Indeed. With all of the stuff that we have no clue about there in our solar system, why spend so much time on the second-best studied body on the solar system? I'd take a single Titan-exploring tiltrotor VTOL craft over a hundred new lunar rovers.

"Love" is the nice way to put it. "Largess at the expense of all other solar system exploration" would be more accurate. Here's a graph. And it's always the same stupid justifications - how many times can we pretend to be excited about "revelations" that Mars was once in its past a wet place? Or that we're going to stumble into life any time soon in its perchlorate-rich, destroys-organics-on-contact regolith?

And it's not just huge amounts of money that they're wasting - they're also throwing away most of the remainder of our plutonium supply. At least there's money to start making it again, but it'll take time. Plutonium is precious, and it's needed for outer planet missions.

I hate to be the one to tell you but academia generally pays poorly outside of the US. More so in a country like Russia that is still clawing its way back up from the economic collapse that occurred during the transition from communism to capitalism.

Perhaps if most of the country's wealth wasn't concentrated in the hands of a handful of corrupt oligarchs who live like a modern version of Roman emperors they'd be able to pay researchers a living wage.

If you don't like it, you can also try to play around with semantic patching (like coccinelle)

Anonymous coward( 'Bull Fucking Shit', below) is far too strident; but it is the case that there's a curious sort of 'bifurcation' in the 'terrorist' labor market(a confusion we probably contribute to by conflating the various local tribal militias, warlords, strongmen, etc. who cause us trouble during our ground campaigns with the 'terrorists' who are much more international in scope).

On the one hand, as you say, the terrorist grunt supply is heavily drawn from frustrated young men(inconveniently, lots of prime recruiting grounds have demographics that skew fairly young, so there are lots of them), with limited economic prospects, often compounded by a culture where you probably aren't getting laid unless you've achieved enough economic stability to get married. The miscellaneous 'insurgents' who raise hell when you attempt to occupy their home sand trap; but lack international ambitions and/or capabilities are mostly these guys. Some of the lower-skill terrorists proper are as well(particularly for the Israelis, since Gaza's festering-prison-slum atmosphere provides an endless supply of the angry and hopeless; and you don't even need to buy them plane tickets to have them go do a 'martyrdom operation'.

On the other hand, a lot of terrorist leadership, and high-skill recruits(if you want to blow stuff up, it sure helps to have some real engineers and chemists around), are not driven by economic desperation. Bin Laden himself was basically a trust-fund fundamentalist, and a lot of the more influential and logistically important figures are people with decent university degrees, often in marketable subjects, who are financially stable; but alienated by some aspect of the injustice of the world, or disaffected by secularism or the wrong sort of religious practice, exactly which one varying by person.

They come in both flavors.

If anything, Al-Qaeda isn't actually in the mass-murder business.

They are a nasty bunch, treat civilian casualties as a feature not a bug, etc.; but they don't have nearly the resources or the direct combat assets; much less specialized infrastructure that must either be carefully hidden or sited in an area where you are the de-facto government, to do 'mass murder'.

They do terrorism: that tends to include a good deal of violence; but calibrated with an eye to maximum psychological impact, attacks on culturally salient targets, that sort of thing. In terms of straight body count, they rank well below more-or-less-strictly-business drug cartels, and even a fair percentage of the 21st century bush wars in countries that aren't interesting enough to even attract a few foreign correspondents; much less the sort of stuff that made the 20th century so notorious.

The numbers get a bit fuzzy because of the various more-and-less-actually-connected 'franchise' operators, some of which were actually collaborators to some reasonably close degree, some of which were little more than unrelated thugs with a taste for trademark infringement; but Al-Qaeda's body count just isn't that big. It's well weighted for psychological punch, lots of Americans in important buildings, fewer peasant conscripts in ethniclashistan; but in absolute numbers? Chickenshit. ISIS and Boko Haram are almost certainly well ahead; and let's not even talk about how quickly the professionals working for established nation states can stack up bodies...

"What's the other half, Joe?"

"Killing those Cobra motherfuckers!"

Our defense spending has also been disproportionately high for close to three decades now.

And most corporations don't actually pay 35%. Some large notable corporations didn't even pay 10% for the last several years.

In part due to finding a way to bypass existing tax laws.

The understanding was-- you do business in region "X", you pay taxes in region "X" to support services (like roads, court systems, police). The businesses found a way to say, "Oh- I'm legally in region "Y" even tho I made billions of dollars in region "X" last year. In some cases (like ireland) they are finding it wasn't really legal in the first place... in other places they are closing the loophole.

You don't need "antigravity" (which in all likelihood is impossible). Diamagnetic hoverboards would be possible... if we could make ridiculously powerful, compact halbach arrays in the board. Also you'd need a clever mechanism to detect and deal with flying over ferromagnetic material, or otherwise it's going to smack into your board really hard.

I can't since you don't read Swedish and obviously don't believe me who do.

All the above is media echo chamber from one police report. Even if you failed to link it correctly its this one.

Now, I'm not going to translate the lot for you, as you wouldn't believe it anyway, but just the first sentence sums it up quite nicely "I Sverige finns i nulÃget 55 geografiska omrÃ¥den dÃr lokala kriminella nÃtverk anses ha negativ pÃ¥verkan pÃ¥ lokalsamhÃllet". -> In Sweden there are at present 55 geographic areas where local criminal network are considered to have a negative impact on the local community."

That's as far as the "no-go" zones go.

Now, I'm not going to fisk the rest, because it's too tedious, but just as a "for instance": "Here is just one of many news stories on how police have to install shatterproof glass on their vehicles because they get rocks hurled at them whenever entering these areas". No, if you read the article, it says that due to the possibility of stones being thrown, the police responce busses (piketbussarna) have had shatterproof glass fitted. These are the vehicles carrying the special response units, riot police for example, that gets called in when things have gotten bad enough that its warranted (much like armed police in Britain). Again hyperbole. The offered citation doesn't actually say or support what "swedenreport" is trying to sell.

But like I said before, you're fishing in the wrong pond. There are "better" sites if you wish to keep this up.

If you're so concerned for the truth, then there's plenty of that to go around. One would think that with all this crime, drug dealing, shootings and IS supporters running rampant that would show up in crime statistics? Now, general crime statistics is a tricky subject since there's always the problem of what gets reported and how, so the usual proxy is to look at "homicide" i.e. wrongful death. That's a pretty useful statistic as dead people tend to show up in the statistics and are easy to count, and general crime tends to correlate rather well with violent crime, which correlates with people dying from it.

Here's the current count of "lethal violence" in Sweden. Since we have population of 9 644 864 at last count that means a rate of 0.9 per 100k inhabitants in 2014. This is including the last three years of gang shootings (that as you can see didn't even impact the overall statistics). That's better than almost all countries in the world. Including, I might add, Ireland.

So, by that token, it doesn't even matter that we have "no-go zones" then, as the people in them don't get up to much anyway... Police presence or not...

What? If that's really the general case in the US, then drugs should be a very distant second concern, far behind the transmission of disease.

You need to get your HVAC-shit together.

Hyperbole. That was already included in my previous reply.

That one police officer with no official or other standing says one thing doesn't a summer make. (Why he says that I don't know, but there are a number of mundane reasons).

Now, yes, we're having problems in certain areas. And they seem to stick. No denying that. BUT, by that token, why take the word of one policeman when it comes to "no-go zones". We've had much worse in the very city I'm writing this from. That was a real loss of control of general order from the police. No question about it. And even those reports were overblown. The city was perfectly safe for anybody who wasn't either a protester or police even at the height of "the troubles" (:-)). I should know, I was there... I can only imagine what "swedenreport" would have reported had he been there... He would no doubt be on about how Sweden still wasn't safe for the public and how police were still out of control of the streets. (Hint. If they ever were, they regained it very quickly. That wasn't actually the problem, but rather the overreaction of the establishment to what was really a rather minor incident, all things considered.)

So, what we're having now is the analogue. Police can't act like the usually do, i.e. just a single patrol can't necessarily just take off after a suspect if that suspect flees to certain streets in certain parts of the city in the middle of the night or they might get a stone thrown at their car. They have to actually call for backup. And since Swedish police is dimensioned for the actual need, that backup isn't available. Hence they'll let is slide, and the fiction of "no-go zones" were invented.

When police reallocates (as they have due to the last spate of shootings), lo and behold that place is cleared out in short order. (And then police will allocate back, the bad places left to fester and the cycle repeats. We wouldn't even need more police to solve that, but for the police we have to work when crimes are actually committed, i.e. nights and weekends. But since our police force is ageing, they don't want to/need to work nights and weekends. This is actually a bigger problem than any "no-go" zone).

That's a useful analogy. First of course, even in Northern Ireland the streets were "completely safe" even at the heights of the troubles. If you weren't a British squaddie walking alone down Falls road in the middle of the night. If you do the numbers, US crime in New York beat the death rate of "the troubles" by a factor of ten if you look at the period as a whole.

Second. Even taking that as a comparison, the very worst current level of violence in Gothenburg, taking the recent spate of shootings into account, doesn't even begin to reach the level of IRA violence in Republic of Ireland during the troubles. The tourists you speak of objectively were in more danger from the IRA walking the streets of Dublin than the would walking our streets here. In both cases, while the difference in relative risk is quite substantial, the difference in absolute risk is similar, as the absolute risk is the same: as close to zero as to make no difference.

So, it's interesting that you should mention the troubles, as we have a similar situation here, much, much more ink is being spilled than actual blood. Making the general public think there is danger where there actually isn't.

This isn't due to a need to "defend" my home country BTW. To the extent that it needs defending it can do that very well itself, thank you very much, but rather that these horrid little one man web show like "swedenreport" really needs to go off in a corner and die. They're part of the noise, not the signal. I'm happy to say that even though we've seen the general decline of news reporting that the rest of the west has seen, we never had to suffer the likes of the British tabloids, and I'll be damned if we have to suffer it from the likes of swedenreport.

So if you seriously want to learn about the current Swedish situation get yourself a real source. If you're just another one of the "OMG MUSLIMS!!!" looking to verify your preconceived notions, then there are quite frankly better (i.e. even worse, even less connected to reality) sources out there for you to quote. The conclusion however, is the same: In either case, stay away from "swedenreport."

You don't have perfect flexibility to raise your prices.

You might wish you did, but for most businesses, you don't.

The truth is somewhere in between you raising your prices 30% and you eating the entire tax. If you raise your prices 30%, you will sell less product. Often, raising them 30% will cut your business by more than 30%. So you raise prices by less - make a little less profit- and maximize the profits you can make at the new tax rate.

If the tax rate is unsustainable, then you'll go out of business.

Clearly with most of the targeted companies making record profits and more to the point, unusually high profit margins compared to other businesses - they have a lot of slack. They are just a new business and the government hasn't figured out how to take a share from them yet. But it will-- because police have to be paid, roads have to be maintained, the courts have to be run, and the military has to protect the country, etc. etc.

As a person who lightly dealt with tax software-- I can tell you it's not easy.

It's something we need to do, but it's ridiculously complicated with multiple overlapping taxing entities.
It won't be easy.