Does anyone know what theorems/definitions this paragraph is referring to?
"Finally, in 1912, almost half a century after Cantor’s discovery, and
after many failed attempts to prove the invariance of dimension, L.E.J.
Brouwer succeeded by employing some methods of his own creation. In
essence, he proved that it is impossible to put a higher-dimensional
object inside one of smaller dimension, or to place one of smaller
dimension into one of larger dimension and fill the entire space,
without breaking the object into many pieces, as Cantor did, or allowing
it to intersect itself, as Peano did."
The Waltons (Walmart) already own the regional Arvest Bank with numerous locations in Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma so they're no strangers to finance.
They were when they appeared. That is, in comparison to the phones that existed at that time, which are now known as "dumb phones". Now, smartphones are the normal.
I’m French, France sounds ready to put up a stink, but I have difficulty understanding who is right.
I guess Australia is building submarines in preparation to keep China within their waters. So the contract (even though it’s already signed) should come back to the nation that is least under Chinese dominance:
- Australia itself is deeply impregnated of Chinese spies, currently focussing on busting Chinese citizens evaded in Australia,
- USA has chosen the president who had the most ties to China,
- While UK banned Huawei products notably for national routers, France has signed a historic major partnership with Huawei, which is suspected of being the main reification of the Chinese’s secret services.
Whatever the Australians are trying to buy submarines for, I don’t think they can be isolated from the enemy they are supposed to fight.
The problem from a French point of view is a breach of trust from close allies. The problem is not that they made a collaboration agreement, and the breach of contract by itself could be worked out (this sort of things happen all the time). More annoying is that they did it behind France’s collective back, keeping them in the dark to the last moment even though diplomatic relations with Australia were considered excellent and those with the US re-normalising after Trump.
Also, France has some difficulties making the rest of the EU understand the urgency of the situation, and would have probably seized the opportunity for cooperation in the Pacific if given the chance, as they have quite large territories there, unlike any other European country.
Also also, this is a political victory for Boris Johnson who probably cannot believe his luck and is going to be a pain in the arse of everybody else in Europe for quite a few years.
So Australia and the US are right to work something out (China certainly is menacing). The U.K. is completely useless in this as usual. They should have done it better, though, and excluding France even though they clearly have aligned interests and are supposed to be close allies is not great.
Reading this, I'm seeing how some people might get so defensive about criticism. "How can you be so stupid" can scar you in ways to make you upset instead of accepting to do better. Sure, they're teasing the children, but in a way that the child can laugh with them and learn instead of shutting down to protect the self.
Sigh... Wealth taxes don't work. Almost every single European country that had a wealth tax repealed theirs. The fact that Senator Warren is continuing to try to push a wealth tax shows how poor her policies are.
Do you have a better source for what countries had it an discontinued it? For what it's worth I am here considering Financial property exclusively, France still has it's property tax which can be considered a wealth tax.
I am struggling to find write ups that don't just echo "they all repealed it" but list the specific countries.
From the article you cited (just above the examples):
> In 1990, about a dozen European countries had a wealth tax, but by 2019, all but four had eliminated the tax because of the difficulties and costs associated with both design and enforcement. Belgium, Norway, Spain, and Switzerland are the countries that raised revenue from net wealth taxes on individuals in 2019 with net wealth taxes accounting for 1.1% of overall tax revenues in Norway, 0.55% in Spain, and 3.6% in Switzerland for 2017.
The citation for those statements links back to the OECD, so they apparently don't count the Italian and Dutch taxes as "wealth taxes". The NPR transcript linked elsewhere says only three countries have it, so that interviewee may not be counting Belgium either (since the tax is solely on financial instruments and not total wealth).
Germany discontinued it after it was struck down by the supreme court because it only taxed liquid/easy to measure wealth. Any new wealth tax would have to extend to all forms of wealth and would therefore be very costly to administrate. Successive governments have so far refrained from creating a new version.
In fairness, the "old" wealth tax did not bring a lot of revenue.
Wealthy regions like Madrid have abolished it. Non coincidentally, the regions that are economically doing better, and more contributing, per capita, to the central State.
En concreto, la región de Díaz Ayuso recibió de la caja común apenas el 23% de lo que ingresó en 2019.
Meaning that Madrid out of the 100% taxes it collects for the State, only 23% end up in Madrid. But that's still fine, because of the higher economic activity.
Madrid has been accused of "tax dumping", by having way lower taxes than other regions, and still:
Tanto es así, que Madrid aporta en torno al 68% del sistema de solidaridad interterritorial (más de 4.000 millones) frente al 25,5% de Cataluña o el 6,6% de Baleares.
Meaning that, even with low taxes, Madrid funds 68% (+4 billion Euro) of the inter-region fund system.
It depends how the wealth tax is implemented. European wealth taxes were primarily on capital like stocks, which are extremely easy to move, even easier than income.
A wealth tax on land (an LVT) is literally impossible to avoid however since you can't move the land.
It's not because they repealed them that they don't work. It could also be a symptom of the current times in which wealthy people became extremely good at influencing politics to reinforce their position.
This is a point worth emphasizing, a tax being repealed does not necessarily imply a lack of efficacy, due to the aforementioned reasons of political influence/corruption etc. Switzerland has done very well with a global wealth tax, arguably being the highest standard of living in Europe.
I can't talk about other countries, but in my country (France) it didn't get repealed because it “didn't work”, it got repealed because it worked too well and it pissed off the billionaires who lobbied all they could to get it repealed (and even with such intensive lobby it lasted more than 30 years and survived several conservative majorities).
> ROSALSKY: In 1990, there were 12 countries in Europe that had a wealth tax. Today there are only three. Perret says they didn't work for a lot of reasons. Among other things, it costs a lot to enforce. It pushed rich people out of the country, and the wealth taxes didn't raise a lot of revenue.
But
> ROSALSKY: But Warren says that her proposal, which has no exemptions, will play out differently in the United States. Greg Rosalsky, NPR News.
Unfortunately, nothing in her proposal justifies that. Why can't companies and people just move out of the US to avoid this? Singapore or other countries will readily welcome them.
> Perret says they didn't work for a lot of reasons. Among other things, it costs a lot to enforce. It pushed rich people out of the country, and the wealth taxes didn't raise a lot of revenue.
In France at least, it has been a topic of political debate for decades before the recent abolition and what's clear at this point is that it costed much less than what it brought (both in terms of law enforcement, and in terms of rich people moving out of the country).
> Unfortunately, nothing in her proposal justifies that. Why can't companies and people just move out of the US to avoid this?
A wealth tax isn't a tax on a company, it's a tax on the owner of the company so moving the company won't help here. And the owner leaving the US won't help either, since they will still have to pay taxes as long as they remain a US citizen. Renouncing to US citizenship would still be an option of course, but I'd expect the opportunity cost would be much higher than the cost of the tax itself.
> . Renouncing to US citizenship would still be an option of course, but I'd expect the opportunity cost would be much higher than the cost of the tax itself.
Why? In 2021, a lot of countries have US levels or better infrastructure. The owner can reside outside the US and still make products for the US and the world.
> Americans Gave Up Citizenship in Record Numbers in 2020, Up Triple From 2019, Reports Tax Specialists Americans Overseas
America forces people to renounce citizenship to avoid high taxes (unlike every other country in the world where you can just leave the country), so the people who flee Warren's wealth tax will not ever be coming back.
Yeah, not taxing the rich also does not work. See the trillion Dollar tax break Pres. Trump and the GOP implemented. The savings were supposed to somehow trickle down to the "lower decks", but this has proven not to happen.
Meanwhile the ultra rich are getting ultra richer and the rest is getting poorer.
So lets globally coordinated tax the rich for a while in a way that they can not evade their net wealth to some other country and lets see how well that works.
> The savings were supposed to somehow trickle down to the "lower decks", but this has proven not to happen.
Do you have more info on this? The middle class literally paid less in taxes due to Trump's cuts[1]. The rates were lowered across the board and the standard deduction (negligible to the 1%, a huge chunk of change to the middle class) was increased.
"...the Trump administration claimed that its corporate tax cuts would increase the average household income in the United States by $4,000. But two years later, there is little indication that the tax cut is even beginning to trickle down in the ways its proponents claimed."
Well that is expected when they own most of the capital/money. That's not really a factor or surprising.
What is important is how much a person is paying as a function of how rich they are. Rich people get to pay way less and it's not fair. They can get around tax laws because their cash flows don't look like the average citizen's tax flows.
Yeah, peace doesn't work too, every single European country that's tried it has reneged on it at least once in the past century, except maybe Switzerland and the Vatican.
More seriously though, issues like wealth taxation, capital gains taxation, inheritance taxes etc. are I would say more of a reflection of the relative strength of large property owners (a.k.a. "Capitalists" or "The 1%" to use other colloquial terms) versus the rest of the populace, to set economic-cultural norms and influence legislation.
Certainly, if such a tax is put in effect, many of the wealthy would make an effort to hide their assets away, possibly even abroad. But if the (federal) state wanted to cope with or overcome this potential tendency - which it really does not in the ultra-bought-off US political system, including Ms. Warren - there are many ways it could do so, both on the national and international levels. Not to mention how US corporations already employ asset and activity off-shoring to evade taxation.
If it's not behind XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions (or a preview/incubator module), it's considered stable and prod-ready, yes. Will there be fixes and improvements? Yes. Should you be afraid to use it for business? No, but obviously test it first.
I really dislike comments like these, because it removes personal responsibility while at the same time blaming everyone for the actions of individuals and the consequences of national or corporate policy. And it low-key advocates in favor of reducing or removing the human population entirely.
Forest fires happened outside of human intervention.
If you accept the idea that the planet's biosphere is a super-organism, then a natural description of large-scale and ongoing reduction in ecological diversity could be "disease".
Or, you could notice that we're the only ones that care. "Reduction", "destruction" are terms meaningful to us and us only, because we're also capable of appreciating the ecosystem as its own thing. The rest of life on this planet falls on the spectrum between "must eat, must not get eaten" and "runaway chemical reaction".
If the planet's biosphere is a super-organism, then we are its brain cells.
That's quite a reductive view of the rest of the animal kingdom. There are plenty of animals that appear to have some degree of sentience and self-awareness, and every living thing cares about its own survival. We may have the best understanding of the situation on a global scale, but it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine that, for example, some marine mammals have a good understanding of the declining conditions in the world's oceans, especially given how widely they migrate.
I'm open to admit there might be some animal species one could reasonably argue we should start seeing as people. Dolphins and some cephalopods come to mind, perhaps even some corvidae (and I'm getting increasingly uneasy about cows and pigs).
But these are still coupled questions. On the one edge of the spectrum you have archaea, bacteria and viruses - glorified chemical reactions. On the other edge you have us. I don't know of a moral framework that would both attribute great importance to lives of most of the thing on the life spectrum, and not lead to horrible conclusions like sacrificing a human child to save a field of grass. The way we normally reason about, we try to figure out which entities are capable of enough self-awareness and experience processing that we can talk about them feeling pain, suffering, or - for this discussion - finding meaning.
The point I'm trying to make: if we believe that between bacteria and us, there's a point (or a continuity) on the spectrum, separating mere chemical automatons from entities capable of thinking about meaning, then if the latter are gone, there's no point, no meaning, to anything in the universe.
As an analogy: if you imagine a server running a persistent Minecraft world, then if all the players leave, and the server gets forever cut off from the Internet, it doesn't matter whether the server keeps running the simulation or not. Nobody will ever see that game world again.
> I don't know of a moral framework that would both attribute great importance to lives of most of the thing on the life spectrum, and not lead to horrible conclusions like sacrificing a human child to save a field of grass.
Such thought experiments are fun to throw around (there must be a line somewhere, right? is all the grass in the world worth one human life? how about all the trees? all the rice?), but they sidestep the point which is that (without wishing to be harsh) it's arrogant of us to assume that being higher on one particular spectrum gives us some greater right to decide. Certainly we have the power to decide the fate of every living thing on the planet but that's a different matter.
> The point I'm trying to make: if we believe that between bacteria and us, there's a point (or a continuity) on the spectrum, separating mere chemical automatons from entities capable of thinking about meaning, then if the latter are gone, there's no point, no meaning, to anything in the universe.
This presupposes that progress towards sentience (or whatever is the right word for that spectrum) is the only meaning of life. As a counterpoint, do not the activities of those organisms that produce oxygen have much more meaning to life on this planet than whatever we come up with? Most of those organisms don't do much higher reasoning but we wouldn't be here without them. There are lots of other examples like that, as we exist in a web with all life on the planet, not as visitors separate from it.
> As an analogy: if you imagine a server running a persistent Minecraft world, then if all the players leave, and the server gets forever cut off from the Internet, it doesn't matter whether the server keeps running the simulation or not. Nobody will ever see that game world again.
This is a point of difference between us, as I believe that all life has intrinsic beauty and value regardless of who is doing the observing. That's not to say that I don't want us to be here doing the observing, but I do find it almost impossible to reconcile the beautiful things humans are capable of with the terrible price we're collectively extracting on everything else.
Ultimately we're just one more animal on this fascinating rock, albeit that we make better sandwiches than the other animals.
That’s a better analogy - there have been countless extinctions and mass extinctions and the ecology shifts as the climate changes anyway. Nature is indifferent.
It would be ‘good’ if we weren’t causing this one, but good and bad are concepts of consciousness
"Who cares?" reminds me of the diagnostician's distinction between signs and symptoms. Vital signs of the health of the biosphere can be measured, just like your blood pressure can be measured regardless of whether you I should care about how you feel.
"Vital signs" are still only meaningful in terms of humans talking about how the body of a human (or an animal, or a living or life-like system) should function. Blood pressure just is - whether its measured value is "good" or "bad", that's up to our preferences for what it should be.
If you remove sapience from this situation, then blood pressure just is, period. One particular aspect of what is just one big chemical reaction, or [insert whatever is at the bottom of how reality works].
It is said that since god died, the meaning of life is what we make it to be. But if there's no one around capable of processing the concept of meaning, then life has no meaning at all.
"Would a tree falling in the forest ..." never seemed much of a puzzle to me.
I don't agree with the proposition that life on Earth had no value until it gave rise to the evolution of Homo sapiens, or that it would have no value after our extinction.
I think the point GP is making is that this categorization is counterproductive to solving the underlying issues, regardless of what consensus is reached on the taxonomy of our place in the wider ecosystem.
To make an analogy: It's a lot like calling a student dumb for being unable to answer questions on a test they didn't have a chance to study for. If the goal is to improve grades, demoralizing the student is counterproductive.
We are doing exactly what any other, less intelligent species is doing too: myopically exploiting the environment to fuel instantaneous growth. Wolves don't think, "heck, let's leave some deer around and limit our offspring so we may prosper next year".
Of course we should know better, and be kinder to our planet, for our own good. As far as nature is concerned, we are doing what nature does. And if we go extinct as a result, that's part of nature too.
They won't care. 10 million years after we wipe ourselves (and unpleasantly many of them) out, it will be hard to tell we ever existed, aside from the dip in fossil diversity right after. The raccoons might take up the yoke of sentience.
I chuckle thinking about future sapient trash-pandas discovering human landfills and worshipping the Ancient Ones who very clearly created this bounty for them. "They were so prosperous they put boxes of food on every street corner for our early ancestors."
It's possible to extend empathy to all living creatures, not just those similar to oneself. Or to put it another way, to take the view that all living things have equal value on a grand scale.
But if one takes a completely objective viewpoint, what makes humans special? We’re no different than beavers who make damns and flood a river. Sure we do it on a larger scale but are we any less “natural” than any other species? Keep in mind the fact we “care” is irrelevant and no more important than a beavers urge to build a damn. It’s all driven by genetics.
I mean oxygen producing single called organisms drastically altered the environment. They were not conscious to actually notice, but we are. But tons of species went extinct and the earth was irrevocably changed due to their presence.
Thinking humans are special on the cosmic timescale is just arrogance.
This type of self-defeatist attitude I can only imagine comes from suicidal people. It makes no sense unless the person saying it has given up on living.
I'm not talking about concerns of having a healthy environment and a clean planet.
I'm talking about population control that Malthusians want to impose so much, always on others, not on them.
I find it entirely implausible that facebook, with their vast troves of data and an army of the very best computer scientists money can buy, is incapable of reliably identifying posts and users responsible for mass manipulation on their platform. Unwilling? Sure. Unable? Not a chance.
With the current logic that Facebook is using, "manipulation" can mean any behavior that they don't endorse. For example someone is "manipulating" their network by posting anti Biden memes.
I recognize that I am extrapolating real group behavior to real individual behavior, but I think that extrapolation is warranted given that we've just made the jump from group bot behaviour to group people behavior.
"Finally, in 1912, almost half a century after Cantor’s discovery, and after many failed attempts to prove the invariance of dimension, L.E.J. Brouwer succeeded by employing some methods of his own creation. In essence, he proved that it is impossible to put a higher-dimensional object inside one of smaller dimension, or to place one of smaller dimension into one of larger dimension and fill the entire space, without breaking the object into many pieces, as Cantor did, or allowing it to intersect itself, as Peano did."