Your arguments for taxing assets and not taxing earnings is nonsensical. Most assets are already taxed, as has been pointed out on the number of occasions by many respondants when you have posted your asset-tax nonsense before. In addition, much earnings, especially of those who can least afford to have it taxed away, are already exempted or taxed at lower rates, by so-called "progressive income tax" systems.
I'll just add one more item. Taxing assets wouldn't act as a disincentive to aquiring and hoarding wealth, as you have argued before, any more than taxing earnings is a disincentive to employment now. Carried to your intended extreme all it would accomplish is simply to impoverish the very working people you apparently want to shelter from paying any taxes.
You always talk about assets as if only the wealthy have them. Hence, you try to come across as a Robin Hood who wants to rob the rich to pay the poor. I'm not wealthy and work to support myself and my family, yet I have a personal savings account, an asset, would you tax that? I happen to own some computer equipment, an asset, on which I paid sales taxes at purchase, would you tax that? What about my furniture? What about my car? What about the insurance that takes $100 a month out my takehome pay? I don't own a house because I can't afford to come up with a downpayment, although in the long run it would benefit me much more than pouring my earnings down the drain of renting all my life. But my apartment is also an asset, paid for monthly, would you tax that? Or are you arguing that I should live on the street without any assets, maybe on the sidewalk in front of the office building where the company I work for is located?
As a society we decide to do things that individually would be difficult or impossible. Taxing ourselves and pooling our resources is the mechanism. The only system of taxation that makes sense and is viable in the long term is based on the ability to pay those taxes, which in turn is based on the earnings of those who are paying. It is not based on some arbitrarily assigned "value" from which taxes can be assessed.
It's the ability to own private property, enter into personal contracts and reliance on a rule of law to enforce both that separates prosperous societies from impoverished ones where corruption and incompetence condemn the majority of people to lifetimes of poverty and no opportunity to get out it. There are a lot of things that could be done to make a system of taxation more equitable and fair to a larger number of tax payers. But basing it on assets rather that earnings is not one of them.
Those puppies were industrial quality - you had to exert so much force on the buttons there was no such thing as an accidental mouse click! If you managed to force it down, you had to know you were doing so. And yes, I used 4 ST's over the course of 10 years.
Not really, the United States happens to be located where an abundance of natural resources produced most of that wealth. An econonic and social system that rewards and encourages accomplishment and success accounts for the rest.
I don't hear the Saudis complaining that the US is not paying for their oil. I don't hear Indians complaining that the US is not paying for their textiles. I don't hear the Indonesians and Thais complaining about the money US tourists spend in their countries.
>>...enslaving peoples of Africa
Actually the British mostly did that. They did so because their colonial sugar and then cotton plantations in the Carribean and North America couldn't function without cheap labour. Admittedly, the nascent US inherited the practice and its consequences. But the US also fought a Civil War, partly to put an end to slavery. That was 145 years ago, in case you've forgotten.
>>...supporting slaughters in Indonesia to aid American business interests
You are referring to which particular slaughters?
>>...countless other ways America has used force to take the freedom from the poorest people of the world.
Perhaps you'd like to elaborate? Most of the "poorest people" of the world are poor because of the corruption and incompentence of their own political and social systems. Most of them would be even worse off if the United States was not the most generous country in the world.
Not so. My dad has only dialup and his XP box has been compromised numerous times, mostly with viruses and spy/adware. The box has gotten so glutted that he has had to take to his local shop on two separate occasions to have it sterilized to make it workable again. He was using AV software, too. The last trip to the shop he asked them to install firewall software. I also advised him to download and install Firefox and stop using IE, which he did. So far (about 6 weeks) his box is OK.
Well, it was a nice run while it lasted. The creative torch will pass to someone else and the USA will fade into the background. The "Once Great and Late" USA.
Theoretically, we have one guy making a mountain out of a molehill. Practically, we have two women with enough sense to consider making a lot of money doing something trivial.
Women always know who the mother is, men are never sure who the father is. And this makes sex a matter of different perspectives! Women have always been ready, willing and able. Men have invented ways to control them, including calling them "whores".
If you define "robot" loosely enough, my slinky tumbling down the stairs would qualify as an "externally programmable, gravimetric tracking robot."
While I have the highest regard for Leonardo da Vinci, I think it's a long stretch to call this thing a robot! An ingenious device, to be sure, but I think we need more than spring powered, cam actuated push rods to have a robot. Just another example of wishful thinking.
With traditional selective breeding you are working with the OUTPUT of a natural process of genetic mutation. Nature itself produces all sorts of mutations that may or may not be viable. The ones that are viable survive the ones that aren't don't. If the ones that survive enhance a species ability to prosper then they get passed on into future generations and the species thrives. If the mutations don't enhance survivability, they die out quickly. By selectively breeding to encourage mutations you find desireable, you simply make a bet on the outcome. You are not changing the natural process.
With GM you don't simply make a bet on the outcome of a natural process, you selectively alter the natural process to achieve what you think is a desireable mutation. You basically stack the deck in favour of your mutation du jour.
You may think this is a good thing, but it's only a good thing under two situations. (1) You already know everything there is to know and can thereby make an informed decision based on full knowledge of how your mutation du jour will affect everything else now and into the future. (2) Your mutation is so trivial that if it turns out to be destructive it self-destructs before it can initiate a cascade failure of the biosphere.
Species on this planet have evolved for maybe 2.5 billion years, maybe longer. Mutations have occurred, provided enhanced survivability and been passed along to everything that followed. Mutations that did not enhance survivability died out. That means entire species died out because some genetic mutation or mutations prevented the species from adapting to changing environmental conditions or made them so "super adapted" that they consumed their way to extinction.
I think you would agree that the 2 conditions for a beneficial GM are not currently fulfilled. So I would answer your question as follows:
We don't know enough about how life develops and interacts and becomes symbiotic or parasitic, or the processes by which mutations become survival enhancing or destructive. Until we do, it is utter hubristic stupidity to mess with the basic building blocks of life. Those blocks keep us alive too.
I'm not even addresses the insanity of cross species genetic mixing. If different species have diverged sufficiently to prevent their interbreeding, then we'd better be fulfilling condition (1) above before we create alchemies whose outcomes may add us to the list of extinct species on this planet.
Doesn't anyone else try to answer the questions?
on
They Killed Ken!
·
· Score: 1
Maybe I'm an oddball, but I enjoy Jeopardy by trying to answer the questions, too. So Ken Jennings gets beaten at 75? Had/has to happen sooner or later. Whenever, he did an amazing thing and I enjoyed playing along, getting some that he missed! I knew Joseph Conrad and Apocalypse Now and Ken didn't!
reasons is to get someone off this planet, just in case one of those near orbitting asteroids makes contact! In the past, we had no possibility of surviving a catastrophic impact event.
You're not including a lot of non-income taxes that we in Canada pay over and above income tax that are not "progressive". That would be mostly GST and PST. Here in BC that adds 14.5% on every purchase (some stuff is PST exempt here, but everything except food bought in a supermarket is taxed GST at 7%!)
There are other more or less hidden taxes as well. For exemple, here in Vancouver I pay a "transit levy" on my electric bill which is a dedicated tax to support local transit. This in turn is subject to GST! I also pay "network access fees" on my long distance plan. These "fees" are taxes that At&T Primus must pay and which they pass along to me. These "fees" again are subject to GST. So in these two cases I am actually paying tax on tax!
Network Access Fees are also built into the service charges my bank and Interac pass on to me. I don't think these are subject to GST though.
There are so many of these hidden taxes imposed by all levels of government (local, municipal, regional, provincial, federal - did I miss anyone?) that it's virtually impossible to calculate just how much tax you're actually paying. But I would bet a week's pay that 50% is pretty close when you include them all.
To add insult to "progression" we get a GST rebate based on taxable income. The more taxable income you have the bigger the rebate. This means that those who really need the extra cash get the least and get nothing if their taxable income is zip. And in BC everyone gets a $50 PST tax credit on your income taxes no matter what your taxable income is. Of course, if you don't file you don't get it.
So don't think no one in Canada is paying 50% taxes. Even if it's not 50% for most people, it's still way too much. And it's way too much because we have way too much government in Canada, every level of which is composed of incompetent twits who think they know better than me how to spend my money.
Hubble/Webb are supposedly looking at stuff 13+ billion years ago since it now supposedly takes the light from that stuff 13+ billion years to get to us. But 13+ billion years ago the universe was a lot smaller than it is now, so whatever these telescopes are looking at ya gotta wonder: what has it been doing all that time? Has it been ricocheting back and forth from the expanding edge of the universe? If so, how reliable is what we're finally able to see? Maybe it's so red-shifted by now that any calculation of distance/time is useless. Has the expansion of the universe acted as a kind of distance/time cop, such that no matter when you see this stuff it always seems to be 13+ billion years away/ago? If so, it doesn't really tell us much about the beginning state. Maybe in the early history of the universe time didn't "run" at the same "velocity" it does today. Who knows?
So what you're saying is mean old Mr. Gravity always wins. Too bad I can't put some of that dark energy into my sagging body parts that Mr. Gravity is relentlessly pulling out of shape. Sigh.
1. the mm and cm are too small, the meter too long and you can't divide it into thirds
3. the kilometer is too short
4. the metric ton is too big
5. A4 paper is too small, A3 is too big
6. the gram is too small, the kilogram too large
7. and on and on...
All of which are due to using some arbitrarily determined base with no reference to human dimensions. Sure, the metric system is mathematically more convenient to work with, which is why scientists use it. But for the real world of work and commerce the so-called "imperial" system is far more useful.
This argument is both old and bogus. MS Windows (any interation) is architecturally inferior to UNIX, Linux and NetWare. Why? Because MS began as a single user, single tasking OS, the others as multi user, multi tasking OSes, which are architecturally designed for security and process isolation: users can't interfere with other users, processes can't interfere with other processes, etc. So even if OSX, Linux or some other *nix was as dominant as MS, the exploits would be fewer and less damaging. Case in point Apache: most widely used http server, exploits can be counted on two hands with fingers left over, compared to MS IIS with so many exploits I've lost count.
Until the final death knell, traders basically are in it for two reasons: (1) to make a buck, (2) to have fun playing a risky game. They will keep kicking the price around as long as they can force the price up and down, even if the overall trend is down and will hit zero eventually, traders will drive it up and down making money on every change. When the price tanks because all the real investors bail out, the gamblers will lose interest too and the price will tank towards zero.
Slashdot Mirror
Your arguments for taxing assets and not taxing earnings is nonsensical. Most assets are already taxed, as has been pointed out on the number of occasions by many respondants when you have posted your asset-tax nonsense before. In addition, much earnings, especially of those who can least afford to have it taxed away, are already exempted or taxed at lower rates, by so-called "progressive income tax" systems.
I'll just add one more item. Taxing assets wouldn't act as a disincentive to aquiring and hoarding wealth, as you have argued before, any more than taxing earnings is a disincentive to employment now. Carried to your intended extreme all it would accomplish is simply to impoverish the very working people you apparently want to shelter from paying any taxes.
You always talk about assets as if only the wealthy have them. Hence, you try to come across as a Robin Hood who wants to rob the rich to pay the poor. I'm not wealthy and work to support myself and my family, yet I have a personal savings account, an asset, would you tax that? I happen to own some computer equipment, an asset, on which I paid sales taxes at purchase, would you tax that? What about my furniture? What about my car? What about the insurance that takes $100 a month out my takehome pay? I don't own a house because I can't afford to come up with a downpayment, although in the long run it would benefit me much more than pouring my earnings down the drain of renting all my life. But my apartment is also an asset, paid for monthly, would you tax that? Or are you arguing that I should live on the street without any assets, maybe on the sidewalk in front of the office building where the company I work for is located?
As a society we decide to do things that individually would be difficult or impossible. Taxing ourselves and pooling our resources is the mechanism. The only system of taxation that makes sense and is viable in the long term is based on the ability to pay those taxes, which in turn is based on the earnings of those who are paying. It is not based on some arbitrarily assigned "value" from which taxes can be assessed.
It's the ability to own private property, enter into personal contracts and reliance on a rule of law to enforce both that separates prosperous societies from impoverished ones where corruption and incompetence condemn the majority of people to lifetimes of poverty and no opportunity to get out it. There are a lot of things that could be done to make a system of taxation more equitable and fair to a larger number of tax payers. But basing it on assets rather that earnings is not one of them.
Those puppies were industrial quality - you had to exert so much force on the buttons there was no such thing as an accidental mouse click! If you managed to force it down, you had to know you were doing so. And yes, I used 4 ST's over the course of 10 years.
>>...our wealth has been stolen from these people
Not really, the United States happens to be located where an abundance of natural resources produced most of that wealth. An econonic and social system that rewards and encourages accomplishment and success accounts for the rest.
I don't hear the Saudis complaining that the US is not paying for their oil. I don't hear Indians complaining that the US is not paying for their textiles. I don't hear the Indonesians and Thais complaining about the money US tourists spend in their countries.
>>...enslaving peoples of Africa
Actually the British mostly did that. They did so because their colonial sugar and then cotton plantations in the Carribean and North America couldn't function without cheap labour. Admittedly, the nascent US inherited the practice and its consequences. But the US also fought a Civil War, partly to put an end to slavery. That was 145 years ago, in case you've forgotten.
>>...supporting slaughters in Indonesia to aid American business interests
You are referring to which particular slaughters?
>>...countless other ways America has used force to take the freedom from the poorest people of the world.
Perhaps you'd like to elaborate? Most of the "poorest people" of the world are poor because of the corruption and incompentence of their own political and social systems. Most of them would be even worse off if the United States was not the most generous country in the world.
Not so. My dad has only dialup and his XP box has been compromised numerous times, mostly with viruses and spy/adware. The box has gotten so glutted that he has had to take to his local shop on two separate occasions to have it sterilized to make it workable again. He was using AV software, too. The last trip to the shop he asked them to install firewall software. I also advised him to download and install Firefox and stop using IE, which he did. So far (about 6 weeks) his box is OK.
Well, it was a nice run while it lasted. The creative torch will pass to someone else and the USA will fade into the background. The "Once Great and Late" USA.
Theoretically, we have one guy making a mountain out of a molehill. Practically, we have two women with enough sense to consider making a lot of money doing something trivial.
Women always know who the mother is, men are never sure who the father is. And this makes sex a matter of different perspectives! Women have always been ready, willing and able. Men have invented ways to control them, including calling them "whores".
If you define "robot" loosely enough, my slinky tumbling down the stairs would qualify as an "externally programmable, gravimetric tracking robot."
While I have the highest regard for Leonardo da Vinci, I think it's a long stretch to call this thing a robot! An ingenious device, to be sure, but I think we need more than spring powered, cam actuated push rods to have a robot. Just another example of wishful thinking.
Yes: levels of abstraction.
With traditional selective breeding you are working with the OUTPUT of a natural process of genetic mutation. Nature itself produces all sorts of mutations that may or may not be viable. The ones that are viable survive the ones that aren't don't. If the ones that survive enhance a species ability to prosper then they get passed on into future generations and the species thrives. If the mutations don't enhance survivability, they die out quickly. By selectively breeding to encourage mutations you find desireable, you simply make a bet on the outcome. You are not changing the natural process.
With GM you don't simply make a bet on the outcome of a natural process, you selectively alter the natural process to achieve what you think is a desireable mutation. You basically stack the deck in favour of your mutation du jour.
You may think this is a good thing, but it's only a good thing under two situations. (1) You already know everything there is to know and can thereby make an informed decision based on full knowledge of how your mutation du jour will affect everything else now and into the future. (2) Your mutation is so trivial that if it turns out to be destructive it self-destructs before it can initiate a cascade failure of the biosphere.
Species on this planet have evolved for maybe 2.5 billion years, maybe longer. Mutations have occurred, provided enhanced survivability and been passed along to everything that followed. Mutations that did not enhance survivability died out. That means entire species died out because some genetic mutation or mutations prevented the species from adapting to changing environmental conditions or made them so "super adapted" that they consumed their way to extinction.
I think you would agree that the 2 conditions for a beneficial GM are not currently fulfilled. So I would answer your question as follows:
We don't know enough about how life develops and interacts and becomes symbiotic or parasitic, or the processes by which mutations become survival enhancing or destructive. Until we do, it is utter hubristic stupidity to mess with the basic building blocks of life. Those blocks keep us alive too.
I'm not even addresses the insanity of cross species genetic mixing. If different species have diverged sufficiently to prevent their interbreeding, then we'd better be fulfilling condition (1) above before we create alchemies whose outcomes may add us to the list of extinct species on this planet.
Maybe I'm an oddball, but I enjoy Jeopardy by trying to answer the questions, too. So Ken Jennings gets beaten at 75? Had/has to happen sooner or later. Whenever, he did an amazing thing and I enjoyed playing along, getting some that he missed! I knew Joseph Conrad and Apocalypse Now and Ken didn't!
Maybe they did. In which case they are now at least 65 million years more technologically advanced than we are, wherever they are out there!
reasons is to get someone off this planet, just in case one of those near orbitting asteroids makes contact! In the past, we had no possibility of surviving a catastrophic impact event.
Now we do.
You're not including a lot of non-income taxes that we in Canada pay over and above income tax that are not "progressive". That would be mostly GST and PST. Here in BC that adds 14.5% on every purchase (some stuff is PST exempt here, but everything except food bought in a supermarket is taxed GST at 7%!)
There are other more or less hidden taxes as well. For exemple, here in Vancouver I pay a "transit levy" on my electric bill which is a dedicated tax to support local transit. This in turn is subject to GST! I also pay "network access fees" on my long distance plan. These "fees" are taxes that At&T Primus must pay and which they pass along to me. These "fees" again are subject to GST. So in these two cases I am actually paying tax on tax!
Network Access Fees are also built into the service charges my bank and Interac pass on to me. I don't think these are subject to GST though.
There are so many of these hidden taxes imposed by all levels of government (local, municipal, regional, provincial, federal - did I miss anyone?) that it's virtually impossible to calculate just how much tax you're actually paying. But I would bet a week's pay that 50% is pretty close when you include them all.
To add insult to "progression" we get a GST rebate based on taxable income. The more taxable income you have the bigger the rebate. This means that those who really need the extra cash get the least and get nothing if their taxable income is zip. And in BC everyone gets a $50 PST tax credit on your income taxes no matter what your taxable income is. Of course, if you don't file you don't get it.
So don't think no one in Canada is paying 50% taxes. Even if it's not 50% for most people, it's still way too much. And it's way too much because we have way too much government in Canada, every level of which is composed of incompetent twits who think they know better than me how to spend my money.
Hubble/Webb are supposedly looking at stuff 13+ billion years ago since it now supposedly takes the light from that stuff 13+ billion years to get to us. But 13+ billion years ago the universe was a lot smaller than it is now, so whatever these telescopes are looking at ya gotta wonder: what has it been doing all that time? Has it been ricocheting back and forth from the expanding edge of the universe? If so, how reliable is what we're finally able to see? Maybe it's so red-shifted by now that any calculation of distance/time is useless. Has the expansion of the universe acted as a kind of distance/time cop, such that no matter when you see this stuff it always seems to be 13+ billion years away/ago? If so, it doesn't really tell us much about the beginning state. Maybe in the early history of the universe time didn't "run" at the same "velocity" it does today. Who knows?
So many questions, so little time.
So what you're saying is mean old Mr. Gravity always wins. Too bad I can't put some of that dark energy into my sagging body parts that Mr. Gravity is relentlessly pulling out of shape. Sigh.
... never was so much inferred from so little.
You should have gotten +5 for very funny! :-)
is nothing's quite right:
1. the mm and cm are too small, the meter too long and you can't divide it into thirds
3. the kilometer is too short
4. the metric ton is too big
5. A4 paper is too small, A3 is too big
6. the gram is too small, the kilogram too large
7. and on and on...
All of which are due to using some arbitrarily determined base with no reference to human dimensions. Sure, the metric system is mathematically more convenient to work with, which is why scientists use it. But for the real world of work and commerce the so-called "imperial" system is far more useful.
This argument is both old and bogus. MS Windows (any interation) is architecturally inferior to UNIX, Linux and NetWare. Why? Because MS began as a single user, single tasking OS, the others as multi user, multi tasking OSes, which are architecturally designed for security and process isolation: users can't interfere with other users, processes can't interfere with other processes, etc. So even if OSX, Linux or some other *nix was as dominant as MS, the exploits would be fewer and less damaging. Case in point Apache: most widely used http server, exploits can be counted on two hands with fingers left over, compared to MS IIS with so many exploits I've lost count.
Until the final death knell, traders basically are in it for two reasons: (1) to make a buck, (2) to have fun playing a risky game. They will keep kicking the price around as long as they can force the price up and down, even if the overall trend is down and will hit zero eventually, traders will drive it up and down making money on every change. When the price tanks because all the real investors bail out, the gamblers will lose interest too and the price will tank towards zero.
Seriously, I wonder if they have thought to try mercury as a substitute for palladium. Maybe the alchemists really were onto something?
Wake me when they get to the iron/lead/scrap metal >> gold/platinum part.