Random Politics & Religion #02

a natural disaster of historic, Pompeii-like proportions and even then the damage can be severely mitigated.

But you shouldn't say that a Pompeii-like event could be mitigated cause that's untrue.

In FL the utility companies are trying to put solar out of the picture.

Utility-backed solar group raised over $7M to counter TPO proposal in Florida

Get the Facts - Floridians for Solar Choice

Please note that the state has so little marginal power that they will give consumers interruptible power options. Live in FL and you can get interruptible power on your hot water heater, freezer, and pool, perhaps other appliances too.

With Tax Day right around the corner, a federal agency is facing criticism for approving more than $600,000 to study – wait for it – why some people cheat on their taxes.

Maybe it’s because of projects like this?

Whatever the researchers discover, one Republican lawmaker is fuming that the National Science Foundation felt the need to fund such a report.

“It’s inconceivable that the NSF decided to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars to study why some individuals cheat on their taxes,” Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas

This interdisciplinary research project will advance basic understanding of how tax compliance behavior emerges by focusing on how perceptions of risk and tax fairness form, how these perceptions spread through a social network, and the interplay caused by the complex feedback loops among individual behaviors and population-level outcomes. The project also will address how audit, penalty, and taxation policies, and changes in those policies, influence perceptions and ultimately reduce tax evasion. The project will provide new insights regarding how tax compliance behavior is modified by the perceived aggregated compliance and on how behavior and the perceived aggregated compliance depend on social network structure over which perceptions of taxation spreads. The project will demonstrate the utility of the use of agent-based modeling for research on interactions between individuals and governments as well as how data from the American Life Panel collected by Rand Corporation can be employed to address problems like this. The analysis also will have practical utility, because it will shed light on why certain countries with high taxation levels, such as Scandinavian nations, can maintain high levels of tax compliance while other countries with lower taxation levels may have high levels of tax evasion as is the case in Greece and Italy. Project findings therefore should help nations like the United States reduce the occurrence of tax evasion.

. . .

Well Seha, if you read, I said a natural disaster of historic, Pompeii-like proportions, meaning a natural disaster so large that damage would be inevitable. Thats what happened in Fukushima, a 9.0 earthquake that caused a tsunami. And that could have been way worse, if not for the brave Japanese workers that died working to prevent further disaster....

North Korea conducted a missile test off its east coast on Friday morning, but the launch appears to have failed, say US and South Korean officials.
The launch coincided with the birthday of North Korea's founding leader, Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of current leader Kim Jong-un.
The South's officials said it was not immediately clear what type of missile had been launched, nor its range.

Rooks lied to me or I miscounted.

It's ok, we all miss the 'EDIT' button... /comfort :p

His edit still works!

And I had told him it was 15 posts to a page, but it's actually 30. There are a couple places where "15" is referenced in the code and I never bothered to manually count, so I just assumed that was it.

/tmyk

I mean, I could have went back a page and just counted.

Interesting debate tonight. I can't tell if it's depressing or refreshing that Hillary and Bernie are finally at each other's throats. Either way, it might actually get people to watch a Democratic debate for once.

Sad thing is Bernie knows exactly what is wrong. But then he gets to the part of fixing it..

Vote Republican.

They have majorities in Congress and Senate and I don't see anything getting done. Could you be more specific?