World News Thread (Politics,whatever)


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Let's talk money.

2016: IMF says Deutsche Bank's global links make it biggest potential risk :
At the same time though:
https://www.goldbroker.com/news/rec...he-bank-last-celebration-before-collapse-1539
According to a ranking compiled by Les Echos, among the seventeen largest European banks, Deutsche Bank has the largest number of employees paid more than €1 million per year - exactly 643 - ahead of Barclays (542) and HSBC (399), despite being the largest bank in the EU by balance sheet.

This figure is truly scandalous, because the leading German bank does not have an exceptional performance - far from it. It certainly had a profitable 2018 year, but just barely (€267 million), and which came after three years of loss.
 
@Klumpen: Oh, man... I didn't know that. Where can I apply?
 
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Instead of the complicated staircase of income tax rates we have at the moment, how about a smooth sigmoid function, like so:

smooth_taxes.png


Which has the important features that:
  • The gradient is always positive, so there is always an incentive to get a better-paying job
  • Post-tax income is tangential to a maximum income line, so that a pay rise for extremely high earners brings them almost no benefit
 
Instead of the complicated staircase of income tax rates we have at the moment, how about a smooth sigmoid function, like so:

View attachment 32587

Which has the important features that:
  • The gradient is always positive, so there is always an incentive to get a better-paying job
  • Post-tax income is tangential to a maximum income line, so that a pay rise for extremely high earners brings them almost no benefit
I'm advocating for a maximum income of that kind for years now, but have never even seen it mentioned by someone else at all.
 
It's tempting, but regardless of there always being a positive delta, there's still a maximum take home pay. At some point, earning an extra thousand gets you less than a penny of actual take home pay, and at that point, I'd say the incentive for high earners to get a raise is pretty much nullified. That might not be an actual problem, but I'm a crappy social scientist, so I dunno.

Also, while I appreciate the idea of filling tax offices up and down the country with degree level mathematicians, at the end of the day it'll be down to self assessing taxpayers to actually calculate their owed tax. While a sigmoid function isn't the scariest maths I've ever seen, I did once get a couple of a-levels in the subject, and I still get a bit lost looking at the function definitions for a Smoothstep function. Maybe you'd expect the tax offices to be able to calculate this automatically based on the previous year, but in my experience they only use that for your tax code here (which guides your free allowance), and the tend to want you to have a good guess at your current years income so they get the money sooner.

Plus I can't imagine how a semi-public discussion of the pros and cons of a gudermannian function over a hyperbolic one would go.
 
i also thought about how to tax people a bit, when thinking about how to simplify the US tax system (i.e., replace the brackets with an integral). i wasn't taking into account a minimum income, which would be a hard sell here in the States (and at what age would it be active, etc.).

the first thought i had was to tax using an exponential -- t(i) = 1 - exp(-i / i0) -- the tax fraction for the given income i, for some parameter i0.

total tax would be the integral: T(I) = int_0^I di t(i) = I + i0 exp(-i / i0) |_0^I = I + i0 exp(-I / i0) - i0

take home income would be H(I) = I - T(I) = i0 * ( 1 - exp(-I / i0) )

it was kinda surprising to see that the exponential resulted in a maximum income (i0 in fact), but that's math for you.

i figured that was actually a bit of a failing of the exponential -- it would probably be better to allow a logarithmic divergence, so that you can technically make more money.

i've heard other arguments that you shouldn't have much of an income tax, but more of a progressive sales tax (i.e., on each item, so that higher priced items are taxed at higher rates).
 
Now with 5G, more difficult to detect weatherpatterns (a drop to 1940'ties technology and methods)!
This seems to be a thinly disguised piece of opinion in an otherwise well linked news collection, or have I missed the news story that supports that assertion.

Re the first one, the article states you had a quiet winter period. Do this months totals compare against the ones you'd expect to have over the wintertime?
 
or have I missed the news story
Directly from NOAA. Here is an excerpt:

Experts are warning that the development of 5G technology could interfere with weather forecasting. The acting head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Neil Jacobs, testified on Capitol Hill last week that potential interference from 5G wireless radios could reduce forecasting accuracy by as much as 30%, CNET reports.

In March, the Federal Communications Commission started auctioning off the 24 GHz spectrum to wireless carriers for use in 5G networks, which would eventually enable far faster wireless internet. But as CBS News weather producer David Parkinson explained on CBSN, that's close to the 23.8 GHz spectrum forecasters rely on to look at water vapor in the atmosphere.

"The concern is that if you miss one of the water vapor signals at seven days out, you might not see that a hurricane is intensifying. You might not see that there are certain things going on in the atmosphere that are going to steer a storm in one particular direction," Parkinson said.


https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alterslash+5g+reduces+weather+forecast&t=ffnt&ia=web

Mainstream, easy video, but no details:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/5g-technology-could-interfere-with-weather-forecasting/

More details like the fight for auction delays:
http://strangesounds.org/2019/05/5g-wireless-technology-weather-forecast-threat.html


When I first heard this is I was wow'ed. It's like when I heard the camera can read your heartrate. Gives a whole new meaning to "vapourware". ;)


The problem is then, if another country (or nearby city) uses 5G, then that water vapour (above that country) could not be 'read' due to 5G produced disturbances. The result is of course, too little time to prepare for rough weather events; predictions hours instead of days, just like last century. Which seems ok for city folks (just close the windows). But for farmers, hearing "you have 2 hours to farm your crops or risk to lose 60% of your crops".. that's a bit more "heavy".
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Do this months totals compare against the ones you'd expect to have over the wintertime?
Good question, I'd like to know too. At the moment, we have a solar minimum, so that affects the weather too.
source: https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/news-articles/solar-minimum-is-coming
[doublepost=1559504718][/doublepost]@Klumpen You must see it from the other side of the fence...
 
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Im a bit worryd about this new "Tornados" (Twister) in Germany, i thought they are only in USA (Poor Americans ;( ) , but because this Global Warming, there are also some of these Tornados in Germany..

Luckly not at my Place, as whe have to much Hills, but on the Flat Countrys of Germany theyre are allready some of them..

Some yeahrs ago, i had the luck to watch some wind pants on a meadow, nothing compared to a real tornado, but allready pretty impressive..
 
I remember about ten years ago someone filmed a tornado in Birmingham (not Birmingham, Alabama, the one in the West Midlands, UK). It was a small thing only really able to throw some litter about, but there it was. I don't think they're talking about roof-lifting twisters in Germany yet are they?
 
I don't think they're talking about roof-lifting twisters in Germany yet are they?
Oh, we had some of those in the last years already, one unroofed a whole town neighboring to the one where my ex lives in.
Every area without hills is endangered to get those by now.
 
Netherlands had some waterhoses in our biggest lake. Once every 4 years or so:

And a fire-nado.

And some dustdevils from time to time (harmless).

What we ussually have are ruk-winden. PULL wind. Sudden rifts of wind pulling you in the air. Grandma's roll over the ground. Poodles fly. Fun while driving on the highway:
 
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