Yeah, my first thought was that since the "rules" of art are merely the discovery of what we as humans find pleasing, and since mathematics is the discovery of fundamental logical conclusions, there's no reason to assume it has anything to do with genetics (well, aside from the fact that we must somehow be 'genetically' predisposed to liking golden ratios, etc).
> the fact that we must somehow be 'genetically' predisposed to liking golden ratios, etc
This is not a fact. There is absolutely no research evidence that people tend to prefer the golden ratio of 1.618.. over other ratios. Especially it's very doubtful people would have a preference compared to the nearby simple ratios of small numbers 1.5 and 1.666.
Fibonacci-like sequences pop up in a few specific growth models in nature, which often converge to the golden ratio (if the growth is perfect and unhampered by external factors). Mostly in plants. Particularly not in nautilus shell spirals (that's a legend, based on cherry-picking and sloppy measurements) and also not in spiral galaxies, or fiddlehead ferns.
It's still fascinating stuff, but it's even more fascinating if you ask to see proof of all these outlandish claims, and learning about the underlying principles behind the actual phenomenon.
When I was younger and actually cared about going to bars and clubs, I quickly learned that you're kept entirely in the dark until you get inside. I waited in line and paid too many cover charges to get inside and find out the place was deserted.
My definition of programming is just a definition that is capable of describing every programming language I've seen. If programming is not giving commands to a computer then what is it?
Microsoft Word is a domain specific language for formatting documents. Just because you can't create an OS with it doesn't mean you aren't telling a computer what to do using gestures and keystrokes that you had to learn first.
Every day user tasks are just very high level programming, with limited power compared to general purpose languages.
The worst of everything tends to get my attention - doesn't it get yours?
There are three kinds of blacks in America today - feral, traditional, assimilated. Traditional black people are the nicest people in the world and have the coolest churches. Unfortunately they're all over 50 and have high blood pressure. Assimilated black people are just like white people except for the little box they check when they want to get into Harvard. (Samuel R. Delany's memoir, The Motion of Light in Water, is among other things a wonderful evocation of the old "Jack and Jill" black upper class.) Feral black people need to be rounded up, flex-cuffed, laser de-tattooed, sent to boot camp for three months, and placed in the unconditional custody of traditional black people, who will know exactly what to do with them.
Is that enough stereotypes for you? A stereotype is a pattern you don't want to recognize. I think you'll find you recognize these patterns just fine, however.
... a man devoted unreafonably to a certain party; prejudiced in favour of certain opinions; a blind zealot. It is ufed often with to before the object of zeal; as, a bigot to the Cartefian tenets...
I'm pretty sure you're not a bigot to the Cartesian tenets. You do strike me as pretty zealous, though - n'est ce pas?
I am actually quite okay with bigots and bigotry. We can't all embrace change. We don't all have to. One thing is certain, though - if it's not surprising, it's not change. Welcome to the 21st century!
I've known Joseph for a while--I wanted to make sure he got credit for being right about this over a YEAR ago. Meaning GM could have saved $10M if they'd read his blog.
I think it's a good attitude to take, particularly when dealing with peers. Giving others the benefit of the doubt and not assuming that everyone should know everything you know goes a long way toward making the world a better and more tolerable place. Also, when discussing matters of principle it's extremely valuable to be able to understand and argue for the opposition, rather than merely dismissing opposing views as 'stupid'.
However, the author is fundamentally wrong. There are stupid people. I didn't believe it until I got out of my college/career track and met a few of them.
I've heard a number of people (Grover Norquist included) make the claim that although the top marginal tax rates were higher, there were a far greater number of tax exemptions available. I have no idea how true this is, and I'm not aware of anyone who's studied the actual income, wealth, and taxes of America's rich over the decades.
In addition, the point at which the top tax rate kicks in has varied quite a bit throughout the 1900's. For instance, in the 1950's, when we had a top marginal tax rates over 90%, the top bracket also kicked in at 400k, which would be nearly 4 million in todays dollars. That's why merely looking at the top marginal rate is kind of misleading.
90% of the top bracket..? That seems like honest robbery to me, like saying "I'm sorry. You're not allowed to make a lot of money. The government needs this money."
Why should it be possible to write it all off? These systems seem to be completely in disagreement with each other? Why not keep it less than 50%, just make it harder to write things off O.o
Because, in liberal (small-l, read: the West) democracies, the notion that taxation policy should be used to encourage productive behaviours and discourage unproductive ones is deeply-enshrined. Thus do we give tax breaks to people who start companies, create jobs, or invest in same, and further penalize with a luxury tax those who just go and buy a big fuck-off yacht. We give tax breaks to local farmers, but tax cigarettes and booze.
If we had the kind of tax structure you propose, we'd equally reward those who invest their money in growing companies, and those who blow it on hookers and blow. Some libertarians would claim this as a just tax system, and that the free market would determine how and where people invest, but this is not an idea that has much purchase among economists, social scientists, or the political elite.
Asking Grover Norquist for advice on economics is like asking Pat Robertson to explain what causes hurricanes and earthquakes (hint: he says it's something about the sexual orientation of some people).
What answer would that be? Because looking here[1], the effective tax rate during our largest job growth (Clinton Administration) was also when we saw the largest effective tax rates for the 10, 5, and 1%.
I guess I have to correlate until we run out of data, then checkmate or something.
this debate is so complicated that you can easily take data to support any side of the argument
for eg. the effective rates don't match up for the 80s but they do for the 90s. they also don't take into account capital gains, which is what most of the top 5, 1% etc. pay
then if I was arguing the other side of the debat I would say that this data hasn't been normalized for purchasing power
I think it's also worth noting that the US already gets 70% of all its taxes from the top 10%
Why is that worth noting? That only further demonstrates the income inequality in the United States. Furthermore, wealth is far more important to take into account than income in any discussion of taxation or inequality.
Also, I have yet to hear anyone make an argument that sounds anything like "simply being rich is wrong."
The problem is not the disparity, but how wide it is. Inequality in the US is currently so wide, it's absurd. It's widening in Europe as well, but not as fast and not as radically as in the US in the last 30 years. This is not healthy, it's polarizing society and eroding the social contract. The only way to effectively balance this trend is through higher taxation.
First of all, doesn't anyone see the correlation between increased government power (revenue/spending) and an increase in the income inequality gap? Look at a graph showing govt spending as a percentage of gdp vs the inequality gap.
Secondly, assuming that the "inequality gap" is necessarily a bad thing, which I don't think anyone has shown...
Why do you assume that higher taxation will decrease the income inequality gap?
If anything, higher taxation means more money (ie power) in the hands of the government. More power in the hands of the government just leads to more crony capitalism that concentrates even more money and power into fewer hands. Worse, those companies that then have access to all that money and power are the worst sorts of companies that don't even need to provide good products and services to consumers. Instead they get more bang for the buck by sucking tax dollars out of the system.
In face increasing Gini coefficient for 0.01 increases mortality in state for 122% after 12 years. Yes, it is a bad thing in almost all recorded metrics.
- First of all, doesn't anyone see the correlation between increased government power (revenue/spending)
Nope. I think revenue spending isn't really good metric of government power and so far no one has proved that. You are free to test your hypothesis though. I'd wager that there is quite a bit of income inequality if your gov. revenue is low but they spend a lot of money.
I found the youtube to be more compelling than the OSU study. The OSU study contradicted lots of other studies that found nothing conclusive for nearly the same hypothesis. The author of the study managed to fit a curve that he was apparently looking for by allowing for enormous flexibility on the time axis. That's like finding pictures in clouds. You can see what you want to see if you look at something from enough angles. To be meaningful, you would need to apply those findings to lots of other data sets to see if you're just seeing what you want to see or if there's a real likelihood of a pattern. Science isn't finding one occurrence of something that you were looking for. Science is predicting where and how you'll find something and then having others find you're right over and over.
On the Youtube lecture: The statistics seem to show correlation, but causation? Is the inequality the cause of a lack of trust? Or is it the other way around? Furthermore, I saw lots of other correlations in the data they showed. Graph homogeneity of the population's ethnical background vs trust. Look at the states and countries that scored high trust. At a glance, they seemed to be the highly ethnically/religiously/culturally unified ones.
> Nope. I think revenue spending isn't really good metric of government power
Okay, what would you suggest... Watts?
> I'd wager that there is quite a bit of income inequality if your gov. revenue is low but they spend a lot of money.
Wait, your conjecture agrees with me. Spending is high and inequality is high. The gov. revenue is almost a non-factor in terms of government power. For the part of the curve where the currency hasn't been completely devalued because of over-borrowing and printing money, the amount the government spends is all that your really need to describe government power. Lack of revenue to back it up is just a ginormous credit card bill that no one seems to remember is out there.
Let me put it this way. It sounds like you don't want the entire government budget to rest on taxing one class and one class alone, the upper-class. That's a pretty virtuous and equitable thought to have, very fair to people who probably have much more than you.
Problem is, if income/wealth inequality is too severe, those guys are the only ones with money to contribute. So on some level, you need a certain level of income/wealth equality just to have multiple classes/brackets with enough excess income to contribute to the national welfare.
If all you can afford is ramen/bread/fast food, your body makes you overeat to get enough other nutrients (eg. vitamin C, B).
The second is that your insulin goes crazy with all those simple carbs and sugars (carbs are cheap, unlike protein, fish and vegetables, and get metabolised to glucose) so you get massive blood sugar swings. The low side of those makes you eat more and get fatter.
Lottery tickets are a strawman. Or, to quote a science fiction novel that I can't quite remember: "a tax on hope."
It's just as cheap to eat properly as it is to eat unhealthily. The difference is you need to actually put some effort in, rather than order a large Big Mac Meal.
Complex carbohydrates are cheap. Fat is cheap. Eating simple carbohydrates is not an economic choice.
Vitamins pills and vegetables are reasonably cheap. And anyway if deficiencies caused obesity, the rate would drop off dramatically over some threshold income.
Lotteries matter because that's where poor Americans spend about 10% of their income. Taxing the rich to destruction will not fix that.
Yes, in fact good food can be extremely cheap. Beans, eggs, and butter are dirt cheap. Canned vegetables are affordable if you buy for nutrition (i.e., not empty food like green beans).
Re. lottery spending, they are losing $12 a week! That is $600 a year! That could buy premium multivitamins, an extra several eggs a day, rather a lot of cheese, with money left over for the occassional meal out.
The problem of most poor Americans is not resources, it is the deployment of them.
Problem is, a strong middle class usually rests on the strong provision and spread of certain goods. Some of these are private goods, like owning one's own house, but many of them are public goods: liveable environment, public transit, public schools, public universities, public health and health-care, etc.
So is this the basic issue, then? That there's income inequality?
No, not at all. Who have you ever heard make such a claim?
The issue is the size of the inequality, its growth, and the fact that historical periods with less inequality and a stronger middle class seem to correlate with strong overall growth and prosperity.
I don't understand why the size of inequality matters. If I make $20,000 and Rich guy makes $2,000,000, how does me making $20,000 and him making $200,000,000 million make any difference?
There's another take on it here: http://www.quora.com/Economic-Inequality/How-is-income-inequ.... In, that link says that the degree of inequality matters in the us because in the us, the poor are desperately poor, and the rich are fantastically rich. In other words, if the poor had a pretty good standard of living and the rich were absurdly healthy, maybe that would be ok, but that's not the situation we have.
Because the money he spends raises the price of goods etc. Therefore your 20,000 becomes less money. This is easy too see in expensive cities. The same middle-class person would have to demand more money to live at the same standards as he/she would have elsewhere, simply because richness have driven up the prices.
It makes no difference to you. It makes a great difference to the politician trying to get control of $198,000,000.
The blather about a strong middle class is misdirection. If the U.S. governing.g elite cared about the middle class, they would abolish the armies of bunny rabbit inspectors, No Child Left Behind functionaries, and so forth. The American middle class is being choked to death by regulators, not billionaires.
Because economic power and political power are strongly correlated, and always have been. It's the difference between the typical rich person having 100x more political power and influence in government than the average citizen, and the same wealthy individual having 10,000x more.
Massive gaping holes in income distribution are inherently anti-democratic. That might offend a person's capitalist sensibilities but it doesn't make it any less true.
It's worth noting when talking about how the wealthy should pay their "fair share." That discussion should at least consider what percent of all taxes they pay.
Also, I have some friends who grew up very poor and who believe pretty strongly that it's wrong to own an excessive amount of money while others go hungry. Though I think they make good points, that's not my view.
And I am pretty sure that it is the initial reason why some religions are not allowed to eat pork
In anthropology class, we were told that bone records showed the domestication of pigs, a subsequent explosion in pig population, then a sudden disappearance. The most likely explanation, we were told, was that pigs competed with humans for resources.
