That's par for ProPublica (I am their biggest detractor, as far as I can tell). Still, I think it would be nice to have policy and mechanism to ensure that certain kinds of ads are part of an ad group targeting all ages, races, or whatever requirement. It's a legitimate concern, even if this is more manufactured outrage.
There's no mechanism to enforce that, so someone raised a concern. On the other hand, it's ProPublica, who like to manufacture outrage by flawed reasoning. They routinely get a hold of lesson's learned documentation from the Red Cross and publish an article about ARC "covering up" and "ignoring" severe systemic problems, for example (if you're not a PM, you might not know that everything you do should generate LL).
A method to ensure an ad campaign is running certain types of ads targeting all age groups would be interesting, nonetheless. I'm not sure how to implement it, though. Consider: there may just be more fitting 30-somethings than 50-somethings. More of your ad money gets spent on impressions and CTR for one age group over another, and that age group gets more advertisement. It's representative, but not even; how do you prove it's representative?
What about the layoffs at GE? A corporation making record profits and benefiting from enough loopholes so they have not had to pay taxes in almost a decade?
GE has a bunch of gas turbine business scaled to meet demand of a growing natural gas power generation market. That market is no longer expanding rapidly, so the orders are smaller. If you sell 10,000 turbines per year between 2005 and 2015, and then 2,000 between 2016 and 2017, well... 80% of your line employees are idle, sitting around doing nothing, sucking payroll. What do you do with them?
Answer: you either expand into a new market and somehow use their skill, or you send them off with a pink slip.
I'd like to know what "loopholes" GE has been using. Aside from double-irish schemes, there aren't many real tax loopholes.
When a business buys a piece of equipment, we don't let them expense it immediately (Trump wants to). You spend a million dollars on machines, we make you follow a depreciation schedule. 10% per year down to 10%. If you actually take a loss--say you buy a million dollars of computer equipment and it depreciates 50% to 10% (50% in the year bought, 40% the next year)--you can apply the NOL back two years (revising your taxes) and forward 20 years. That last bit that the asset is worth is taken as an expense when you get rid of the asset, unless you sell it. If you're constantly spending to expand and change your business, you can actually offset 100% of your profits 100% of the time.
We also have deductions, which are different. A deduction isn't considered an expense, and lets you reduce your tax liability by deducting it like an expense. That's what the AMT is about: corporate tax rate is 35%; if you ring in enough deductions to get below 20%, you pay 20% anyway. So let's say you generate something like solar energy, and so we give you a deduction for half a million dollars based on some stimulus program. You have a million in profits, and you deduct half of that. Now you're taxed 35% of half a million, but that's 17.5% of your profits. Well, you have to pay 20%--instead of deducting down to half a million, you only get to deduct yourself down as far as $571,429.
Oh. Right. The new tax bill removed the AMT, didn't it? Well I guess that's par for the course in this fiscally-irresponsible pile of broken legislation.
What would make more sense is to layoff the executives as they make so much compared to they people who actually do anything.
295,000 employees. Immlet made $8.1 million in cash comp (which comes from revenue) and got some stocks (which doesn't come from any expenditure--they just make shareholders's stocks less-valuable by magicking more stock out of thin air). That's $27.45 per employee per year, or 1.375 cents per employee per hour.
If GE was desperate enough to cut executives to try and save money, they'd just reduce everyone's raises by 0.037% in the next cycle. This, by the way, is also the problem with the often-repeated line that executives should take lower salaries so their workers can make more: it only works if you pick a handful of workers to get nice raises and let the vast majority rot (a good-old-boys club of a few more rich bastards, just less-rich). There are a few excessively-wealthy in this world, but not many.
These are important facts if you actually want to structure something to fix things like poverty or economic instability (which turns out to be easy).
One thinks of Carly Fiorina and Don Capellas regarding this statement
When we're talking about HP, we're generally talking about genuine incompetence. They're good at finding bad CEOs.
Normally, he responds along the lines that those jobs are for teens who live at home.
I eventually (by 2022) want my Universal Dividend to pay out at age 16+ (but not lower) so teenagers in distressed households don't sacrifice their school performance by working a job to help keep the household solvent. The additional income will let teens learn about fiscal responsibility or, if they're already in very poor households (not really certain that's possible at this point...), provide additional support for their families.
Or women, who rely on a man to provide the essentials.
My Universal Dividend pays per-adult, so a two-adult household has two Dividends to help support it. Many women also work professional jobs, and may even bring the larger income in the household--the "reverse breadwinner effect". As well, many women live alone or are single mothers, and so need the capacity to support themselves and their families in the entire, whether by wage or assistance. There are many cases in which the income of the woman is an important fiscal concern in the household.
Or black people, who don't like to live in houses anyway.
Here in the city, a lot of black people live in tents due to extreme poverty; however, being that they live in the city, it's most-likely that they prefer to live in apartments rather than tents. My Universal Dividend will push many receiving HUD assistance over the income limit, and raise the remainder so as to be eligible for a smaller subsidy.
Take the folks I came across the other day, when going to have my suit repaired: a black man and his wife, living in a tent, trying to prepare for the upcoming snow. Between them, they would have $1,400 of Dividend each month. HUD can easily provide a small subsidy which will move this couple into an apartment instead, where they'd prefer to live; and with the additional consumer spending power in the city, there would be jobs available for them to work and bring further income, living better lives. It's clear to me that jobs and homes are what these people want most, and what they need.
Between the Universal Dividend and a Federal minimum wage pinned to 1/1000 of the annual Dividend per hour--that is,$8,769/year $8.78/hr minimum wage--a working individual in 2016 would take home $13.15/hr at full-time, or $2,192/month. A couple with a minimum-wage worker between them would bring the equivalent of $17.54/hr or $2,923/month. In Maryland, our minimum wage is $9.25/hr and will be $10.25/hr next year, so the numbers in 2018 will be somewhat higher. I'm certain this is enough for most families to get by without further assistance, although we can provide assistance for any families facing higher costs-of-living with minimal Federal expenditure compared to today.
So you see, it really isn't difficult to consider teens living at home, women, and black people in our economic policies. They all have the same needs: food, shelter, and economic security.
Oh we know the new tax bill will just lead to more dividends and stock buybacks, not higher wages. Higher wages means higher prices, and he who doth not raise prices competes better and makes more profit. Executive compensation is actually negligible--it's pennies per hour per employee for big, high-dollar companies; it's only small businesses with CEOs making $150k or so that pay thousands per employee to their executives. All in all, though, the tax bill is a giant corporate give-away and enormously irresponsible. It's going to be a job-destroying bill, as it weakens consumer buying power overall, and the GOP wants to approach the deficit by cutting away welfare--removing even more consumer buying power and further slowing revenues to businesses, thus cutting off the support for jobs.
CEOs are often valued for their capacity to slowly drop a distressed business. This sometimes allows for a buy-out and restructuring, which helps pay off creditors. It also avoids a sudden implosion and massive job loss all-at-once, instead giving job cuts, bankruptcy, and potential rescue. Often the delay in job loss helps employees prepare their finances and get back on the job market. There are CEOs who move from company to company specifically to perform these corporate teardowns.
There are a lot of complex things that go on in both the economy and the business world. Nobody has a whole view, and few have a broad view. The GOP pretends to understand business, but they don't; the Democrats don't pretend to understand business as well as the GOP claims to, but are actually concerned with the demand-side economy because we understand how the frigging economy works. That's why we have welfare programs and Keynesian stimulus programs and all kinds of other things that help the broad consumer class keep buying things, while the GOP has tax cuts on corporate incomes that have no impact on job creation.
In order to implement "fast lanes", an ISP must throttle non-"fast lane" packets, which is a negation of net neutrality.
Comcast sells you 20Mbit, 50Mbit, or a 200Mbit connection. Then they have that Boost thing, so you start downloading a file and grab the first 100MB at like 500Mbit/s.
I imagine it'd be like that: you never get less than your baseline service, and they can't throttle a particular service (netflix, google, etc.) below your baseline service. 200Mbit means you get 200Mbit to Google, to Netflix, to Spotify, to everything; getting more doesn't violate your contract.
Of course, I imagine things being done in a way that makes sense, and the GOP has shown they have no sense.
You know how you can buy a 20Mbit/s, 50Mbit/s, 100Mbit/s, or 200Mbit/s connection from Comcast?
You'd get a 200Mbit/s connection: that link carries like 2000Mbit/s, but your whole connection is throttled to that 200Mbit/s. Comcast has this thing where they'll give you a speed boost, so you get half a gig instead of 200Mbit for a brief moment when you download a large file. They've had that forever.
A fast lane is just like, you bought 50Mbit/s service but they allow you to draw an extra 20Mbit or so when streaming Netflix or whatever.
I don't have a problem with fast lanes and QoS that don't impact the network: user A's fast lane and QoS should not cannibalize User B's throughput. If you have 200Mbit/s capacity and two 100Mbit/s users, they need completely-fair packet queuing between them (each user gets half the bandwidth), and within one user's connection you can prioritize VoIP or streaming or whatnot so he doesn't get stutters. Likewise, you can let Netflix go over that 100Mbit/s throughput for User A, so long as User B isn't using that bandwidth; if User B starts downloading a big file at 100Mbit/s, he gets full service, at the expense of the fast lane.
When you buy Internet, you buy a basic service. You get 100Mbit/s, everywhere, to everything, no less. Without Net Neutrality, you could get 100Mbit/s with individual resources restricted to 1Mbit/s. That's a huge problem: Comcast can rent-seek by slowing Netflix unless Netflix pays up, and then Netflix makes you pay up, so you pay Comcast a hidden fee by proxy.
I have little concern for the opposite effect, because you get no less than you pay for. Without fast lanes, everything is 100Mbit/s; with fast lanes, everything is 100Mbit/s or faster. As I said above: this needs to be isolated to individual users, such that one user consuming 120Mbit/s doesn't mean the next user is only getting 80Mbit/s. If they degrade your connection to supply someone else use of a fast lane, they're violating the contract of providing the promised baseline service.
Some people also don't like things having to do with bandwidth caps, which I think is a more-general problem: bandwidth caps should be reasonable. At home, it should be hard to hit your bandwidth cap; on mobile, it's reasonable to have a bandwidth cap. If Netflix puts a data center on T-Mobile's network and T-Mobile wants to make Netflix bandwidth no longer count, that's fine by me.
I'd like to see bandwidth caps regulated to be no less than typical usage for fixed connections, though. HD streaming 8 hours per day for 30 days is 250GBytes; double that and you have 500GB/month. Mintsim might sell you 2G, 5G, or 10G of LTE high speed data; Comcast shouldn't be allowed to sell you less than 500GB, and they damned well shouldn't be allowed to not state the limit up-front. When we're streaming 4K H.265, we'll be looking at over 3.5TB for what's bare-minimum as a reasonable monthly cap.
Maybe we should just raise the regulation-specified minimum usage cap by 7% each year, or benchmark it to something like a typical video stream or connection speed. I don't know. Nobody's mandated all Internet must be unlimited usage yet, and I understand the risks in doing that; I want to lean on the wall before tearing it down.
He hasn't come back with his usual "those jobs aren't intended for people to make a living at" response yet?
Well, they're minimum-wage jobs.
Under these codes, in the industries covered, child labor has been eliminated. The work day and the work week have been shortened. Minimum wages have been established and other wages adjusted toward a rising standard of living.[...]
[...]Another question arises as to whether in fixing minimum wages on the basis of an hourly or weekly wage we have reached into the heart of the problem which is to provide such annual earnings for the lowest paid worker as will meet his minimum needs.
The minimum wage is intended to provide such annual earnings as for the lowest-paid worker to meet his minimum needs. That's what it was created for.
I hate to see ANY US citizen lose their job to a H1b.
My concern is whether we're creating enough jobs to keep up with population, thus avoiding unemployment growth; and if we're providing the social safety net to carry people through unemployment.
One way or another, people lose jobs. Trade (including H1B labor trade) and technology do that; they also improve our standard-of-living. We take these things away, we get poorer, and the poorest suffer the most. That means the guy at the bottom... we need grocery baggers and burger flippers; he deserves to be recognized as an important part of the economy. The guy in the path of progress... we get richer because he lost his job; he's a big part of our economic growth.
We owe these people support. We owe it to them to carry them to the next job. We owe it to them to keep them out of poverty when their wage isn't enough. We owe it to them to make sure they're mobile, that they can compete for the limited opportunities above their station--not everyone can be an astronaut. because we only need five of them, but being a burger flipper right now shouldn't mean you're automatically-excluded from becoming something better later.
I want Americans to be secure. I want them to know they've got something to fall back on, and that they've got a future in a stable economy that can find a place for them. Maybe not today, but next month, or six months from now--and we'll carry you that far so you can take that opportunity when it comes.
Ah, you're not talking about mining the belt; you're talking about going up, mining a passing asteroid, and coming back.
Today, it costs $10,000 to put a pound of payload in Earth orbit. NASA's goal is to reduce the cost of getting to space to hundreds of dollars per pound within 25 years and tens of dollars per pound within 40 years.
An excavator weighs 30,000 pounds. That's $300,000,000 to put into orbit today. A two-person mission to the moon costs $1.5 billion, though, and that's only 300 pounds. Why?
Distance.
You have to lift the fuel, too. You have to lift supplies to keep the astronauts alive.
It may be feasible to mine 162173 Ryugu, if you can mine it out before it passes, and if you can transport the materials back, and if you can get sufficient equipment up there without sufficient costs. What's a space drilling operation weigh, in its entirety, and how much does the fuel to get there and back (with the payload) weigh?
Entertainment is a good example, and if we can divert even a small percentage of viewership towards a Mars mission then that has little real productivity cost elsewhere.
Careful. You start arguing that people's decisions about what they spend their labor producing are really pointless and better off in the hands of smarter people, you eventually get to arguing about who should breed. In a general economic sense, there is capacity; and social democracy focuses on providing welfare, at cost to the general productivity of the economy. Cherry-picking what things people spend that productivity on in the general economy (free market) as pointless and unproductive starts you down a dark path.
I see the otherwise-neutral point, though: if you can market it, people will stop watching Hollywood and start watching NASA. You're competing with the free market.
There's no denying the most compelling reasons to explore our solar system today are largely intangible. You're right that it's too soon to turn a guaranteed profit
My point is more that doing what is feasible today brings the advancement that allows some farther-reaching things--like Mars missions--to become cheaper and more-feasible tomorrow. That structure generates more net growth and thus ends in greater wealth--and wealth is wholly a matter of technological advancement.
Yet the evidence says that this course of action leads to more violent crime and more harm to innocents. You're okay with more innocents dying and a more-crime-riddled society so you can get a rush from your sense of mob justice?
You can dispose of phones quickly, yes. The problem is that you're usually not being tailed actively, and go unnoticed. You and the guy on the other end can have burners, and be hard to find. Not really true with a guy in prison.
Part of the argument was also that this may be infeasible to tightly control. Part of it was that it increases risk of being caught using the phones for criminal purposes. Part of it was that maybe we should be thinking about rehabilitation, and exactly what that means changes depending on the world around you.
Look at the whole situation. People can get phones easy... okay, maybe we need to accept that that's a thing. People might get phones for criminal purposes... that's a problem. People also will try to get phones to satisfy their need for contact with their friends and family outside, though, and do we punish them for that? How harshly? There's the big question: they can now do it casually, and punishment may be harmful to their rehabilitation; do we try to mitigate the criminal activity or the phone activity?
A lot of variables have changed, both in the world itself and our model of it.
Because there is a very expensive monopolistic racket charging sky high prices for people to be able to call inmates using the official channels.
Yes but I don't care about that. It's like when we tried to reform our criminal justice system here in Baltimore because bail was always set way high d00d!!! and small-time, non-violent criminals considered no flight risk were forced to sit in jail when they could be working and maintaining their households and stuff. The delegates said, "Oh wait a minute, the bail bondsmen are going to lose a lot of profitability for this!" They then worked with them to make sure that bails were set low enough that people could make bail, but not so low as to hurt the bondsmen.
... because we need to change this as it's unfairly hurting people, but we should keep it set up to unfairly hurt accused but not convicted to a degree they can handle and bleed their money (you know, the scarce life-blood of people in poverty) toward rich bondsmen.
How about the bondsmen pack up and move to Chicago? I can understand a phase-out or some such to try to not drop anyone too hard, but come on, man.
No, I don't care to ensure the next hundred years of the prison racket either. I care to ensure the operational safety of the prison guards, the prison staff, the administrators; but the things that are just there to suck money when we could just do it cheaply, no, get that out of here.
Why keep phones out of prisons? I'd like inmates to have robust access to the outside world—the capacity to talk to others, to keep up on the news, to stay in touch with the world outside their concrete walls.
When inmates exit prison, they have to go to a halfway house. They're so out-of-touch with reality that they need to be re-introduced to society--reintegration. That's ridiculous. Okay, maybe we don't buy you a Sega Saturn for your birthday; but you should be able to stay in contact with family, friends, the like. You should be able to keep track of politics and current events.
Yes, I know: keeping them from somehow gaming all day while allowing access to not-gaming material is hard. We can probably get away with locking down access to 80 and 443, using a robust Web filter, and generally letting the collective game of whack-a-mole packaged into an off-the-shelf product suffice. It's not like it's hard to block Steam; they'll have to struggle to find little flash games and such.
If you're committing criminal activities inside prison using a cell phone, you're... I mean, you're in prison, you're identifiable, and you're organizing crime using a cell phone. You're a high risk and at risk of scrutiny, which makes criminal activity harder to conceal (this is also a good Constitutional argument: a lot of rights against search and seizure or self-incrimination make it easy to commit crimes that nobody really cares about, whereas loud and visible crimes draw attention and are harder to conceal).
Prison is hard. On the one hand, you want people to be in prison. On the other, you want them to come out of prison capable of engaging in society. You don't want them in a nice little luxury hotel where they can relax--just penned in--and you don't want shoplifters coming out as hardened criminals with no capacity to engage with civil society.
At this junction, we have a question: can we keep cell phones away from inmates? It's become harder, so we should ask another question: should we keep cell phones away from inmates? We may have learned things about rehabilitation and prison management which would change the answers to these questions. I've heard that some countries have less-terrible prisons and also have lower recidivism rates--Norway is bewildering and god damn I need to update my platform on criminal justice reform.
There's a heck of a lot more [wikipedia.org] than $5k on offer as a jackpot for asteroid mining, when most potential targets offer billions in estimated profits (commonly 20-30% RoI) and some even reaching trillions
23-meter-wide asteroid would cost $2.6 billion to haul into lunar orbit. 500 tonnes. $5.2 million per tonne. Nickel costs $11,600 per tonne, so a 500 tonne nickel asteroid would cost 448 times as much as terrestrial nickel.
That's just for the nearest candidate.
What do you suppose would be the costs of going to the belt? The belt is out between Mars and Jupiter. A Mars mission is expected to cost $1.5 trillion--that's a minimalist mission, not carrying heavy equipment. To mine the belt, you have to get heavy equipment up there—mining and refining, because you're going to want to bootstrap. Then, you have to get all this heavy metal back (or just use it on Mars, and not have a terrestrial market).
Each individual target requires somehow getting fuel off Mars--and possibly to Mars, since the planet probably doesn't have any oil fields, being that it lacks a rich organic history (although Io has plenty of methane)--but not the mining equipment, because you want to leave that up there in the belt. You're going to have to shuffle transport equipment up and down to Mars, though, or back and forth to Earth. There's an operating expense cost here in terms of keeping a city-sized space station operating near the belt, or else shuttling miners back and forth constantly, along with supporting the miners and their equipment.
So now how much is it going to cost to get ore from the belt to Earth?
But I'm gathering that you're not really opposed to commercial space development or robotic research, just politicians declaring arbitrary manned-flight goals, which is perhaps understandable, even when it worked out pretty well with Apollo. There are certainly scientific reasons to put humans in space, even if only to learn about how it affects those humans and what we can do about that, but there's not many commercial cases where it's currently worth the effort.
There you go: we can be in space on the IIS; we don't need to be in space around Mars. Is there a reason to go to Mars? Sure. Will we profit from the endeavor, as a society? Oh hell no, not today. When we go into orbit enough times that putting a satellite up costs thousands of dollars, we'll be ready to send a small city to Mars for billions (maybe hundreds of billions), and put down a self-sustaining colony. That might pay off.
It's undeniably inspirational to a lot of people (because it certainly is "cool", and epic pioneering journeys make damn good TV as they found with Apollo - the entertainment rights alone could pay for a sizeable chunk of the cost).
Not really.
The US GDP is $18.57 trillion. In general, we're at carry-capacity for our current level of technology, always: we can't make more than we make today, but only replace some production with other production. If it costs $10 trillion to do something, then that's the cost. If people are spending $10 trillion on entertainment, they're not spending $10 trillion on other things, and so they're poorer in regard to those other things.
It's not Sim Space Colony; people aren't spawned off-screen with some amount of money, and money has real backing in productivity. Think in terms of whole economics, not in entrepreneurial terms of getting other people's money for yourself.
And what was the profit for Faraday to do research into electromagnets in the 1840s, a time when the largest market for electrical gadgets was magicians doing parlor tricks? A far more profitable endeavor would have been better horse breeding techniques or faster looms.
Would it have been more profitable for Faraday? Would it have been less-risky? Who funded Faraday's research, and what did they intend to get out of it?
More to the point, what is the profit for society to fund this scientific research, compared to other scientific research? What is the likelihood of doing so?
We have no way to know which paths will be "profitable" and which ones will be dead ends
We have ways to project which have more opportunity (risk) and less cost, thus to target those things which will pay off better. That allows us to make incremental progress rapidly, overall profiting more.
Imagine if governments decided to build railroads before the hot-blast furnace. It would have set us back hundreds of years. Not slowed--set us back: society would have had to give up many then-modern comforts to support the railroad system.
We're asking the same basic question about going to Mars and building a colony: should we do this today, or is it more worthwhile to keep building better rockets and putting things in orbit, send probes around the galaxy, and wait until we've advanced the technology to do that (it's expensive, so we very much want to do so--and now space tourism is turning into a thing) to the point where it's reasonable to try and push a Mars mission?
You'll notice the advancement doesn't stop if we don't go to Mars, and the immediate push to Mars doesn't create a new drive for technology. It's highly-likely doing so today would be a huge waste of society's labor resources.
It was a xenophobic comment, suggesting that Chinese folks sell snake-oil while twirling their fumanchu and thumbing the scale because, well, that's what the Chinese do. No substance behind it, just some idiotic ranting from racist assholes.
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That's par for ProPublica (I am their biggest detractor, as far as I can tell). Still, I think it would be nice to have policy and mechanism to ensure that certain kinds of ads are part of an ad group targeting all ages, races, or whatever requirement. It's a legitimate concern, even if this is more manufactured outrage.
There's no mechanism to enforce that, so someone raised a concern. On the other hand, it's ProPublica, who like to manufacture outrage by flawed reasoning. They routinely get a hold of lesson's learned documentation from the Red Cross and publish an article about ARC "covering up" and "ignoring" severe systemic problems, for example (if you're not a PM, you might not know that everything you do should generate LL).
A method to ensure an ad campaign is running certain types of ads targeting all age groups would be interesting, nonetheless. I'm not sure how to implement it, though. Consider: there may just be more fitting 30-somethings than 50-somethings. More of your ad money gets spent on impressions and CTR for one age group over another, and that age group gets more advertisement. It's representative, but not even; how do you prove it's representative?
Bored, mostly. Plus I'm supposed to have an answer for everything, apparently.
What about the layoffs at GE? A corporation making record profits and benefiting from enough loopholes so they have not had to pay taxes in almost a decade?
GE has a bunch of gas turbine business scaled to meet demand of a growing natural gas power generation market. That market is no longer expanding rapidly, so the orders are smaller. If you sell 10,000 turbines per year between 2005 and 2015, and then 2,000 between 2016 and 2017, well... 80% of your line employees are idle, sitting around doing nothing, sucking payroll. What do you do with them?
Answer: you either expand into a new market and somehow use their skill, or you send them off with a pink slip.
I'd like to know what "loopholes" GE has been using. Aside from double-irish schemes, there aren't many real tax loopholes.
When a business buys a piece of equipment, we don't let them expense it immediately (Trump wants to). You spend a million dollars on machines, we make you follow a depreciation schedule. 10% per year down to 10%. If you actually take a loss--say you buy a million dollars of computer equipment and it depreciates 50% to 10% (50% in the year bought, 40% the next year)--you can apply the NOL back two years (revising your taxes) and forward 20 years. That last bit that the asset is worth is taken as an expense when you get rid of the asset, unless you sell it. If you're constantly spending to expand and change your business, you can actually offset 100% of your profits 100% of the time.
We also have deductions, which are different. A deduction isn't considered an expense, and lets you reduce your tax liability by deducting it like an expense. That's what the AMT is about: corporate tax rate is 35%; if you ring in enough deductions to get below 20%, you pay 20% anyway. So let's say you generate something like solar energy, and so we give you a deduction for half a million dollars based on some stimulus program. You have a million in profits, and you deduct half of that. Now you're taxed 35% of half a million, but that's 17.5% of your profits. Well, you have to pay 20%--instead of deducting down to half a million, you only get to deduct yourself down as far as $571,429.
Oh. Right. The new tax bill removed the AMT, didn't it? Well I guess that's par for the course in this fiscally-irresponsible pile of broken legislation.
What would make more sense is to layoff the executives as they make so much compared to they people who actually do anything.
295,000 employees. Immlet made $8.1 million in cash comp (which comes from revenue) and got some stocks (which doesn't come from any expenditure--they just make shareholders's stocks less-valuable by magicking more stock out of thin air). That's $27.45 per employee per year, or 1.375 cents per employee per hour.
If GE was desperate enough to cut executives to try and save money, they'd just reduce everyone's raises by 0.037% in the next cycle. This, by the way, is also the problem with the often-repeated line that executives should take lower salaries so their workers can make more: it only works if you pick a handful of workers to get nice raises and let the vast majority rot (a good-old-boys club of a few more rich bastards, just less-rich). There are a few excessively-wealthy in this world, but not many.
These are important facts if you actually want to structure something to fix things like poverty or economic instability (which turns out to be easy).
One thinks of Carly Fiorina and Don Capellas regarding this statement
When we're talking about HP, we're generally talking about genuine incompetence. They're good at finding bad CEOs.
Normally, he responds along the lines that those jobs are for teens who live at home.
I eventually (by 2022) want my Universal Dividend to pay out at age 16+ (but not lower) so teenagers in distressed households don't sacrifice their school performance by working a job to help keep the household solvent. The additional income will let teens learn about fiscal responsibility or, if they're already in very poor households (not really certain that's possible at this point...), provide additional support for their families.
Or women, who rely on a man to provide the essentials.
My Universal Dividend pays per-adult, so a two-adult household has two Dividends to help support it. Many women also work professional jobs, and may even bring the larger income in the household--the "reverse breadwinner effect". As well, many women live alone or are single mothers, and so need the capacity to support themselves and their families in the entire, whether by wage or assistance. There are many cases in which the income of the woman is an important fiscal concern in the household.
Or black people, who don't like to live in houses anyway.
Here in the city, a lot of black people live in tents due to extreme poverty; however, being that they live in the city, it's most-likely that they prefer to live in apartments rather than tents. My Universal Dividend will push many receiving HUD assistance over the income limit, and raise the remainder so as to be eligible for a smaller subsidy.
Take the folks I came across the other day, when going to have my suit repaired: a black man and his wife, living in a tent, trying to prepare for the upcoming snow. Between them, they would have $1,400 of Dividend each month. HUD can easily provide a small subsidy which will move this couple into an apartment instead, where they'd prefer to live; and with the additional consumer spending power in the city, there would be jobs available for them to work and bring further income, living better lives. It's clear to me that jobs and homes are what these people want most, and what they need.
Between the Universal Dividend and a Federal minimum wage pinned to 1/1000 of the annual Dividend per hour--that is,$8,769/year $8.78/hr minimum wage--a working individual in 2016 would take home $13.15/hr at full-time, or $2,192/month. A couple with a minimum-wage worker between them would bring the equivalent of $17.54/hr or $2,923/month. In Maryland, our minimum wage is $9.25/hr and will be $10.25/hr next year, so the numbers in 2018 will be somewhat higher. I'm certain this is enough for most families to get by without further assistance, although we can provide assistance for any families facing higher costs-of-living with minimal Federal expenditure compared to today.
So you see, it really isn't difficult to consider teens living at home, women, and black people in our economic policies. They all have the same needs: food, shelter, and economic security.
I'm using a OnePlus One, and hope to upgrade to a 5T one day when Resurrection Remix runs on it.
Just put iDroid on it.
Well, yes, it was created in a time where we expect humans to have families so as to continue the species.
Oh we know the new tax bill will just lead to more dividends and stock buybacks, not higher wages. Higher wages means higher prices, and he who doth not raise prices competes better and makes more profit. Executive compensation is actually negligible--it's pennies per hour per employee for big, high-dollar companies; it's only small businesses with CEOs making $150k or so that pay thousands per employee to their executives. All in all, though, the tax bill is a giant corporate give-away and enormously irresponsible. It's going to be a job-destroying bill, as it weakens consumer buying power overall, and the GOP wants to approach the deficit by cutting away welfare--removing even more consumer buying power and further slowing revenues to businesses, thus cutting off the support for jobs.
CEOs are often valued for their capacity to slowly drop a distressed business. This sometimes allows for a buy-out and restructuring, which helps pay off creditors. It also avoids a sudden implosion and massive job loss all-at-once, instead giving job cuts, bankruptcy, and potential rescue. Often the delay in job loss helps employees prepare their finances and get back on the job market. There are CEOs who move from company to company specifically to perform these corporate teardowns.
There are a lot of complex things that go on in both the economy and the business world. Nobody has a whole view, and few have a broad view. The GOP pretends to understand business, but they don't; the Democrats don't pretend to understand business as well as the GOP claims to, but are actually concerned with the demand-side economy because we understand how the frigging economy works. That's why we have welfare programs and Keynesian stimulus programs and all kinds of other things that help the broad consumer class keep buying things, while the GOP has tax cuts on corporate incomes that have no impact on job creation.
In order to implement "fast lanes", an ISP must throttle non-"fast lane" packets, which is a negation of net neutrality.
Comcast sells you 20Mbit, 50Mbit, or a 200Mbit connection. Then they have that Boost thing, so you start downloading a file and grab the first 100MB at like 500Mbit/s.
I imagine it'd be like that: you never get less than your baseline service, and they can't throttle a particular service (netflix, google, etc.) below your baseline service. 200Mbit means you get 200Mbit to Google, to Netflix, to Spotify, to everything; getting more doesn't violate your contract.
Of course, I imagine things being done in a way that makes sense, and the GOP has shown they have no sense.
You know how you can buy a 20Mbit/s, 50Mbit/s, 100Mbit/s, or 200Mbit/s connection from Comcast?
You'd get a 200Mbit/s connection: that link carries like 2000Mbit/s, but your whole connection is throttled to that 200Mbit/s. Comcast has this thing where they'll give you a speed boost, so you get half a gig instead of 200Mbit for a brief moment when you download a large file. They've had that forever.
A fast lane is just like, you bought 50Mbit/s service but they allow you to draw an extra 20Mbit or so when streaming Netflix or whatever.
I don't have a problem with fast lanes and QoS that don't impact the network: user A's fast lane and QoS should not cannibalize User B's throughput. If you have 200Mbit/s capacity and two 100Mbit/s users, they need completely-fair packet queuing between them (each user gets half the bandwidth), and within one user's connection you can prioritize VoIP or streaming or whatnot so he doesn't get stutters. Likewise, you can let Netflix go over that 100Mbit/s throughput for User A, so long as User B isn't using that bandwidth; if User B starts downloading a big file at 100Mbit/s, he gets full service, at the expense of the fast lane.
When you buy Internet, you buy a basic service. You get 100Mbit/s, everywhere, to everything, no less. Without Net Neutrality, you could get 100Mbit/s with individual resources restricted to 1Mbit/s. That's a huge problem: Comcast can rent-seek by slowing Netflix unless Netflix pays up, and then Netflix makes you pay up, so you pay Comcast a hidden fee by proxy.
I have little concern for the opposite effect, because you get no less than you pay for. Without fast lanes, everything is 100Mbit/s; with fast lanes, everything is 100Mbit/s or faster. As I said above: this needs to be isolated to individual users, such that one user consuming 120Mbit/s doesn't mean the next user is only getting 80Mbit/s. If they degrade your connection to supply someone else use of a fast lane, they're violating the contract of providing the promised baseline service.
Some people also don't like things having to do with bandwidth caps, which I think is a more-general problem: bandwidth caps should be reasonable. At home, it should be hard to hit your bandwidth cap; on mobile, it's reasonable to have a bandwidth cap. If Netflix puts a data center on T-Mobile's network and T-Mobile wants to make Netflix bandwidth no longer count, that's fine by me.
I'd like to see bandwidth caps regulated to be no less than typical usage for fixed connections, though. HD streaming 8 hours per day for 30 days is 250GBytes; double that and you have 500GB/month. Mintsim might sell you 2G, 5G, or 10G of LTE high speed data; Comcast shouldn't be allowed to sell you less than 500GB, and they damned well shouldn't be allowed to not state the limit up-front. When we're streaming 4K H.265, we'll be looking at over 3.5TB for what's bare-minimum as a reasonable monthly cap.
Maybe we should just raise the regulation-specified minimum usage cap by 7% each year, or benchmark it to something like a typical video stream or connection speed. I don't know. Nobody's mandated all Internet must be unlimited usage yet, and I understand the risks in doing that; I want to lean on the wall before tearing it down.
He hasn't come back with his usual "those jobs aren't intended for people to make a living at" response yet?
Well, they're minimum-wage jobs.
Under these codes, in the industries covered, child labor has been eliminated. The work day and the work week have been shortened. Minimum wages have been established and other wages adjusted toward a rising standard of living.[...]
[...]Another question arises as to whether in fixing minimum wages on the basis of an hourly or weekly wage we have reached into the heart of the problem which is to provide such annual earnings for the lowest paid worker as will meet his minimum needs.
The minimum wage is intended to provide such annual earnings as for the lowest-paid worker to meet his minimum needs. That's what it was created for.
There is NO social "safety net" in America. Trust me - been there, done that, thank God I survived.
Oh, I'm aware. I'm trying to fix it.
I hate to see ANY US citizen lose their job to a H1b.
My concern is whether we're creating enough jobs to keep up with population, thus avoiding unemployment growth; and if we're providing the social safety net to carry people through unemployment.
One way or another, people lose jobs. Trade (including H1B labor trade) and technology do that; they also improve our standard-of-living. We take these things away, we get poorer, and the poorest suffer the most. That means the guy at the bottom... we need grocery baggers and burger flippers; he deserves to be recognized as an important part of the economy. The guy in the path of progress... we get richer because he lost his job; he's a big part of our economic growth.
We owe these people support. We owe it to them to carry them to the next job. We owe it to them to keep them out of poverty when their wage isn't enough. We owe it to them to make sure they're mobile, that they can compete for the limited opportunities above their station--not everyone can be an astronaut. because we only need five of them, but being a burger flipper right now shouldn't mean you're automatically-excluded from becoming something better later.
I want Americans to be secure. I want them to know they've got something to fall back on, and that they've got a future in a stable economy that can find a place for them. Maybe not today, but next month, or six months from now--and we'll carry you that far so you can take that opportunity when it comes.
At fair pay and with humane treatment?
Ah, you're not talking about mining the belt; you're talking about going up, mining a passing asteroid, and coming back.
Today, it costs $10,000 to put a pound of payload in Earth orbit. NASA's goal is to reduce the cost of getting to space to hundreds of dollars per pound within 25 years and tens of dollars per pound within 40 years.
An excavator weighs 30,000 pounds. That's $300,000,000 to put into orbit today. A two-person mission to the moon costs $1.5 billion, though, and that's only 300 pounds. Why?
Distance.
You have to lift the fuel, too. You have to lift supplies to keep the astronauts alive.
It may be feasible to mine 162173 Ryugu, if you can mine it out before it passes, and if you can transport the materials back, and if you can get sufficient equipment up there without sufficient costs. What's a space drilling operation weigh, in its entirety, and how much does the fuel to get there and back (with the payload) weigh?
Entertainment is a good example, and if we can divert even a small percentage of viewership towards a Mars mission then that has little real productivity cost elsewhere.
Careful. You start arguing that people's decisions about what they spend their labor producing are really pointless and better off in the hands of smarter people, you eventually get to arguing about who should breed. In a general economic sense, there is capacity; and social democracy focuses on providing welfare, at cost to the general productivity of the economy. Cherry-picking what things people spend that productivity on in the general economy (free market) as pointless and unproductive starts you down a dark path.
I see the otherwise-neutral point, though: if you can market it, people will stop watching Hollywood and start watching NASA. You're competing with the free market.
There's no denying the most compelling reasons to explore our solar system today are largely intangible. You're right that it's too soon to turn a guaranteed profit
My point is more that doing what is feasible today brings the advancement that allows some farther-reaching things--like Mars missions--to become cheaper and more-feasible tomorrow. That structure generates more net growth and thus ends in greater wealth--and wealth is wholly a matter of technological advancement.
Yet the evidence says that this course of action leads to more violent crime and more harm to innocents. You're okay with more innocents dying and a more-crime-riddled society so you can get a rush from your sense of mob justice?
You can dispose of phones quickly, yes. The problem is that you're usually not being tailed actively, and go unnoticed. You and the guy on the other end can have burners, and be hard to find. Not really true with a guy in prison.
Part of the argument was also that this may be infeasible to tightly control. Part of it was that it increases risk of being caught using the phones for criminal purposes. Part of it was that maybe we should be thinking about rehabilitation, and exactly what that means changes depending on the world around you.
Look at the whole situation. People can get phones easy... okay, maybe we need to accept that that's a thing. People might get phones for criminal purposes... that's a problem. People also will try to get phones to satisfy their need for contact with their friends and family outside, though, and do we punish them for that? How harshly? There's the big question: they can now do it casually, and punishment may be harmful to their rehabilitation; do we try to mitigate the criminal activity or the phone activity?
A lot of variables have changed, both in the world itself and our model of it.
Because there is a very expensive monopolistic racket charging sky high prices for people to be able to call inmates using the official channels.
Yes but I don't care about that. It's like when we tried to reform our criminal justice system here in Baltimore because bail was always set way high d00d!!! and small-time, non-violent criminals considered no flight risk were forced to sit in jail when they could be working and maintaining their households and stuff. The delegates said, "Oh wait a minute, the bail bondsmen are going to lose a lot of profitability for this!" They then worked with them to make sure that bails were set low enough that people could make bail, but not so low as to hurt the bondsmen.
How about the bondsmen pack up and move to Chicago? I can understand a phase-out or some such to try to not drop anyone too hard, but come on, man.
No, I don't care to ensure the next hundred years of the prison racket either. I care to ensure the operational safety of the prison guards, the prison staff, the administrators; but the things that are just there to suck money when we could just do it cheaply, no, get that out of here.
Why keep phones out of prisons? I'd like inmates to have robust access to the outside world—the capacity to talk to others, to keep up on the news, to stay in touch with the world outside their concrete walls.
When inmates exit prison, they have to go to a halfway house. They're so out-of-touch with reality that they need to be re-introduced to society--reintegration. That's ridiculous. Okay, maybe we don't buy you a Sega Saturn for your birthday; but you should be able to stay in contact with family, friends, the like. You should be able to keep track of politics and current events.
Yes, I know: keeping them from somehow gaming all day while allowing access to not-gaming material is hard. We can probably get away with locking down access to 80 and 443, using a robust Web filter, and generally letting the collective game of whack-a-mole packaged into an off-the-shelf product suffice. It's not like it's hard to block Steam; they'll have to struggle to find little flash games and such.
If you're committing criminal activities inside prison using a cell phone, you're ... I mean, you're in prison, you're identifiable, and you're organizing crime using a cell phone. You're a high risk and at risk of scrutiny, which makes criminal activity harder to conceal (this is also a good Constitutional argument: a lot of rights against search and seizure or self-incrimination make it easy to commit crimes that nobody really cares about, whereas loud and visible crimes draw attention and are harder to conceal).
Prison is hard. On the one hand, you want people to be in prison. On the other, you want them to come out of prison capable of engaging in society. You don't want them in a nice little luxury hotel where they can relax--just penned in--and you don't want shoplifters coming out as hardened criminals with no capacity to engage with civil society.
At this junction, we have a question: can we keep cell phones away from inmates? It's become harder, so we should ask another question: should we keep cell phones away from inmates? We may have learned things about rehabilitation and prison management which would change the answers to these questions. I've heard that some countries have less-terrible prisons and also have lower recidivism rates--Norway is bewildering and god damn I need to update my platform on criminal justice reform.
There's a heck of a lot more [wikipedia.org] than $5k on offer as a jackpot for asteroid mining, when most potential targets offer billions in estimated profits (commonly 20-30% RoI) and some even reaching trillions
23-meter-wide asteroid would cost $2.6 billion to haul into lunar orbit. 500 tonnes. $5.2 million per tonne. Nickel costs $11,600 per tonne, so a 500 tonne nickel asteroid would cost 448 times as much as terrestrial nickel.
That's just for the nearest candidate.
What do you suppose would be the costs of going to the belt? The belt is out between Mars and Jupiter. A Mars mission is expected to cost $1.5 trillion--that's a minimalist mission, not carrying heavy equipment. To mine the belt, you have to get heavy equipment up there—mining and refining, because you're going to want to bootstrap. Then, you have to get all this heavy metal back (or just use it on Mars, and not have a terrestrial market).
Each individual target requires somehow getting fuel off Mars--and possibly to Mars, since the planet probably doesn't have any oil fields, being that it lacks a rich organic history (although Io has plenty of methane)--but not the mining equipment, because you want to leave that up there in the belt. You're going to have to shuffle transport equipment up and down to Mars, though, or back and forth to Earth. There's an operating expense cost here in terms of keeping a city-sized space station operating near the belt, or else shuttling miners back and forth constantly, along with supporting the miners and their equipment.
So now how much is it going to cost to get ore from the belt to Earth?
But I'm gathering that you're not really opposed to commercial space development or robotic research, just politicians declaring arbitrary manned-flight goals, which is perhaps understandable, even when it worked out pretty well with Apollo. There are certainly scientific reasons to put humans in space, even if only to learn about how it affects those humans and what we can do about that, but there's not many commercial cases where it's currently worth the effort.
There you go: we can be in space on the IIS; we don't need to be in space around Mars. Is there a reason to go to Mars? Sure. Will we profit from the endeavor, as a society? Oh hell no, not today. When we go into orbit enough times that putting a satellite up costs thousands of dollars, we'll be ready to send a small city to Mars for billions (maybe hundreds of billions), and put down a self-sustaining colony. That might pay off.
It's undeniably inspirational to a lot of people (because it certainly is "cool", and epic pioneering journeys make damn good TV as they found with Apollo - the entertainment rights alone could pay for a sizeable chunk of the cost).
Not really.
The US GDP is $18.57 trillion. In general, we're at carry-capacity for our current level of technology, always: we can't make more than we make today, but only replace some production with other production. If it costs $10 trillion to do something, then that's the cost. If people are spending $10 trillion on entertainment, they're not spending $10 trillion on other things, and so they're poorer in regard to those other things.
It's not Sim Space Colony; people aren't spawned off-screen with some amount of money, and money has real backing in productivity. Think in terms of whole economics, not in entrepreneurial terms of getting other people's money for yourself.
And what was the profit for Faraday to do research into electromagnets in the 1840s, a time when the largest market for electrical gadgets was magicians doing parlor tricks? A far more profitable endeavor would have been better horse breeding techniques or faster looms.
Would it have been more profitable for Faraday? Would it have been less-risky? Who funded Faraday's research, and what did they intend to get out of it?
More to the point, what is the profit for society to fund this scientific research, compared to other scientific research? What is the likelihood of doing so?
We have no way to know which paths will be "profitable" and which ones will be dead ends
We have ways to project which have more opportunity (risk) and less cost, thus to target those things which will pay off better. That allows us to make incremental progress rapidly, overall profiting more.
Imagine if governments decided to build railroads before the hot-blast furnace. It would have set us back hundreds of years. Not slowed--set us back: society would have had to give up many then-modern comforts to support the railroad system.
We're asking the same basic question about going to Mars and building a colony: should we do this today, or is it more worthwhile to keep building better rockets and putting things in orbit, send probes around the galaxy, and wait until we've advanced the technology to do that (it's expensive, so we very much want to do so--and now space tourism is turning into a thing) to the point where it's reasonable to try and push a Mars mission?
You'll notice the advancement doesn't stop if we don't go to Mars, and the immediate push to Mars doesn't create a new drive for technology. It's highly-likely doing so today would be a huge waste of society's labor resources.
To be fair, the earth is (relatively) flat.
It looks like a homeless guy was using the car as shelter and a way to get food.
It was a xenophobic comment, suggesting that Chinese folks sell snake-oil while twirling their fumanchu and thumbing the scale because, well, that's what the Chinese do. No substance behind it, just some idiotic ranting from racist assholes.