• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • WiseThat@lemmy.catoFuck Cars@lemmy.caOur approach to road safety
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    15 days ago

    I take it you’ve never been on a job site, because there is a TON of infrastructure and protocol that cranes and crane operators have to follow to make sure everything is as safe as possible.

    You need to have extensive training to be allowed to do overhead materials handling, the ground conditions need to be thoroughly checked, the job site needs to be planned and laid out, in general there are a ton of constraints and checks to make sure that there is virtually zero risk that a random person could accidentally walk into a danger zone and get hurt.

    That’s pretty much the exact opposite as with cars. Pretty much every parking lot I have ever been to is front-loading, which REQUIRES that pedestrians have to cross the main driving path to get to their destination and there is very little training and certification required of drivers compared to crane operators.



  • In Canada, we spend about $8k on healthcare each year per person. This is mostly taxes, but also partly co-pays and private employer insurance.

    America spends about $14k per person.

    In both the USA and Canada, about 28% of government spending goes to healthcare. In the US that means about ~6k in total government budget from your tax dollars is spent on healthcare, while in Canada it’s about ~7K.

    The difference is that the average american also pays an additional $8K in their own after-tax dollars from their pockets in insurance and direct-billing for services.

    And for the privilege of paying nearly twice as much, the Americans have a life expectancy of 6 years less than Canadians (76.3 vs 82.6)



  • And in fact, increasing the tax on profits makes it much, much more valuable to reinvest in the business.

    Like, lets say your business is expecting a net profit of $200K after a year. You can either choose to reinvest that into the business to buy new equipment and hire new staff, or you can record that as profit, pay the taxes, and then put the after tax dollars money directly into your and your investors pockets.

    With our current corporate tax rate of 15%, it’s really tempting to just pay the 30K in taxes and personally keep $170k as take-home, which gets taxed at a MUCH lower rate than regular income, rather than keep it in the business. $30K as a fee to keep $170K in personal income is pretty cheap.

    However, if taking money our of the business was much more expensive, say 45% or something comparable to the marginal personal income tax rate for a working professional, then maybe as a business owner you might think that paying $90K to keep $110K is not as good a deal, and so you will think about whether there are other opportunities WITHIN the business you could invest in, putting those profits towards new equipment or training, rather than losing 45% of it to taxes just to add a small amount to your own pocket.






  • WiseThat@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzMythbusters
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    3 months ago

    This is what conspiracy theorists don’t get. The world’s scientists are not skeptical of your claims that water has secret spiritual memory because they hate you, they are skeptical because the claim you make, if it were true, would be so important and world-changing that they want to be absolutely sure of it before they endorse it.

    The difference is that, to a scientist, “this would be amazing if it were true” is not a good reason to believe it anyway



  • Cars are also REALLY not that convenient. I’m a dad to a four-month-old, and getting to appointments by bus/metro is SO much easier than using the car.

    Car:

    • Have to get the fucking car seat in the back seat
    • Pack stroller in as well
    • Drive with potentially screaming kid who feels isolated and lonely, feel like I’m gonna crash at any moment
    • Parking lots SUCK to walk around in with a stroller,have to push kid out into the open before I can see around these tall cars and just hope nobody is speeding

    Transit:

    • Push stroller right on to kneeling bus/level-boarding platform
    • can attend to my baby the whole time, no fussing.
    • don’t have to worry about parking AT ALL

  • Yeah, the definition of “Productive” is all sorts of wacky when you consider that, by the numbers, the people doing high-frequency stock trading are some of the most “productive” people on the planet, because they manage to hoard so much money to themselves.

    Meanwhile, the people actually providing goods and services that make people’s lives better and create new things, those people are “unproductive”, because they don’t get filthy rich off their honest work.

    The real reason we are not “productive” is that foreign investors are paying us to do the hard work of extracting resources (lumber, ore), or generating new research (we have MANY top universities), but then demanding that the money made from refining those resources or selling those idea goes to them, in other nations (typically the US or China)


  • Okay, so the problem is that because fossil fuels are cheap, most people don’t find it very worthwhile to explore new or more efficient ways to do things. This is especially true for the wealthy, for whom gas and heating costs are basically nothing, so they will do dumb shit like heat their homes while leaving windows open, or buy larger and less efficient luxury cars.

    The federal program fixes this. It adds a small cost to using fossil fuels, collects that money, and pays it back out to everyone. That means that people who use more carbon than average (which, again, is the willfully wasteful) will see a small penalty for their waste, while the people who are already trying their best to cut back will see a LARGE benefit, as they get a direct payment of cash for doing their part to conserve. If you are about average, there’s very little impact on you, but you NOW have an economic inventive to try and economize.