Basically, if you are simply acting in accordance to already existing unequal systems, then it is exploitative, even if people don't feel exploited. It takes a proactive stance, not a neutral stance, to combat exploitation. It's understandable that people from poorer countries will gladly accept lower wages and will be thankful for opportunities granted by a multinational corporation. Probably they are better off for it. Nevertheless, the corporation is still exploiting them. They are arbitraging in labor in an unfair labor market in which people are not free to change national allegiances. Corporations should pay a wage commensurate with people's skills and not based on where they happen to come from, not because it makes business sense, but because it is more fair. Yes, call me crazy, but I do expect people to act outside their own self interest.
That is a totally reasonable point of view, but it's important for USA to put its foot down to prevent this from being used as a loophole to pretty much all labor laws. Pretty soon US companies would only hire foreign nationals to do their work.
People have more to spend when you put less restrictions on what they can do with their labor.
You mean, rich people have more to spend. You are perhaps morally opposed to redistributive effects of taxation, but you'll have a hard time arguing that it doesn't improve the spending power of the poor.
You got things confused. Government is supposed to act in the interest of all citizens. Businesses act in the interest of their shareholders, not the typical consumer. Sometimes these interests align, and sometimes they don't.
Exactly. To generalize an attribute to sex is sexism, because people aren't average. If we need strong people to be firefighters, then should we require that firefighters be men? No, because we can simply require people to pass a strength test.
There's no point in arguing with people like you, who think of poor people as poo. The only way your worldview could be redeemed is by experiencing poverty yourself.
Perhaps I should have emphasized progressive. It is very simple to collect a flat (regressive) tax at the point of sale. The store doesn't have the information to collect a progressive tax.
Never is too strong a word. Taxation does of course reduce people's buying power, but the numbers can be tweaked so that people can still buy houses and stuff while still funding government. There can be a progressive scheme if necessary, but the nature of wealth tax makes it already pretty progressive.
I want to know where you got this idea that taxes on consumption tend to be progressive. It's almost certainly regressive, unless you exempt the right mix of basic goods. What counts as "consumption"? A poor person spends most eir money on rent, food, possibly car, and possibly cigarettes and booze. A rich person invests a bunch, buys several million dollar houses, hires maids and gardeners to clean these houses, buys some cars, new electronics, and probably eats out a lot and goes to high-end concerts and travels the world. A rich person spends a far higher percentage on capital goods and on employing people and only a small percentage on consumables. Also, you can't really tax consumption while traveling. The best you can do is tax the transportation, and tax rich tourists who come _here_
Who uses the nonrenewable resource? The company that digs it from the ground? The person who burns it? The company that converts it into a manufactured product? The person who buys the product? The person who throws it away?
You don't "consume" expensive toys like yachts. You invest in them. Or at least, that's what you will tell the IRS. If that won't fly, you form a company that buys yachts and you invest in the company.
Taxing consumption is stupid. It encourages people to save and hoard till the day they die, which defeats the purpose of money. The rich are the most capable of doing this, which big trust funds and investments. Also, the idea of a progressive consumption tax is mind-boggling. How can a sales tax be progressive? Right now, sales taxes are collected on point of sale, which is a flat (actually regressive) tax. Do you have to fill out everything you buy on some IRS form?
A better idea is to tax wealth. That will encourage people to spend, and drive the economy forward.
And we had a proof of concept for tokamaks in the 50s.
There are several aspects of this announcement which cause me to disregard it. First of all, there doesn't seem to be any journal article describing the work. I'm of the impression that science journalists are mostly full of shit and one must go to the primary sources to get any semblance of reality. Where are the technical documents?
The idea of a magnetic mirror is not new. For a state-of-the-art mirror system, take a look at the Gas Dynamic Trap. You see that it's mostly science and not hype. There's plenty of actual journal articles and technical documents. (With Lockheed, we are supposed to just take their word for it, based on their layman explanations to journalists?) Note that scientists working on GDT are much more modest about what is realistically attainable using this technology. A fusion reactor based on GDT technology would be 1km long [AA Ivanov and VV Prikhodko. PPCF 55 (2013) 063001], and so people look at it more as a neutron source for fusion material research than a viable reactor concept.
Lockheed spokespeople were making the claim that they could develop more quickly than tokamaks due to the small size of the system. Well, you know, first generation tokamaks were also pretty small. We have a good understanding of how reactor parameters will scale with size, and that's why ITER is so large. (The original plan for ITER was even larger, in order to guarantee ignition (fusion gain=infinity), but we have scaled back our ambitions to achieve a fusion gain of 10.)
All else is not equal. If you didn't have solar panels up there, you could put some light-colored paint on the roof, which reflects much of the sunlight. Solar panels tend to be quite dark, and get quite hot since they aren't anywhere near 100% efficient.
Farm animals are not much better off than if they were in the wild. Sure, they get food, but they are slaughtered as soon as they reach full size. Dairy cows might have it a little better, depending on your point of view, but most of their babies certainly don't have it better.
What is animal abuse? Going by what gets media and court attention, it seems like the definition of animal abuse in America is treating dogs and cats as farm animals.
Slashdot Mirror
right?
Basically, if you are simply acting in accordance to already existing unequal systems, then it is exploitative, even if people don't feel exploited. It takes a proactive stance, not a neutral stance, to combat exploitation. It's understandable that people from poorer countries will gladly accept lower wages and will be thankful for opportunities granted by a multinational corporation. Probably they are better off for it. Nevertheless, the corporation is still exploiting them. They are arbitraging in labor in an unfair labor market in which people are not free to change national allegiances. Corporations should pay a wage commensurate with people's skills and not based on where they happen to come from, not because it makes business sense, but because it is more fair. Yes, call me crazy, but I do expect people to act outside their own self interest.
That is a totally reasonable point of view, but it's important for USA to put its foot down to prevent this from being used as a loophole to pretty much all labor laws. Pretty soon US companies would only hire foreign nationals to do their work.
read up on mens rea
People have more to spend when you put less restrictions on what they can do with their labor.
You mean, rich people have more to spend. You are perhaps morally opposed to redistributive effects of taxation, but you'll have a hard time arguing that it doesn't improve the spending power of the poor.
You got things confused. Government is supposed to act in the interest of all citizens. Businesses act in the interest of their shareholders, not the typical consumer. Sometimes these interests align, and sometimes they don't.
You don't personally know a good representative sample of people.
Exactly. To generalize an attribute to sex is sexism, because people aren't average. If we need strong people to be firefighters, then should we require that firefighters be men? No, because we can simply require people to pass a strength test.
And how does the most metabolically active female compare to the least metabolically active male?
That's actually what they do with the jails in many places.
Is crime dropping because of "tough on crime" or is it dropping because we phased out leaded gasoline?
There's no point in arguing with people like you, who think of poor people as poo. The only way your worldview could be redeemed is by experiencing poverty yourself.
Perhaps I should have emphasized progressive. It is very simple to collect a flat (regressive) tax at the point of sale. The store doesn't have the information to collect a progressive tax.
Never is too strong a word. Taxation does of course reduce people's buying power, but the numbers can be tweaked so that people can still buy houses and stuff while still funding government. There can be a progressive scheme if necessary, but the nature of wealth tax makes it already pretty progressive.
I want to know where you got this idea that taxes on consumption tend to be progressive. It's almost certainly regressive, unless you exempt the right mix of basic goods.
What counts as "consumption"? A poor person spends most eir money on rent, food, possibly car, and possibly cigarettes and booze.
A rich person invests a bunch, buys several million dollar houses, hires maids and gardeners to clean these houses, buys some cars, new electronics, and probably eats out a lot and goes to high-end concerts and travels the world.
A rich person spends a far higher percentage on capital goods and on employing people and only a small percentage on consumables. Also, you can't really tax consumption while traveling. The best you can do is tax the transportation, and tax rich tourists who come _here_
Who uses the nonrenewable resource? The company that digs it from the ground? The person who burns it? The company that converts it into a manufactured product? The person who buys the product? The person who throws it away?
You don't "consume" expensive toys like yachts. You invest in them. Or at least, that's what you will tell the IRS. If that won't fly, you form a company that buys yachts and you invest in the company.
Taxing consumption is stupid. It encourages people to save and hoard till the day they die, which defeats the purpose of money. The rich are the most capable of doing this, which big trust funds and investments. Also, the idea of a progressive consumption tax is mind-boggling. How can a sales tax be progressive? Right now, sales taxes are collected on point of sale, which is a flat (actually regressive) tax. Do you have to fill out everything you buy on some IRS form?
A better idea is to tax wealth. That will encourage people to spend, and drive the economy forward.
And we had a proof of concept for tokamaks in the 50s.
There are several aspects of this announcement which cause me to disregard it. First of all, there doesn't seem to be any journal article describing the work. I'm of the impression that science journalists are mostly full of shit and one must go to the primary sources to get any semblance of reality. Where are the technical documents?
The idea of a magnetic mirror is not new. For a state-of-the-art mirror system, take a look at the Gas Dynamic Trap. You see that it's mostly science and not hype. There's plenty of actual journal articles and technical documents. (With Lockheed, we are supposed to just take their word for it, based on their layman explanations to journalists?) Note that scientists working on GDT are much more modest about what is realistically attainable using this technology. A fusion reactor based on GDT technology would be 1km long [AA Ivanov and VV Prikhodko. PPCF 55 (2013) 063001], and so people look at it more as a neutron source for fusion material research than a viable reactor concept.
Lockheed spokespeople were making the claim that they could develop more quickly than tokamaks due to the small size of the system. Well, you know, first generation tokamaks were also pretty small. We have a good understanding of how reactor parameters will scale with size, and that's why ITER is so large. (The original plan for ITER was even larger, in order to guarantee ignition (fusion gain=infinity), but we have scaled back our ambitions to achieve a fusion gain of 10.)
Power != energy.
All else is not equal. If you didn't have solar panels up there, you could put some light-colored paint on the roof, which reflects much of the sunlight. Solar panels tend to be quite dark, and get quite hot since they aren't anywhere near 100% efficient.
What percentage of male calves become studs? Only some very lucky ones.
I think "vacuum" in the article means the Bose-Einstein condensate with no phonons, which is the analog to the true vacuum and not actually a vacuum.
Science isn't so clear cut. The question isn't settled yet, and probably won't be settled until we have a clear theory of quantum gravity.
Farm animals are not much better off than if they were in the wild. Sure, they get food, but they are slaughtered as soon as they reach full size. Dairy cows might have it a little better, depending on your point of view, but most of their babies certainly don't have it better.
What is animal abuse? Going by what gets media and court attention, it seems like the definition of animal abuse in America is treating dogs and cats as farm animals.