Income tax only accounts for some of the taxes a state can take in. Property and sales tax are also forms states use to collect income, and they happen to be regressive in most cases.
If you look at the CFED chart [2], those nine states [1] with no income tax make up the top 9 slots where the bottom 20% pay many times more in taxes than the top 1% (as a percentage of income), from 3.8 times (Tennessee) to a whopping 6.7 times (Washington).
...states [1] with no income tax make up the top 9 slots where the bottom 20% pay many times more in taxes than the top 1%...
By itself, this statistic is meaningless. A state with a progressive tax system but lower rates of inequality will score poorly on this metric than a state with higher inequality but an identical tax system.
I.e., you might be showing Tennessee has a regressive tax system, or you might be showing Tennessee has low inequality. Without more details we cannot determine this.
Most companies don't have 4000 employees, or need 1000 robots. Like every business, you add capacity as necessary. Diapers.com started with one mom and minivan.
Ripe bananas are yellow, but painting a green banana yellow does not ripen it.
You're making a huge assumption here that the way someone's mind works is fixed and unalterable. I don't believe this. I think, and have some personal experience here, that you can change the way you think about things, the way you approach things, etc. And you can certainly develop the way successful people look at the world.
I actually think the banana metaphor is excellent: a certain technique may not work for person A, who thinks about the world in A way. But, that person can work to change their mind, to ripen, and eventually see the world close to the way that person B does.
>You're making a huge assumption here that the way someone's mind works is fixed and unalterable.
Well first off, that's not what I meant by my analogy. I was making a point about causality vs. correlation.
Secondly people's minds are certainly alterable, but the extent to which they can be altered is not unlimited. Moreover, given a scale with A) altering your mind so that you can adopt someone else's habits, and B) adopting habits which play to your current strengths, it makes more sense to tend toward B when possible.
Uh, this is actually a pretty good idea, if you could implement it. It would have to filter out background noise, and would be tough to make it work in a crowd, but it seems like a decent aid, at least for those who are lucid enough to understand that they have a disorder.
As SoftwareMaven explains below, many schizophrenics experience visual hallucinations in addition to aural hallucinations, but this doesn't seem like a huge stumbling block.
Bigger, I think, is the paranoia aspect. If you really, truly believe the plants in and outside your house are vampires who are waiting to kill you (true story, unfortunately) I can't imagine you're going to put too much faith into your wristband.
>>No one really wants to help you unless there is something in it for them or it fits into their larger plan.<<
Some good points, but I've found this one to be wildly untrue. Almost universally, I've found really successful people want to help other people become really successful. Like his other points, you'll have to initiate and ask for their help, but I've never met anyone successful who isn't willing to give to just about anyone.
Science seems to agree with you [1]. The human race is so successful because from almost birth on, humans are collaborating. Some patterns can be seen where small children are much more willing to collaborate and after success to share the result of work with others than apes with similar individual problem solving capabilities.
Whats in it for them? Largely based on experiences, one way to get successful people on your side and helping you - ask them for advice. But more importantly, follow through and actually do something with it. And then keep them updated.
Most people won't take action, and doing something is a very easy way to separate yourself from everyone else.
This seems like the most important question... Since the paper is paywalled, and science reporting is terrible, can someone with access inform us just what the hell the fungus turns the plastic into?
Which manufacturers rely on point and shoots to stay afloat?
You're point is valid, though not exactly contrarian. The decline of point and shoots became pretty obvious when the iphone 3g was released. I'm sure this is why every manufacturer has been diversifying their lineups away from point and shoots over the last 5 years. Sony released a full SLR lineup, including lenses. Olympus has been producing very high quality mirrorless bodies (not exactly point and shoots) for a few years now. Even Fujifilm has followed suit. Nikon and Canon, who probably generate a lot of revenue from p&s sales, have been widely diversified for decades.
I'll bet you that with Facebook, there's no Groupon-like 50%-restatement. To be more concrete, between first and final S-1, I'll say no more than a 5% restatement of revenues in the downward direction. Facebook is not in the same panicked 'damn the torpedos' rush as Groupon was.
There's a difference between suburbs where everyone has a yard and peace and quiet and suburbs where the sidewalks inconsistently exist, cul-de-sac neighborhoods inflate route lengths and compound traffic snarls, zoning breaks up residential areas with light commerical areas that have mandated massive lots to handle twice-a-year peak parking needs, etc.
You can literally see the difference in walkability and infrastructure service levels between suburban neighborhoods built in the 50s and those built in the late 70s and later.
One has consistent street and infrastructure grids, parks, likely bus stops (because they're feasible) and commercial-cluster downtown areas for goodness sake! While the other has larger yards, cul-de-sacs, inconsistent sidewalks and the closest they come to a downtown is a (likely now decrepit) mall with its own ocean of usually-empty parking and the commensurate traffic-snarling entrances and exits.
This is why I feel so out of place in the vast majority of american suburbs today. Standing in any public space, if you look at roads and parking lots as dead space, it seems as if half the total space surrounding you is just nothing. It isn't beautiful, it isn't usable, it is just empty space that soaks up the landscape, carving it up all to make it cheap for someone to drive, but making it impossible for someone to walk.
If the correlation between income disparity and crime rates remains despite a net drop in crime, how is that a refutation of inequality of disparity as a component to crime?
Wouldn't a larger drop in crime in more-equal countries than less-equal countries only re-affirm that though there are clearly other factors involved, inequality is still a component?
I don't actually know the numbers but I'd think it would be pretty easy to look and see whether crime rates are dropping uniformly, or if less-equal countries are seeing a lower drop than more-equal ones.
Sure. But since income disparity has soared in the last 40 years and crime rates have plummeted, even if they have plummeted everywhere, this indicates that inequality, if it has any effect at all, is likely pretty minor.
I think this would be near impossible to test for though. So many factors affect crime rates across difference societies, and different societies experience wildly different types of income disparity. Intuitively, I imagine places with smaller net income disparity but larger real income disparity (ie a city where everyone is relatively poor but some are destitute) have much more crime than places with larger net income disparity but smaller real income disparity (ie a city where everyone is relatively wealthy, but a few are unbelievably rich).
> "since income disparity has soared in the last 40 years and crime rates have plummeted, even if they have plummeted everywhere, this indicates that inequality, if it has any effect at all, is likely pretty minor."
The big problem with a simple comparison of the plot of inequality and the plot of crime, is that inequality and crime aren't evenly spread across demographics. The young are disproportionately on the losing end of inequality and the perpetrating end of crime. (Regardless of how poor they are and how rich their neighbors, the elderly simply can't flip a car anymore.)
If you had, say, a bulge in the poor demographic around 1970 and expected crime to increase with a rise in inequality, you would expect to see the spike in crime from 1970 to 1990 and you would expect to see it subside as that bulge grew older and transitioned out of the age groups that perpetrate crime.
So, again, we cannot trivially rule out inequality as minor just because a simple plot of crime rates and a simple plot of inequality do not suggest a straightforward correlation.
It's not impossible. Levitt discusses issues like this in Freakonomics.
Just because all crime falls over a period of time doesn't discount the effect. It doesn't even mean the effect of income disparity is minor. If the rate of crime falling in countries with a lowering income disparity is vastly higher than the rate of crime falling in countries with high income disparity, then that suggests a link that can be followed up on statistically.
We have states that have no personal income tax. Not surprisingly, these states are doing fine because they raise revenue other ways.