I absolutely agree that life should not be a competition. But - I assume you are from the U.S. - I'm pretty sure that overall life here is less a competition then it is over there, so clearly public tax information is not driving the competition the way you assume it would.

The way I see it is that it gives you more information to make important desicions about your life. Like how big a mortgage can you actually pay back? Or is your employer really valueing you highly like they say they are doing? And that is a very good thing. Most other information sources, like banks or surveys only give you very averaged and aggregated data that is difficult to use this way.

In a similar way, we built a house 7 years ago and I've been trying to tell all interested how much the project cost. People around here often do not share that kind of information. Prospective house builders have to work with very inaccurate information about the real cost of building a house. People bragging about how clever they were and how much they saved etc. I think this kind of thing is a really big problem in our society and we need more public economical information - not less.

Well, certainly the people earning a lot of money think we have a culture of envy. But I'm not at all convinced that we actually have one outside of the top 10% earners envying each other. Now, of course the people making less money envy the rich in the sense that they would like to make more money - but isn't that what market capitalism is all about? What I mean is that most people are not consumed by this envy and they do not suffer from it in any significant way. Nor do people regularly harass each other about their money.

I dunno, maybe it is different in Norway, but your original comment really sounded like the comments I hear around here and I don't see any hard evidence to back them up.

And finally: if the tax information was not available, it would not stop this. People would probably think the rich are earning even more then they really are and envy them even more. Out of sight - out of mind, does not really work when you can see people using their big income in luxury boats, big houses and expensive cars.

The idea is to get the information for the negotiations, and offers from other companies suffer from the same problem. I.e. if you don't know what you are worth, how do you get good offers from other companies? Also .. getting an offer from another company seems to take some days in my experience: maybe two interviews and some kind of pair coding thing. How many of those am I supposed to go through to get a general feel?

I don't know what you do for a living, but I sure as hell know how good the other members of my dev team are at their work. I would like to add that I know it much better then our managers.

And yes, we do also share this kind of information between coworkers. Sometimes with numbers, sometimes without them.

After all above: public salary info would IMHO make everything easier and ... more transparent. If someone feels they should get more pay, they are free to leave. I just don't see the problem.

I live in Finland and we also have publis tax information. I think the rationale for having that information public is to make hiding income harder... if you have no taxable income and your neighbour sees you buying new cars every year, that may cause him to go and talk to someone at the tax office. I'm not sure if there actually is someone you can report a suspected tax evader, but that's the general idea. The shaming is bad, but that is mostly done by the press here and AFAICT there is no shame if you have some reason for the large income. E.g. people owning companies are treated more like heroes.

But, anyway, what I really wanted to say was that the "culture of envy" is a myth. We have the same myth here too. The envy is mostly inside the head of people earning a lot of money. The people earning less generally do not care.

Personally I am very much in favor of public tax information. I usually check the income of some of my coworkers every couple of years. Usually their wages are very much what I expect, but once I noticed that my previous employer valued writing design documents over creating working software - and after learning that I decided to change to another job. I did not start raving and frothing at mouth.

Usually, what you imagine without the information is much worse then the reality.

Compared to what Google and NSA are doing, I find the public tax information to not be a problem.

I don't think the schools here in Finland have degrading for decades. The buildings are getting old because many of them where built after WW2 and they have certainly degraded, but the other stuff is just about a just as it has ever been. You still get a free meal, good books and professional teachers.

The reason we are running out of money is that we now have a lot of old people not working anymore and their healthcare may well be the end of the nordic welllfare state. But the public school system is still doing just fine.

How does an identical twin raised apart inherit poor education? By being adopted inside US so all schools are equally bad?

A btter critique for these twin studies is that the children "reared apart" are probably mostly reared in a relativety similar environment. Meaning that if you sent identical twins e.g. from the most poor areas of Africa to a good place in US you might get more environment effect then 20%. But still IQ is partly hereditary and the hereditary part about half or more.

12V * 100Ah = 1200Wh = 1,2kWh. If I have a closet full of those that's, maybe 50kWh of energy. It's not enough. A winter night is 16 hours and my house can use 150kWh of energy during that time. (And the solar panels would not work under snow.)

But I'm not in Michigan. Maybe there it would be enough?

According to the article the 50 miles drive is one reason the plant is not competitive against cheap landfills. The garbage trucks need to drive 100 miles with each load.

Here (Finland, Europe) we have pipes that circulate almost boiling water in city and town centers. The plants can be a mile or two away and the losses are not too bad - the pipes are underground and they have a lot of polyurethane around them for insulation. The plants do produce both elecricity and heat.

It may be true that is Michigan it's not cold enough to make something like that worthwhile. Here we can easily have a month of -20C cold and in December days are 8 hours long, so solar just isn't not an option. During that time my house uses about 200kWh of heat a day - and it is well insulated. I am looking at ways to get as much as possible of that 200kWh from something other then electricity.

Wow, they are doing it wrong!

The incineration plant was 50 miles from the city that produces the garbage. The idea is to have the plant so close to the city that you can use the heat to heat houses in the winter. Also, the stuff they take in contains all kinds of stuff that doesn't really burn, the article mentions refrigrerators. Around here we recycle all kinds of stuff (and definately refridgerators) so that what is left in the dumpster burns very well.

And finally, saying that solar is cheaper may be true in the summer, but how will you heat houses in the winter with solar? Only run the plant during nights and winter or whatever are the peak hours. Obviously this will probably make the individual kwh:s even more expensive, but peak hour power is much more valuable when other sources are not enough.

It's meant for the Gulf of Finland near St. Petersburg. A PDF report at http://www.baltice.org/ shows that the thickest ice during 2011-2012 winter was 50cm.

It's true that as Russia is more and more interested in exploiting the arctic sea, they will need bigger things.

They have a whole website about the current ice breaking situation, but of course, currently there is no ice:
http://baltice.org/
In this report of the winter between 2011 and 2012 the thickest ice in the Gulf of Finland was 50cm near St. Petersburg:
http://portal.liikennevirasto.fi/sivu/www/baltice/BIM_Joint_Annual__2011__2012-1.pdf