Do they have to incite a mob to overtake the halls of a separate and equal branch of our government resulting in the deaths of five people including a police officer?
It wouldn't be. Forcing the producers to pay for their externalities will also make some products like bottled water cost-prohibitive to sell in glass bottles and reduce demand or increase packaging sizes to more is bought in reusable plastic carboys, etc. "Reduce" is more important than reuse or recycle and while there is an obvious need for cheap bottled water, probably at least 80% of plastic disposable water bottles do not need to be sold in that way.
But how much other economic activity are you limiting and what other products are affected? For example, what about plastic for prototyping and engineering use? Are you going to force products to use higher cost and higher impact materials like brass and aluminum?
The issue is I can't see any of these restrictions accurately reflecting cost. If they could these things would not be a concern.
Any of these suggestions that apply only within a national market are also ineffective, as by their very nature they are going to reduce economic activity in that nation... which will be picked up by someone else who doesn't care. The laws need to take this into account.
> Are you going to force products to use higher cost and higher impact materials like brass and aluminum?
The post above you didn't suggest using higher impact materials like brass and aluminum, they suggested making manufacturers pay for externalities which would be the case for plastics or metals.
Nothing happens in a vacuum. You could very easily end up incentivizing worse behavior by misjudging what the externalities actually are and their impact.
Do you remember how telephone fraud with blue boxes was prosecuted? The stolen time was judged at full sale value of the minutes. But this doesn't make any sense, as if the call could not be placed for free it would not have happened, and if no one else was in line to place a call there was not lost revenue.
It seems like people are trying to do this with e.g. unrecycled plastics. Recycling is expensive likely because it is not economically productive, not because people are freeloading. The bar for showing otherwise should be very high.
We could also just tax the income used to make the donations at similar levels to prior top brackets and not depend on philanthropy as a means to fund public institutions or social safety nets.
That puts the decision on where to put public good will and non-profitable money sinks solely into the machine of government bureaucracy, which I don't think would be very effective.
Currently we incentivize private individual donations, and that lets a lot of things happen quickly and without the requirement of soliciting the permission of a bottlenecked council for anything to happen.
Government is often significantly more effective at spending money for charitable works than private charities due to all the overhead involved in running charities. Further, as a private individual I dislike that my tax money is used to in part fund charities that I strongly disagree with.
If you want to use your money to support some private crusade that’s fine, but why must we support anything anyone thinks as a worthy cause? It’s in effect a blank check without meaningful oversight. Their are for example homeopathy charities whose donations are tax deductible.
Isn't budget a part of elections platform, and so democracy? Because certainly when it comes to giving money to people bureaucracy becomes a factor, but then rather than redistributing money, things that you could spend tax money on:
(granted these last 2 are pretty much just redistributing money)
The question is whether you want the few billionaires to decide where to spend the money, or everyone (that is, people who haven't been disenfranchised).
AND THEN arguably given the polarization of the US today, I can understand that anyone feels frisky in raising the taxes to found the other side's ideas (being republicans not wanting to fund healthcare or democrats not wanting to fund a wall)
Perhaps a slight twist on that would be to be if society as a whole considered paying taxes as if it were "pay it forward" philanthropy.
In fact if the government recognized honest taxpayers as if they were forward thinking "philanthropic donors" (replete with award dinners for the million dollar donors) - perhaps there'd be more excitement for April 15th - and such people would not be so quick to figure out ways to avoid paying taxes.
It would help if we could decide what our taxes got allocated to directly. Like 50‰ nasa 0% racist border wall. I hate paying my taxes because it's going to bullshit like that federally. Or locally, funding mismanaged pensions.
> Drones are a serious responsibility, and can be misused to cause a lot of damage
>I flew the drone over to a friend's back yard, and had misconfigured the "return-to-home" altitude too low
You claim to understand the need for responsible drone ownership, yet in the same comment mention how you crashed your drone (luckily only into a tree) while violating clearly-stated FAA line-of-sight guidelines (and also not having understood the basic flight controls and recovery options). This is some serious cognitive dissonance.
I think it’s possible to both understand that something is a serious responsibility as well as still crash a drone as an inexperienced operator.
There was never danger to people or property (besides the drone itself). I just misjudged the one tall tree in the field between our houses which managed to exceed 30 meters, and somehow was unlucky enough for the drone to decide to fly exactly straight into the very top of it when the link dropped out.
Worth noting that the range of the remote is significantly less than claimed in the marketing materials, which is not really surprising because they claim 4km (!) and it dropped out on me at ~200 meters.
I do think they oversell their “return to home” feature and after spending more time on the forums and reading many similar experiences to my own, it’s much better to configure it to hover-in-place (or go up to a set altitude and hover there) on a lost signal, and then you can go to it instead of having it come to you.
Basically the marketing, training videos, and manual all make “return to home” sound like a better idea than it really is in practice.
Now I know from experience if the drone ever decides to fly itself somewhere you’re probably going to have a bad day. You aren’t going to learn that from reading their manual or watching their video tutorials.
>Worth noting that the range of the remote is significantly less than claimed in the marketing materials, which is not really surprising because they claim 4km (!) and it dropped out on me at ~200 meters.
This isn't really true. While radio links can of course perform poorly or unexpectedly at times, DJI's actually does deliver on their promises. It's quite incredible what they're doing with range of the control & video systems on 2.4 & 5.8Ghz actually. Not sure which model you have but the 2.4Ghz one will perform far better, though 5.8 is plenty fine in decent operating conditions. As you saw though, just because it can go 4km in normal conditions doesn't mean it won't ever hiccup for a variety of reasons (noise floor, obstructions, orientation, etc).
Seriously though, they must have a very high gain antenna to get 4km range at 2.4GHz with streaming video at unlicensed power levels, so there probably is a very specific antenna and controller orientation you are supposed to maintain to achieve that range.
I got it to go 2.5 km away on a very long beach, so it always had line-of-sight. It didn't lose control, so I imagine it could have gone farther (but probably wouldn't have enough battery to come back).
What is the real cognitive dissonance is how "flew the drone over to a friend's back yard" is interpreted as some violation rule about line-of-sight guidelines -- or whatever this has to do with "not having understood the basic flight controls and recovery options".
You could also stop this degree inflation by requiring a $15 minimum wage on all jobs but a $25 minimum wage when the job lists a bachelor's degree requirement (applied based on whether the job requires a degree, not whether the employee has a degree).
If jobs with a similar title, description, and other requirements require a degree, and the people you hire all happen to have degrees, it's pretty obvious that you're using it as a criteria. While like other discrimination cases it may be difficult to prove in any one instance and thus small businesses who don't individually hire a statistically significant number of people might get away with it, large employers can still be held accountable.
I think something along these lines would be great. The problem with Amazon competing in their own marketplace is that there is far too much information asymmetry -- they know about how their marketplace sellers are setting prices and they know the cumulative sales of all items and trends, whereas the marketplace sellers only see their end of things. Amazon then has the ability to just cut those sellers out as it wishes (either through undercutting, making their own Amazon-branded versions, or even just kicking the seller off the platform with no recourse.
This provides Amazon with the ability to do what financial marketplaces are forbidden: front-running, insider trading, etc with their own "stock" of merchandise.
No, because stores like Kroger aren't building a marketplace platform, they are building a single thing to sell their products -- this is evident in the fact that there's aren't grocery monopolies. A single market is not a marketplace.
