Problem with the current system is that the glass manufacturing and installation lobby likely outweigh the common good in terms of control of the legislative process, so in that sense, breaking glass does improve their economy.
Citation: insurance requirements in the state of Florida requiring all insurance companies to provide red-carpet windshield replacement service at no (additional) cost to policy holders. It's amazingly good service, you get a crack in your windshield, call them up, they refer you to a number where they provide a list of service providers, all of whom will drive to your work to replace your windshield the next day before lunch. 5 minutes effort on my part and the windshield was more or less magically replaced the next day. Every single legally insured vehicle in Florida is eligible for this "free" service. More things in life should be like this... but I wouldn't necessarily have chosen windshield replacement as the first one to implement.
And the tunnels worked out so well for the Branch Davidians.
In my experience, it is usually counterproductive to attempt to make Law Enforcement Officers (of all levels) follow the law. Not that is should be, just that it is.
You might disagree strongly with his politics and his presidency - that's completely fine - but calling him names and resorting to insinuations about his intelligence adds nothing useful to the public political discourse.
While I completely agree with your points, I'd like to point out the *ahem* high level of critical analysis usually proffered by Obama's detractors regarding his parentage, intelligence, species, etc. duing their "whining" about him being elected.
Granted, W. had above average intelligence, but one episode from his youth crystalizes my opinions about his "fitness to lead" - something about a joyride in a military jet? By itself, not a damning act, but coupled with "Mission Accomplished" and all of his other antics as CINC, I'm sure people who knew him knew all of that was coming before he did it. They should be deeply ashamed of having promoted him to the highest office.
I'm impressed. The first time in 3 years I've been impressed, so the bar is pretty low. But good going Obama.
It does read like unexpectedly good news. Maybe a bit too good, even?
...
If this is real, a more likely reason would be that there happens to be big enough players whose interests by chance happen to line with the common good in this particular case, at this point in history, right?
The cynic in me keeps hoping that someday, the majority of the people will be treated like a "big player" and the "big players" will realize that screwing the majority of the people is not really good for the "big players" in the end.
You do realize that the President isn't the one wasting his time writing legislation like this. Nor was he the one wasting time voting to reaffirm that "In God we Trust" is our national motto or that the mint should print Baseball Hall of Fame coins.
Right now he's the only one making any attempt at fixing anything with the limited powers he has. Even if you don't agree with what he is doing at least he is DOING something.
I wouldn't say he's the "only one", but I would say that the majority of the executive branch is doing something, whereas the majority of Congress is not.
But if you're going to become another Einstein, well I don't really see it.
I have a theory on Einstein, and I mean the man no disrespect because he obviously hit on some basic truths that "the establishment" was missing, and more to his credit, he published very little in the way of "misses," but, with all the billions of people, and all the millions of unusually intelligent people, and all the thousands of weird (non-conformist) exceptionally intelligent people, I think that a lot of Einsteins success was simply that he got a lucky, he happened to tie into a vision of the truth and get it "out there" - one that others before him may have tried to explain, but couldn't get traction with. If the accounts I have seen/heard/read are at all accurate, Einstein's ideas could well have been ignored with just a little bad luck at any of a dozen critical points in his life - I have a hard time believing that the "first Einstein," meaning the first physicist with his visions of the universe, actually succeeded in changing the world's view. His arguments were theoretical, hard to prove (even today), and of little immediate (next 6 months immediate) practical application. If he truly was the first person with these visions, I think the world is exceptionally lucky to have taken notice of them.
I am virtually certain that among all the kooks out there espousing far out paradigm shifting visions of whatever, some of them are hitting on the truth - I have absolutely no idea how to practically differentiate them from the majority that are just kooks. It takes a lot of resources to confirm or deny most theories, and "cheap, preliminary investigations" are very prone to false negative (and false positive) results. Getting resources devoted to anything that is not going to provide immediate (next 6 months) benefit to the resource provider is rare in the non-PhD world, and PhDs are rare, so, in a sense, discovery and proof of far out truths is already facing rare-squared odds. We like to think that the "best and brightest" become PhDs, but that's an imperfect process, as is the allocation of resources to research. There are a lot of "great truths" still discoverable in garages by college dropouts, but they face a different sort of rare-squared (probably more like rare to the fourth) challenge in getting traction with the establishment
As a society, if we could find a way to distribute our abundance (food, shelter, access to knowledge are all orders of magnitude "cheaper" than they were a century ago) and incentivize more people to endeavor in the fields of discovery and verification of theories, I feel it would pay better dividends than our current pursuits which seem centered on accumulating, distributing, and profiting from flashy material "bling." In just the past three decades, I feel like there has been an order of magnitude increase in the amount of basically useless junk that is manufactured, distributed (worldwide), sold, owned, stored, re-sold, donated and sent to land-fills. I don't feel like any of that activity is doing anything but making busywork for most people involved, a few get wealthy, and a lot of energy is expended in the process, but at the end of it all, it's just a way for people to pass the time while making piles of junk in landfills.
The governments that are proposing this (Oregon, at least) deny there is any privacy issue or that the GPS devices will be used to track people. Even after being reminded that the GPS must record where and when the car is driven so the tax can be computed.
These fine legislators were begotten from relationships wherein their daddy "picked up" their momma to be with the line "it's okay, you can trust me, I'm with the government."
The difference is they attach something to your property. They also don't have the restriction of manpower.
If we take your argument at face value, why not install these devices on all cars during the inspection? or when sold?
OBD-III contained various proposals along these lines, RFID type transponders that would "talk" to checkpoints as you pass, etc. I haven't kept up with current state of the proposals, I think we're still mostly getting OBD-II in today's cars.
Yes they can. There is no ruling that the police can't follow you everywhere you go 24 hours 7 days a week other than the laws of economics.
Except, they may not enter your private property. I suppose they can try to watch you from the air, which is why it's useful to have a system of tunnels, you know, like the Branch Davidians had?
I approached a 'cycle cop running a speed trap out of his jurisdiction once, I asked him about where the city lines were drawn, he gave me some vague answer about how complicated it is, I gave him a story about how his city police force refused to investigate alarm calls next door because it was outside their jurisdiction, we wished each other a good day and I walked back to the house. He radared one or two more cars as I walked away, then packed up and moved down the street to his jurisdiction.
When it's no big deal, I think they'll try to do the right thing, but if you are a "person of interest" and they have no more interesting persons to investigate, their title is "detective" and they do have a job to do. You wouldn't want them slacking off, would you?
It is a little bit fun, in an unnerving way, if you truly have nothing to hide. On the other hand, anytime I have ever been searched, I have always worried if the searcher was dirty enough to plant something on me. So far, none of them ever have been. I have also been detained a couple of times longer than felt comfortable when I obviously matched a description of someone they were searching for - in two cases I managed to break the ice with them with a question on the order of "what are you really looking for, is there any way I can help." In both cases, they let me go within a minute or so after that. In another case, the pig (they're not all pigs, but this one was) ordered me to stay in my car for 40 minutes via his bullhorn and then finally wrote me a ticket for running a light that wasn't red and told me straight out without me saying anything "you can take it to court, but when we get in front of the judge it's my word as a police officer against yours."
We already have flying cars, but maybe only 1K civilians choose to afford to use them on a regular basis: they're called helicopters, and if people really wanted them in the form of cars badly enough (like Molleret. al.), they could do that, but like the helicopters, it's a question of economics and socio-political reality, not science, technology or invention per-se.
Everything new that is discovered, learned, realized or developed comes in no small part from everything that came before it.
That is changing. In the 1800s, all learned men with a University education would know Greek and Latin, certain philosophers, certain writers, etc. and this was the common education that they all shared to base their extended learning on. Today, we specialize to such an extent that some science and engineering majors may only share two or three classes in common with other majors such as business, art, or education.
Within engineering, there is the core curriculum of a dozen or so classes, then the branches form.
As the world grows in its billions and we specialize ever further, we will have less and less in common with people from other fields.
If you should chance into an entirely new field, or, more likely, a fusion of two previously disparate fields, it is not necessary for you to have the sum of all knowledge of everything that has ever been known before in the related areas for you to contribute entirely new things to the world. It might help, more often, it seems like a waste of effort.
I have been more or less doing this fusion with software and other engineering in various fields since graduation, mostly medicine. The work is chaotic and I'm not sure I'll ever make an enduring "mark" on the world, that is not my goal, it might happen by chance, but I'd be just as happy if it didn't.
If you say open source free software benefits the software industry, why would cheap software (developed off-shore) not do the same?
Start by viewing the movie "Outsourced," about call centers instead of software, yes, but not so different - tell me how "Toad" ends that movie and tell me who profited from the entire venture>
Ben and Jerry built a damn good ice cream business based on the naive, children's version of "the Golden rule" they became an international force to be reckoned with while keeping to their promise to maintain a maximum ratio of 7x between the lowest and highest paid employees in their company. Eventually, the grown up version: "He who has the gold, makes the rules." overpowered their ideals, and now they're just another big company in the global landscape. Google is currently undergoing a similar transition from "don't be evil," to "try not to be too evil." God help us if they ever turn around and try to extract every penny they can from their current position of power in the world's information flow. But, shouldn't they? Aren't they obligated to their shareholders to maximize profits? Shouldn't they dump all these high priced child prodigies and outsource their software business to some guys in India who are "good enough" to keep the ad revenue flowing in?
They vote on it in secret... great, maybe they should also be provided secret identities ala the witness protection program, so lobbyists can't find them, and then you could penalize them with threat of the death penalty if they are caught seeking out bribe money. (Hint: given human nature, this rule will be violated in every session, regardless of the death penalty.)
Might as well just accept solar power as it falls naturally. 100% pure natural sunlight already turns caucasian skin all kinds of painful purple and red in less than an hour, blisters within 2 or 3. Increase that power density by a factor of 100 and see what happens, even if you shift the wavelengths.
Faster and better is good for transit, supply chain management, service delivery, etc. Reward those top performers.
Being able to execute a stock trade in sub-millisecond time has esoteric spin-off benefits at best, the profits it generates are wholly disproportionate to any benefit delivered to society.
Crazy. A website devoted to nerds where so many people rail against automation and computerization. WTF slashdot.
Technology can be used for good, or not good. Unless you're one of the 0.1% who benefit directly from profits of high frequency trading, or maybe the 0.2% who benefit from the millisecond liquidity afforded by the high frequency traders, I'd call it not good for "the rest of us."
If securities trading liquidity was dragged back to where it took (gasp) a whole day to buy or sell, I don't think the majority of the world would suffer, just those guys that make money in trading. Use automation and computerization to execute those daily trades efficiently, but don't make our financial markets a god damned casino.
Or we could seriously commit to harnessing wind, solar, waves, geothermal and human produced power (I mean ride your bike to work and take the stairs to decrease power consumption). We should also start putting policies in places that make it harder to be sub-urban. Cities are much more efficient at using energy than the far flung sprawl.
-GiH
Hey, I like living in my sprawl! I woudn't mind having decent mass transit to ride, but decent - economically viable - mass transit - and sprawl don't seem to all work together, yet.
Tell you what, let me use 200 square feet of my 2400 square foot house as a "virtual office" and teleconference to my colleagues as needed, hell, leave the connection open 9 hours a day, instead of making me drive 20 miles a day to share an 80 square foot office with another guy and bitch about how the AC is always too cold.
Sounds like Big Appliance needs a windfall profits tax!
Hey, lots of good blue collar American workers will be put out of jobs if you tax the appliance makers - oh, wait, they're already out of their jobs because 90% of production moved overseas. I guess we made oil a little too cheap, didn't we? Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
How can it be that you say: So, we don't want to reduce carbon emissions because it will hurt our economy - When the european economies easily can reduce CO2 production *and* strive?
The current economicaly crisis is not an economical one per se, but a financial one.
(Hint: by investing into greener thechnology, the industry producing that green technology is growing and creating economical growth)
Yes, yes, yes, but what you fail to realize is that the established industries (coal, oil, natural gas, etc.) are the ones with the deep connections to the politicians. Anything that hurts them hurts our "democratically elected representatives." How will we ever get out of this without killing them all and starting over?
"High frequency" trading would become much less profitable.
Any tax at all on high frequency trading would make it unprofitable. If we don't slay that monster (HFT) soon, it will build itself a economic-political fortress that will be very hard to tear down.
We could also substantially reduce our emissions by buying fewer goods from overseas. One cargo ship emits the equivalent pollution of 50 million cars (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-pollution). Here's another way of putting it from the article:
Just 15 of the world's biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world's 760m cars.
Making more of an effort to produce items more locally is sort of the same as "living closer to where we work", but it has benefits far beyond a shorter commute. Additionally, where most of us live we probably have stricter environmental controls, which would mean that what IS produced is produced more cleanly. This would likely drive up the costs of goods, forcing us to buy fewer items of higher quality and own them longer, which would provide further environmental (and, dare I say, social) benefits. Overall, it seems like a good plan.
Germany has used locally produced appliances in preference to imports for a long time... they'll pay $800 for a dishwasher with 1/3 the capacity of an "American" dishwasher (made in China) that sells for $300.
Are you suggesting that Americans start living and thinking like Germans? Not likely to happen until the WWII vets / Great Depression survivors (and most of their children) are dead.
Slashdot Mirror
"breaking windows does not improve the economy"
Problem with the current system is that the glass manufacturing and installation lobby likely outweigh the common good in terms of control of the legislative process, so in that sense, breaking glass does improve their economy.
Citation: insurance requirements in the state of Florida requiring all insurance companies to provide red-carpet windshield replacement service at no (additional) cost to policy holders. It's amazingly good service, you get a crack in your windshield, call them up, they refer you to a number where they provide a list of service providers, all of whom will drive to your work to replace your windshield the next day before lunch. 5 minutes effort on my part and the windshield was more or less magically replaced the next day. Every single legally insured vehicle in Florida is eligible for this "free" service. More things in life should be like this... but I wouldn't necessarily have chosen windshield replacement as the first one to implement.
And the tunnels worked out so well for the Branch Davidians.
In my experience, it is usually counterproductive to attempt to make Law Enforcement Officers (of all levels) follow the law. Not that is should be, just that it is.
You might disagree strongly with his politics and his presidency - that's completely fine - but calling him names and resorting to insinuations about his intelligence adds nothing useful to the public political discourse.
While I completely agree with your points, I'd like to point out the *ahem* high level of critical analysis usually proffered by Obama's detractors regarding his parentage, intelligence, species, etc. duing their "whining" about him being elected.
Granted, W. had above average intelligence, but one episode from his youth crystalizes my opinions about his "fitness to lead" - something about a joyride in a military jet? By itself, not a damning act, but coupled with "Mission Accomplished" and all of his other antics as CINC, I'm sure people who knew him knew all of that was coming before he did it. They should be deeply ashamed of having promoted him to the highest office.
I'm impressed. The first time in 3 years I've been impressed, so the bar is pretty low. But good going Obama.
Really? Getting rid of Ghadafi at very minimal cost and with 0 US lives lost didn't impress you?
He was certainly cheaper than Osama or Saddam.
I'm impressed. The first time in 3 years I've been impressed, so the bar is pretty low. But good going Obama.
It does read like unexpectedly good news. Maybe a bit too good, even?
If this is real, a more likely reason would be that there happens to be big enough players whose interests by chance happen to line with the common good in this particular case, at this point in history, right?
The cynic in me keeps hoping that someday, the majority of the people will be treated like a "big player" and the "big players" will realize that screwing the majority of the people is not really good for the "big players" in the end.
You do realize that the President isn't the one wasting his time writing legislation like this. Nor was he the one wasting time voting to reaffirm that "In God we Trust" is our national motto or that the mint should print Baseball Hall of Fame coins.
Right now he's the only one making any attempt at fixing anything with the limited powers he has. Even if you don't agree with what he is doing at least he is DOING something.
I wouldn't say he's the "only one", but I would say that the majority of the executive branch is doing something, whereas the majority of Congress is not.
But if you're going to become another Einstein, well I don't really see it.
I have a theory on Einstein, and I mean the man no disrespect because he obviously hit on some basic truths that "the establishment" was missing, and more to his credit, he published very little in the way of "misses," but, with all the billions of people, and all the millions of unusually intelligent people, and all the thousands of weird (non-conformist) exceptionally intelligent people, I think that a lot of Einsteins success was simply that he got a lucky, he happened to tie into a vision of the truth and get it "out there" - one that others before him may have tried to explain, but couldn't get traction with. If the accounts I have seen/heard/read are at all accurate, Einstein's ideas could well have been ignored with just a little bad luck at any of a dozen critical points in his life - I have a hard time believing that the "first Einstein," meaning the first physicist with his visions of the universe, actually succeeded in changing the world's view. His arguments were theoretical, hard to prove (even today), and of little immediate (next 6 months immediate) practical application. If he truly was the first person with these visions, I think the world is exceptionally lucky to have taken notice of them.
I am virtually certain that among all the kooks out there espousing far out paradigm shifting visions of whatever, some of them are hitting on the truth - I have absolutely no idea how to practically differentiate them from the majority that are just kooks. It takes a lot of resources to confirm or deny most theories, and "cheap, preliminary investigations" are very prone to false negative (and false positive) results. Getting resources devoted to anything that is not going to provide immediate (next 6 months) benefit to the resource provider is rare in the non-PhD world, and PhDs are rare, so, in a sense, discovery and proof of far out truths is already facing rare-squared odds. We like to think that the "best and brightest" become PhDs, but that's an imperfect process, as is the allocation of resources to research. There are a lot of "great truths" still discoverable in garages by college dropouts, but they face a different sort of rare-squared (probably more like rare to the fourth) challenge in getting traction with the establishment
As a society, if we could find a way to distribute our abundance (food, shelter, access to knowledge are all orders of magnitude "cheaper" than they were a century ago) and incentivize more people to endeavor in the fields of discovery and verification of theories, I feel it would pay better dividends than our current pursuits which seem centered on accumulating, distributing, and profiting from flashy material "bling." In just the past three decades, I feel like there has been an order of magnitude increase in the amount of basically useless junk that is manufactured, distributed (worldwide), sold, owned, stored, re-sold, donated and sent to land-fills. I don't feel like any of that activity is doing anything but making busywork for most people involved, a few get wealthy, and a lot of energy is expended in the process, but at the end of it all, it's just a way for people to pass the time while making piles of junk in landfills.
but I sure hope you don't expect to prevail based on the above premise.
of course not.
since, you need to account for the weight and wind resistance of the wiring, too.
So, is it o.k. if the officer squirts a half-ounce of gasoline into your tank while he plants the device?
The governments that are proposing this (Oregon, at least) deny there is any privacy issue or that the GPS devices will be used to track people. Even after being reminded that the GPS must record where and when the car is driven so the tax can be computed.
These fine legislators were begotten from relationships wherein their daddy "picked up" their momma to be with the line "it's okay, you can trust me, I'm with the government."
The difference is they attach something to your property. They also don't have the restriction of manpower.
If we take your argument at face value, why not install these devices on all cars during the inspection? or when sold?
OBD-III contained various proposals along these lines, RFID type transponders that would "talk" to checkpoints as you pass, etc. I haven't kept up with current state of the proposals, I think we're still mostly getting OBD-II in today's cars.
Yes they can. There is no ruling that the police can't follow you everywhere you go 24 hours 7 days a week other than the laws of economics.
Except, they may not enter your private property. I suppose they can try to watch you from the air, which is why it's useful to have a system of tunnels, you know, like the Branch Davidians had?
I approached a 'cycle cop running a speed trap out of his jurisdiction once, I asked him about where the city lines were drawn, he gave me some vague answer about how complicated it is, I gave him a story about how his city police force refused to investigate alarm calls next door because it was outside their jurisdiction, we wished each other a good day and I walked back to the house. He radared one or two more cars as I walked away, then packed up and moved down the street to his jurisdiction.
When it's no big deal, I think they'll try to do the right thing, but if you are a "person of interest" and they have no more interesting persons to investigate, their title is "detective" and they do have a job to do. You wouldn't want them slacking off, would you?
It is a little bit fun, in an unnerving way, if you truly have nothing to hide. On the other hand, anytime I have ever been searched, I have always worried if the searcher was dirty enough to plant something on me. So far, none of them ever have been. I have also been detained a couple of times longer than felt comfortable when I obviously matched a description of someone they were searching for - in two cases I managed to break the ice with them with a question on the order of "what are you really looking for, is there any way I can help." In both cases, they let me go within a minute or so after that. In another case, the pig (they're not all pigs, but this one was) ordered me to stay in my car for 40 minutes via his bullhorn and then finally wrote me a ticket for running a light that wasn't red and told me straight out without me saying anything "you can take it to court, but when we get in front of the judge it's my word as a police officer against yours."
Maybe even flying cars!
We already have flying cars, but maybe only 1K civilians choose to afford to use them on a regular basis: they're called helicopters, and if people really wanted them in the form of cars badly enough (like Moller et. al.), they could do that, but like the helicopters, it's a question of economics and socio-political reality, not science, technology or invention per-se.
Everything new that is discovered, learned, realized or developed comes in no small part from everything that came before it.
That is changing. In the 1800s, all learned men with a University education would know Greek and Latin, certain philosophers, certain writers, etc. and this was the common education that they all shared to base their extended learning on. Today, we specialize to such an extent that some science and engineering majors may only share two or three classes in common with other majors such as business, art, or education.
Within engineering, there is the core curriculum of a dozen or so classes, then the branches form.
As the world grows in its billions and we specialize ever further, we will have less and less in common with people from other fields.
If you should chance into an entirely new field, or, more likely, a fusion of two previously disparate fields, it is not necessary for you to have the sum of all knowledge of everything that has ever been known before in the related areas for you to contribute entirely new things to the world. It might help, more often, it seems like a waste of effort.
I have been more or less doing this fusion with software and other engineering in various fields since graduation, mostly medicine. The work is chaotic and I'm not sure I'll ever make an enduring "mark" on the world, that is not my goal, it might happen by chance, but I'd be just as happy if it didn't.
If you say open source free software benefits the software industry, why would cheap software (developed off-shore) not do the same?
Start by viewing the movie "Outsourced," about call centers instead of software, yes, but not so different - tell me how "Toad" ends that movie and tell me who profited from the entire venture>
Ben and Jerry built a damn good ice cream business based on the naive, children's version of "the Golden rule" they became an international force to be reckoned with while keeping to their promise to maintain a maximum ratio of 7x between the lowest and highest paid employees in their company. Eventually, the grown up version: "He who has the gold, makes the rules." overpowered their ideals, and now they're just another big company in the global landscape. Google is currently undergoing a similar transition from "don't be evil," to "try not to be too evil." God help us if they ever turn around and try to extract every penny they can from their current position of power in the world's information flow. But, shouldn't they? Aren't they obligated to their shareholders to maximize profits? Shouldn't they dump all these high priced child prodigies and outsource their software business to some guys in India who are "good enough" to keep the ad revenue flowing in?
They vote on it in secret... great, maybe they should also be provided secret identities ala the witness protection program, so lobbyists can't find them, and then you could penalize them with threat of the death penalty if they are caught seeking out bribe money. (Hint: given human nature, this rule will be violated in every session, regardless of the death penalty.)
Might as well just accept solar power as it falls naturally. 100% pure natural sunlight already turns caucasian skin all kinds of painful purple and red in less than an hour, blisters within 2 or 3. Increase that power density by a factor of 100 and see what happens, even if you shift the wavelengths.
Faster and better is good for transit, supply chain management, service delivery, etc. Reward those top performers.
Being able to execute a stock trade in sub-millisecond time has esoteric spin-off benefits at best, the profits it generates are wholly disproportionate to any benefit delivered to society.
The accounting costs might well sink it.
Crazy. A website devoted to nerds where so many people rail against automation and computerization. WTF slashdot.
Technology can be used for good, or not good. Unless you're one of the 0.1% who benefit directly from profits of high frequency trading, or maybe the 0.2% who benefit from the millisecond liquidity afforded by the high frequency traders, I'd call it not good for "the rest of us."
If securities trading liquidity was dragged back to where it took (gasp) a whole day to buy or sell, I don't think the majority of the world would suffer, just those guys that make money in trading. Use automation and computerization to execute those daily trades efficiently, but don't make our financial markets a god damned casino.
Skyhooks. Mmm.. sci-fi solutions to our problems.
Or we could seriously commit to harnessing wind, solar, waves, geothermal and human produced power (I mean ride your bike to work and take the stairs to decrease power consumption). We should also start putting policies in places that make it harder to be sub-urban. Cities are much more efficient at using energy than the far flung sprawl.
-GiH
Hey, I like living in my sprawl! I woudn't mind having decent mass transit to ride, but decent - economically viable - mass transit - and sprawl don't seem to all work together, yet.
Tell you what, let me use 200 square feet of my 2400 square foot house as a "virtual office" and teleconference to my colleagues as needed, hell, leave the connection open 9 hours a day, instead of making me drive 20 miles a day to share an 80 square foot office with another guy and bitch about how the AC is always too cold.
Sounds like Big Appliance needs a windfall profits tax!
Hey, lots of good blue collar American workers will be put out of jobs if you tax the appliance makers - oh, wait, they're already out of their jobs because 90% of production moved overseas. I guess we made oil a little too cheap, didn't we? Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
How can it be that you say: So, we don't want to reduce carbon emissions because it will hurt our economy -
When the european economies easily can reduce CO2 production *and* strive?
The current economicaly crisis is not an economical one per se, but a financial one.
(Hint: by investing into greener thechnology, the industry producing that green technology is growing and creating economical growth)
Yes, yes, yes, but what you fail to realize is that the established industries (coal, oil, natural gas, etc.) are the ones with the deep connections to the politicians. Anything that hurts them hurts our "democratically elected representatives." How will we ever get out of this without killing them all and starting over?
"High frequency" trading would become much less profitable.
Any tax at all on high frequency trading would make it unprofitable. If we don't slay that monster (HFT) soon, it will build itself a economic-political fortress that will be very hard to tear down.
We could also substantially reduce our emissions by buying fewer goods from overseas. One cargo ship emits the equivalent pollution of 50 million cars (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-pollution). Here's another way of putting it from the article:
Just 15 of the world's biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world's 760m cars.
Making more of an effort to produce items more locally is sort of the same as "living closer to where we work", but it has benefits far beyond a shorter commute. Additionally, where most of us live we probably have stricter environmental controls, which would mean that what IS produced is produced more cleanly. This would likely drive up the costs of goods, forcing us to buy fewer items of higher quality and own them longer, which would provide further environmental (and, dare I say, social) benefits. Overall, it seems like a good plan.
Germany has used locally produced appliances in preference to imports for a long time... they'll pay $800 for a dishwasher with 1/3 the capacity of an "American" dishwasher (made in China) that sells for $300.
Are you suggesting that Americans start living and thinking like Germans? Not likely to happen until the WWII vets / Great Depression survivors (and most of their children) are dead.