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Grex > Agora46 > #17: affirmative action - UM - supreme court (wha-hoppin?!) | |
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janc
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response 64 of 113:
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Jul 1 13:46 UTC 2003 |
I grew up among physicians and observed even as a kid that doctors
make *terrible* engineers. Doctors generally work on human bodies.
The human body, is so complex that you can't really understand many
of it's processes. You have to do things by trial and error and see
what works. But you are working in what is usually an essentially
benign environment. A good surgeon doesn't try to carefully stitch
everything back together exactly right. He gets things close enough and
gets the incision closed quickly (reducing chance of infection) trusting
that the natural healing processes of the body will fix all the details.
A lot of medical processes are like that - attack the patient with knives
and poisons, trusting the body to fix all the collateral damage you do.
Doctors don't heal people - they just try to facilitate the body's
natural healing.
For engineering, proceeding without a thorough understanding of the
underlying principles is undesirable (though very often necessary), but
getting things approximately right and trusting that things will work
out the rest of the way hardly ever works. I've seen brick walls built
by physicians. It's not a pretty sight. The mind set is similarly bad
for flying aircraft - I've heard small private aircraft refered to as
"Doctor Killers". If you are riding in a plane, pick one piloted by an
engineer over one piloted by a doctor any day. Doctors just don't have
a sufficiently firm grasp of Murphy's Law.
I think doctors might make better politicians than engineers.
Like engineers, they are in the habit of judging the value of their
procedures by the real world outcome. They are a bit better a
dealing with poorly understood systems and outcomes that are not
always subjectively measurable (though doctors are much better at
treating broken limbs than they are at treating general feelings of
malease). Social systems do have certain abilities to naturally heal.
People implementing a law often modify it to make it make more sense
(eg, there are lots of laws the police quietly agree not to enforce).
Having faith in this process might be better for a lawmaker than trying
to get all the details exactly perfect in the legislation.
However, like engineers, physicians aren't really used to marketing their
ideas to the general public. They are used to having people come to them
as penitents, pleading for help, and they are used to their opinions being
accepted at face value with little question by most of their customers.
This is not a very good starting point for getting legislation passed.
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janc
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response 65 of 113:
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Jul 1 14:13 UTC 2003 |
For a businessman, the value of an idea is ultimately determined by whether
it makes a profit when implemented. Success is measured in dollars.
(Yes, I know real businessmen think about other things too, just as real
lawyers and physicians and engineers are more complex that the profiles
I mention. I'm trying to describe the distinctive thought processes needed
for success in different fields. Considerations of ethics and social
responsibility have a place in *any* profession, and all professions have
people all over the ethical spectrum.)
Hmm...I'm having a hard time with this one. Part of the problem is that
*everyone* is a businessman. We all need to bring in as much or more money
than we spend. It's a major consideration in all our lives. We all market
our services.
Businessman tend to operate in very hierarchical structures. The larger
supply of businessmen in the Republican party is probably why it is more
hierarchically structured. People used to a hierarchical command structure
might get by OK in the white house (up to a point) but the legislature is
rather a different deal.
On the other hand, many businessmen are salesmen - used to going out and
talking to masses of people and trying to convince them to buy a product.
Being able to convince people to buy a product isn't that different from
being able to convince them to support an idea or a candidate.
I'm just not sure how you actually apply the idea of profit to a government.
It's a dubious fit.
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jazz
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response 66 of 113:
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Jul 1 14:42 UTC 2003 |
There's also what seems to be a great deal more commonality of interest
in the Republican party.
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gull
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response 67 of 113:
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Jul 1 15:01 UTC 2003 |
Re #64: I always figured that the reason physicians tended to have
aircraft accidents is that they had a lot of money. Just because you
can afford a high-performance aircraft doesn't mean you can fly one
well. I've heard the term "Doctor Killer" used specifically to refer to
the Beech Baroness, which is a fast, roomy single-engine plane that
apparently has some unfortunate stall characteristics that can make it
tricky to fly.
Re #66: I don't know if there's more commonality of interest, or if they
just do a better job keeping everyone in line. The Republican party
does not tolerate moderates well.
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goose
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response 68 of 113:
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Jul 1 17:27 UTC 2003 |
The Beech Bonanza is known as the Forked Tail Doctor Killer, because of it's
V tail and the reputation it has as a plane that is harder to handle than most
recreational pilots are used to.
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janc
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response 69 of 113:
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Jul 1 18:24 UTC 2003 |
It's certainly true that no plane is likely to get called a "Janitor Killer".
Doctors are more likely to own airplanes than many other professions. But
few of the doctors I've ever met had the necessarily paranoia to be safe
pilots. They just don't *expect* things to go wrong the way engineers do.
I've known several doctors killed in plane crashes - mostly taking off and
flying in bad conditions, sure that everything will work out.
I was surprised that I wasn't very good at characterizing the mindset
encouraged by being a businessman. I don't find educators easy either.
Educators measure their success by their ability to communicate key ideas
and methods of thought to their students. They aren't necessarily trying
to convince their students to take any particular action, instead, they
are trying to endow people with new capabilities.
I would expect an educator-turned-politician to tend toward trying to solve
social problems by empowering people. Give people the capability to act,
and trust them to identify and solve the problem themselves. This kind of
thinking might fit in better in local government than in federal government.
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jazz
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response 70 of 113:
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Jul 1 18:24 UTC 2003 |
Re #67: I really do think there's more commonality, though. Most
conservatives can agree on certain common economic and social interests, and
are more willing to compromise towards the party line. On the left, however,
you have everything from the greens and (arguably) the libertarians to Earth
First and racial consciousness groups.
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russ
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response 71 of 113:
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Jul 2 02:08 UTC 2003 |
Re various: The Beechcraft Bonanza came in two models: the V-tail
and the straight-tail (originally known as the Debonair, because the
straight tail didn't have the same cachet).
The original "straight 35" Bonanzas had a serious structural defect
in the left wing, where the end of the wing spar's shear web, the
landing light opening and a joint in the wing skin all fell at the same
place. This amounted to a sign saying "BREAK HERE", and from what
I understand a very large fraction of those aircraft did exactly that.
(In-flight airframe failure is essentially 100% fatal.)
Even after that was fixed, the V-tail Bonanza had a problem. Its
tail caused yaw/roll coupling ("Dutch roll"), and when the original
designer increased the tailplane area to cure another problem he
did it by making the ruddervator panels wider... but he did not
relocate the structural spar, nor add ribs to stiffen the greater
depth of the front D-tube. The ruddervator ahead of the spar was
an empty metal tube, and sufficient force could cause it to buckle.
Once buckled, the deflection of the leading edge amounted to a huge
(and unintended) control input which caused the aircraft to go out
of control or even break up in midair due to excessive aerodynamic
forces. Sharp wind shears, wake turbulence from other aircraft and
other factors were apparently sufficient to buckle a ruddervator.
The powers that be finally issued an Airworthiness Directive (AD)
which set forth standards for stiffening the attachment between
the ruddervator leading edges and the aircraft tailcone, and the
problem went away (though not without grumbling from people whose
fixes didn't meet the letter of the AD and had to do it over).
Re #69: Doctors also have a tendency to neglect their recurrent
training and just hop in the machine when it suits them; when
something comes up, they often don't have the proper reactions
drilled into them. The Bonanza is a high-performance aircraft,
and things can happen mighty fast; the pilot has to be ahead of it.
IIRC, the Mitsubishi MU-2 became essentially worthless because of a
slightly more extreme case of the same; it became nearly impossible
to get insurance for one because the required training was so
specialized and could not be neglected. If you didn't mind flying
without insurance on your life and hull, you could pick up a really
fast twin-turbine airplane for less than some used Cherokees.
Re #65: Actually, some business principles do appear to be at
work in the Republican platform (though not the execution). The
idea of the Laffer curve is classic economics, finding the "sweet
spot" even if it means giving up some of your margin because the
greater volume will yield you more money. Ditto the "flat tax",
because the simpler something is the less overhead you have and
the fewer discouraging hassles (another form of tax) there are.
What we could really use for a good tax policy is a bunch of smart
folks who don't have ideological axes to grind, nor horses of their
own in the race (and aren't in the pay of folks who do); they could
do a good job of making one. And it'll never happen.
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janc
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response 72 of 113:
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Jul 2 05:07 UTC 2003 |
I disagree with the last paragraph. Non-ideological people could not
design a good tax code. The basic idea behind taxation is to raise
money. But any form of taxation is going to cause people to change their
behaviour to accomodate the tax. Given this, it is necessary to try to
think of ways to design the tax system so that it encourages productive
behaviors rather than destructive ones. Your choices are to design the
tax code blindly, without thought to the impact it will have on society,
or you can design it guided by some ideological theory of what kind of
society would be good.
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lk
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response 73 of 113:
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Jul 2 05:54 UTC 2003 |
Jan, I think what you were getting at is the "god complex" of [some] doctors.
There's a dental software package that advertises that it's the only
such software designed and written by a dentist.... which of course
made it an instant hit with dentists.
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mdw
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response 74 of 113:
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Jul 2 06:27 UTC 2003 |
I suppose if you were really keen on "blind" taxation, you could design
the whole system around this. We already have something like this for
parking tickets and speeding tickets. Saddam had a somewhat larger
scale version of this running in Iraq. There's no reason we couldn't
do something like this here. Here's how it would work: the feds would
randomly pick on people, property, or money, and upon finding it, would
randomly confiscate some large arbitrary amount. Private insurers
could then cover the risk of this happening, and people could elect
either to take the big but unlikely risk from the gov't, or a smaller
more predictable nibble from private insurers.
So, for instance, driving down the road, you might be pulled over by
the police, and handed a "random" tax bill of, say, $320,000. Or maybe
they just seize your car and sell it at public auction. Not to fear --
you would be prepared for this, because it's merely another risk (like
being struck by a drunk driver, or having your car stolen), and your
insurance policy would actually pay the bill. Some people would elect
not to have the insurance, and would lose more. That happens today,
and nobody sweats that.
Same thing with bank accounts. Every so often, the feds would walk
into a bank, essentially say "stick 'em up", and walk out with the
contents of everybody's savings account. The bank would have
previously subscribed to some form of private insurance consortium,
funded it out of small charges taken from everyone's account, and would
merely replace the money with the insurance payoff. The result in this
case would be an inversion of what we do today: today the feds insure
private loss: with this new tax scheme, private insurance would insure
against loss due to the feds.
Another way to look at this is that it would privatize the tax
collector and taxation rates. Instead of having one governmental
entity that collects tax moneys, according to some instutitional
formula nobody likes, there would be many private parties collecting
the money that ultimately funds the government, according to numerous
different schemes each designed to favour one element of society at the
expense of others. Presumably market pressure would distribute the
risk to be equally fair to everyone, on average. Just as our current
privately run medical field is presumably more efficient at providing
affordable quality medical care at a fair price to all, so would this
new scheme be more efficient at funding the government.
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scg
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response 75 of 113:
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Jul 2 06:51 UTC 2003 |
Immediately following the dot-com crash, I knew a few people that had sort
of happened to. They excercised somewhere around a million dollars worth of
stock options, didn't sell any of the stock, watched the stock's value decline
to near zero, and then ended up with tax bills in the hundreds of thousands
of dollars. This was the lack of insurance scenario -- the widely repeated
rule was that seling stock quickly was bad because it would be taxed at a
higher rate, but it turned out that not selling left them not only vulnerable
to losing the entire value, but to owing taxes on money they no longer had
anyway.
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jazz
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response 76 of 113:
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Jul 2 13:19 UTC 2003 |
Mmmm, aren't losses deductible?
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slynne
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response 77 of 113:
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Jul 2 14:00 UTC 2003 |
Yeah, stock market losses are deductible. That I one reason I like to
gamble on the market because at least when I lose money, I get to write
it off. ;)
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flem
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response 78 of 113:
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Jul 2 14:46 UTC 2003 |
You can only deduct $3000/year in losses, though. Further losses can be
carried over to future years, but that doesn't help in the case described in
#75.
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slynne
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response 79 of 113:
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Jul 2 15:37 UTC 2003 |
Oh, I didnt realize that there was a limit. I never lost more than
$3000 so it never came up.
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russ
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response 80 of 113:
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Jul 3 03:33 UTC 2003 |
Re #72: Our current tax code/abortion is a result of trying to
use tax policy for social engineering. Regardless of the intent,
the ill effects are well documented: people spend billions each
year merely trying to file their taxes, and billions more trying
to avoid taxes on the money they make. The cost to the economy
of the malinvestments made because they were better for tax purposes
than simply doing the most productive thing is probably much bigger
than the gross income of the tax preparation industry.
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i
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response 81 of 113:
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Jul 3 10:58 UTC 2003 |
Re: #80
If you haven't noticed, the biggest problem with our current tax
codes (at least at the Federal level) is the result of using tax
policy - quite successfully - to milk fat campaign contributions
out of innumerable groups and individuals who desire more favorable
treatment for themselves. Employing many more people in the IRS,
tax prep. industry, tax consulting & shelter industry, etc. are
not a material (to the politicians) issue.
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janc
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response 82 of 113:
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Jul 3 15:44 UTC 2003 |
Re: #80
Taxation *IS* social engineering. You cannot apply a tax without changing
the way the economy works. There is no option of doing taxation without doing
social engineering. The only options are which kind of social engineering
you are going to do. You can disagree with the goals the lawmakers have
pursued with the tax code, but you cannot demand a "neutral" tax code. There
is no such thing.
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polygon
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response 83 of 113:
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Jul 3 16:19 UTC 2003 |
Economists tout the value-added tax (VAT) as one which has relatively
little impact on economic decisionmaking. Essentially, the flow of
money through your business is taxed, regardless whether it ends up
as profits, employee salary, executive furniture, or whatever.
Michigan is the only US jurisdiction to have a VAT -- we call it the
Single Business Tax (SBT). Hundreds of business taxes were abolished and
replaced with the single low rate on gross receipts.
The immediate impact of enacting the SBT was to dramatically reduce the
state tax bills of the Big Three auto companies, because practically every
one of the individual business taxes that were abolished had built-in bias
to tax larger companies more heavily. So the SBT was amended to
completely EXEMPT firms with gross receipts below a certain number,
something like $300,000. Of course, this meant that a growing company
which exceeded $300,000 for the first time would be hit with a large tax
bill, but only the same rate that all their larger competitors were
already paying.
Nonetheless, the SBT remained extraordinarily unpopular, since it meant
that a money-losing business still had a substantial tax liability.
Quite necessary for the concept, you see, because taxing profits creates
an incentive to redirect what otherwise might be profits into other
things.
So the Engler Administration and the Republican legislature decided to
abolish the SBT and replace it with, um, well, good question. Certainly
not the hundreds of business taxes that the SBT replaced. Maybe a
corporate profits tax with a very low rate like the SBT. Of course, that
would generate much less revenue, hence shifting the state tax burden to
individual taxpayers.
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klg
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response 84 of 113:
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Jul 3 16:32 UTC 2003 |
The VAT is, in effect, a national sales tax. It is passed along
through the manufacturing/retail chain from seller to buyer and is
eventually paid in total by the consumer. As a tax on consumption, it
would be expected to reduce consumer spending and increase consumer
savings.
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other
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response 85 of 113:
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Jul 3 16:36 UTC 2003 |
And since when is anyone ineresed in that?
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keesan
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response 86 of 113:
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Jul 4 02:05 UTC 2003 |
I found it interesting. The individual tax in Michigan has already been cut
severely, which explains why state programs also got cut severely.
I read that houses in Louisiana were at one time taxed according to number
of rooms, and closets counted as rooms, so they stopped building closets.
In England they taxed by number of windows, so people bricked up their
windows. In the Netherlands they made one large window (whole wall). Here
they tax according to what they think your house would sell for if you had
to move because the taxes are so high, not what it actually cost you to build.
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gelinas
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response 87 of 113:
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Jul 4 02:54 UTC 2003 |
(Charleston, SC, I think it was, taxed based on the width of the house. So
the houses were all one room wide and very long.)
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russ
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response 88 of 113:
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Jul 4 03:22 UTC 2003 |
Re #82: You got your first fallacy in your first sentence. Taxation
per se is NOT social engineering; any tax may have social effects,
but to be "social engineering" the effect has to have been a goal of
the tax policy rather than an unintended outcome (design is required
to have engineering). A tax policy which treats things more equally
has fewer distorting effects, and is "engineered" to raise money
rather than achieve some other end.
While searching for something else, I found an example of social
engineering via taxation gone horribly wrong. Turns out that Denmark
imposed a tax on fuel used for heating, but not on fuel used for other
purposes. This caused industry, which often had low-pressure steam or
hot water as a byproduct of some other process, to dump the heat to
the environment rather than selling it for heating buildings; if they
dumped the heat, they didn't owe tax on their fuel. The tax policy
effectively demanded waste.
The result of a carbon tax would have been the opposite, as well as
being a simpler and more direct way to accomplish the end. (Carbon
taxes are social engineering, but much more direct and harder to
game [and with fewer unintended consequences] than complex schemes.)
Re #81: <russ has nothing to say, but agrees 99.9% with Walter>
Re #83: Taxing firms which have yet to make a profit is a good way
to keep firms from getting started. This may be why the USA does
a much better job of it than the European economies.
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