Other third-world hell-holes: Estonia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Sweden and Australia. They have the five least burdensome taxes among the 34 OECD nations according to the Tax Foundation’s International Tax Competitiveness Index (pdf, rankings on page 5).

Canada ranks 24th. The United States ranks 32nd with an overall score of 44.6% (to Estonia's 100%), better than only Portugal and France.

from the linked article at engineering.com:

Can anyone here make sense of that statement? GPS only works when buildings are aligned with true north?

from the summary:

from the LA Times:

So the absolute number of electric car sales is increasing but their market share is not. The reporter, one "Charles Fleming," seems not to comprehend that a fixed percentage of an increasing value is itself an increasing value. "Stagnant," is the wrong term to describe an increase in sales. Math is hard.

Tor developer Andrew Lewman says... agents from [NSA and GCHQ ] leak flaws directly to the developers, so they can be fixed quickly.

Why announce that publicly? The NSA and GCHQ will now attempt to to shut down the leaks and arrest the leakers. Even if they fail, it is certain to scare the leakers and make leaking more difficult.

"You have to think about the type of people who would be able to do this and have the expertise and time to read Tor source....

Why give those agencies clues to help them figure out who are the leakers?

...except those with several billon dollars.

California State and federal EPA environmental regulations are all unnecessary and harmful. The massive, wasteful, expensive, totalitarian, sadistic and incompetent EPA bureaucracy can be abolished and the environment made cleaner and safer. All that is required to efficiently limit environmental pollution and risks to any desired levels are these two measures:

1. The government implements pollution monitoring and sells tradable pollution licenses for individual pollutants in specified quantities. It buys back licenses to reduce emissions. It sells more credits to increase emissions.

2. The government monetizes risk by mandating bonding, requiring that any enterprise which risks accidental environmental damage hold a bond at the value of the maximum potential damage. (Offshore drilling is a good example.) This prevents companies from causing damage which they can not afford to pay for. The cap also limits the feeding frenzy among lawyers after an accident. To reduce risk exposure the government mandates more expensive bonds. To decrease risk exposure the government mandates less expensive bonds. Let insurers price and sell bonds to those business which are required to buy them. Obviously, the actual price of the bond to the purchaser from the insurer will typically be less than the nominal value of the bond because the price will be the nominal value of the bond multiplied by a risk factor usually less than 1.

Those two measures in combination reduce pollution and accident risks to any desired level with high efficiency and they do so equitably. Externalities are bad. Internalize externalities by compelling polluters to pay for the costs of polluting and the risk-takers to safeguard against risk.

That system allows state and local preferences for pollution levels and corporate favors to combine easily and transparently with national standards. Suppose that system was actually in place in California and Tesla was lured in with either subsidies or by slackening environmental regulations. Well, under that system, it would be done by giving/subsidizing/purchasing Tesla pollution licenses and adjusting the bond requirements or subsidizing a bond. Those actions would have assigned monetary values and identifiable and quantifiable changes to the level of pollution and risk. So we would know exactly what doing favors for Tesla costs the environment in increased pollution and risk and what it costs the taxpayer in dollars.

Six reasons we do not have flying cars:

1. Unforgivingness: Run out of gas, stall, fail to perform scheduled maintenance? You plummet and die. Road vehicles are more forgiving of errors and faults.
2. Regulation: There is an overwhelming regulatory burden imposed by the FAA. This restricts R&D, commercialization and ownership.
3. Expertise: Piloting requires specialized skills and extensive training.
4. Expense: Flying vehicles are expensive.
5. Infrastructure: The air traffic control system can not handle ubiquitous flying vehicles. Take-off and landing zones are not ubiquitous. For short distances, it is inefficient to to the airport to fly to the next airport to drive to where you are going, Why not just drive to where you are going to start with? For longer distances, drive to the airport and take a plane. The flying car only makes sense if we put airports everywhere. Yes, VTOL would mitigate this.
6. Inherent inefficiency: Hauling your car around with you everywhere you fly? Carrying your airplane with you everywhere you drive? A combination car/plane of the future makes about as much sense as traveling with your car on a commercial passenger flight today.

You are stuck with #6; Flying cars might just be an inherently stupid idea. Other barriers can be overcome with technology and mass commercialization except for the FAA regulatory burden and restrictions.

Ubiquitous personal air transport makes more sense for short to medium distances if you do not try to make combination, flyable/roadable vehicle. As-the-crow-flies routes are way more efficient than road networks and with automated navigation and automated air-traffic control there would be no traffic jams in 3 dimensions. Automated VTOL would largely obviate road travel.

Race Differences and the Out-of-Africa theory of Human Origins. East Asian-White-Black differences fit the theory that modern humans arose in Africa about 100,000 years ago and expanded northward. During prolonged winters there was evolutionary selection for higher IQ created by problems of raising children, gathering and storing food, gaining shelter, and making clothes.

And/Or possibly by interbreeding with neanderthals. They had larger brains than modern humans.

The higher IQ of caucasians likely developed due to the cold, temperate climate of Northern Europe which required more long term planning and skilled crafts to develop technologies to survive the cold winters. The cold winters heavily selected for higher IQ, whilst the tropical environment, where the fruit hangs on the true all year, does not.

Neanderthals inhabited cold northern climates over 300,000 before present. We know they were extremely muscular, they were also probably highly intelligent. Perhaps they were, literally, superhuman. Modern Europeans are partially descended from them.

Those comments are speculative obviously, but testable, because we have sequenced neanderthal DNA. In fact there have been many ancient and modern migrations into Europe. There was an ancient invasion into central Europe of agriculturalists from the middle east, and the medieval Jewish diaspora into the Rhine Valley. Mongols reached Poland, not sure how much DNA they left behind.

It would be interesting if the ancient genetic origins of distinguishing modern European behavioral traits could be identified. Interesting because Europe is unique in the high degree of genetic mixing which has gone on for such a long period. Other societies not so much, they are more genetically homogeneous. Judging from tremendous achievements of Europeans in science, art and technology, diversity is a good thing. Diversity in the traditional sense of the word, not in the modern sense of eligibility for affirmative action handouts.

U.S. companies are worth more to foreign companies than to other U.S. companies because foreign companies pay lower income taxes. A U.S. company, Emerson, lost a bid to a French company, Schneider, for APC for that reason. As the WSJ states (free access to the paywalled article via FaceBook):

In 2006, Emerson sought to acquire a company called American Power Conversion (APC). This was a Rhode Island-based company that made more than half of its earnings outside the U.S. Unfortunately, Emerson competed against Schneider Electric, a French company, to acquire APC. Emerson offered more than $5 billion, but ultimately Schneider acquired APC by offering a bid in excess of $6 billion.

Why was Schneider willing to offer more? Schneider outbid us because France's tax code—typical of most OECD countries—exempts 95% of foreign-source income from taxation, while the U.S. tax code fully taxes such income. APC's profits were worth more to Schneider because, once absorbed, APC's global profits (net of the taxes paid in the countries where those profits were earned) could be repatriated to Schneider's headquarters in France, where they would be taxed at less than 2%.

In contrast, earnings repatriated to the U.S. are subject to a tax rate of nearly 40%, with a credit for taxes paid abroad on that income. That dramatic difference made it possible for Schneider to offer more for APC. So what had once been an American company became French.

Though inefficiencies reduce profitability, the inference that negative profitability implies inefficiency is invalid.

Let's unpack your own reasoning here: An inefficient business will be unprofitable. Amazon is unprofitable. Therefore, Amazon is inefficient. If A, then B. B, therefore A. The category of error you have made is termed "affirming the consequent", colloquially known as Modus Morons.

Profit is, to quote WP, "the difference between the purchase and the component costs of delivered goods and/or services and any operating or other expenses." Therefore negative profitability could result from either inordinately low pricing or inordinately high expenses, or both.

Amazon's pricing argument is one instance of the same general phenomenon that gross expenditures, under some conditions, increase in response to price decreases. The effect has different names in different contexts:

With taxation, people sometimes refer to the Laffer Curve, which for levels of taxation to the right of the peak of the curve, reducing tax rates increases tax revenues.

For technology, Jevons Paradox explains why, as the efficiency of home appliances increases, so does energy consumption.

My grandfather, an economist, had an amusing story about a toll bridge authority attempting to taper down revenues as the bond which funded the bridge was paid off. They lowered the toll price to reduce revenues and revenues shot up as customers responded to the lower toll price by crossing the bridge more frequently. So they lowered the toll price again and revenues shot up further. As I recall the story goes that it worked the third time.

Why is it bad for efficient suppliers to replace inefficient suppliers? And why bad in the long run but not the short run?

If efficient suppliers replaced inefficient suppliers, but then in the long run inefficient suppliers returned to dominate the market, than that would be a good outcome in your view.

Can you explain your reasoning?

Or from ever having posted an eBay auction with a large reserve price which then closed with no bids.

Even if Amazon's argument is flawed, their attempt to persuade by using reason and presenting facts is nonetheless admirable. As opposed to the feces hurling which accompanies most public disputes these days.

It builds a solid foundation for a researched and reasoned response in opposition. As opposed to picking up the monkey dung and throwing back.

So my mother has a Ph.D in experimental psychology and knows a thing or two about how to design experiments, how to avoid systematic bias, how to distinguish that from random error, and in the admittedly non-objective opinion of her son, is quite sharp about identifying sources of those in methodologies. After raising three children she tries to restart her career. At first the only work she could find was a lowly temp job entering survey responses from a drug trial into a database. Turns out that the forms completed by the doctors and patients surveyed left answers to many questions blank. So how is she instructed by those managing the data entry to handle those cases? She is told to systematically select particular answers to particular questions. And which answers? The answers consistent with the drug being effective and harmless.

Now you do not have to be a Ph.D. to spot a problem with that. Hell, my German Shepherd could probably do that. But maybe as a scientist herself the violation of scientific integrity stung too strongly and my mother insistently raised complaints within the company. And how far did those go to correct the "mistaken" guidelines for data entry? Absolutely nowhere.