Well, I was talking about high-yield investments and you are talking about crowdfunding. But that is my fault because the person I replied to was also talking about crowdfunding.
However, I don't think people are spending money they can't afford to lose on crowdfunding projects, either. They are spending money they can afford to lose.
That simply isn't true. Read this thread for many anecdotes about how desperate people are often the easiest marks for schemes involving ways to get unbelievable returns.
This proposal seems to make a lot sense for deciding what to tax, but I am curious about how this would affect who is getting taxed and where these changes would be felt.
It seems like decreasing taxes on labor (people) and increasing taxes on raw materials (things we dig out of the ground) would simply shift the tax burden away from urban areas (where people are) to rural areas (where the mines are).
Wouldn't this just make things worse for poorest parts of the country, like Appalachia, where the mining industry is typically the only provider of well paying jobs?
Something to think about is "the masses" are not going to quietly stop driving, stop working, stop eating, and die. They'll just pay more carbon tax. So if keeping 400M americans alive takes 400 train loads of coal, they'll still be mining and shipping 400 train loads of coal, just the next taxes paid to .gov will increase, everyone will be poorer, slightly lower standard of living, but the cops will spend money on more and better guns to shoot us with.
Its not like the mine owners are going to eat the tax losses out of their own pocket, LOL. The price of their product will increase.
As a side effect the more regulated an industry the more corrupt it'll be on average. So expect plenty of sweet tax loopholes to make up for it, so to be revenue neutral at the new higher tax rate the proles will have to pay even higher taxes.
Higher taxes always result in higher tax evasion, I'm guessing black market coal would be non-trivial to work, but black market charcoal or black market firewood would become a pretty serious issue under this carbon tax 2.0.
Minihack is the best Hacker News app I've found found for iOS. I've tried almost all of the HN apps in the App Store and Minihack is the one that I keep on my homescreen. It meets all of the criteria you listed, including the bonus ones, and the dev has done a great job at keeping the app up to date and bug-free.
Thank you for this. I had been using different iOS apps for a while, some of them paid, and none of them really gave me the functionality I was looking for.
Thanks to your comment, I just tried MiniHack out. This app has beautiful typography, minimalist design and full account functionality.
The only thing I really miss after switching over to MiniHack is collapsing comments and threads. Otherwise, 9/10.
EDIT: Nevermind, just figured out how to collapse comments, it was different from other apps. 10/10 :)
Again, why the focus on the average person? Does the average person actively, directly participate in space industry? No. Has the average person been profoundly affected by the technologies developed by space programs? Undeniably.
Isn't this the whole goal of Bitcoin? Mass adoption so that you can use Bitcoin at least as easily as your credit card? You can obviously not have mass adoption without the average person. If, on the other hand, you only want Bitcoin as a curiosity used by a hand full of people, accepted by a hand full of business, well, this goal has already been reached.
It's great that you take such a pragmatic approach!
I recommend this article [0] by Mark Lynas [1] that explains the arguments that convinced him to go from a vocal anti-GMO activist to, what he calls, a pro-science environmentalist. (I think the hip term now is "eco-modernist"). From the article:
What happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.
Nuclear engineer here. Definitely not in the software industry, but still do a bit of coding, albeit mostly in Fortran because (most) reactor design software stays pretty far from the bleeding edge.
I come to HN for the startup culture discussions. Even though my field is pretty far from the software/tech field, it's pretty amazing how much of the startup experience remains the same.
For those interested, my startup, Transatomic, is developing a molten salt reactor that's cheaper than coal and (hopefully) as cheap as natural gas, just without the greenhouse gas emissions.
We just closed our first round of VC funding from Peter Thiel and Founders Fund a few days ago. More details here:
Forgive me for leapin in here, but one does not often get the chance to meet nuclear scientists (well on HN it's more likely which is I guess the point)
Anyway - I mentally write off nuclear power from the list of useful alternative sources because of the enormous pre-generation costs, the running costs, the politics of nuclear weaponry and the decommissioning costs (and yes this is almost entirely about traditional reactors)
How do you escape being in the nuclear industry dominated by the above seemingly negative problems - how much of your success is dominated by selling a mousetrap than building a better one?
I meant the whole "as a startup in the nuclear industry I don't have the backing of an major nation state, I don't have a proven technical track record, I am in an industry with a PR problem only slightly better than chemical weapons and the major reason to exist was to build nukes, which we kind of have plenty now"
How does he play that set of cards? It's no impossible and I do think someone needs to play that hand well, I just wonder - why him, why now? What's his secret sauce?
Sounds really cool. Are there any technical articles/papers available for the public to read on what you're doing? Or are all the details (understandably) under wraps?
