You didn't imagine any possibilities there; you just rephrased the problem. A solution would be to show how that universe's laws work, such that cardinality is meaningless, or how it lacks informational reversibility. Simply positing the universe lacks cardinality is begging the question.
misperception of "1+1=2" purely as a description of the physical world, when it doesn't have to be perceived that way.
How is that a misperception? What can "1+1=2 is not true in this universe" even mean other than "1+1=2" does not map to any aspect of this universe. The only reason we can even say that "1+1=2" in this universe is that it maps to (a wide variety of) our observations. Certainly, you can dredge up an axiom set that's internally consistent but doesn't correspond to anything, but that's wasn't the question, was it?
Actually you can dream up universes where 1+1=2 doesn't hold. It can fail to hold for a variety of reasons.
You can? I've thought about that problem for a while, and I didn't come up with anything except a debatable, trivial case. (See below.) Remember, for "1+1=2" not to hold, there would have to be *nothing* isomorphic to addition. It wouldn't be enough, for example, that that universe's laws of physics cause two colliding particles to make a third. Because you can then still say that "if there are three particles, it can be fully subdivided into 2 and 1" which is then isomorphic to 1+2=3. Even the possibility of making a computer capable of simulating addition would make it true in that world, because there is a set of physical circumstances that map to addition.
So, like I said, there is one arguable case: a completely empty, unchanging universe. However, nothing and no one would be capable of observing such a universe, whether or not it existed, which puts it outside of science. Furthermore, I think that if I can simulate that universe on a computer with operations isomorphic to addition, then the laws of addition are still true in that universe.
Did you in fact read "On Intelligence". I did. You're not describing anything I found in Hawkins's ideas. And I can certainly tell you he's not the type to say that intelligence magically happens once you get enough complexity. You are especially unfair to say,
Realistically, how could one build an artificial brain without first understanding how the real one works?... don't think you can slap a bunch of artificial neurons together and expect intelligence to happen.
because Hawkins's main lament throughout the text is that, when he researched the problem, no one was coming up with theories for how the brain works. He specifically says something like (paraphrasing since i don't have it with me), "It's not that there were bad or failed theories; there were no theories at all." Regardless of whether he's on the right track, the book specifically tries to functionally decompose the brain to understand it, and he also says that is goal is to implement the brain a different way once he understands how it works, a goal I applaud.
Furthermore, he recognizes thorughout the book that simply upping the computational power will not get better results or improve your understanding of the brain, since he adheres to the (not sure about the specific number) 20-step rule, that whatever algorithm you propose for how something happens must require fewer than 20 steps, since that is all the brain's neural pulse rate allows. (He explains it with a methaphor about how using more trucks won't reduce the time it takes for the first unit to get to the destination.)
On top of that, Hawkins highlighted specific mechanisms that he believes are lacking in existing models. For example, the need to treat all signals as going both ways, i.e. when you touch something, you're getting tactile input, but at the same time your brain is outputting a prediction of what the sensory data should look like, which helps in interpreting it.
Finally, he lists 11 testable predictions at the back that could break his theory and are not designed to be unfeasible.
This is not to say I agree with Hawkins or think his answers are the best; for one thing, I didn't like his theories regarding invariant represenations, which didn't appear to shed any insight beyond, "the brain magically has some way of representing the invariant form of a concept, which I can't explain". Still, you are not fairly representing his book.
I'm not the AC, but I am an illustrious reader, and I have to admit, he does have a point. And a funny one at that.
You talk about how you duped all the chicks into thinking you were hot merely because you were already with hot girls. But your wife? Oh, no, she wasn't duped, because...
Now, I do believe what you said about you and your wife being a good match, such that she liked you for other reasons too. Just the same though, would she have given you the time of day otherwise? Hence the AC's point.
Btw, what the heck am I supposed to do if I don't already have hot chicks to accompany me? Should I hire some, thereby "priming the pump" and finding non-paid girls for next time, by basically springboarding off the paid ones?
I'm not sure I follow what you mean. In what sense does "entropy rot us out"? What mechanism are you talking about?
The "Law of Entropy" (2nd law of thermodynamics) only says that the total entropy in the universe must increase. So you can indefinitely preserve the "order" that is your life -- it's just that you have to keep shifting the disorder somewhere else. And that can continue until the heat death of the universe.
It's politically incorrect to say that some ghetto druggie "isn't addicted, but just likes getting high more than working". So, to make it more palatable, ghetto druggies are classified as "psychologically addicted, beyond their control".
On the other hand, video game addicts... come on, man! It's just a bunch of white kids that need to get their act together and stop spending so much time on the Xbox! That's clearly not a psychological addiction! Come on, they're old enough to handle their problems on their own. They just need a good dose of "tough love"!
"Video game addiction! *snort* You gotta be joking, right?"
It just plainly doesn't make sense. If I want to share a ride with a complete stranger and split the gas, how is that any different from sharing a ride with a family member? According to these restrictions, I can't drive myself and my mom to the airport and split the gas cost?
You may not realize it, but you've just explained how a lot of people become libertarian. Look at how your argument generalizes:
-"If I want to hire a complete stranger to do a job and pay them an agreed-upon sum, how is that any different from sharing the costs with a family member? [What business is it of anyone else how much the stranger agrees to?]"
And so on...
Yes, there are problems that arise when you consider the impact on other people -- which is why they sortakinda encourage carpooling in the first place -- but the correct response is to do your best to price that in to the cost of driving, and *then* look at the best solution people come up with, given that constraint, NOT to dictate "the" right way to rook people into doing something that coincidentally helps the environment and how they're actually fooled, which is basically what car-pooling incentives amount to.
Yeah, *great* point. That's why I'm glad to hear that you support legalization of drugs, so long as the drugs are used under regulated, registered, controlled conditions so as to keep the users from hurting others while they are high and their perceptions are distored.
Wait, you mean you don't support legalization of drugs even for setups like that? So then, your concern about the harm to others while the user is high... was just a bullshit rationalization you never bothered to think about? I see.
This practice (of treatment of gift card holders in bankruptcy) has always repulsed me, and here's why: When a store sells any other product, *it's gone*. It's not theirs anymore. They don't get to repo it to pay other creditors, no matter how bad their business is. But with gift cards, they do. You'd think that "$50 worth of Circuit City merchandise" is no longer theirs to give away, but you'd be wrong.
Ho, hum, right? But no, it gets worse when you think about it this way:
By considering you as an unsecured creditor, that effectively means that when CC sells a gift card, they are selling a financial security, like a stock or a bond. Now, think about the normal procedures you have to go through to buy securities, all the hoops the SEC makes you, and the issuers of securities, jump through, all to protect you from yourself. Now, whether or not you agree with that kind of paternalism, you have to realize that they are effectively *exempting* businesses from ordinary laws about securities -- by not making them jump through these hoops to issue additional debt/equity -- and they're doing it in *just* the very case that hurts the little guy with least capacity to sue.
Now, go tell Circuit City that your financial situation isn't so good, so you want back some of the money you gave to them years ago, and let me know what happens.
I think you misread it. The meaning in that context was, "I know many of our readers may not have heard of them, but these kinds of games are big now, and they're called..."
That is, it wants to acknowledge it's bringing in a new term it doesn't expect you to already know. Same as when they'd say, "he accesses the computer through a so-called 'mouse'" in 1990:-P
What effect will this had on the election, if someone will invented time travel? (Note my use of the appropriate grammatical tense for speaking of time travel.)
Yeah, good point, environmental regulations have never been passed (especially not based on new technological feasibilities), nor have they been followed or enforced, nor has any injuction been awared against any polluter, nor has any country been pressured into more environmentally-friendly policies, nor has any major group of countries agreed to adhere to environmental policies,.
Or at least, such are the new facts I've learned about the world you're posting from.
Um.... best = "most profitable" in this case. That is, the best alternative fuel is the one with the lowest costs and highest return on investment. Those costs include cost of manufacture, distribution, and infrastructure upgrades needed for widescale use.
I'm sorry, but where did you get the idea that environmental costs show up explicitly and directly on balance sheets? In the real world, the most profitable investment may have a huge environmental cost canceling any benefit therefrom. Even restrcting to nominally "eco-friendly" fuels, you have to factor in their *relative*, *total* environmental harm, and weigh it against the utility to users, in order to find which is the best. And since "total life-cycle environmental harm" is not a parameter in the corporate profitability computation, we shouldn't be surprised if they don't factor it in.
Of course, environmental costs do, in a sense, show up in balance sheets... but not in any efficient, sensible way. They manifest as stuff like:
- Bribe to regulator. - Lobbyist salaries. - $Environmenal_harm1 denial campaign. - Compliance costs of $efficiency_standard1 which barely accomplishes anything. - Goodwill (modulo the impact of advertising)
Please, please stop assuming "profitability within current system" is the same as "efficiency, discounting for meaningful environmental damage".
No, I'm not a greenie, just upset at how blind people can get to the other side's arguments.
That kind of reminds me: back when I was younger and I wished games were more immersive (~'92), I had a wonderful dream about such a game, and it was based on the Simpsons. In it, you could restore a small amount of health by switching to "eat mode" and then walking across someone's lawn. Your character would then graze as they walked. And then, of course, if your character was Lisa or Marge, they would take out a fork to use when eating it:-P
Normally, I'd wait for a non-AC to make the point, but since you're probably going to get modded up, I'll just have to snuff it out right here:
Are you retiring in the next year to two? If not, them you have nothing to worry about.
Right, because I wasn't planning on using the money in my savings account until I turn 65, is that it?
Okay, so let's just look at the "long-term" savings accounts. Given the recent downturn and the still-pathetic earnings yields, the stock market over -- yes, the long term -- will probably return 5% nominal, since it first has to make up the ~40% downturn. (The 10-year S&P fund return was 4.5%/year *before* the recent downturn, and even that isn't enough to cover the taxes+inflation+volatility. Even in a tax-advantaged account, that's not a good deal.)
So, in exchange for giving up most of my wealth when it's most valuable to me (at a young age), I get to have a whopping 1% inflation/tax/volatility-adjusted return by investing till 65.
If your personal time discount rate is more than 1% -- which it is for almost everyone -- it just doesn't make sense to save, I am now sadly forced to admit. So frankly, I can't really criticize people who took advantage of way-underprice interested rates to buy durable consumer items. Show me risk-free interest rates (money markets) of 8% real, and I will change my mind.
Btw, anyone notice how the reasoning I'm responding to is sounding more and more these days like, "oh, don't worry man, the roulette wheel can be kinda mean, just keep playing, you'll make up your losses, totally, the guys in suits have it all figured out."
Now before you get really down on the system, keep in mind, you'd be worse off (less money, less control, watching much of your money paying for shit you don't want, and money going to the politicians' buddies) if the Government took care of everything for you.
As opposed to all those wise people like me who lived well within our means and invested in stocks (!) and earned negative real returns on savings accounts? Yeah, that worked out real well for us, didn't it.
The government should be using incentives to change behaviors when those behaviors have wide-spread negative impacts (eg increasing CO2 pollution which effects everyone, not just the driver of the SUV)."
NO NO NO NO NO NO!! It is NOT the federal governments job to mold a citizen's legal behavior!!!
You lost me there. If the government redefined murder as legal, is it now no longer the government's job to mold people's behavior away from murder?
You are certainly correct that government has gone way too far in specific instances of "molding behavior". But the GP brought up a point that I don't think you adequately acknowledged. By using the atmosphere as a free pollution dumping ground, you are concretely harming others -- as per the best science we have -- just as surely as if you sprayed gunfire at them. (Though obviously the magnitude is less!) This is miles from the standard, nebulous BS about, "Oh, well, getting more education helps, like, the community and stuff, so that should be subsidized."
You would also be correct to bring up the corruption-prone, counterproductive, inefficient ways that government tries to contain these wrongful externalities[1]. For example, trying to figure out which fossil fuel uses are "truly" wasteful and then banning them with no recourse except for the well-connected. But again, the GP didn't advocate something stupid like that; he simply asked that this wrongful externality *show up* as a price to anyone creating it, without bias for one use vs. another. I think he got the magnitude way too high, but it's definitely the right approach. Note how your net gain or loss correlates with your net emissions.
Finally, it's true that "tax incentives" complicate tax forms, but that isn't the case here: it's a fixed, same-size rebate for everyone. The way that you "make money" (as the GP said) *results* from having a tax on fossil fuels plus a fixed rebate; it's not something you have to specifically calculate on the form.
Fossil fuels are way too valuable to be banned entirely, like murder. But part of their economic gain *should* be diverted to cancel out the damage they cause to others. Making people compensate others for their torts -- which the rebate portion does -- is exactly what the judicial function of government is for.
Btw, I'm a long-time libertarian and see nothing unlibertarian about anything I've said here.
[1] People often muddle the debate about negative externalities pretty quickly by bringing up, "But aren't minority religions/atheists a negative externality to a..."? However, we can and should restrict our attentions to negative externalities which are *also* universally regarded as creating a legitimate grievance, which I here label "wrongful externalities", to differentiate from e.g minority religions or a perfume smell you don't like.
As a representative of UltraProfitCom, I must point out that the use of 40 mW transmissions over the whitespace could raise very unpleasant technical issues. For example, it could damage the profitus of the entrenchedplayerus. It may also vastly increase the alternativus that individuals have for data transmission containing dangerous features like competitiveservicus. Left unchecked, these transmissions could also increase the convenientus that people have to do deal with. Clearly, it should not be done.
What if I came up with a logo that said, "$1,000 for the next person to kill the president." I'm pretty sure there's a law that can stop that particular logo.
If you think that's a squirrelly case because it involves a direct threat, then imagine if I had a logo that said, "Wear the Mongol symbol if you will help in killing the president." Or, "When I next wear a Mongol symbol, I am on a mission to kill the president." Then imagine if wearing that logo becomes a mass movement and you can kind of understand why they might go after gang symbols.
Not endorsing it, but I can kind of see how there are laws for this.
I wouldn't doubt that the whole system isn't there to catch actual terrorists, but to simply condition the populace into accepting this kind of routine as a the standard quo. Fo
I agree with your general point, but: exactly how dependable and well-capitalized do you think GM really is? Here's their financials. Summary (Note that some are in negative multiples of their market cap):
Book value: negative 15 times market cap. Earnings (profits): negative 16 times market cap
Profit margin: -34% Current cash: $20 billion Amount lost in first two quarters of '08: $18 billion
Even if Tesla merely had their waiting list to work with, they'd still last longer than GM... if you ignore GM's lobbying advantage... which was my point.
Agreed. I've long held that GM should have been force to liquidate assets (gradually) in increasing order of importance to profitability until the point that they can pay a third party to take on all their legacy obligations. To think: all during the past ~5 years when their financial situtation was in turmoil (actually, it just became more obvious), and they were still paying dividends in preference to the deferred compensation of those who did their work as much as fifty years ago!
So, tying the two topics together, they should have been force to whore out their brand names for cash, to groups like Tesla. If we were in a remotely just world.
Well said! Now, if only we could have a "lobbying crunch" so that banks who demand major intervention to avoid the atrocity of having to honor obligations or pay a few tenths of a percent more (annualized!) on interbank loans, would be rightly laughed at.
It's pretty sad how Tesla Motors has a proven ability to make high-quality, practical (at least once they can get unit costs down) green cars that people want, and it's GM and Ford who are getting the $25 billion in well-below-market-rate loans[1] to do something they should have been doing ten years ago.
[1] GM, for example, has an effective borrowing cost on new capital of about 30%/year, more than most compulsive shoppers and banana republics pay, as that is the yield that their bonds are maturing at if they mature in just three years. Yet they're only having to pay something like 5% on the government loan. Tesla, by the way, would kiss the ground for a loan that size at three times the rate.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't imagine any possibilities there; you just rephrased the problem. A solution would be to show how that universe's laws work, such that cardinality is meaningless, or how it lacks informational reversibility. Simply positing the universe lacks cardinality is begging the question.
misperception of "1+1=2" purely as a description of the physical world, when it doesn't have to be perceived that way.
How is that a misperception? What can "1+1=2 is not true in this universe" even mean other than "1+1=2" does not map to any aspect of this universe. The only reason we can even say that "1+1=2" in this universe is that it maps to (a wide variety of) our observations. Certainly, you can dredge up an axiom set that's internally consistent but doesn't correspond to anything, but that's wasn't the question, was it?
Actually you can dream up universes where 1+1=2 doesn't hold. It can fail to hold for a variety of reasons.
You can? I've thought about that problem for a while, and I didn't come up with anything except a debatable, trivial case. (See below.) Remember, for "1+1=2" not to hold, there would have to be *nothing* isomorphic to addition. It wouldn't be enough, for example, that that universe's laws of physics cause two colliding particles to make a third. Because you can then still say that "if there are three particles, it can be fully subdivided into 2 and 1" which is then isomorphic to 1+2=3. Even the possibility of making a computer capable of simulating addition would make it true in that world, because there is a set of physical circumstances that map to addition.
So, like I said, there is one arguable case: a completely empty, unchanging universe. However, nothing and no one would be capable of observing such a universe, whether or not it existed, which puts it outside of science. Furthermore, I think that if I can simulate that universe on a computer with operations isomorphic to addition, then the laws of addition are still true in that universe.
Did you in fact read "On Intelligence". I did. You're not describing anything I found in Hawkins's ideas. And I can certainly tell you he's not the type to say that intelligence magically happens once you get enough complexity. You are especially unfair to say,
Realistically, how could one build an artificial brain without first understanding how the real one works? ... don't think you can slap a bunch of artificial neurons together and expect intelligence to happen.
because Hawkins's main lament throughout the text is that, when he researched the problem, no one was coming up with theories for how the brain works. He specifically says something like (paraphrasing since i don't have it with me), "It's not that there were bad or failed theories; there were no theories at all." Regardless of whether he's on the right track, the book specifically tries to functionally decompose the brain to understand it, and he also says that is goal is to implement the brain a different way once he understands how it works, a goal I applaud.
Furthermore, he recognizes thorughout the book that simply upping the computational power will not get better results or improve your understanding of the brain, since he adheres to the (not sure about the specific number) 20-step rule, that whatever algorithm you propose for how something happens must require fewer than 20 steps, since that is all the brain's neural pulse rate allows. (He explains it with a methaphor about how using more trucks won't reduce the time it takes for the first unit to get to the destination.)
On top of that, Hawkins highlighted specific mechanisms that he believes are lacking in existing models. For example, the need to treat all signals as going both ways, i.e. when you touch something, you're getting tactile input, but at the same time your brain is outputting a prediction of what the sensory data should look like, which helps in interpreting it.
Finally, he lists 11 testable predictions at the back that could break his theory and are not designed to be unfeasible.
This is not to say I agree with Hawkins or think his answers are the best; for one thing, I didn't like his theories regarding invariant represenations, which didn't appear to shed any insight beyond, "the brain magically has some way of representing the invariant form of a concept, which I can't explain". Still, you are not fairly representing his book.
I'm not the AC, but I am an illustrious reader, and I have to admit, he does have a point. And a funny one at that.
You talk about how you duped all the chicks into thinking you were hot merely because you were already with hot girls. But your wife? Oh, no, she wasn't duped, because ...
Now, I do believe what you said about you and your wife being a good match, such that she liked you for other reasons too. Just the same though, would she have given you the time of day otherwise? Hence the AC's point.
Btw, what the heck am I supposed to do if I don't already have hot chicks to accompany me? Should I hire some, thereby "priming the pump" and finding non-paid girls for next time, by basically springboarding off the paid ones?
I'm not sure I follow what you mean. In what sense does "entropy rot us out"? What mechanism are you talking about?
The "Law of Entropy" (2nd law of thermodynamics) only says that the total entropy in the universe must increase. So you can indefinitely preserve the "order" that is your life -- it's just that you have to keep shifting the disorder somewhere else. And that can continue until the heat death of the universe.
Yeah, that was kinda unclear. Let me clarify:
It's politically incorrect to say that some ghetto druggie "isn't addicted, but just likes getting high more than working". So, to make it more palatable, ghetto druggies are classified as "psychologically addicted, beyond their control".
On the other hand, video game addicts ... come on, man! It's just a bunch of white kids that need to get their act together and stop spending so much time on the Xbox! That's clearly not a psychological addiction! Come on, they're old enough to handle their problems on their own. They just need a good dose of "tough love"!
"Video game addiction! *snort* You gotta be joking, right?"
It just plainly doesn't make sense. If I want to share a ride with a complete stranger and split the gas, how is that any different from sharing a ride with a family member? According to these restrictions, I can't drive myself and my mom to the airport and split the gas cost?
You may not realize it, but you've just explained how a lot of people become libertarian. Look at how your argument generalizes:
-"If I want to hire a complete stranger to do a job and pay them an agreed-upon sum, how is that any different from sharing the costs with a family member? [What business is it of anyone else how much the stranger agrees to?]"
And so on...
Yes, there are problems that arise when you consider the impact on other people -- which is why they sortakinda encourage carpooling in the first place -- but the correct response is to do your best to price that in to the cost of driving, and *then* look at the best solution people come up with, given that constraint, NOT to dictate "the" right way to rook people into doing something that coincidentally helps the environment and how they're actually fooled, which is basically what car-pooling incentives amount to.
Yeah, *great* point. That's why I'm glad to hear that you support legalization of drugs, so long as the drugs are used under regulated, registered, controlled conditions so as to keep the users from hurting others while they are high and their perceptions are distored.
Wait, you mean you don't support legalization of drugs even for setups like that? So then, your concern about the harm to others while the user is high ... was just a bullshit rationalization you never bothered to think about? I see.
This practice (of treatment of gift card holders in bankruptcy) has always repulsed me, and here's why: When a store sells any other product, *it's gone*. It's not theirs anymore. They don't get to repo it to pay other creditors, no matter how bad their business is. But with gift cards, they do. You'd think that "$50 worth of Circuit City merchandise" is no longer theirs to give away, but you'd be wrong.
Ho, hum, right? But no, it gets worse when you think about it this way:
By considering you as an unsecured creditor, that effectively means that when CC sells a gift card, they are selling a financial security, like a stock or a bond. Now, think about the normal procedures you have to go through to buy securities, all the hoops the SEC makes you, and the issuers of securities, jump through, all to protect you from yourself. Now, whether or not you agree with that kind of paternalism, you have to realize that they are effectively *exempting* businesses from ordinary laws about securities -- by not making them jump through these hoops to issue additional debt/equity -- and they're doing it in *just* the very case that hurts the little guy with least capacity to sue.
Now, go tell Circuit City that your financial situation isn't so good, so you want back some of the money you gave to them years ago, and let me know what happens.
I think you misread it. The meaning in that context was, "I know many of our readers may not have heard of them, but these kinds of games are big now, and they're called ..."
That is, it wants to acknowledge it's bringing in a new term it doesn't expect you to already know. Same as when they'd say, "he accesses the computer through a so-called 'mouse'" in 1990 :-P
What effect will this had on the election, if someone will invented time travel? (Note my use of the appropriate grammatical tense for speaking of time travel.)
Yeah, good point, environmental regulations have never been passed (especially not based on new technological feasibilities), nor have they been followed or enforced, nor has any injuction been awared against any polluter, nor has any country been pressured into more environmentally-friendly policies, nor has any major group of countries agreed to adhere to environmental policies,.
Or at least, such are the new facts I've learned about the world you're posting from.
Um.... best = "most profitable" in this case. That is, the best alternative fuel is the one with the lowest costs and highest return on investment. Those costs include cost of manufacture, distribution, and infrastructure upgrades needed for widescale use.
I'm sorry, but where did you get the idea that environmental costs show up explicitly and directly on balance sheets? In the real world, the most profitable investment may have a huge environmental cost canceling any benefit therefrom. Even restrcting to nominally "eco-friendly" fuels, you have to factor in their *relative*, *total* environmental harm, and weigh it against the utility to users, in order to find which is the best. And since "total life-cycle environmental harm" is not a parameter in the corporate profitability computation, we shouldn't be surprised if they don't factor it in.
Of course, environmental costs do, in a sense, show up in balance sheets ... but not in any efficient, sensible way. They manifest as stuff like:
- Bribe to regulator.
- Lobbyist salaries.
- $Environmenal_harm1 denial campaign.
- Compliance costs of $efficiency_standard1 which barely accomplishes anything.
- Goodwill (modulo the impact of advertising)
Please, please stop assuming "profitability within current system" is the same as "efficiency, discounting for meaningful environmental damage".
No, I'm not a greenie, just upset at how blind people can get to the other side's arguments.
That kind of reminds me: back when I was younger and I wished games were more immersive (~'92), I had a wonderful dream about such a game, and it was based on the Simpsons. In it, you could restore a small amount of health by switching to "eat mode" and then walking across someone's lawn. Your character would then graze as they walked. And then, of course, if your character was Lisa or Marge, they would take out a fork to use when eating it :-P
Normally, I'd wait for a non-AC to make the point, but since you're probably going to get modded up, I'll just have to snuff it out right here:
Are you retiring in the next year to two? If not, them you have nothing to worry about.
Right, because I wasn't planning on using the money in my savings account until I turn 65, is that it?
Okay, so let's just look at the "long-term" savings accounts. Given the recent downturn and the still-pathetic earnings yields, the stock market over -- yes, the long term -- will probably return 5% nominal, since it first has to make up the ~40% downturn. (The 10-year S&P fund return was 4.5%/year *before* the recent downturn, and even that isn't enough to cover the taxes+inflation+volatility. Even in a tax-advantaged account, that's not a good deal.)
So, in exchange for giving up most of my wealth when it's most valuable to me (at a young age), I get to have a whopping 1% inflation/tax/volatility-adjusted return by investing till 65.
If your personal time discount rate is more than 1% -- which it is for almost everyone -- it just doesn't make sense to save, I am now sadly forced to admit. So frankly, I can't really criticize people who took advantage of way-underprice interested rates to buy durable consumer items. Show me risk-free interest rates (money markets) of 8% real, and I will change my mind.
Btw, anyone notice how the reasoning I'm responding to is sounding more and more these days like, "oh, don't worry man, the roulette wheel can be kinda mean, just keep playing, you'll make up your losses, totally, the guys in suits have it all figured out."
Now before you get really down on the system, keep in mind, you'd be worse off (less money, less control, watching much of your money paying for shit you don't want, and money going to the politicians' buddies) if the Government took care of everything for you.
Relevance to what I actually posted, please?
As opposed to all those wise people like me who lived well within our means and invested in stocks (!) and earned negative real returns on savings accounts? Yeah, that worked out real well for us, didn't it.
You lost me there. If the government redefined murder as legal, is it now no longer the government's job to mold people's behavior away from murder?
You are certainly correct that government has gone way too far in specific instances of "molding behavior". But the GP brought up a point that I don't think you adequately acknowledged. By using the atmosphere as a free pollution dumping ground, you are concretely harming others -- as per the best science we have -- just as surely as if you sprayed gunfire at them. (Though obviously the magnitude is less!) This is miles from the standard, nebulous BS about, "Oh, well, getting more education helps, like, the community and stuff, so that should be subsidized."
You would also be correct to bring up the corruption-prone, counterproductive, inefficient ways that government tries to contain these wrongful externalities[1]. For example, trying to figure out which fossil fuel uses are "truly" wasteful and then banning them with no recourse except for the well-connected. But again, the GP didn't advocate something stupid like that; he simply asked that this wrongful externality *show up* as a price to anyone creating it, without bias for one use vs. another. I think he got the magnitude way too high, but it's definitely the right approach. Note how your net gain or loss correlates with your net emissions.
Finally, it's true that "tax incentives" complicate tax forms, but that isn't the case here: it's a fixed, same-size rebate for everyone. The way that you "make money" (as the GP said) *results* from having a tax on fossil fuels plus a fixed rebate; it's not something you have to specifically calculate on the form.
Fossil fuels are way too valuable to be banned entirely, like murder. But part of their economic gain *should* be diverted to cancel out the damage they cause to others. Making people compensate others for their torts -- which the rebate portion does -- is exactly what the judicial function of government is for.
Btw, I'm a long-time libertarian and see nothing unlibertarian about anything I've said here.
[1] People often muddle the debate about negative externalities pretty quickly by bringing up, "But aren't minority religions/atheists a negative externality to a ..."? However, we can and should restrict our attentions to negative externalities which are *also* universally regarded as creating a legitimate grievance, which I here label "wrongful externalities", to differentiate from e.g minority religions or a perfume smell you don't like.
Good point. But make sure the instructions for building the computer are picture-only, in case your language is lost too...
What does subsidies being cut have to do with discourtesy after anal sex?
As a representative of UltraProfitCom, I must point out that the use of 40 mW transmissions over the whitespace could raise very unpleasant technical issues. For example, it could damage the profitus of the entrenchedplayerus. It may also vastly increase the alternativus that individuals have for data transmission containing dangerous features like competitiveservicus. Left unchecked, these transmissions could also increase the convenientus that people have to do deal with. Clearly, it should not be done.
What if I came up with a logo that said, "$1,000 for the next person to kill the president." I'm pretty sure there's a law that can stop that particular logo.
If you think that's a squirrelly case because it involves a direct threat, then imagine if I had a logo that said, "Wear the Mongol symbol if you will help in killing the president." Or, "When I next wear a Mongol symbol, I am on a mission to kill the president." Then imagine if wearing that logo becomes a mass movement and you can kind of understand why they might go after gang symbols.
Not endorsing it, but I can kind of see how there are laws for this.
I wouldn't doubt that the whole system isn't there to catch actual terrorists, but to simply condition the populace into accepting this kind of routine as a the standard quo. Fo
You left off "shizzle".
I agree with your general point, but: exactly how dependable and well-capitalized do you think GM really is? Here's their financials. Summary (Note that some are in negative multiples of their market cap):
Book value: negative 15 times market cap.
Earnings (profits): negative 16 times market cap
Profit margin: -34%
Current cash: $20 billion
Amount lost in first two quarters of '08: $18 billion
Even if Tesla merely had their waiting list to work with, they'd still last longer than GM ... if you ignore GM's lobbying advantage ... which was my point.
Agreed. I've long held that GM should have been force to liquidate assets (gradually) in increasing order of importance to profitability until the point that they can pay a third party to take on all their legacy obligations. To think: all during the past ~5 years when their financial situtation was in turmoil (actually, it just became more obvious), and they were still paying dividends in preference to the deferred compensation of those who did their work as much as fifty years ago!
So, tying the two topics together, they should have been force to whore out their brand names for cash, to groups like Tesla. If we were in a remotely just world.
Well said! Now, if only we could have a "lobbying crunch" so that banks who demand major intervention to avoid the atrocity of having to honor obligations or pay a few tenths of a percent more (annualized!) on interbank loans, would be rightly laughed at.
It's pretty sad how Tesla Motors has a proven ability to make high-quality, practical (at least once they can get unit costs down) green cars that people want, and it's GM and Ford who are getting the $25 billion in well-below-market-rate loans[1] to do something they should have been doing ten years ago.
[1] GM, for example, has an effective borrowing cost on new capital of about 30%/year, more than most compulsive shoppers and banana republics pay, as that is the yield that their bonds are maturing at if they mature in just three years. Yet they're only having to pay something like 5% on the government loan. Tesla, by the way, would kiss the ground for a loan that size at three times the rate.