This morning 50% of Denmark's power supply was covered by wind power, due to a storm. During the peak (at 4 in the morning) it reached 80%. Generally about 20-25% of power is supplied by wind here.
It used to be, for the most part, that something was taxed because it incurred costs on the gov't.
Don't be ridiculous. How about income taxes? Don't see any hidden costs there. Historically, the first taxes were import tariffs. Why? Because they were an easy and controllable target. Taxes have always been raised where the money was. What you're thinking of is taxes that create domestic distortions, due to e.g. negative externalities (smoking, pollution...). Of course, that isn't primarily to raise revenue, but rather to correct such market failures.
There's really no requirement of a connection between a tax and any 'services' provided by the government. The government provides general services, yes, but why should the revenue be raised in the areas of the services? In that sense, there's no a priori reason why for example an income tax is any better than an email tax, only we don't object to the concept of income taxes because we're so used to them.
Now, you brought up the economist yourself. Actually, what the economist would do is to find where the required tax revenues can be raised with minimum distortion. This has nothing to do with providing a service in the area of taxation. If taxing communication is associated with little distortion, then that's perfectly fine by me. Note that I didn't say I believe communication taxes give small distortions.
On a related note, by many accounts it seems that one of the least distortionary (and least cheating-prone) sources of taxation is property taxes. In fact it'd probably be a net good thing from an economic perspective to hike them, and instead lower income taxation. Why doesn't it happen? People are opposed to high property taxes (again an essentially arbitrary consequence of history). Just goes to show that economic considerations aren't alpha and omega in policy.
The suggestion has been suggested by the French centre-right wing member of parliament Alain Lamassoure. The suggested tax would be 0.00001 cent (eurocent) for an email, and an incredible 1.5 cent for an sms! While the email tax seems reasonable given that we accept the premise of the tax, the sms tax is outright ridiculous. In Denmark that amounts to more than 50% of the current price of an sms!
Why is this rated +4 interesting? It's quite plainly wrong.
I agree with many of the above posters. If the US government decides to buy American-manufactured computers, economic resources are drawn into that manufacture from other sectors of the economy. Now, why were the resources originally in other sectors? Because the marginal productivity there is greater. In other words, by buying American, the government would be reducing the output of the US economy.
Elaborating somewhat on that point (though this obviously isn't implied in parent), yes there are newer strategy trade policy theories, which suggest that such actions could be beneficial under specific circumstances. However, from a rent-shifting perspective, this case doesn't make sense, because the profits that can be appropriated are small in the PC manufacturing sector. It's a commodity. As to other arguments, the informational requirements for determining policy that would have a positive net benefit to the economy are too great, and this intervention would be too simplistic. It's like performing acupuncture with a fork, to use a popular metaphor.
I appreciate this is written in jest, but I think it deserves an answer nonetheless. Law firms are generally partnerships, although I'm sure you can find some exceptions, so they aren't publicly listed. Only way to share in the spoils is to take a degree, and slave your way up to the top, I'm afraid!
Actually, Enron by the looks of it did nothing illegal, only the CFO did. The creation of SPEs (Special Purpose Entities) is perfectly legal, the only thing that was out of order in the case was that the CFO put his own name down for him. Of course, by now there's also a large demand for scapegoating, so what will happen remains to be seen.
In a sense this is an eBay system for buying and selling money, which actually can work far better since its a uniform, fungible commodity that allows spreading the risk.
While money itself is a uniform commodity, that's not actually what's being bought and sold here. What's really being traded is risk, and that's nothing near a commodity. Essentially with this kind of system it seems it would be exceedingly difficult to assess the risk profile. To the extent that interest rates would be lower here (not sure why that would be the case), it just means that these individual lenders are exposing themselves to the same risk at a lower premium than the bank. In fact, for reasons of adverse selection and moral hazard they're quite likely going to expose themselves to more risk for a lower premium.
I'm really not sure about the intuition that individual lenders should be better or even equally able to assess such deals as compared to bankers, who do it for a living.
"Microsoft does not need to pay one cent to place its search engine in the lead position on its browser, which sits on the vast majority of PCs in the world"
Stan Beer has obviously never heard of the concept of an opportunity cost and thus misses the point completely. By putting its own search engine in IE7 as default, Microsoft is forgoing the revenue that others would have paid them to put another engine there instead. This is completely equivalent to paying a sum.
As has been stated so many times it hurts (but to no avail, apparently), the central issue is that of monopoly power. Microsoft has a monopoly position in the OS and browser markets. While it's free to use that market power in a number of ways within those markets, it's not allowed to abuse it to gain a dominant position in other markets. It's that simple. It's the law. Accept it.
I submitted two of my undergrad papers: One in International Economics, one in Strategic Management. The former scored 95.9%, the latter 45.7%! Just goes to show that economics is more than twice as scientific as management.
You notice I did say "ideally"... As one who has been involved in searches for applicants I yearn as much as the next person for the silver bullet that would let me identify, in advance, how appropriate a particular applicant is for the job.
Yep, I noticed. My point is that even ideally (unless you can directly and instantly observe applicant suitability) education would be a part of evaluation.
"Can be seen as a proxy" is a far cry from "is an accurate indicator of".
As I noted.
As you say, college is more difficult for some to obtain than for others. Want to keep the blacks out out of your company - demand a degree and call it a proxy for "insert some legit-sounding attibute". You don't have to look far to find plenty of examples.
I appreciate your playing the devil's advocate, but you're moving into an entirely different ballpark here. If an employer is looking to discriminate against certain groups, there's a myriad of different ways he can do that. There's no way you can legislate against them all. While it's undoubtedly true that some employers do use degree demands to discriminate, clearly this argument against using education in general doesn't hold. It's equivalent to disallowing demands for previous job experience, for example.
Actually I think that ideally an employer should discriminate on one thing and one thing only - aptitude for the job (where aptitude encompases all the attributes required by the job whether it be attention to detail, working well with others, willingness/ability to learn new tasks, etc.). Asking about education would not even be legal.
While in utopia that would be nice, most of the parameters you name are unobservable or prohibitively expensive to reveal. You can set tests during the application process, conduct lots of interviews, etc - but all of these are imperfect devices. They are subject to misrepresentation on the part of the applicant, and are costly. Education can be seen as a proxy for lots of desirable employee characteristics, and whilst also clearly imperfect it's a low-cost method.
You may object that most companies conduct interviews etc already, so the additional costs are unimportant. However, if there were no filtering device in the form of education, the number of applicants that companies would have to interview would explode. It's true that with such screening a Gates without a degree might be sorted out, but looking at it from a cost-benefit perspective, it makes more sense for companies to filter by education.
In economics there are some very interesting models, which consider education as a signalling device on the part of the applicant. To the extent that education is more costly (in terms of time, effort, forgone earnings...) to obtain for "undesirable" applicants, the different levels of applicant will differentiate themselves in education. Obviously a simplified model, which doesn't take into account the gain in skills that education gives (a BA in Tibetan culture), but it clearly shows some important mechanisms, and why asking about education should be legal, even in your utopia.
And it's a dumb ploy at that: Giving me a score of 25ms isn't exactly going to motivate me to buy their product. They might as well take it all the way.
On the other hand, they could just be smart enough to recognize that people with as fast brains as me will see right through them anyway...
Re:The Economist... only 20 years behind the times
on
Unusual Open Source
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· Score: 1
Actually, you'll find that practically no economist makes that claim. It's true that economists maintain that under a perfect market, it would be the case. However, nobody believes that markets are complete and that no externalities exist. This is what causes market failure, and the reason why intervention is necessary.
To clarify, in the case of pollution the problem arises because the privately optimal level of pollution for firms differs from the socially optimal one - the negative externalities of pollution are not accounted for in the price of production. Hence, the market will not "solve environmental problems" without intervention that alleviates these market failures.
Of course, what you fail to note is that's exactly what the companies want. If they can foster a public attitude that sharing your own music should be avoided, p2p sharing will plummet. This mechanism is also why p2p networks try to restrict leeching.
De-tagging applications aside, this system could never practically work until all music is distributed electronically on the net. Sure, you can watermark physical CDs - the problem is linking a physical CD with a purchase. First of all, that would require all music stores collecting personal information on all customers and submitting that information to the RIAA - clearly a privacy issue. Credit cards, you object, but a determined pirate clears that hurdle by brandishing the cash in his pocket. Of course, we haven't even touched on the issue of giving that same physical CD away as a present (perhaps to a stranger, sounds like a good legal excuse). A million other issues exist, this is just an example. Conclusion? It'll never fly.
That being said, wind power is definitely inconsistent. From what I've heard about Denmark, which has the most wind power per capita in the world, most Danes are so untrusting of the quality of their electricity that they wouldn't even think about powering something without a UPS, otherwise they'd fry their electronics. Can any Danes back that up?'
Somewhere around 15-20% of Denmark's power supply comes from wind power. When the supply spikes we generally offload the excess to our neighbouring countries, particularly Norway, at an infuriatingly low price. I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that they use it to pump water back up their dams.
Nevertheless, in accordance with the two Danish posters above, I can reject your claim of inconsistency. I don't know anyone who owns an UPS, and have never contemplated buying one. I can only recall one unplanned power outage in my lifetime (21yrs), which afaik originated in Sweden.
I actually find windmills rather aesthetically pleasing, although obviously the noise would be a nuisance for people who live very nearby. Then on the other hand, lots of people live right next to railways and highways, which I think would be a lot worse.
That's quite simply wrong. Yes, they'd cripple interoperability with mega blocks, but in the same fell swoop also cripple interoperability with the masses of existing Lego blocks. If anything, that step would reduce lock-in.
The issue of whether they could get any rights on a subtly modified product is something you should contemplate as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice. Just unfortunate that the results page looks uncannily like on of those domain leech default pages.
This morning 50% of Denmark's power supply was covered by wind power, due to a storm. During the peak (at 4 in the morning) it reached 80%. Generally about 20-25% of power is supplied by wind here.
Sweet move to link to the en-GB version. That's the flavour I like!
Interestingly, while US GDP per capita is higher than in most of Europe, GDP per hour worked is quite a bit lower!
Don't be ridiculous. How about income taxes? Don't see any hidden costs there. Historically, the first taxes were import tariffs. Why? Because they were an easy and controllable target. Taxes have always been raised where the money was. What you're thinking of is taxes that create domestic distortions, due to e.g. negative externalities (smoking, pollution...). Of course, that isn't primarily to raise revenue, but rather to correct such market failures.
There's really no requirement of a connection between a tax and any 'services' provided by the government. The government provides general services, yes, but why should the revenue be raised in the areas of the services? In that sense, there's no a priori reason why for example an income tax is any better than an email tax, only we don't object to the concept of income taxes because we're so used to them.
Now, you brought up the economist yourself. Actually, what the economist would do is to find where the required tax revenues can be raised with minimum distortion. This has nothing to do with providing a service in the area of taxation. If taxing communication is associated with little distortion, then that's perfectly fine by me. Note that I didn't say I believe communication taxes give small distortions.
On a related note, by many accounts it seems that one of the least distortionary (and least cheating-prone) sources of taxation is property taxes. In fact it'd probably be a net good thing from an economic perspective to hike them, and instead lower income taxation. Why doesn't it happen? People are opposed to high property taxes (again an essentially arbitrary consequence of history). Just goes to show that economic considerations aren't alpha and omega in policy.
The suggestion has been suggested by the French centre-right wing member of parliament Alain Lamassoure. The suggested tax would be 0.00001 cent (eurocent) for an email, and an incredible 1.5 cent for an sms! While the email tax seems reasonable given that we accept the premise of the tax, the sms tax is outright ridiculous. In Denmark that amounts to more than 50% of the current price of an sms!
Why is this rated +4 interesting? It's quite plainly wrong.
I agree with many of the above posters. If the US government decides to buy American-manufactured computers, economic resources are drawn into that manufacture from other sectors of the economy. Now, why were the resources originally in other sectors? Because the marginal productivity there is greater. In other words, by buying American, the government would be reducing the output of the US economy.
Elaborating somewhat on that point (though this obviously isn't implied in parent), yes there are newer strategy trade policy theories, which suggest that such actions could be beneficial under specific circumstances. However, from a rent-shifting perspective, this case doesn't make sense, because the profits that can be appropriated are small in the PC manufacturing sector. It's a commodity. As to other arguments, the informational requirements for determining policy that would have a positive net benefit to the economy are too great, and this intervention would be too simplistic. It's like performing acupuncture with a fork, to use a popular metaphor.
Actually, Enron by the looks of it did nothing illegal, only the CFO did. The creation of SPEs (Special Purpose Entities) is perfectly legal, the only thing that was out of order in the case was that the CFO put his own name down for him. Of course, by now there's also a large demand for scapegoating, so what will happen remains to be seen.
I'm really not sure about the intuition that individual lenders should be better or even equally able to assess such deals as compared to bankers, who do it for a living.
Stan Beer has obviously never heard of the concept of an opportunity cost and thus misses the point completely. By putting its own search engine in IE7 as default, Microsoft is forgoing the revenue that others would have paid them to put another engine there instead. This is completely equivalent to paying a sum.
As has been stated so many times it hurts (but to no avail, apparently), the central issue is that of monopoly power. Microsoft has a monopoly position in the OS and browser markets. While it's free to use that market power in a number of ways within those markets, it's not allowed to abuse it to gain a dominant position in other markets. It's that simple. It's the law. Accept it.
I submitted two of my undergrad papers: One in International Economics, one in Strategic Management. The former scored 95.9%, the latter 45.7%! Just goes to show that economics is more than twice as scientific as management.
Might I add: Rien n'est pas une man!
Yep, I noticed. My point is that even ideally (unless you can directly and instantly observe applicant suitability) education would be a part of evaluation.
As I noted.
I appreciate your playing the devil's advocate, but you're moving into an entirely different ballpark here. If an employer is looking to discriminate against certain groups, there's a myriad of different ways he can do that. There's no way you can legislate against them all. While it's undoubtedly true that some employers do use degree demands to discriminate, clearly this argument against using education in general doesn't hold. It's equivalent to disallowing demands for previous job experience, for example.
While in utopia that would be nice, most of the parameters you name are unobservable or prohibitively expensive to reveal. You can set tests during the application process, conduct lots of interviews, etc - but all of these are imperfect devices. They are subject to misrepresentation on the part of the applicant, and are costly. Education can be seen as a proxy for lots of desirable employee characteristics, and whilst also clearly imperfect it's a low-cost method.
You may object that most companies conduct interviews etc already, so the additional costs are unimportant. However, if there were no filtering device in the form of education, the number of applicants that companies would have to interview would explode. It's true that with such screening a Gates without a degree might be sorted out, but looking at it from a cost-benefit perspective, it makes more sense for companies to filter by education.
In economics there are some very interesting models, which consider education as a signalling device on the part of the applicant. To the extent that education is more costly (in terms of time, effort, forgone earnings...) to obtain for "undesirable" applicants, the different levels of applicant will differentiate themselves in education. Obviously a simplified model, which doesn't take into account the gain in skills that education gives (a BA in Tibetan culture), but it clearly shows some important mechanisms, and why asking about education should be legal, even in your utopia.
And it's a dumb ploy at that: Giving me a score of 25ms isn't exactly going to motivate me to buy their product. They might as well take it all the way.
On the other hand, they could just be smart enough to recognize that people with as fast brains as me will see right through them anyway...
Actually, you'll find that practically no economist makes that claim. It's true that economists maintain that under a perfect market, it would be the case. However, nobody believes that markets are complete and that no externalities exist. This is what causes market failure, and the reason why intervention is necessary.
To clarify, in the case of pollution the problem arises because the privately optimal level of pollution for firms differs from the socially optimal one - the negative externalities of pollution are not accounted for in the price of production. Hence, the market will not "solve environmental problems" without intervention that alleviates these market failures.
[Disclaimer: I am an economist]
Of course, what you fail to note is that's exactly what the companies want. If they can foster a public attitude that sharing your own music should be avoided, p2p sharing will plummet. This mechanism is also why p2p networks try to restrict leeching.
De-tagging applications aside, this system could never practically work until all music is distributed electronically on the net. Sure, you can watermark physical CDs - the problem is linking a physical CD with a purchase. First of all, that would require all music stores collecting personal information on all customers and submitting that information to the RIAA - clearly a privacy issue. Credit cards, you object, but a determined pirate clears that hurdle by brandishing the cash in his pocket. Of course, we haven't even touched on the issue of giving that same physical CD away as a present (perhaps to a stranger, sounds like a good legal excuse). A million other issues exist, this is just an example. Conclusion? It'll never fly.
Would you have been surprised by the announcement had there been no censorship debacle? If no, then the most likely answer is no.
Somewhere around 15-20% of Denmark's power supply comes from wind power. When the supply spikes we generally offload the excess to our neighbouring countries, particularly Norway, at an infuriatingly low price. I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that they use it to pump water back up their dams.
Nevertheless, in accordance with the two Danish posters above, I can reject your claim of inconsistency. I don't know anyone who owns an UPS, and have never contemplated buying one. I can only recall one unplanned power outage in my lifetime (21yrs), which afaik originated in Sweden.
As an aside, here's a Google maps link to a series of sea-based wind mills just off the coast of Copenhagen: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=copenhage
I actually find windmills rather aesthetically pleasing, although obviously the noise would be a nuisance for people who live very nearby. Then on the other hand, lots of people live right next to railways and highways, which I think would be a lot worse.
That's quite simply wrong. Yes, they'd cripple interoperability with mega blocks, but in the same fell swoop also cripple interoperability with the masses of existing Lego blocks. If anything, that step would reduce lock-in. The issue of whether they could get any rights on a subtly modified product is something you should contemplate as well.