So you end up with octogenarians in power? No thanks.
I am glad that in my country people retire and fuck off to spend their last days on holiday. Spending their accumulated wealth has become a major engine of the national economy.
If anything, we’ve seen that older generations of leadership can’t keep up with changing technology and fail to adapt to massive upheavals.
In times of rapid technological development, the old are not wise. They are reactionary and cannot adapt. Their brain stopped developing before the internet. To expect them to make adequate decisions for the current landscape is to expect them to understand a world they simply weren’t built for.
Its not standard, but its widely used because it is more comparable between companies as it removes the impact of interest (and therefore capital structure) and depreciation (which can reflect different histories).
Sure, EBITDA is useful for comparing operating performance between companies in a single industry, where capital structures and asset bases are broadly similar. But the article applies it across industries, where those assumptions break down. This makes no sense.
The article called it a 'standard profit metric'. It is a metric, but it doesn't measure profit (as it ignores capitalized costs) and it isn't standard.
> Sure, EBITDA is useful for comparing operating performance between companies in a single industry, where capital structures and asset bases are broadly similar.
The whole point of EBITDA is, as I said, to eliminate the effect of capital structures.
EBITDA margin is not meaningful between dissimilar industries. I am not sure what would be best. Some sort of return on investment measure.
> A third of the entire human population is infected with toxoplasmosis, in some places nearly every human.
So if it is often harmful to some extent in people who do not show severe symptoms, then it is a terrible disease that causes widespread harm. There is evidence it causes lesser, but possibly significant harm, in far more people than is generally recognised:
> Most humans (and other beings) aren't pregnant or immunocompromised
So we do not need to vaccinate against rubella either? most people are not disabled so we do not need wheelchair ramps? Most people are not sick at any given time so we do not need hospitals?
That is the aim. Its not a bad idea to reduce the number of cars (at least in cities) but the problem is that the British government wants to drastically reduce the number cars without spending on providing more public transport.
In Germany for example(and other EU countries) you get money back from the government on your tax return for your daily commutes to work, if you live far away enough from work to qualify for commuter subsidies. Those subsidies you get no matter which transportation you use, bicycle, train, car, etc. And plenty of people commute by car when their work/home is far away and remote enough for cycle/public transportation to not be very useful or convenient.
Funny how their solution was to subsidize burning fossil fuels for car commutes to the office instead of, oh I don't know, MANDATING WFH!, given Germans are such staunched green environmentalists. Sure, let's turn off nuclear and ban plastic straws, but let's also subsidize the generation of diesel, brake pad and tire fine dust particles we breathe in, for commuting by car to work. We can't forget our car industry lobbyists.
I am guessing its a deduction in calculating your taxable income. You also say it applies to all forms of transport. That is not a subsidy. It is not different from allowing a factory that uses a fuel to deduct the cost of that fuel in calculating their taxable profits.
Some countries literally subsidize gasoline, but even if your country does not it probably supports oil companies with tax breaks ('creating jobs'). There also are lots of untaxed externalities like global warming and exhaust pollution.
They are not so different: it's the same private/public money dynamic but money flowing in different ways. For consumers it doesn't really matter if it's a tax or 'mandatory levy'. For instance: in the EU it's mandatory to pay for disposal of consumer goods, which is priced in with every purchase. That's as close as a 'disposal tax' as you can get.
In the US, at least, we directly subsidize fossil fuels to the tune of billions of dollars a year -- just counting the above-board, direct subsidies through legislation. If you count indirect subsidies, the figures are staggering.
But put a $7500 point-of-sale rebate on an electric car and people go nuts. So the solution is either make the EV subsidy less obvious, like we do for fossil fuels, or try to educate people on where their tax dollars actually go. The former is more feasible, certainly, in the modern political environment where ideology rules over facts.
reply