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Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

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Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#431

Post by travmatt »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #299
jordanb wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly this was the premise behind Brownback's tax plan in Kansas: Small businesses were being held back by their tax burden. They wanted to invest more capital in their businesses, to scale up and hire more people. They had untapped opportunities in the market that they could not pursue because they didn't have the money that they would have if their taxes were lower. Here's how that worked out: http://thehil…

> Small businesses were being held back by their tax burden. It's never taxes on profits that holds small businesses back. It's all the annoying things you need to do to employ people[1]. Best thing the government could do for small businesses is provide healthcare and decent pensions for workers. Which would be two fewer things for a business owner to worry about. Having the state employment agency handle payroll wo…

>Best thing the government could do for small businesses is provide healthcare and decent pensions for workers.

The lack of these things is a competitive advantage for larger companies with the resources to negotiate these benefits in behalf of their employees

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#432

Post by dredmorbius »

mtremsal wrote: post #129
VHRanger wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to note that, in the US, worker __compensation__ has increased steadily. However, __wages__ have not. A lot of this has to do with employer provided health insurance and ballooning healthcare costs, which are fairly specific problems to the US. Housing and education costs have also increased much faster than overall worker compensation.

Couldn't you argue that an increase in compensation driven by 'ballooning healthcare costs' wouldn't actually improve the standard of living of workers? Comparing wages (rather than total compensation) to cost of living would seem more pertinent in this regard.

David Ricardo. Rent vs. Wages.

(Rents win.)

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#433

Post by dredmorbius »

will_pseudonym wrote: post #257
mtremsal wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you argue that an increase in compensation driven by 'ballooning healthcare costs' wouldn't actually improve the standard of living of workers? Comparing wages (rather than total compensation) to cost of living would seem more pertinent in this regard.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but new medications for difficult to treat diseases do raise the quality of life for those populations, despite being incredibly expensive. I'm certainly not saying they shouldn't be less expensive, mind you. :)

The overwhelming evidence is that 1) this is not the case and 2) that it's been improvements to access rather than intensity of medical care that have had the biggest impacts.

This is a major component of Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Effectively, medical progress in the U.S. halted roughly in the 1960s and 1970s, with a very small number of exceptions.

If you go back to the bigger picture, virtually all improvements in healthcare outcomes were made prior to 1920, and those largely constituted public health, sanitation, and nutritional improvements. Laurie Garrett attributes 85% of the improvements in lifespan to public health, rather than acute medical treatments.

Improved pre-natal, natal, and childhood circumstances (medical, nutrition, nurturing, nutrition, and safety), overall safety improvements, environmental regulation, and reductions in high-risk behaviours (smoking, drinking, indiscriminate and unprotected sex, injected drugs) have all had major impacts.

Joel Mokyr notes that the truly effective medical advances are tremendously underreported in GDP statistics as the measurement basis is cost rather than benefit.

Sorry, but this turns out to be a tremendous and highly-repeated canard.

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#434

Post by dredmorbius »

WalterBright wrote: post #109
gaius wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Military spending got you the Internet, GPS, jet engines, microwave ovens and a million more things that you take for granted ...

Internet? Everybody with 2 or more computers tried to connect them together. Without the internet we'd have BIX, FidoNet, Compuserve, Prodigy, MCImail, RBBS, or any of innumerable other schemes to network computers. Jet engines? Governments refused to fund jet engine development until they were confronted with FLYING jet aircraft. This happened in both England and Germany. The US government ordered Lockheed to stop w…

You might want to think about what it was that, in a highly-competitive landscape of networking options, lead to TCP/IP and BGP succeeding where other options didn't.

I've just unearthed my copy of The Matrix, John S. Quarterman's exploration of "computer networks and conferencing systems worldwide". It was published in 1990, just on the cusp of the breakout of the Internet (there's a late 1990s revised edition I've not seen).

It covers a lot of ground. Not of much practical use at this point, but a phenomenal historical document: Layers & protocols, management protocols, administration. And the networks!

AQ, HEPnet, PHYSNET, BITNET, USENET, UUCP, FidoNet, Ean, VNETT, XEROX Internet, EASYnet, Tandem, HP Internet, UUNET, DASnet, CUNYVM, CERN, EUnet, FNET, ARISTOTE, SMARTIX, REUNIR, Minitel, Dnet, DFN, AGFNET, BELWU, ARIADNE, HEANET, INFNET, SURFnet, Enet, JANET, UKnet, GreeNet, COSMOS, NORDUnet, DENet, DKnet, ....

(Nothing about WWW or Gopher though. Al Gore is mentioned.)

On the one hand, one network would have had to emerge. But on the other, why the Internet?

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#435

Post by chiefalchemist »

colordrops wrote: post #430
chiefalchemist wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. Fair enough. But how does the blindness that feeds their bias any different than that which feeds say a Trump supporter. I'm not sticking up for either. But to believe one side is less ignorant than the other is fairly naive. The proles are the proles. Just because you side with one subset (because they match your beliefs) doesn't make them any less prole-y.

I agree with you but you'll rarely get anywhere on a public forum by framing 95% of the population as suckers. Which they are, but the truth hurts.

85% is more accurate. The 15% are the 1% plus their enablers/support/wannabes.

I agree, such statements are underappreciated. But I'm not running for office so popularity isn't really my concern. It also doesn't help to be silent when faced with the current status quo. Change is painful; saying what needs to be said even more so.

C'est la vie.

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#436

Post by dredmorbius »

pohl wrote: post #99
mjw1007 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it's easier to pressure governments to change what's going on when we have journalists willing to tell us what's going on. When it comes to reporting information obtained from "secrecy jurisdictions", I think a standard of "if it's not illegal to report, it's OK to report" is reasonable. After all, that's the same standard you're advocating for managing your tax affairs.

Wasn’t the reporter behind the Panama Papers killed by a car bomb?

s/the/a/

Panama Papers and the ICIJ are a very large effort. But yes, a Maltese reporter, Daphne Caruana Galizia, who worked on Panama Papers (about 80 reporters in total) was assassinated by car bomb in Malta last month.

ICIJ are now over 200 journalists.

https://www.icij.org/blog/2017/10/investigative-malta-journa...

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#437

Post by WalterBright »

dredmorbius wrote: post #434
WalterBright wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet? Everybody with 2 or more computers tried to connect them together. Without the internet we'd have BIX, FidoNet, Compuserve, Prodigy, MCImail, RBBS, or any of innumerable other schemes to network computers. Jet engines? Governments refused to fund jet engine development until they were confronted with FLYING jet aircraft. This happened in both England and Germany. The US government ordered Lockheed to stop w…

You might want to think about what it was that, in a highly-competitive landscape of networking options, lead to TCP/IP and BGP succeeding where other options didn't. I've just unearthed my copy of The Matrix , John S. Quarterman's exploration of "computer networks and conferencing systems worldwide". It was published in 1990, just on the cusp of the breakout of the Internet (there's a late 1990s revised edition I've…

> why the Internet?

You could also ask why (privately developed) Ethernet, instead of the other LAN protocols like Token Ring. One possible answer is government is an elephant and has the power to push their standards - perhaps due to algore.

That's an interesting question, but is beside my point. My point is to counter the notion that without government funding, we wouldn't have a global network, that nobody would have connected computers together.

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#438

Post by dredmorbius »

T2_t2 wrote: post #337
noobermin wrote: post #79

Since there are no top level comments putting this out for probably obvious reasons, here is a supportive comment for the article. This is what people feel in their guts when they drive out on tattered roads and avoid going to the hospital even though they are sick, when they don't have a real increase in wages but are working longer hours. They have the sense that something isn't right, that there are two sets of ru…

Assuming SG is Singapore, that is a really specific example, because it is a tiny Island of 4 million people with a lot of very unique attributes - it is a major shipping and airport hub, as well as a financial hub in a notoriously corrupt region. The USA has similar areas - often much larger, usually with very similar outcomes. Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP_per... and compare it to…

US levels of wealth disparity are not entirely out of line with other very large countries or regions.

The US is better thought of as an empire. It is carved up into a large number of territories (states), 50, as compared with Australia's ... well, it's complicated, but let's look at the six principal states: NSW, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Northern Territories, Queensland, and Tasmania.

Each major Australian state is comprised, largely, of a single principal city, and ... everything else. Australia has, unlike the United States, relatively little inland settlements: the land tends to be arid, there are no major river systems. The result is ... a rough parity between Australian states, though you'll find a tremendous variance within them.

If you consider other large countries: Russia, Canada, China, Brazil, Indonesia, or India, you'll find that there are in fact large variations in wealth across territory. Or the EU, if considered a single state, ranges from Germany and France to Portugal, Greece, and the Balkan states.

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#439

Post by dredmorbius »

WalterBright wrote: post #437
dredmorbius wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to think about what it was that, in a highly-competitive landscape of networking options, lead to TCP/IP and BGP succeeding where other options didn't. I've just unearthed my copy of The Matrix , John S. Quarterman's exploration of "computer networks and conferencing systems worldwide". It was published in 1990, just on the cusp of the breakout of the Internet (there's a late 1990s revised edition I've…

> why the Internet? You could also ask why (privately developed) Ethernet, instead of the other LAN protocols like Token Ring. One possible answer is government is an elephant and has the power to push their standards - perhaps due to algore. That's an interesting question, but is beside my point. My point is to counter the notion that without government funding, we wouldn't have a global network, that nobody would h…

And I'll suggest that your response above points strongly at a probable explanation: the U.S. government as a single "consumer" in this case, was able to force standards adoption.

Hardly the first time that's happened. Look to the establishment of the US Bureau of Standards (by Herbert Hoover, as Secretary of Commerce), the standardisation of fasteners, plumbing, railroads, electrical components, and transmissions, among other elements. The US Navy's transport needs in Vietnam resulted in the marine shipping industry standardising on the "20 foot equivalent" standard cargo container (the concept itself had been kicked around for decades).

There are numerous other document, data, signage, fabrication, materials, commodity, etc., standards established by the US Federal (and at times, state) governments.

It's a very powerful role. One that seems lacking of the past two decades or so.

Re: Paradise Papers: New leak from offshore finance firm

#440

Post by kurthr »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #426
ajslater wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference in educational levels is economic. If you correct for the income & wealth levels of the international district and match them to american districts with similar levels, you have similar academic results. There's no gap. The issue occurs with taking averages. The United States is a rich country or a developing country depending on where you look. Few other modern industrialized nations are run this way.…

>If you correct for the income & wealth levels of the international district and match them to american districts with similar levels, you have similar academic results. There's no gap. Most well-off American school districts do not teach even their honors students integral calculus and linear algebra by the end of high school. Valedictorians in those districts haven't usually learned that much. Most of those kids in…

Weird... I went to regular HS in Texas (there weren't magnet schools yet) in the 80s and they taught integral calculus, analytic geometry, and linear algebra for everyone. Standard algebra was taught in 8th grade. Several of us finished all of the math by junior year and took college classes.

I guess public school just went down hill from there? Certainly, private schools teach those classes now.

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