_Earned_ income should correspond to productivity.
But unearned income enjoys a dramatically lower tax rate (the capital gains rate is lower than income rate, and capital gains are not subject to FICA/self-employment taxes)
The capital gains rate is lower because the way capital gains are calculated causes nominal price increases due to inflation to be counted as an increase in the value of the asset. This is a pretty dumb way to do this -- just calculate the capital gain in inflation-adjusted dollars instead -- but the current system isn't inherently to the advantage of capital gains. For long-held low-risk assets it typically goes the other way because so much of the "gain" is only on paper but gets taxed anyway. And short-term capital gains are taxed at a higher rate.
What you are calling "unearned income" can still represent production indirectly, since it is income from passive investments, which are supposed to give returns based on creating wealth. It is true that that isn't always the case, however, particularly when such investments can include various sorts of derivatives and other zero-sum transactions.
That said, if no income were taxed at all, any disparity between how the various kinds of income were taxed would go away.
That seems a very elegant solution to the problem of fair income taxes. Just don't tax income, that way you can't have a disparity in income tax.
What should we tax instead? Capital seems to me a viable choice. It would be a lot more work for everyone, though.
My proposal (in the GP of the post you responded to) was to tax consumption, i.e., a national sales tax or something like it.
> Capital seems to me a viable choice.
What would count as "capital"?
Whatever the answer is, this would seem to me to have the same issue as income taxes have: you would be taxing production instead of consumption, hence lowering the incentive to produce.
Are there _any_ generally available consumer applications (document viewers, printers, obscure browsers, ...) that use a TTF font renderer with the WASM feature enabled?
> Plus, being from the 1970s, no attempt was made to make this look like a toy.
This probably isn't just a '70s thing, but a Japan thing.
Even today, toy guns in Japan don't have the tell-tale orange tips or plastic-y appearance; they try to look as real as they (cheaply) can.
While walking up some stairs in a public park, I once stepped over a toy gun left on the edge of the steps. Being an American, the sight of a pistol just left lying in the open a step in front of me gave me quite a momentary shock, before I remembered what country I was in.
My understanding is that this is because real guns are so uncommon in Japan, people generally wouldn't make the assumption that they're not toys.
Supposedly it has the added safety benefit of dissuading would-be-robbers from using firearms in robberies, because even confronted with a real firearm, the victims would assume it's a toy rather than the real thing, and so it wouldn't be as effective of a threat.
> the victims would assume it's a toy rather than the real thing, and so it wouldn't be as effective of a threat.
I dunno... I was once mugged by a guy holding a gun that I was probably 95% sure didn't work. It was a pistol that was rusted and filthy and looked like he'd found it in the ocean or something...
Nevertheless I have him what (small) money I had.
I don't think a lot of people are willing to risk their life on the chance a gun might be a toy, you know?
The homicide rate in Japan is extremely low, owing largely to the extreme small number of firearms in the country: approximately 0.2% of the population own firearms (compared to 40% ish of US households)
In a country of 125 million, there are only single-digit numbers of gun homicides each year.
(The USA has about 20k, with a population a bit more than double at 333 million; about 800x the rate in Japan)
It wouldn't even cross anyone's mind that it is a real gun.
I used to build ecommerce presences, many of which were for old catalogue merchants making the jump to ecommerce.
It was eye-opening. Even in the heyday of catalogue shopping, which this paper is from the tail end of in the early noughts, conversion rates were abysmal - and they were entirely acceptant of that, and didn’t believe it could be improved upon.
Don’t even get me started on print and distribution costs. You’re looking at double digit CPAs on sales. Margins had to make up for it, which usually meant cutting everything else to the bone and really, really pushing finance options.
An interesting part of this was that when they went online they often really, really, really wanted to replicate the catalogue experience on their websites - page flipping, etc. - took a lot of dissuasion, and in one case where they were particularly obstinate, we went ahead with their desires, with the proviso that they would allow us to build a competing site on more traditional ecommerce lines at no additional cost, with the proviso that we got a cut of sales.
They dropped their catalogues entirely a year into the experiment.
Yeah, but on email it costs you $0.002 to hit a target - catalogues, you’re looking more like $3-$15 depending on scale, catalogue size and quality. Those things cost money.
I sometimes have a look at something but don’t pull the trigger yet, then come back multiple times to look at it again before I buy.
I wonder if that kind of behavior could mean that the real number is a bit higher. For example say 2% of visitors are buying a license but it is counted as 1% because people visiting without buying and then coming back later and buying are counted as different “unique visitors”.
Hard to say as this sort of data is very 'dirty'. Basic analytics will generally take account of returning visitos, but someone might be counted as multiple visitors because they looked at a website on multiple devices.
I used to work for one of the largest tech catalog companies in the US. The largest? Won’t say. Anyway we made about $30 per catalog and we sent 3 a month to millions of people. Our prices ended in 9s but I am not sure there was research behind it, just convention.
"Vertical" cities are cheaper, healthier, and more sustainable to live in than spread-out suburbs.
What makes cities miserable is _cars_, which in most cities are driven primarily by people who don't live there -- since in well designed cities, the people who live there can complete many (though not necessarily all) trips on foot, bicycle, or by public transit.
In the spread out neighborhoods the article is envisioning, anything but personal car transport becomes impossible for essentially every trip. This is bad for your health, the "nature" the author is focused on, and your wallet.
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Cities don't need to be built hundreds of stories high; two or three story apartment buildings are enough. They don't need to be built with a lack of green and nature; tree lined avenues are pleasant and don't take up much space.
Very few cities are designed to begin with, let alone designed well.
Brasília (Brazil's capital city) is one that IMO is designed, and well designed at that.
Living in Brasília (I have never lived there but I have family and have visited many times) feels a bit like living in a small village with plenty of green and living spaces, where everybody knows each other but at the same time you have everything a big city has to offer just a short-to-medium car trip away. Unfortunately it wasn't designed with public transit in mind, but traffic there is mostly kept away from living and working spaces, so noise and air pollution is kept down anyway.
That is, at least the parts that were in the original city design. It grew though, and that growth was organic and disordered like any other city.
Agreed, but for reasonable density you would probably want to go with 4-7 story apartment buildings. Which is what you will see in (most?) bigger European cities.
No, it will _never_ be feasible to collect and transport any meaningful amount of carbon out of the atmosphere.
We emit 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year.
That is more than 7x the amount of cement made each year (4.5 billion tons). More than 8x the amount of food that's made each year (about 4 billion tons). About 17x the amount of steel made each year (2 billion tons). About 60x the amount of plastic made each year (about 0.5 billion tons).
But carbon is completely worthless. We can't build a logistics pipeline dedicated solely to moving a worthless substance that is larger than the rest of human logistics combined.
The only plausible result would be something along the lines of a photosynthesis hack to produce synthetic wood at a faster rate than natural processes, which would then have a market value because you could make boxes and couches and houses out of it.
But then you could also use it as a renewable fuel and we'd be calling it biofuels instead of carbon capture.
That's a very good point: commercializing the products of CO2 capture. I wonder if bio-engineering photosynthesis to speed it up is moderately feasible.
>No, it will _never_ be feasible to collect and transport any meaningful amount of carbon out of the atmosphere.
This is obviously utterly false, given how much CO2 has been absorbed each year by current gen CO2 absorption technology.
>But carbon is completely worthless.
Current Gen carbon absorbers turn CO2 into some of the most useful materials on earth, like food, building materials and raw materials for oils and plastics. Much of the current world logistics is already dedicated to transporting their products.
It's probably increased accessibility of applied map projection plotting libraries vs. the knowledge of theory and history as formal requirement for making up stuff like this.
See also Gall-Peters. Formalizing and marketing Map Projectsions are two separate skill sets.
Physplaining [2] describes this quite well, if there is an established body of resarch and astrophysic specialist
"rediscover" a specialist area that got reduced exposure with in the era of digital print and publishing.
There was essentially no detected sulfyryl fluoride outside of California. They don't really guess why that is, but the authors do seem surprised by it
A caveat was that they don't have good detection networks in Florida, but determined that it must be significantly less than California due to the ability to detect emissions traveling away in South Carolina.
The linked article doesn't do a good job explaining the context or why this particular greenhouse gas matters.
> Significance and policy relevance
> California’s SO2F2 emissions provide a case study on how greenhouse gas emissions that are unaccounted for in emissions inventories can potentially offset progress made towards emissions reductions. In 2006, California passed AB-32, the Global Warming Solutions Act, which charged the California Air Resources Board (CARB) with monitoring and regulating statewide emissions sources of GHGs, and set a target of reducing statewide GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. However, since the long atmospheric lifetime of SO2F2 was not discovered until 2009, SO2F2 was not included in AB-32. California renewed its commitment to emissions reductions in 2016 by passing SB-32, which expanded upon AB-32 and set a statewide GHG emissions reduction target of 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. Although CARB classified SO2F2 as a short-lived climate pollutant (SLCP) in 2016, it has yet to add the gas to the state’s annual GHG emissions inventory or its latest Climate Change Scoping Plan
So this gas was recently discovered to be harmful, but the legal framework for tracking emissions hasn't yet been updated to include it.
> From 2007-2019, California reports an average of 4.8 Tg CO2 equivalents (CO2e) yr−1 in statewide GHG emissions reductions under AB-32. (1 Tg = 1 million metric tons (MMT)). Notably, these emissions reductions slowed and plateaued to an average of 2.25 Tg CO2e yr−1 from 2010-2015. Our inverse model results imply an annual mean SO2F2 emissions rate of 0.7–1.7 Tg CO2e yr−1 (100-yr GWP) or 1.2–2.7 Tg CO2e yr−1 (20-yr GWP) for 2015-2017.
The abstract describes the actual problem that these photonic chips solve:
> We designed and experimentally demonstrated a vector–matrix product for a 2 × 2 matrix and a 3 × 3 matrix. We also designed a 10 × 10 matrix using the proposed 2D computational method. These examples demonstrate that these techniques have the potential to enable larger-scale wave-based analogue computing platforms.
It appears the main contribution of this paper is not so much a new chip technology, but a new way to efficiently model the flow of light through a particular kind of chip (using raised and lowered bumps of silicon) that makes designing photonic chips that compute matrix multiplications practical.
For a fixed matrix, they can design a chip that approximately multiplies that matrix by an input query vector, using light.
Being a fixed matrix severely limits the usefulness of this for now, especially at the 2x2 and 3x3 sizes, but it could be useful if it could be made much larger, or ways to vary the contents of the matrix are discovered.
This won't work alone for ML. The matrix sizes are huge with billions of parameters. Doing light based calculations for that seems impossible with this technique.
Potentially you could break apart a big matrix into smaller matrices for these chips to process
But unearned income enjoys a dramatically lower tax rate (the capital gains rate is lower than income rate, and capital gains are not subject to FICA/self-employment taxes)