This proposal seems to make a lot sense for deciding what to tax, but I am curious about how this would affect who is getting taxed and where these changes would be felt.
It seems like decreasing taxes on labor (people) and increasing taxes on raw materials (things we dig out of the ground) would simply shift the tax burden away from urban areas (where people are) to rural areas (where the mines are).
Wouldn't this just make things worse for poorest parts of the country, like Appalachia, where the mining industry is typically the only provider of well paying jobs?
Minihack is the best Hacker News app I've found found for iOS. I've tried almost all of the HN apps in the App Store and Minihack is the one that I keep on my homescreen. It meets all of the criteria you listed, including the bonus ones, and the dev has done a great job at keeping the app up to date and bug-free.
Again, why the focus on the average person? Does the average person actively, directly participate in space industry? No. Has the average person been profoundly affected by the technologies developed by space programs? Undeniably.
It's great that you take such a pragmatic approach!
I recommend this article [0] by Mark Lynas [1] that explains the arguments that convinced him to go from a vocal anti-GMO activist to, what he calls, a pro-science environmentalist. (I think the hip term now is "eco-modernist"). From the article:
What happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.
Nuclear engineer here. Definitely not in the software industry, but still do a bit of coding, albeit mostly in Fortran because (most) reactor design software stays pretty far from the bleeding edge.
I come to HN for the startup culture discussions. Even though my field is pretty far from the software/tech field, it's pretty amazing how much of the startup experience remains the same.
For those interested, my startup, Transatomic, is developing a molten salt reactor that's cheaper than coal and (hopefully) as cheap as natural gas, just without the greenhouse gas emissions.
We just closed our first round of VC funding from Peter Thiel and Founders Fund a few days ago. More details here:
Asus RT-ACxxx. I have the earlier version of the router reviewed in the link, but I bought it for the same reason that this review recommends it: it's the best consumer AC router available.
I'm not sure what you mean with your first point, but your concern with corrosion was solved in the 1970s at Oak Ridge National Lab, where they operated a molten salt reactor for four years. That reactor demonstrated that extremely low corrosion with a high-nickel alloy called Hastelloy-N, which is similar to the metals widely used to handle other high-temperature molten salts in industries like aluminum refining.
You can find more information on corrosion and material compatibility in section 2.5 of our technical white paper: