What is the basis for the claim that income tax in NYS and CA pushed prices and income up? This seems extremely unlikely, unless you are looking at pretax income or something.
You're right, after looking it up it was Muhammed who we have records mentioning either during life or within ~30 years[1]. For Jesus it definitely came after.
This isn't accurate if you are talking about the federal level. A better model in terms of spending is that the federal government is an insurance company with an army.
The federal government spends something like 10 times as much on defense as direct educational expenditures and it's still significantly more than education if you include things like loan financing in education.
Given that education funding is done by the states, that's like saying the Federal government spends 10 times as much on welfare as on police and firefighting.
I mean, OK, but that's only because the second part of your comparison isn't a federal government responsibility and there are only certain targeted initiatives (mostly pork-barrel) that fall into that category. Same for federal spending on education.
But when you look at all government spending on education, it's very clear that we spend more on education (5% of GDP, not counting loan guarantees) than on defense (3.7% of GDP). Except education is funded by local government whereas defense is funded by the federal government.
OP was correctly refuting the prior post which claimed "US govt" (that means federal) is "mostly in the business of insurance (welfare, healthcare) and 'education'. Defense and infrastructure come some time after those."
It's just not true that the federal government spends more on education than defense, in fact it's very lopsided in the other direction.
The context is a thread on the federal income tax specifically, and someone said the federal govt used to be not very technologically ambitious, and someone else says, essentially, it still isn't technologically ambitious, it spends most of its money on education and social welfare. OP corrected that. The social welfare part has some validity but federal education spending is quite minor.
Yes the total spending by all govts in the US including state + local has a lot more education spending but the thread and the whole article are focused on federal taxes.
Totally incorrect. The most cursory research (e.g. a Google for “US government”, a search on the nytimes, lookup in the AP style guide) will refute this.
Anyway, regardless of your personal definition of the term, the intent of communication of the person you are replying to is crystal clear and in obvious contradiction to your analysis. (That person expressly uses the word “federal.”)
My initial reaction is to disagree with this statement and to point out that I think the parent comment is sorting the issue well.
As I think about more though, I must wonder if this could be a regional thing and varies.. and or if that is relevant to the specifics in this thread.
The more I think about it, I wonder if places like Cali and NY would think of things in that manner.. with places like Texas and TN thinking very differently.
It's an interesting thought, and wonder if there is data / polls out there for something seemingly basic like this.
Who cares? What matters is if it's working or not. Of course it's hard to untangle if it's due to accords, scientific/engineering breakthroughs, government investment, etc. but India and China are far ahead of their Paris targets: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15052017/china-india-pari...
China has no obligation for 20 years.
This statement is wrong in multiple ways. As you noted above, Paris is non-binding, so there are no "obligations" beyond developing a plan and reporting on progress. Next, China's goals begin in 2030, which is 13 years away, not 20. Finally, according to the link above, China is on pace to meet its goals almost a decade (!) in advance, i.e. early in the 2020s. So even a charitable interpretation of your statement looks to be wrong by about 4x.
It's not ratified by Congress.
This is as far as I can tell, just a negative thrown in that has nothing to do with the thesis. Is agreeing to the accords bad for the U.S. (cost billions!) or does it not matter, because it's not ratified. Which is it?
Nothing from agreeing to this was going to affect your descendants other than draining American coffers of billions.
So basically every other country is willing to drain their coffers. Why is that?
The correct answer is probably to allow car deliveries/parking at certain times of the day (late evening and early morning?) and have the streets be pedestrian/biker only outside of those hours.
I'd guess most are more concerned that if they give you a private office, others will request one and they aren't equipped to give lots of private offices. And if they give just you one, it will cause resentment in the team that isn't worth it.
I think that's very true, but it makes the situation even more frustrating. Going all the way back to books like Peopleware, it's been well-known for a long time that even in dense urban areas like Manhattan or San Francisco, it is more cost-effective to provide private and quiet space for knowledge workers than to attempt to "save" short-term money by buying open-plan office space and increasing worker density.
There's a ton of quantitative evidence supporting this. Yet employers persist in only ever buying open-plan space. Established companies that already had private offices sometimes even spend money to tear down the privacy features and remodel the office to function as a type of fashion signalling that they are "cool" like what they perceive start-ups to be. So they actually pay money to destroy productivity, so they pay money to move their business into a state in which the business makes less money.
Then you also see firms spending money on needlessly opulent lifestyle masturbation, like moving their office to some expensive downtown location with a roof deck. Or building a rock climbing wall in the office.
So you know it's not an issue of lacking the money for buying real estate that would support private working conditions. It's just a lot of issues about status and opulence.
So while you're correct that given their current office layout they might be unable to accommodate giving someone privacy, it's disheartening that they were ever in that situation to begin with since it would have been demonstrably more cost-effective for them to have built privacy features into the workplace from the beginning.
It has really caused me to see office space as a major red flag about a company. It says a lot about what the management of that company cares about.
A decent analogy for most governments is that they behave similarly to an insurance company with an army. You absolutely pay a percentage of the value of what you are insuring (here your life, wealth, earning potential) not a flat fee.
