So I love this topic. This is a big deal now, and looking at trends in demography, incomes, and wealth, it's going to be a yet bigger deal for many years to come. But is there something that can be done? Is there a tech/business solution that helps alleviate the mutual exclusive quality that bingobangobongo mentions? If you could crack that, you could probably be make a big impact for a long time.
Definitely! This was the most line of reasoning in the article with the most impact. Property taxes are often progressive, disproportionally affecting the relatively wealthy. That's good. But when the benefits are collected and spent too locally, it means areas with higher property values also get better services. It takes away the progressive quality of property taxes.
Continue this to an extreme: property taxes that I pay are only spent on my household. The city/county maintains my property, educates my children. There's no more progressive distribution.
I think you've gotten your definition of progressive muddled. Property taxes are considered to be progressive because property values are widely considered to correlate strongly with income and wealth. Spending those taxes locally (or apportioning funds for local amenaties based on local tax revenue) is regressive, because increased benefit is then therefore correlated strongly with increased wealth and income. Therefore, your example represents a most regressive distribution of tax distribution.
They originate from small New England towns where they would have been progressive. Now that the rich and the poor don't live near each other they're regressive.
I think the article did a poor job of representing the recent efforts by elite universities to open up access to the children of farmers and auto-mechanics. http://npc.fas.harvard.edu/
There's still more to be done, sure, but it's important to mention that this isn't as bad as it was even 10 years ago.
Interesting. I'm the daughter of an electrician. I was admitted to Harvard in 2002, and at that time I believe they wanted my parents to pay about $12,000 for my first year. My parents couldn't afford it, and I did not attend. If that calculator is to be believed, Harvard would now expect less than $3000 from my parents. I probably would have attended had that been the case back then.
I think things changed a lot around 2009? I'm just going by memory... but I think that's when a lot of the ivies drastically changed tuition assistance based on income.
Another interesting way to think about "too big to fail" is as a considerable government subsidy. Banks operate in a risky environment. When there's a meltdown, the government steps in to bail the largest banks out. These banks are getting a free insurance policy from the government, a subsidy that's not going to the smaller banks.
That would also require the patent office to grant patents in well less than a year. It wouldn't help the little guys too much if you found out you were granted the patent 6 months or more after its expired.
I work in an environment where most enterprises still cling to IE6. These enterprises do so, because they've built up an internal expertise in keeping IE6 secure (kinda) and stable (kinda).
At some point in the future, it seems like that internal expertise will be too expensive or will fail to maintain that secure and stable (kinda) environment. At that point, it seems, there will be a fairly quick migration to newer technologies.
I don't think it'll be the killer app that draws the enterprise market... it'll be the bottom line.
Completely agree here. I think that a good portion of IE6 use is tied to corporate environments that prevents users from running anything other than IE6.
