-1=e^ipi

But it's the norm in Westeros for kingdoms to go to war due to ruling family conflicts, is it not? Isn't that what the people have come to expect? So if the new ruler of the Vale (Petyr) wants to go to war due to what Ramsay did to Sansa (also what Roose did to Robb Stark) then I doubt the common people would find it unusual. The main issue is getting the Vale's nobility on Petyr's side.

Yes, this is the definition that is the most accepted. Progressive means that the proportion of income paid as tax as a function of income is an increasing function. Regressive means that proportion of income paid as tax as a function of income is a decreasing function. Flat tax = neither progressive, nor regressive. It is neutral. Sales tax with exemptions on essentials is effectively progressive. Flat tax + guaranteed income (via lump sum transfer) is effectively progressive.

Your definition is vague. So my guess is that for you and Dre, a 'progressive' tax is whatever you feel is 'progressive'. Anyway, the use of the words 'progressive' and 'regressive' to describe different tax structures seems very Orwellian. Rather than justify a specific tax structure, you simply play an Orwellian word association game to associate progress with the tax structure you advocate and regress with the tax structure you oppose. When asked to give a precise definition of 'progressive' you refuse. So as far as I can tell, progressive means the a tax system that you approve of, and you approve of a tax system because it's 'progressive'. That is circular reasoning.

Let's go with the definition that a tax is progressive if the proportion of income a person pays as tax is an strictly increasing function of income (though I suspect many in this thread may have different definitions). Let's take an individual earning $80,000 per year in Ontario. Here are the relevant tax rates: Ontario: 5.05% on the first $40,922 of taxable income, + 9.15% on the next $40,925, + National: 15% on the first $44,701 of taxable income, + 22% on the next $44,700 of taxable income (on the portion of taxable income over $44,701 up to $89,401), + The individual pays 25.14% of their tax as income but their marginal tax rate is 31.15%. So the individual's incentive to work is (1-0.2514)/(1-0.3115) -1 = 8.7% higher under a flat tax system that taxed this individual at the same rate compared to the progressive system. Okay, I'll give you another example. Let's say you have two otherwise identical fishermen who live next door. The fishermen both earn $200,000 dollars in two years. One fisherman earns $100,000 each year and the other fisherman earns $50,000 in one year and $150,000 in the following year. Under the progressive tax system, the second fisherman has to pay more in taxes than the first, even though they both have earned the same amount of money. How is that fair?

And can you give me a mathematical definition of how you determine what is 'disproportional' or not?

For the sake of clarity of conversation, could you please define 'regressive tax'? Is the basis of your claim that sales taxes are 'regressive' based upon a comparative statement?

There is more to a tax structure than just how 'progressive' it is. There is also how it changes incentives (particularly the incentive to work and the incentive to perform activities that have negative externalities such as pollution). Trying to justify a CO2 emission tax on its 'progressiveness' just misses the entire point of the tax.

Those two positions aren't necessarily in conflict. Most economists would probably agree that a small marginal increase in consumption taxes and a corresponding decrease in income taxes would be beneficial for the economy in the long run (at least for places like Canada, USA, etc.). However, when it comes to very large changes in the tax structure, things become more complicated. Using only consumption taxes may result in more tax evasion than using a combination of income and consumption taxes. But more importantly, there is such a thing as too much savings (some argue Japan might be at this level); the simple Solow model suggests that there is a level of saving that maximizes long run economic consumption; after which long run economic consumption decreases. So a combination of consumption and income taxes may be preferable to consumption taxes alone. 25% is also nice because it is easily invertible. 1/1.25 = 0.8.

As much as I am in favour of pigouvian taxes, I don't think the revenue from these taxes alone (provided they are taxes appropriately, i.e. at the marginal external social cost) will be sufficient to replace income taxes alone. 1. Call it a CO2 emission tax please; that is more accurate. 2. With respect to a CO2 emission tax, there is the complicating aspect of game theory. Unlike the previous examples, the majority of the effect of CO2 emissions is going to be outside of Canada (given that Canada is ~2% of global GDP, let's say that 98% of the 'benefit' is outside Canada). If Canada were to implement a CO2 tax that were in its national best interest then it would be only 2% the tax level that would be in the global best interest (all assuming that CO2 emissions have a negative externality). If Canada were to unanimously do that tax level that is in the global best interest, then that doesn't incentivize other countries from doing the same, where as doing some sort of tit-for-tat approach (refusing to implement the globally optimal level until a global agreement on reducing CO2 emissions) would be more effective at incentivizing other countries from doing the same. 3. You say there is no doubt that a CO2 emission tax is one of the most effective ways to raise revenue. Well I have doubts. Can you please demonstrate to me that the marginal external social cost of CO2 emissions is negative? A few things: - Income tax doesn't incentivize savings as much as a consumption tax, so doesn't result in an as high long run GDP per capita. - Our current system isn't as simple as you make it seem. All the tax brackets and exceptions make it far more complicated than it needs to be. Personally, I would argue that tax as a function of income should at the very least be a c-infinity function rather than this arbitrary mess we have now. - A progressive income tax creates a much higher disincentive to work than a flat income tax per revenue earned. - Progressive tax system leads to unfair distribution of taxes in some cases (example: two families that earn the same amount may pay significantly different levels of taxes based upon distribution of income within the family; income splitting helps somewhat, but then it causes discrimination against unmarried couples and people that don't agree with the institution of marriage).

Conservatives can win if they somehow allow another terrorist attack to occur, like on parliament hill; or get lucky and have one occur. Otherwise, I see no way for them to win.

Not yet. But Cersei has agreed for Petyr to be Warden of the North once he takes out the winner of Bolton vs Stannis. Once Sansa comes back to him, Petyr will have an excuse to invade the North (and Sansa may stumble upon some nobel houses loyal to the Starks along the way, giving Petyr allies). Plus many in the Vale wanted to side with the North and Riverlands in the war of 5 kings and value honour highly, so would be willing to go to war anyway. But does Petyr have enough command of the Vale to invade the North? Not yet. But that is what season 6 is for (Petyr will establish control over the vale, and probably also deal with the situation in King's Landing by using Gendry to help the Tyrells). So come season 7, then we may see the start of the war between the Boltons and Petyr (plus conflict between Roose and Ramsey). Edit: This scene is particularly relevant to what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_V8210JoCo Ramsey said that he will 'make Sansa happy' and 'I'll never hurt her, you have my word'. It's a perfect setup to give Petyr an excuse to invade the North.

Or they go to the iron islands, or they go to the vale, or they go to karhold or something (northern allies) or they go to the river lands (harrenhall, Tulleys, Reeds). They can go in pretty much any direction and will find allies that can protect them. That would be extremely pointless. It wouldn't really advance Theon's plot, and it would make Sansa's plot too divergent from the books. 1. It allows them to avoid creating the new character of Jeyne Poole, which helps save time for a series that only has 10 episodes per season. It also gives Sansa and the Boltons more scenes. 2. It allows for a smoother transition between season 5 (which concentrates on Northern politics and the Stannis-Bolton conflict) and season 6 (which will probably concentrate on Vale and Iron Island politics). 3. It arguably gives Petyr Baelish an excuse to declare war on Roose Bolton later on. 4. It will create conflict between Roose and Ramsey since it was Ramsey's fault for mistreating his bride that she ran away (after Roose arranged such a politically important marriage).

Yes. It gets very complicated. Actually, a capital gains tax would discourage savings more than corporate tax since capital gains tax is directly on capital gains from investments. There are two things I think you should be wary of. First, just because someone has a Nobel prize or went to an Ivy League school doesn't mean they are correct about something; I'm not saying Paul Krugman isn't a very qualified economist but one should avoid appeal to authority; try to at least understand the basics of the reasoning that is given in support of their claims. Second, just because someone has the title 'economist' doesn't mean that they don't have significant bias or don't try to dogmatically arrive at a pre-determined conclusion; economics has historically been relatively politicized (though is becoming more objective, mathematical and based on empiricism recently) and you can find economists that are liberal, conservative, communist, anarchist and white-nationalist. He's 90 years old and long retired. I have no idea what is view is. Maybe it's out of ignorance, but likely it is not seen as 'progressive' enough. Perhaps these social activists do no think that low-income communities should pay any tax, and the 1% or whatever should pay 100% of the tax. That would arguably be an improvement (especially getting rid of the tax credits). Although, as a generalization, higher consumption taxes or even pigouvian taxes (such as taxes on pollution or tobacco) would be preferable to either business taxes or income taxes.

Yes, but is it considered ideological. As I read more, it does seem closer to terrorism, but it is still borderline. Did he release some sort of Manifesto like Anders Brevik did?

As for empirical data going outside the 95% confidence interval CMIP5, here is Figure 11.9 of AR5: And that is using RCP 4.5. And here I thought that RCP 8.5 was suppose to be representative of the 'business as usual' emission scenario according to the alarmists. I guess they must have chosen to go with RCP 4.5 because RCP 6.0 and 8.5 failed them too strongly. Here's what happens when you include other RCPS: Yep. Outside of the 95% confidence interval.

It's too bad you are ignoring the issue of 30 W/m^2 zonal oscillations in solar insolation for CMIP5 models. Because I think it's a major nail in the coffin of the reliability of CMIP5 models. - Estimate the probability distribution function of volcanic eruptions using empirical data (an assumption of log-log linearity between the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) and frequency seems reasonable). - Use the estimated PDF to perform Monte-Carlo simulations using the computer model and the estimates of future radiative forcing (you could also vary this based on the uncertainty in the Monte-Carlo simulation) to obtain estimates of future warming that takes the probability of future volcanism into account. Is that so hard? But I guess pretending volcanism just stops advances the alarmist cause more. Oh, it is small in comparison. But that doesn't mean you should ignore it. You can predict future changes in solar irradiance by taking the fourier transform of past changes and maybe applying Akaike's Information Criterion to select the best sinusoidal model. Yes and longer term projections pretend that volcanism and changes in solar irradiance are zero after 2035 as well. Solar Irradiance peaked around 1958 and has roughly stabilized (though has been gradually decreasing). It will continue to decrease (probably more rapidly) over the coming decades. This is based upon fourier analysis of the empirical data (including radio-nucleotide Holocene reconstructions).

I'm pretty sure that the recent empirical data (even using Cowtan and Way) has gone well outside of the 95% confidence interval of the CMIP3 predictions that used data ending in 2000. A 5% significant level is the most common significance level in science to test hypotheses. As for 'being in the range of overall simulations', if that were your criteria then you wouldn't be able to falsify climate models since you could just make the number of simulations to be arbitrarily large to get an arbitrarily large range. And if you can't allow for the possibility to falsify the models, then you aren't following the scientific method. With respect to CMIP5, there is a discrepancy, although I don't think that there has been sufficient time for the projections to be falsified since it is newer. Of course, by the time enough time has passed to potentially falsify CMIP5, CMIP6 or 7 will be out. Coverage bias in HadCRUT4 explains some but not all of the discrepancy between CIMP3/5 projections and the instrumental record. I was tired and made a mistake. I apologize and thank you for pointing that out. I retract my earlier claims with respect to part C of AR5 Figure 10.1. See, I can admit when I am wrong or make a mistake. Too bad you can't do the same.

And the best estimate still doesn't exist, just like the AR5 best estimate for ECS doesn't exist. If it does exist then it must have a median value and a 95% confidence interval, so please provide me with the median value of the estimate and its 95% confidence interval. Again, all based on CMIP5, which are inconsistent with the empirical data, overestimate climate sensitivity and have 30 W/m^2 zonal oscillations in solar insolation. I suspected that solar irradiance changes prior to 1950 might have not been properly taken into account based on the very limited information you provided earlier. Since I have seen the methodology, I retracted my previous claims. That said, given that the CMIP5 models are strongly subject to specification error, did not adequately predict recent temperature changes and have 30 W/m^2 zonal oscillations, I don't consider them a reliable tool to answer the question of how much warming since 1950 is anthropogenic. It's related. If a computer model gives biased estimates of climate sensitivity, then chances are it will give biased estimates of how much recent warming is anthropogenic. A set of computer models with median ECS of 3.2 C cannot be considered representative of our best understanding of climate when that is even higher than the 'best estimate' of ECS provided in AR4 (and in AR5 the lower bound of the 95% confidence interval was reduced). Either you don't understand the context of Bjorn Stevens' statement or you do but you are purposely misrepresenting it because it is convenient for your dogma. Bjorn Stevens published a paper and Nic Lewis used the updated estimates to update his estimates from his 2014 paper with Judith Curry. He found that his estimate of ECS was nearly 12% lower due to the updated forcing estimates relative to AR5 estimates. Conservative outlets and deniers then took the updated estimates by Nic Lewis as evidence to somehow discredit AGW. I.e. the deniers were misrepresenting both Bjorn Stevens and Nic Lewis. Bjorn Stevens then felt it was necessary to respond to this misinterpretation of his findings especially given that he was getting emails from the general public who were taking the false claims by the conservative outlets at face value. I see you are avoiding the question (as well as many others). Do you consider Nic Lewis a denier? Yes or no? Certainly he has been called a denier many times. Yes, and that isn't calling Nic Lewis a denier. One of the reasons for the discrepancy in climate sensitivity estimates is the fact that the definition of ECS tends to vary somewhat from study to study. In the case of Nic Lewis' radiative forcing calculation, his ECS definition is probably lower than more traditional definitions of ECS. Bjorn Stevens had said the same thing and Nic Lewis does not deny this claim. Using a methodology that uses a slightly different definition of ECS that causes and underestimation of ECS doesn't make you a denier. Generally the burden is suppose to be on the person making the claims to provide the supporting evidence or methodology or whatever that result in those claims. But with you, I've gotten used to your refusal to provide evidence or care about the methodology behind an estimate. I was hoping you would provide a link to the exact part of AR5 that contains an explanation of the methodology, or better yet copy the exact paragraphs and paste them into the thread. But 'here's the entire AR5, I'm too scientific illiterate to find it so go find it yourself' was as good as I could get. Yes. For example, the former UN IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri who claims that environmentalism is his religion and dharma. What ideology is that? I reject CMIP5 results as being reliable to obtain percentage of warming since 1950 due to human activity. Is this what you mean by broad-based and dismissive?

I found more interesting nonsense in AR5. "As discussed in Section 11.3.6.2, the RCP scenarios assume nounderlying trend in total solar irradiance and no future volcanic eruptions." Wow, really? I knew RCP had problems, but not this. Given that TSI is expected to decrease and volcanic aerosols have a cooling affect, these assumptions conveniently help the alarmist cause in making the RCP scenarios overestimate future warming even more.

Also, let's look how your beloved CMIP5 fairs in your beloved AR5. Here is figure 10.1 from AR5. Part A shows a clear discrepancy between the model/predictions and the recent slowdown in the rate of global warming. The difference is large enough to arguably falsify the models. Part C is even worse. It shows the complete failure for the computer models to reproduce the instrumental record, particularly post 1970. Guess what happened after 1970? The correlation between human aerosols and greenhouse gas forcing broke down and started to diverge. Look at what your beloved CMIP5 is doing; it is greatly overestimating temperature changes post 1970! Obviously, CMIP5 simultaneously overestimates the effect of aerosols and greenhouse gasses. Maybe I need to dumb it down a bit. In part C, the red line is your wonderful computer model with median ECS of 3.2 C. The black line is reality. But you and Gavin Schmidt would have me believe that CMIP5 is a good way to obtain post 1950 warming due to anthropogenic factors? Edit: Sorry I was tired and misread the caption of Figure 10.1. Part C consists only of temperature changes due to greenhouse gases. The fact that there is a discrepancy between the recent slowdown and warming and the expectations of CMIP5 as shown by part A still stands.

Actually, the above analogy could be improved a bit since only 1 linearly independent observation won't allow you to obtain a best estimate for the weights of elephants and mice. Suppose instead there are two observations, the first is the weight of 3000 elephants and 3000 mice and the second is the weight of 3000 elephants and 3001 mice. According to the a priori belief one would expect the first weight to be 12000000 +/- 60000 kg and the second weight to be 12002000 +/- 60010 kg. The first observation is 12000000.00 kg and the second observation is 12000000.04 kg. It would appear that the a priori assumptions are consistent with the data. However, that doesn't mean that these are your best estimates of the elephants and mice. These observations suggest that the best estimate for the weight of a mouse is 0.04 kg and the best estimate for the weight of an elephant is 3999.96 kg.

Yes. Let's be the nation of Cybernetic American Muslims!

Okay. How about we become 1 with the United States. Then we will be a superpower. I guess an alternative is to join the Islamic Caliphate. Then we will be a superpower and have a high population growth. Win-win! Realism. I explained why climate change isn't going to be sufficient for the next 100 years. I guess a 3rd option is to encourage rapid cyberization & advance in robotics and somehow use that to build a massive army of drones controlled by cyborgs; then natural resources will become more relevant relative to population. So you have 3 options to make Canada a super power: 1. Merge with the USA. 2. Join the Islamic Caliphate. 3. Become cyborgs before the other countries do, although I suspect South Korea will beat us to this. Take your pick. Maybe we can do all 3. You can believe you have wings as much as you want, but that isn't going to make you sprout wings and fly around like an angel.

"Terrorism is commonly defined as violent acts (or the threat of violent acts) intended to create fear (terror), perpetrated for an economic,[1] religious, political, or ideological goal, and which deliberately target or disregard the safety of non-combatants (e.g., neutral military personnel or civilians)." As far as I am concerned there are three traits needed for this to be considered terrorism. A. Must consist of violent acts. B. Must target civilian population. C. Must be in the name of or due to a religious, political or ideological goal. This is a hate crime, and A and B are true in this case, but I'm not sure about C. What is the ideology? I'm not sure if racism counts as an ideology.

Sure I can explain the basic intuition behind the idea. Firstly, in society goods and services are produced. How much goods and services are produced depend on many factors such as the number of people working, how much education or experience the people have, how much technology your society has, or how much physical capital there is. I'll focus on the physical capital aspect (because that is what is relevant in the context of your question). Basically, physical capital encompasses non-human things that are bought for the purposes of production. It can include tools, cars, or buildings. For example, a hammer is a form of physical capital; if I have a wooden mallet, I can hammer things faster than if I use my bear hands; if I have an iron hammer I can do more hammering that with a wooden mallet; If I have some sort of electronic hammer the I can do more hammering than with the iron hammer. Another example is a computer. If I have an old DOS computer, I can generally do more work than with no computer at all. However, if I have a windows7 computer, then I can do more work than with the DOS computer. As a 3rd example, I will do a building. It is easier to do office work in a mud-hut than outside; but even easier to do work in someone's living room; and even easier to get work done in an air-conditioned office building. So physical capital is used in the production of goods and services, it costs money (usually), and if you have more physical capital, you will generally be able to produce more goods and services. In our society, people save money in banks or in bonds or in the stock market or wherever. Banks then take that money and invest it (in bonds or stocks or wherever). That money is then lended to companies to purchase physical capital. For example, a construction company might use it to by a bulldozer, a tech company may use it to buy a computer, or a trucking company may use it to buy a truck. That purchase of capital is then used to make goods and services which the population then benefits from. If a society has more savings then it will get more investment, which leads to a greater production of goods and services (which results in a richer society). Some taxes (such as consumption taxes) discourage consumption and encourage saving, where as other taxes (such as a capital gains tax) discourage saving and encourage consumption. Thus different taxes will affect the long run production of goods and services differently. I'll point out that there is such a thing as saving too much. If you were to save 100% of what you produce then you would have nothing to consume, which would mean that you would have a very low standard of living (because what ultimately matters is consumption of goods and services; investment is a means to an end). There is an optimal amount of savings for a society. However, in the case of Canada or the USA, we are way under this optimal value so could benefit from more savings (some countries are arguably above the optimal, such as Japan).