Aceticon

The "tax" part is what you pay above what the cost of a Product or Service would be if there wasn't a Monopoly, Cartel or legal structure forcing you to acquire that product or service.

The actual cost of making and/or providing that Product or Service (plus a bit of profit to incentivise somebody to actual do it) is the part that serves that purpose (and thus can be said to be "earmarked for a specific purpose"), anything above that is just money you are forced to put in the pocked of somebody for holding a dominant market position due to natural or artificial market barriers and/or even having bough politicians to tilt that market in their favor, killing the viability of alternative products or services or even legally forcing you to acquire that product or service.

That "above natural cost" part of what people are forced to pay for essentials like housing is not earmarked for anything (since it does not go into the costs of the other side to provide you that Product or Service or the profit margin needed to incentivise somebody to do it), plus unlike taxes payed to the Public it will never come back and provide you with any benefit and even in a Democratic system you have no control whatsoever over what it is used for unlike one's traditional taxes where theoritically (the more trully Democratic a nation is, the more it is so in practice) one has some influence in how it gets uses through the vote.

But sure, you can call the part that is used to actually pay the costs of the Products and Services plus a fair profit margin, to be a deduction if you want (personally I just think of it as natural cost of living). Personally I see that part as totally fair, so not at all an unfair burden, whilst more broadly politically I actually favor a system were life's essentials are take care of for all from the common pot which is the taxes paid to the public, in this specific point I'm restricting myself to a pure Trade logic.

Oh, I'm a member of a small leftwing party in my home country and there are plently of old people there who were once Communists and still are anti-Capitalists who fought against the Fascist Dictatorship and in the Revolution against Fascism in 74, who agree with me. It's only tankies and Chinese Propagand muppets who do not.

Your "it's not autocratic" interpretation is just you chosing to reframe the definition of property in such a way that confiscation by force of that which some people own doesn't count as the state taking their shit.

Sure mate, everything is naturally owned by everybody, hence those people controlling the "Revolution" deem to be the burgeouisie are people keeping everybody else from enjoying what is actually owned by everybody, hance taking the shit of those deemed the burgeoisie is not confiscation by force, rather it's "freeing" it and when those deemed the burgeoisie try to stop that "freeing" of those things they feel are theirs and end up killed by the force wielding structures of a government that calls itself the "Revolution", that's just Justice, not State Organised Theft.

Same circular logic as when America invades a country to take their shit and calls it "Bringing Freedom to that country".

That shit is even more convolutedly self-justifying through circular logic and redefinition of the meaning of words than most Religions.

It's pretty much a required upgrade to be able to protect yourself from dropped or balistic nukes.

Depends on the salt used.

If you check here on table 5 you'll see that common table salt (NaCl) melts at 801º C.

As for what's used, in Chapter 2 of that paper they say "Molten salts consist of alkali metal or alkali metal halides and oxygen-containing salts", so it's not actually table salt that's used in Generation 2 of those kind of power generators.

In all fairness, you need to install a magnet at the far end and keep constantly pluging and unplugging it to generate power...

Actually it does change, from what I read mainly in terms of what substance is used to capture the heat of the sunlight, which in turn has other implications downstream: for example, if you melt salt and the molten salt is used to generate steam (so a generation 2 system), rather than directly heating water with sunlight to generate the steam (generation 1), not only does the efficiency go up but you can keep on generating power during the night as long as there's enough heat left in the salt, and whilst the basic principle is the same a lot of the engineering of the system changes because you're circulating melted salt rather than steam, you want to store some of the heated salte for the nighttime and you need to concentrate more sunlight to reach higher temperatures so the area of mirrors is larger.

Here is a paper I found about this stuff.

I think that's what they called a First Generation generator.

The ones in use now will actually use sunlight to melt salt (than then is used to generate steam) rather than directly generating the steam which has way more capacity to store heat, so they have a solar conversion efficiency of between 38% and 44%, plus the molten salt can keep on being used to generate steam during the night until it cools down enough.

There are literally some kinds of solar panel to generate heated water for things like home use.

They're just boxes painted in black with a pipe with water also painted in black zigzagging inside of it, rather than being photovoltaic panels.

Were I live now - Portugal - something like that works fine even in Winter to generate hot water for things like showering.

That said even during the Summer something like that won't generate steam (or at least, not with enough steam pressure to drive a turbine), unlike what the meme shows, though there are solar power concentrators that use sunlight to melt salt which then boils water to generate steam for a steam turbine, but those use a ton of mirrors to concentrate sunlight into a central tower were the salt is being melted. (For example).

There is actually a Solar Power Generation system were a solar collector uses sunlight to melt salt which then circulates through pipes to a place were it heats up water to boiling and that steam then goes through a turbine thus generating electricity.

However to reach those temperatures a simple panel isn't enough so what you have is a ton of mirrors over a large area all focusing the sunlight on a central tower were the salt-melting happens.

Here is an example.

By the way, this stuff actually has benefits over solar such as the ability to generate power at night (basically you don't extract all the heat from the molten salt during the day and just keep using it to boil water to feed the steam turbine during the night), plus it's a bit more efficient than solar panels and like solar panels it's also improving, throught things like using different salts.

I think that in Social-Democracy the means by which information is spread should not be owned by the Private sector.

In other words, the Press should either be state owned, owned by its workers (i.e. cooperatives), owned by everybody in the area they cover or some other such form of communal ownership were power over it is not approportioned based on wealth.

Like Tolerance, there is a Paradox here were the freedom of Social-Democracy when extended to structures which can be captured by those who gain from having a different system to undermine Social-Democracy through Propaganda, will end up destroying it, so permiting freedom there Social-Democracy ends up delivering less freedom overall (because it gets subverted and eventually destroyed).

Mind you, this just a vague idea based on having seen in places like Britain when I lived there how the Press, after being almost entirelly captured by a few wealthy individuals in Thatcher's years, very activelly and openly pushed the country first towards extreme Neoliberalism (which is how the leftwing Labour Party was hollowed out and replaced by the hard-right "New Labour" ideology) and later even Fascism (which is how the Tory party was captured and the "conservative" ideology it was replaced by rabid racist and ultra-nationalist populism and New Labour itself has more openly embraced autoritarian tools of exercising power, such as expanding extreme civil society surveillance more forcefully and deeming groups demonstrating against their policies "terrorists" and arresting those who support those groups).

Roughly, Socialism is a way to reach the state of perfect Equality of Outcomes called Communism, which requires an Revolution of The Proletariat where the Means of Production are siezed - so, an autocratic stage - to get there, and said stage is where all the so-called "Communist" countries are stuck - there is no nation in the World were everybody had the same, and there never was.

Social-Democracy is about how to get as much Equality as possible with the expectation that Equality Of Outcomes (in other words, Communism) is an impossible utopia because people are different, have different capabilities and have different levels of wanting to have things, and to do so without going through autocracy but rather using Democratic means.

So Social-Democracy aims for Equality Of Opportunity rather than Equality Of Outcomes (i.e. everybody gets the same chances rather than everybody has the same things), has things like higher taxation for people with higher incomes, wealth taxes and higher inheritance taxes (basically, the idea that those who can most afford it pay the most) to try and flatten wealth inequality and instead of seizing the means of production in the whole Economy, has a mixed system were in areas deemed essential for life or to provide equality of opportunities the state provides for peoples' needs (so for example, Public Education including University level, with a meritocratic selection processes) whilst in areas not deemed so (say, the manufacture and sale of soap) there's a Capitalist market system though with strong regulation and oversight for things deemed important for people's quality of life (for example, to stop Environmental damage).

Of course, even the most effective Social-Democratic systems have been highly subverted and undermined by the push in the Neoliberal Era for "Free Markets", "Low Regulation" and other such ideas designed to put the Power Of Money above the Power Of The Vote (by making the structures controlled by the vote de facto have less power over most of that which affects people's lives, than those controlled by Money).

That doesn't mean that Social-Democracy in its original form is a bad idea, it means that even in so-called Social-Democrat countries what they have is a system were Capitalism is currently dominant (having taken over a lot of "essential for life" domains which should still be controlled by the State, and nullified regulatory oversight in many areas that although not essential are important for people's quality of life), though still less so than in nations were when Neoliberalism started spreading Social-Democracy was weaker or even non-existent.

Further, Neoliberalism spread faster and deeper in places were Corruption was higher since it mostly works by buying politicians to sell Public companies, change the Laws to remove State participation in and oversight of important areas of the Economy and to weaken Regulatory oversight both by weakening the actual Regulatory Authorities directly and by making the fines for breaking regulations be smaller than the profits of doing so.

All this is why, for example, the US is way more fucked up than Denmark.

Exactly.

This is what I've been saying for years.

If you have to pay it merely because you're alive, it's a "tax".

Have to pay healthcare insurance because otherwise you will die or lose everything you managed to get from decades of working if you get sick or have an accident: Tax!

Have no other option than to pay for a car and for gas because you have to drive everywhere since the entire infrastructures is designed for that to be the only option you have: Tax!

Need to have Internet access at home because a lot of things must be done via the Internet nowadays and/or you work from home and there only one or two expensive Internet providers: Tax!

Need a mobile phone for everything and there's only a handful of mobile telephony available, all expensive: Tax!

Need a place to live and because of all the realestate "investors" house prices are insane and totally beyond your reach, and rents are high because of being highly correlated with house prices: Tax!

Must pay for an expensive kindergarten for your young kids because both members of a couple must work to keep up with all the other taxes I described above: Tax!

And, guess what, the Taxes paid to the state (be it Local, State-level or Central Government) at least have a chance to partly get back to you as benefits, whilst the Taxes paid to the Private Sector go entirelly to shareholder pockets and fuck you plebe.

In the Neoliberal era even in Europe the whole Economy is riddled with these Taxes payed directly to the Private sector because politicians in the past were payed to make laws to distort certain markets or to remove the state from regulating markets prone to monopolies or cartels (or, even more subtly, to make sure the fines for breaking competition rules are a microscopic fraction of the gains from doing it) hence large sections of the Economy and Society are little more than rent-seeking, but the US is way more extreme than Europe in this because it's even more Neoliberal and its system even in the beginning of this era was way less tempered by a tradition of society-oriented politics than most of Europe.

A LOT of effort has been spent into brainwashing Americans to think that Taxes paid into the common pot which pays for benefits for everybody (even though, in all fairness, a large fraction of that pot just to subsidies for politically connected companies) are a great burden for them even whilst they don't count in the same way all that money they're forced to put in the hands of certain private entities, even though in both cases the system is structured to make sure they have no real choice but to pay and, you know, money is money so even in the purest most selfish logic it's no less a burden if you're forced to pay X amount to the Private sector for unearned profits from merelly having a monopoly or being part of a cartel as it would be to pay X amount to a Public sector that did absolutelly nothing for you (and even in the US the Public sector does do something for everybody, at the very least basic schools and roads).

This shit has been exported to Europe but people here aren't yet anywhere as brainwashed.