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The idea of a minuscule 1% Wealth tax has been promoted recently, but what I think would be better is a truly progressive tax on all wealth gains regardless of source – whether it be through employment income, capital gains, or gifts and inheritances.

What reasonable objection can there be to a tax regime which says you can keep 1/n of the nth $million of whatever wealth you gain, by any means whatsoever, in any given year?

This would mean (since 1/1=1) that there would be no tax at all on the first million dollars of income.

The second million would be taxed at a rate of 50%

The third at 67%.

And so on.

So an income of $2million (either from employment, capital gains, or inheritance) would yield an after-tax gain of $1000000+$500000=$1500000 for an effective tax rate of 25%

An income of $3million would yield  $1500000+$333333=$1833333 for an effective tax rate of 39%

$4million would yield  $1833333+$250000=$2083333 for a net rate of 48%

And an income of $ten million (either from employment, capital gains, or inheritance) would yield an after-tax gain of $1000000+$500000+$333333+…+$100000=$2,930,000 for an effective tax rate of 71%.

And, yes, the marginal tax rate would be unlimited, so an inheritance of $1billion, if paid all at once, would have a marginal tax rate (on the last million) of 99.9% but the amount the poor exploited child would get to keep would still be almost $7.5 million.

But if the transfer was spread out over several years the tax impact would be a lot less – which might perhaps provide a useful incentive for effective succession planning!

The revenue (and taxpayer impact) of such a system could easily be adjusted by just changing the tax-free amount and step size from a million dollars to some other amount (such as, say, $100k)

It’s in the last minute and a half of this video that the doctor testifying in Chauvin’s defense provides what I consider the most damning evidence for the prosecution. It relates to the difference between the last two videos in my earlier post where, in the color negative version of the Floyd incident, the person who died was immediately placed in a recovery position and subjected to CPR.

It is never possible to really prove the intended outcome of an action, so I guess the legal definition of murder is generally more along the lines of an intended act (or omission?) whose consequence is known to almost certainly be death. In Chauvin’s case we can be reasonably certain that he knew of the possible risk of knee-on-neck restraint, but in my opinion it is not obvious that while Floyd was complaining Chauvin had any good reason to know that what he was doing was almost certain to cause death(*); and since it is often used by police, taking that level of risk is at least sometimes considered not to be murderous even if death does ensue.

But I think we can be almost certain (eg from senior police testimony) that Chauvin knew from his training at least that when Floyd stopped complaining, cardiac arrest was likely to have occurred (albeit very likely largely due to the drugs and panic as much or more than actual airway obstruction). And from that moment on, any interference with prompt attempts at resuscitation does amount to murder.

*- Perhaps it should be more widely known by police that knee-on-neck restraint is very likely to cause death when applied to people in a state of drug-induced panic – to the extent that using it at all in such cases should be prohibited, and should result in an almost automatic conviction for at least manslaughter if death does ensue.

Well, I have to admit that I had been completely unaware of Coleridge as a philosopher until coming upon this Aeon Essay. But on reading it  I found much to like about what seems to have been his approach.

In particular I was impressed by the assertion that “seeing polarised debates as revealing an interdependent whole, he tried to embrace the views of his philosophical opponents, rather than simply dismiss them.” If true this would be a refreshing deviation from the impression I often got from reading philosophy that each new school was arguing against a wilfully over-literal interpretation of whatever its predecessor had tried to express in the probably always inadequate words and sentences of human language. Perhaps his poet’s ear gave him a greater understanding of the weakness of propositional language than seems to have been common among those who try to define perfect grand philosophical systems (often with the same effectiveness as the famous blind men studying an elephant without an understanding of the difference between “has” and “is”).

And I also like many aspects of how his ‘polar philosophy’ deals with subjective and objective ideas and how he seems to have thought of the age-old stress between thinking of parts and wholes (the many vs the one) as related to different mental functions (which some might now, perhaps too simplistically, identify with left and right brain hemispheres).

Source: Why do humans have numbers: are they cultural or innate? | Aeon Essays

The fact that we can reliably count to 152 and distinguish it from 153 does not mean that we have a “sense” of either of those numbers. In fact I know of no-one who does. But they are not “social constructions” for us either.

Our understanding of the distinct features of 152, while not directly built into our brains, is an inevitable consequence of certain simpler features that are built in  – namely the tendency to clump aspects of our experience together into distinct objects (including the finding of smaller clumps within larger ones and conversely identifying groups of clumps as new bigger clumps), to identify pairs or groups of clumps as being somehow the “same” as one another in various ways (eg as having equivalent elements, as having the same small number of elements, or as having similar structure in space or time, or…), to have some idea of “relationships” between different things with the possibility that a putative such relationship may be “true” or “false”, and to have rules of “logic” that allow us to relate the truth and falsehood of various such relationships. Any entity with these capacities, even if alone in the universe, might well learn to distinguish 152 from 153, to factor both of them, to recognize 151 as prime, and even to prove Fermat’s Theorem and wonder about the Riemann Hypothesis. There is definitely nothing social or cultural about any of that (apart from the names with which we label the various concepts).

Of course that doesn’t make it all a “real” feature of the universe (though I guess it would be real by definition as a feature of our minds if those minds were really capable of implementing it to all levels), as it depends on those inherited means of processing data which may or may not suffice to describe and predict things at all levels of accuracy.

This is basically just a rehash (or messed up complication) of what I said last time, but the second half of Ball’s article brings up another important point.

Although the arithmetic of large numbers can be analyzed in terms of mental tools which only include built in models for very small ones, we do have (and share with other animals) other ways of dealing with quantity. These involve intuition about relative magnitudes which allow us to compare them without the use of discrete numbers. These comparisons often seem based on geometry (and sometimes fail us – especially as children – when the physical scales conflict with the quantities we are asked to compare). They also often seem based on ratios, and so involve a logarithmic relationship to the additive scales we sometimes use for the same quantities (perhaps also related to the physiological structure of some of our sensory apparati).

Whatever the reason, I think it is important to recognize that our built-in mental apparatus for recognizing and comparing quantities may have (at least) two completely distinct components, which may have evolved to meet different environmental pressures, and may be located in different parts of the brain with different types of implementation. A deeper understanding of this may well be extremely useful in mathematics education, and also perhaps in many other situations where quantitative information needs to be communicated to a wide variety of human types.

This Aeon Essay about whether numbers are cultural or innate is a rerun from 2017. But I read it again and it strikes me that the claims attributed to cognitive scientist Rafael Núñez are wrong on at least two counts.

Yet whether numbers really exist independently of humans ‘is not a scientific debate, but a philosophical, theological or ideological one’, said Núñez. ‘The claim that, say, five is a prime number independently of humans is not scientifically testable. Such facts are matters of beliefs or faith, and we can have conversations and debates about them but we cannot do science with them.’

This is doubly wrong.

First, I would argue that whether numbers “really exist” independently of humans is indeed a scientific question with little to learn from philosophical, theological or ideological perspectives.

And secondly I would say that, if numbers “really exist”, then the fact that five is a prime number independently of humans is indeed scientifically testable.

But first things first. The question of whether numbers “really exist” is really a question about whether or not our propensity to identify parts of our experience as separate countable things, and the binary logic that we use to relate propositions about them, are in fact capable of providing an optimal means for making predictions about what we will experience – or whether some modified “quantum” logic about not-exactly-countable objects with fuzzy boundaries may eventually do a better job. (Yes, some Philosopher may tell me that’s just one “Ontological Perspective”, but I would just ask them to come back when they have a better one.)

And with respect to the primality of five, I would say that (so long as our conventional rules of logic survive the test of experiment) one kind of scientific test of a proposition is provided by showing its logical relationship to others that have already been established. And the primality of five is indeed a logical consequence of the basic properties of numbers that we already consider well tested. (And, yes, some Philosopher may tell me that’s just one “Epistemological Perspective”, but I would just ask them to come back when they have a better one.)

But the article does raise some interesting questions about how our capacity for inventing and/or understanding numbers evolved – which I think are worthy of a subsequent posting.

This is old enough that I may have already responded to it. And after more than half a century maybe I should admit defeat. But every time I see that word I re-live the indignation I felt as a 17 year old being forced to sit through a course on ‘Scientism, Man, and Religion’ and not being able to focus on anything other than the outrageous etymological dishonesty of introducing that pejorative term with the effect (obviously intended because any literate scholar would see it) of causing confusion in the public mind between the mental attitudes of a scientist (which is what the structure of the word implies) and an uncritical devotion to science as our only source of truth and value (which would have been better referred to as “scienceism”).

My contempt for the fearful overreactions of police is tempered by things like this (if that goes on too long for you here’s a summary and shorter version but I actually found the initial boring bit of the longer version quite instructive) and, for colour balance, this.

But while things like this show the colour negative of this, the fact remains that, although the final outcomes were similar, it is not obvious that the second one would have been so fatal if the lead perpetrator had been even one tenth as solicitous of the victim as the one in the first case.

So, apparently many nursing home staff in the US are skipping the vaccine. What scares me most about this (aside from the obvious fact that these people will potentially be carrying the virus into their clients’ living space) is what it says about the lack of medical knowledge among those staff. They don’t all need to be experts, and may well be as gentle and caring as others with more knowledge, but if there’s no medical training there may well be no vetting re other characteristics either.

1/16/2021 1:33 GMT —Nigel Higgenbotham reports from Washundasee, in the Republic of Uzambongo“The free and fair elections that recently took place in the tiny nation of Uzambongo are now being violently rejected by the followers of current Prime Minister and strong-man Doninga Batrumpe. Members of a pro-Batrumpe faction laid siege to the government building in Washundasee, as election results were being confirmed. The pro-Batrumpe rioters broke windows, smashed through doors, and pushed past government….

Source: (285) Sam Morningstar’s answer to What is the purpose of the Million Militia March that is slated to happen on January 20, 2021? – Quora

The Economist has noticed that: After years of dithering, companies are embracing automation – though I wouldn’t necessarily consider waiting for development of the appropriate level of DeepLearning-based AI before making the leap to be “dithering”.

“We must build, but we must build surely”

But “What about the workers?”

“What about the workers, indeed …sir

Let them grasp, I beseech you, with both hands (toot! I’m so sorry, I beg your pardon madam) the opportunities that are offered in this new era of unparalleled progress in productivity. I am sure that we can all appreciate the benefits to society at large of the great, nay unlimited, prospects of these new developments. Let us assume a bold front and go forward together….”

(with apologies for the butchery to PeterSellers )

 Habib Fanny’s answer to What do you think about the fact that 45% of Republicans said they strongly or somewhat support the storming of the Capitol? correctly points out that the reported figure is nonsense. But the somewhat smaller numbers that may not support the storming but fail to consider it an attempted coup do not really disturb me.

I don’t actually think it was an attempted coup myself, in any but a few of the perpetrators’ and instigators’ minds. What I think most of them thought they were doing is attempting to shame, rather than coerce, the Republican senators into acknowledging the rampant fraud that they were convinced those senators really believed had happened.

And I actually feel some sympathy for the sense of profound disrespect and contempt that people like that correctly sense as coming from people like me.

Also (drifting even a bit more off-topic from the question here) I don’t really mind the doomed-to-fail legislators’ challenges and protests. Whichever way a US election goes there is often an objection at that stage from part of the losing side, and these do need to be heard and voted down.

In fact some of the objecting legislators’ speeches were not so much making claims of fraud as claims of non-transparency, and while I do favour mail-in or internet ballots, both in the current special circumstances and going forward, I think that it is not unreasonable for some to feel that the verification process needs to be reviewed and perhaps modified for future elections – both in the US and here in Canada. For example, when I submitted my mail-in ballot in our recent BC election, I was both annoyed by the silly extra “secrecy” envelope and troubled by the fact that with our current mail-in voting procedures we make a mockery of the idea of a secret ballot as there was nothing to prevent my wife from demanding to see my ballot and offering punishment or reward in order to control how I filled it in. (And I could well imagine churchfulls of fundamentalist bigots getting together for a communal voting event in which there would be a lot of social pressure to conform to the community leaders’ preferences.)

Source: Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman tests positive for coronavirus after lockdown with maskless lawmakers during Capitol siege – The Washington Post

A friend recently pointed me to an article at Inside Climate News : Many Scientists Now Say Global Warming Could Stop Relatively Quickly After Emissions Go to Zero –  with the understandable comment “The game-changing, optimistic assertion in the headline is not discussed until the last eight paragraphs of the article (???)!!! And little ink is spent explaining it. Dunno why.”

Well, let’s see.

The article does say that “The idea that global warming could stop relatively quickly after emissions go to zero was described as a ‘game-changing new scientific understanding’ by Covering Climate Now, a collaboration of news organizations covering climate.” And the article linked to does, in turn, refer to two interviews with Michael Mann – one on the CBS News show 60 Minutes and  a companion interview in The Guardian, the latter of which I guess can be taken as the root source of the claim.

According to the Guardian:

 Using new, more elaborate computer models equipped with an interactive carbon cycle, “what we now understand is that if you stop emitting carbon right now … the oceans start to take up carbon more rapidly,” Mann says. Such ocean storage of CO₂ “mostly” offsets the warming effect of the CO₂ that still remains in the atmosphere. Thus, the actual lag between halting CO₂ emissions and halting temperature rise is not 25 to 30 years, he explains, but “more like three to five years”.

Well if Mann said that he’s a scientific idiot. The idea that the oceans will “start to take up carbon more rapidly” if we stop putting it in the air is manifestly ridiculous. The oceans don’t care where the carbon comes from, and the rate of ocean uptake at any time is a function only of the current concentration and other atmospheric conditions at that time – not of their rate of change. Also, there is no way that ocean storage of CO2 “offsets the warming effect of the CO₂ that still remains in the atmosphere”. Absorption into the ocean may actually reduce atmospheric CO2, but if it does so fast enough then the effect won’t just be to stop global warming but to reverse it (though the effects of the consequent ocean acidification may in that case be even stronger than in the earlier predictions).

And even if there is some correct science behind Mann’s garbled nonsense, he’s a political idiot for bringing it up in the context of this interview – for at least two reasons.

First, suggesting the possibility of a rapid reversal of global warming completely undermines his claim that another four year delay in shutting of the CO2 tap would be catastrophic.

And secondly, his idiotic claim on 60 Minutes that  “There’s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity” is undermined by his assertion that “research over the last decade has overturned” the previous consensus that even if all CO₂ emissions were halted overnight, global temperatures would keep rising and heatwaves, droughts, storms and other impacts would keep intensifying “for about 25 to 30 years” (as Sir David King, the former chief science advisor to the British government, said in 2006). It is manifestly clear that large swathes of climate science are definitely NOT “settled” in anything like the same sense as that of gravity and to claim that they are is just to unnecessarily invite challenges to those parts where we do have some certainty – either about some of the actual facts themselves, or about our lack of certainty about how bad some other facts might be. (Whatever anyone may speculate, we certainly don’t know that there is anything that will mitigate the harmful effects of spewing GHGs. So we must stop. And, since we don’t really know how long we have, we must do so as soon as possible.)

I’ve always had doubts about Mann. From when his sloppy temperature studies had to be re-done by Richard Muller’s Berkely Earth Temperature Study and when foolish emails about data adjustment used language which virtually demanded charges of fakery and tampering. Unfortunately the most prominent advocates for anything are often not the most credible.

Sometimes it is necessary to encourage people to follow a protocol while at the same time challenging its appropriateness and suggesting possible alternatives. Source: John Ioannidis: Coronavirus lockdowns questioned by Stanford scientist on Fox News – The Washington Post

I love the idea of Bloomberg Businessweek’s Annual Jealousy List, in which its writers select and promote the work of others.

My reaction to the choices is mixed, but one that struck me is Susan Berfield’s selection of What Happened in Room 10? from The California Sunday Magazine. As Ms Berfield says:

This is a masterful, beautiful, heartbreaking, and provocative story. Katie Engelhart starts with a close and harrowing account of the two women in Room 10 of the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Wash., during the first weeks of the Covid pandemic. From there she moves confidently to dissect the business of nursing homes. Life Care is the biggest privately owned long-term care corporation in the country, its owner a billionaire. The lobbying for deregulation, the Medicare fraud, the fear of litigation, the many ways in which facilities fall short—all are explained with a light touch. She ends with a meditation on aging. What more could we want from a story?

Thanks to Ms Englehart for the story, to Ms Berfield for the pointer, to Bloomberg’s for the unselfish acknowledgement of the work of their competitors and to the New York Times for including a link to it in the ‘Morning Reads’ section of their newsletter.

Aeon’s sibling Psyche presents Nicholas Agar’s views: On the moral obligation to stop shit-stirring | Psyche Ideas

But, far from being the mere random trouble-making of a typical shit-disturber, the slow and deliberate shit-stirring of philosophers is actually what they do best – and most usefully – namely exposing the over-confidence of others, and especially of other philosophers, in the power and scope of their intellectual and moral systems.

Source: (20+) Live | Facebook

This happened a couple of weeks ago.

Panelists included Niki Ashton (didn’t show up but submitted a statement of support), Paul Manley, . . .and my fellow student from half a century ago John Philpot.

To my mind John McCallum was right, back when this started (in the comments that got him fired) and furthermore, regardless of the strength of its legal implications, Trump’s blathering about using Meng as a bargaining chip should have been taken as justification for a use of the Ministerial prerogative to refuse the extradition request. But at this stage it’s too late for that, and the gov’t is irreversibly committed to letting the legal arguments play out. Furthermore I am not convinced that release of Meng would automatically guarantee that of the Michaels. It depends on how explicitly the Chinese would want such a reciprocal release to be seen as an indication that the arrests were just a taking of hostages for exchange purposes – in contradiction to their repeated loud denials of exactly that.

The claim that An irrational constraint is the motivating force in modern science is completely wrong. The first hint of this comes in the subheading “Is hard data the only path to scientific truth? That’s an absurd, illogical and profoundly useful fiction”. Often editorial subheadings egregiously misrepresent the content of what follows, and we can’t fault the author for an editor’s incompetence, but in this case the summary is (almost) a fair one. The article does not deny the role of “beauty” as a motivation or even a path to understanding but it does claim that such considerations are not accepted as part of the process of acceptance of a theory, and that is just not the case. What matters first in the acceptance of a scientific theory is indeed the correctness of its predictions, and a theory that makes false predictions is indeed judged to be, well, false. But among theories that are not false those which can be most beautifully, ie elegantly, ie concisely, expressed are preferred. And there are many historical instances in which credit has been given for a theory which merely improves the elegance without changing the predictions (Copernican astronomy and Special Relativity being two famous examples). So beauty is taken as a valid criterion for comparing theories (so long as they meet the prior criterion of not being demonstrably false) and the claim that “science says you must ignore it . . . in your professional contributions, your publications” is just a lie. And the claim that it’s “irrational” to set one criterion as mandatory before employing another because it violates some philosophical  ‘principle of total evidence’ is complete nonsense!

This article in ‘The Economist’  would be more useful if it identified specific problematic wordings in the proposed US Equality Act (whose goal is allegedly to “ban “discrimination on the basis of sex, gender identity and sexual orientation””).

If the act really is intended to completely “ban” discrimination on the basis of sex, then the inclusion of gender identity and sexual orientation as additional forbidden grounds has little opportunity to undermine the legality of women’s sports and spaces.

It’s hard to find an article anywhere which does not use weaselly mis- and/or partial quotes to deniably misrepresent one side or another in an argument (or just to make a story more “interesting”). So Perhaps Donald Trump is right that all news is “fake”.

Of course his own lies are more blatant. But perhaps that means that at least he is an honest liar (in a similar sense to how the dad of a friend of mine in England referred to the cow shit we fell into while playing rugger in a pasture as “good clean dirt”).

What I had intended to post about is now gone! Moments ago the article: Federal Election Averted As Liberals, NDP Defeat Contentious Conservative Motion | HuffPost Canada had been about Singh’s raising the abstention option – which I had thought was fucking brilliant! He could just have said “we support this motion and will not vote against it but are not willing to vote for it at this time because we do not think it advisable to trigger an election”. So why did they end up actually voting against it?