Almost, but not quite: The key step was not the alcohol,but the boiling while brewing the alcohol.

Your initial statement was a bit more important than you may have thought. At a 0% profit rate, ANY business would have to do something or face being driven out of business. And at a 100% tax rate, well, it would be close to impossible to run a modern business, so the point is moot.

You argue that any tax increase on profits will be sent directly to the consumer. This, however, carries a number of implicit assumptions:
1) Increasing the price will not impact sales: Increasing the price by x% may make fewer consumers buy the product, decreasing the sales by y%. This could easily lead to lower total profits for the corporation.
2) No competition: Competing companies may opt not to increase prices and be able to undercut prices. This allows them to build a larger market share by attracting the customers of those corporations that increased prices.

Regarding your arguments on cutting cost, this will happen regardless of taxation. Any corporation in a Capitalist economy will look for ways to minimize costs in order to become more competitive and drive out competition.

You do realize that most countries tax a corporation on its profits, not on its turnover, right? So, it is not the $5000 price per good that is taxed, but the $1000 of profits. And that the corporate tax rate is quite low, compared to income tax. Where I live, corporate tax has been reduced from 50% to 25% over the last 30 years. And guess what? 30 years ago corporations did turn a profit!

Seriously? Out of curiosity, can you provide some sources for that? Not because I'm doubting you, but because I'd like to dig a bit further ...

That is including community tax. You are getting confused by the tax on the last earned dollar, as this tax can be high, but total income tax will not increase above 51.7 % of the income. As you note, there are other taxes that muddles the picture, as these depend on how the tax earner lives his or her life.

It causes you to dehydrate and get a stroke! I'm sure that I heard that somewhere. If only I could find the source ...

The maximum income tax in Denmark is 51.7%, but there are a lot of ways to decrease the taxed part of the incomes (e.g. union membership, transportation costs, debt, pension savings) so the actual average tax rate on income is in the mid 30s.

Usually Windows users do the same, but every now and then the device manufacturer wants to "improve" their product by pushing out a new driver. And when I write "improve" what I really mean is "make it suck so bad that the user either has to uninstall the driver (advanced) or get a new mouse (ka-ching)". Whenever Windows Update wants to saddle me with an updated mouse driver, I have learned by experience to press "Hide" on that as fast as possible.

Yeah, I suppose you are right. Sometimes it just gets me down when interesting discussions almost disappear among all the clutter. Lightening up :-)

I really love it when people post off-topic drivel and get it modded up. I also love all those "funny" comments that always seem to dominate topics like this one. Sigh.

As I understand it, the brain is highly adaptive. This begs the question that early conditioning and training may very well have long term consequences to how our brains develop. If boys and girls are subjected to different stimuli and expectations, it follows that their brains are also going to develop differently. Or, to be more blunt, any change in development trajectories that happen after birth could be due to different biology just as well as environmental pressure on the child. This, naturally, makes it very difficult when one wants to consider which is cause and which is effect.

Yes, if someone goes overboard in security, they can have all sorts of defenses against theft. But how many regular people will set up *any* encryption beyond their pin codes? And all to often it will be easy to guess the code as you can see the residue of the greasy fingers on the screen.

It is also a lot easier to steal Joe's iPhone than it is to break into his apartment and run away with his desktop PC ;-)

TFA says that a study with test subjects would cost $1 mio per person, so I don't see how you can get the procedure to cost $6 mio. According to this article, the device is already on sale in Europe for $100,000, though it may just be for the system itself, not the install.

Hijacking airplanes was much easier back then, because it was much easier to smuggle guns and explosives on board. Often there were little, if any, security checks, making it relatively easy to smuggle guns on board. In turn, guns make crowd control a lot easier. Today, it is extremely difficult to smuggle anything but very primitive weapons on board. And even that requires careful planning and preparation. These primitive weapons makes it comparatively easy for passengers to rush the would-be hijackers. My point is that the security checks actually do increase security. (Some of them are quite obnoxious, and seem to be dictated by airport shops rather than security concerns, though).

One interesting question is if airplane hijacking will get a renaissance when/if 3D printing becomes able to print robust automatic weapons in plastic.