ecocomics

Someone sent me these bar stool economics

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Bar Stool Economics

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100 and If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.)

So, that's what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve.

"Because you are all such good customers," he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20." so drinks for the ten now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected...They would still drink for free...But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?'...They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33...But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer..So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.
And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before...And the first four continued to drink for free...But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.
"I only got a dollar out of the $20,"declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man," but he got $10!" "Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man.
"I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I!"
"That's true!!" shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!"
"Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!"
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, ladies and gentlemen, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the-- highest taxes-- are entitled to get the most from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics
University of Georgia
For those who understand, no explanation is needed.
For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.
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Here is my input to the above theory:

I am happy for the the tenth man, that he could afford to pay a bigger share. It does look unfair that he has to pay a bigger share.

The question remains on how could that tenth man afford to pay for everyone's beer.

He probably had the first 4 working for him at an hourly basis.

He had the fifth and sixth as managers

Seventh and Eighth were like senior managers and VPs.

The ninth was some part of the team that formed committees, that advised the law makers, which helped him make big bucks that made him wealthy. Maybe some of the ninth ones were law makers themselves.

So he realised, if I pay a bigger share and provide free beer and subsidized it to everyone else, then I can pretty much rule these idiots.

The question is not about fairness, the question is how can you be the tenth person or be closer to the tenth.

Is there a path for everyone else to become that tenth person? If the path does not exist or is made difficult by the ninth person as per direction from the tenth, then we know why the tenth one was more then ready to pay for everyone else.

But if there is a path, that allows anyone to reach that goal, then I think this is a fair system, except that he does not need to be punished for being successful. My suspicion is people beat him, because they did not find a path to become the tenth person.

Personal integrity

I was reading a checklist for a certain program and came cross a statement that said the person needs to possess high level of personal integrity. I started wondering about that line. What exactly do we mean by personal integrity? Is this something that we learn in school or does the environment around, teaches you integrity. The definition runs closely with our moral compass that we maintain within ourselves. In reality personal integrity is actually what defines who we are and what our moral composition is comprised of. The pillar of integrity gets built brick by brick based on events and incidents we face in our life. We lay the boundaries for ourselves and people around us perceive our whole self based on this very moral fabric we weave ourselves into.

The strongest realization of your own integrity will dawn upon you, when you act it out on your own, without any intervention and without anyone actually witnessing it.

Like returning extra change handed out to you mistakenly by a cab driver. Returning to the rightful owner something that does not belong to you, even when you know that you could have got away with it and no one would have noticed, that would define you as someone with better integrity.

Failure a positive step

What exactly would be termed as failure? The way I see it is that there exists a goal post, beyond which a person will strive to exert an effort to reach the post. There is a time span that is defined, in which you are supposed to make it to the goal post. Not everyone can be winners, there will be losers. These folks that lose will experience the emotion called failure.

Everyone needs to realise that failing is just part of life. Every game that is played has a losing and winning person or team. So you lose a game or event in life. But thats not end of your life or end of the career for a player.

Failure is the begining and actually the first stepping stone for success, if you can orient your energy in the right direction. Learn from your mistakes and start working on the next event. Every junction in your life is like a game, you win some you lose some.

The way I see it is that when I lose a big event, I lay out the the timespan. The game is not over until I win it. It can span from few months to decades or maybe till my last breath. I will build the stage for a come back. So do not count me out, there will be a comeback, it maybe a delayed one, but win has to be mine. Positive vindictiveness is a good thing and keeps me on my toes.

Vivir Mata

One of my colleague at work, gave me this movie to watch. Vivir Mata, in spanish it means life kills. The movie deals with how two strangers concoct lies to impress upon each other, Thus they find some kind of twisted romance in their adventure. To be frank, I did not get the punch that I have normally felt from other Spanish language movies. It was a little slow going and did not really draw me into its story line. The movie deals with how some people are desparate to derive pleasure from relationships with strangers, that are more exotic, even if its a total sham and built with lies. The movie does end with a feel good effect, where both of them accept the fact that they were drawn towards each other for their respective lies and yet choose to accept one another.

In a way, I still see it as similar to how two people in order to impress each other will build a fantasy world around them. Each of them enjoys the bliss and works hard in maintaining the level of excitement. But how long can you maintain the same level of excitement? That is why sometimes people are bored after getting married and would term that the relationship has become meaningless or is losing its weight.

But if you look harder and try to understand, you will realise, that the meaning and weight to the relationship was built by this imaginary fairy tale perception by both the involved parties. Marriage is just a ritual that was performed, it should not blunt the effort for maintaining excitement at the same level or maybe higher. SO the question I ask is do you still work hard to impress your soul mate, just like you did when you met them the first time?

Death

There comes a time in life when we have to face the subject of death. As much as death is end of life for the person involved, it does result in start of vaccuum for all the people related to the deceased.

One of my neighbors nine month old son passed away to heavenly abode yesterday during the early hours. The family had been fighting the baby's illness for several months. The pain involved for the parents in such a situation is totally unexplainable.

The family did not leave any stone unturned to find a cure for the illness. They hopped from one hospital to another, with hope upon hope to fight the tumor that refused to budge from the little gems delicate brain. However their relentless pursuit to keep him with us mortal souls wanned day by day, since almighty god had laid out a different journey for the little soul, perhaps more glowing and celestial than ours.

Today I offer my deepest thoughts and prayers to the family in pain, as they continue to embrace the heart wrenching reality that they will have to undergo for years to come.

Avatar

A few days ago, I watched the much talked about movie Avatar. I would give full points for its technical brillance. The whole concept and its execution is really commendable. But I personally felt that the story line was very much hackneyed. A sci-fi movie can have the liberty of portraying an abstract message, something that can convey a larger, more challenging theme. But they chose to go with a concept that was easily likable to the masses, hence did not prefer to choose a subject that would have been more intellectually stimulating.

But the name Avatar, echoes back to India. Avatar is a sanskrit word and in simpler words avatar means to take a different form. The Hindu mythological stories abound in various avatars of the gods. Especially Avatars of trinity gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. From what I understand from these stories are that the Gods would take Avatar (forms) of different beings to slay a demon or to bring a drastic change. The way I see it is that to bring about a change, we need to make transformational changes in ourselves, so to speak as though take an Avatar.

Sub conscious mind

I was reading about hypnosis the other day and came across several articles that talks about how hypnosis can help a person to work on his personality traits like self esteem, confidence level and also addictions. That got me thinking as to how there exist a whole different universe out there which we probably don't use in our day to day life, which if used would bring immense changes in our lifestyle.

One subject that I want to broach here is the potential of subconscious mind. This is an arena if tapped correctly can bring about changes in multi-dimensional level. As far as I can recollect, I first came across this topic in a book, that I picked up from a road stall at Andheri railway station in Mumbai. You know, like those cheap books you can buy for Rs 20 or something, that you want to tag along for a quick read. As always I was looking for something that would challenge my curiosity and found this book titled "The power of subconscious mind". I don't remember who the author was, but I carried that book with me while I was flying to UK. This was in 1999, I was reading this book on the airplane and to the best of my knowledge, I think the author was some christian preacher.

The book wandered more into the religious aspect of it. But the whole concept really awed me. I added my own perception to his philosophy. So here is the gist of my perception from the book.

We have a conscious mind which defines and shapes our physical identity in this world. But there also exist a subconscious meta physical existence, which is actually the universe by itself. The whole universe, non-physical nature and everything in this universe is controlled by the subconscious existence. So when we refer to our inner self as subconscious mind, we are actually sapping some energy or an abstract phenomena from the subconscious meta physical existence.

So speaking in mathematical terms, the subconscious existence is a whole set, in which resides the universe, without the physical presence of nature. Our subconscious minds are a subset of this larger set. So mathematically all of our subconscious minds are connected together and form part of the system.

So how is this going to help us? Well, if you can feed positive energy to your subconscious mind, then you can pass that energy to the larger set around you and hence influence your surrounding to change or affect you in a positive way. So the name of the game is stay positive and feed your inner mind with positive energy and you will remain confident and be successful in all your endeavors