Ok, so 1: how do you quantify the amounts given to who,
Like I said to the other poster, this is just a detail, except that you would want to make it uniform so as to cut out the complexity and corruption. Just $X to every adult, maybe a modification for marital status or kids. No "How much energy did you use this year" on your tax form, no "how much do you make", no "did you try to save energy REALLY hard", etc. You just get the $X, period.
The point, again, is that the problem of "disproportionally burdening the poor" is way overblown, because there are trivial ways to make it progressive while preserving the incentive for cutting back on any *individual* unit of fossil fuel use. And I just laid out how to do it.
and 2: if everyone got their expense back before spending it, then companies have no reason to not pass all the costs onto the consumer. In other words, it would be no different then what we have today except there would be some convoluted scheme in place.
Of course they would pass the costs on, and THAT'S THE FREAKING POINT!
1) Each *unit* of fossil fuel energy costs more, so people stop doing those uses when it's not worth the additional tax, whether they are rich or poor. 2) In the aggregate, the poor do not become any more poor because their additional costs are canceled by the prebate. If the poor find they cannot cut back on any uses, their after tax income is unchanged. 3) Everyone retains their automony in deciding which energy or energy-derived uses they cut back on. (This is a HUGE improvement over proposals that dictate which technologies are "efficient enough".)
And no, the modification I proposed is not convoluted. "$X to everyone" is not convoluted. The complexity of the result *emerges* from the simple rules, but no one has to understand anything convoluted. All they have to understand is, "stuff is more expensive, it's probably due to CO2 caps, and you get free money each year. Go about your usual business of not buying stuff that's too expensive."
Policies don't have to be perfect but they should not under any circumstances, be detrimental to the very people least likely to be able to cope with it.
Again, you're making an unfair comparison. Sure, some poor people spend more than the standard amount. But then, this prebate is better than the cap and trade program without it. Which in turn, is better than no c/t at all, which is ALSO detrimental to some people least able to cope with it. Pick your poison.
Your accusation of screwing some to benefit society is misplaced.
Lowering the dose of APAP in prescription pills makes sense too, I mean 650mg in Darvocets? Take that 4 times a day and you are already over the daily dose. All of that just to prevent some junkies from getting high?
Right on. When I was first prescribed Tramadol, the only medicine to make inroads on my back pain, the doctor felt he had to spike it with tylenol.
Hint: if Tylenol were effective, I wouldn't be coming to you, moron. Thanks for the poison.
Suppose the prebate only covers people living in poverty,
I very specifically said the prebate would be given to everyone, regardless of income, to avoid exactly the problems you listed.
And yes, you can find instances of poor people using much more than the average for their income level. So no "x% of poverty level energy spending" will be perfect. I didn't know policies had to be 100% perfect these days.
AES-128 uses keys which are 128 bits long. That means in order to "break AES" (in order to decrypt something you don't have the key to), all you have to do is try all possible keys of length 128 until you find one that works. That means you would have to try 2^128 different combinations, which is a lot.
What these people have done is found some clever way where you can break AES trying only 2^119 combinations.
Pff. Well if that's all they're claiming, then even I can do better. Hint: don't guess composite numbers! The two factors you have to find are prime!
Hold the phone, homer. How about don't take it from me in the first place! The government can't send you a 'check' unless they take the money from you first.
And the government can't price in the cost your CO2 emissions impose on others unless it takes the money from you.[1] Are you even aware of the point of these programs to begin with? Even if the plan I outlined only shifted money around, it diverts resources from carbon-intensive technologies, while "no tax no rebate" doesn't do that.
Sheesh man, it's fine if you have a good reason to oppose what Congress has come up with (heck, even I can't support it in its current form), but is it too much to ask that you learn the purpose of a CO2 restriction programs before commenting on them?
[1] Or the politically reality changes to one that's fundamentally different from the present one.
Absolutely you might as well bother. Do you really think that we're ever going to convince any of the BRIC countries to volunteer for this, if the richest developed nations won't?
Well, I think that's exactly what I meant when I said:
"'Unilateral disarmament' is symbolic at best."
Though I confess I made that sound dismissive.
So if you're concerned about the *symbolism* -- i.e. in terms of how it looks to other countries -- then yes, such unilateral action could be justified.
But it's not even necessary to play a game of "you go first"; so long as there's international enforcement, everyone can start at the same time.
It would work fine if the tax were progressive, but if the assumption is that the burden on a poor person is the same as the burden on a rich person, then "prebating" enough that the poor guy's net tax is 0 means everyone's net tax is 0.
Not sure I understand. My solution was just prebating energy taxes, and I mean the net tax *change* is zero, and if you base it on poverty level energy spending, that makes it progressive. Because you net change in taxes (if they go up) is equal to the tax you pay on each unit of energy you consume *above* the poverty level energy consumption.
In other words, if E is the cost of the energy concent of goods you consume, and t is the effective tax on energy, and P is the poverty level spending on energy, and R is the Rebate, your net change in taxes is:
E*t - P*t
or, t*(E-P).
1) How will you calculate the amount of this "prebate"? Will it be figured "per man woman or child" in line with the article's assumptions? How much per? How will ou even begin to estimate this?
Yes, great concerns, all, but you're changing the topic. The original concern was "but this will hurt the poor". Fine. There are trivial ways to remove this unpleasant aspect without fundamentally changing the plan or its incentives on any marginal unit of fossil fuels. I just explained how.
So pay a uniform "pre-bate" [1]to everyone equal to the "energy tax" they would pay if their income were x% of the poverty level. (Again, that's a uniform prebate to all adults, with no means-testing.)
Then, the only people whose *net* taxes go up are the ones making above the poverty level and don't reduce energy use. And the poor's taxes (by whatever definition you use for x) don't change. And it retains the incentive for everyone, including the poor, to cut back whatever energy consumption they can.
[1] For those of you with low intelligence or born before 1960, read that as "Mail a check".
The other important consideration is making sure you don't just shift the problem. If only a few countries, or even most of them agree to restrictions, the rest of the world will shrug its collective shoulders, and take on the fossil fuel burning and productino that the nicer countries have kept themselves from doing. Specifically, the BRIC block (Brazil, Russia, India, and China).
Any plan for such a global problem MUST take into account the actions of such "defecting" countries, or you might as well not bother. That can mean using auction revenues to sink CO2, tariffing non-compliant countries (though with blanket punitive tariff on all of their products; it's too much work to figure out the marginal CO2 impact of any one product when they're not pricing its cost in), and yes, even geoengineering.
Red Steel was fun, but it's not what most people like the GP was referring to. I think he meant games with a more one-to-one mapping between the Wiimote's motions and then sword's motions, which should be possible with the Wii Motion Plus or whatever (which IMHO should have been part of functionality at launch).
In Red Steel, when you swing the Wiimote, it just maps it to one of a handful of basic sword moves, plus it allows a few combos.
Not to say it isn't fun though. Red Steel lets you shoot weapons out of enemies' hands so they surrender. If you do it to a leader, his whole group surrenders. It's pretty satisfying to charge in, make the leader surrender, and then "clank, clank,... clankclankclankclank" as all the underlings drop their weapons.
Well put. Would have used my mod points, but I had already comments on how painful it is to read Gladwell, especially knowing people take him seriously.
I don't think Wikipedia was slashdotted because I can confirm I got the error message shortly before the story was posted when I tried to look up an article.
Unless of course, the Firehosers slashdotted it. Do we still have the Firehose? I mean, a real Firehose, that like, doesn't look like a psychedelic trip that crashes your browser and has no option to revert to a pre-sharkjump format?
If you RTFA/S you'll see that some of the legal vagueness on this one surrounds the fact that her MySpace rant wasn't published in any sort of commercial context. It's just her, ranting. That doesn't have anything to do with whether or not she owns the copyright, but it has a lot to do with what's at stake when someone infringes on those copyrights. So, people who don't feel like meeting the price an artist is asking for the work they're selling, and simply rip it off, instead, are - correctly - the targets of a different sort of attention, legally. They're ripping someone off to avoid having to pay what the seller is asking. The MySpace rant wasn't for sale, and she doesn't earn her income through publishing her writings. That's an important consideration in arriving at a sense of what's at stake in the infringement.
Well, obviously the newspaper considered the MySpace rant to have commercial value, since they added it to a commercial product that they did sell. The girl did not want them to publish it (and had legal rights to stop them), while the newspaper, as part of a business, did want to publish it. This establishes commercial value of her work.
But I guess she isn't an "official" artist, so it doesn't count.
The question should be - what about Michael Jackson's life leads people to believe that news of his death is so likely to be a prank that it must be immediately verified?
Well, in my case, because my brother used to prank me exactly that way when we were younger. He would occasionally tell me "Michael Jackson died" and then laugh when I found out it wasn't true. I assumed it was a common prank people played, like they do with Stephen King.
Then when a co-worker told me MJ died, I assumed the same thing was going on, and was like, "you're joking right?" But I didn't do more than load news.google.com, which I do anyway, to verify.
Yeah, and back in 2004, some anti-Bush spammers bought long ads on CBS deliberately designed to look like real CBS news, even including a doctored video made to look like Dan Rather presenting documents proving Bush skipped out on his National Guard service.
What's funny is, they didn't even bother to make the documents look realistic.
Exactly right. Couldn't have said it better myself. This post by itself makes me your fan.
Sadly, I've been in debates with (fellow!) libertarians trying to explain to them that "defining clear rights in a scarce resource (i.e. use of the atmosphere as a waste dump)" really is a market solution and something we should support in general, though not necessarily any *particular* manifestation of such a scheme.
But apparently, because it's not "their view" of what markets "should" look like (i.e. with the inalienable right to cheap oil at the expense of coastal dwellers), they don't consider it a market.
And yes, you are absolutely right about this being about dinosaur industries trying to preserve their commons-dumping privileges rather than supporting a genuine, free enterprise economy with well-defined rights in scarce resources.
Um, the broken windows fallacy works both ways here. Now that we know that unlimited CO2 emissions are harmful to others, it is those who burn fossil fuels who are, in effect, "breaking windows to create jobs".
Yes, it's stupid to cap CO2 emissions to "create jobs", and I wish environmentalists would, for their own good, stop using that argument.
But it's just as bad to say, "Let's f*** over the rest of the world with CO2 emissions so dinosaur industry workers can keep their jobs!"
Carbon restriction legislation doesn't merely "create jobs". Indeed, as the broken window people point out, it "merely" redirects jobs. But it redirects people from "jobs that f*** over future generations and the environment" to "jobs that don't f*** over future generations of the environment".
Not so pointless when you look at it that way, I think.
This is not to say I support the current bill. To the extent that GHG emissions are the problem, they need to be done the most economically efficient, least painful way. A simpler, easier, less painful solution would be to impose a tax or cap the level and auction permits, and then rebate money received this way to individuals in equal shares so as to offset the higher costs of goods, while retaining the incentive to cut back any activity not worth its environmental cost.
But politics allocates by political power, not reason.
I'd like to ask the slashdot community if they've ever heard of anyone who wanted it having trouble getting pot (or almost any common street drug for that matter).
Okay, I'll be honest. I don't know where to get any street drug, including pot. And I'm honestly perplexed at the people who claim that everyone already knows where to get them. (I'm not asking for directions, FBI.) I don't know of any friends who do them, and any friend who I suspect would have connections, I haven't talked to in so long they'd probably be suspicious.
You're reading too much into it. F451 was about bookburning, pure and simple. About some now-quaint worry that, omg someone's gonna burn the subversive books!
Well, now we have the internet, where the books can be uploaded forever.
So Bradbury got it wrong. Instead of trying to read hidden meanings into his books, why not just accept that he got it wrong and was woefully pessimistic about technology.
Oh, right, because he's a hero now, so we can't criticize his earlier -- or ever present -- stupidity. "oh, he *really* meant... whatever happens to be correct!"
I can't wait to hear the rationalizations when Mars gets colonized for real...
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so 1: how do you quantify the amounts given to who,
Like I said to the other poster, this is just a detail, except that you would want to make it uniform so as to cut out the complexity and corruption. Just $X to every adult, maybe a modification for marital status or kids. No "How much energy did you use this year" on your tax form, no "how much do you make", no "did you try to save energy REALLY hard", etc. You just get the $X, period.
The point, again, is that the problem of "disproportionally burdening the poor" is way overblown, because there are trivial ways to make it progressive while preserving the incentive for cutting back on any *individual* unit of fossil fuel use. And I just laid out how to do it.
and 2: if everyone got their expense back before spending it, then companies have no reason to not pass all the costs onto the consumer. In other words, it would be no different then what we have today except there would be some convoluted scheme in place.
Of course they would pass the costs on, and THAT'S THE FREAKING POINT!
1) Each *unit* of fossil fuel energy costs more, so people stop doing those uses when it's not worth the additional tax, whether they are rich or poor.
2) In the aggregate, the poor do not become any more poor because their additional costs are canceled by the prebate. If the poor find they cannot cut back on any uses, their after tax income is unchanged.
3) Everyone retains their automony in deciding which energy or energy-derived uses they cut back on. (This is a HUGE improvement over proposals that dictate which technologies are "efficient enough".)
And no, the modification I proposed is not convoluted. "$X to everyone" is not convoluted. The complexity of the result *emerges* from the simple rules, but no one has to understand anything convoluted. All they have to understand is, "stuff is more expensive, it's probably due to CO2 caps, and you get free money each year. Go about your usual business of not buying stuff that's too expensive."
Policies don't have to be perfect but they should not under any circumstances, be detrimental to the very people least likely to be able to cope with it.
Again, you're making an unfair comparison. Sure, some poor people spend more than the standard amount. But then, this prebate is better than the cap and trade program without it. Which in turn, is better than no c/t at all, which is ALSO detrimental to some people least able to cope with it. Pick your poison.
Your accusation of screwing some to benefit society is misplaced.
Lowering the dose of APAP in prescription pills makes sense too, I mean 650mg in Darvocets? Take that 4 times a day and you are already over the daily dose. All of that just to prevent some junkies from getting high?
Right on. When I was first prescribed Tramadol, the only medicine to make inroads on my back pain, the doctor felt he had to spike it with tylenol.
Hint: if Tylenol were effective, I wouldn't be coming to you, moron. Thanks for the poison.
Yeah, now it won't be long before they seriously consider my argument that nanobots already did build Egyptian structures on Mars!
Suppose the prebate only covers people living in poverty,
I very specifically said the prebate would be given to everyone, regardless of income, to avoid exactly the problems you listed.
And yes, you can find instances of poor people using much more than the average for their income level. So no "x% of poverty level energy spending" will be perfect. I didn't know policies had to be 100% perfect these days.
Note to self: never try to tell a cryptography joke.
AES-128 uses keys which are 128 bits long. That means in order to "break AES" (in order to decrypt something you don't have the key to), all you have to do is try all possible keys of length 128 until you find one that works. That means you would have to try 2^128 different combinations, which is a lot.
What these people have done is found some clever way where you can break AES trying only 2^119 combinations.
Pff. Well if that's all they're claiming, then even I can do better. Hint: don't guess composite numbers! The two factors you have to find are prime!
How'd this get modded insightful?
Hold the phone, homer. How about don't take it from me in the first place! The government can't send you a 'check' unless they take the money from you first.
And the government can't price in the cost your CO2 emissions impose on others unless it takes the money from you.[1] Are you even aware of the point of these programs to begin with? Even if the plan I outlined only shifted money around, it diverts resources from carbon-intensive technologies, while "no tax no rebate" doesn't do that.
Sheesh man, it's fine if you have a good reason to oppose what Congress has come up with (heck, even I can't support it in its current form), but is it too much to ask that you learn the purpose of a CO2 restriction programs before commenting on them?
[1] Or the politically reality changes to one that's fundamentally different from the present one.
Absolutely you might as well bother. Do you really think that we're ever going to convince any of the BRIC countries to volunteer for this, if the richest developed nations won't?
Well, I think that's exactly what I meant when I said:
"'Unilateral disarmament' is symbolic at best."
Though I confess I made that sound dismissive.
So if you're concerned about the *symbolism* -- i.e. in terms of how it looks to other countries -- then yes, such unilateral action could be justified.
But it's not even necessary to play a game of "you go first"; so long as there's international enforcement, everyone can start at the same time.
It would work fine if the tax were progressive, but if the assumption is that the burden on a poor person is the same as the burden on a rich person, then "prebating" enough that the poor guy's net tax is 0 means everyone's net tax is 0.
Not sure I understand. My solution was just prebating energy taxes, and I mean the net tax *change* is zero, and if you base it on poverty level energy spending, that makes it progressive. Because you net change in taxes (if they go up) is equal to the tax you pay on each unit of energy you consume *above* the poverty level energy consumption.
In other words, if E is the cost of the energy concent of goods you consume, and t is the effective tax on energy, and P is the poverty level spending on energy, and R is the Rebate, your net change in taxes is:
E*t - P*t
or, t*(E-P).
1) How will you calculate the amount of this "prebate"? Will it be figured "per man woman or child" in line with the article's assumptions? How much per? How will ou even begin to estimate this?
Yes, great concerns, all, but you're changing the topic. The original concern was "but this will hurt the poor". Fine. There are trivial ways to remove this unpleasant aspect without fundamentally changing the plan or its incentives on any marginal unit of fossil fuels. I just explained how.
2) How will you fund the "prebate"?
From the auction revenues.
So pay a uniform "pre-bate" [1]to everyone equal to the "energy tax" they would pay if their income were x% of the poverty level. (Again, that's a uniform prebate to all adults, with no means-testing.)
Then, the only people whose *net* taxes go up are the ones making above the poverty level and don't reduce energy use. And the poor's taxes (by whatever definition you use for x) don't change. And it retains the incentive for everyone, including the poor, to cut back whatever energy consumption they can.
[1] For those of you with low intelligence or born before 1960, read that as "Mail a check".
The other important consideration is making sure you don't just shift the problem. If only a few countries, or even most of them agree to restrictions, the rest of the world will shrug its collective shoulders, and take on the fossil fuel burning and productino that the nicer countries have kept themselves from doing. Specifically, the BRIC block (Brazil, Russia, India, and China).
Any plan for such a global problem MUST take into account the actions of such "defecting" countries, or you might as well not bother. That can mean using auction revenues to sink CO2, tariffing non-compliant countries (though with blanket punitive tariff on all of their products; it's too much work to figure out the marginal CO2 impact of any one product when they're not pricing its cost in), and yes, even geoengineering.
"Unilateral disarmament" is symbolic at best.
Wait, cavemen had the concept of a straw man argument, and could refer to it abstractly? Wow, they were smarter than I thought!
Red Steel was fun, but it's not what most people like the GP was referring to. I think he meant games with a more one-to-one mapping between the Wiimote's motions and then sword's motions, which should be possible with the Wii Motion Plus or whatever (which IMHO should have been part of functionality at launch).
In Red Steel, when you swing the Wiimote, it just maps it to one of a handful of basic sword moves, plus it allows a few combos.
Not to say it isn't fun though. Red Steel lets you shoot weapons out of enemies' hands so they surrender. If you do it to a leader, his whole group surrenders. It's pretty satisfying to charge in, make the leader surrender, and then "clank, clank, ... clankclankclankclank" as all the underlings drop their weapons.
Well put. Would have used my mod points, but I had already comments on how painful it is to read Gladwell, especially knowing people take him seriously.
I don't think Wikipedia was slashdotted because I can confirm I got the error message shortly before the story was posted when I tried to look up an article.
Unless of course, the Firehosers slashdotted it. Do we still have the Firehose? I mean, a real Firehose, that like, doesn't look like a psychedelic trip that crashes your browser and has no option to revert to a pre-sharkjump format?
FACT: Chuck Norris is the only one who can read Malcom Gladwell without losing brain cells.
But even he loses one.
If you RTFA/S you'll see that some of the legal vagueness on this one surrounds the fact that her MySpace rant wasn't published in any sort of commercial context. It's just her, ranting. That doesn't have anything to do with whether or not she owns the copyright, but it has a lot to do with what's at stake when someone infringes on those copyrights. So, people who don't feel like meeting the price an artist is asking for the work they're selling, and simply rip it off, instead, are - correctly - the targets of a different sort of attention, legally. They're ripping someone off to avoid having to pay what the seller is asking. The MySpace rant wasn't for sale, and she doesn't earn her income through publishing her writings. That's an important consideration in arriving at a sense of what's at stake in the infringement.
Well, obviously the newspaper considered the MySpace rant to have commercial value, since they added it to a commercial product that they did sell. The girl did not want them to publish it (and had legal rights to stop them), while the newspaper, as part of a business, did want to publish it. This establishes commercial value of her work.
But I guess she isn't an "official" artist, so it doesn't count.
The question should be - what about Michael Jackson's life leads people to believe that news of his death is so likely to be a prank that it must be immediately verified?
Well, in my case, because my brother used to prank me exactly that way when we were younger. He would occasionally tell me "Michael Jackson died" and then laugh when I found out it wasn't true. I assumed it was a common prank people played, like they do with Stephen King.
Then when a co-worker told me MJ died, I assumed the same thing was going on, and was like, "you're joking right?" But I didn't do more than load news.google.com, which I do anyway, to verify.
Yeah, and back in 2004, some anti-Bush spammers bought long ads on CBS deliberately designed to look like real CBS news, even including a doctored video made to look like Dan Rather presenting documents proving Bush skipped out on his National Guard service.
What's funny is, they didn't even bother to make the documents look realistic.
Why CBS even approved the "ads", I have no idea.
Exactly right. Couldn't have said it better myself. This post by itself makes me your fan.
Sadly, I've been in debates with (fellow!) libertarians trying to explain to them that "defining clear rights in a scarce resource (i.e. use of the atmosphere as a waste dump)" really is a market solution and something we should support in general, though not necessarily any *particular* manifestation of such a scheme.
But apparently, because it's not "their view" of what markets "should" look like (i.e. with the inalienable right to cheap oil at the expense of coastal dwellers), they don't consider it a market.
And yes, you are absolutely right about this being about dinosaur industries trying to preserve their commons-dumping privileges rather than supporting a genuine, free enterprise economy with well-defined rights in scarce resources.
Um, the broken windows fallacy works both ways here. Now that we know that unlimited CO2 emissions are harmful to others, it is those who burn fossil fuels who are, in effect, "breaking windows to create jobs".
Yes, it's stupid to cap CO2 emissions to "create jobs", and I wish environmentalists would, for their own good, stop using that argument.
But it's just as bad to say, "Let's f*** over the rest of the world with CO2 emissions so dinosaur industry workers can keep their jobs!"
Carbon restriction legislation doesn't merely "create jobs". Indeed, as the broken window people point out, it "merely" redirects jobs. But it redirects people from "jobs that f*** over future generations and the environment" to "jobs that don't f*** over future generations of the environment".
Not so pointless when you look at it that way, I think.
This is not to say I support the current bill. To the extent that GHG emissions are the problem, they need to be done the most economically efficient, least painful way. A simpler, easier, less painful solution would be to impose a tax or cap the level and auction permits, and then rebate money received this way to individuals in equal shares so as to offset the higher costs of goods, while retaining the incentive to cut back any activity not worth its environmental cost.
But politics allocates by political power, not reason.
My hands know the password to my sperm bank.
Fine with me. Iran could use a lot of "joint ventures involving Siemens" right about now, if you ask me ;-)
*ducks*
I'd like to ask the slashdot community if they've ever heard of anyone who wanted it having trouble getting pot (or almost any common street drug for that matter).
Okay, I'll be honest. I don't know where to get any street drug, including pot. And I'm honestly perplexed at the people who claim that everyone already knows where to get them. (I'm not asking for directions, FBI.) I don't know of any friends who do them, and any friend who I suspect would have connections, I haven't talked to in so long they'd probably be suspicious.
So, how much of an outlier am I?
You're reading too much into it. F451 was about bookburning, pure and simple. About some now-quaint worry that, omg someone's gonna burn the subversive books!
Well, now we have the internet, where the books can be uploaded forever.
So Bradbury got it wrong. Instead of trying to read hidden meanings into his books, why not just accept that he got it wrong and was woefully pessimistic about technology.
Oh, right, because he's a hero now, so we can't criticize his earlier -- or ever present -- stupidity. "oh, he *really* meant ... whatever happens to be correct!"
I can't wait to hear the rationalizations when Mars gets colonized for real...