Being unarmed does not help, so being armed gives you a tool to use that is not available if it isn't there. Does having a hammer increase the odds of being able to drive a nail into a board. What about the fact that on most days you don't need to drive nails into wood? That means we will never have the need, so should never have the ability. And if you don't need the ability, then no-one else does either, right?
I don't know. How often do we hear stories of "Innocent armed civilian calms down crazed cops who mistakenly kicked down her front door"?
The question I asked was not "should people be permitted firearms" it was "does having a firearm make one safer from the crazed police." I have not seen any evidence one way or another, but my instinct is that if the crazed police are shooting people because they THINK they are armed, actually being armed doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent.
Granted, in a wacko world of crazed police and overreaching government, possibly the heroic and noble thing is to proudly bear arms against the oppressor, but that doesn't necessarily make it the safe thing.
It sounds exactly like the way cops act when storming into an unsuspecting house full of elderly or children. Shoot anything that moves. I just don't understand why the people who want to get rid of guns, don't count the ones in the cops hands. When the cops get rid of the guns, then I MIGHT think about getting rid of mine. Until then, the gang in blue is too dangerous, and their handlers, the politicians, too evil.
From a purely self-survival point of view, is being personally armed likely to increase or decrease your odds of survival when interacting with the cops?
This isn't a race to the bottom. For those of you who aren't old enough to remember air travel before deregulation, prices were about twice as high back then.
I notice that the data graph in the article STARTS with the date of deregulation. As I recall from a Consumer Reports article a decade or so back, the rate of price dropping actually was HIGHER before deregulation, which might make someone think that things would be cheaper if we had just continued that.
I like this quote: "The most rigorous analysis of the impact of deregulation was done by David B. Richards, formerly of the CAB and FAA. His research concluded, “This paper makes clear that the grant of pricing freedom to the airline industry has generally resulted in average prices being higher than they would have been had regulation continued...”" from https://www.huffingtonpost.com...
Good thing ebay listened to all those genius analysts back in 2015 when they told them to spin off paypal for $50B. If they hadn't listened, and kept hold of paypal instead they'd be able to spin it off today for $100B. Who would ever have wanted to double the value of something you're holding over a 3 year timespan?/sarcasm
But would it have sold for $100B if it had spent the last 3 years as a division of eBay? It is hard to say. The market might have only valued it at $50B.
Did eBay sell all of their stock 3 years ago? Maybe they retained a large fraction of that stock which has now doubled in value.
As an aside, I was reading the letters a relative sent to their family when traveling from the US East to West coast during WW2. The roads were shit, the car was crap and like any long distance traveler in those days, they had numerous breakdowns and needed to plan their days around where the gas stations were located and the mechanics who could provide service. They waited on multiple occasions for multiple days for available parts. They carried all sorts of tools for on-the-road work. This was considered normal.
$17.5K/ea less any expenses for a two-man crew. That would NOT be worth it to me to even daydream about... in Canada the sentence for a conviction of Theft over $5000 is a max of 10 years... $1,750 per year (not indexed to inflation!) that you may not get to keep, though I suppose you do get free room and board.
People who turn to a "life of crime", even highly intelligent ones, don't think like "most people", and seldom think that they might get caught. A single $15,000 payout might be very enticing, even if it actually takes a whole lot of work to get it.
Why Drug Dealers Live With Their Moms If you had a job paying $3.30 an hour, you'd be bunking at home too. April 24, 2005|Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner |
During the crack cocaine boom of the 1990s, the image of the millionaire crack dealer implanted itself on the public consciousness. But anyone who spent time around the Crips or Bloods or any other crack-selling gang might have noticed something odd: A great many crack dealers still lived at home with their moms. Why was that?
Sudhir Venkatesh, a University of Chicago graduate student at the time, discovered the answer.
He had originally been sent by his thesis advisor into a Chicago housing project to administer a sociological survey. But after a harrowing encounter with a local crack gang, he befriended its leader and virtually embedded himself with the gang for six years. He was given a pile of notebooks containing four years' worth of the gang's financial transactions -- a trove of data that, when subjected to an economic analysis, proved incredibly revealing.
At root, economics is the study of incentives -- how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. The rules apply just as well to a crack gang as to a Fortune 500 business.
As it turned out, the gang worked a lot like most American businesses, though perhaps none more so than McDonald's. If you were to hold a McDonald's organizational chart and the crack gang's organizational chart side by side, you could hardly tell the difference....
The only time I had to sign it's when I'm traveling to US. Never understood why they want a ZIP code at gas stations. Well I'm from Canada so that doesn't work well.
Just use the three numbers and add three zeros - if your postal code is A1B 2C3 you can enter 123000 as the zip code and it probably will work.
According to the linked website, this machine supports 16GB, as well as the latest version of macOS, 10.13 (as well as 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10, 10.11, and 10.12).
Install Linux if one wants, but upgrading to the latest version of macOS is probably a "simpler" way of addressing the "out of date browsers" issue.
That upgrade in Apples world means buying a new OS. Years ago in our household we had one Apple that had the same issue, just a few years old and the only way to be able to run a recent browser was buying a new OS.
Yeah, that was a problem for a while - Apple was charging $20 for 10.7 as I recall. Later versions we all free. However, even if the machine in question will not do an upgrade jump from 10.6 to 10.13, Apple provides a free download for 10.11 here: https://support.apple.com/en-u... and one can upgrade for free from 10.11 to 10.13. With the proper firmware updates, this machine seems to be able to do "Internet Recovery", so one should be able to install or update it even with a bare drive and no OS installed.
According to https://everymac.com/systems/a... the MacBook7,1 supports up to 16GB of RAM and can run the current version of macOS, "High Sierra" 10.13. Put in a SATA SSD and this machine is perfectly capable of running all the latest macOS software at very acceptable speed.
The difference is not between heat pump and heater. The difference is between well-insulated and not, unless it's so cold that a heat pump won't actually work.
The difference is whenever a heat pump reaches balance point it turns into a paper weight. When you turn up the stat after lowering it to "save energy" what ends up happening the heat pump spends more time burning expensive electricity not just to heat the air but to heat all of the solid things in the building which were allowed to cool off and are now absorbing heat.
If you just set a temp and leave it be the heat pump stands a better chance of spending more of it's time doing it's job as a heat pump rather than an electric heater. The few percentage points of thermal energy saved does not hold a candle to the amount of energy wasted by switching on aux heat to satisfy stat.
I don't think you understand the physics of heat transfer and/or the accounting of energy. Your language seems to differentiate heating the air and heating the interior objects with the idea that somehow that is an important distinction. I am not sure of the best way to address this type of inaccuracy in your physical model of heat energy transfer - I know it feels like keeping something at a given temperature is greatly different than heating it up and cooing it down again, but it really is not.
To maintain a box at a any temperature requires that the heat energy being lost from that box is equal to the heat energy added to that box. Heat energy is ALWAYS flowing out of the box. The rate of heat energy loss increases as the temperature inside the box increases (we are assuming that outside the box is at some low constant temperature). Thus, for a given amount of time, it takes more heat energy to maintain a high temperature than to maintain a low temperature inside the box. This is true, even if there is a large thermal mass inside the box - the only important thing is the rate that the heat energy is being lost, and this is purely a function of the thermal insulation on the outside of the box, and the temperature difference between the inside and the outside. If the box is filled with lots of stuff with high thermal mass, the temperature inside the box will fall slower than if the box is filled only with air, but the rate of heat energy loss will be the same. Lowering the set temperature for a short amount of time and then later increasing it will require less heat energy input then keeping it at the higher temperature all the time.
The majority of heating system have only two states - "heat" and "off", and the thermostat controls the temperature in the box by turning the heating system off when the inside of the box gets too hot, and switching to "heat" when it gets too cold. When the thermostat is set to a lower temperature, the heating system simply runs for a smaller fraction of the time compared to when the thermostat is set to a higher temperature.
It is true that when you turn the thermostat from a low temperature to a high temperature, the heating system will run constantly until the interior temperature is raised to the high temperature, so for this amount of time the system will "consume" more energy than a system that was being maintained at the constant higher temperature. But the opposite is also true, that when you turn the thermostat from a high temperature to a low temperature, the heating system will not run AT ALL until the interior temperature falls to the low temperature.
If you simply turn off the heating system for 20 minutes, and then immediately turn it back on again, it will take x amount of minutes to heat back up to the starting temperature. The amount of energy used by the heating system over those x minutes will be less than the amount of energy that would have been used to maintain the box at the starting temperature over the full (20 + x) minutes, because the amount of energy that pours out through the sides of the box during the full (20 + x) minutes is les
Low-income people don't even come CLOSE to paying transfer taxes (like SS, etc) in the amount they receive. All other federal expenditures come out of income taxes, which they don't pay.
Right. We are arguing on the same side - excellent. We should design systems that encourage employers to employ more people, even as other forces such as technology advances encourage them to not employ as many. All in the interests of having more people able to pay a larger share of our shared social costs.
While it is true that many low wage earners effectively pay no "federal income tax"
I see what you did there - clipping the part where I said "but they pay lots of other things, like into social security and stuff" - funding some of the things people complain about.
Not only do they not PAY it, they generally get credits out of the tax code that results in paying negative income taxes. They get "refunds" on taxes they do not pay. Those, of course, are just dollars transferred directly from other taxpayers.
So that would be an argument for trying to prevent them from losing their jobs and becoming even more of a "burden" on society, no?
Isn't that what we are talking about?
As an aside, and in order to show my cred as a pinko commie, I heard this the other day from some comedian on the radio: "Ever notice how entitlements for rich people are called 'incentives', and incentives for poor people are called 'entitlements'?" I did a google search of it, and couldn't find who to attribute it to, so maybe it came to me an some drug induced fever dream...
The government ALSO loses even more money from the lack of workers not earning a wage (which is taxed), compounding the issue.
The kind of labor we're talking about, here (landscapers, burger-cashiers) DO NOT PAY INCOME TAXES. Nearly half of the people in the country pay no income taxes, including people who make a lot more than minimum wage.
You have obviously never worked a minimum wage job if you think legally employed landscapers and burger-cashiers do not pay income taxes. While it is true that many low wage earners effectively pay no "federal income tax" directly, they do generate funding of federal programs through the employers' payroll taxes, as well as state and local income taxes and sales taxes, and also Social Security and Medicare taxes (FICA). Lay them off, and that income for all those local, state, and federal social programs drops significantly.
Sounds like you need to go get a job as a pizza delivery driver. You'll change your tune in about a week, 2 at tops.
I don't know. I have been underpaid in the past, and I don't feel I was particularly open to tax fraud then. I will admit that I have never been in particularly high risk of not having enough money to pay my expenses, with solid family support available if necessary, so I might feel different if I was just scraping by.
Is it so strange to think that income should be reported as required? It seems like at least 84% of people agree with in that "they thought it was not acceptable to cheat at all on taxes" according to https://www.livescience.com/81...
I think you are missing something somewhere, because by that logic there should be far far far more businesses that do not take credit cards, and the vast vast vast majority of consumer facing (versus business-to-business companies) that I deal with do take credit cards.
No, that's crazy. Nobody today can afford not to take cards. Cards are 80% of our sales. But, that 20% of cash doesn't cost us the 3% in fees, so you'd have to be dump or crazy not to accept cash.
Just pulling numbers out of my ass, but if a business needs to pay someone for two hours per week (which seems like a huge under estimate, it is only 20 minutes per day for a six-day week) to deal with cash (count, sort, bring to the bank to deposit, etc) than that would be easily $30 in labour per week. $30 is 3% of $1000. If that is 20% of sales, then total sales are $5000/week. Probably very few businesses are successful on $5000/week in gross sales, so that isn't very persuasive, but it is suggestive. I imagine that $50,000/week in gross sales is more typical, which is $10,000/week in cash for those 20% of transactions. 3% of that is $300, or somewhere around ten hours of labour (seven hours if looking at 2%). That does seem a bit high, but it doesn't take long to use up that "budget" if the drive to the bank takes up much time, or there are any thefts or losses or errors at the till.
So, three percent might be high, but anyone who thinks it is significantly lower than 1% is probably wrong too. A one person operation might not be "paying" themselves for the time it takes to collect, count, and deposit their cash, but the time is being spent non-the-less, and the risk of loss or theft is probably a bit higher for cash vs plastic.
At some point, if a business does most of their transactions with plastic, it might be less expensive to eliminate the whole cash-processing infrastructure. Not having to purchase the hardware (cash register, safe, etc.) might tilt the calculation away from cash.
Government is like a teanager. The last thing they should have is a credit card or unlimited funds. They just get into trouble, doing things they shouldn't.
It is immoral to _not_ avoid AND evade your taxes as much as possible!
So you are ok with tax fraud at any level? It is people's duty to try to evade taxes through illegal means? How's that supposed to work?
I want people to be nervous about committing tax fraud. Our tax system only works because the vast majority of payers are honestly trying to follow the rules. If almost everyone tried to cheat, most would get away with it. I want people to be ashamed of breaking the law and worried about flouting their illegal activities. Do you really want everyone to "lie, cheat, and steal"? Yeah, I understand the idea that governmental over-reach is a problem, but if the answer is every-gang-for-themselves, I don't know that is the best solution.
So, the person cheating on the taxes is OK, but the person who reports them is a dirtbag?
How about shoplifters? Spouse beaters? Muggers? People planting bombs? Which crimes that you might observe would you report? Where is the line that you pay attention to? Corporate malfeasance? Littering? Industrial pollution? Voter fraud? Government corruption? Cheating at poker? Checkers? Go-Fish?
I am genuinely curious.
I haven't actually reported anyone in this type of case, but the "snitches get stitches" type of philosophy doesn't really seem like the best way of running a society. That's how a gang/tribal/warlord type of society might be structured, and frankly isn't the type of rule-of-law society I would prefer to live in.
These businesses who can afford to throw away 3% of their gross right off the top are doing so because either:
- Their products are severely overpriced, and they don't mind giving 3% to Visa/MC
- They're being run by very inept people.
I think you are missing something somewhere, because by that logic there should be far far far more businesses that do not take credit cards, and the vast vast vast majority of consumer facing (versus business-to-business companies) that I deal with do take credit cards.
I suppose they must have upped their prices to cover those 3% fees and their customers have sucked it up due to the convenience, or they have taken a pay-cut. Those places that don't take the cards may be making a bit more money per transaction, but they have not been able to drive the ones using CCs out of business due to their supposedly lower costs, and maybe they have lower business volume.
Also note the the credit card company can see where I bought something, not what. Same with the bank. The store will not have the card number, so it will not be able to link purchases to you, unless you have a store card,
Well, the store might notice that every time the wireless MAC address aa:11:22:33:55:66 is visible in the store, the latest issue of "Cool dude Magazine" and "Brainz and Bronze Monthly" are sold. If they trade info with other establishments, they might not be able to track "houghi", but that phone can have quite a dossier built up after a while.
Eventually, there might be tentative links between that phone and other aspects of your life. Get a new phone and the old phone stops following the old routine, but a new one does, so the two might be linked. Sign up with a store's free WiFi system, and an email address might get linked to the profile.
The system doesn't need to be even close to perfect in order to provide useful data to retailers, so it seems almost inevitable that this type of thing will occur. Even without a cell phone to provide a simple tracker, eventually computer vision and security cameras will do visual tracking well enough to do this.
NYC does seem to have about 2.5% of the us population (8.5 out of 323 million). And the two coasts about about 90% "urban", with the rest about 75% urban, for a total of +80% urban. It certainly seems that "urban" is more "typical" than any other experience.
Of course, the NYC experience is not necessarily the same as the non-NYC urban experience.
None of this means that one should necessarily make decisions or base policy on the fact that the USA is a largely urban nation, but it also seems like a bad idea to not recognize that it is the reality that most of the population is "in the city".
I have heard that Mountain Equipment Co-op ( http://www.mec.ca/ ) used to give a cash discount to reflect the perceived lower costs associated with cash over plastic, until they did a closer accounting of the actual costs and realized that the cash costs were comparable to the plastic costs. Paying employees for count, sort, deposit, and otherwise handle the cash are real, unavoidable costs. Errors, accidents, and thefts impose additional costs that can be minimized by increased error checking and security procedures, but those procedures impose further direct costs. Non-cash transactions also have various costs (including errors, and thefts) associated with them beyond the transaction fees paid to the processor, but they are often so much smaller than cash handling costs that they can almost be ignored when making a comparison.
Of course, the devil is in the details. Different businesses have different characteristics such that the balance between the the two can not be covered by blanket statements. And none of this addresses the psychology of the customer experience. It might be worthwhile taking a loss on the single pack of gum sales in order to maintain customer loyalty for more typical large purchases, or it might not.
Some possible customer results: "I just want some gum, but they have a $5 minimum CC purchase, so I won't go in at all." "I know they have $5 minimum, so I will buy some milk and bread along with the gum." "They don't have a $5 minimum, but now that I'm here I might as well pickup some milk and the paper too." "Oh, their sign explains their fee structure, without demanding minimums, that is nice, so I'll pay using the format that costs them the least to process."
Push hard and you can see discounts of near their marginal tax rates on income.
Which is a rip. You know they are keeping the cost of what they sold you on the books, just forgetting they got paid.
Protip: Only works when dealing with the owner, or at least someone who understands.
Then you take great the "cash discount" for your product, and report them to the IRS or local tax authority for investigation (great if they also offered to "fogive the sales tax" too) and maybe you can get a "snitch reward" on top o the great purchase deal! And a criminal gets some payback! Win-win-win!
Slashdot Mirror
But then what would we do with all our military surplus gear?
Being unarmed does not help, so being armed gives you a tool to use that is not available if it isn't there. Does having a hammer increase the odds of being able to drive a nail into a board. What about the fact that on most days you don't need to drive nails into wood? That means we will never have the need, so should never have the ability. And if you don't need the ability, then no-one else does either, right?
I don't know. How often do we hear stories of "Innocent armed civilian calms down crazed cops who mistakenly kicked down her front door"?
The question I asked was not "should people be permitted firearms" it was "does having a firearm make one safer from the crazed police." I have not seen any evidence one way or another, but my instinct is that if the crazed police are shooting people because they THINK they are armed, actually being armed doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent.
Granted, in a wacko world of crazed police and overreaching government, possibly the heroic and noble thing is to proudly bear arms against the oppressor, but that doesn't necessarily make it the safe thing.
It sounds exactly like the way cops act when storming into an unsuspecting house full of elderly or children. Shoot anything that moves. I just don't understand why the people who want to get rid of guns, don't count the ones in the cops hands. When the cops get rid of the guns, then I MIGHT think about getting rid of mine. Until then, the gang in blue is too dangerous, and their handlers, the politicians, too evil.
From a purely self-survival point of view, is being personally armed likely to increase or decrease your odds of survival when interacting with the cops?
This isn't a race to the bottom. For those of you who aren't old enough to remember air travel before deregulation, prices were about twice as high back then.
I notice that the data graph in the article STARTS with the date of deregulation. As I recall from a Consumer Reports article a decade or so back, the rate of price dropping actually was HIGHER before deregulation, which might make someone think that things would be cheaper if we had just continued that.
I like this quote: "The most rigorous analysis of the impact of deregulation was done by David B. Richards, formerly of the CAB and FAA. His research concluded, “This paper makes clear that the grant of pricing freedom to the airline industry has generally resulted in average prices being higher than they would have been had regulation continued...”" from https://www.huffingtonpost.com...
Good thing ebay listened to all those genius analysts back in 2015 when they told them to spin off paypal for $50B. If they hadn't listened, and kept hold of paypal instead they'd be able to spin it off today for $100B. Who would ever have wanted to double the value of something you're holding over a 3 year timespan? /sarcasm
But would it have sold for $100B if it had spent the last 3 years as a division of eBay? It is hard to say. The market might have only valued it at $50B.
Did eBay sell all of their stock 3 years ago? Maybe they retained a large fraction of that stock which has now doubled in value.
I have a MAC and Version: 5.3.7.2, and it still had the bug.
The but was fixed in 5.4.4, so if you upgrade to 5.4.4 or later it should not be a problem.
Put a gas generator in the towed vehicle and charge using that. Easy-peasy.
https://www.wired.com/2010/11/...
As an aside, I was reading the letters a relative sent to their family when traveling from the US East to West coast during WW2. The roads were shit, the car was crap and like any long distance traveler in those days, they had numerous breakdowns and needed to plan their days around where the gas stations were located and the mechanics who could provide service. They waited on multiple occasions for multiple days for available parts. They carried all sorts of tools for on-the-road work. This was considered normal.
Widespread infrastructure doesn't grow overnight.
Does anybody know if LibreOffice 6 fixes the bug where portrait documents will only print in landscape mode?
If this is the bug you were talking about, it seems to have been fixed in at least 5.4.4
https://bugs.documentfoundatio...
$17.5K/ea less any expenses for a two-man crew. That would NOT be worth it to me to even daydream about... in Canada the sentence for a conviction of Theft over $5000 is a max of 10 years... $1,750 per year (not indexed to inflation!) that you may not get to keep, though I suppose you do get free room and board.
People who turn to a "life of crime", even highly intelligent ones, don't think like "most people", and seldom think that they might get caught. A single $15,000 payout might be very enticing, even if it actually takes a whole lot of work to get it.
http://articles.latimes.com/20...
Why Drug Dealers Live With Their Moms
If you had a job paying $3.30 an hour, you'd be bunking at home too.
April 24, 2005|Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner |
During the crack cocaine boom of the 1990s, the image of the millionaire crack dealer implanted itself on the public consciousness. But anyone who spent time around the Crips or Bloods or any other crack-selling gang might have noticed something odd: A great many crack dealers still lived at home with their moms. Why was that?
Sudhir Venkatesh, a University of Chicago graduate student at the time, discovered the answer.
He had originally been sent by his thesis advisor into a Chicago housing project to administer a sociological survey. But after a harrowing encounter with a local crack gang, he befriended its leader and virtually embedded himself with the gang for six years. He was given a pile of notebooks containing four years' worth of the gang's financial transactions -- a trove of data that, when subjected to an economic analysis, proved incredibly revealing.
At root, economics is the study of incentives -- how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. The rules apply just as well to a crack gang as to a Fortune 500 business.
As it turned out, the gang worked a lot like most American businesses, though perhaps none more so than McDonald's. If you were to hold a McDonald's organizational chart and the crack gang's organizational chart side by side, you could hardly tell the difference. ...
The only time I had to sign it's when I'm traveling to US. Never understood why they want a ZIP code at gas stations. Well I'm from Canada so that doesn't work well.
Just use the three numbers and add three zeros - if your postal code is A1B 2C3 you can enter 123000 as the zip code and it probably will work.
Here is a note from back in 2013 - https://www.theglobeandmail.co...
According to the linked website, this machine supports 16GB, as well as the latest version of macOS, 10.13 (as well as 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10, 10.11, and 10.12).
Install Linux if one wants, but upgrading to the latest version of macOS is probably a "simpler" way of addressing the "out of date browsers" issue.
That upgrade in Apples world means buying a new OS.
Years ago in our household we had one Apple that had the same issue, just a few years old and the only way to be able to run a recent browser was buying a new OS.
Yeah, that was a problem for a while - Apple was charging $20 for 10.7 as I recall. Later versions we all free. However, even if the machine in question will not do an upgrade jump from 10.6 to 10.13, Apple provides a free download for 10.11 here: https://support.apple.com/en-u... and one can upgrade for free from 10.11 to 10.13. With the proper firmware updates, this machine seems to be able to do "Internet Recovery", so one should be able to install or update it even with a bare drive and no OS installed.
https://support.apple.com/en-u...
According to https://everymac.com/systems/a... the MacBook7,1 supports up to 16GB of RAM and can run the current version of macOS, "High Sierra" 10.13. Put in a SATA SSD and this machine is perfectly capable of running all the latest macOS software at very acceptable speed.
The difference is not between heat pump and heater. The difference is between well-insulated and not, unless it's so cold that a heat pump won't actually work.
The difference is whenever a heat pump reaches balance point it turns into a paper weight. When you turn up the stat after lowering it to "save energy" what ends up happening the heat pump spends more time burning expensive electricity not just to heat the air but to heat all of the solid things in the building which were allowed to cool off and are now absorbing heat.
If you just set a temp and leave it be the heat pump stands a better chance of spending more of it's time doing it's job as a heat pump rather than an electric heater. The few percentage points of thermal energy saved does not hold a candle to the amount of energy wasted by switching on aux heat to satisfy stat.
I don't think you understand the physics of heat transfer and/or the accounting of energy. Your language seems to differentiate heating the air and heating the interior objects with the idea that somehow that is an important distinction. I am not sure of the best way to address this type of inaccuracy in your physical model of heat energy transfer - I know it feels like keeping something at a given temperature is greatly different than heating it up and cooing it down again, but it really is not.
To maintain a box at a any temperature requires that the heat energy being lost from that box is equal to the heat energy added to that box. Heat energy is ALWAYS flowing out of the box. The rate of heat energy loss increases as the temperature inside the box increases (we are assuming that outside the box is at some low constant temperature). Thus, for a given amount of time, it takes more heat energy to maintain a high temperature than to maintain a low temperature inside the box. This is true, even if there is a large thermal mass inside the box - the only important thing is the rate that the heat energy is being lost, and this is purely a function of the thermal insulation on the outside of the box, and the temperature difference between the inside and the outside. If the box is filled with lots of stuff with high thermal mass, the temperature inside the box will fall slower than if the box is filled only with air, but the rate of heat energy loss will be the same. Lowering the set temperature for a short amount of time and then later increasing it will require less heat energy input then keeping it at the higher temperature all the time.
The majority of heating system have only two states - "heat" and "off", and the thermostat controls the temperature in the box by turning the heating system off when the inside of the box gets too hot, and switching to "heat" when it gets too cold. When the thermostat is set to a lower temperature, the heating system simply runs for a smaller fraction of the time compared to when the thermostat is set to a higher temperature.
It is true that when you turn the thermostat from a low temperature to a high temperature, the heating system will run constantly until the interior temperature is raised to the high temperature, so for this amount of time the system will "consume" more energy than a system that was being maintained at the constant higher temperature. But the opposite is also true, that when you turn the thermostat from a high temperature to a low temperature, the heating system will not run AT ALL until the interior temperature falls to the low temperature.
If you simply turn off the heating system for 20 minutes, and then immediately turn it back on again, it will take x amount of minutes to heat back up to the starting temperature. The amount of energy used by the heating system over those x minutes will be less than the amount of energy that would have been used to maintain the box at the starting temperature over the full (20 + x) minutes, because the amount of energy that pours out through the sides of the box during the full (20 + x) minutes is les
Low-income people don't even come CLOSE to paying transfer taxes (like SS, etc) in the amount they receive. All other federal expenditures come out of income taxes, which they don't pay.
Right. We are arguing on the same side - excellent. We should design systems that encourage employers to employ more people, even as other forces such as technology advances encourage them to not employ as many. All in the interests of having more people able to pay a larger share of our shared social costs.
While it is true that many low wage earners effectively pay no "federal income tax"
I see what you did there - clipping the part where I said "but they pay lots of other things, like into social security and stuff" - funding some of the things people complain about.
Not only do they not PAY it, they generally get credits out of the tax code that results in paying negative income taxes. They get "refunds" on taxes they do not pay. Those, of course, are just dollars transferred directly from other taxpayers.
So that would be an argument for trying to prevent them from losing their jobs and becoming even more of a "burden" on society, no?
Isn't that what we are talking about?
As an aside, and in order to show my cred as a pinko commie, I heard this the other day from some comedian on the radio: "Ever notice how entitlements for rich people are called 'incentives', and incentives for poor people are called 'entitlements'?" I did a google search of it, and couldn't find who to attribute it to, so maybe it came to me an some drug induced fever dream...
The government ALSO loses even more money from the lack of workers not earning a wage (which is taxed), compounding the issue.
The kind of labor we're talking about, here (landscapers, burger-cashiers) DO NOT PAY INCOME TAXES. Nearly half of the people in the country pay no income taxes, including people who make a lot more than minimum wage.
You have obviously never worked a minimum wage job if you think legally employed landscapers and burger-cashiers do not pay income taxes. While it is true that many low wage earners effectively pay no "federal income tax" directly, they do generate funding of federal programs through the employers' payroll taxes, as well as state and local income taxes and sales taxes, and also Social Security and Medicare taxes (FICA). Lay them off, and that income for all those local, state, and federal social programs drops significantly.
https://mises.org/blog/myth-ha...
Sounds like you need to go get a job as a pizza delivery driver. You'll change your tune in about a week, 2 at tops.
I don't know. I have been underpaid in the past, and I don't feel I was particularly open to tax fraud then. I will admit that I have never been in particularly high risk of not having enough money to pay my expenses, with solid family support available if necessary, so I might feel different if I was just scraping by.
Is it so strange to think that income should be reported as required? It seems like at least 84% of people agree with in that "they thought it was not acceptable to cheat at all on taxes" according to https://www.livescience.com/81...
It looks like I am in the majority on this one.
I think you are missing something somewhere, because by that logic there should be far far far more businesses that do not take credit cards, and the vast vast vast majority of consumer facing (versus business-to-business companies) that I deal with do take credit cards.
No, that's crazy. Nobody today can afford not to take cards. Cards are 80% of our sales. But, that 20% of cash doesn't cost us the 3% in fees, so you'd have to be dump or crazy not to accept cash.
Are you sure? First off "typical" credit card fees seem to be more like 2% according to https://www.cardfellow.com/ave...
Just pulling numbers out of my ass, but if a business needs to pay someone for two hours per week (which seems like a huge under estimate, it is only 20 minutes per day for a six-day week) to deal with cash (count, sort, bring to the bank to deposit, etc) than that would be easily $30 in labour per week. $30 is 3% of $1000. If that is 20% of sales, then total sales are $5000/week. Probably very few businesses are successful on $5000/week in gross sales, so that isn't very persuasive, but it is suggestive. I imagine that $50,000/week in gross sales is more typical, which is $10,000/week in cash for those 20% of transactions. 3% of that is $300, or somewhere around ten hours of labour (seven hours if looking at 2%). That does seem a bit high, but it doesn't take long to use up that "budget" if the drive to the bank takes up much time, or there are any thefts or losses or errors at the till.
So, three percent might be high, but anyone who thinks it is significantly lower than 1% is probably wrong too. A one person operation might not be "paying" themselves for the time it takes to collect, count, and deposit their cash, but the time is being spent non-the-less, and the risk of loss or theft is probably a bit higher for cash vs plastic.
At some point, if a business does most of their transactions with plastic, it might be less expensive to eliminate the whole cash-processing infrastructure. Not having to purchase the hardware (cash register, safe, etc.) might tilt the calculation away from cash.
Goddamn law abider!
Government is like a teanager. The last thing they should have is a credit card or unlimited funds. They just get into trouble, doing things they shouldn't.
It is immoral to _not_ avoid AND evade your taxes as much as possible!
So you are ok with tax fraud at any level? It is people's duty to try to evade taxes through illegal means? How's that supposed to work?
I want people to be nervous about committing tax fraud. Our tax system only works because the vast majority of payers are honestly trying to follow the rules. If almost everyone tried to cheat, most would get away with it. I want people to be ashamed of breaking the law and worried about flouting their illegal activities. Do you really want everyone to "lie, cheat, and steal"? Yeah, I understand the idea that governmental over-reach is a problem, but if the answer is every-gang-for-themselves, I don't know that is the best solution.
So, the person cheating on the taxes is OK, but the person who reports them is a dirtbag?
How about shoplifters? Spouse beaters? Muggers? People planting bombs? Which crimes that you might observe would you report? Where is the line that you pay attention to? Corporate malfeasance? Littering? Industrial pollution? Voter fraud? Government corruption? Cheating at poker? Checkers? Go-Fish?
I am genuinely curious.
I haven't actually reported anyone in this type of case, but the "snitches get stitches" type of philosophy doesn't really seem like the best way of running a society. That's how a gang/tribal/warlord type of society might be structured, and frankly isn't the type of rule-of-law society I would prefer to live in.
These businesses who can afford to throw away 3% of their gross right off the top are doing so because either:
- Their products are severely overpriced, and they don't mind giving 3% to Visa/MC
- They're being run by very inept people.
I think you are missing something somewhere, because by that logic there should be far far far more businesses that do not take credit cards, and the vast vast vast majority of consumer facing (versus business-to-business companies) that I deal with do take credit cards.
I suppose they must have upped their prices to cover those 3% fees and their customers have sucked it up due to the convenience, or they have taken a pay-cut. Those places that don't take the cards may be making a bit more money per transaction, but they have not been able to drive the ones using CCs out of business due to their supposedly lower costs, and maybe they have lower business volume.
Also note the the credit card company can see where I bought something, not what. Same with the bank. The store will not have the card number, so it will not be able to link purchases to you, unless you have a store card,
Well, the store might notice that every time the wireless MAC address aa:11:22:33:55:66 is visible in the store, the latest issue of "Cool dude Magazine" and "Brainz and Bronze Monthly" are sold. If they trade info with other establishments, they might not be able to track "houghi", but that phone can have quite a dossier built up after a while.
Eventually, there might be tentative links between that phone and other aspects of your life. Get a new phone and the old phone stops following the old routine, but a new one does, so the two might be linked. Sign up with a store's free WiFi system, and an email address might get linked to the profile.
The system doesn't need to be even close to perfect in order to provide useful data to retailers, so it seems almost inevitable that this type of thing will occur. Even without a cell phone to provide a simple tracker, eventually computer vision and security cameras will do visual tracking well enough to do this.
NYC does seem to have about 2.5% of the us population (8.5 out of 323 million). And the two coasts about about 90% "urban", with the rest about 75% urban, for a total of +80% urban. It certainly seems that "urban" is more "typical" than any other experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Of course, the NYC experience is not necessarily the same as the non-NYC urban experience.
None of this means that one should necessarily make decisions or base policy on the fact that the USA is a largely urban nation, but it also seems like a bad idea to not recognize that it is the reality that most of the population is "in the city".
I have heard that Mountain Equipment Co-op ( http://www.mec.ca/ ) used to give a cash discount to reflect the perceived lower costs associated with cash over plastic, until they did a closer accounting of the actual costs and realized that the cash costs were comparable to the plastic costs. Paying employees for count, sort, deposit, and otherwise handle the cash are real, unavoidable costs. Errors, accidents, and thefts impose additional costs that can be minimized by increased error checking and security procedures, but those procedures impose further direct costs. Non-cash transactions also have various costs (including errors, and thefts) associated with them beyond the transaction fees paid to the processor, but they are often so much smaller than cash handling costs that they can almost be ignored when making a comparison.
Of course, the devil is in the details. Different businesses have different characteristics such that the balance between the the two can not be covered by blanket statements. And none of this addresses the psychology of the customer experience. It might be worthwhile taking a loss on the single pack of gum sales in order to maintain customer loyalty for more typical large purchases, or it might not.
Some possible customer results: "I just want some gum, but they have a $5 minimum CC purchase, so I won't go in at all." "I know they have $5 minimum, so I will buy some milk and bread along with the gum." "They don't have a $5 minimum, but now that I'm here I might as well pickup some milk and the paper too." "Oh, their sign explains their fee structure, without demanding minimums, that is nice, so I'll pay using the format that costs them the least to process."
Push hard and you can see discounts of near their marginal tax rates on income.
Which is a rip. You know they are keeping the cost of what they sold you on the books, just forgetting they got paid.
Protip: Only works when dealing with the owner, or at least someone who understands.
Then you take great the "cash discount" for your product, and report them to the IRS or local tax authority for investigation (great if they also offered to "fogive the sales tax" too) and maybe you can get a "snitch reward" on top o the great purchase deal! And a criminal gets some payback! Win-win-win!
IRS links for reporting fraud - https://www.irs.gov/individual...
Probably this type of "they offered me a great deal" evidence isn't enough to actually get the reward payout, but hey, worth a try, no?
story on how to get paid for reporting - https://www.usatoday.com/story...