I read a legal analysis of this -- when you are hired to act something, it's for that something, and the implied right of whoever hired you to twist it out of all recognition or use it for other things is not infinitely malleable, sans a speific contract for that.
You phrased this as a statement, but it should be phrased as a question: if the work done by the actress is used in a way substantially different than what she was informed by the film-maker, is there an "implied right" which gives the actress copyright over the film (or, more specifically, over her performance in the film)?
So there is precedence for her to be able to put the brakes on it.
Again: you phrased that as a statement, but it should be a question: is there precedent? What is the precedent?
Yes, really. Or, more precisely: the White House statements were based on the information reported by US intelligence at the time.
Here's the report http://www.intelligence.senate... The relevant part, from the summary, is here: In intelligence reports after September 11, 2012, intelligence analysts inaccurately referred to the presence of a protest at the U.S. mission facility before the attack based on open source information and limited intelligence, but without sufficient intelligence or eyewitness statements to corroborate that assertion. The Intelligence Community took too long to correct these erroneous reports, which caused confusion and influenced the public statements of policymakers.
I think that the GP was just making a point that many of the global warming proponents have oversold their agenda.
I agree. It would be nice to be accurate about what we know, and how well we know it.
To a very large extent, the problem is exacerbated by the news media: the more extreme a statement is, the more newsworthy; and the more immediate it is, also the more newsworthy. "Some models indicate that hurricanes could be 10% more powerful by the year 2100, but we need to do some more modelling work to verify how well this number holds up under different scenarios" just doesn't play well in the media. They'll interview that scientist, but the headline is from the scientist who says "killer hurricanes ahead!"
Usually the more detailed kind of statement is toward the middle or end of news articles: the sensational stuff first, and the more cautiously-worded part later ("most scientists don't think we will see a noticeable increase in storm intensity until the next century") toward the end.
Take-home lessons: 1. don't get your science information from the popular press. 2. When you do read the popular press science articles, the important part is outside the headlines.
I wouldn't attribute present day weather patterns to global warming. Undoubtably there will be changes, but it's a bit too early to attribute specific events-- like "more frequent and severe heat waves"-- to anthropogenic warming. There isn't a strong consensus yet. And anthropogenic warming doesn't substitute for natural variations-- natural variations (like heat waves) still occur. With that said, in terms of modelling effects, what's known and how well it's known keeps getting better. if you do want more details of the current thinking, I'd direct you to the literature. That would be the province of Working Group 2, so I'd probably start with the most recent working group 2 report http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/index....
More storms, more violent storms, the coasts scoured down to bedrock by hurricanes, the interior a hell of violent weather.
I don't recall anybody ever predicting "the coasts scoured down to bedrock by hurricanes, the interior a hell of violent weather".
It's worth summarizing what we actually know (minus the idiotic alarmism), what we have some models for but still need details, and what is simply speculation.
Here is what we do know: greenhouse gasses added to the atmosphere increases the average temperature of the planet, and this includes the greenhouse gasses added by human activity. The physics of this seems to be sound, large numbers of measurements bear out the fundamentals, and so far all the alternative theories that say greenhouse gasses don't increase average temperature have been failed; they've been ruled out by evidence.
There is still quite a large set of error bars on how much warming to expect from anthropogenic greenhouse gasses. A hundred different groups have studied this problem (this is not one or two climate scientists) with models using different assumptions. The best estimate is 3 degrees kelvin per doubling, with error bars of about plus or minus 1.5. The amount by which the planet has so far warmed due to anthropogenic effects is slightly over a half degree-- call it about one degree Fahrenheit. Let me point out how small that is-- you probably wouldn't feel the difference between, say, a fall day with a high of 54 F or one that's 55. However, on a global scale, this has an effect, and it's worth noting that the warming is cumulative-- the average will go up from there, not down.
However, it's also important to not that this is an average. It's not what you see in one particular location, or one particular day, or even any particular year. This is summarized by the motto "climate is not weather." Any location--any region-- might be warmer of cooler than the average in any given year.
The effect of this warming on weather--extreme storms-- is less well known. This is a much harder problem to model. The best models suggest that warming will increase extremes of weather, but this is not a robustly confirmed result, and exactly which extremes of weather-- hurricanes? typhoons? Arctic storms? Tornados? Droughts? Floods?-- needs a lot of work to model well.
In general, these predictions of increases of extreme weather are long term predictions. So far, the warming is still relatively small. If we keep increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, the effect (assuming that better models confirm that there is an effect) will be larger. This is a long term effect, not a short term one-- we're talking effect of warming of several degrees, not the current half degree. Not next year, but in decades in the future. And even then, predicting an average increase in large storms doesn't necessarily say large storms hitting the continental US will increase-- we are discussing the world, not the few percent of the world that is called the U.S.
But in general, detailed effects are much harder to model than global averages.
And of course, any given storm cannot be ascribed to global warming. All the people who said "Hurricane Sandy is an example of global warming!" were simply off base. Climate is not weather.
I repeat: you have failed to convince me that you know anything about road maintenance. However, you have convinced met that you know little or nothing about economics.
You also don't seem to pay attention to what you write.
Unless a sales tax is based not on the cost of the goods but on the mass, the distance it is shipped, and the kind of vehicle used to ship it, it doesn't address the problems you mention in any way.
I never suggested a sales tax.
Here are your actual words:
I'm all for the cost of road maintenance being accounted for correctly, but where the bulk of the money would actually be coming from is the goods which would be purchased by those who do and do not drive alike.
So: people purchase goods, and part of the money from that purchase goes to pay for road maintenance.
That's a sales tax.
So, my question is: what is the point in your proposing solutions that are more complicated but in no way better?
Mu. I did no such thing.
I will rephrase my question in the form of a statement. You are making trivial objections to the simple solution, but propose only muddled and confused solutions yourself-- so muddled that you don't even remember what you proposed-- which don't address the problems that you yourself bring up.
You have failed to convince me that you know anything about road maintenance. You also haven't convinced me you have much understanding of economics. What you say implies that we should build roads that trucks aren't allowed on, because (according to you) that means that they will cost nothing because they are maintenance-free. Yeah, right. Write to your state governor: roads that don't have to be paid for at all! Every politician will love you. Around here the worst damage to the roads is done by salt and snowplows. This is needed even if no trucks use the road. This should be paid for by the people who use roads (and the cost of salting and snowplowing as well). There are also indirect costs ("externalities", in economics jargon) that should be paid by the people incurring them. We could categorize the various expenses in road maintenance for many boring hours, but the trivial solution is still that people who use roads should pay for them with a gasoline tax. Yes, some people don't use cars, but still buy goods shipped on roads. Guess what? These people still pay, because the cost includes transportation cost, which includes the fuel cost. Unless a sales tax is based not on the cost of the goods but on the mass, the distance it is shipped, and the kind of vehicle used to ship it, it doesn't address the problems you mention in any way. This is what I would call "vastly more complicated". (In any case, you can hardly say that a sales tax is less regressive. It is almost the poster child for regressive taxation.) Let me repeat: you are saying that the simple solution won't work because of trivial and inconsequential problems, and then you propose different solutions that not only doesn't address any of the problems you mention, they make all of the problems you bring up worse. So, my question is: what is the point in your proposing solutions that are more complicated but in no way better?
EVs are such a trivial fraction of the vehicles on the road that your objection here is pointless. Possibly some time in the future it won't be. But it is now.
As for other vehicles-- the amount of gasoline used, and the amount of road damage done, are both going to be proportional to how far you drive. Road wear will also be proportional to weight (which decreases gas mileage). Therefore, yes, the amount of gas used for transporting stuff tends to be proportional to the amount of damage done to the road. People driving 1000 miles are going to do roughly a hundred times less damage than people driving 100000 miles
Yes, there are other factors. However, your idea to pay for roads with sales taxes addresses none of these other factors. It doesn't have even a vague connection between the amount of road wear used to transport the goods and the amount of tax paid, unless you start with an assumption that all goods have the same ratio of price to mass and all goods are transported the same distance. These assumptions are laughably wrong.
So, basically, you have taken a very simple idea, pointed out an unimportant problem, and then propose solutions that are more complicated... but don't solve any of the problems you point out.
What's the point here? You don't solve any of the problems you mention-- you don't even try to solve any of the problems you mention.
Roads need to be paid for somehow-- you do seem to admit that. You seem to be saying, well, rather than a gasoline tax, let's invent some vastly more complicated method of paying for roads. Or something.
No, no I don't seem to be saying that, not to anyone who speaks English.
You neglected to quote the very next sentence. I wrote (that you had said):
Maybe a new supplemental sales tax--
What you had written was "I'm all for the cost of road maintenance being accounted for correctly, but where the bulk of the money would actually be coming from is the goods which would be purchased by those who do and do not drive alike.
To anyone who speaks English (your phrase) a tax on "goods which are purchased" is known as a "sales tax." Of course, if you simply taxed gasoline, then the goods which are transported by truck will pay that tax, and the ones that don't won't, but that's apparently too simple to consider.
On the matter of understanding the phrase "vastly more complicated", you had written "Further, in order to accurately account for the damage done to roads (necessitating maintenance) you'd have to know the weight per tire, the size of each tire's contact patch, the temperature of the road surface when you drove over it, and a whole bunch of other data that we have no meaningful way to collect."
To anyone who speaks English this is known as "vastly complicated."
Look: a gasoline tax is very simple, and puts the tax burden of maintaining roads on the people who use roads. This is simple. You could put some kind of complicated sales tax in, with some sort of way of taxing based on weight, and not based on cost, and some calculations to differentiate which goods are shipped thousands of miles and which are shipped ten miles. This is what I would call "vastly complicated". And the improvement over a gas tax is... uh, what, exactly?
Roads need to be paid for somehow-- you do seem to admit that. You seem to be saying, well, rather than a gasoline tax, let's invent some vastly more complicated method of paying for roads. Or something. Maybe a new supplemental sales tax-- that will help the poor because you seem to think that gas taxes are regressive but somehow sales taxes aren't. Or invent an entirely new form of rapid transit-- reinventing personal transit from the ground up has got to be easier than figuring out how to pay for maintaining what we already have.
Sure. Let's make things complicated. That always helps. Taxing gasoline is just be too simple; it couldn't possibly work.
Unless you actually are advocating for policies to help poor people
Yes I am. This is one of a thousand stupid ideas that slice at the little bit of money poor people have.
And thus there are a thousand good ideas that could remove those slices. My experience is that anonymous cowards who shout "it will hurt the poor!" about any possible tax actually don't give a damn about the poor, they are knee-jerk anti-taxers. But you can prove me wrong: simply respond to this post stating "I believe we should put the federal inheritance tax back in place, and also that we should increase the tax rate on the top earners." That would do it.
Have you ever been poor? I have. Many in my family have. It sucks.
Last time I was poor-- which admittedly was a very long time ago, in a previous millennium-- I didn't have a car, so gas price was almost irrelevant to me. Not completely irrelevant-- my technique for transportation at the time, if it was somewhere that was too far to walk (I was within walking range of a grocery story), was to find a friend with a car and say "hey, can you give me a ride to XX?" Most of my friends didn't have cars either, but some did. I suppose if the ride needed had been more than a few miles, the answer would have been "if you buy gas."
How much you drive is something that you have some amount of control over.
At a minimum, the fees and taxes for operating a car should pay for all externalities of operating a car, including highway maintenance (at the moment they don't), all effects of pollution, and for that matter all costs relating to automobile accidents. If they don't, then car owners are getting a subsidy at the expense of taxpayers.
Knew there would be someone like you in this conversation.
You know who that kicks in the balls? Poor people.
There's always some idiot like you in any conversation.
You want to help poor people? Then go help poor people. There are ten thousand policy changes that would help poor people. Go advocate for some of those.
Unless you actually are advocating for policies to help poor people. But I doubt it.
Exactly. Manufacturing a car produces a significant amount of pollution. If the recession means that fewer cars were sold, and instead the existing cars were used longer, this would reduce pollution. Unless this effect is accounted for, the headline here is meaningless.
from www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Environment/E_Overview/E_Overview2.htm: "Historian Mark Foster has estimated that “fully one-third of the total environmental damage caused by automobiles occurred before they were sold and driven.” He cited a study that estimated that fabricating one car produced 29 tons of waste and 1,207 million cubic yards of polluted air. Extracting iron ore, bauxite, petroleum, copper, lead, and a variety of other raw materials to process steel, aluminum, plastics, glass, rubber, and other products necessary to construct automobiles consumes limited resources, uses great amounts of energy, and has serious environmental repercussions."
The idea that things would be fundamentally different because the internet was always rather silly
Well, it's not that language is changing because of the internet (although it is). It's that language changes can be tracked and dated and the spread of new words mapped because of the internet.
As for the internet fundamentally spreading new words just because the internet-- doesn't seem to be working. I've been spreading the word "photosnark" to refer to those pictures with a snarky comment photoshopped onto them (often pictures of Willy Wonka, or Batman. Sometimes Picard doing a facepalm.). But so far the word hasn't seemed to spread. (People are calling them "memes" sometimes. Completely inaccurately.) Inernets, do your magic!
It was a trick question. There are a large number of proposed and science fictional spaceships named Orion. The bomb-powered ship (much beloved by science fiction writers) was one; the Pan Am Space Clipper "Orion" was another. The Raumschiff Orion from the 1966 TV show "Raumpatrouille - Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffs Orion" is probably the most famous, although almost unknown to English speakers.
But the fact that they were willing to manually override the auto wind triggers suggests that they either felt pressured with the closing of the launch window, or didn't trust enough in the reliability of those automated systems.
It works better to have the automated system slightly conservative: to flag the weather as potential for a wind delay, and then have a human judgement serve as the go-ahead. You could do it the other way, with the automated system set to err on the side of "go for launch" in the cases requiring a human evaluation, and rely on human judgement to rule "no."
So, then, where can I purchase one of your 90% or better efficiency solar cells?
Quantum efficiency is not the same as energy conversion efficiency. A solar cell with 90% quantum efficiency isn't too hard to find. It's not going to have 90% energy conversion efficiency.
The latter - but that's still a nice jump in the solar cell world.
No, that's a terrible quantum efficiency in the solar cell world.
Quantum efficiency is electrons out per photon in. In the wavelength band over which a solar cell absorbs, the quantum efficiency of a good solar cell ought to be very close to 100%. Even a mediocre solar cell should be 90% or better.
It's a tricky case. Basically, the doctrine says that a fugitive can't say "I'm not subject to this court" (by fleeing justice) and simultaneously use the court to his advantage, in different aspects of the same matter. I am not a lawyer (IANL), but as far as I can see, this case is very similar to Degen v. United States (1996). In that case, the Supreme Court explicitly said that the government was not justified in using the doctrine of fugitive disentitlement to dismiss a challenge of forfeiture. Reference and discussion: http://scholarlycommons.law.no...
The summary of that case (from http://www.oyez.org/cases/1990... ): "Principles of deference to the other branches of government require a court to invoke its inherent power only as a reasonable response to the problems and needs that provoke it. No sufficient reason justifies disentitlement here. Since the court's jurisdiction over the property is secure despite Degen's absence, there is no risk of delay or frustration in determining the merits of the government's forfeiture claims or in enforcing the resulting judgment. Also, the court has alternatives, other than disentitlement, to keep Degen from using liberal civil discovery rules to gain an improper advantage in the criminal prosecution, where discovery is more limited. Finally, disentitlement is an excessive response to the court's interests in redressing the indignity visited upon it by Degen's absence from the criminal proceeding, and in deterring flight from criminal prosecution in general; it is a response that erodes rather than enhances the dignity of the court."
I have seen - predominantly on Slashdot, obviously, but also elsewhere, a sort of naive technocrats (who are often also libertarians) believing that as soon as some technology is needed, the invisible hand of the market magically creates this technology so one only has to sit and wait for this magic solution to appear out of thin air. The more down-to-earth kind of these people even tried to explain this magic by telling that this process happens by throwing enough money at a problem.
--and Anonymous Coward responds
I have seen - predominantly on Slashdot, obviously, but also elsewhere, a sort of naive technocrats (who are often also liberals or progressives or socialists) believing that as soon as some technology is needed, the state magically creates this technology so one only has to sit and wait for this magic solution to appear out of thin air. The more down-to-earth kind of these people even tried to explain this magic by telling that this process happens by throwing enough money at a problem.
OK, somebody should moderate both of these as "troll".
There is some insight here, but the insight is completely washed out by the gratuitous insults and use of deliberately slanted vocabulary.
In fact, the market is good at solving some types of problems. And government is good at solving some of the types of problems that the market isn't good at. But people of all political views always call approaches that don't fit their ideology "throwing money at the problem." If it's a solution that fits your politics, it's "investing in technology," and if it's a solution that doesn't fit your politics, it suddenly "throwing money at the problem." Same thing, different choice of spin.
But randomly insulting political positions for the joy of insults, and substituting buzz words for thinking, really does not substitute for actual analysis.
Solar cell costs are plunging, while their efficiencies rise. I predict a collision, a market and a profit.
You might see one, if you could just plug solar cells into your house and magically get power all day. Most of our power usage in our house is at night, when... oops... there's no solar power.
No, actually, in America the highest electrical usage is in the afternoon. It's driven by air conditioning loads in summer, along with the fact that business and industry tends to use the most power only during working hours. There's a slight bump at about 7, but it's not as big as the afternoon peak.
Quick calculations suggest that you can replace about 10% of US electrical usage with solar with no disruption at all, and something like 20 to 30 percent with only minimal disruption.
That's not enough to solve the energy problem. But, with the electricity market in the US at something like half a trillion dollars a year, that's a substantial market (and substantial profit)
--What a carefully crafted weasel-worded policy. It says that Uber retains the right to violate your privacy for "legitimate business purposes"-- but doesn't define any limits on what they're going to call "legitimate." They list some "examples", which sounds soothing-- but these are just SOME of the reasons they might violate your privacy-- not ALL the reasons. Frankly, this policy states that they can violate your privacy any time they want, just as long as they say there is a business purpose to doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
I read a legal analysis of this -- when you are hired to act something, it's for that something, and the implied right of whoever hired you to twist it out of all recognition or use it for other things is not infinitely malleable, sans a speific contract for that.
You phrased this as a statement, but it should be phrased as a question: if the work done by the actress is used in a way substantially different than what she was informed by the film-maker, is there an "implied right" which gives the actress copyright over the film (or, more specifically, over her performance in the film)?
So there is precedence for her to be able to put the brakes on it.
Again: you phrased that as a statement, but it should be a question: is there precedent? What is the precedent?
The White House told the truth
Oh, really??
Yes, really. Or, more precisely: the White House statements were based on the information reported by US intelligence at the time.
Here's the report http://www.intelligence.senate...
The relevant part, from the summary, is here:
In intelligence reports after September 11, 2012, intelligence analysts inaccurately referred to the presence of a protest at the U.S. mission facility before the attack based on open source information and limited intelligence, but without sufficient intelligence or eyewitness statements to corroborate that assertion. The Intelligence Community took too long to correct these erroneous reports, which caused confusion and influenced the public statements of policymakers.
I think that the GP was just making a point that many of the global warming proponents have oversold their agenda.
I agree. It would be nice to be accurate about what we know, and how well we know it.
To a very large extent, the problem is exacerbated by the news media: the more extreme a statement is, the more newsworthy; and the more immediate it is, also the more newsworthy. "Some models indicate that hurricanes could be 10% more powerful by the year 2100, but we need to do some more modelling work to verify how well this number holds up under different scenarios" just doesn't play well in the media. They'll interview that scientist, but the headline is from the scientist who says "killer hurricanes ahead!"
Usually the more detailed kind of statement is toward the middle or end of news articles: the sensational stuff first, and the more cautiously-worded part later ("most scientists don't think we will see a noticeable increase in storm intensity until the next century") toward the end.
Take-home lessons: 1. don't get your science information from the popular press. 2. When you do read the popular press science articles, the important part is outside the headlines.
I wouldn't attribute present day weather patterns to global warming. Undoubtably there will be changes, but it's a bit too early to attribute specific events-- like "more frequent and severe heat waves"-- to anthropogenic warming. There isn't a strong consensus yet. And anthropogenic warming doesn't substitute for natural variations-- natural variations (like heat waves) still occur.
With that said, in terms of modelling effects, what's known and how well it's known keeps getting better. if you do want more details of the current thinking, I'd direct you to the literature. That would be the province of Working Group 2, so I'd probably start with the most recent working group 2 report http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/index....
More storms, more violent storms, the coasts scoured down to bedrock by hurricanes, the interior a hell of violent weather.
I don't recall anybody ever predicting "the coasts scoured down to bedrock by hurricanes, the interior a hell of violent weather".
It's worth summarizing what we actually know (minus the idiotic alarmism), what we have some models for but still need details, and what is simply speculation.
Here is what we do know: greenhouse gasses added to the atmosphere increases the average temperature of the planet, and this includes the greenhouse gasses added by human activity. The physics of this seems to be sound, large numbers of measurements bear out the fundamentals, and so far all the alternative theories that say greenhouse gasses don't increase average temperature have been failed; they've been ruled out by evidence.
There is still quite a large set of error bars on how much warming to expect from anthropogenic greenhouse gasses. A hundred different groups have studied this problem (this is not one or two climate scientists) with models using different assumptions. The best estimate is 3 degrees kelvin per doubling, with error bars of about plus or minus 1.5. The amount by which the planet has so far warmed due to anthropogenic effects is slightly over a half degree-- call it about one degree Fahrenheit. Let me point out how small that is-- you probably wouldn't feel the difference between, say, a fall day with a high of 54 F or one that's 55. However, on a global scale, this has an effect, and it's worth noting that the warming is cumulative-- the average will go up from there, not down.
However, it's also important to not that this is an average. It's not what you see in one particular location, or one particular day, or even any particular year. This is summarized by the motto "climate is not weather." Any location--any region-- might be warmer of cooler than the average in any given year.
The effect of this warming on weather--extreme storms-- is less well known. This is a much harder problem to model. The best models suggest that warming will increase extremes of weather, but this is not a robustly confirmed result, and exactly which extremes of weather-- hurricanes? typhoons? Arctic storms? Tornados? Droughts? Floods?-- needs a lot of work to model well.
In general, these predictions of increases of extreme weather are long term predictions. So far, the warming is still relatively small. If we keep increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, the effect (assuming that better models confirm that there is an effect) will be larger. This is a long term effect, not a short term one-- we're talking effect of warming of several degrees, not the current half degree. Not next year, but in decades in the future. And even then, predicting an average increase in large storms doesn't necessarily say large storms hitting the continental US will increase-- we are discussing the world, not the few percent of the world that is called the U.S.
But in general, detailed effects are much harder to model than global averages.
And of course, any given storm cannot be ascribed to global warming. All the people who said "Hurricane Sandy is an example of global warming!" were simply off base. Climate is not weather.
I repeat: you have failed to convince me that you know anything about road maintenance. However, you have convinced met that you know little or nothing about economics.
You also don't seem to pay attention to what you write.
Unless a sales tax is based not on the cost of the goods but on the mass, the distance it is shipped, and the kind of vehicle used to ship it, it doesn't address the problems you mention in any way.
I never suggested a sales tax.
Here are your actual words:
I'm all for the cost of road maintenance being accounted for correctly, but where the bulk of the money would actually be coming from is the goods which would be purchased by those who do and do not drive alike.
So: people purchase goods, and part of the money from that purchase goes to pay for road maintenance.
That's a sales tax.
So, my question is: what is the point in your proposing solutions that are more complicated but in no way better?
Mu. I did no such thing.
I will rephrase my question in the form of a statement. You are making trivial objections to the simple solution, but propose only muddled and confused solutions yourself-- so muddled that you don't even remember what you proposed-- which don't address the problems that you yourself bring up.
You have failed to convince me that you know anything about road maintenance. You also haven't convinced me you have much understanding of economics. What you say implies that we should build roads that trucks aren't allowed on, because (according to you) that means that they will cost nothing because they are maintenance-free. Yeah, right. Write to your state governor: roads that don't have to be paid for at all! Every politician will love you.
Around here the worst damage to the roads is done by salt and snowplows. This is needed even if no trucks use the road. This should be paid for by the people who use roads (and the cost of salting and snowplowing as well). There are also indirect costs ("externalities", in economics jargon) that should be paid by the people incurring them.
We could categorize the various expenses in road maintenance for many boring hours, but the trivial solution is still that people who use roads should pay for them with a gasoline tax. Yes, some people don't use cars, but still buy goods shipped on roads. Guess what? These people still pay, because the cost includes transportation cost, which includes the fuel cost.
Unless a sales tax is based not on the cost of the goods but on the mass, the distance it is shipped, and the kind of vehicle used to ship it, it doesn't address the problems you mention in any way. This is what I would call "vastly more complicated".
(In any case, you can hardly say that a sales tax is less regressive. It is almost the poster child for regressive taxation.)
Let me repeat: you are saying that the simple solution won't work because of trivial and inconsequential problems, and then you propose different solutions that not only doesn't address any of the problems you mention, they make all of the problems you bring up worse.
So, my question is: what is the point in your proposing solutions that are more complicated but in no way better?
EVs are such a trivial fraction of the vehicles on the road that your objection here is pointless. Possibly some time in the future it won't be. But it is now.
As for other vehicles-- the amount of gasoline used, and the amount of road damage done, are both going to be proportional to how far you drive. Road wear will also be proportional to weight (which decreases gas mileage). Therefore, yes, the amount of gas used for transporting stuff tends to be proportional to the amount of damage done to the road. People driving 1000 miles are going to do roughly a hundred times less damage than people driving 100000 miles
Yes, there are other factors. However, your idea to pay for roads with sales taxes addresses none of these other factors. It doesn't have even a vague connection between the amount of road wear used to transport the goods and the amount of tax paid, unless you start with an assumption that all goods have the same ratio of price to mass and all goods are transported the same distance. These assumptions are laughably wrong.
So, basically, you have taken a very simple idea, pointed out an unimportant problem, and then propose solutions that are more complicated... but don't solve any of the problems you point out.
What's the point here? You don't solve any of the problems you mention-- you don't even try to solve any of the problems you mention.
Roads need to be paid for somehow-- you do seem to admit that. You seem to be saying, well, rather than a gasoline tax, let's invent some vastly more complicated method of paying for roads. Or something.
No, no I don't seem to be saying that, not to anyone who speaks English.
You neglected to quote the very next sentence. I wrote (that you had said):
Maybe a new supplemental sales tax--
What you had written was
"I'm all for the cost of road maintenance being accounted for correctly, but where the bulk of the money would actually be coming from is the goods which would be purchased by those who do and do not drive alike.
To anyone who speaks English (your phrase) a tax on "goods which are purchased" is known as a "sales tax." Of course, if you simply taxed gasoline, then the goods which are transported by truck will pay that tax, and the ones that don't won't, but that's apparently too simple to consider.
On the matter of understanding the phrase "vastly more complicated", you had written "Further, in order to accurately account for the damage done to roads (necessitating maintenance) you'd have to know the weight per tire, the size of each tire's contact patch, the temperature of the road surface when you drove over it, and a whole bunch of other data that we have no meaningful way to collect."
To anyone who speaks English this is known as "vastly complicated."
Look: a gasoline tax is very simple, and puts the tax burden of maintaining roads on the people who use roads. This is simple. You could put some kind of complicated sales tax in, with some sort of way of taxing based on weight, and not based on cost, and some calculations to differentiate which goods are shipped thousands of miles and which are shipped ten miles. This is what I would call "vastly complicated". And the improvement over a gas tax is... uh, what, exactly?
Roads need to be paid for somehow-- you do seem to admit that. You seem to be saying, well, rather than a gasoline tax, let's invent some vastly more complicated method of paying for roads. Or something. Maybe a new supplemental sales tax-- that will help the poor because you seem to think that gas taxes are regressive but somehow sales taxes aren't. Or invent an entirely new form of rapid transit-- reinventing personal transit from the ground up has got to be easier than figuring out how to pay for maintaining what we already have.
Sure. Let's make things complicated. That always helps. Taxing gasoline is just be too simple; it couldn't possibly work.
So cite some sources yourself.
Unless you actually are advocating for policies to help poor people
Yes I am. This is one of a thousand stupid ideas that slice at the little bit of money poor people have.
And thus there are a thousand good ideas that could remove those slices. My experience is that anonymous cowards who shout "it will hurt the poor!" about any possible tax actually don't give a damn about the poor, they are knee-jerk anti-taxers. But you can prove me wrong: simply respond to this post stating "I believe we should put the federal inheritance tax back in place, and also that we should increase the tax rate on the top earners." That would do it.
Have you ever been poor? I have. Many in my family have. It sucks.
Last time I was poor-- which admittedly was a very long time ago, in a previous millennium-- I didn't have a car, so gas price was almost irrelevant to me. Not completely irrelevant-- my technique for transportation at the time, if it was somewhere that was too far to walk (I was within walking range of a grocery story), was to find a friend with a car and say "hey, can you give me a ride to XX?" Most of my friends didn't have cars either, but some did. I suppose if the ride needed had been more than a few miles, the answer would have been "if you buy gas."
How much you drive is something that you have some amount of control over.
At a minimum, the fees and taxes for operating a car should pay for all externalities of operating a car, including highway maintenance (at the moment they don't), all effects of pollution, and for that matter all costs relating to automobile accidents. If they don't, then car owners are getting a subsidy at the expense of taxpayers.
Knew there would be someone like you in this conversation.
You know who that kicks in the balls? Poor people.
There's always some idiot like you in any conversation.
You want to help poor people? Then go help poor people. There are ten thousand policy changes that would help poor people. Go advocate for some of those.
Unless you actually are advocating for policies to help poor people. But I doubt it.
Exactly.
Manufacturing a car produces a significant amount of pollution. If the recession means that fewer cars were sold, and instead the existing cars were used longer, this would reduce pollution.
Unless this effect is accounted for, the headline here is meaningless.
from www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Environment/E_Overview/E_Overview2.htm:
"Historian Mark Foster has estimated that “fully one-third of the total environmental damage caused by automobiles occurred before they were sold and driven.” He cited a study that estimated that fabricating one car produced 29 tons of waste and 1,207 million cubic yards of polluted air. Extracting iron ore, bauxite, petroleum, copper, lead, and a variety of other raw materials to process steel, aluminum, plastics, glass, rubber, and other products necessary to construct automobiles consumes limited resources, uses great amounts of energy, and has serious environmental repercussions."
see also:
http://www.theguardian.com/env...
The idea that things would be fundamentally different because the internet was always rather silly
Well, it's not that language is changing because of the internet (although it is). It's that language changes can be tracked and dated and the spread of new words mapped because of the internet.
As for the internet fundamentally spreading new words just because the internet-- doesn't seem to be working. I've been spreading the word "photosnark" to refer to those pictures with a snarky comment photoshopped onto them (often pictures of Willy Wonka, or Batman. Sometimes Picard doing a facepalm.). But so far the word hasn't seemed to spread. (People are calling them "memes" sometimes. Completely inaccurately.) Inernets, do your magic!
It was a trick question. There are a large number of proposed and science fictional spaceships named Orion. The bomb-powered ship (much beloved by science fiction writers) was one; the Pan Am Space Clipper "Orion" was another. The Raumschiff Orion from the 1966 TV show "Raumpatrouille - Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffs Orion" is probably the most famous, although almost unknown to English speakers.
Wasn't Orion the name of a concept spacecraft powered by throwing nukes out the back and detonating them?
No, wasn't it the name of the Pan Am Space Clipper in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
But the fact that they were willing to manually override the auto wind triggers suggests that they either felt pressured with the closing of the launch window, or didn't trust enough in the reliability of those automated systems.
It works better to have the automated system slightly conservative: to flag the weather as potential for a wind delay, and then have a human judgement serve as the go-ahead.
You could do it the other way, with the automated system set to err on the side of "go for launch" in the cases requiring a human evaluation, and rely on human judgement to rule "no."
So, then, where can I purchase one of your 90% or better efficiency solar cells?
Quantum efficiency is not the same as energy conversion efficiency. A solar cell with 90% quantum efficiency isn't too hard to find. It's not going to have 90% energy conversion efficiency.
https://www.google.com/search?...
The latter - but that's still a nice jump in the solar cell world.
No, that's a terrible quantum efficiency in the solar cell world.
Quantum efficiency is electrons out per photon in. In the wavelength band over which a solar cell absorbs, the quantum efficiency of a good solar cell ought to be very close to 100%. Even a mediocre solar cell should be 90% or better.
40%??? That's nothing to brag about.
It's a tricky case. Basically, the doctrine says that a fugitive can't say "I'm not subject to this court" (by fleeing justice) and simultaneously use the court to his advantage, in different aspects of the same matter.
I am not a lawyer (IANL), but as far as I can see, this case is very similar to Degen v. United States (1996). In that case, the Supreme Court explicitly said that the government was not justified in using the doctrine of fugitive disentitlement to dismiss a challenge of forfeiture.
Reference and discussion: http://scholarlycommons.law.no...
The summary of that case (from http://www.oyez.org/cases/1990... ):
"Principles of deference to the other branches of government require a court to invoke its inherent power only as a reasonable response to the problems and needs that provoke it. No sufficient reason justifies disentitlement here. Since the court's jurisdiction over the property is secure despite Degen's absence, there is no risk of delay or frustration in determining the merits of the government's forfeiture claims or in enforcing the resulting judgment. Also, the court has alternatives, other than disentitlement, to keep Degen from using liberal civil discovery rules to gain an improper advantage in the criminal prosecution, where discovery is more limited. Finally, disentitlement is an excessive response to the court's interests in redressing the indignity visited upon it by Degen's absence from the criminal proceeding, and in deterring flight from criminal prosecution in general; it is a response that erodes rather than enhances the dignity of the court."
dunkelfalke (91624) writes:
I have seen - predominantly on Slashdot, obviously, but also elsewhere, a sort of naive technocrats (who are often also libertarians) believing that as soon as some technology is needed, the invisible hand of the market magically creates this technology so one only has to sit and wait for this magic solution to appear out of thin air. The more down-to-earth kind of these people even tried to explain this magic by telling that this process happens by throwing enough money at a problem.
--and Anonymous Coward responds
I have seen - predominantly on Slashdot, obviously, but also elsewhere, a sort of naive technocrats (who are often also liberals or progressives or socialists) believing that as soon as some technology is needed, the state magically creates this technology so one only has to sit and wait for this magic solution to appear out of thin air. The more down-to-earth kind of these people even tried to explain this magic by telling that this process happens by throwing enough money at a problem.
OK, somebody should moderate both of these as "troll".
There is some insight here, but the insight is completely washed out by the gratuitous insults and use of deliberately slanted vocabulary.
In fact, the market is good at solving some types of problems. And government is good at solving some of the types of problems that the market isn't good at. But people of all political views always call approaches that don't fit their ideology "throwing money at the problem." If it's a solution that fits your politics, it's "investing in technology," and if it's a solution that doesn't fit your politics, it suddenly "throwing money at the problem." Same thing, different choice of spin.
But randomly insulting political positions for the joy of insults, and substituting buzz words for thinking, really does not substitute for actual analysis.
Solar cell costs are plunging, while their efficiencies rise. I predict a collision, a market and a profit.
You might see one, if you could just plug solar cells into your house and magically get power all day. Most of our power usage in our house is at night, when... oops... there's no solar power.
No, actually, in America the highest electrical usage is in the afternoon. It's driven by air conditioning loads in summer, along with the fact that business and industry tends to use the most power only during working hours. There's a slight bump at about 7, but it's not as big as the afternoon peak.
Quick calculations suggest that you can replace about 10% of US electrical usage with solar with no disruption at all, and something like 20 to 30 percent with only minimal disruption.
That's not enough to solve the energy problem. But, with the electricity market in the US at something like half a trillion dollars a year, that's a substantial market (and substantial profit)
For European readers: it is about 5% of the area of Bavaria
How many Liechtenstein is that?
On the subject of Uber, anybody else look at Uber's new privacy policy, and think it's a bit skanky?
http://www.buzzfeed.com/johana...
--What a carefully crafted weasel-worded policy. It says that Uber retains the right to violate your privacy for "legitimate business purposes"-- but doesn't define any limits on what they're going to call "legitimate." They list some "examples", which sounds soothing-- but these are just SOME of the reasons they might violate your privacy-- not ALL the reasons. Frankly, this policy states that they can violate your privacy any time they want, just as long as they say there is a business purpose to doing so.
Oh, and they don't have to tell you, either.