As usual, I don’t write film reviews, only critiques and analyses, so get the hell away from this post if you have yet to watch this film. Come back only after you’ve done so.
Anyone who reads this blog should know that Christopher Nolan is easily my favorite director and that I eagerly look forward to every film that he makes. This has been true ever since I first discovered Memento. Since then, I’ve watched every one of his films, except for The Following, which I understand is sort of a student film made on a shoestring budget. With the sole exception of Insomnia, which, being an adaptation of a Norwegian film, is competent but otherwise unremarkable, all have been stellar.
It’s been a while since I last posted a YouTube video as a post and since I’m busy at work today, here’s a video showing how well a modern computer equipped with suitable sensors can parallel park a car. Note that there’s a human driver in the car but he’s just there for safety reasons and is not driving the car in the maneuver shown in the video. Certainly few human drivers will be able to pull this off.
This is something that I’ve touched on before, but I recently got involved in an extended discussion on the subject on the LYN, so I’ll post a summary here. To me, the argument in favor of inheritance taxes is painfully obvious. Unless you’re a tax-hating anarcho-capitalist, in which case I invite you to move to Somalia, everyone agrees that every country needs to raise taxes somehow to function. And for the sake of fairness, it is a given that taxes should be progressive. This not only means that folks who are better off needs to pay more taxes as an absolute figure, but that they need to pay more as a proportion of their total income and wealth.
This means that inheritance taxes need to be a part of any reasonable tax system as they’re probably the most progressive form of tax possible. True, you can make income taxes highly progressive by vastly increasing the marginal tax rates for the highest income tiers, but economists generally agree that this is inadvisable that extremely high income tax rates create a disincentive to work. Inheritance taxes have similar effects, but to a much lesser degree than income taxes. Given all this, what are the objections to them. The following is directly from one my posts on LYN:
Four articles this month. Three of them are about humans the last one, about giraffes, is just something I threw in for fun. The three articles about people deal respectively with yet another mooted cause for schizophrenia, how our sense of touch affects our judgment and an unconventional, but very intuitive, way of determining whether or not someone is lying.
Schizophrenia
The first article is from The Economist and deliberately evokes a scenario that could have come right out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There have been many different causes mooted for schizophrenia over the years and some of the theories I’ve read even include pathogens. But this is the first time I’ve heard that it’s caused by one that explicitly causes behavioral changes in its host to ensure its own propagation.
