Posts by Erik Pedersen

Raspberry Pi OS 5.2 is here, with pleasant tweaks to Wayland-based desktop

Re: 800MB

>> Is this the right forum to reminisce about my first 20MB hard drive?

Or about devices like my 1980s-era 64K CP/M machine, which provided only 62K for running WordStar, my text editor, since the OS had gobbled up a massive 2K.

— Erik

Samsung family sells $2B worth of shares to pay inheritance tax bill

> Inheritance tax is one of the most regressive taxes there is — Jimmy2Cows

Inheritance tax can be made very fair by exempting, say, the first $5 million or so, which is more than any normal, honest human will acquire in a lifetime. Rapacious billionaire robber barons should be cut down to size, and people who own a family farm, for instance, would not have to sell off land parcels.

I agree with Jimmy2Cows that income should be taxed in a steeply progressive way, with perhaps a 90 percent top marginal rate, as applied in the U.S. during the Eisenhower administraiton.

As to inadequately taxed and accumulated wealth, Bill Gates and his former wife, Melinda, have set a good example by promising to give away the majority of their accumulated wealth before their deaths, but short of a tax on inherited wealth, how else can society combat the evil of unearned wealth held by greedsters that does nothing useful in society?

Flat rate taxes are an invention of the moneyed class and are extremely regressive.This has been a project of the Republicans in the U.S., and they have nearly succeeded in their perverse goal. Only a steeply progressive, logarithmically increasing tax, will enable the poor and the middle class to thrive while adequately confiscating a sufficient amount of the surplus wealth that would otherwise not serve any useful purpose in supporting educaton that is free to the student , and health care that is free to the patient.

This is wonderful news. Granted, the company has faced several ethics concerns, as El Reg has pointed out (https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/29/samsung_ethics/), but for a country to apply an effective 39 percent tax vill on the inheritors of personal wealth will do a lot to help root out systemic inequality. The U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, and the EU should do the same, whilst cracking down on offshore tax havens that allow individuals to shelter wealth stolen from the citizens of real countries.

Baidu's patriotic doodle ruffles Japanese feathers

Just a thought for disputed territories....

Why not treat disputed lands as a sort of international resource? Either Japan or China could cede the islands to the other party, but with a treaty that provides for international access. The Svalbard islands offer a useful example of how this might work. While the islands are technically governed by Norwegian law, Norway places no restrictions on who can go there.

Wikipedia reports: "Norway grants permission for any nation to conduct research on Svalbard, resulting in the Polish Polar Station and the Chinese Arctic Yellow River Station, plus Russian facilities in Barentsburg. The University Centre in Svalbard in Longyearbyen offers undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate courses to 350 students...with Norwegian and international students equally represented." The archipelago is also home to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault,a priceless genetics resource of world significance.

Something like this sounds a whole lot more pleasant than sabre-rattling and ominous predictions of unnecessary regional wars.

Christians get God-optimized 'Edifi' Android fondleslab

Scribal interpolations and dehydration

Clearly Exodus 34:28 and Deuteronomy 9:18 are scribal interpolations. Had the scribes who wrote those verses ever tried going without water for much more than a week (or two or three days in a hot desert land) they'd have suffered irreversible renal failure. Since Moses was a prophet, he would have foreseen this catastrophic result and brought many litres of water with him in jerry cans to survive.