Good inventions will not be concealed in a free market to protect an inferior product. This is simply demonstrated in just about every basic econ textbook.
So for your absurd conspiracy theory to be true, not only must every government in the world be in on the scam, but also every company. Just one defector could bring the whole deck of cards down.
Pigs will fly before such a crazy plan could happen.
I have full access to all the relevant journals. I must have missed your evidence in the flood of mine.
Evolution and global warming are the same in that there is no longer debate about existence, but rather only debates about the details of the past and projections for the future.
Here is another challenge for you. Please describe any experimental result which would convince you that global warming was being caused by humans. I can easily do the reverse. For example, if ice cores and such were to show similar gas and temperature spikes as the one we are currently undergoing, it would be a strong argument that natural cycles can cause what we are seeing. 600,000 years of data have failed to provide such evidence. What we are seeing is unprecedented in the "natural" data.
Unless you have a whole bunch of earths where you can run controlled experiments, establishing "causality" is impossible.
There is as much "debate" about the two points I listed in the mainstream scientific community as there is "debate" about evolution. You are making the same arguments as ID supporters - that gaps in our knowledge mean you can throw the baby out with the bathwater.
This can be figured into the calculations. Remember, the booty collected from corporate gasoline use would also be figured into the credit.
Anyhow, I do think the poor should share some of the burden as well. I grew up in a small, rural town, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the correlation between gasoline use and income in my town was negative. In other words, the poor often were the worse hogs of all, often spending far too much of their stretched cash on ridiculous trucks. Rich or poor, such fools should be slammed.
A $1.00/gal tax phased in over a couple of years would be fine by me. Make it tax neutral with a credit and you have a winner.
glass bottles are usually sorted by color, crushed and re-made, even when "recycled". It is usually cheaper than sorting, shipping, and cleaning the bottles.
It is closer to ten thousand. One after the other, the same general conclusion. Have you ever even read Nature or something similar? There is practically no debate about the following two points in the scientific community:
1: The climate is warming
2: Human activity is a major contributor to the warming
Instead of taxing gasoline, they should increase registration fees, tax unnecessary supersized vehicles with supersized engines and offer registration fee reductions for low emission, high efficiency, well-maintained, etc. vehicles down to (or even below) current rates. This way, people with average cars could work their way around the registration hikes/taxes by keeping their vehicles in perfect working order and by opting for more fuel-efficient and low-emission vehicles in the future. Many places already do things along those lines, some even go as far as offering subventions and tax deductions for hybrids.
Taxing gasoline would do all the things you suggest, much more simply, much more fairly, and much more effectively. Why have the government have a billion-and-two regulations for which vehicle gets what tax or registration fee, when you can just tax gasoline, which forces people to pay in direct proportion to how much they pollute? Your proposed system is completely arbitrary - someone who drives a decently fuel-effecient vehicle hundreds of miles per week pays nothing, while someone who owns the "wrong" vehicle may drive only fifty miles per week but pays through the @$$, even though he or she is polluting far less.
If you are concerned about the poor, the situation can be handled with a fuel credit equal to the average value that people put in each year. For example, a typical person driving 12k miles per year at 20 mpg uses 600 gallons. Let's say we implement a $1/gallon tax, but give a $600 tax rebate. This is approximately tax neutral, but slams gas hogs and rewards those are frugal. It encourages everyone, rich and poor alike, to conserve. It also does not harm the poor. as most will find a way to come out ahead, and the gas hogs who don't are SOL.
A gasoline tax is quite close to economically efficient, and fairly taxes everyone in direct proportion to the problem they create. It is both fair and effective. Arbitrary regulations and cut-offs, such as you suggest, are neither.
Donating eggs has some serious risks. The rules preventing researchers from donating to their own research are there to prevent these young women from being pressured into taking a risk to their own health by over-zealous advisors or simply the pressure to finish their next paper.
if I could program my cpu to turn off and on at certain times (not just go into sleep mode, where it sucks a pile of power, but off to the point that the only thing running is a clock).
Since I wake up and go to sleep at the same time every week day, a pretty simple algorithm would suffice: IF (weekday)&(not used in 30 minutes)&(after midnight) THEN (turn off). If (weekday) and (after 6am) THEN (turn on). Same routine for turning off during the day when I am at work.
I often leave my cpu on at night because I hate waiting for it to boot up in the morning.
who is starving, poisoned, and under constant threat of thuggery or worse? You do not need to make these people rich before they can begin to boot-strap themselves, but one needs to start with providing basic sanitation, safety, food, and water. Survival first is a necessity.
Hell, what the heck are they going to do with a computer in a place that doesn't even have reliable energy sources? Or are you saying we should only engage in this project in places that already have electricity, in which case we are spending money on relatively rich people.
Or how about clean water to Bangledeshis, who are dying by the thousands due to arsenic poisoning? For the price of one of these computers, we can supply a family with safe water for years. These people, too, will create jobs, products, and knowledge that will benefit all.
With literally thousands of people in developing nations dying every day due to lack of clean water, vitamins, food, and other essentials, isn't this project rather silly?
Europe is more population dense, for example. This helps matters enormously.
Also, most European city layouts were formed pre-car, leaving the streets too narrow for cars to be particularly useful. In America, many of the major cities grew along with automobile traffic. Hence, the layouts were designed to be more car-friendly.
Compare the public transportation and layout of an "old" city like Boston and a "new" city like Houston to see what I mean.
God, anyone with this attitude, you included, should be taken out to the woodshed and removed from the gene pool. I am serious.
Taxing by gasoline consumption forces everyone to pay in direct proportion to the amount of problem they create. That is fair.
What you are suggesting is far from fair, with some big polluters paying little (somebody who drives a "normal" vehicle quite a lot), some small polluters paying lots (someone who drives an SUV, but not many miles), and (not surprisingly) you paying nothing. This "me first" attitude is the biggest problem with the political system as it is - please don't add to it.
First, most of your "solutions" involve taxes. Income, sales, and property taxes are also massively economically inefficient, as much so or more than a monopoly. You are going to solve the fundamental market-failure problem this way.
Systems A, B, and C are not equivalent for a number of reasons. Maybe A and B are depending on how you define B (I have no idea what you mean...can the company tax anyone, or only people who buy its product? Can it still exclude competitors?). Assuming these, then yes, there really is no difference, though at this point, calling it a "tax" is rather misleading. We normally call this "selling". C is completely different, though, as you have not stated how the Magic Fairy government is going to know whether to issue a 500% tax, a 5% tax, or a billion % tax.
There are far more appropriate ways to reward increased R&D
Have fairies from the Magic Forest come and wave their little wands, while their leprechaun friends bring pots o' gold?
I am especially interested because you used "reward" in a transitive sense. Exactly who is doing the rewarding? The government? God, what a mess that would be. I'll take a temporary monopoly, thank you very much.
There is a serious problem with overly-broad software patents, and this needs to be addressed. I am not an expert in that field but it is pretty obvious even from the outside that there is a problem. However, copyrights at minimum are still necessary in software development (or else everyone will just copy all your hard work for free).
At least in my field (chemistry) patents are all but a necessity. There are basically three facets to introducing a new chemical to market - figuring out how to make the chemical, proving it works in the customer's process, and figuring out how to scale the production to commercial levels. By just waiting for your competitor to do the research, you can get a free ride on all but the last step. Honestly, by the time they could actually get the product validated at the customer's site, you could be up and running with an identical product.
funded that would all but disappear without patents to protect the work. If you read the article carefully, you realize it isn't much of a big deal. Only about 10% of respondants (not a random sample, by a longshot) reported giving up a research project because a patent stood in the way. Most of the time, the respondants were just claiming that the licensing issues delayed their research. However, if you think about it the other way, without the licensed technology in the first place, the research would never have been done! Better late than never.
Do you really think eliminating patents would advance science? In the absence of patents, corporations will be forced to hide their research as a last-resort. I fail to see how this helps science in any way.
Let's add up the total value of the money he has brought in and the value of what he currently owns, subtract off what he paid, and then divide by the number of hours he spent managing this whole business.
bring this up, but yes, a first-world life is worth $5-10 million dollars, depending on how you do your figures. This is how much we value our own lives, as expressed by our willingness to take risks for money (which we all do, every day, if we are brave enough to drive to work or undertake other similar trivial daily events)
This has a lot of implications for the legal field. Many of the whacko verdicts you hear are patently absurd. If my whole life is at the outside worth ~$10 million, how can something which is obviously a small fraction of my life's happiness be worth as much or more?
Slashdot Mirror
Good inventions will not be concealed in a free market to protect an inferior product. This is simply demonstrated in just about every basic econ textbook.
So for your absurd conspiracy theory to be true, not only must every government in the world be in on the scam, but also every company. Just one defector could bring the whole deck of cards down.
Pigs will fly before such a crazy plan could happen.
The atmosphere (or the enviroment in general) is a public good. That is the crux of the problem, and not one that is easily resolved.
Too bad you can only come up with a tongue-in-cheek method of privatization.
making either of the following claims:
1: The earth is not getting warmer
2: The cause is not human-induced
I have full access to all the relevant journals. I must have missed your evidence in the flood of mine.
Evolution and global warming are the same in that there is no longer debate about existence, but rather only debates about the details of the past and projections for the future.
Here is another challenge for you. Please describe any experimental result which would convince you that global warming was being caused by humans. I can easily do the reverse. For example, if ice cores and such were to show similar gas and temperature spikes as the one we are currently undergoing, it would be a strong argument that natural cycles can cause what we are seeing. 600,000 years of data have failed to provide such evidence. What we are seeing is unprecedented in the "natural" data.
Most recycling is exactly what you said - extra energy in trade for less garbage. This is rarely a good deal, though things are improving.
Unless you have a whole bunch of earths where you can run controlled experiments, establishing "causality" is impossible.
There is as much "debate" about the two points I listed in the mainstream scientific community as there is "debate" about evolution. You are making the same arguments as ID supporters - that gaps in our knowledge mean you can throw the baby out with the bathwater.
This can be figured into the calculations. Remember, the booty collected from corporate gasoline use would also be figured into the credit.
Anyhow, I do think the poor should share some of the burden as well. I grew up in a small, rural town, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the correlation between gasoline use and income in my town was negative. In other words, the poor often were the worse hogs of all, often spending far too much of their stretched cash on ridiculous trucks. Rich or poor, such fools should be slammed.
A $1.00/gal tax phased in over a couple of years would be fine by me. Make it tax neutral with a credit and you have a winner.
glass bottles are usually sorted by color, crushed and re-made, even when "recycled". It is usually cheaper than sorting, shipping, and cleaning the bottles.
It is closer to ten thousand. One after the other, the same general conclusion. Have you ever even read Nature or something similar? There is practically no debate about the following two points in the scientific community:
1: The climate is warming
2: Human activity is a major contributor to the warming
The information is out there.
Instead of taxing gasoline, they should increase registration fees, tax unnecessary supersized vehicles with supersized engines and offer registration fee reductions for low emission, high efficiency, well-maintained, etc. vehicles down to (or even below) current rates. This way, people with average cars could work their way around the registration hikes/taxes by keeping their vehicles in perfect working order and by opting for more fuel-efficient and low-emission vehicles in the future. Many places already do things along those lines, some even go as far as offering subventions and tax deductions for hybrids. Taxing gasoline would do all the things you suggest, much more simply, much more fairly, and much more effectively. Why have the government have a billion-and-two regulations for which vehicle gets what tax or registration fee, when you can just tax gasoline, which forces people to pay in direct proportion to how much they pollute? Your proposed system is completely arbitrary - someone who drives a decently fuel-effecient vehicle hundreds of miles per week pays nothing, while someone who owns the "wrong" vehicle may drive only fifty miles per week but pays through the @$$, even though he or she is polluting far less.
If you are concerned about the poor, the situation can be handled with a fuel credit equal to the average value that people put in each year. For example, a typical person driving 12k miles per year at 20 mpg uses 600 gallons. Let's say we implement a $1/gallon tax, but give a $600 tax rebate. This is approximately tax neutral, but slams gas hogs and rewards those are frugal. It encourages everyone, rich and poor alike, to conserve. It also does not harm the poor. as most will find a way to come out ahead, and the gas hogs who don't are SOL.
A gasoline tax is quite close to economically efficient, and fairly taxes everyone in direct proportion to the problem they create. It is both fair and effective. Arbitrary regulations and cut-offs, such as you suggest, are neither.
The pressures to get data are enormous.
Donating eggs has some serious risks. The rules preventing researchers from donating to their own research are there to prevent these young women from being pressured into taking a risk to their own health by over-zealous advisors or simply the pressure to finish their next paper.
if I could program my cpu to turn off and on at certain times (not just go into sleep mode, where it sucks a pile of power, but off to the point that the only thing running is a clock).
Since I wake up and go to sleep at the same time every week day, a pretty simple algorithm would suffice: IF (weekday)&(not used in 30 minutes)&(after midnight) THEN (turn off). If (weekday) and (after 6am) THEN (turn on). Same routine for turning off during the day when I am at work.
I often leave my cpu on at night because I hate waiting for it to boot up in the morning.
who is starving, poisoned, and under constant threat of thuggery or worse? You do not need to make these people rich before they can begin to boot-strap themselves, but one needs to start with providing basic sanitation, safety, food, and water. Survival first is a necessity.
Hell, what the heck are they going to do with a computer in a place that doesn't even have reliable energy sources? Or are you saying we should only engage in this project in places that already have electricity, in which case we are spending money on relatively rich people.
Or how about clean water to Bangledeshis, who are dying by the thousands due to arsenic poisoning? For the price of one of these computers, we can supply a family with safe water for years. These people, too, will create jobs, products, and knowledge that will benefit all.
With literally thousands of people in developing nations dying every day due to lack of clean water, vitamins, food, and other essentials, isn't this project rather silly?
Europe is more population dense, for example. This helps matters enormously.
Also, most European city layouts were formed pre-car, leaving the streets too narrow for cars to be particularly useful. In America, many of the major cities grew along with automobile traffic. Hence, the layouts were designed to be more car-friendly.
Compare the public transportation and layout of an "old" city like Boston and a "new" city like Houston to see what I mean.
God, anyone with this attitude, you included, should be taken out to the woodshed and removed from the gene pool. I am serious.
Taxing by gasoline consumption forces everyone to pay in direct proportion to the amount of problem they create. That is fair.
What you are suggesting is far from fair, with some big polluters paying little (somebody who drives a "normal" vehicle quite a lot), some small polluters paying lots (someone who drives an SUV, but not many miles), and (not surprisingly) you paying nothing. This "me first" attitude is the biggest problem with the political system as it is - please don't add to it.
Invest the money in pollution credits or a good insulation for your hot water heater, for example, and you save more pollution for less $$$.
Of course, you don't get the "holier-than-thou" bragging rights, unless you routinely drag people into your basement.
Hybrids, as they currently stand, are not the best way to help the environment, and are rather a way to show off.
First, most of your "solutions" involve taxes. Income, sales, and property taxes are also massively economically inefficient, as much so or more than a monopoly. You are going to solve the fundamental market-failure problem this way.
Systems A, B, and C are not equivalent for a number of reasons. Maybe A and B are depending on how you define B (I have no idea what you mean...can the company tax anyone, or only people who buy its product? Can it still exclude competitors?). Assuming these, then yes, there really is no difference, though at this point, calling it a "tax" is rather misleading. We normally call this "selling". C is completely different, though, as you have not stated how the Magic Fairy government is going to know whether to issue a 500% tax, a 5% tax, or a billion % tax.
There are far more appropriate ways to reward increased R&D Have fairies from the Magic Forest come and wave their little wands, while their leprechaun friends bring pots o' gold? I am especially interested because you used "reward" in a transitive sense. Exactly who is doing the rewarding? The government? God, what a mess that would be. I'll take a temporary monopoly, thank you very much.
This is dwarfed by the enjoyed by his enjoyment of the game, I hope, or he is really wasting his time.
No one but the poorest of the poor Chinese would attempt to do this as a way to make money.
There is a serious problem with overly-broad software patents, and this needs to be addressed. I am not an expert in that field but it is pretty obvious even from the outside that there is a problem. However, copyrights at minimum are still necessary in software development (or else everyone will just copy all your hard work for free).
At least in my field (chemistry) patents are all but a necessity. There are basically three facets to introducing a new chemical to market - figuring out how to make the chemical, proving it works in the customer's process, and figuring out how to scale the production to commercial levels. By just waiting for your competitor to do the research, you can get a free ride on all but the last step. Honestly, by the time they could actually get the product validated at the customer's site, you could be up and running with an identical product.
funded that would all but disappear without patents to protect the work. If you read the article carefully, you realize it isn't much of a big deal. Only about 10% of respondants (not a random sample, by a longshot) reported giving up a research project because a patent stood in the way. Most of the time, the respondants were just claiming that the licensing issues delayed their research. However, if you think about it the other way, without the licensed technology in the first place, the research would never have been done! Better late than never.
Do you really think eliminating patents would advance science? In the absence of patents, corporations will be forced to hide their research as a last-resort. I fail to see how this helps science in any way.
Let's add up the total value of the money he has brought in and the value of what he currently owns, subtract off what he paid, and then divide by the number of hours he spent managing this whole business.
I am sure we are talking nickels and dimes.
and you have "made your money back" instantaneously!
This guy may have beaten the interest rate on a CD, but a CD doesn't require hundreds of hours of micromanaging, either.
bring this up, but yes, a first-world life is worth $5-10 million dollars, depending on how you do your figures. This is how much we value our own lives, as expressed by our willingness to take risks for money (which we all do, every day, if we are brave enough to drive to work or undertake other similar trivial daily events)
This has a lot of implications for the legal field. Many of the whacko verdicts you hear are patently absurd. If my whole life is at the outside worth ~$10 million, how can something which is obviously a small fraction of my life's happiness be worth as much or more?