Yes, the definition of 'middle class' is somewhat arbitrary, but the percentile distibution curve of wealth is not.
There's always rich and poor, but it's the proportions.
If the top 1% rich people own 99% of the country, then there's rich and... serfs; and there's a 99% chance you're in the latter category.
While we're waiting for this to become widely available, there's always:
http://www.newscientist.com/ar...
which also works via the vagus nerve!
Amazon doesn't make profit in any country. But hey, would you prefer they sent the money from the UK immediately to Seattle? If the USA and EU were in a single trade bloc then they could certainly do that and cut Luxembourg out of the equation, but it wouldn't make any difference to the UK's tax take.
Amazon doesn't make profit in any country.
That may be true at the moment, because they're plowing most of it back into capital expenditure, but in the long run, it would be expected to not carry on like that. And that's also why Amazon were the first to declare that they're doing this; it doesn't cost them much right now.
But hey, would you prefer they sent the money from the UK immediately to Seattle? If the USA and EU were in a single trade bloc then they could certainly do that and cut Luxembourg out of the equation, but it wouldn't make any difference to the UK's tax take.
If they were making profits it certainly could.
Luxembourg is a tax haven, very low tax rates. But if they were declared in the UK, then there's a bigger tax take there. The UK would also probably claim tax on profits that wasn't paid in other countries like the USA that was due to economic activity in the UK.
> Yes, they do. It's called free trade and is generally seen as very desirable, as it reduces paperwork and leads to countries competing to be better places to do business than their neighbours.
With all due respect, if you actually believe any of that, as pertains to THIS topic, you're a fucking idiot.
This isn't any idea of free trade, nor have they been reducing the paperwork- on the contrary they've been filling a whole bunch of extra paperwork.
What they've been doing is performing most or all of the work in (say) the UK and then filling the tax in Luxembourg as if all the profit was magically done there; and this is purely and simply a tax fiddle.
By running two or more different companies in different countries you can "sell" things across the borders at artificial (fake) prices so that, no profit is made in the UK, and all of it is in Luxembourg or Ireland, on paper. There's no free market for those trades, it's all between two companies, controlled by the same people.
If they actually did everything in Luxembourg, that might well be fair enough, but that's NOT at all what's been going on.
This isn't some free trade utopia, it's essentially fraud, they're saying they made no profit in a country, when they really did. It's not totally dissimilar to the types of things that Enron got up to.
Yes, prices may go up somewhat.
But if you think about it, at the moment transnational businesses have an unfair tax advantage over national ones.
So companies like Amazon are creating and extending monopolistic positions; not because they're necessarily better companies, but simply because they're able to rig their tax positions; if you don't pay taxes, you can lower prices and take markets that you don't necessarily have any right to.
In other words, tax avoidance of the type they're legislating against is anti-competitive; and that too can raise prices in the long run.
No, and you might want to read the following wikipedia articles, hopefully you might even get a clue, but I'm starting to doubt it:
Climate gives an average wind speed that varies from place to place around the world.
Scotland/UK has really good resources for example.
A main factor as to how well suited the climate of a place is for wind power is how well jet streams line up, the UK gets a jet stream over it a lot of the time. Some of this energy filters down to lower in the atmosphere and can be captured, but Denmark is further North. There's also several other weather factors that also make the UK particularly good, and Denmark just not as good; but you'd have to talk to a meteorologist about that.
The bottom line is that Denmark is nothing special.
The real reason Denmark is using wind power is because of Norway; they can use Norway's hydroelectricity to buffer the variations in wind power. On average they use none of Norway's power, but at any given time they can be either borrowing or repaying the energy, or selling spare energy on to other countries to reduce their fossil fuel use. It works really well, and they're expanding its use, but the actual wind resources aren't considered to be very special.
You just have to wear aluminium foil on your head, it keeps it out.
That's not what the consumer pays. The consumer pays the lower figure I gave. The point of feed-in tariffs is to give people a reason to build these systems, so as to displace carbon producing generators, which cause very bad problems.
As well, many other generators also have historically been given these kinds of incentives in very many places. Note that peaker plants pretty much always got those kinds of costs anyway.
Power lines and links certainly have power capacities, and these can and do certainly limit renewables, but, as others have pointed out, electricity travels at a large fraction of the speed of light. In any real sense with respect to weather and wind power systems, electricity does not take time to move.
Denmark has low average windspeeds.
Microwave and fibre repeaters do the forwarding without waiting for the whole packet. They typically work bit-by-bit.
There may well be a little latency, but only a few bits at most, which at these speeds is inconsequential. There's no point in buffering when you're in the middle of a point-to-point link; that's only done when you may make routing decisions, but in a point-to-point link there's no decisions to be made.
Yes, stuff like that can happen. That's partly why they don't put wind turbines close to residential areas; also they are somewhat noisy in high winds at close range.
But if you mean, the tornado could carry the blades for miles, well yeah, but a tornado that big is going to fuck up so much other shit than the wind turbines that that's the least of your troubles.
Well, wind turbines do indeed raise power costs.
By about 0.3-0.6c per kWh.
Onshore wind power just isn't very expensive.
Denmark is currently running 40% wind power, and their wind is pretty shitty. And they're going for 85% wind power.
BULLSHIT
My parents live about a kilometre from a wind turbine, and you can NEVER hear it.
I'll tell you what does travel far though: lies about infrasonic noise supposedly generated by wind turbines in significant quantities.
Solutions are obvious if one only has the optical power to observe them over the horizon. -- K.A. Arsdall
