In case of homosexuality it could be that the genes which cause this in a man are also helping his sister in becoming more attractive to other men (and the brother of a homosexual woman to be more attractive to other women).
I have no stats on this, but it would be interesting to see if the sisters of gay men and the brothers of lesbian women do have more kids than the average (for the same education and income levels, of course).
There is a Italian study that shows mothers of gay men are quite a bit more likely to bear many children than mothers of only hetero children.
Their conclusion is there at least a partial genetic component, likely coding for "Likes to have sex with men" that the gay men just happen to get as a side effect of the very effective gene for women.
The pay-go pension system is a huge ponzi scheme because it needs more and more people into the game with each generation. It lasted less than a century and it's on the edge of collapse now. Why should we postpone the inevitable?
>The pay-go pension system is a huge ponzi scheme because it needs more and more people into the game with each generation.
Depends on the ratio of the people paying in to the payout. Social Security would be pretty easy to fix by reducing the payout a bit and raising the tax a bit. The big problem, of course, is Medicare, and I expect that's why a single payer plan is inevitable in the US.
These programs have problems as currently constituted, but they're fixable even if the population isn't growing. However, whatever problems we have will be exacerbated if the number of people working is actually falling.
I don't think anything will be postponed despite anyone's efforts. Let's face it, if you're not about to retire you will have no SS. And if you are, you will get so little you won't be able to live off of it.
Sad but true. And most Americans are afraid of socialism because they think it's somehow related to communism. No wonder there is never any progress in this country.
But why should the satellites be on geosynchronous orbit? What if we bring them closer to Earth? For example, when we use mobile internet, we travel from antenna to antenna. With satellites on lower orbits, the antennas will travel around us.
This is possible, but the problem is that the closer your satellites get to earth, the larger number of satellites you need in your constellation to maintain coverage. Iridium[1] spent $6 billion putting a very large constellation of satellites into orbit and promptly went bust. Convincing an investor that you won't end up having the same problems that iridium had would be tricky.
It's certainly not impossible, but I would be surprised if the economics of satellite based internet can compete with fibre based networks. The areas where fibre isn't feasible are also probably the areas with few people, and so the potential to make money is limited.
Iridium has shown that (once you disregard capital costs), there is a niche for satellite based telecom services, but it's a fairly niche area.
Obviously military use is quite different from civilian use. I was really trying to address the part of the original article which suggested that this technology might make its way into civil life.
But that subsidy must come from somewhere. For every $.20 the widget company gets, some other company is taxed $.20
And GDP is a joke. If I buy your laptop for $1 bln, and you buy it back from me for $1 bln, nothing will change for us, but it will look very good on the GDP.
That's not how GDP is calculated. In your example, GDP is unchanged. The laptop only affected GDP the moment you originally purchased the laptop from the laptop store, and at that moment GDP went up by the price you paid for the laptop (excl. taxes). Used goods transactions do not count in GDP calculations.
EDITS (replies to below):
In the case of the two poems, as archgoon points out, the government will collect sales and income taxes which is why that situation never happens... ever. And if you didn't report the transaction to the government to avoid taxes, GDP will be unaffected because GDP is a statistic that is reported by the government, which can't report things it doesn't know about.
Technotony is right about the smashed windows paradox. You could argue that the "value" that is added is the tradesman gets paid (income), and the shopowner gets a new window.
The GDP is not a perfect measure of the strength of an economy. There are plenty of valid criticisms. But it's certainly one of many useful data points.
Okay, we both write a poem and sell it to each other for a billion dollars. How's that? Or if you want something more physical, we both make an ash-tray by scraping a groove in a lump of wood and sell those to each other for a billion each.
If only you 2 are doing this, this won't affect GDP much.
If everybody is doing this, prices rise aproprietely, and GDP corrected for inflation is still a good indicator.
EDIT: BTW there's a reason people don't generally sell cheap things for billions of $ - you'll both have to pay tax from that sale :)
And even if we assume no inflation - government can now invest these money, fueling economy, so this sale had at least some positive effect on economy.
A better example of the flaw in GDP is the smashed window paradox: if a thug breaks a shop window the owner of the window will have to fix it, paying a tradesman. That cost gets included in GDP but it's not really meaningful increase in society's value.
This is taking the edge case and extrapolating it over the rest of the curve of possible activities.
Maintenance and repair are a subset of all business and economic activities. AFAIK its a subset of GDP calculations.
The rest of the value additive portions of the economy are captured, which is what GDP is supposed to roughly reflect.
Further, if there was a spurt of such activity, such as an earthquake - GDP output would fall, because now while work is being done to repair things, profits from more valuable actions such as making high margin products stops.
Your GDP growth rate, for that year drops, if not total GDP output, because now effort and energy is being directed at maintenance and not wealth creation.
It doesn't have to. Sure, subsidies can help the overall economy. But when you're falling off a fiscal cliff, the debt ceiling is rising, and your credit rating has already been downgraded, you have to be careful to take long term eventualities into account. If a significant number of US businesses are relying on government subsidies and programs to be profitable, and that funding dries up, we're gonna have a bad time. Such subsidies and programs are a tiny fraction of US spending, but they are also low-hanging fruit when it comes time for cuts, as compared with military, medicare, and social security spending. Not saying that will happen, but leaning towards austerity may have been a better choice in the long run than trying to "jump start" the economy, especially if we double-dip (knock on wood!). Time will tell. Interestingly, US and UK unemployment rates as of October 2012 are identical at 7.8.
> For every $.20 the widget company gets, some other company is taxed $.20
There are many sectors of government where spending can be reduced to increase available revenue for subsidies or tax cuts. You need taxes, tolls, tariffs, etc to generate absolute government revenue, but subsidies can be carved out of existing budgets without new taxation. The question of the right balance of both taxation and austerity, to maximally benefit the recovery of the economy, in both the short and long-term--that is the real issue. Seems nobody's discovered the magic formula yet.
When a country is still spending more money than it earnes, can we call it "austerity"? I mean, if you have a salary of $100000, even if spend only $130000 instead of the usual $160000 you are still living above your means.
Using EC2 also takes away a part of the risk. If your startup fails in a year, then you don't get stuck in the end with a pile of hardware (for which you paid big bucks).
I guess that the best would be to use EC2 in the beginning, when you don't really know how much hardware you need, and later on use EC2 only for demand spikes.
Yes - this is what we are doing. With this 4x cost differential however, we calculated that it takes only 6-8 months to have the hardware pay for itself, so if you plan to be in business in that time frame you are better of buying.
I have no stats on this, but it would be interesting to see if the sisters of gay men and the brothers of lesbian women do have more kids than the average (for the same education and income levels, of course).