Most of the time, the collective actions of profit maximizing firms lead to rather efficient distributions of resources for the general population. But exclusivity contracts are not an example of this.
Apple and AT&T are better off, but everyone else is worse off. This is not even a case of income redistribution, because the total gain to Apple and AT&T is less than the total loss from everyone else. This is a case of resource destruction, of wide scale theft from society.
"No. It means becoming more efficient and drilling in places like ANWR."
That is not going to be enough to do it. ANWR does not provide nearly enough oil to make a dent in our oil consumption, and the oil that is there is rather expensive to tap (I don't work in the field, but I've heard that the cold temperatures affect oil viscosity)
Efficiency? We certainly should improve efficiency where possible, but lets not delusion ourselves into thinking it will give us energy independence. Europe has very high oil consumption taxes (and has had them for a very long time), very large oil deposits, and countless investments in alternative energy.
The effect? Oil consumption is certainly lower, in fact, it is significantly lower. However, a quick back of the envelope calculation shows that even if America reduced itself to the gasoline consumption per person of Europe, it would still be a large net oil importer.
Europe's consumption numbers skew downwards because of countries with low GDP per capita (and correspondingly low oil usage); these are countries like Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland. Not only that, but European standards of living are around 15% lower than American ones.
After a wide array of European-style measures to control gasoline consumptions, and a corresponding large hit in our standards of living, we will still be large importers of oil (We would be importing around 50% more then we import, and keep in mind that US oil production is beginning to decrease.).
If we are importing such a large amount of oil, it does not matter if we import 200% of our oil, or 50%. The CIA will still have an incentive to prop up dictators, and the US will still invade oil rich oil countries. Not that I support those activities, but this is not an effective means to curb them.
This is most likely not how they would do it, but: Passengers could explicitly buy first, second, third,... with some sort of price gradient. This would likely generate quite a bit of income.
This is a little off topic, but as long as we're on voting systems, I think that unless we have a Condorcet winner(that the winning candidate would win a runoff against all of his opponents), we should postpone the election for 2 weeks and try again.
Re:This is HIGHLY illegal in the US
on
eBay The Vote
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"If the Fair Tax passes, there will be no tax deductions. Have kids? Too damn bad. Wave bye-bye to the mortgage interest deduction. No more retirement savings advantages."
So? Tax deductions are extremely distortionary. Why exactly should parents and homeowners get tax breaks? Why should the government encourage people to save?
There are positive externialities that should be subsidized by the government because of spillover effects(parks, education, etc.), but tax breaks are a horrible way to do it. This is because over-funding a positive externiality is just as bad as underfunding it, and because of this, the amount of funding needs to be adjusted very often. But tax breaks are usually forgotten and neglected, used and exploited well past their use, not only that, but they tend to have rather non-linear incentive effects.
It is better to have an agency that directly doles the money for the cause in question. This is easier to monitor than tax breaks, easier to manage, and the incentive effects are highly predictable.
"It totally neglects people's current after-tax investments. All that Roth IRA money people have invested? They'll be paying tax on it twice--income tax when they earned it, and again when they purchase stuff."
So? We have a lot of distortionary effects from income taxes too, it's just that the mathematics are a lot more complicated, making the effects much harder to see. Most papers I have seen on the subject show that deadweight loss is lower with some sort of consumption tax than with income taxes.
"Speaking of collection, it turns millions of people into tax collectors. Keep in mind that the Fair Tax applies to services, too. Does your son mow lawns in the summer? He has to collect Fair Tax. Does your daughter baby-sit the neighbor's baby? She has to collect the Fair Tax. If they don't and the new Santa Claus government entity that collects Fair Tax finds out, they'll be punished for tax evasion."
Every state in the country collects sales taxes. We could just force them to tack on a federal surchange and send their share to the government. We would still need an extensive team of auditors to ensure that the stats are not ripping us off, but that seems much simpler than the IRS. But I don't really support abolishing the IRS, I think that we need some way of obtaining people's income for the purpose of benefit allocation.
"There is no provision for paying different taxes on different things. Right now, if you buy a $200,000 house for example, you don't pay that much in sales tax. Under the Fair Tax, you'll be stuck with an extra $46,000. If I'm not mistaken (I'd have to go look it up again), I think that loans are subject to the Fair Tax also as a service, which means that you'll be paying another $41,400 of Fair Tax (assuming you pay around 10% down) to your mortgage lender!"
This is a feature, not a bug. If there are different marginal taxes on different goods, that is a recipe for massive economic distortion. I don't see why buying a house is any different from buying anything else, it should be taxed, as should loans.
"The Fair Tax doesn't apply to foreign-bought goods or to used goods. Yeah, no potential for tax dodges and under-the-table dealings there, right?"
I'm not sure what you mean by that, I'm not really a Fair Tax junkie. I support a consumption tax, and have read a couple of papers on the subject, but I never really researched their specific proposal. I think every transaction should be taxed equally, without any exception.
"Now here's the $64,000 question--probably literally! If the poor people are paying the same, and rich people are paying 12% less, who will be making up the difference in that huge pile of cash? The middle class. That's the dirty little secret that the Fair Tax advocates don't like to tell people: It is a huge shift of the tax burden off the backs of the rich people in this country onto the backs o
I don't see what you have to back this assertion. We can create frameworks so that the collective greed of every individual is harnessed for the overall good of society.
I realize that the world would suck if everyone followed this line of reasoning, but that does not make it any less valid. Luckily, a certain percentage of individuals enjoy(in the sense that they will do it consistently) grassroots efforts, so we can free-ride off them.
"If it were proved to people that paying taxes would benefit everyone directly, they'd happily pay them for the most part; true sociopaths are rare. Of course, since currently most governments do as much harm as good, they are not supplying any convincing proofs to the populace. Parents grieving for children who died to prop up the price of Texas oil are unlikely to be thankful for the educational opportunities provided by the land-grant university system, for one example."
Even if you include the possibility of altruism, that just changes the value of the tax policy D. I showed that no matter how high D is, it still does not make sense to pay taxes.
The real problem is that your taxes will only help society if everyone else pays taxes. If you pay taxes, you have to hope that everyone else will. If you don't pay taxes, you still have to hope everyone else pays taxes. But in the second case, you more pocket cash. Please re-read the mathematical argument, you'll see the "caring about others" term cancels out.
And while I consider myself to have very libertarian values, I don't have any issues with paying taxes to programs I don't support. But I do want any tax system to pass basic mathematical muster.
Sorry if I offended you with the high horse comment, none was meant. But to answer your question, I pay taxes because I have to, not out of any moral requirement. If I were given the opertunity, I would evade taxes, as would nearly everyone else.
I believe that you cannot expect individuals to act against their own self interest on a wide-scale, any system that relies on the wide-spread honesty of the population is going to fail.
"Your strategy is wrong! As all MLM-ers and chain email senders know, you need to use the power of exponential growth. Why waste time convincing 100 voters? Just convince 10, and tell them to do the same, and you'll already have over 100 voters on your side. Another iteration will give >1,000, then 10,000--and before you know it you'll have 1,000,000,000 voters all on your side! More voters than there are in the entire US population! How can you possibly lose?!
Seriously though: grassroots campaigns can and do have an effect. Not nearly often enough, and it's an awful lot of work, but with an effective lobbying/campaigning organisation it is possible to influence enough people to swing a result."
While I agree, keep in mind that if there was such a potential for a grassroots effort, it would almost certainly been done by somebody else.
"Or postal ballots. Or having enough resources so that long lines don't ever form. Or paying people to vote. (Not that I'm actually advocating any of these--just don't let your lack of imagination leave you with the conclusion that compulsory voting is the only solution to the problem you describe:-)"
Actualy, all of those things are illegal in Brazil. Sex in Brazil is illegal until the age of 18 without parental consent, The drinking age in Brazil is 18(so I correct my previous statement), same with drugs and witness laws.
My point is that legality does not imply morality. If you want to condemn Cisco, you can't just say "it was illegal" and end it there.
"You want to know why Europe and US are the first world, while you will always be the third? Because we had revolutions, DEMANDED our rights, and imposed reasonable laws that the government AND citizens HAVE to follow, instead of cowardly breaking the law as a national sport and stupidly claiming that law-breaking is bliss."
Things are much more difficult now then they were when the Europeans and US had their revolutions. Now the weaponry gap between the populace and a government is much wider, and militaries are much more disciplined.
Revolutions now only happen when A) The country in question is extremely poor, and the revolution consists of disgruntled unpaid solders, or B) A government insider uses influence and subterfuge in order to convince the military to side with him, or at the very least refrain from using force against protesters.
Both of these cases usually lead to military juntas or a bloodthirsty dictator, though sometimes a country gets lucky with sufficient foreign intervention.
"The fact the tax system is not fair is no reason to evade taxes. It's reason to get engaged in politics, something very few do and not always with the best intentions."
Tell me the probability of success of such an action, and then tell me how much time that would take. Calculate the gain you would recieve from your desired outcome and multiply it by the previously mentioned probability. Unless you are a corporation, I'm almost certain that this number will be much less than what you would have recieved had you recieved had you invested this time into a job.
I have a feeling that attempting to smuggle into another country is a better bet.
So you've never had sex before the age of 18, never drunk booze before 21, never engaged in illegal drugs, never saw friends engage in illegal drugs and refrained from calling the police? Never went over the speed limit? Never pirated copyrighted material?...
Sorry, made a mistake in the 3rd paragraph. Here is what I meant to say:
E(A)>E(B), so Pw*D>Pq*D+C, so (Pw-Pq)*D>C . Now, let's analyze this condition. Binomial models show that (Pw-Pq) is very close to zero for reasonable population sizes, so we can safely assume (Pw-Pq)=0. So now, in order for to make E(A)>E(B), we need 0*D>C, 0>C. In other words, you actually have to be paying negative taxes (interestingly, this is sometimes true) in order for paying taxes to be in your self interest (And note that this is completely regardless of the level of service). (As a side note, I made a lot of unrealistic assumptions about income distribution, but smarter people have put some thought into it, and the results don't really change)
"Just a thought: If you don't pay taxes, you can't wonder why the government doesn't have the money to provide worthwhile services."
This is true. If it's not in your self interest to pay taxes, it is most likely not in anyone elses interest either. The correct responce to this is not to pay taxes though, that does nothing to fix everyone elses evasion. The only real solution to the problem is to introduce tax penaltys and step up enforcement.
"Just on the line of "If you don't get involved in politics - some to the extent of not even bothering to vote - you can't complain much on who got elected""
This is not true either. If you strongly disagree with the policies of your government, your best bet is to move(hopefully this option is available to you). Lets try and model the decision of whether to vote or not.
You have a choice between A (voting), and B (not voting). Let C be the gain that your desired policy creates, D be the gain you would get from doing the thing other than voting that would make you happiest, Let Pw be the probability that your cause will win when you vote, and Qw be the probability that they will win when you don't vote.
E(A)=Pw*c E(B)=D+Qw*c In order for A to be the rational choice, E(A)>E(B).
Algebra shows that this condition is equivalent to (Pw-Qw)*C>D . There are a couple of ways to analytically derive Pw-Qw. A naïve binomial approach shows that it is approximately equal to 1/Sqrt(n), where n is population size. But recent regression work on congressional elections has shown that it is really much closer to 1/n(or 1/n^.92 if you want to be pedantic). No matter which model you use, in most elections, n is really large (even local election usually have a few thousand voters). This makes the corresponding factor (Pw-Qw) extremely small, which makes the corresponding product (Pw-Qw)*C very small as well. So small, that it can be modeled as 0. So now, rational voting is equivalent to 0>D, which contradicts the definition of D in itself.
Why do people vote at all? It gives certain people an irrational sense of power and control, rather akin to the lottery. So it's really more of a leisure activity than a social responsibility.
Don't mention civil activism as an alternative. Even if you manage to convince a 100 voters to switch sides (which is unlikely, even if you devote large amounts of time into it), the math is the same for any reasonable population size.
I personally don't like the idea that individuals who enjoy waiting in line to drop a slip of paper into a box have a monopoly on collective decision making. But the only alternative seems to be mandatory voting.
"Paying taxes isn't stupid if your government provides worthwhile services. And if it doesn't, it probably because you have the kind of culture where people think it's cool to avoid paying taxes."
If you're an individual in Brazil, let's look at your options: A) Pay taxes, B) avoid taxes. Assuming you're a rational individual, you will pick the option that maximizes your expected value.
Let Pw be the probability that your government raises enough revenue to provide worthwhile services if you pay taxes, and Pq be the probability that your government raises enough revenue if you do not pay taxes. Let C be the amount of money you would pay in taxes, and let D be the amount of services you would receive.
E(A)=Pw*D and E(B)=Pq*D+C . In order for A to be the best choice, E(A) must be more than E(B)
E(A)>E(B) Pw*D>Pq*D+C (Pw-Pq)*D>C . Now, let's analyze this condition. Since Pw-Pw1000, you can safely treat Pw-Pq=0. So now, in order for to make E(A)>E(B), we need 0*D>C, 0>C. In other words, you actually have to be paying negative taxes (interestingly, this is sometimes true) in order for paying taxes to be in your self interest (And note that this is completely regardless of the level of service). (As a side note, I made a lot of unrealistic assumptions about income distribution, but smarter people have put some thought into it, and the results don't really change)
Now, it is fully possible that everyone would be collectively better off if everyone paid taxes (this depends on the government), but unless you place direct or indirect strict penalties (strictly more than C), the end result is going to be mass tax evasion.
"One square mile is 2,7878,400 square feet, right? 5280x5280. That is equivalent to 13,939.2 tons. Let's pretend that NASA actually delivered their promise of $200 / pound on putting something into orbit, instead of the $5000 per pound you can get today in Russia. The price tag of a single square mile of solar panels into orbit is USD $5,575,680,000. Construction of a 1-square mile quantity of terrestrial solar panels (and the land grading, etc.) in Portugal is proposed at about $600 Million, a negligible cost. Even 100x that much is negligible compared to orbital lift costs."
We don't really need to launch very much mass here. Solar cells are actually capable of absorbing a far higher amount of solar radiation then the sun produces(I recall over 3000 times on a conventional cell, who knows how high we could make that), assuming cooling is worked out. The lack of gravity and much higher availability of sunlight make certain optical configurations impossible on earth feasible.
Mirrors are extremely light, as the Cosmos project showed. So while I don't think it would push even unless it was heavily expandable, the launch costs are lower that what you calculated.
That is fascinating. How do you propose that Best Buy creates a mechanism that simultaneously gives managers an incentive to perform, and keeps them from committing costly law violations?
Sorry for the length of time it took to post, I had tests this week. I'm not really sure what the strawman is. My argument is that in the absense of unexplained enjoyment from the act of voting(as opposed to it's consequences), it is irrational to vote. If we agree there, I don't really see the dispute.
If we don't agree there, then please, state your reasons and rebuttal to my arguments.
I'm actually taking a graduate level class in game theory, though it's just an elective for my math major. But that's beside the point. I don't see what is so strange about statistics in game theory. When faced with uncertainty, game theorists assume that players will try and maximize expected value, calculating expected value for more complicated games requires very involved statistics. Not only that, but check out the statistical models for the break-up of collusion.
Since your so stubborn about it, let's actually calculate the two scenarios. You have a choice between A(voting), and B(not voting). Let C be the gain that your desired policy creates, D be the gain you would get from doing the thing other than voting that would make you happiest, Let Pw and 1-Pw be the probability of winning and losing when you vote, and Qw and 1-Qw the probability when you don't vote.
E(A)=Pw*c+(1-Pw)*0=Pw*c
E(B)=D+Qw*c
In order for A to be the rational choice, E(A)>E(B). This translates to D(Pw-Qw)*c. I used the hyper geometric distribution in order to model what Pw-Qw is, and it is essentialy zero. To give an example, suppose that a voter has a 50% likelyhood of supporting your cause, there are only two options, and there is a population of 1,000,000. The probability becomes so small that it disappears under floating point arithmetic.
So the only way A is the rational choice is if D0, which is impossible by definition of D.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the time, the collective actions of profit maximizing firms lead to rather efficient distributions of resources for the general population. But exclusivity contracts are not an example of this.
Apple and AT&T are better off, but everyone else is worse off. This is not even a case of income redistribution, because the total gain to Apple and AT&T is less than the total loss from everyone else. This is a case of resource destruction, of wide scale theft from society.
At least, that's why I'm pissed.
Think we could get him for war crimes?
That is not going to be enough to do it. ANWR does not provide nearly enough oil to make a dent in our oil consumption, and the oil that is there is rather expensive to tap (I don't work in the field, but I've heard that the cold temperatures affect oil viscosity)
Efficiency? We certainly should improve efficiency where possible, but lets not delusion ourselves into thinking it will give us energy independence. Europe has very high oil consumption taxes (and has had them for a very long time), very large oil deposits, and countless investments in alternative energy.
The effect? Oil consumption is certainly lower, in fact, it is significantly lower. However, a quick back of the envelope calculation shows that even if America reduced itself to the gasoline consumption per person of Europe, it would still be a large net oil importer.
Europe's consumption numbers skew downwards because of countries with low GDP per capita (and correspondingly low oil usage); these are countries like Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland. Not only that, but European standards of living are around 15% lower than American ones.
After a wide array of European-style measures to control gasoline consumptions, and a corresponding large hit in our standards of living, we will still be large importers of oil (We would be importing around 50% more then we import, and keep in mind that US oil production is beginning to decrease.).
If we are importing such a large amount of oil, it does not matter if we import 200% of our oil, or 50%. The CIA will still have an incentive to prop up dictators, and the US will still invade oil rich oil countries. Not that I support those activities, but this is not an effective means to curb them.
Yeah, I can see how that could cause problems. To make it a bit more workable, you could sell "First 10", "First 100",...
This is most likely not how they would do it, but: Passengers could explicitly buy first, second, third,... with some sort of price gradient. This would likely generate quite a bit of income.
This is a little off topic, but as long as we're on voting systems, I think that unless we have a Condorcet winner(that the winning candidate would win a runoff against all of his opponents), we should postpone the election for 2 weeks and try again.
You must be new here.
So? Tax deductions are extremely distortionary. Why exactly should parents and homeowners get tax breaks? Why should the government encourage people to save?
There are positive externialities that should be subsidized by the government because of spillover effects(parks, education, etc.), but tax breaks are a horrible way to do it. This is because over-funding a positive externiality is just as bad as underfunding it, and because of this, the amount of funding needs to be adjusted very often. But tax breaks are usually forgotten and neglected, used and exploited well past their use, not only that, but they tend to have rather non-linear incentive effects.
It is better to have an agency that directly doles the money for the cause in question. This is easier to monitor than tax breaks, easier to manage, and the incentive effects are highly predictable.
"It totally neglects people's current after-tax investments. All that Roth IRA money people have invested? They'll be paying tax on it twice--income tax when they earned it, and again when they purchase stuff."
So? We have a lot of distortionary effects from income taxes too, it's just that the mathematics are a lot more complicated, making the effects much harder to see. Most papers I have seen on the subject show that deadweight loss is lower with some sort of consumption tax than with income taxes.
"Speaking of collection, it turns millions of people into tax collectors. Keep in mind that the Fair Tax applies to services, too. Does your son mow lawns in the summer? He has to collect Fair Tax. Does your daughter baby-sit the neighbor's baby? She has to collect the Fair Tax. If they don't and the new Santa Claus government entity that collects Fair Tax finds out, they'll be punished for tax evasion."
Every state in the country collects sales taxes. We could just force them to tack on a federal surchange and send their share to the government. We would still need an extensive team of auditors to ensure that the stats are not ripping us off, but that seems much simpler than the IRS. But I don't really support abolishing the IRS, I think that we need some way of obtaining people's income for the purpose of benefit allocation.
"There is no provision for paying different taxes on different things. Right now, if you buy a $200,000 house for example, you don't pay that much in sales tax. Under the Fair Tax, you'll be stuck with an extra $46,000. If I'm not mistaken (I'd have to go look it up again), I think that loans are subject to the Fair Tax also as a service, which means that you'll be paying another $41,400 of Fair Tax (assuming you pay around 10% down) to your mortgage lender!"
This is a feature, not a bug. If there are different marginal taxes on different goods, that is a recipe for massive economic distortion. I don't see why buying a house is any different from buying anything else, it should be taxed, as should loans.
"The Fair Tax doesn't apply to foreign-bought goods or to used goods. Yeah, no potential for tax dodges and under-the-table dealings there, right?"
I'm not sure what you mean by that, I'm not really a Fair Tax junkie. I support a consumption tax, and have read a couple of papers on the subject, but I never really researched their specific proposal. I think every transaction should be taxed equally, without any exception.
"Now here's the $64,000 question--probably literally! If the poor people are paying the same, and rich people are paying 12% less, who will be making up the difference in that huge pile of cash? The middle class. That's the dirty little secret that the Fair Tax advocates don't like to tell people: It is a huge shift of the tax burden off the backs of the rich people in this country onto the backs o
I don't see what you have to back this assertion. We can create frameworks so that the collective greed of every individual is harnessed for the overall good of society.
I realize that the world would suck if everyone followed this line of reasoning, but that does not make it any less valid. Luckily, a certain percentage of individuals enjoy(in the sense that they will do it consistently) grassroots efforts, so we can free-ride off them.
"If it were proved to people that paying taxes would benefit everyone directly, they'd happily pay them for the most part; true sociopaths are rare. Of course, since currently most governments do as much harm as good, they are not supplying any convincing proofs to the populace. Parents grieving for children who died to prop up the price of Texas oil are unlikely to be thankful for the educational opportunities provided by the land-grant university system, for one example."
Even if you include the possibility of altruism, that just changes the value of the tax policy D. I showed that no matter how high D is, it still does not make sense to pay taxes.
The real problem is that your taxes will only help society if everyone else pays taxes. If you pay taxes, you have to hope that everyone else will. If you don't pay taxes, you still have to hope everyone else pays taxes. But in the second case, you more pocket cash. Please re-read the mathematical argument, you'll see the "caring about others" term cancels out.
And while I consider myself to have very libertarian values, I don't have any issues with paying taxes to programs I don't support. But I do want any tax system to pass basic mathematical muster.
I believe that you cannot expect individuals to act against their own self interest on a wide-scale, any system that relies on the wide-spread honesty of the population is going to fail.
Yes, foreign intervention can, and usualy does, just lead to more bloodshed. But sometimes it can go the other way.
While I agree, keep in mind that if there was such a potential for a grassroots effort, it would almost certainly been done by somebody else.
"Or postal ballots. Or having enough resources so that long lines don't ever form. Or paying people to vote. (Not that I'm actually advocating any of these--just don't let your lack of imagination leave you with the conclusion that compulsory voting is the only solution to the problem you describe :-)"
I concede this point.
My point is that legality does not imply morality. If you want to condemn Cisco, you can't just say "it was illegal" and end it there.
Please give me a consistent distinction between "police state" and "law"/
Things are much more difficult now then they were when the Europeans and US had their revolutions. Now the weaponry gap between the populace and a government is much wider, and militaries are much more disciplined.
Revolutions now only happen when A) The country in question is extremely poor, and the revolution consists of disgruntled unpaid solders, or B) A government insider uses influence and subterfuge in order to convince the military to side with him, or at the very least refrain from using force against protesters.
Both of these cases usually lead to military juntas or a bloodthirsty dictator, though sometimes a country gets lucky with sufficient foreign intervention.
Tell me the probability of success of such an action, and then tell me how much time that would take. Calculate the gain you would recieve from your desired outcome and multiply it by the previously mentioned probability. Unless you are a corporation, I'm almost certain that this number will be much less than what you would have recieved had you recieved had you invested this time into a job.
I have a feeling that attempting to smuggle into another country is a better bet.
Get off your high horse.
E(A)>E(B), so Pw*D>Pq*D+C, so (Pw-Pq)*D>C . Now, let's analyze this condition. Binomial models show that (Pw-Pq) is very close to zero for reasonable population sizes, so we can safely assume (Pw-Pq)=0. So now, in order for to make E(A)>E(B), we need 0*D>C, 0>C. In other words, you actually have to be paying negative taxes (interestingly, this is sometimes true) in order for paying taxes to be in your self interest (And note that this is completely regardless of the level of service). (As a side note, I made a lot of unrealistic assumptions about income distribution, but smarter people have put some thought into it, and the results don't really change)
This is true. If it's not in your self interest to pay taxes, it is most likely not in anyone elses interest either. The correct responce to this is not to pay taxes though, that does nothing to fix everyone elses evasion. The only real solution to the problem is to introduce tax penaltys and step up enforcement.
"Just on the line of "If you don't get involved in politics - some to the extent of not even bothering to vote - you can't complain much on who got elected""
This is not true either. If you strongly disagree with the policies of your government, your best bet is to move(hopefully this option is available to you). Lets try and model the decision of whether to vote or not.
You have a choice between A (voting), and B (not voting). Let C be the gain that your desired policy creates, D be the gain you would get from doing the thing other than voting that would make you happiest, Let Pw be the probability that your cause will win when you vote, and Qw be the probability that they will win when you don't vote.
E(A)=Pw*c E(B)=D+Qw*c In order for A to be the rational choice, E(A)>E(B).
Algebra shows that this condition is equivalent to (Pw-Qw)*C>D . There are a couple of ways to analytically derive Pw-Qw. A naïve binomial approach shows that it is approximately equal to 1/Sqrt(n), where n is population size. But recent regression work on congressional elections has shown that it is really much closer to 1/n(or 1/n^.92 if you want to be pedantic). No matter which model you use, in most elections, n is really large (even local election usually have a few thousand voters). This makes the corresponding factor (Pw-Qw) extremely small, which makes the corresponding product (Pw-Qw)*C very small as well. So small, that it can be modeled as 0. So now, rational voting is equivalent to 0>D, which contradicts the definition of D in itself.
Why do people vote at all? It gives certain people an irrational sense of power and control, rather akin to the lottery. So it's really more of a leisure activity than a social responsibility.
Don't mention civil activism as an alternative. Even if you manage to convince a 100 voters to switch sides (which is unlikely, even if you devote large amounts of time into it), the math is the same for any reasonable population size.
I personally don't like the idea that individuals who enjoy waiting in line to drop a slip of paper into a box have a monopoly on collective decision making. But the only alternative seems to be mandatory voting.
If you're an individual in Brazil, let's look at your options: A) Pay taxes, B) avoid taxes. Assuming you're a rational individual, you will pick the option that maximizes your expected value.
Let Pw be the probability that your government raises enough revenue to provide worthwhile services if you pay taxes, and Pq be the probability that your government raises enough revenue if you do not pay taxes. Let C be the amount of money you would pay in taxes, and let D be the amount of services you would receive.
E(A)=Pw*D and E(B)=Pq*D+C . In order for A to be the best choice, E(A) must be more than E(B)
E(A)>E(B) Pw*D>Pq*D+C (Pw-Pq)*D>C . Now, let's analyze this condition. Since Pw-Pw1000, you can safely treat Pw-Pq=0. So now, in order for to make E(A)>E(B), we need 0*D>C, 0>C. In other words, you actually have to be paying negative taxes (interestingly, this is sometimes true) in order for paying taxes to be in your self interest (And note that this is completely regardless of the level of service). (As a side note, I made a lot of unrealistic assumptions about income distribution, but smarter people have put some thought into it, and the results don't really change)
Now, it is fully possible that everyone would be collectively better off if everyone paid taxes (this depends on the government), but unless you place direct or indirect strict penalties (strictly more than C), the end result is going to be mass tax evasion.
We don't really need to launch very much mass here. Solar cells are actually capable of absorbing a far higher amount of solar radiation then the sun produces(I recall over 3000 times on a conventional cell, who knows how high we could make that), assuming cooling is worked out. The lack of gravity and much higher availability of sunlight make certain optical configurations impossible on earth feasible.
Mirrors are extremely light, as the Cosmos project showed. So while I don't think it would push even unless it was heavily expandable, the launch costs are lower that what you calculated.
That is fascinating. How do you propose that Best Buy creates a mechanism that simultaneously gives managers an incentive to perform, and keeps them from committing costly law violations?
If we don't agree there, then please, state your reasons and rebuttal to my arguments.
Since your so stubborn about it, let's actually calculate the two scenarios. You have a choice between A(voting), and B(not voting). Let C be the gain that your desired policy creates, D be the gain you would get from doing the thing other than voting that would make you happiest, Let Pw and 1-Pw be the probability of winning and losing when you vote, and Qw and 1-Qw the probability when you don't vote. E(A)=Pw*c+(1-Pw)*0=Pw*c E(B)=D+Qw*c In order for A to be the rational choice, E(A)>E(B). This translates to D(Pw-Qw)*c. I used the hyper geometric distribution in order to model what Pw-Qw is, and it is essentialy zero. To give an example, suppose that a voter has a 50% likelyhood of supporting your cause, there are only two options, and there is a population of 1,000,000. The probability becomes so small that it disappears under floating point arithmetic. So the only way A is the rational choice is if D0, which is impossible by definition of D.