David Calverley works at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law. That explains everything.
Prisoner rape should have topped the list
on
2006's Bill of Wrongs
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Readers of slashdot, typically "nerdy" males, are the ones most directly targeted by the government's unofficial policy of tolerating racist gang rape of the least "street smart" or gang affiliated in its prison system. This functions to keep the most dangerous element of the population, technologists, in a state of perpetual terror of the government's wrath, not unlike the terror experienced by the denizens of George Orwell's "1984" who live under the subtle but continual threat of their worst fears in the Inner Party's "Room 101".
sexual pressure ushers, guides or shepherds the process of sexual awakening.
So the way your government retreats from its threat of having some ethnic gang make you its bitch and infect you with Hepatitis C if not AIDS while sexually torturing you because you're a technologist who got out of line, is to claim that you aren't being raped, you are experiencing "sexual awakening".
This should have topped the list and of course, since American technologists don't count (just look at the H-1b and outsourcing riots trashing their ability to support families) it didn't appear anywhere
Guess what's missing from this Slate Top 10 list?
on
2006's Bill of Wrongs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, you guessed it: DA Mike Nifong's Hunt for the Great White Defendants in the Duke Lacrosse Frame-Up is a no-show. You see, the long-running pattern of hate crime hoaxes victimizing white male college students is nothing compared to, say, #8 on Lithwick's List, the Bush Administration "Slagging the Media."
In recent news, the hoax continues to implode. Nifong dropped the rape charges but is pressing on with other felony charges. Meanwhile, the North Carolina State Bar is investigating Nifong for ethics violations. And now the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys has asked him to recuse himself from the case.
Clearly the existing carbon sources provide not only a great source of nutrients but also heat for near term algae cultivation. They should be pursued but the real potential lies with offloading current territories to territories less prone to destruction of biodiversity.
Land capitalization is typically included in the capitalization of the greenhouse area of the reference (solar updraft tower) system which has a total capitalization of under $700M -- as was referenced in the proforma.
The value of algae farming is a lot more than mere fuel oil. Algae is at the base of the food chain. If we're going to take responsibility for support of human populations whether terrestrial or beyond earth -- algae will be very crucial.
There is a great need to increase world-wide carrying capacity without impacting high biodiversity ecosystems such as the Brazilian rainforests or continental shelf fisheries, and that reduces greenhouse phenomena. There may be an economic option that uses sea water pumped to desert areas powered by the fact that ground level temperatures are much higher than temperatures at high altitudes. Indeed, it would dump greenhouse heat to space for its power while producing biodiesel, electricity, fish, fresh water, salt and real estate -- all in quantities demanded by developed-world populations -- without adding to, and possibly even sequestering, greenhouse gases.
Proposals for solar updraft towers have typically assumed that they
would be single use structures: solar to electricity via heat
differentials between high altitude air and ground level
greenhouse-enclosed air. The resulting system has marginal economic value.
Something which would further enhance the value of the solar updraft
tower power structure is to use the greenhouse area for algae ponds to
add biodiesel, water, fish and salt production to the production of electricity normally envisioned.
Doing so brings the proposal from marginally viable to viable, with a
net present value, primarily from live fish production, of $3.5 billion per system,
thereby allowing for far higher capitalization and/or return on investment.
Let's start with just the value of algae biodiesel:
The greenhouse area required per solar updraft tower of is huge:
(pi * (5km/2)^2) ? hectares
= 1963.49 hectares
producing peak at peak 200MW via a 1km tall tower.
We now add to this the production of algae biodiesel:
The UNH estimate for algae biodiesel
production is 1 quad per 200,000 hectares. Let's assume only half of
the area of the solar updraft tower greenhouse would be available for
production at any time (the other half would be used for ponds that buffered heat for the inner ponds, produce fish, provide additional evaporative surface for desalination and provide recreation for residential areas at the outer rim).
Interestingly, the biodiesel revenue is nearly 3 times the electrical
revenue of a solar updraft tower!
200*200MW or 40GW electrical peak capacity is produced per quad of
biodiesel.
Further that same UNH document estimates 19 quads to replace all
transportation fuel in the US or 3800 towers, which would also produce
3800*200MW or 760GW or.76TW of electricity.
The state has a bug in its software: It protects property rights but taxes activity. This subsidizes you for owning stuff even when you occupy a key position of control that you could never control without the support of the government. The juiciest stuff is monopolistic because the more people there are the more money you can tax out of them. Ever since Gates bought MS-DOS (from some poor schmuck who, for all we know, could be homeless and dying of Hepatitis-C acquired after being raped in prison for the crime of being a white nerd who screwed up his Schedule "C" because he couldn't afford to pay for a tax accountant for his H-1b-decimated software consulting sole-proprietorship) and got IBM to adopt it as the standard by which personal computer software interoperates, he's been collecting a tax on Moore's Law while providing mediocre OS technology that was obsolete years before it was imposed on the industry.
Oh, I'm not saying Microsoft hasn't done any good. Hell, I'm sure Gates even thinks he's doing something about malaria even though the world's foremost authority on evolutionary medicine says the approach he's taking is tragically ill-advised. The problem is Gates had a chance to exploit a bug in the system and then correct it with intimate knowledge of it -- the way a white hat cracker would. Instead, he exploited it and has convinced himself (with the help of many toadies I'm sure) that he deserved to be the world's richest man. He's a black hat who deludes himself he's a white hat so he can hang out with other rich folks in denial about their fundamentally evil ways and have a whole lot of sycophants with them at all times to ensure they luxuriate in the opiated haze of self-righteousness.
Microsoft? Its the expression of Gate's delusions writ as large as Moore's Law can support -- which is really impressive.
I can't believe people are worried about some minor species of dolphin going extinct when Bill Gates is being prevented from importing unlimited H-1b programmers. Can't people keep perspective anymore? How is Microsoft supposed to be able to afford the tens of thousands of programmers if it actually has to pay them real money? Can a fresh water dolphin program C#, VB,.NET, for $15/hour? No? Then let's hear it for dolphin sushi!
Find the location with the lowest real estate cost from which you can get reliable broadband service and telecommute to jobs.
It used to be you could locate in Silicon Valley and commute to various jobs you had without selling your house and buying a new one each time you changed jobs. No more. The price of real estate in Silicon Valley is so high and competition so heavy you now need to be from a wealthy family or part of an ethnic mafia to get anywhere if you're young -- so unless you are from a wealthy family, Asian or Latino, forget about S.V. as a way of avoiding real estate transaction costs between job changes.
DARPA presumably lost its granting authority with the passage of a congressional act--the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007--which gave money-granting power to another government agency, Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. So at the time, instead of awarding $2 million for first prize, $500,000 for second and $250,000 for third, DARPA said it would simply give out trophies to the three finalists.
But after much complaint from contestants, Kenneth Krieg, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, approved the prize money.
Policy that is so prone to failure is about as ridiculous as a system that cuts off funding to an entire branch of the military if someone tweaks some minor policy somewhere.
These prize awards aren't just some minor toy program -- they are the future of technology development which means defense preparedness. Maybe there are some radical Muslim cleric moles posing as policy makers. Oh well... Islam isn't as bad as some theocracies.
Following common usage, the framers of the Second Amendment used the phrase "bear arms" to refer to possession of weapons for military use... The best evidence for the Second Amendment meaning of "bear arms" is in the original draft of the Amendment proposed in the First Congress by James Madison: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well-regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person."
In... the conscientious objector provision, Madison clearly used the phrase "bearing arms" to refer solely to the possession of weapons for military use...
Madison's use of the phrase "bear arms" to refer to military activities is echoed in other contemporary usages... Records of debates in the Continental and U.S. Congresses between 1774 and 1821 [include] 30 uses of the phrase "bear arms" or "bearing arms" (other than in discussing the proposed Second Amendment); in every single one of these uses, the phrase has an unambiguously military meaning...
Source: The Second Amendment Foundation
The phrase "the people" is unambiguously defined as individual citizens of the States in the Constitution by virtue of the fact that when the States are being designated, the phrase "the States" or "the several States" is used consistently.
All gun control legislation is geared toward either prohibiting or licensing your right to bear arms.
The government cannot license rights already admitted to be yours by the Constitution and retain legitimacy.
A further point of clarification may be necessary for some:
The Bill of Rights grants no rights to the people nor to the States. The Bill of Rights is a confession and warning on the part of the United States Constitution that central governments such as those it constitutes, have a tendency to take more rights than they have been granted, and enumerates the rights most likely to be stolen by the central government.
Infrastructure gets built by market forces if the demand side is there from consumers that have money with which to "vote", the capital sources are not risk averse and owners of properties put up their asking prices as part of tax assessment.
Large science projects? Well, when one looks at the history of science the real advances have not been during times of major government support but during times that the there was an abundance of middle class men of independent means supporting independent minds educated by the equivalent of the Land Grant Colleges of the US. Consider, for example, Isaac Newton:
Newton was born at Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire. He was born to a family of farmers who owned animals and land, thus making them fairly wealthy. The location he was born at was about seven miles from Grantham, where he later attended school. By his own later accounts, Newton was born prematurely and no one expected him to live; his mother Hannah Ayscough said that his body at that time could have fit inside a quart mug. His father, also named Isaac Newton, had been a yeoman farmer and had died three months before Newton's birth, at the time of the English Civil War. When Newton was three, his mother remarried and went to live with her new husband, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough.
Rentiers tend to send their children to private schools where they get an exceptional education. If everyone is made a rentier through a citizen's dividend then there is every reason to believe everyone will tend to have the same opportunities. Taking control of children away from parents may seem like a good idea to many busy bodies but when some moron comes through and grabs your children to take them off to "educate" them in some ideology, you will change your mind.
Running a balance sheet where a net pay-out or net pay-in to the system is done rather than a separate pay-out and pay-in is reasonable and that is normally how things are handled if you're dealing with the same institution.
"The rich get richer" is basically a result of something sometimes called the "risk free asset" by modern portfolio theory aka "risk free rate of return" -- generally the interest rate the government pays to borrow money. In classical economics its called "economic rent" or "Ricardian rent" (after the classical economist Ricardo). It results from systemic growth in the economy -- growth that increases the value of assets that do not increase with increasing demand, such as land. If you shove more people onto the Earth, you get higher land prices but you don't get more land. (BTW: This is the real reason guys like Gates, Bush and Kennedy are for immigration liberalization.) In a natural setting, this corrects itself through die-offs and/or fighting over the land -- or whatever the monopoly at issue happens to be (it could be a monopoly on, say, the right to make copies of an operating system that everyone happens to have standardized on, which is what made the present day's richest man). Governments protect wealth holders from this natural redistribution by taxing things to pay for police, courts, military, and other things that protect nonsubsistence property rights. When this service is paid for by taxing things other than those property rights, you have a subsidy of nonsubsistence property rights.
If you don't tax away all monopoly profits and redistribute it evenly to everyone, then you end up with a class of people who have an incentive to load up the economy with more people, whether through immigration or birth rates, in order to increase the demand for their property. This class can be the private owners of the monopolized rental properties or it can be public officials that reserve to themselves and their special interests the economic rent derived from taxation.
Think of it as signal processing where you don't subtract out the DC component of the signal before integrating. You end up overflowing your accumulators and losing the information you were trying to extract.
The only exception you might make is for intellectual property representing genuine invention of technological utility, and subsistence property rights since people will generally fight to the death to retain their subsistence.
That's why "the money quote" from my white paper says:
The government should tax net assets, in excess of levels
typically protected under personal bankruptcy, at a rate equal to
the rate of interest on the national debt, thereby eliminating
other forms of taxation. Creator-owned intellectual property
should be exempt.
The levels typically protected by personal bankruptcy can be
approximated by the median price of housing an individual added
to the median capitalization of a job in the economy. Together,
these exemptions add up to between $50,000 and $100,000.
Additional but smaller exemptions may be added to represent the
lower levels of bankruptcy protection typically extended to
children within families.
The NAT is a self-adjusting system that seeks an equilibrium
between government debt levels, current tax rates and private
wealth distribution, without attempting to achieve an outright
balanced budget or direct intervention in the economy.
Under current (1992) asset distribution and government debt the
NAT would generate between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion in
revenue, thus totally displacing other forms of taxation....
only assets whose existence is legally recorded in titles, insurance
documents, etc., or that are currently reported for capital gains
and losses would be individually assessed. Since most households
own few major assets changing little from year to year, the NAT
would greatly simplify tax computation.
Most of the 11 million students in India's 18,000 colleges and universities receive starkly inferior training, according to the article, heavy on obedience and rote memorization and light on useful job skills.
They can get jobs as TA's in American universities where they can require the students to obediently engage in rote memorization. All we need to do is reduce the xenophobia in the US's immigration policies.
One wonders how long before the WTO meetings (and other organizational meetings) are going to be targeted by millimeter-wave weapons wielded by anarchists who no longer dare form crowds in protest?
Read the Gates Foundation page on what they're doing about sub Sahara African malaria and then read Plague Time by Paul Ewald describing precisely why none of the approaches used by the Gates Foundation can be really effective against a sexually reproducing, horizontally transmitted pathogen like malaria -- and describing the approach that actually works -- which of course the Gates Foundation can't pursue because none of the grant writers are serious about really stopping the scourge of malaria.
Any rich guy who leaves his money in a foundation rather than in escrow for a set of objective prize awards, such as the X-Prize, has no recognition of the failed history of foundations.
Hell, the folks at the Ford Foundation are proud of the fact that they call Henry Ford "the grave spinner".
Indeed, the Gates Foundation is probably already failing to get the results they should because their failure to use objective criteria for prize awards creates a systemic malincentive: rewarding proposal writing rather than getting real results.
The game Gates is playing is to somehow make up for his monopolistic practices by disbursing the wealth thereby obtained in fashionable philanthropy. If he is serious about his philanthropy, he should use his wealth to correct the tax system so that it derives its revenue from "economic rent" -- profits arising from monopoly.
The easiest way to approximate a tax on economic rent is to replace taxes on economic activity -- all of them, including income tax, capital gains tax, value added tax, sales tax, inheritance tax, etc. -- with a single tax on the value of unimproved land, or lot, value. Means of establishing land value are quite well understood and used in eminent domain proceedings all the time. The late Milton Friedman, hardly an enemy of the rich, declared this kind of tax to be the "least distorting" of various tax bases.
In this scenario antitrust cases evaporate since the proper way for the government to express its perception of monopoly profits is merely to increase its bid for the tax net asset, thereby increasing the economic rent tax on the owner.
The government should tax net assets, in excess of levels
typically protected under personal bankruptcy, at a rate equal to
the rate of interest on the national debt, thereby eliminating
other forms of taxation. Creator-owned intellectual property
should be exempt.
The levels typically protected by personal bankruptcy can be
approximated by the median price of housing an individual added
to the median capitalization of a job in the economy. Together,
these exemptions [back in 1992 when this was originally written --JAB] add up to between $50,000 and $100,000.
Additional but smaller exemptions may be added to represent the
lower levels of bankruptcy protection typically extended to
children within families.
The NAT is a self-adjusting system that seeks an equilibrium
between government debt levels, current tax rates and private
wealth distribution, without attempting to achieve an outright
balanced budget or direct intervention in the economy.
Under current (1992) asset distribution and government debt the
NAT would generate between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion in
revenue, thus totally displacing other forms of taxation....
only assets whose existence is legally recorded in titles, insurance
documents, etc., or that are currently reported for capital gains
and losses would be individually assessed. Since most households
own few major assets changing little from year to year, the NAT
would greatly simplify tax computation.
and
With the exception of basic functions of government and the pay
down of debt, the government budget should be dispersed to
citizens as cash, rather than being spent in government programs
or even limited in the form of vouchers. This is "market
democracy" in which the citizens and their markets, rather than
central planning and politics, influence the selection of goods
and services to be capitalized and provided.
Could someone explain the difference between "promiscuous dependency taking" and "highly factored code" -- I mean in terms that metrics that can be applied to quantitative methods of statistical quality control?
Slashdot Mirror
David Calverley works at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law. That explains everything.
When pressure came from Human Rights Watch the US government's response was to pass a "Prisoner rape elimination act" the chief result of which was to commission a study by one Mark Fleisher, who concludes that, get this:
So the way your government retreats from its threat of having some ethnic gang make you its bitch and infect you with Hepatitis C if not AIDS while sexually torturing you because you're a technologist who got out of line, is to claim that you aren't being raped, you are experiencing "sexual awakening".This should have topped the list and of course, since American technologists don't count (just look at the H-1b and outsourcing riots trashing their ability to support families) it didn't appear anywhere
Clearly the existing carbon sources provide not only a great source of nutrients but also heat for near term algae cultivation. They should be pursued but the real potential lies with offloading current territories to territories less prone to destruction of biodiversity.
Land capitalization is typically included in the capitalization of the greenhouse area of the reference (solar updraft tower) system which has a total capitalization of under $700M -- as was referenced in the proforma.
There is a great need to increase world-wide carrying capacity without impacting high biodiversity ecosystems such as the Brazilian rainforests or continental shelf fisheries, and that reduces greenhouse phenomena. There may be an economic option that uses sea water pumped to desert areas powered by the fact that ground level temperatures are much higher than temperatures at high altitudes. Indeed, it would dump greenhouse heat to space for its power while producing biodiesel, electricity, fish, fresh water, salt and real estate -- all in quantities demanded by developed-world populations -- without adding to, and possibly even sequestering, greenhouse gases.
Proposals for solar updraft towers have typically assumed that they would be single use structures: solar to electricity via heat differentials between high altitude air and ground level greenhouse-enclosed air. The resulting system has marginal economic value.
Something which would further enhance the value of the solar updraft tower power structure is to use the greenhouse area for algae ponds to add biodiesel, water, fish and salt production to the production of electricity normally envisioned.
Doing so brings the proposal from marginally viable to viable, with a net present value, primarily from live fish production, of $3.5 billion per system, thereby allowing for far higher capitalization and/or return on investment.
Let's start with just the value of algae biodiesel:
The greenhouse area required per solar updraft tower of is huge:
(pi * (5km/2)^2) ? hectares
= 1963.49 hectares
producing peak at peak 200MW via a 1km tall tower.
We now add to this the production of algae biodiesel:
The UNH estimate for algae biodiesel production is 1 quad per 200,000 hectares. Let's assume only half of the area of the solar updraft tower greenhouse would be available for production at any time (the other half would be used for ponds that buffered heat for the inner ponds, produce fish, provide additional evaporative surface for desalination and provide recreation for residential areas at the outer rim).
That gives us:
(1963.49/2)hectares/tower;200000hectares/quad ? towers/quad
= 203.719 towers/quad
Or about 200 towers per quad of biodiesel.
We can now calculate the biodiesel per tower:
7.2gallon/1e6btu;200tower/quad ? gallon/tower
= 3.5998E+07 gallon/tower
or about 35M gallons of biodiesel per year per tower.
At $2/gallon for wholesale diesel, this yields $70M biodiesel revenue per year.
Now for electrical revenue:
At an average rate of sold production only 1/2 (100MW) of peak capacity (200MW), electrical production per tower per year, is:
100MW;year ? GWh
= 876 GWh
At $30/MWh wholesale:
100MW;year;30$/MWh ? $
= 2.628E+07 $
or about $25M electrical revenue per year.
Interestingly, the biodiesel revenue is nearly 3 times the electrical revenue of a solar updraft tower!
200*200MW or 40GW electrical peak capacity is produced per quad of biodiesel.
Further that same UNH document estimates 19 quads to replace all transportation fuel in the US or 3800 towers, which would also produce 3800*200MW or 760GW or .76TW of electricity.
Current winter capacity in the US i
Until citizen's dividends derived from taxation of nonsubsistence property rights are a reality, Perelman's principles are destructive for those of us who might want to support a family and raise children. It should be immoral to promote, as Perelman does, the future portrayed in Idiocracy.
Oh, I'm not saying Microsoft hasn't done any good. Hell, I'm sure Gates even thinks he's doing something about malaria even though the world's foremost authority on evolutionary medicine says the approach he's taking is tragically ill-advised. The problem is Gates had a chance to exploit a bug in the system and then correct it with intimate knowledge of it -- the way a white hat cracker would. Instead, he exploited it and has convinced himself (with the help of many toadies I'm sure) that he deserved to be the world's richest man. He's a black hat who deludes himself he's a white hat so he can hang out with other rich folks in denial about their fundamentally evil ways and have a whole lot of sycophants with them at all times to ensure they luxuriate in the opiated haze of self-righteousness.
Microsoft? Its the expression of Gate's delusions writ as large as Moore's Law can support -- which is really impressive.
I can't believe people are worried about some minor species of dolphin going extinct when Bill Gates is being prevented from importing unlimited H-1b programmers. Can't people keep perspective anymore? How is Microsoft supposed to be able to afford the tens of thousands of programmers if it actually has to pay them real money? Can a fresh water dolphin program C#, VB, .NET, for $15/hour? No? Then let's hear it for dolphin sushi!
It used to be you could locate in Silicon Valley and commute to various jobs you had without selling your house and buying a new one each time you changed jobs. No more. The price of real estate in Silicon Valley is so high and competition so heavy you now need to be from a wealthy family or part of an ethnic mafia to get anywhere if you're young -- so unless you are from a wealthy family, Asian or Latino, forget about S.V. as a way of avoiding real estate transaction costs between job changes.
But after much complaint from contestants, Kenneth Krieg, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, approved the prize money.
Policy that is so prone to failure is about as ridiculous as a system that cuts off funding to an entire branch of the military if someone tweaks some minor policy somewhere.
These prize awards aren't just some minor toy program -- they are the future of technology development which means defense preparedness. Maybe there are some radical Muslim cleric moles posing as policy makers. Oh well... Islam isn't as bad as some theocracies.
Following common usage, the framers of the Second Amendment used the phrase "bear arms" to refer to possession of weapons for military use... The best evidence for the Second Amendment meaning of "bear arms" is in the original draft of the Amendment proposed in the First Congress by James Madison: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well-regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person."
In... the conscientious objector provision, Madison clearly used the phrase "bearing arms" to refer solely to the possession of weapons for military use...
Madison's use of the phrase "bear arms" to refer to military activities is echoed in other contemporary usages... Records of debates in the Continental and U.S. Congresses between 1774 and 1821 [include] 30 uses of the phrase "bear arms" or "bearing arms" (other than in discussing the proposed Second Amendment); in every single one of these uses, the phrase has an unambiguously military meaning...
Source: The Second Amendment Foundation
The phrase "the people" is unambiguously defined as individual citizens of the States in the Constitution by virtue of the fact that when the States are being designated, the phrase "the States" or "the several States" is used consistently.
All gun control legislation is geared toward either prohibiting or licensing your right to bear arms.
The government cannot license rights already admitted to be yours by the Constitution and retain legitimacy.
A further point of clarification may be necessary for some:
The Bill of Rights grants no rights to the people nor to the States. The Bill of Rights is a confession and warning on the part of the United States Constitution that central governments such as those it constitutes, have a tendency to take more rights than they have been granted, and enumerates the rights most likely to be stolen by the central government.
Large science projects? Well, when one looks at the history of science the real advances have not been during times of major government support but during times that the there was an abundance of middle class men of independent means supporting independent minds educated by the equivalent of the Land Grant Colleges of the US. Consider, for example, Isaac Newton:
Rentiers tend to send their children to private schools where they get an exceptional education. If everyone is made a rentier through a citizen's dividend then there is every reason to believe everyone will tend to have the same opportunities. Taking control of children away from parents may seem like a good idea to many busy bodies but when some moron comes through and grabs your children to take them off to "educate" them in some ideology, you will change your mind.
Running a balance sheet where a net pay-out or net pay-in to the system is done rather than a separate pay-out and pay-in is reasonable and that is normally how things are handled if you're dealing with the same institution.
"The rich get richer" is basically a result of something sometimes called the "risk free asset" by modern portfolio theory aka "risk free rate of return" -- generally the interest rate the government pays to borrow money. In classical economics its called "economic rent" or "Ricardian rent" (after the classical economist Ricardo). It results from systemic growth in the economy -- growth that increases the value of assets that do not increase with increasing demand, such as land. If you shove more people onto the Earth, you get higher land prices but you don't get more land. (BTW: This is the real reason guys like Gates, Bush and Kennedy are for immigration liberalization.) In a natural setting, this corrects itself through die-offs and/or fighting over the land -- or whatever the monopoly at issue happens to be (it could be a monopoly on, say, the right to make copies of an operating system that everyone happens to have standardized on, which is what made the present day's richest man). Governments protect wealth holders from this natural redistribution by taxing things to pay for police, courts, military, and other things that protect nonsubsistence property rights. When this service is paid for by taxing things other than those property rights, you have a subsidy of nonsubsistence property rights.
If you don't tax away all monopoly profits and redistribute it evenly to everyone, then you end up with a class of people who have an incentive to load up the economy with more people, whether through immigration or birth rates, in order to increase the demand for their property. This class can be the private owners of the monopolized rental properties or it can be public officials that reserve to themselves and their special interests the economic rent derived from taxation.
Think of it as signal processing where you don't subtract out the DC component of the signal before integrating. You end up overflowing your accumulators and losing the information you were trying to extract.
The only exception you might make is for intellectual property representing genuine invention of technological utility, and subsistence property rights since people will generally fight to the death to retain their subsistence.
That's why "the money quote" from my white paper says:
They can get jobs as TA's in American universities where they can require the students to obediently engage in rote memorization. All we need to do is reduce the xenophobia in the US's immigration policies.
One wonders how long before the WTO meetings (and other organizational meetings) are going to be targeted by millimeter-wave weapons wielded by anarchists who no longer dare form crowds in protest?
Yes, PBS is a case in point. PBS is properly called Propaganda Broadcasting Service.
Read the Gates Foundation page on what they're doing about sub Sahara African malaria and then read Plague Time by Paul Ewald describing precisely why none of the approaches used by the Gates Foundation can be really effective against a sexually reproducing, horizontally transmitted pathogen like malaria -- and describing the approach that actually works -- which of course the Gates Foundation can't pursue because none of the grant writers are serious about really stopping the scourge of malaria.
Hell, the folks at the Ford Foundation are proud of the fact that they call Henry Ford "the grave spinner".
Indeed, the Gates Foundation is probably already failing to get the results they should because their failure to use objective criteria for prize awards creates a systemic malincentive: rewarding proposal writing rather than getting real results.
The easiest way to approximate a tax on economic rent is to replace taxes on economic activity -- all of them, including income tax, capital gains tax, value added tax, sales tax, inheritance tax, etc. -- with a single tax on the value of unimproved land, or lot, value. Means of establishing land value are quite well understood and used in eminent domain proceedings all the time. The late Milton Friedman, hardly an enemy of the rich, declared this kind of tax to be the "least distorting" of various tax bases.
A more accurate approximation of economic rent taxation than land value only is to tax net assets at the short term Treasury rate, aka the zero risk interest rate used in modern portfolio theory -- with assessment of asset value by the government the same way it would assess asset value for eminent domain compensation, with the owner having the right to demand that the government purchase the asset at the assessed value.
In this scenario antitrust cases evaporate since the proper way for the government to express its perception of monopoly profits is merely to increase its bid for the tax net asset, thereby increasing the economic rent tax on the owner.
These are better than trees. You can't grow trees in the ocean -- at least not without some pretty impressive artificial islands.
But be warned: This web page is not only uncited, it is no longer on the web outside of the archive.
Could someone explain the difference between "promiscuous dependency taking" and "highly factored code" -- I mean in terms that metrics that can be applied to quantitative methods of statistical quality control?
"Obviousness" can be decided in a trial if the jury is made up of peers of the inventor -- those skilled in the art by some reasonable criteria.