A niece and a friend's wife have been cleaning homes for the past 25 years; they constantly turn down new business and if they lose a client, there are many more interested in their services. Neither of them work weekends. They each make $40k/yr cash, unreported revenue. Neither of them will ever be without work.
Until someone reports them to the IRS (for the reward) and they get a hefty fine or jail time, or at least big bucks in lawyer fees. Not to sound too cynical, but only the uber-rich get away without paying taxes.
"The IRS Whistleblower Office pays money to people who blow the whistle on persons who fail to pay the tax that they owe. If the IRS uses information provided by the whistleblower, it can award the whistleblower up to 30 percent of the additional tax, penalty and other amounts it collects." https://www.irs.gov/uac/whistl...
Customer service rep positions are replaced with machine repair and maintenance positions. The law of unintended consequences is preserved and the inevitable slide towards machine replacement for most human tasks is moved forward. Everyone wins, except of course for the people that the higher minimum wage laws and Affordable Care Act were designed to help. They have been priced out the job market. They are just too expensive to keep on board.
If this analysis is correct, not changing the mimium wage delays this type of thing by only a few years I would guess.
$15 per hour wouldn't even be the highest it's ever been. $15 per hour isn't a high number.
It looks like the mimum wage was historically the highest back in 1968:
"The minimum wage reached its (inflation-adjusted) historic high in 1968, when it was raised from $1.40 to $1.60 per hour. Adjusted for inflation using the BLS online inflation calculator that would come to $10.55 per hour in 2012 dollars."
Clearly, whatever mimium wage society thinks is appropriate, it should really be indexed somehow to inflation or agerage wages or something like that.
I have always liked the idea of setting mimimum wages as some fraction of the top wage in a company, or as some fraction of the wages of politicians - though that would not work well in states with underpaid legislators.
Well, if we could get everyone to agree that "yeah this is a real problem and these are good ways of addressing them, but we will never get everyone to agree to do anything", then it becomes much less difficult to actually do it. I'm pessimistic, but I don't want to completely rule out the possibility of actual action.
Side note: Yes, I agree with you... I'm looking at it from a practical point of view, not theory. Lots of stuff works in theory, but not in reality.
I like the meta nature of this: In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there ususally is.
In this case, Bob's customers are harming people on the other side of the planet. Bob's customers want cheap chips. It will take war to try and change their mind.
Well, we managed to be fairly effective on ozone and acid rain - so there are at least a few counter examples of this type of thing working without threat of war. I suspect that the same sorts of trade and ecconomic sticks and carrots we used for that might also be workable - but finding the will to do anything in any one spot is a challenge.
Oh, yes, I was glib when I said it was "easy". We are talking about real people trying to make acceptable group decisions. I agree totally that none of these sorts of regulatory/fee/tax issues is "easy" from an "actually get systems in place" point of view!
Trying to move everyone to something else that costs more can't be done at no cost, that violates how money works.
At some level what you are saying is correct - moving to non-carbon sources will be more "expensive" at the simplest level of accounting. But at another level it is completely wrong, since the "cheaper" sources have all sorts of externalities that are REAL costs, they are just shifted to other people or other accounting lines. In this particular case, one of the reason the "something" costs less is that the purcase price does not reflect all the costs that are being paid for that thing. What we can hopefully someday do it to make the prices paid by the purchaser more in line with the actual total costs we all pay for the items.
If Bob's House of Chips sells lots of bags of chips, but doesn't provide enough trash cans and/or people who take the bags away toss them on the ground a few blocks away - someone besides Bob is paying to clean up the mess. The whole community is paying those costs, while Bob and his customers are the ones who should be shouldering the majority of them. Imposing a cleanup-fee on companies like Bob can be a way to make the price of Bob's bags-o-chips properly reflect the actual total cost of the product, and can make Mary's House of Brownies comparitively less expensive, even though Bob's material and production costs might be lower than Mary's, since her product gets eaten completely and doesn't generate any littering issues.
Getting the numbers right may be hard, but getting them "more right" than the current numbers (Bob's product reflect NONE of the cleanup costs) is not that difficult, and any imporvements to the correct price should send at least some signal to the "magical market free hand" to change behaviour, shifting more towards products that have lower total "real" cost. Having a system where Bob is incentivized to develop litter-free-bags (lower cleaup-fee for Bob), or using a refundable deposit to incentivize customer behaviour (also lower cleaup-fee for Bob), could in fact make the whole enterprise more efficient from the overall societal point of view, thus improving the total standard of living for everyone!
At the end of the day, there is no free lunch. What you want is for everyone to pay more money to have the same stuff they already have today. There is no way that won't cost us all in the form of our standard of living.
I would say: "At the end of the day, there is no free lunch. What I want is for everyone to pay more money to have the same stuff they already have today, and also to not have all that other stuff like the shared enviornment and natural resourses being depleted at unsustainable levels. Leaving all these externalities at zero cost to the companies and consumers makes us all pay more than we should, as some of the seemingly "more expensive" options are in fact cheaper when all factors are considered. There is no way that having society paying more than they could be by using the alternatives, won't cost us all in the form of our standard of living."
Making Bob's customers pay the true price of the product is a good idea.
Actually managing to implement such a thing is left to the reader as an exercise....:-)
And we can look to any of the places that have put in carbon taxes or polution taxes or cap-and-trade systems to put prices on externalites and see exactly this!
Cute, but you're ignoring the obvious... the places that have done this are already taxed to death and socialist places to begin with.
Do it in the US and you'd have riots on your hands. If the price of gas ended up at $5/gal you'd quickly have 50 million people unable to afford gas.
The reality is that you can't tax carbon enough to matter without stomping on the lower class and what you can tax it won't change anything worthwhile.
Unforunately, we don't magically see all the other potential benifits - carbon emission does seem to decrease, but not hugely for example. In any case, as long as it is revenue neutral - any carbon pricing scheme seem unlikely to have a big effect on standard of living.
A carbon tax large enough to do what Musk wants would crush standards of living. No one has actually done that yet.
One could easily set the tax rate and various rebates and the like to make it tax neutral for virtually everyone. Yes the cost of items would rise to cover the now embeded carbon fees, but the sales tax and/or income tax could be reduced by equivalent amounts. This would have the effect of reducing the prices of products and services that have lower carbon impact, while those with higher carbon impact would have a comparitively higher price. In BC there are also direct rebates to people who's earnings/taxes are so low that they do not benifit from the reduction in taxes compared to the increase of prices. Oh, and while BC might be a "socialist placs to begin with", the total tax rate of a BC resident is lower than the tax rate for residents of a numer of US states.
The social difficulties of convincing people to not riot when the tax system gets changed, are as you allude, a challenge, even if those changes do not have a large impact. People do get upset when one of their costs increase, even if one of their other costs decrease by the same amount.
The short version then is that Elon Musk wants to lower the average standard of living then.
Because that would be the effect of his plan, even if he doesn't say it out loud.
And we can look to any of the places that have put in carbon taxes or polution taxes or cap-and-trade systems to put prices on externalites and see exactly this!
Unforunately, we don't magically see all the other potential benifits - carbon emission does seem to decrease, but not hugely for example. In any case, as long as it is revenue neutral - any carbon pricing scheme seem unlikely to have a big effect on standard of living.
Taxes are not the solution to everything you dim-witted Dems.
All of those gas stations that operate on razor thin margins will shut down and put hundreds of thousands out of work.
Why? Are people going to stop buying gas just because the price went up? Did they all shut down when gas prices were significantly higher? Oil prices have been as low as $16.44/barrel to has high as $151.72/barrel in the last two decades. Significant change in usage has not followed. Oil and food are fairly "inelastic" - the consumption thereof is not hugely effected by the price becuase they are mostly "necessities".
What does change is the TYPE of thing that is consumed. If the price of chicken increases, people will eat less of it and more of some other type of food. If we decided that we should put fees on chicken production to reflect the cost that is not born by the chicken producers (like charging for noisy clucking outside the chicken factory), then people would switch to the cheaper pork products and any chicken farmer could reduce their costs by installing sound proofing and pay less "cluck-bucks". Similarly, if we imposed a fee on carbon emmission, people might be able to switch to other forms of energy with lower emmissions.
As things now stand, there is little incentive to reducing the loud clucking - the producers have lots of unpaid externalized costs.
His own electric cars get about 40mpg co2 wise where I live due to the coal powering the majority of electrical use. Is he asking to up the price people pay on his own products?
Yeah, in this case he is. Some sort of CO2 fee would raise the cost of using an electric car in some areas, but it would make that price more reflective of the true total cost to us all, so it would be a good thing. Almost always it is better to have the price of a good or a service to reflect all of the costs of that good or service.
Yeah, that was my reaction too. Why is everyone's answer to anything a new Tax? If the fossil fuel industry receives so many subsidy's how about slowly phasing those out and giving them manufacturers, the states and the general public to make electric cars cheaper and more affordable then gas powered cars? Give incentives to the states to put more recharging stations along the highways so you can drive an electric car almost anywhere and not be afraid that you won't be able to find a charging station.
Imposing fees (via taxes, or cap-and-trade, or manditory insurance, or other methods) on things that are not currently well reflected in the cost to produce stuff or deliver services is generally a good idea. Fees for releasing greenhouse gasses, air pollution, mining, or whatever else, can make the producers and consumers pay for those externalities in a more transparent way without requiring others to shoulder the full costs.
In theory, if you manage to properly reflect the true total cost of all these types of externalities, one could remove virtually all subsidies, and not really care which choice producers or consumers make - the price of the service would include the cost to mitigate the problems. We are already paying these costs since we are damaging our environment, but right now we don't collectively care about them because they are paid slowly and invisibly.
Total ownership cost is something else than true cost. There are plenty of costs which currently are not paid by the owner. Mostly environmental effects which are very, very expensive to clean up but which are cleaned up by the tax payer instead of the company that actually caused the environmental damage.
A carbon tax (priced in a way that the cost to "clean up" the carbon emission is exactly that carbon tax) would internalize these costs and make the owner actually pay his due.
I see myself as mostly libertarian but even I can see the point in such a tax. It wouldn't interfere with free market, it would ensure a free market, where cost directly connected to a product can no longer be externalized to the general public.
The other problem if you look at the subsidies that oil companies get they are the same that any other company get. Tax deductions for research, forgien tax credits and standard costs of business that any mom and pop business also gets as a subsidy.
Direct subsidies or tax breaks are one thing, but there is also the externalities that are going unpriced by some industries. Mom and pop do not get help from various forms of government when they accidentally spill their garbage in the street - they probably have to pay a fine and pick up the garbage. (You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). When there is an oil spill, often the total cost of cleanup is not paid by the producer, but by the wider society. Thus the companies in these situations are not paying the full cost of their products or services. A fee or tax to more accurately reflect these types of costs is certainly what a "proper" capitolist system should have.
If you replace the word subsidy with externality the statement actually makes sense. Society at large bears the cost of pollution, but that cost is not factored into the price of using fossil fuels. A tax on carbon is absolutely the right way to handle that.
Trying to figure out reasonable numbers for other externalities that other generators may be offloading would be good too - the methane production of resevoirs behind hydro-electric dams, bird deaths from large structures like turbines and sky-scrapers, domestic cat caused small animal deaths, chemical polltion due to disposal of batteries, etc. Fees (ie taxes) and disposal deposits are good ways of applying these sorts of costs.
I would happily take a President Camacho over having to deal with a Hillary Clinton. The woman has little chance of beating Trump. She's at a huge disadvantage because she triggers a very negative reaction at the genetic level in the vast majority of males. She sounds like that nagging aunt that you wanted to slap around when you were young. That along with her insane stance on trying to push gun control will doom her by pushing a good number of Democrats over to Trump.
While I think you accurately portray the emotional feelings that some (or even "many") have to Clinton, I don't think you have accurately captured the feelings of the electorate overall. Maybe people are lying to the pollsters or somehow the pollsters are doing everything wrong, but Clinton's favourability ratings have been much higher than Trumps since he entered the Republican race, and that does not seem to have changed much:
Now, I am not saying that any of this guarantees a Clinton win, but I think we need to be careful to not project our own feelings about the candidates onto what "the masses" are feeling. Of course being brilliant, insightful individuals with superior congnitive skills, "the masses" SHOULD feel like we do, but often they somehow don't seem to. Strangely enough, on contentious issues like gun control, abortion, ecconomic policies, and everything else - a large fraction of the population DOES NOT AGREE with our right and proper views! That is why they are contentious issues.
Sure, things are likely to change over the course of the campaign, but right now more people dislike Trump (58%) than dislike Clinton (50%) and more people like Clinton (42%) than like Trump (33%).
Here is some more combined polling data from a few weeks back, which seems to be even more extreme:
It may be hard (or almost impossible) to understand WHY so many people do not share our good and correct feelings about these candidates, but to think that Clinton "triggers a very negative reaction at the genetic level in the vast majority of males" is just wrong unless "vast majority" means something different than what I think it means - the data just doesn't support it.
Oh I am sure it doesn't cost Valve anything other than some developer time to explore the idea so it's no skin off their back, but even the tweenage argument doesn't make a lot of sense in the age of shared Netflix and Prime accounts. My kid's had their own Netflix profile on my account for years, works great.
Sure, my kids can watch Netflix, but if they want to rent "Leprechaun 3" they can use their Steam money (or maybe it is available on Netflix?) and get used to doing that and maybe never bother getting an iTunes account or whatever other options are out there.
(I tried very hard not to mention that "kid's" is either a contraction of "kid is" as in "My kid's a credit to his school" or is the possessive form of the singular "kid", as in "I hate my kid's friends". I just couldn't let it go. I guess I am a jerk. http://gizmodo.com/study-peopl... I obviously need help. I have little doubt that there are greater errors in my own writing.)
1. Easy game and save management where it didn't exist before, with excellent social/community integration
2. Steam SALES where you get games that are a couple of years old at rock bottom prices.
Neither of these things will apply to movies on Steam from what I see so far, so there's just no benefit to renting one there.
There is probably a significan number of Steam subscribers (such as my "tweenage" kids) who do not have any other (or few other) online funded accounts to watch movies. Steam gift cards being usable for movie rentals doesn't seem totally stupid. If it does not cost Valve much to provide this content, it might bring in a few bucks now and possibly more in the future. Bring in the young ones now and you might have them long-term.
This doesn't seem like a simple way to send 100,000 to anyone who I might be wanting to abuse, does it?
In any case I hope they have tried to engineer some security and sanity checks into the system.
I would not want to be the unfortunate sod who has got a new cell phone and found out that the previous owner of that number has enabled this feature and forgot to update their facebook profile when they changed cell phones - getting random authentification texts via facebook for the rest of my life doesn't seem very pleasant.
Geez - it's a no win situation. If I had to ask her to make changes she'd ask "am I your secretary?!"
nope - if a $1 buys a happy marriage I'll go without the expensive coffee.
I have not changed anything since we opened the account a few years back, certainly nothing that needed to be changed by phone. You do have a shared password file, don't you? What, you don't trust the love of your life?:-)
That reminds me, I should make sure my spouse knows where to find the password to the PW safe in case I kick the bucket unexpectedly.
Yes - but it goes beyond that little Profile (my account is used on the AppleTV so Kiddo channel is under mine).
Notification emails go to her, changes are in her control, whatever is there...she never needs to ask me to change anything. My wife always points out the second-class woman world to me.
We worked for the same company - (met and got married). She called to change her name - but since I made more I was the account owner (men always make more)....and she wasn't allowed to update her profile with her new (legal) name --- they had to ask ME if it was okay for her to make this change.
Many other things are like this for her. Only one controller allowed - and usually the man. So - if having her own account for Netflix provides 100% control... it's worth a $1.
Then give up your account! Save the $1! Be the "second-class-spouse"!
For the future, put all account possible under a "non-gendered" name like "Chris Smith" and just each of you pretend your name is "Chris" when you call them.
I am good at telling people how to live their lives. Maybe I should go into politics?
Perhaps your dad would have been better off in a state with open carry. Even an empty holster tends to make strangers polite.
The politeness effect was always my theory too, but I though I recently read a study that seems to suggest otherwise - that firearms tended to increase conflict. As I recall the sociolocial "story" was that without firearms, humans (like all socal primates) tend to unconsiously react to the social power structure, with weaker/less dominant individuals generally deferring to stronger/more dominant ones, and the level of strength/dominance being something that people generally evaluate relatively consistently. Thus, the "big guy" is deferred to gererally in little ways like interrupting him a lett less than average durring a conversation. When the "big poor guy" interacts with the "rich little guy", there is a bit of back and fort initially until one side or the other defers in that particular situation and the result might be different if the location is a bar compared to a board room.
When a firearm or two is present, much of the subtle cues are less useful, the "little guy with a gun" does not defer in quite the way he "should" according to the instinctual part of the "big guy's" brain. So the "bug guy" thumps his chest a bit more than normal, even if his intelect knows there is a gun that should make the "little guy" more powerful.
Thus we get a mismatch between what we think should happen - increased politeness - and what does happen - every being even more touchy.
I'll tell you what you find me ANYTHING that suggests businesses were open to mixing customers in the era of Jim Crow because I have read up on black culture and I've seen nothing to suggest any businesses were open to that much less many much less most of them.
You need to read some more books, bud. Businesses want money. If some businesses would have actively discriminated while others hadn't, the former would promptly gotten out-competed and would have been gone. Only by government fiat can that kind of discrimination work. Get a clue.
There are many examples of "the free market" having little or no impact in places with large scale behaviour that we now find repugnant. "Whites only" golf clubs were not out-competed by integrated ones for example, thus it in not "only" my government fiat that such things exist.
Hopefully the "family" plan will be better. My wife has her own basic subscription too (she used to be a DVD only person until we got married and I bought her an iPad). I think we could save a buck by combining. eh. She likes the independence and a buck is worth that.
I don't know what "independence" she might be enjoying that is not available in a single subscription - the online stuff can be segregated into different "profiles" (or whatever they might be called) so your "My Little Poney" viewing habits do not pollute her "Serious Cinema" choices. As I recall from our days of DVD Netflix - there are similar features for ordering disks. You could alway cancel your subscription and ask to join her's - give her all the control.
You mean the Democrats sunk all their money into pensions and shitty social services instead of actual things that benefit society like mass transit...
You mean the politicians did not do their long term planning well but instead caved to short term self serving interests? Or perhaps you mean the public bought into the "us verses them" arguments and refused to support a rational logn term prioitization of expenses? Or perhaps you mean everyone but you and me is an idiot?
Slashdot Mirror
A niece and a friend's wife have been cleaning homes for the past 25 years; they constantly turn down new business and if they lose a client, there are many more interested in their services. Neither of them work weekends. They each make $40k/yr cash, unreported revenue. Neither of them will ever be without work.
Until someone reports them to the IRS (for the reward) and they get a hefty fine or jail time, or at least big bucks in lawyer fees. Not to sound too cynical, but only the uber-rich get away without paying taxes.
"The IRS Whistleblower Office pays money to people who blow the whistle on persons who fail to pay the tax that they owe. If the IRS uses information provided by the whistleblower, it can award the whistleblower up to 30 percent of the additional tax, penalty and other amounts it collects."
https://www.irs.gov/uac/whistl...
Customer service rep positions are replaced with machine repair and maintenance positions. The law of unintended consequences is preserved and the inevitable slide towards machine replacement for most human tasks is moved forward. Everyone wins, except of course for the people that the higher minimum wage laws and Affordable Care Act were designed to help. They have been priced out the job market. They are just too expensive to keep on board.
If this analysis is correct, not changing the mimium wage delays this type of thing by only a few years I would guess.
$15 per hour wouldn't even be the highest it's ever been. $15 per hour isn't a high number.
It looks like the mimum wage was historically the highest back in 1968:
"The minimum wage reached its (inflation-adjusted) historic high in 1968, when it was raised from $1.40 to $1.60 per hour. Adjusted for inflation using the BLS online inflation calculator that would come to $10.55 per hour in 2012 dollars."
http://inequality.org/minimum-...
Clearly, whatever mimium wage society thinks is appropriate, it should really be indexed somehow to inflation or agerage wages or something like that.
I have always liked the idea of setting mimimum wages as some fraction of the top wage in a company, or as some fraction of the wages of politicians - though that would not work well in states with underpaid legislators.
Well, if we could get everyone to agree that "yeah this is a real problem and these are good ways of addressing them, but we will never get everyone to agree to do anything", then it becomes much less difficult to actually do it. I'm pessimistic, but I don't want to completely rule out the possibility of actual action.
Side note: Yes, I agree with you... I'm looking at it from a practical point of view, not theory. Lots of stuff works in theory, but not in reality.
I like the meta nature of this: In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there ususally is.
In this case, Bob's customers are harming people on the other side of the planet. Bob's customers want cheap chips. It will take war to try and change their mind.
Well, we managed to be fairly effective on ozone and acid rain - so there are at least a few counter examples of this type of thing working without threat of war. I suspect that the same sorts of trade and ecconomic sticks and carrots we used for that might also be workable - but finding the will to do anything in any one spot is a challenge.
Oh, yes, I was glib when I said it was "easy". We are talking about real people trying to make acceptable group decisions. I agree totally that none of these sorts of regulatory/fee/tax issues is "easy" from an "actually get systems in place" point of view!
Trying to move everyone to something else that costs more can't be done at no cost, that violates how money works.
At some level what you are saying is correct - moving to non-carbon sources will be more "expensive" at the simplest level of accounting. But at another level it is completely wrong, since the "cheaper" sources have all sorts of externalities that are REAL costs, they are just shifted to other people or other accounting lines. In this particular case, one of the reason the "something" costs less is that the purcase price does not reflect all the costs that are being paid for that thing. What we can hopefully someday do it to make the prices paid by the purchaser more in line with the actual total costs we all pay for the items.
If Bob's House of Chips sells lots of bags of chips, but doesn't provide enough trash cans and/or people who take the bags away toss them on the ground a few blocks away - someone besides Bob is paying to clean up the mess. The whole community is paying those costs, while Bob and his customers are the ones who should be shouldering the majority of them. Imposing a cleanup-fee on companies like Bob can be a way to make the price of Bob's bags-o-chips properly reflect the actual total cost of the product, and can make Mary's House of Brownies comparitively less expensive, even though Bob's material and production costs might be lower than Mary's, since her product gets eaten completely and doesn't generate any littering issues.
Getting the numbers right may be hard, but getting them "more right" than the current numbers (Bob's product reflect NONE of the cleanup costs) is not that difficult, and any imporvements to the correct price should send at least some signal to the "magical market free hand" to change behaviour, shifting more towards products that have lower total "real" cost. Having a system where Bob is incentivized to develop litter-free-bags (lower cleaup-fee for Bob), or using a refundable deposit to incentivize customer behaviour (also lower cleaup-fee for Bob), could in fact make the whole enterprise more efficient from the overall societal point of view, thus improving the total standard of living for everyone!
At the end of the day, there is no free lunch. What you want is for everyone to pay more money to have the same stuff they already have today. There is no way that won't cost us all in the form of our standard of living.
I would say: "At the end of the day, there is no free lunch. What I want is for everyone to pay more money to have the same stuff they already have today, and also to not have all that other stuff like the shared enviornment and natural resourses being depleted at unsustainable levels. Leaving all these externalities at zero cost to the companies and consumers makes us all pay more than we should, as some of the seemingly "more expensive" options are in fact cheaper when all factors are considered. There is no way that having society paying more than they could be by using the alternatives, won't cost us all in the form of our standard of living."
Making Bob's customers pay the true price of the product is a good idea.
Actually managing to implement such a thing is left to the reader as an exercise.... :-)
And we can look to any of the places that have put in carbon taxes or polution taxes or cap-and-trade systems to put prices on externalites and see exactly this!
Cute, but you're ignoring the obvious... the places that have done this are already taxed to death and socialist places to begin with.
Do it in the US and you'd have riots on your hands. If the price of gas ended up at $5/gal you'd quickly have 50 million people unable to afford gas.
The reality is that you can't tax carbon enough to matter without stomping on the lower class and what you can tax it won't change anything worthwhile.
Unforunately, we don't magically see all the other potential benifits - carbon emission does seem to decrease, but not hugely for example. In any case, as long as it is revenue neutral - any carbon pricing scheme seem unlikely to have a big effect on standard of living.
A carbon tax large enough to do what Musk wants would crush standards of living. No one has actually done that yet.
One could easily set the tax rate and various rebates and the like to make it tax neutral for virtually everyone. Yes the cost of items would rise to cover the now embeded carbon fees, but the sales tax and/or income tax could be reduced by equivalent amounts. This would have the effect of reducing the prices of products and services that have lower carbon impact, while those with higher carbon impact would have a comparitively higher price. In BC there are also direct rebates to people who's earnings/taxes are so low that they do not benifit from the reduction in taxes compared to the increase of prices. Oh, and while BC might be a "socialist placs to begin with", the total tax rate of a BC resident is lower than the tax rate for residents of a numer of US states.
The social difficulties of convincing people to not riot when the tax system gets changed, are as you allude, a challenge, even if those changes do not have a large impact. People do get upset when one of their costs increase, even if one of their other costs decrease by the same amount.
The short version then is that Elon Musk wants to lower the average standard of living then.
Because that would be the effect of his plan, even if he doesn't say it out loud.
And we can look to any of the places that have put in carbon taxes or polution taxes or cap-and-trade systems to put prices on externalites and see exactly this!
Oh wait, that is not what we see: http://www.carbontax.org/where...
Unforunately, we don't magically see all the other potential benifits - carbon emission does seem to decrease, but not hugely for example. In any case, as long as it is revenue neutral - any carbon pricing scheme seem unlikely to have a big effect on standard of living.
Taxes are not the solution to everything you dim-witted Dems.
All of those gas stations that operate on razor thin margins will shut down and put hundreds of thousands out of work.
Why? Are people going to stop buying gas just because the price went up? Did they all shut down when gas prices were significantly higher? Oil prices have been as low as $16.44/barrel to has high as $151.72/barrel in the last two decades. Significant change in usage has not followed. Oil and food are fairly "inelastic" - the consumption thereof is not hugely effected by the price becuase they are mostly "necessities".
What does change is the TYPE of thing that is consumed. If the price of chicken increases, people will eat less of it and more of some other type of food. If we decided that we should put fees on chicken production to reflect the cost that is not born by the chicken producers (like charging for noisy clucking outside the chicken factory), then people would switch to the cheaper pork products and any chicken farmer could reduce their costs by installing sound proofing and pay less "cluck-bucks". Similarly, if we imposed a fee on carbon emmission, people might be able to switch to other forms of energy with lower emmissions.
As things now stand, there is little incentive to reducing the loud clucking - the producers have lots of unpaid externalized costs.
His own electric cars get about 40mpg co2 wise where I live due to the coal powering the majority of electrical use. Is he asking to up the price people pay on his own products?
Yeah, in this case he is. Some sort of CO2 fee would raise the cost of using an electric car in some areas, but it would make that price more reflective of the true total cost to us all, so it would be a good thing. Almost always it is better to have the price of a good or a service to reflect all of the costs of that good or service.
The only way your business can be a success is if you use the police power of the government to take out your competitors.
Rubbish.
Yeah! The competitors got there first, so they get the protection!
Yeah, that was my reaction too. Why is everyone's answer to anything a new Tax? If the fossil fuel industry receives so many subsidy's how about slowly phasing those out and giving them manufacturers, the states and the general public to make electric cars cheaper and more affordable then gas powered cars? Give incentives to the states to put more recharging stations along the highways so you can drive an electric car almost anywhere and not be afraid that you won't be able to find a charging station.
Imposing fees (via taxes, or cap-and-trade, or manditory insurance, or other methods) on things that are not currently well reflected in the cost to produce stuff or deliver services is generally a good idea. Fees for releasing greenhouse gasses, air pollution, mining, or whatever else, can make the producers and consumers pay for those externalities in a more transparent way without requiring others to shoulder the full costs.
In theory, if you manage to properly reflect the true total cost of all these types of externalities, one could remove virtually all subsidies, and not really care which choice producers or consumers make - the price of the service would include the cost to mitigate the problems. We are already paying these costs since we are damaging our environment, but right now we don't collectively care about them because they are paid slowly and invisibly.
Total ownership cost is something else than true cost. There are plenty of costs which currently are not paid by the owner. Mostly environmental effects which are very, very expensive to clean up but which are cleaned up by the tax payer instead of the company that actually caused the environmental damage.
A carbon tax (priced in a way that the cost to "clean up" the carbon emission is exactly that carbon tax) would internalize these costs and make the owner actually pay his due.
I see myself as mostly libertarian but even I can see the point in such a tax. It wouldn't interfere with free market, it would ensure a free market, where cost directly connected to a product can no longer be externalized to the general public.
Don't you be talking sense around here child!
The other problem if you look at the subsidies that oil companies get they are the same that any other company get. Tax deductions for research, forgien tax credits and standard costs of business that any mom and pop business also gets as a subsidy.
Direct subsidies or tax breaks are one thing, but there is also the externalities that are going unpriced by some industries. Mom and pop do not get help from various forms of government when they accidentally spill their garbage in the street - they probably have to pay a fine and pick up the garbage. (You can get anything you want, at Alice's Restaurant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). When there is an oil spill, often the total cost of cleanup is not paid by the producer, but by the wider society. Thus the companies in these situations are not paying the full cost of their products or services. A fee or tax to more accurately reflect these types of costs is certainly what a "proper" capitolist system should have.
If you replace the word subsidy with externality the statement actually makes sense. Society at large bears the cost of pollution, but that cost is not factored into the price of using fossil fuels. A tax on carbon is absolutely the right way to handle that.
Trying to figure out reasonable numbers for other externalities that other generators may be offloading would be good too - the methane production of resevoirs behind hydro-electric dams, bird deaths from large structures like turbines and sky-scrapers, domestic cat caused small animal deaths, chemical polltion due to disposal of batteries, etc. Fees (ie taxes) and disposal deposits are good ways of applying these sorts of costs.
300,000 US birds killed by wind turbines annually, compared to the 3 billion birds killed by cats every year.
Learn to check statistics before opening your damn mouth, you fossil-fuel shilling waste-of-space intellectually dishonest cunt.
Maybe we should be trying to run over more cats?
I would happily take a President Camacho over having to deal with a Hillary Clinton. The woman has little chance of beating Trump. She's at a huge disadvantage because she triggers a very negative reaction at the genetic level in the vast majority of males. She sounds like that nagging aunt that you wanted to slap around when you were young. That along with her insane stance on trying to push gun control will doom her by pushing a good number of Democrats over to Trump.
While I think you accurately portray the emotional feelings that some (or even "many") have to Clinton, I don't think you have accurately captured the feelings of the electorate overall. Maybe people are lying to the pollsters or somehow the pollsters are doing everything wrong, but Clinton's favourability ratings have been much higher than Trumps since he entered the Republican race, and that does not seem to have changed much:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...
http://elections.huffingtonpos...
Now, I am not saying that any of this guarantees a Clinton win, but I think we need to be careful to not project our own feelings about the candidates onto what "the masses" are feeling. Of course being brilliant, insightful individuals with superior congnitive skills, "the masses" SHOULD feel like we do, but often they somehow don't seem to. Strangely enough, on contentious issues like gun control, abortion, ecconomic policies, and everything else - a large fraction of the population DOES NOT AGREE with our right and proper views! That is why they are contentious issues.
Sure, things are likely to change over the course of the campaign, but right now more people dislike Trump (58%) than dislike Clinton (50%) and more people like Clinton (42%) than like Trump (33%).
Here is some more combined polling data from a few weeks back, which seems to be even more extreme:
http://heavy.com/news/2016/04/...
It may be hard (or almost impossible) to understand WHY so many people do not share our good and correct feelings about these candidates, but to think that Clinton "triggers a very negative reaction at the genetic level in the vast majority of males" is just wrong unless "vast majority" means something different than what I think it means - the data just doesn't support it.
Oh I am sure it doesn't cost Valve anything other than some developer time to explore the idea so it's no skin off their back, but even the tweenage argument doesn't make a lot of sense in the age of shared Netflix and Prime accounts. My kid's had their own Netflix profile on my account for years, works great.
Sure, my kids can watch Netflix, but if they want to rent "Leprechaun 3" they can use their Steam money (or maybe it is available on Netflix?) and get used to doing that and maybe never bother getting an iTunes account or whatever other options are out there.
(I tried very hard not to mention that "kid's" is either a contraction of "kid is" as in "My kid's a credit to his school" or is the possessive form of the singular "kid", as in "I hate my kid's friends". I just couldn't let it go. I guess I am a jerk. http://gizmodo.com/study-peopl... I obviously need help. I have little doubt that there are greater errors in my own writing.)
1. Easy game and save management where it didn't exist before, with excellent social/community integration
2. Steam SALES where you get games that are a couple of years old at rock bottom prices.
Neither of these things will apply to movies on Steam from what I see so far, so there's just no benefit to renting one there.
There is probably a significan number of Steam subscribers (such as my "tweenage" kids) who do not have any other (or few other) online funded accounts to watch movies. Steam gift cards being usable for movie rentals doesn't seem totally stupid. If it does not cost Valve much to provide this content, it might bring in a few bucks now and possibly more in the future. Bring in the young ones now and you might have them long-term.
This doesn't seem like a simple way to send 100,000 to anyone who I might be wanting to abuse, does it?
In any case I hope they have tried to engineer some security and sanity checks into the system.
I would not want to be the unfortunate sod who has got a new cell phone and found out that the previous owner of that number has enabled this feature and forgot to update their facebook profile when they changed cell phones - getting random authentification texts via facebook for the rest of my life doesn't seem very pleasant.
Geez - it's a no win situation. If I had to ask her to make changes she'd ask "am I your secretary?!"
nope - if a $1 buys a happy marriage I'll go without the expensive coffee.
I have not changed anything since we opened the account a few years back, certainly nothing that needed to be changed by phone. You do have a shared password file, don't you? What, you don't trust the love of your life? :-)
That reminds me, I should make sure my spouse knows where to find the password to the PW safe in case I kick the bucket unexpectedly.
Yes - but it goes beyond that little Profile (my account is used on the AppleTV so Kiddo channel is under mine).
Notification emails go to her, changes are in her control, whatever is there...she never needs to ask me to change anything. My wife always points out the second-class woman world to me.
We worked for the same company - (met and got married). She called to change her name - but since I made more I was the account owner (men always make more)....and she wasn't allowed to update her profile with her new (legal) name --- they had to ask ME if it was okay for her to make this change.
Many other things are like this for her. Only one controller allowed - and usually the man. So - if having her own account for Netflix provides 100% control ... it's worth a $1.
Then give up your account! Save the $1! Be the "second-class-spouse"!
For the future, put all account possible under a "non-gendered" name like "Chris Smith" and just each of you pretend your name is "Chris" when you call them.
I am good at telling people how to live their lives. Maybe I should go into politics?
Perhaps your dad would have been better off in a state with open carry. Even an empty holster tends to make strangers polite.
The politeness effect was always my theory too, but I though I recently read a study that seems to suggest otherwise - that firearms tended to increase conflict. As I recall the sociolocial "story" was that without firearms, humans (like all socal primates) tend to unconsiously react to the social power structure, with weaker/less dominant individuals generally deferring to stronger/more dominant ones, and the level of strength/dominance being something that people generally evaluate relatively consistently. Thus, the "big guy" is deferred to gererally in little ways like interrupting him a lett less than average durring a conversation. When the "big poor guy" interacts with the "rich little guy", there is a bit of back and fort initially until one side or the other defers in that particular situation and the result might be different if the location is a bar compared to a board room.
When a firearm or two is present, much of the subtle cues are less useful, the "little guy with a gun" does not defer in quite the way he "should" according to the instinctual part of the "big guy's" brain. So the "bug guy" thumps his chest a bit more than normal, even if his intelect knows there is a gun that should make the "little guy" more powerful.
Thus we get a mismatch between what we think should happen - increased politeness - and what does happen - every being even more touchy.
I'll tell you what you find me ANYTHING that suggests businesses were open to mixing customers in the era of Jim Crow because I have read up on black culture and I've seen nothing to suggest any businesses were open to that much less many much less most of them.
You need to read some more books, bud. Businesses want money. If some businesses would have actively discriminated while others hadn't, the former would promptly gotten out-competed and would have been gone. Only by government fiat can that kind of discrimination work. Get a clue.
There are many examples of "the free market" having little or no impact in places with large scale behaviour that we now find repugnant. "Whites only" golf clubs were not out-competed by integrated ones for example, thus it in not "only" my government fiat that such things exist.
Hopefully the "family" plan will be better. My wife has her own basic subscription too (she used to be a DVD only person until we got married and I bought her an iPad). I think we could save a buck by combining. eh. She likes the independence and a buck is worth that.
I don't know what "independence" she might be enjoying that is not available in a single subscription - the online stuff can be segregated into different "profiles" (or whatever they might be called) so your "My Little Poney" viewing habits do not pollute her "Serious Cinema" choices. As I recall from our days of DVD Netflix - there are similar features for ordering disks. You could alway cancel your subscription and ask to join her's - give her all the control.
You mean the Democrats sunk all their money into pensions and shitty social services instead of actual things that benefit society like mass transit...
You mean the politicians did not do their long term planning well but instead caved to short term self serving interests? Or perhaps you mean the public bought into the "us verses them" arguments and refused to support a rational logn term prioitization of expenses? Or perhaps you mean everyone but you and me is an idiot?