Oh no! I'm 102% African, with a 2% margin of error!

Pretty much. You can get more money doing X, so you do X. This is why free markets raise prices above the minimum when competition is hot, instead of doing an infinite downward spiral.

In negotiation, we use a tactic of carrying about public standards of fairness to negotiate. This is why I argue for a repeal of minimum wage: once we've instituted a Citizen's Dividend, a minimum wage becomes a tool for hiring managers to pin all basic labor jobs to a published figure, which increases the belief that this figure is "Fair" even though most people would flatly refuse to work for so little if such a figure weren't published. It's the same with published standard rates: that looks like a fair rate, drivers feel it's unfair to get paid much less, and passengers are encouraged to not blame the driver for the rate being high (and to believe more that the rate is fair, or at least more fair than they would otherwise think).

This is why published standards are dangerous when done wrong and when done in the wrong market. Minimum wage is the poster child for context-sensitive effect: in scarce employment markets, people are desperate and will take low wages, and so a minimum wage increases unemployment but sets a minimum standard of working-man income; in markets where demand for employment is more casual (i.e. you don't absolutely need a job, but life is considerably bad without one; or there are hundreds of jobs for you to take), people will argue for higher wages, and minimum wage helps managers convince people that $8/hr is silly and demanding and that they only deserve the $7.25 standard minimum wage for a minimum wage job.

Uber is just suffering from published baselines. It's impossible not to have market input; but it's authoritative when someone runs the numbers and sets a de-facto standard for drivers and passengers to reference.

Can we do this for Presidential debates?

That sounds a lot like a command economy to me.

What I hear is 57,000 cabbies want to take money out of the mouths of families to feed their families, claiming their families are more important than other families. When you supply a service for $500, and the next guy supplies it for $250, the next guy can eat, and the people you were fleecing have $250 and can also eat. If they could eat already, they spend that $250 at the cobbler for shoes, and the cobbler can eat.

The cabbies should get a new job. Their business model is old and outdated. The CDAA needs to stop trying to prop up an obsolete business model that the consumer has already abandoned.

Income. All of it. All taxed income. You'd be surprised how much of your income taxes go to welfare: 37% of government spending, $900bn of which is deficit, coming to 47% of taxes, which include business income tax, individual income tax, payroll tax, excise (taxes on alcohol, tobacco, fuel...), and so on. Imagine how much of your taxes would vanish if you cut out the social safety net, and reduced just personal and business income taxes by that much. It'd be more than half.

The first tax bracket is 16.2%. There's a dip around $120k where 6.2% is removed from taxes, dropping from 34.2% around $110k income to 28% around $130k income. The top bracket is 39.6%. There would be a change where the low bracket is 8.1% + 14.5% = 22.6%, and the high bracket is 19.8% + 14.5% = 34.3%. The numbers can be shifted around some after that; funny thing about changing tax plans around is you can make a final pass and adjust all the tax brackets if necessary.

The most important tax impact is around the middle class, as the dip around $120k turns into a 1% increase that's mostly realized around $110k-$180k. Effective tax increases start somewhere around $50k, but they're wholly insignificant until around $90k. The 6.4% increase at the bottom end has a real impact on low-wage jobs, because workers require higher compensation to offset taxes; this is a tax on businesses for the use of labor, and so the relative cost of a management style requiring less labor changes, and so businesses will find ways to eliminate labor. This is why there should be some adjustment of tax brackets. The adjustment is small: there are far more dollars invested in the top earners's income than the bottom, so a reduction of 2% on a laborer is an increase of less than 1% on businesses and high-earners, and so there are options. One primary option is the smoothing of the tax system, flattening it out in the middle where there is currently a 6.2% a drop in effective tax rate as income increases.

I've got this enormous plan full of risk controls, transitional plans, social contract management, and the like to ensure a smooth transition even if lots of things go horribly wrong. This includes everything from controlled drop of OASDI (15 years before it starts) to leaving state welfare plans in place until the states decide to do away with unemployment, food stamps, HUD, and the like (all of which should become obsolete in under two years)--not that the Federal government has any authority to dictate that such welfare services should be eliminated, although it can withdraw Federal aid (a marginal funding source for some services in some states). Withdrawing Federal aid is non-catastrophic: all persons on welfare services have an income basis which we can deduct from any welfare they would otherwise receive, resulting in lower costs for those services.

In theory, the coverage is 100%: these services are obsolete, we can live perfectly unhappy lives without them, and so we should have our apartments and food and clothing and our demand for jobs to gain more income to buy our way into perfectly happy lives that involve something bigger than a cramped studio; but, again, risk controls: I can be considerably wrong, and it won't be catastrophic.

Absolute Poverty is defined by access to the basic needs of life, such as food, shelter, clothing.

Mass-production of small pieces like pen caps and battery doors is unlikely. They produce enough for stock in manufacture; but they don't have a distribution procedure for sending replacements. The disruption costs several dollars just to send one thing, plus you get charged $5 to ship via FedEx or USPS or whatnot; it's not like they have a fulfillment center set up that's rapidly sending out small plastic bits to people, marginalizing the human labor costs in the process.

Mass-production of PLA filament reduces all considerations of how much of what thing to stock, which to stock for consumer use, locating in the vast stock shelves, shipping, and so on to a single product: PLA filament. Risks and human costs are reduced.

Producers purchase the methods of production all the time. All producers consume some input and produce some output for the general public, up to and including consuming the labor of consumers. Consumers are end product purchasers.

In market terminology, consumers represent the great majority of individual purchasers. This means middle-class, usually; everyone above middle-class can purchase middle-class goods, and there are relatively few poor people. Most goods extend down by having different grades which are targeted to lower-income consumers, expanding the market. When the market shrinks such that most consumers can't buy or aren't interested in a certain product (for example: a $3 million Ferrari or an extremely-specialized $50 vacuum tube), it's no longer a "Consumer good"; expensive consumer goods become "Luxury goods", and others become military or commercial goods.

A consumer-grade 3D printer would be a printer at a price point whereby it is useful to consumers. A producer making 500,000 copies of something he can sell will pay $50,000 for a 3D printer that can produce them for a total amortized cost of less than $10 each; a consumer needing one copy of a few trinkets may not pay $1,000 for a printer to produce 30 or 40 goods he could buy for a grand total of $200. If the great many available 3D templates appear which are useful to consumers and cheaper to fabricate than purchase, a 3D printer with low enough cost will appeal to consumers and become a consumer-grade good.

That was my argument in the last discussion about the twin experiments. Schutstaffel scientists did a bunch of experiments on Jews and gained a lot of medical data; someone informed me that using such data would be unethical, as it is disrespectful to the victims and their survivors.

My response was that we should just take the results of the experiments, and burn the people who actually performed the experiments in a giant oven. Anyone who suppresses life-saving knowledge should have those same experiments performed on them, so that they can experience what they have made others experience: if you have medical knowledge useful to stop some horrible disease, and you suppress it, someone is going to suffer that horrible disease because you are an asshole, and so you should be punished for bringing harm and suffering and death upon the innocent.

It makes sense. Some people did bad things, and they should be executed for those bad things. We learned things from those bad things, but the things we learned are not the cause of those bad things.

So this dude fucked some schoolgirls. So what? Fire him. Did his course material fuck any schoolgirls? No? Then keep that.

Do I have to explain the fallacy of whole body analogy to you?

It doesn't matter what's easier, or whatever. It matters what actually happens, and what the consequences are.

Yes, that's like saying your little gang of 8-year-olds is going to just completely wipe out the Russian Mafia when all eight thousand of them come to stomp on your face.

We can't launch nukes. Some of these nations have nukes, and a war between nations would hopefully involve the mutual agreement to not use nukes. As they have useful nukes, they also have ICBMs, planes, tanks, guns, and such military assets. They're not all as backwater as Iraq.

If we can't obliterate them in the first 3 months, we won't be able to obliterate them in the next 3 years. If we don't immediately win the war against an angry middle-eastern uprising, we lose that war. We would have to stomp the whole region like we stomped Iraq; and some of them are quite capable of putting up a fight.

This is the point I've been largely trying to make, although being mindful that we are blowing up civilian assets as the mode of making ourselves the obvious target of their ire.