Quotulatiousness

July 10, 2012

American exceptionalism, especially in taxation

Filed under: Business, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:19

Mark Steyn on the unique American perspective on taxes:

Elsewhere in the world, there are two generally accepted bases for taxation: residency and source of income. Most countries tax you if you live within their borders, some tax you if you live elsewhere but earn money within their jurisdiction, but only America claims the right to tax you simply for being American — even if you, say, live in Belgium but drive over the border to work in Luxembourg every day. This is unique to the United States: Spain taxes you if you’re a resident of Spain; Slovenia taxes you if you’re a resident of Slovenia; but America taxes you if you’re an American who’s working as a teacher in Gabon. You’re at permanent risk of double taxation, and the fines for minor and accidental infraction are arbitrary and confiscatory.

As I say, no other developed country does this — although Eritrea does.

On January 1st 2013, all this gets worse. The FATCAT act (technically, it’s FATCA, but we all get the acronymic message) makes it not worth a foreign bank’s while to do business with Americans. I don’t just mean Mitt Romney’s chums in the Cayman Islands, but an American of modest means on a two-year secondment to Hong Kong requiring a small checking account with which to pay local utility bills — or a small businessman attempting to expand his distribution in Canada.

Maybe you don’t care about these people: Why can’t the business guy expand his business in Michigan or Idaho like true-blue Americans would do, etc? But at a time when America is ever more mortgaged to foreigners, making it more difficult for Americans to go out and earn money from the rest of the planet doesn’t seem a smart move. Unless you’re planning on making U.S. citizenship a combination food-stamp card. American exceptionalism and American isolationism are not the same thing.

More to the point, the 2008 “exit tax”, the existing foreign bank-account disclosure paperwork, the new FATCAT act, and even the recent habit of publishing the names of those who renounce citizenship are simply inappropriate in a free society.

Does “Rule 34” have an exception after all?

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:58

Kathy Shaidle may have found the only known exception to Rule 34:

Since women (and not a few men) obviously love a man in uniform, where is all the porn featuring the Royal Canadian Mounted Police?

Dirty cops are an X-rated staple, and “the UPS guy” has almost driven the once-ubiquitous “mailman” out of the porn business.

Even Nazis get to go where Mounties fear to tread. Those sleek black (Hugo Boss-designed) SS getups can get under even the most surprising skins: During the Eichmann trial in Israel, “Stalag” porn became Über-popular sexual samizdat.

So this slightly put-out Canuck wonders: What’s wrong with the RCMP, eh? Their uniforms are pretty sharp, too. And Due South fandom was rabid.

Yet there’s a distinct Mountie-porn void, one that violates a law of the Internet — “Rule 34” to be exact, which declares, “If it exists, there is porn of it.”

Telstar’s 50th anniversary

Filed under: History, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

Scott Van Wynsberghe in the National Post:

What followed Echo 1 was a space race within a space race, this one determining whether government or industry would send up the first active non-military communications satellite. In 1961, NASA awarded a contract for such a satellite to the company RCA, but Pierce and Bell Labs were undeterred. According to Calvin Tomkins, Bell Labs spent US$50-million (at early-1960s rates) for research and development and devoted about 700 of its personnel to the project.

The baby that was born of it all was a sphere weighing 170 pounds (77 kilograms), called Telstar 1. Going by specifications collected by Bill Yenne, an authority on U.S. spacecraft, Telstar 1 received signals at 6,390 megacycles, re-transmitted them at 4,170, and boasted of 600 voice channels and one channel for television.

Perched atop a Thor-Delta booster — paid for by Bell Labs but launched by NASA — Telstar 1 ascended on July 10, 1962. It did not go far, parking itself in an elliptical orbit less than 2,000 miles (3,220 kilometers) away. Within hours, Bell Labs arranged what was previously impossible — transatlantic television. As described by T.A. Heppenheimer, the ensuing video exchange humorously followed national stereotypes. The United States sent France and the U.K. taped material heavy on patriotic themes, the French responded with footage of actor Yves Montand and other cultural figures, and the British muddled about for a few days before getting things straight.

Humour aside, the achievement left the world stunned. In just the month of the launching of Telstar 1, the New York Times ran almost 100 articles related to the satellite. Joe Meek’s Telstar composition stormed the pop charts later in the year, and that 1963 New Yorker profile of Pierce ran for 29 pages. Telstar 1 did not outlast some of this acclaim, as it ceased transmission in early 1963, but it had blazed a path. Today, anyone using satellite TV or radio is honouring that decades-old triumph of engineering.

Update: Bill Ray has more at The Register:

Arthur C Clarke is often credited with inventing the idea of satellite communications, though in fact his contribution was to point out that three birds in geostationary orbit could provide global coverage. Geostationary orbit is more than 35,000km up, beyond the reach of radios in 1962, so Telstar’s orbit peaked at less than 6,000km up and dipped down to less than 1,000km during its two-and-a-half-hour circumnavigation.

That dip is also what caused Telstar’s downfall. Its repeated drops into the Van Allen radiation belt did allow the satellite to gather information about the belt (which was part of the plan) but the information it gathered was largely the havoc such radiation plays with electronic circuits. If Wikipedia is to be believed then US nuclear tests at the time had left the Van Allen particularly charged, but either way the satellite failed intermittently for a few months and finally stopped relaying signals entirely in February 1963. However, it remains in orbit to this day, faithfully tracked by the US government as required by international treaties.

Telstar was solar powered, with 3,600 solar cells feeding 19 nickel-cadmium batteries which received a 6GHz signal and retransmitted it with 2.25w of power at 4GHz. The electrics necessary were all suspended by shock-absorbent nylon cords in the middle of the spherical body, which had to spin at 180 rpm for stabilisation (gyroscopes perform the same function on modern satellites, but weren’t reliable enough back then).

Tim Harford on Iceland’s economic recovery

Filed under: Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

From his weekend column:

Iceland managed to create three massive global banks. The economy itself is tiny: Iceland has the same population as Coventry, although arguably the scenery is better. That’s really not big enough to support a lot of globally competitive export industries. Iceland had three: fish, aluminium smelting and tourism. Four if you count Björk. Can you blame them if they fancied dabbling in something a bit sexier, such as investment banking?

Investment banking is sexier than Björk?

I don’t think investment banking even manages to be sexier than aluminium smelting these days, but eight or nine years ago it must have seemed like a great gig. So these Icelandic banks borrowed loads of cash and used it to buy pretty much anything they wanted. In particular, they bought from each other at rather ebullient levels, which made for substantial profits on paper. The whole thing was a classic bubble.

And when the flow of loans dried up?

The banks crashed and there was clearly nothing the government could do to save them – they were far too big. And the party came to a grinding halt.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

No. It’s hard to understand why anyone wanted to lend them the money, and just as hard to understand why they thought they could instantly learn the craft of global investment banking.

BMI: Badly Misleading Indicator

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

Lewis Page explains why being too thin is a bad idea health-wise:

Yet another study has shown that the so-called “obesity” epidemic sweeping the wealthy nations of the world has been massively over-hyped, as new results show that is is far more dangerous to be assessed as “underweight” than it is to be assessed even as “severely obese” — let alone merely “obese” or “overweight”.

“There is currently a widespread belief that any degree of overweight or obesity increases the risk of death, however our findings suggest this may not be the case,” says health prof Anthony Jerant, lead author of the study. “In the six-year timeframe of our evaluation, we found that only severe obesity was associated with an increased risk of death.”

Most statistics in this field are still based on the now widely discredited Body Mass Index (BMI) system, under which people are assessed as “underweight”, “normal”, “overweight”, “obese” or “severely obese”. BMI, devised in the early 19th century by an obscure Belgian sociologist without medical qualifications, copes poorly with increases in height as it assumes the human body will scale up in mass in proportion to the square of height — which doesn’t allow for the fact that bodies are three dimensional — and further fails to allow for the greater cross-sectional area needed in supporting structures to carry increasing weights.

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