> "It came up on our left hand side (rapidly veered) to the north, we saw a bright light and it just disappeared at a very high speed ... we were just wondering. We didn't think it was a likely collision course .. (just wondering) what it could be," she said.
> A pilot on Virgin Flight 76 added that his flight crew had seen "two bright lights at 11 o'clock (which) seemed to bank over to the right and then climb away at speed."
It doesn't matter though. Just as people are rightfully skeptical of Uber's selling a dollar for 80 cents, it looks like Tesla are doing the same thing.
I noticed that imgflip is using Cloudflare. Just curious - if you're willing to share this information - what are your traffic levels and hosting costs like? Does hosting a large percentage of static asset require a Cloudflare enterprise contract? Cheers
When Imgflip moved to Cloudflare they did require an enterprise contract if we would use Cloudflare as a CDN (lots of static assets, in our case .jpg and .gif). The contract was a constant price per month as opposed to per-GB like classic CDNs. It's possible contracts are different now though Imgflip has been there a while.
As much as I hate seeing setbacks and delays to commercial crew, it's best to have these failures early on in the program before they risk the life of astronauts and personnel.
> Upon his father's death, in August 2016, as well as the peerages, he inherited a wealth currently estimated at £9 billion, with considerable trust funds for his sisters. This wealth is held in a trust, of which the Duke is a beneficial owner but not the legal owner — an arrangement which received considerable press attention due to the inheritance tax exemption this confers.
I don't think its to do with fairness, but as this exemplifies, wealth accumulates over generations. If left unchecked then over 400 years a few people own a huge chunk of the world. Why? Is that good for society? Doesn't seem so. Yet society spends a lot of time and money enforcing these laws. Certainly you want your children to inherit if you've done well, but hundreds of years later?
Ownership is a fiction of society, as are most rules, and its probably up to us to decide what "fairness" means. I find it hard to make an argument that someones great grandchildren to the nth level has any claim on this property. So inheritance taxes do seem reasonable.
I have wondered if the modern trend of the rich establishing "foundations" is a way to sidestep inheritance taxes. The foundation will accumulate assets that will be controlled by the heirs some goes to charity which is good for society, but still more and more assets will of necessity be controlled by the foundation and all tax free.
I don’t know. If I’ve been paying taxes over my income all my life, and I’ve chosen to do nothing with what remains, what business is that of the government? It’s just another way of double taxation.
Does it make more sense to think that a grandson should get paid because the grandfather inherited a billion that the son (who dies) wasn't able to spend fast enough to squander? Both inheritance scenarios are conventions and both are a bit silly when presented nakedly without nuance.
You have it backwards. When a person dies, their property becomes unowned (dead people cannot own things). It is active government intervention that takes that unowned property and gives to rich kids on the basis of some scribbles on some pieces of paper.
You say that like it goes to the government and stays there. But really this would just be another part of the public budget. So try it the other way around:
I don't think it's fair that public services for all have to be cut so that some people who's parents (not themselves!) got very rich can stay rich. Let them start out from "wealthy" or from "well off" instead, and let everyone else go from "scraping by" to "okay" in return.
If you extend this logic then it would imply that government should simply prevent anyone from getting rich - dead or alive. If you were socialist then you still wouldn’t have issue with this but for all others this would be infringement on their right to own property and more broadly to achieve prosperity even while doing nothing illegal. In other words, becoming rich should not be an act of crime that leads to stiff penalties.
A more logical view is to think of inheritance as just usual income to other person and hence eligible for usual income tax as contribution towards shared goal of the society.
1. You can extend that argument like that, but I wouldn't. At least not to "there should be no rich people at all". But at some level of wealth, a difference in quantity (of money owned by an individual) becomes a difference in quality, and IMHO we should think really hard if we want that difference to exist in our societies.
2. I agree that an inheritance can/should be treated just like an income. And that's why I applied the usual tax fairness argument of "the more wealth you have, the more responsibility you bear for financing public services, because you have greatly (if perhaps indirectly) benefited from them."
> I'm not sure why everyone thinks it's fair the government should get paid when a citizen dies.
I'd argue that it's even less fair that the government feels it's entitled to a percentage of your income. Taking money from a dead person doesn't seem as bad as taking money from a living person.
Nobody likes taxes, but they have been a part of society for several thousand years.
You might not need your money when you're dead, but people you very much wanted to provide for and support, like your spouse or your children, certainly do need it if they survive you. Providing for one's family is one of the main motivations for people to do productive work and create wealth.
> Do you have a dataset showing people without children work less hard and create less wealth?
That wouldn't be the right calculation. If a person has children, their children will contribute to future GDP. So a proper analysis of having children on the economy would compare the output of:
- someone without children; and
- someone with children plus the net output of their children discounted to present day value.
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the average person without children individually contributes more to GDP than the average person with children. However, that's largely because raising children takes time, labor, and resources. The person with children is sacrificing their own individual wealth and production and investing it their children. However, when the children's future production is taken into account, discounted by the future value of that production, I suspect that it turns out the other way.
I don't have data on this and although my suspicions feel correct, maybe they aren't. I'd be genuinely to see such data.
> That wouldn't be the right calculation. If a person has children, their children will contribute to future GDP
I think you're taking that in the wrong direction. The op was suggesting that the primary reason people work hard and create wealth is because they want to leave money for their children after they're dead, and that a redistributive estate tax would prevent that. Essentially: people are primarily motivated to create because of their children.
> The op was suggesting that the primary reason people work hard and create wealth is because they want to leave money for their children after they're dead
No, I was not. I was saying that that is one of the main reasons, not the main reason.
> Do you have a dataset showing people without children work less hard and create less wealth?
That's not what I was claiming. I was only claiming that providing for one's family is one of the main motivations for people to do productive work and create wealth, not that it is the only motivation.
Do you have a dataset showing that people with spouses and children do not do productive work and create wealth?
Of course the thing about systems of rules with people is that they react to incentives in inconvenient ways. At best they would save less to pass on if nobody they cared about would receive any of it.
Really if we valued equality of opportunity at all cost we would either collectivize or randomize children but needless to say that would be incredibly unpopular and not lead to good outcomes given aspects of mammalian child-raising and bonds - we already know from our experience with orphanages that calling the results sub-optimal is an understatement.
> “Wait a second,” he said. “How do you know we’re the only time there’s been a civilization on our own planet?”
Imagine for a moment that we're Martians who managed to terraform Earth because of some runaway climate catastrophe on Mars. That now, we're in the early stages of repeating the same mistakes because of some extinction event in the past that wiped out all of our prior history and knowledge.
If they could terraform another planet, they could probably just fix mars instead. There are a lot of weird contradictions in these kind of stories. Like they can move an entire planet's worth of people, but can't make a data repository that would survive them. Or that they would have a bad climate on mars, but somehow survive long enough to learn how to terraform a whole planet reliably as well as cross solar-system level distances.
It's the same reason that software engineers love greenfielding projects. Architecting clean, fresh systems is romantic! You won't make any of the mistakes that you've now learned from! All this needless complexity can be done away with once and for all.
I just thought of that that argument only holds water if there wasn't exchange of genetic information between the planets. If during evolution cells and viruses get blasted from one planet to the other on a regular basis, that would not be a great argument.
It would have had to have been going on long before intelligence arose though, which is not impossible.
Life has been on Earth for at least 3.8 billion years. All of the life on Earth today is descended from that original life. So if life on Earth originally came from Mars, it would have had to do so at least 3.8 billion years ago. But that's too close to the origin of the solar system as a whole for it to be credible that an industrial civilization could have evolved on Mars, caused a climate catastrophe, and then migrated to Earth.
I don't think it's at all likely that life on Earth originated on Mars, but if it did then there could have been cross pollination of microorganisms over billions of years due to meteor impacts on both worlds throwing bits of crust into space. In fact if we do find life on Mars at some point it wouldn't be shocking if they are quite similar to bacteria found on Earth, since they might just be descendants of earth bacteria carried over from the impact that killed the dinosaurs.
> if it did then there could have been cross pollination of microorganisms over billions of years
I don't think this is consistent with DNA evidence, since such cross pollination would be expected to show up as two sets of genetic lines of descent with very different characteristics, since the environment of Mars is very different from that of Earth; and we don't observer anything like that. In fact, if life was evolving separately on Earth and Mars, it might not take very long before the two lines of descent were not even compatible genetically, meaning that genetic exchange would be impossible even if the organisms were brought back together.
As long as you are not employed by your company, you don't need a work visa.
If you want to be employed by your company and live in the US, currently the E2 is the best option (for that, you already need ongoing substantial operations in the US).
Did they mention Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man + Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Turks and Caicos Islands?
Well, I suppose they aren't EU member states, carry on.