What is this devilry?
Never seen one before! Is that basically a filter coffee thing with the filter around all sides for convenience?
My main filter (it's the one at work) is one of these:
https://www.nisbets.co.uk/novo...
It takes a rather large paper filter. Less convenient for one cup, but it'll crank out 12, and keep them warm while cranking out 12 more.
Lower cost but not lower risk.
Why are people so I'm live with it? It's worked pretty well so far. Turns out global warming is the massive elephant in the room and will be fast now destructive than all the nuclear accidents including Chernobyl, the weapons ones and everything put together times 100. And all the major economies with lower carbon footprints have substantial nuclear energy in the mix.
Germany is the worst of all the comparable European states.
They are the worst in terms of absolute numbers and the worst in terms of improvement.
What they appear to have is a very good PR campaign based on unrealised future promises.
Is the future nuclear? Probably not too a major extent but to dismiss the efficacy up to now you kind of have to dismiss carbon dioxide as a big problem.
What's a coffee pad?
Mostly I drink kirkland signature filter these days (at work) and whatever's available locally in a cafetiere at home.
Those unrealized gains are good enough to borrow from, so they are good enough to tax.
The collateral necessary for a loan is far greater than the loan amount due to the volatility of the asset value.
The loan requires interest, taxes are pain on that income. The spending of the loan amount is taxed via sales taxes.
The counterpoint is that the valuation seems to be a fiction when it could represent a liability, and a real thing when they want to, say, take out a loan against it. It's awfully convenient that it is selectively fictional.
It's not, it is inherently fictional to all. When you want a loan you will have to put up significantly more than the loan amount as collateral.
Note that for more humble "wealth", folks are taxed. If you own the house you live in, even if you are not using it as a financial instrument but just a place to live, you get taxed on the unrealized "value" of the house. I don't get to say the market value of my house is a fiction since I'm not selling it.
(1) That tax appraisal value is often significantly less than the retail appraisal, and tax appraisal often stand for many years without adjustment. However if retail value decreases a homeowners can generally request a reappraisal.
(2) Both the more modest and the wealthy are subject to this.
if you live in your house, your property tax is subject to the standard deduction, which means folks generally don't get a deduction for it.
"Don't take" not "don't get", the homeowner gets to choose to use the standard or the itemized, whichever is the larger deduction.
If you own a house that you rent out to someone else, the property tax you pay is not subject to the deductible, and you can deduct it.
No, it is a business expense that gets deducted from business income. Renting is a business activity.
The tax system rewards landlords more than homeowners.
The preceding calls into question the logic of your determination.
It seems that either you assess a property tax on net worth analogous to what is imposed on common folk
We do. Homes are taxed. Stock valuations are not. Wealthy or common.
or at *least* tax loans against such assets that have nothing to do with paying for that asset.
The interest on those loads is taxed. The spending of the loan amout is taxed via sales tax.
I think you tried to the wrong person. I was quoting the op.
Did you actually understand that the practice I mentioned, of colocating R&D engineers onsite during development, was an innovation practice that Chinese OEMs do and that GM does not do, and has never done?
Do you realize that colocating is something GM and many other did with their domestic supply chain, suppliers that could be trusted to respect intellectual property.
And that GM's moving R&D to a joint facility in China is precisely what you describe. The Chinese mostly state owned entity was one of their Chinese suppliers and manufacturers.
Because it sure reads like you didn’t understand this and thought it was some point about innovation at GM being stifled by being outsourced.
No, outsourcing worked while they strictly withheld sharing core IP, have your engineers on site to assist and train does not require handing over key IP.
And you made a broad claim, not a narrow claim, about Chinese OEM innovation
Nope. I made a claim about sharing next generation R&D.
The options they may have for evading wealth tax would depend on how the statutes get written, and what loopholes they can buy.
And they and their lawyers will always be smarter than the politicians drafting the laws. And the politicians are limited by limited jurisdiction, they wealthy will be mobile.
Read up on Seattle tanking due to taxation and law enforcement policies, while Bellevue 12 miles away, but a different jurisdiction, excels and grows.
The Soviets decided that they could save money because the probability of those reactors failing was very small.
Not really. They decided they could save money because they were short of cash and engaged in an arms race that they couldn't keep up in. They wanted something to bolster their weapons programme as well as generating power.
So they built a reactor with a void coefficient of 4.7!
Nothing like that has ever been built outside of the USSR. It's a completely mental design and of literally no bearing on anyone who isn't in the USSR. No one's built anything like that for power generation outside and a defunct empire won't make anyone build one like that either.
In both cases, the risks were known, and in both cases they were downplayed by the people making the decisions. Soviet or democratic, both systems failed.
The magnitude is somewhat different. Chernobyl was way worse, and wasn't assisted by being hit with a tsunami. Orders of magnitude more people dead. Orders of magnitude radiation released. Orders of magnitude bigger exclusion zone.
So the whole "yah but they both failed" is about akin to saying Starmer is no better than Tuss because they're both bad.
Nothing is perfectly safe (not wind or solar either). Everything is a money/death tradeoff. Including renewables. And coal. Which as you may know is needed to smelt the iron ore required to build renewables and nuclear (though less per GW for nuclear).
Chernobyl demonstrated the fundamental problem with nuclear power: Trust.
You have to trust the designers,
Oh come on. I know you don't like nuclear but there's no excuse for disingenuous arguments. People didn't trust the USSR, it's just they had no choice it what with it being a dictatorship that killed people who were too vocal about not trusting them.
And Chernobyl has zero bearing on any reactors built you know outside of the USSR. No one else has ever built a powerstation like that.
And while mini nuclear reactors are a real thing, they are a fantastically dumb real thing. Nuclear reactors aren't super safe,
This is false. They really are safe unless you make an utterly insane design. Outside of the USSR where no one was mad enough to build a design like that (and it was also a dual use reactor), nuclear reactors have cause way way way way fewer radiation related cancer deaths than the coal plants they originally replaced. Not to mention all the other deaths. They're one of the safest forms of electricity available. They're about on a par with solar and wind, and until people can make steel effectively without coal, then wind and solar are going to have the coal problem more than nuclear.
Chernobyl reactor was a very smart and safe design
What the actual fuck. It had a void coefficient of +4. That's beyond insane. No one else builds reactors with positive void coefficients like that (CANDU has a tiny positive one kind of on a technicality). It was built that way to cheaply be able to produce weapons grade plutonium and run on cheap fuel.
It was always mad, not a "very smart safe design".
A problem so costly if it gets out of hand that the US's original major nuclear research and production site in of Hanford, Washington
Remind me what a weapons research and production facility has to do with nuclear power?
On top of that nuclear reactors are expensive compared to renewables
You got something right!
Just build some fucking windmills
Now how did Sweden never figure that out? Oh no wait they already did build quite a lot of fucking windmills (maybe that's how they got so many, from the breeding program).
Starmer is still better than the alternatives (Farage, Badenoch) but that's not saying much. The alternatives are just that shit.
Well quite. The thing about the lesser evil is it's still less evil.
I mean some stuff he's done is good. Some bad. It's all directionless.
Some of the laws they're creating are made to be abused, even though Starmer isn't going to abuse them
Well apart from the laws against protest which are selectively enforced (left wing aligned protests get policed heavily with long sentences, farmers causing disruption get zero arrests) and of course the utter, shameful abuse of anti terrorist legislation proscribing Palestine Action (without reference to agreement on their actions, what they did is not terrorism).
Thing is he happily abuses laws he railed against in opposition.
and yes we will be properly fucked. Starmer wants people to obey HIM, NOW. He is not smart enough to realise he will still be alive when someone else gets a crack at it, somehow.
Does GM co-locate engineers from dozens of suppliers on its sites in the programme teams throughout the development phase? No, no it does not.
Under past CEOs GM kept key critical R&D in-house. But then with the current CEO, R&D moved to a joint venture with a majority state-owned enterprise in China.
This is but one of hundreds of innovation practices
It's just the one example the GP mentioned. Just one part of the GM R&D that was shared with China.
In the near future we will probably see a headline that is something like "Elon loses $200 billion". Elon will in fact suffer no such loss. There is no loss or gain until a stock is sold. A valuation based on today's closing price is a fiction.
By that logic, if CA took $200 billion worth of shares from Elon, he wouldn't actually suffer a loss?
Wrong, that would be a loss. That is not a market fluctuation that is recoverable with time, that is a permanent loss of an asset.
Their assets are valued at whatever they need to be valued for them to get the loans they want.
They need only a small fraction of today's fictitious net worth value to collateralize such loans. They will engineer their fictitious net wealth as needed.
And those loans are below market rates so that they never pay much of any interest on them.
Add evadable taxation on top of that and you just accelerate the usage of mobility and creative tax avoidance.
They don't do that for billionaires or other members of the ruling class.
I'm glad you understand they have options others don't. What makes you think they will not have options for wealth tax? Again, mobility, creative accounting, creative asset management, etc.
"I've finally learned what `upward compatible' means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes." -- Dennie van Tassel
