Think about it this way: they’ve evolved a clever behavioural hack that doubles the length of their entire digestive tract without any increase in weight. This is extremely efficient!

They deposit them directly into their mouth. They know when they’re about to produce one and they reach down there with their mouth and consume it directly.

If you think about where wild rabbits spend most of their time (underground in burrows surrounded by dirt) this makes total sense. By not allowing cecotropes to touch the ground, they avoid contamination with soil-borne pathogens.

Integration: just think about driving somewhere in your car. How long it takes you to get there depends on how fast you’re going as well as the total distance you need to travel. This is easy to figure out if you’re going exactly one constant speed for the entire trip.

But what if you’re driving in the city and you’re speeding up and slowing down all the time? Maybe sometimes you even need to go in reverse which takes you further away from the destination! So the problem you have is that your speed is changing throughout the trip (sometimes even going negative when you’re driving in reverse) and you still want to somehow figure out how long it takes.

Perhaps you might have thought of a straightforward (albeit tedious) way of getting the answer: record your current speed and the current time in a notebook every so often and then multiply each speed by the time interval to get all these small slices of distance travelled, then add them all up at the end. Congratulations, that’s the idea behind integration!

There’s one problem though: your speed might be changing throughout each time interval so the answer you get has all these mistakes that just add up to give you an inaccurate result! Solution: make all the time intervals smaller! This way each time interval includes a more accurate speed, so there will be less errors when we add them all up. Thus the theory of integration is that we can make the intervals arbitrarily small (as small as we want) to get an answer as accurate as we want all the way down to infinite intervals of infinitesimal length which ought to give us the exact answer (and it does)!

Differentiation (calculation of derivatives): the opposite of integration. This takes an entire trip in the car and gives us the ability to calculate our exact speed at any instant in time. Unlike how we might calculate an average speed by looking at the total distance travelled over a time interval and dividing it by that length of time, a derivative gives us the exact speed at a moment in time!

Anyway I hope those two rough explanations help illuminate things a bit for you. Integration and differentiation (calculus) are actually way more useful than just for calculating speeds and distances. For example, the same ideas can be used to calculate the area of an irregular shape (divide it up into squares and add them all up, making the squares smaller helps reduce the errors around the edges) or the volume of an irregular container! Or the slope of a hill at any point on its surface! Or perhaps the lowest point of a valley (using a technique called gradient descent).

That last one is actually very commonly used in artificial intelligence as a training technique. There you’re trying to find the minimum point in some higher dimensional data, according to some rules you have. With gradient descent you use differentiation to find the slope and then you take a small step along the slope towards that minimum point, then repeat!

Love integration! Much more fun than derivatives!

Neither in Canada nor in the US do you need to pay a service to file taxes. All you need to do is get the forms and fill them out. People use these services because the forms are very long with many things to figure out, most of which don’t apply to most people.

I dunno about the US but in Canada you can download the completed form at the end before submitting it to the tax agency. Using this completed form can show you what you need to fill out yourself next year, assuming your circumstances don’t change.

All spiders are little mechs to me! Their legs are powered by hydraulics!

Also known as kicking the can down the road.

If you don’t fail a kid in elementary school they’re gonna fail in high school. If you don’t fail them in high school they’re gonna fail in university or in life in general.

Life has consequences for making mistakes and not learning from them. If we try to shelter children from their mistakes and bad habits then we raise adults who are poorly equipped for handling the challenges of life.

When I was in first year of university I met so many nice, seemingly-well-adjusted people who hit a brick wall with their coursework. I believe around a third of my peers failed to graduate at all in their programs. Many dropped out or transferred to other departments or other universities.

But here’s the thing: my peers had already been subject to a rigorous selection process to get in (only about 10% of applicants were admitted). If you had put all applicants through the rigours of the coursework far more would have failed.

The really tragic part of this whole story is when you factor in the degrees of the consequences for failure. In elementary school the consequences for failure would be very low. Children who are older than their peers tend to outperform them anyway. In university, however, the consequences for failure are very high (thousands of dollars wasted on failed courses that need to be repeated).

The consequences for failure outside of school (real life as they call it) are even higher: unemployment, homelessness, incarceration, and even violence and death.

They did mention being a driving instructor. Driving (and teaching students to drive) all day every day is going to put a lot more wear on the tires than a typical driver.

When the right goes too far, they’re ascendant in politics. They’ve won the election and they’re enacting some seriously bad policies.

When the left goes too far they fragment into a million pieces. No coalition can be built because everyone is too caught up in fighting over the details.

What I described is water filtration: biological filtration. Runoff from farms is organic in nature: manure and fertilizer, for the most part. Filtering it with traditional water filters (which need to be regularly replaced) is a huge waste of materials and a source of plastic waste that needs to be disposed of. It’s spending more money in order to fill up landfills needlessly.

Furthermore, it doesn’t even make sense from an infrastructure perspective. Artificial water filters are designed to be installed in pipelines. The water runoff on farms is not contained in a pipeline. It’s caused by rainfall and snowmelt on fields and running downhill (as well as sinking into the ground, soil permitting) over a large area. To filter it artificially you’d need to collect all that water into a pipe which would require enormous infrastructure to construct.

It’s so much easier, so much more economical, and so much more environmentally friendly to do minimal landscaping and allow water to collect in a basin located downhill where the water was flowing anyway. Some of it may need to be diverted for one reason or another, but that’s nothing compared to the cost of full collection and water treatment. Plus all those native wetlands plants that uptake the excess nutrients provide a habitat for native wetlands wildlife. It’s a win-win!

Fixing the runoff problem is just a matter of proper landscaping. Establishing an artificial wetland or preserving a natural wetland can go a long way towards reducing nutrient loads in the water that drains from a farm.

It’s all about having a basin to store water so it doesn’t drain off the farm too quickly and allowing native aquatic plants to take up nutrients to filter them out of the water.

I love this. I am a big fan of the use of colour, the small details, the little spires in the distance. So evocative! Beautiful!

Even chess feels the inevitability of carcinization! We might as well start calling it like it is: the 4th law of thermodynamics.

Look at the gold line then. That’s the effective tax rate which incorporates all of the different bands (right now there are only 2 bands anyway).

Why are you so ardent to defend taxing billionaires?

Please, be more charitable than that.

My argument is not that we shouldn’t make wealthy people pay their fair share. It’s that tax avoidance isn’t a trivial problem to solve. It’s actually very complicated because people are smart in general and they generally always try to minimize the taxes they pay.

This is half of the reason the entire accounting profession exists (the other half in auditing)! When one tax loophole is discovered, an accounting firm can put it to work for all of their clients.

What I suspect you're identifying is the loophole whereby wealthy individuals hold on to stocks to avoid taxable events. They then take out a loan with the stocks as collateral. The bank charges a small % because the risk to them is tiny. Thus it's far cheaper for the individual than simply paying the capital gains.

Yes, though it’s not just billionaires who do this. Regular people do this as well. And they don’t just do this with stocks and bonds, they do it with real estate. Reverse mortgages, home equity lines of credit, rental properties, etc!

If you own a million dollars worth of stocks and bonds you can use that as collateral for a loan to help you make the down payment on a new mortgage. Then you can convert that property into a rental and use the rental income to pay off the loan as well as make mortgage payments. Or you could use the loan to help you start a small business.

There’s just so much people can do when they have access to capital. Our whole economy is based on it.

Capital gains taxes only need to be paid when the gains are realized; that is, when stocks or bonds are sold for a profit or when dividends are paid. Capital gains taxes are not owed if you’re just holding a stock as it rises in value over time.

If you look at the history of capital gains taxes in the US, you’ll see that when capital gains taxes are high people don’t realize their gains because they don’t want to pay the tax. Instead they’ll hold on to their investments until a later time when taxes are low again:

As you can see with the “taxes paid on capital gains” line in the graph, lowering capital gains tax can actually increase the total amount of taxes you collect.

Most wealth isn’t in the form of houses and luxury goods, it’s in the form of capital. Ownership of businesses, stocks, and bonds.

Trying to seize all that wealth in the stock market is even more difficult than seizing a car or a boat. As we’ve seen, the stock market can drop by billions and trillions of dollars within seconds. The truth is, that wealth doesn’t really exist in the same way that a rock or a tree exists. That wealth is based on people’s perception of value. It’s literally a figment of our imaginations and it can vanish in an instant if people come to believe it has.

Imposing a large wealth tax on people’s stocks and bonds would crater the market far worse than the Great Depression. It would trigger bank runs and total chaos.

Even if you announced a plan to gradually phase it in over several years, you’d have people phase out their market holdings faster than that. They’d switch to buying tankers full of oil or other hard commodities that they keep off-shore. And they’d use it to hold the country hostage as everyday living costs skyrocket.

I mean unless you’re going to turn the world into a giant prison, there’s tons and tons of ways to avoid paying taxes.

Life is not a matter of problems and solutions, it’s all about tradeoffs. When you think you’re solving one problem, you’re really creating another one somewhere else.

When it comes to society and the laws we make for it, this should be clearer than it is. Every law has intended and unintended consequences. For example, in the Code of Hammurabi most crimes were punishable by death. This would’ve had the unintended consequence that criminals would feel no deterrence against murdering all witnesses, since they faced execution either way when caught.

The theory of why we don’t maximize all punishments against criminals is called marginal deterrence. This theory applies way more broadly than just criminal law however. It applies to all laws and their effects on people’s behaviour within a society.

It even applies to biology and ecology more broadly, for example with parasites. The more resources a host spends defending against parasites the less resources it has available for other biological functions. A maximalist approach to fighting off parasites would leave the host with too few resources for survival, so would not be a good strategy overall.

Companies do leave over time though. Look at the history of manufacturing in the US. So much of it has left for cheaper places to do business, such as China. Trump now has this fantasy of using tariffs to try to force companies to come back to manufacturing in the US, and he’s destroying the economy to try and achieve it.

People sometimes forget that tariffs are a tax. Other sorts of extreme taxes (like the 90% income taxes in the past) can have similarly devastating effects. Those effects may have been mitigated to an extent by the relative difficulty of moving around back then. Today it’s much easier to move. A big part of that is jet travel which allows you to closely monitor a factory in another country by travelling there to check up on it and hold meetings and plan.

Also note that just because a company leaves the US doesn’t mean its executives have to. They keep their wealth offshore while travelling freely between countries. The only way to prevent that is to impose draconian measures such as restricting freedom of movement and capital controls. This is the kind of stuff China does to its citizens to try to stop wealth from leaving the country and it’s not even all that successful at preventing the wealthiest people from moving their money out, despite being highly draconian.

It’s not just local tax loopholes. Companies and wealthy individuals can leave the country if taxes get too high. Unless you’re willing to embargo the country they move to and become a pariah like North Korea then those companies can do business in your country from afar.

The only other solution is to create some kind of world government, but now you’re way outside the realm of practicality. Even if you started the process of forming a world government you’d have to find some way to avoid turning into a dystopian dictatorship. Look at what’s happening in the US right now and it should be clear how difficult it is to prevent that.

But back to tax policy: you have to ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve with taxes. Is it to pay for social programs and national defence is or is it wealth redistribution? If it’s the latter then you might have better ways of achieving that than corporate taxes. Why not land value taxes? You can’t take the land with you when you leave the country, so that loophole is closed.