Interesting Links for 14-05-2012
May. 14th, 2012 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- 100,000 LED lights float down the Sumida River
- Why Hawkeye is awesome
- Why (most) politicians don’t get the internet
- Why has the UK got so few women scientists?
- The IFS backs a land value tax
- 100-year-old photos of British India
- Civil Partnerships and Marriage: What's The Difference?
- Thinking About God Improves Our Self-Control
- Damon Lindelof talks about "Prometheus", rewrites, and how it changed from being a prequel to "Alien"
- DSM-5, what's in and what's out in the psychiatric profession's diagnostic manual
- The Occupy movement now has a manifesto.
- Someone wants to know if there is a modern browser that runs on Windows 3.1.
- The $144,146,165 Button
- George Lucas Does Something Admirable
Movies
- An awesome iPad engraving
- Edible Chocolate Brain from MRI Scan - 3D Printing FTW!
- RE: The Dark One, In Case It Should Arise from Its Horrible Abyss
- The dangers of chiropractic treatments are under-reported
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Thinking about God...
Date: 2012-05-14 12:53 pm (UTC)Thinking About God Improves Our Self-Control
Date: 2012-05-14 01:14 pm (UTC)But the second half suggests there is an effect of thinking about God even if you don't identify as religious, so I don't know.
Re: Thinking About God Improves Our Self-Control
Date: 2012-05-14 01:26 pm (UTC)Re: Thinking About God Improves Our Self-Control
Date: 2012-05-14 01:40 pm (UTC)RE: The Dark One, In Case It Should Arise from Its Horrible Abyss
Date: 2012-05-14 01:15 pm (UTC)The IFS backs a land value tax
Date: 2012-05-14 01:15 pm (UTC)Re: The IFS backs a land value tax
Date: 2012-05-14 02:21 pm (UTC)In the second category we also have things like income and inheritance. If people are earning comfortable to huge salaries we want to tax some of that, partly because they can afford it, partly out of a will to reduce disparities in salaries, and partly because where else are you going to get tax revenues? But that leaves you open to arguments from the rich and/or entrepreneurs that you're penalising hard work. You can decide to tax inheritance, on the basis that people are getting a windfall of cash and/or property purely because of who their parents were, but then you'll run up against edge cases (often manufactured) of farmers not being able to pass on the family business etc.
Also, wealth and inheritance are always going to be gameable somehow - e.g. do the hedge fund thing of claiming revenues as capital gains rather than income, or declare your residence in a tax haven to avoid paying tax in this country; assign your property to a trust fund, etc.
A third reason to tax something is the tax being easy to collect - levying a tax that brings in 1% of GDP when it costs you 0.3% of GDP to collect (made up numbers) isn't going to make you popular, and makes it easy for opponents of the tax to go on about costs. This is the main advantage of a VAT - it's a simple fee added on to everything. It has the disadvantage of being regressive, though, unless you lower- or zero-rate things that the poor are disproportionately likely to buy, and even that isn't usually enough.
A land tax has the two great advantages that it's impossible to game - it's a matter of (mostly - see below) public record how much land you earn - and there are no ill effects on taxing how much land anyone has. It's not like taxing land is going to stop people making land, after all.
The main reason no government has moved towards a land tax, as I understand, is that it would take so long to accurately survey how much land people actually own - which proprietors currently have no incentive to keep accurate, as pretty everyone's in Council Tax band D - that by the time the tax was ready to levy, it would be near the end of parliament, with every chance that a new government would come in and take advantage of the previous government's hard work (after complaining about all of the money the previous government had wasted on such a hare-brained scheme, of course).
Re: The IFS backs a land value tax
Date: 2012-05-14 03:44 pm (UTC)Re: The IFS backs a land value tax
Date: 2012-05-14 08:01 pm (UTC)One thing you can do also is value the land, then announce that over (say) 5 years, council tax will be phased out and land tax phased in, on a pro-rata basis. That way, if you're currently paying £1000 per year on council tax, and it's going to go up to £2,500 in 5 years, you can work out whether you can still afford to stay there, or whether you should make plans to move out.
Re: The IFS backs a land value tax
Date: 2012-05-15 08:36 am (UTC)Re: The IFS backs a land value tax
Date: 2012-05-14 04:00 pm (UTC)Re: The IFS backs a land value tax
Date: 2012-05-14 07:56 pm (UTC)But one of the appeals of a proper land tax is that no, plonking a sodding huge skyscraper on your bit of land doesn't make the land any more valuable. It should still be taxed at the same rate. (Of course, the resulting property is worth more than another, smaller property on the same land, but that's a separate issue.)
A corollary of this is that a land tax encourages building on brownfield sites - or, rather, discourages people holding onto brownfield sites without doing anything on them, because they're taxed at the same rate as they would be if they had something productive on the site.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-14 01:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-14 01:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-14 02:11 pm (UTC)I wouldn't have believed it before following the link, but that title actually makes it sound less awesome than it really is – because it's possible to misunderstand as meaning merely that someone is making and selling these things, whereas the real article explains how to make your own based on your own brain, which is an order of magnitude cooler!
no subject
Date: 2012-05-14 02:59 pm (UTC)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIFi8but3Vw
Also I love love love how seriously they talk about chocolate in that video.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-14 04:40 pm (UTC)The tricky bit is getting the scan in the first place, and then getting your hands on the data in the second. In the UK at least, if a brain MRI is clinically indicated you'll get one, and if you're up to it and they're not too busy they might let you have a glance at it while they're looking, but AIUI getting hold of the data falls in to the 'extra costs, charge required' Data Protection procedures. If there's nothing obviously badly wrong with your head, getting one is expensive and very difficult.
If I'm wrong about this I would really, really like to know, because as well as a mould for making chocolate brains ("my brain has melted!") and jelly brains ("my brain's turned to jelly!" - great for Zombie party food too), I would like a lifesize model of my brain on my desk ("I need to put my brain on to that one"), possibly painted green in a jar of liquid. And also a little version to put on my keyring. ("I keep my brain handy, right here in my pocket.") And lots of little tiny ones, say 1 cm diameter, that I can stick to just about every tool I might use with Sugru, from shiny gadgets to lump hammers, so I can say "I need my brain for this job!".
(Why yes, yes I have thought about this one in the past ....)
no subject
Date: 2012-05-14 04:43 pm (UTC)(only reason I've not done it is because I have hard-to-remove piercing work)
no subject
Date: 2012-05-14 04:44 pm (UTC)I got it by taking part in a study, specifically because I knew they were going to do MRI scans (comparing totally ordinary people like me to people with schizophrenia).
If you have a local university with a psychology/psychiatry department then keep an eye on their noticeboards...
no subject
Date: 2012-05-14 08:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-14 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-14 04:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-14 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-14 09:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-20 04:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-14 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-14 08:05 pm (UTC)The commenters are generally correct: Disconnect that network cable, DO NOT network the PC, glue an iPad to the wall next to it and use *that* for your web-based timesheet entry. Except the iPad requires a computer with iTunes - so get an Aspire W and glue *that* to the wall.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-14 08:21 pm (UTC)And as various people pointed out - he should really be working on a migration strategy for running the bandsaw, for when that PC dies.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-14 11:54 pm (UTC)I can easily believe that fairly rare but serious side effects happen more often than proponents of chiropractic want to accept.