I was under the impression that VAT taxes are considered to impact mostly the poor. While in absolute terms the rich are impacted most, in percentage terms VAT is considered a much smaller portion of expenses for the rich than the poor. I quote:
"VAT is a regressive tax, putting more burden to the poor than to the rich. Indeed, VAT applies the same rate to everyone regardless of their level of wealth – but the richer you are, the lower the proportion of your revenue goes to consumption."
In the U.K. most living expenses are don’t get charged vat, or get charged at a low rate - food, rent, public transport are vat free, electric, gas are low rated.
Why tax the gasoline but then the airplane ticket and not the kerosene?
And similarly i would extrapolate to do we tax the buyer of electricity (which could be green sourced) or the manufacturer - the gas burner. Or maybe even at the first point of contact with the carbon source, the oil company.
If you shoot someone and hit their head killing them or just their ear, its a matter of luck (and possibly skill), the charges are different. The justice system judges based on intent as well as outcome (i.e. execution X luck).
well you're not wrong. That attempted Trump assassination was a few inches away from being in the same books as John Wilkes Booth, instead of being talked about for less than a week and then forgotten. Sentences would have been night and day.
Many jurisdictions have the same punishment for attempted murder and murder though.
I get that there are different views on how much punishment should be based on intent vs outcome. My opinion is factoring in outcome in criminal sentences is often pragmatic, but if we had omniscient judges, judging on intent would be ideal.
It disables your stomach... its like taking PPIs for gerd only to later find out the problem was low stomach acid and now your acid production capability has been permanently damaged by meds
I really don't understand this metamaterials hype.
While obviously this stuff is cool, is it science worthy?
This is basic engineering isn't it? How is this different than a bridge designer designing how a bridge will deform and different kinds of stress?
Sure they make it modular more abstract and general, but is it truly novel its the same science as the bridge designer isn't it?
They drive on the city road in between other "8000 lb" suvs. Not sure why that matters.
I drive my car a 1,500kg car right next to 30,000kg trucks, was never an issue for me.
I find this fascination with the size of the car and how it supposed to be a hazard quite amusing.
Roads are meant to be shared between different participants. These carts are meant for the city, where everyone's speed limit is 50kph anyway, and they avoid the faster roads. For many, this is all they need.
I think American drivers is the real concern. There is a certain percentage of people in the US who really have their heads really solidly right up their ass about sharing the road with other users.
As someone who regularly bicycles and walks let me tell you just a few of the things I have personally experienced. I’ve been spit on, had drinks thrown from moving vehicles onto me, been yelled by a motorcyclist for him almost hitting me on the shoulder of a road, been fairly regularly threatened with violence for riding my bike (1-2 times a year someone just loses it), been run off the road by a pickup truck while finishing a mountain bike ride (on purpose), had diesel vehicles blow their exhaust at me when passing (common), and actually had a family member get run down two meters off the main road by someone not paying attention and rummaging through grocery bags in their backseat while driving — hit him from behind in the middle of the day. It was incredibly difficult to prosecute that case and the police and district attorney in the area really didn’t want to do anything.
I could go on, but the point is that America is not Amsterdam and that “8000 lb” vehicle thing is really more of a reference to car brain idiots and the system that supports them than Gross Vehicle Weights themselves.
My entire family still commutes by bike for 70-80 percent of our trips but we are committed to change, and we live in an exceptionally bike oriented city in California.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Amsterdam and find it one of the most deeply compelling transportation systems in the world. I would be happy to use one of these vehicles, but I worry that the small army of car brain idiots in the Us would make using a vehicle like this just plain dangerous and untenable.
Well first of all this claim is quite a bit exagerated, as a single QD could produce twice more electrons in some situations, but only in some. A process called MEG - Multiple exciton generation.
Let me explain a bit simplified. Normally in semiconductors, when a high energy photon is absorbed, excess energy is converted into heat, and you end up with an electron with energy equal to the bandgap of the semiconductor.
With QDs you could have two QDs in close proximity, and when one of them absorbs a photon with energy more than twice the bandgap, there is a possibility that instead of only one of them getting excited with excess energy, two excitons will form of half the photon energy in each of the two QDs. Resulting in double the amount of excited electrons (A doubling of the electrons!).
If this was really efficient it would mean that now you need to optimize your PV material bandgap differently. And instead of a theoretical maximum efficiency (Shockley-Queisser) for single bandgap solar cells of ~32%, you could theoretically get 45% with a single bandgap.[1]
Thanks for the info. My abrupt comment was because—as with so many articles like this—bold claims are made without explanation or reference and it is particularly common in the semiconductor world whether it be LEDs, solar cells, camera sensors or even semiconductor materials themselves.
I've worked on the periphery of this stuff for years, by that I mostly mean the applied side, and it's so hard to cut to the chase and get overall input/output efficiencies, etc. One has to do searches and wade through research papers just to get some basic info and it's very tedious and ought to be unnecessary.
For example, say I want a spreadsheet-like table that compares overall efficiency of a range of white LEDs using practical or in-use materials versus the theoretical maximum efficiency for same LEDs (materials under ideal conditions) versus theoretical efficiencies for materials that have theoretical† potential but have yet to be fabricated—and then those efficiencies expressed in terms of power in (electron Watts) versus photon Watts out.
A similar scenario is trying to find the efficiencies of image sensors to do comparisons between them, for instance, photons in (captured) versus 'modulated' (signal) electrons out(put) versus S/N—noise of various kinds, shot noise etc.
The same goes for solar cells. Even though the SQ limit is reasonably well known, it's hard to do comparisons between single junction devices let alone those with multiple (stacked) junctions. What's the inter-junction (material and coupling) losses etc? How do losses add up in multiple junctions for practical devices versus their theoretical counterparts? And that's long before we start worrying about trying to develop and or optimize any MEG-like action.
Unless one is on the cutting edge of research or closely involved in developing the technology then it's nigh on impossible to get info like this without months of research. Frankly, it's damn annoying. Moreover, much of the info is either unavailable for various reasons, or hidden behind publishing firewalls and or locked up in proprietary environments—companies such as Sony which make image sensors, etc.
Some would ask why would one want such info, well it could be any number of reasons, trying to determine the state of the art versus the theoretical and trying to figure whether a particular tech is worth pursuing or whether another approach is needed, and so on.
It used to be much easier. For instance the RCA Electro-Optics Handbook was a wealth of information but there's nothing like that available now to my knowledge.
I've been around long enough, that's when one could go to say the RCA Electro-Optics ref and just look up the quantum efficiencies of, say, trialkali photocathodes as in photomultipliers, orthicons, and isocons etc. This stuff is still very important, one needs to know the probability of a photon being captured by a photomultiplier in say a neutrino detector—and it's good to know that this info is easily available.
Come semiconductors however and it's just not. The collated info either doesn't exist or it's in a damn mess.
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† I've an old book on semiconductors but I can't immediately put my hands on it so I can't give you an exact reference at present but it has a comprehensive table comparing electron mobility in different semiconductors. It compares practical materials with those that haven't yet been able to be fabricated against theoretical ones that are unlikely to be practical.
This was extremely informative, before reading the book I used to think gallium arsenide had one of the fastest mobilities but many others beat it hands down, as for silicon it's positively glacial.
Until one sees tables such as this it's almost impossible to grasp the whole picture. This is precisely what I am complaining about.
Crop yields have increased by use of fertilizers, modern farming machinery, and chemicals that prevent disease. Yields did NOT substantially increase due to higher photosynthetic rates which is how carbon is fixated.
