I'd rather go the other way, get the government out of picking winners/losers here and institute across the board apt tax while wiping out income/capital gains/inheritance taxes (keeping ss and gas taxes because they correspond with payout).

Depending on what your goals for a taxation system are, that's downright terrible. I agree with wiping out income tax, but not all capital gains tax. (I would eliminate capital gains tax on investments that produce new wealth - like profit made off buying new machines to build new products, but keep the tax for all "buy low sell high" gains) Inheritance tax I'd change along with property tax in general, which I'd change to be percentile based; that is, your tax rate is higher if you are in a higher percentile bracket of total wealth.

Consumption taxes are bad, because you are taxed if you have to consume (or the system must have complicated exemptions for "minimum allowed consumption"), but if you have extra to spend, you will (on average) consume less (in nominal terms) if consumption is taxed and you have the option of not consuming. Unless the taxing entity (government) adequately creates evenly-distributed demand with its tax revenue, consumption taxes will be a drag on the economy.

Unless you care about EMC or heat dissipation or something else that depends on the interactions between the components, yes, you can think of electronic circuits that way.

I suppose for logic-only devices this works, but as soon as you start wanting to do something that requires power, you can't just drop circuits together like that.

Personally I really *hate* watching blue ray movies in full resolution. Usually the material just looks cheesy to me, where you can see the boundaries of the CGI sequences, makeup smudges on the actors, obvious short cuts on the set construction and all kinds of things that just are not right. It actually makes it more difficult for me to suspend reality long enough to enjoy the movie.

Change the settings on your TV and/or BD player. Usually it's some kind of strange over-scan or post-processing mode with a name like "cinema view" or something unequally helpful. But I agree that "feature" makes movies look like they are stage plays - and it is crap, because SFX are made assuming you can't see it in that much clarity.

Forget about the privacy stuff - what about the advertisement crap!?

If "they" are going to use my car to display ads to someone else, then I better not have to pay anything for my registration. That should be paid by the people who want their ads displayed using my property.

The fact that the storm was larger in area and impacted regions with higher population density and correspondingly greater economic devastation was what made it newsworthy.

Indeed - I wish that, instead of just saying "most expensive storm ever!" they would normalize it somehow - perhaps to something like cost relative to annual mean salary per unit population density. This way you'd weed out all the effects of inflation and higher concentrations of development.

Perhaps mean salary isn't the correct metric - perhaps it's mean property value or something, but essentially something that would indicate indicate the relative damage of the storms rather than the relative amount of stuff we put in places that get hit by storms.

Why would the initial customers need to be charged? Presumably the folks would get enough funding from the Kickstarter (for example) that would include enough profit for them to be happy. This way, some other company "swooping in" won't have any impact on the ability to recoup R&D.

It's a very different model, yes - but it's one where instead of risking a small amount of your own (or VCs) money for a massive payout by winning the IP lottery, you have a (probably lower) guaranteed return with zero risk, assuming you actually met the initial funding threshold.

The way I see it - if you want the IP lottery, you can't complain about patent law

What about getting your potential customers to pay for the innovation itself, rather than some third-party VC group that generally only wants to pay for the right to earn profits off the innovation?

I think Kickstarter and the publicly-commissioned model could make the old funding models of VCs and banks and the like obsolete (for a large swath of products, at least). This reduces the middle-man effect, and ensures that the primary beneficiaries of innovation are the innovators and the consumers of the innovative products and services themselves, rather than the providers of liquidity.

I still think there's a difference between the following philosophies:

• "I have a company whose purpose is to provide good or service X, and want to make enough money to be able to do X well and for a long time."
• "I have a company and want to make money, so I'll provide good or service X so I can make good money for a long time."

Who is the "they" here? The employees of the company? Shareholders?

In either case I don't think it's relevant; my comment was more an observation of the fact that some people believe the only purpose of companies is to make money for the owners.

I might, though, go so far as to argue that most shareholders "do it" for almost nothing: they risk only financial loss, but have no responsibility for the activities of their company. Have shareholders ever been held responsible for the actions of the company they "own"?

It's a shame that people tend to view the purpose of (public) companies is to make money for their owners, rather than provide a product or service which can only be provided by pooling the resources of a group of people acting corporately.

And any economist will tell you trade creates wealth, by the simple fact that as long as both parties are willing, they're both getting something they want.

Not any economist I know!

Wealth is exactly constant during a trade. Now, value may increase (if it's a good trade), but wealth is constant. Wealth is only created by manufacturing and agriculture. Wealth is destroyed by consumption and decay (or active destructive activity like demolition, or disaters).

More trade may encourage the creation of new wealth, but it most definitely does not create it directly.

The trouble with most schemes to "better account for the cost of the externality" is that they don't actually better account for the cost of the externality. They just come up with some arbitrary pricing scheme (even a cap and trade market ends up being arbitrary) because the imposed cost is not linked in any way to the benefit of reducing the perceived unwanted external effect.

If, on the other hand, people had a market where (for example) you could trade health care discounts for increases in energy cost - then you would see a better representation of the cost of the externality. Or perhaps trading tax reductions for higher energy prices. I've never seen a proposal to do this, though. Instead people are asked to "pay more for energy now, so it will maybe reduce the chance you get sick in the future, and so maybe reduce the amount of health care cost increase in the future."

Ugh. I think the fair tax is perhaps the worst type of tax there is (consumption tax).

I've been reading and thinking a lot about taxes, and the perceived problems with taxes. Fundamentally, I believe that you should never tax consumption or production - what you should tax instead is "idle wealth" because you want resources to be used, not sitting idle. I therefore believe all taxes should be based on net wealth, but with a slight caveat:

The tax will still be an income tax only, but the tax rate is based on total net worth. This would help reduce the amount to which the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer" because poor people hold little wealth, so they will get to keep much of their income. The wealthy, however, since they are wealthy, would only be able to grow their wealth more and more slowly.

This is actually simpler than the Fair tax; you don't have to worry about taxing transactions or giving some kind of "credit" based on some average (and therefore incorrect) assumed "minimum standard of living" for food and clothing purchases or whatever.

Probably the most difficult aspects of what I've been thinking will be to figure out how to scale the tax rate appropriately to the wealth; it should probably be done somehow based on relative wealth (rather than an absolute number; e.g., perhaps your income tax rate should be the square of the wealth percentile in which you fall. If you're in the 1%-tile for wealth, your income tax rate is 0.01%; if you're in the 99%-tile for wealth, your income tax rate would be 98%). Note that this is not a marginal rate - this is the actual tax rate.

The other trick will be to figure out how to assign property, so people don't simply hide all their wealth in a holding company. Probably have to base it on shares held or something like that... but it's a proposal that is much more likely to help reduce income inequality, avoid punishing people for being productive, and prevent wealth from aggregating in the hands of a few.

I've always thought this "double taxation" argument is silly, because every single monetary unit exchanged is taxed multiple times.

Someone pays my employer money. My employer pays me some of that money and so pays payroll tax, and I pay income tax. My employer, presuming they make some profit, pays some corporate taxes on some of that money. When I buy something with my money, I probably pay sales tax on it. If I buy property, I pay property tax.

Where in this chain is there any money that is not "taxed multiple times"?

To be fair, there are a couple really good scenes in Revenge of the Sith. As a whole the movie is indeed pretty lacking, but if the whole movie had more scenes like the following, it could have been something truly grand:

The best is the scene (sans dialog!) where (eh, am I really going to spoiler this?) there is one character looking across the city toward where another character is doing something atrocious. That is a brilliant scene, where there is actually a glimpse of emotion, conveyed not by dialog or effects, but simple imagery and the score.

It's too bad, really, that the rest of the movie is so full of cliche and noise.