> it has certainly evolved since the time of Panini, just evolved in a way that doesn't break the rules set up by Panini.
This is important. This constraint alone helps oral traditions a great deal.
516 karma · joined January 31, 2019
This is important. This constraint alone helps oral traditions a great deal.
What this meant was that language stopped evolving since last 2400 years ago. You can create new words but there are precise rules for it. All this means there is no scope for "dialects", words meanings changing with geography etc. Different vedic chants separated by thousands of miles and 1000 years in time are exactly the same and perfectly understandable in any part of the country for anyone who has studied Sanskrit.
This makes Vedic chants unlike anything English, Latin or Arabic has to offer.
In most of those cases, tax need not be the only way to pay for those services. Government in many cases uses coercion to monopolize some of the markets (roads, NHS etc.) which makes it necessary to tax people. But even if I agree with your basic premise then what % of tax revenue actually goes into funding something that is public good, at least in USA around 40% of it is pure waste.
> So they're not paying to get something, they're only paying because everywhere else they would have to pay more. In effect they're robbing the US because they are using public services there, while not paying the tax that is normal for it.
> they're robbing the US
Not true. Apple is keeping its own money to itself using perfectly legal mechanism. This is not very different from claiming spouse or child as an exemption for an individual.
> because they are using public services there
Paying taxes have absolutely nothing to with which services you use. US is happy to tax American citizens who do not even live in USA nor have anything to do with USA. NY state taxes folks who specifically refuse to stay or work in NY and yet work for NY based employers.
Tax is a classic redistribution mechanism, government collects whatever it can, spends (or supposed to spend on) whoever needs it. It has nothing absolutely nothing to do with what services one uses.
> But as a Dutch taxpayer: Thanks Apple!
That is something we can agree on and Thanks Denmark for making it happen. More money in the hands of US government is nothing but trouble for Americans and thrid world countris where they drop bombs.
I accept a job offer than pays me more, that is greed but how does that cause anyone harm or cause neglect ? I think you are mistaking lack of compassion on charity to be greed. Which societies or successful people are not greedy in your case ?
> It's probably not the best movie to teach this, but at least it's for adults and it came to mind easily.
I do not take moral lessons from movies. There might be bad people everywhere but greed has very little to do with it.
> rough rehash of some melodramatic libertarian propaganda meme
This is just flamewar. Extreme ideas are a good way to compare principles. Once you agree that stealing is bad, it is irrelevant how much stealing is bad.
The example of North Korea has nothing to do propaganda meme. The observation, real observation is that people are giving arm and leg to move to areas with lower taxes, these areas also have reasonably well quality of life.
> We're talking about tax havens (and a weird assertion that they should be pride-inducing),
Using our logic (or rather lack of) "haven" is a socialist propaganda term. Some political entities have figured out that by having a "BETTER" tax regime they can invite more wealth and wealthy. Singapore an Hong Kong are such great examples. You in one stroke are calling them "greedy".
Not only is factually wrong, it is also pretty self righteous of you.
Amazon is working hard to get things to our doorstep for real low prices, is that a sacrifice ?
How many sq feet of land do you need to grow say 1000KG of wheat ? That number would widely vary. In Nevada that number would be really really huge compared to say fertile soil of Kansas. But with a vertical farming that number can be made much more uniform all across the geography. With a vertical farm someone in Nevada might put to use the vast empty land they have to produce wheat.
At the end of the day, success of vertical farming would come from such efficient usage of land and in my opinion even if authors narrow case of growing wheat using solar panels comes to fruition would still lead to more efficient use of land
Indian people should ask why Indian government is creating laws that need "evasion", that too from a massively successful, well respected and very innovative company, Amazon wants to invest in India and India needs to change its laws if needed to welcome more investment and more competition.
Perhaps it is the indian government that is wrong here?
You will be surprised to know that from your corner store florist to Walmart and from Bank of America to your child's babysitter everyone is obstructed by regulators of all kinds and to some or large extent all businesses are successful because they have learned how to evade government regulation. I remember a lecture by Aetna CEO who said the only competitive advantage they have over competitors is that they have far better handle on the regulation.
If I were Amazon, I would do the same and as an Indian citizen I am greatly happy to see Amazon going so out of the way to help me get what I want.
> People in tech are being paid massively not because they're postdocs with good credentials and amazing skills, but because they know how to bend governments to their will.
It is other way around. The regulators in DC are confused as to how they will regulate the tech. They simply can not as the people are hooked to Instagram and Snapchat. If you give a free hand to DC people they would want every internet user to have a "internet license" and their search history be made available to every possible alphabet soup of government agency.
> which is almost never correct
I am not seeing either any black or white. You on other hand just called a lot of people antisocial. So people who move out of California to Nevada because they dont want to pay 10% (or 16%) state tax are antisocial ? Seems pretty black and white assertion to me.
Why should forcibly taking money from other people have earned be a good thing ? A perhaps better idea would be just to ban Starbucks from the country and let government run a monopolized coffee shop. That might be a great achievement no ?
From what I can see the government must strive to achieve as much as possible while taking as little as possible from anyone else. Taxation is theft but has no real alternative but being cognizant of that underlying philosophy would help people find a moral compass.
These sort of things probably fall under the category of fraud, wrongdoings, crime etc. any ways and I do not imply that you should be proud of these things. But having a lower tax rates etc. clearly is bringing in more business and more trade to Amsterdam and non of this is due to a scandal or fraud. You can definitely be proud of that achievement while denouncing the frauds and scandals committed by the tax authorities.
I fail to understand what is wrong with this. What is wrong in people keeping more of their wealth to themselves ? Heck I am not even very rich but would love to live in a country that does not tax and on top will be extremely proud to be the citizen.
If there is something wrong in lower taxes are you implying thay countries with 100% taxes (where you turn up everything you have to your government) would be somehow morally superior or something to be proud of ?
I do not think you mean education as in formal education but rather people have not systematically thought about these things. And, I think people will never be educated enough on this topic. Inflation and Climate change in some sense are pretty much alike. Both are some serious market externalities as a consequence of which they do not benefit from market signals (the biggest teacher of them all).
For issues like this the biggest teacher is the market and not books. A lot of climate change deniers have invested in Tesla and Solar companies and a lot of climate change maniacs have purchased Bitcoins and oil stocks. Some of the biggest proponents of climate change hysteria own private jets and ocean front properties. A lot of people call this hypocrisy and assign motives of fraud to these people but I do not think so. When it comes to climate change the market signals are clear that we need to look for an alternatives to our current energy sources and these sources will be more popular while completely rejecting alarmist claims. One might argue that market signals are not correct. But that is irrelevant. The point is people react to market signals FAR FAR better than anything that gets pushed by intellectuals, even those intellectuals who share their own political biases.
Markets signals around bailouts or inflation are missing. As someone like Milton Friedman pointed out, there is simply nothing that an average American can do to prevent government from printing money. If nothing you do will have an impact people wont do anything. The market signals are missing because there is no competition where you can see what works and what does not.
Instead of taking strong ideological positions I think we should work on making market forces operate more freely in this space. Bitcoin is already challenging the dollar in this space. It is a David (USD) vs Goliath right now but at some point people will figure out that a constant inflation for USD would mean higher price for Bitcoin over time.
For bailouts I think we need ot come up with solution that is more market like. Perhaps increase of creating ad-hoc bailouts for large corporations, pass a clear law that describes the terms of bailout well in advance and provide different options to chose from for the corporations and then stick to it.
You will be surprised how quickly people will vote in favor of better bailout policies.
I would rather live in an unsustainable India of 2020 than in sustainable India of 1985.
Debt is not really much of a problem for India as debt of gdp ratio is pretty low. Debt is not a problem in terms of sustainability either, when the proverbial shit hits the fan the country might go into massive recession but even in the worst of worst cases and even with terrible politicians at help recessions don't last very long. But the gain upto that point are all real. (India has over 50M more young and healthy people purely because the country has eliminated Polio and dozen other diseases that were common 40 years ago).
Rising population and rapid urbanization would require India to manage its forests, water and other resources better and India is not equipped to do so because of government control of key industries and bad policies. But we can hope things will change for better as a more competent government is at helm.
If I your were in India which was a deep socialist state in 1980s and 1995 just when the seeds of 1992 reforms were sowed, it was a complete shithole compared to the India of 2020 even with COVID.
In order to qualify to even bid on a contract there is a pretty high entry barrier. The amount of time it will take you to cross that barrier would be more than amount of time it will take you to start a real business. Bidding is another expensive process which costs money. If you bid on 10 contracts in a year and win one the cost of bidding on rest 9 contracts must be covered to the won contract.
Then comes the compliance costs of various government regulations. In a startup world you can take up accessibility as a P2 item but in government contracts it is a P0. So there are all these complexities involved which bloat the contract. Government has passed probably thousand regulations on whom you can hire and how you work, where the data is stored and what kind of background verification you have done on your employees.
Of course if you and I were to develop a similar website we could do it for $4M and spare some cash to buy couple of Ferraris.
PS. There is also bribes. Of course these are never called so but you have to spend good amount of time golfing with right people, throwing parties, offering front row seats to NBA finals and those sort of things to get your files moving.
A lot of human progress is result of human actions but not planning. Centralized planning around "climate change" would 100% be a recipe for disaster and a monumental failure about which future generations will write for 100s of years just the way we talk about slavery today.
Your use of carbon makes my existence on the planet a bit risky and hence you should pay me some compensation. But how much ? That is an impossible task for anyone and not just for the centralized government systems but even for highly efficient private players looking at very small problems. This is something that even outright climate change deniers like me admit.
Unfortunately we live in a world where virtue signaling is more important than actual virtues and winning arguments is more important than actual winning. Yes this is a PR thing and will help to create a positive public image that IKEA hopes will help them thwart the evil eyes of the rent seeking politicians.
Note: A tree is useful and carbon negative only if it is growing a tree in forest that has stopped growing is mostly useless for offsetting carbon, if anything we need a Logging 2.0 where we cut down a lot of trees and use them for long term purposes such as furniture, housing, infrastructure etc. and plant and grow new trees.
> Why they have to explain themselves for doing something useful?
They don't have to and neither does Amazon, Google, Exxon and thousand other companies have to explain anything to the public or govermint and yet you see so many attempts by government and activists to force them to explain.
Most of them will be built by government making huge losses, they will go from nowhere to nowhere and they will not function as intended. The California high speed train is a great example. Not to mention $50K will be put by people but the national rail network will have to built by government (not that they have to but very likely they will grab this opportunity).
I do not know about dbw pedals but power steering and anti-lock breaking operate 100% deterministically and the only true unknown is controlled by the driver.
The analogy is that the electric bulb did not replace candle as such but created entirely new possibilities that were unimaginable when the bulb was invented. This is nearly true for any invention and not just self driving cars. Advancements in self driving will change not just how people go to office or dates but will also change how goods are hauled, how docks are loaded, how agricultural products are transported, how fruits are picked from trees and how law enforcement deals with patrolling and so on.
I am an anti-goverment anti-regulation Libertarian and even I think the government has a very legitimate role to play here in regulating this fraud. This is a bit like Humpty Dumpty where the words do not mean what they mean.
There is plenty of evidence that the GREAT LEADER tried to overturn elections. If the Congress fails to impeach him it would imply the Congress is not a strong and relevant institution anymore and what the GREAT LEADER failed at someone else would succeed in future. Also, no point blaming FBI here as they were merely pen pushers, their bosses and Congress from which derive legitimacy are far more incompetent and responsible for this mess.
Cato Institute (Libertarian/Conservative think tank) analyst David Bier has a timeline here. The Great Leader Supreme had called for this rally in early December and had since used violent language asking folks to move to DC on December 6th.
https://twitter.com/David_J_Bier/status/1351552702032056328?...
Here are some quotable quotes.
> 12/19: Trump announces the Jan. 6th event by tweeting, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Immediately, insurrectionists begin to discuss the “Wild Protest.” Just 2 days later, this UK political analyst predicts the violence
> On Dec. 29, the FBI sends out a nationwide bulletin warning legislatures about attacks
> 1/1: Trump tweets the time of his protest. Then he retweets “The calvary is coming” on Jan. 6!” Sounds like a war? About this time, the FBI begins visiting right wing extremists to tell them not to go--does the FBI tell the president?
>1/5: Trump tweets at various law enforcement, intelligence, and military agencies that he supposedly oversees about the threat from “Antifa.” At the same time, a VA FBI Office warns of a “war” at the Capitol from the far right starting the next day.
> 1/6, 12:00-12:17pm: Trump begins his speech. At 12:17, he says that he will march with the rioters to the Capitol to demand the election be overturned.
> "After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down. We’re going to walk down any one you want, but I think right here. We’re going walk down to the Capitol" - Donald J. Trump - Jan 6 2021
> "We are going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue and we're going to the Capitol and we're going to try and give weak Republicans the pride and boldness that they need to take back our country... So let's walk down Pennsylvania Ave" https://youtu.be/ipTSkxiToDE
Teachers union is easily one of the worst Unions in USA which has turned public education system into a wasteland of incompetent teachers protected at the expense of competent and unemployed. It has turned our education system into a soviet styled "jobs program for adults" instead of a schooling system for children.
If Americans ever wanted an example of how much damage unions can do, look no further than Teachers union.
- Increase immigration. Especially from China and India. - Figure a way out to clip the wings of EU while keeping the free trade and open EU borders intact. EU's unelectable government servants are bringing immense harm.