization for adults. Interesting... his position has changed over the last few years; he was listed as against medical marijuana a while back.
I'm already backing the full legalization of discretionary cannabis use: it's a harmless intoxicant--like khat (cathinone), salvia divinorum (salvinorin A), and a few others--and we're wasting resources and destroying lives with our current policies. These such things should just be legal--at least for those age 21 and up (potentially 18 and up).
My opponent is against legalization.
Batteries are inefficient for this. CAES is a whole lot more economical.
The cost of all the solar power we'd require is somewhere on the order of a year's GDP--about $14 trillion--before you account for electric cars. We can get moving in that direction immediately; hitting the goal is going to take some effort and a lot of time.