Exactlyneddiedrow wrote:Forboding and I are just having a little fun, don't worry about it. They're labels - we both know labels really don't have any meaning that we don't generate for them ourselves.
Besides... He started it
What would you do?
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Forboding Angel
- Evolution RTS Developer
- Posts: 14673
- Joined: 17 Nov 2005, 02:43
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Forboding Angel
- Evolution RTS Developer
- Posts: 14673
- Joined: 17 Nov 2005, 02:43
@ snipa
The problem with the tax brackets suggested, as I learned from SimCity 4 ^^, is that it will drive away weathy and industry, thereby eliminating investors and jobs, killing the economy, driving you into a recession, and doing the opposite of what you intended.
As corrupt as it sounds, giving big corporations huge tax breaks is the best thing for the economy. It's indisputable.
As corrupt as it sounds, giving big corporations huge tax breaks is the best thing for the economy. It's indisputable.
It's very easily disputable, but I don't even need to argue it here. My top tax rates for the upper classes are still much lower than the European equivalents, and where else would the elite go? They don't feel safe in general without a nice cushion of people of their ethnicity around them - wealth leads to comfort, comfort leads to narrowness.Caydr wrote:The problem with the tax brackets suggested, as I learned from SimCity 4 ^^, is that it will drive away weathy and industry, thereby eliminating investors and jobs, killing the economy, driving you into a recession, and doing the opposite of what you intended.
As corrupt as it sounds, giving big corporations huge tax breaks is the best thing for the economy. It's indisputable.
Tax is very complicated and there's one issue in particular. People paying for stuff that they don't use.
Decreasing tax isn't always a good thing.
I'd potentially increase tax. For things like education, transport, medicine etc I'd make people pay taxes on things they almost all use and secondly those that don't use it but pay allot of taxes wel this is called wealth dsitribution which is supposed to be the advantage of tax not just an easy way or paying for services. As all these items are interlinked, for example if people are sick they can't get back to work so quickly with a weak health care system, It also makes the worse of worse off if they are sick of work and have to pay for medical expenses and there's no system to keep them paid during time off then they lose a large amount of money. So potentially even if someone pays allot of tax for something they don't use they may still use returns, for example they will buy things which will be cheaper if there's been more investment in transport to make it more efficient. You have to pay allot of atention to the indirect and hidden rewards of schemes. Military is an important thing but the real main aspect of military is not how many battle ships you have. Consider computers, you buy one for £1000, in a year you can get a budget PC of the ame specs for £500. However this is different, people use computers all the time. Secondly, when you have an army you have to send of men, this is a high cost on production. Many military advances have uses elsewhere consider some of the many advances that have come out of military in the past. Rather than focusing spending on new battleships I would focus it on research into areas such as rapid construction to premptively great machines or war close to a battle using the most recent designs and ai/robotics to help reduce the man power. In fact this would be part of a larger institute of research which would also cover civil technologies including a special division on resource management such as recycling. Efficiency is important for war and the economy.
For those that say we aim too small, this is a forum so we have to just highlight some of the main plans we'd initiate or create too much to read.
Decreasing tax isn't always a good thing.
I'd potentially increase tax. For things like education, transport, medicine etc I'd make people pay taxes on things they almost all use and secondly those that don't use it but pay allot of taxes wel this is called wealth dsitribution which is supposed to be the advantage of tax not just an easy way or paying for services. As all these items are interlinked, for example if people are sick they can't get back to work so quickly with a weak health care system, It also makes the worse of worse off if they are sick of work and have to pay for medical expenses and there's no system to keep them paid during time off then they lose a large amount of money. So potentially even if someone pays allot of tax for something they don't use they may still use returns, for example they will buy things which will be cheaper if there's been more investment in transport to make it more efficient. You have to pay allot of atention to the indirect and hidden rewards of schemes. Military is an important thing but the real main aspect of military is not how many battle ships you have. Consider computers, you buy one for £1000, in a year you can get a budget PC of the ame specs for £500. However this is different, people use computers all the time. Secondly, when you have an army you have to send of men, this is a high cost on production. Many military advances have uses elsewhere consider some of the many advances that have come out of military in the past. Rather than focusing spending on new battleships I would focus it on research into areas such as rapid construction to premptively great machines or war close to a battle using the most recent designs and ai/robotics to help reduce the man power. In fact this would be part of a larger institute of research which would also cover civil technologies including a special division on resource management such as recycling. Efficiency is important for war and the economy.
For those that say we aim too small, this is a forum so we have to just highlight some of the main plans we'd initiate or create too much to read.
Caydr: Yes but by giving big business a huge advantage over small business you kill off the small businesses and reduce the markets to oligopolies, which are often the same as monopolies in their effect on the market. Oligopolies mean stagnation, price fixing and attempts to bribe the government. High import taxes/tariffs prevent companies from offshoring all their production or at least reduce the profitability of that, especially when you've got a huge market in your country that the company can't afford to miss out on. Make it more expensive to pull out than stay in.
Hm, what changes would I introduce? Obviously I'm not in the US so I won't do changes like reforming the democratic system to allow for more parties (since Germany already uses one where small parties get representation, too) or reduce military spending (the German military is already so strapped for cash they can't even afford ammunition for training their soldiers, TV programmes show that some bases have only one working tank out of ten because they can't afford spare parts and have to combine two broken tanks into a working one).
1. Increase corporate accountability. If a corporation commits a felony the corporate veil is pierced and all people responsible for the decision are tried under the appropriate charges (this moves upwards since it is assumed that a manager knows what his underlings are doing unless he can prove that he wasn't given information about their doings). Innocent until proven guilty oes for the company, once provwen guilty guilt is assumed for all people involved in the decision process until proven otherwise (doesn't need to be proven beyond all reasonable doubt, though). Any crime that bears a minimum sentence involving jail time would be subject to this.
2. Outlaw "political contributions" as bribery and make it illegal for politicians to have other jobs while holding a political office. The job-loss is treated in the same way as it is treated for people that are drafted for mandatory military service.
3. Stop the drafting (Germany has 9 months of mandatory military service). We have no need for those additional recruits as they can't be sent into other countries and a defense case in the home country won't happen. Our neighbors are all EU countries (except for Switzerland) and as such allies. All of them either are too weak to fight our regular forces or have nukes anyway. The civil replacement service that is the only reason we still have the draft can be replaced by those 1€/hr workers the current unemployment law introduced.
4. Reinstate that communal corporate tax that Schr├â┬Âder abolished. It was the biggest source of income for many towns and just because it doesn't go into the federal budget doesn't mean we can just cut it to appease the multimillion Euro corporate overlords.
5. Generally reduce the burden on town and commune budgets and give them more income again. Almost all of them are pretty much bankrupt because the federals keep taking income sources away from them while forcing them to pay more and more costs out of their own budgets.
6. Introduce a mandatory statement of intention and layman's summary to all laws that can and should be used by judges to determine the intent of the law and make judgements that were in the intent of the law rather than the laguage. These wouldn't have legal bearing by themselves but judges should respect them. This is to prevent people from abusing loopholes or laws for purposes they weren't designed for.
7. Furthermore exploiting loopholes shall be a crime, not too high of a sentence but it should result in the exploited law being counted as violated which carries the fines detailled there. This is what the statement of intention is necessary for. Determining whether a loophole has been exploited remains duty of the judge, of course.
8. Reduce sales tax and find other means of making that money. Seriously, they're complaining that our economy is going down the shitter and their solution involves draining even more money from it? WTF?
9. Possibly make a law that a company that holds a monopoly in a market shall become public property without reimbursement for the shareholders. Again this has to be found by a judge and may be restricted to monopolies that abuse their power so companies that hold a monopoly do have a chance of not being taken over but they have to play VERY nice to avoid this. Since a monopoly is pretty much unconstrained by the market the consumer has no power over it and it doesn't take much damage from purely selfish decisions it has to be made accountable to the people. This would also reduce shareholder confidence in companies approaching a monopoly (who'd want to invest money that has a high chance of just disappearing?) and as such cause a bit of self-regulation.
10. Tax speculation. I'm not sure about the exact taxation and whether speculation should be choked off or just profited from but speculation does not add anything to society other than a healthy profit for those who speculate and much higher costs for those who actually need the stuff being traded. Perhaps choke it when a good's supply goes below a critical threshold (e.g. during an oil crisis you could only buy oil for processing or sale to the end user).
11. Define nicotine as a narcotic. It works by emulating happiness hormones and can cause a chemical addiction which makes it a narcotic in my book even though it doesn't directly influence your consciousness beyond making you want to smoke more. We don't allow people to smoke crack, why should we allow them to smoke tobacco? The loss of tobacco tax income would have to be compensated for, though.
12. Prevent software patents from being legalized. These things do nothing but cause damage and if we legalized them we'd give power to all those insane patents granted by the USPTO. They make software development a complete legal minefield and inhibit competition, especially from newcomers. Never mind that programs are just algorithms, i.e. maths which should not be patentable. Considering all the patent trolling that goes on in the US (a patent troll is a company that holds (often overbroad) patents but doesn't use them, they hope some larger company violates their patents and wait until the infringing product has reached critical mass, then start suing) we'd just ruin our economy with them. Oh and while we're on the subject of patent trolling, this whole "wait until they've racked up millions of 'damages' before suing them" should stop as well, the infringer will only pay for the infringement that happened after the first notification of infringement (whereby a competing product using said patent and listing the patent somewhere being sold in the same market counts as a notification) so there is an incentive to notify infringers ASAP. Of course this wouldn't allow recovering damage for infringement you were unaware of but I consider that a small price to pay.
Let's see if I forgot anything...
Hm, what changes would I introduce? Obviously I'm not in the US so I won't do changes like reforming the democratic system to allow for more parties (since Germany already uses one where small parties get representation, too) or reduce military spending (the German military is already so strapped for cash they can't even afford ammunition for training their soldiers, TV programmes show that some bases have only one working tank out of ten because they can't afford spare parts and have to combine two broken tanks into a working one).
1. Increase corporate accountability. If a corporation commits a felony the corporate veil is pierced and all people responsible for the decision are tried under the appropriate charges (this moves upwards since it is assumed that a manager knows what his underlings are doing unless he can prove that he wasn't given information about their doings). Innocent until proven guilty oes for the company, once provwen guilty guilt is assumed for all people involved in the decision process until proven otherwise (doesn't need to be proven beyond all reasonable doubt, though). Any crime that bears a minimum sentence involving jail time would be subject to this.
2. Outlaw "political contributions" as bribery and make it illegal for politicians to have other jobs while holding a political office. The job-loss is treated in the same way as it is treated for people that are drafted for mandatory military service.
3. Stop the drafting (Germany has 9 months of mandatory military service). We have no need for those additional recruits as they can't be sent into other countries and a defense case in the home country won't happen. Our neighbors are all EU countries (except for Switzerland) and as such allies. All of them either are too weak to fight our regular forces or have nukes anyway. The civil replacement service that is the only reason we still have the draft can be replaced by those 1€/hr workers the current unemployment law introduced.
4. Reinstate that communal corporate tax that Schr├â┬Âder abolished. It was the biggest source of income for many towns and just because it doesn't go into the federal budget doesn't mean we can just cut it to appease the multimillion Euro corporate overlords.
5. Generally reduce the burden on town and commune budgets and give them more income again. Almost all of them are pretty much bankrupt because the federals keep taking income sources away from them while forcing them to pay more and more costs out of their own budgets.
6. Introduce a mandatory statement of intention and layman's summary to all laws that can and should be used by judges to determine the intent of the law and make judgements that were in the intent of the law rather than the laguage. These wouldn't have legal bearing by themselves but judges should respect them. This is to prevent people from abusing loopholes or laws for purposes they weren't designed for.
7. Furthermore exploiting loopholes shall be a crime, not too high of a sentence but it should result in the exploited law being counted as violated which carries the fines detailled there. This is what the statement of intention is necessary for. Determining whether a loophole has been exploited remains duty of the judge, of course.
8. Reduce sales tax and find other means of making that money. Seriously, they're complaining that our economy is going down the shitter and their solution involves draining even more money from it? WTF?
9. Possibly make a law that a company that holds a monopoly in a market shall become public property without reimbursement for the shareholders. Again this has to be found by a judge and may be restricted to monopolies that abuse their power so companies that hold a monopoly do have a chance of not being taken over but they have to play VERY nice to avoid this. Since a monopoly is pretty much unconstrained by the market the consumer has no power over it and it doesn't take much damage from purely selfish decisions it has to be made accountable to the people. This would also reduce shareholder confidence in companies approaching a monopoly (who'd want to invest money that has a high chance of just disappearing?) and as such cause a bit of self-regulation.
10. Tax speculation. I'm not sure about the exact taxation and whether speculation should be choked off or just profited from but speculation does not add anything to society other than a healthy profit for those who speculate and much higher costs for those who actually need the stuff being traded. Perhaps choke it when a good's supply goes below a critical threshold (e.g. during an oil crisis you could only buy oil for processing or sale to the end user).
11. Define nicotine as a narcotic. It works by emulating happiness hormones and can cause a chemical addiction which makes it a narcotic in my book even though it doesn't directly influence your consciousness beyond making you want to smoke more. We don't allow people to smoke crack, why should we allow them to smoke tobacco? The loss of tobacco tax income would have to be compensated for, though.
12. Prevent software patents from being legalized. These things do nothing but cause damage and if we legalized them we'd give power to all those insane patents granted by the USPTO. They make software development a complete legal minefield and inhibit competition, especially from newcomers. Never mind that programs are just algorithms, i.e. maths which should not be patentable. Considering all the patent trolling that goes on in the US (a patent troll is a company that holds (often overbroad) patents but doesn't use them, they hope some larger company violates their patents and wait until the infringing product has reached critical mass, then start suing) we'd just ruin our economy with them. Oh and while we're on the subject of patent trolling, this whole "wait until they've racked up millions of 'damages' before suing them" should stop as well, the infringer will only pay for the infringement that happened after the first notification of infringement (whereby a competing product using said patent and listing the patent somewhere being sold in the same market counts as a notification) so there is an incentive to notify infringers ASAP. Of course this wouldn't allow recovering damage for infringement you were unaware of but I consider that a small price to pay.
Let's see if I forgot anything...
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unpossible
- Posts: 871
- Joined: 10 May 2005, 19:24
hmmm, interesting. obviously the first step is emergency powers. i'm not getting anything done without them!
i think the most important thing about being a benevolant dictator is transparency. truth instead of opinion in the media representation of what's going on in the world (anyone who's evere watched ITV news will see why this would be necessary).
first off i'd ban indoctrinating kids into a particular belief system...start them off with something neutral - science. once they finished their education (whatever they achieve) they'll have the right/ability to properly consider/decide what they believe. except scientology, as the concept of people paying for spiritual fulfilment seems a little off to me.
Once that is sorted out the next step would be to sort out the distribution of wealth/poorness. after a little rioting from the middle classes, hopefully the dregs of society/street gang culture would calm down a little and stop being such a drain on the rest. no more need for 15 year olds to have a baby to get a council house. they'd be educated enough to understand that that's not the best thing for them.
my hope would be for people to realise that they don't have to compete against one another for resources, provided that everyone plays the same game. EDUCATION! anyone not bringing up their kids with the correct (socially minded) attitude will be chastised. true, people will resent having the freedom to chase big piles of money/drugs/land/carpets/bombs/whatever, but once they see the world is a better place as a whole then they'll be contented.
the new generation will be taught this is the right way, and know nothing different. society will agree that the world is all the better for losing the grab grab grab attitude. those who resist will be removed from society. prison becomes what it used to be. torture. pain. not free bed and board like it seems to be now. perhaps it'll lightnen up a little - let the people decide.
now that society has a good well natured core, other improvements will follow naturally. the new neutrality of opinion will pave the way for my returning power to the masses. enlightened, they'll form a new kind of governement. HELIOS AI or something similar would be fitting for my children. impartial and only concerned about progressing the collective interest. and that does't mean stepping on the small guys/individuals. the small guys are part of the society, and will willingly cooperate.
example: a new sport cnetre is required. buildings must be demolished, houses owned by people living there. new houses are built and the people simply relocate. no fuss.
once earth is sorted (provided the capitalist self concerned mases of the other countires haven't jealously wiped my utopia out) construction of the moon base can begin. that's our stepping stone for leaving earth and expanding. eventually we'll be at the stage that our army of machines is tirelessly creating ever more homes for our people, processing asteroids and the such.
from there...the galaxy is our oyster, assuming we find a feasible way to reach other solar systems with our new floating cities.
oh i forgot to mention. microcscopic assemblers...they'll have to be watched very carefully. some kind of timeout on the signals that enable them, remotely situated. you can never be sure about those things. keep the machines manageable or they'll displace us!
i think the most important thing about being a benevolant dictator is transparency. truth instead of opinion in the media representation of what's going on in the world (anyone who's evere watched ITV news will see why this would be necessary).
first off i'd ban indoctrinating kids into a particular belief system...start them off with something neutral - science. once they finished their education (whatever they achieve) they'll have the right/ability to properly consider/decide what they believe. except scientology, as the concept of people paying for spiritual fulfilment seems a little off to me.
Once that is sorted out the next step would be to sort out the distribution of wealth/poorness. after a little rioting from the middle classes, hopefully the dregs of society/street gang culture would calm down a little and stop being such a drain on the rest. no more need for 15 year olds to have a baby to get a council house. they'd be educated enough to understand that that's not the best thing for them.
my hope would be for people to realise that they don't have to compete against one another for resources, provided that everyone plays the same game. EDUCATION! anyone not bringing up their kids with the correct (socially minded) attitude will be chastised. true, people will resent having the freedom to chase big piles of money/drugs/land/carpets/bombs/whatever, but once they see the world is a better place as a whole then they'll be contented.
the new generation will be taught this is the right way, and know nothing different. society will agree that the world is all the better for losing the grab grab grab attitude. those who resist will be removed from society. prison becomes what it used to be. torture. pain. not free bed and board like it seems to be now. perhaps it'll lightnen up a little - let the people decide.
now that society has a good well natured core, other improvements will follow naturally. the new neutrality of opinion will pave the way for my returning power to the masses. enlightened, they'll form a new kind of governement. HELIOS AI or something similar would be fitting for my children. impartial and only concerned about progressing the collective interest. and that does't mean stepping on the small guys/individuals. the small guys are part of the society, and will willingly cooperate.
example: a new sport cnetre is required. buildings must be demolished, houses owned by people living there. new houses are built and the people simply relocate. no fuss.
once earth is sorted (provided the capitalist self concerned mases of the other countires haven't jealously wiped my utopia out) construction of the moon base can begin. that's our stepping stone for leaving earth and expanding. eventually we'll be at the stage that our army of machines is tirelessly creating ever more homes for our people, processing asteroids and the such.
from there...the galaxy is our oyster, assuming we find a feasible way to reach other solar systems with our new floating cities.
oh i forgot to mention. microcscopic assemblers...they'll have to be watched very carefully. some kind of timeout on the signals that enable them, remotely situated. you can never be sure about those things. keep the machines manageable or they'll displace us!
Actually there is little difference between the two. Communism requires the state to have absolute power, just like Hitler really. But people can be fooled by the rhetoric of communism, particularly if they are poor and blame capitalism for their problems. An unscrupulous leader can use the promise of communism to seize power and establish a dictatorship.Snipawolf wrote:Ahh.. I dunno. I mean, it seems like an ideal set up..
Anyways isn't communism where people rule? Not leaders? Wouldn't mine be more that nazism thing with Hitler XD
IMHO, if you are in charge, the right thing to do is to create a legal framework that will ensure the continuing freedom of the people in your country. This is a bit like the U.S. constitution, but it's the constitution with security patches installed, to protect the people from any corrupt leaders that might get themselves elected in the future. But it might be more fun to oppress your enemies while living a life of A-list luxury in your massive palace...
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unpossible
- Posts: 871
- Joined: 10 May 2005, 19:24
trouble is, in their current state when people are given freedom half of them will make a grab for as much power as they can. you need a level playing field, and for everyone to want a level playing field.Jack wrote:Actually there is little difference between the two. Communism requires the state to have absolute power, just like Hitler really. But people can be fooled by the rhetoric of communism, particularly if they are poor and blame capitalism for their problems. An unscrupulous leader can use the promise of communism to seize power and establish a dictatorship.Snipawolf wrote:Ahh.. I dunno. I mean, it seems like an ideal set up..
Anyways isn't communism where people rule? Not leaders? Wouldn't mine be more that nazism thing with Hitler XD
IMHO, if you are in charge, the right thing to do is to create a legal framework that will ensure the continuing freedom of the people in your country. This is a bit like the U.S. constitution, but it's the constitution with security patches installed, to protect the people from any corrupt leaders that might get themselves elected in the future. But it might be more fun to oppress your enemies while living a life of A-list luxury in your massive palace...
Note that Jack refers to Communism as it actually functions, not as it is supposed to function. The true tenets of Communism cannot be practiced effectively because to be quite frank, humans just don't work in that manner - and the societal constructs we have erected (Religion, politics, economics...) would need to be abandoned before individuals could even attempt to approach the requirements.
No, humans are programmed to not function in such a manner. You'd need a severe reeducation program to make communism work, possibly wiring people to consider helping society the biggest archievement that determines their alpha male status (the same instinct that currently leads them to worship Bling Bling and other capitalist ideals since money is an easy measure of alpha-maleliness).
