This post is a kind of follow-up post to the last one, which dealt amongst others with simulations of political/economic scenarios in multiplayer online games. In a couple of days a new SimCity game will come out and as Wikipedia puts it:

This version of SimCity will be the first to feature full online play since Maxis’s SimCity 2000 Network Edition,[1] allowing for regions to house multiple cities from different players. Regions can alternatively be set to private for solo play.[31] SimCity will require players to be logged into EA’s Origin service to play the game, including when playing single player.

or as SimCity.com puts it:

SimCity has truly connected cities within larger regions for the first time. Cities do not exist in a bubble – they are living, breathing systems that make up a region – and now you can trade and share resources among cities and regions in real time.

Unfortunately the above mentioned Origin seems to have sofar stirred up a lot of controversy about privacy issues. In Europe there are currently new data protection regulations underway, which by the way seem to be heavily “informed” by lobbyists. (The website Lobbyplag (unfortunately sofar only in german) gives an overview, which law drafts have been directly pasted in from which lobbyists brochures.) In view of this ungoing process it is thus however sofar not clear wether any of the discussed privacy issues of Origin will have any or what juridicial consequences.
SimCity2013 seems to allow for no modding at least right after launch. That is in an interview with gameinformer SimCity lead producer Kip Katsarelis replied to the question:
Is there an element of user-created content and sharing in city customization?

We’re not committing to any of that at this time, but we know that is part of Maxis. In SimCity 4, a lot of those tools were released pretty much a year after launch. So, definitely on our minds, but I can’t promise that we’re delivering on any of that right now.

If modding would have been possible then -apart from eventual privacy/data protection problems- the people from the project of the last post could have eventually thought about wether it would make sense to use SimCity2013Mods for their purpose. However it should also pointed out, that even if modding would be possible then too political game mods could pose problems.

One should also think about the economic consequences of computer simulations/games etc. (you may eventually also want to read my comment on the blog Backreaction in this context.)

In a recent comment on randform randform reader Bibi asked:

You had written at Azimuth that your idea to use MMOGs for simulating economic and political real world scenarios

seems to have recently been picked up for the Global Participatory Platform of the 2013 Flagship proposal FucturICT

It seems also that your scientific platform idea had been picked up for that ICTfutur grant proposal.

What about your intellectual property?

The FuturICT application for 1 billion Euros had though been turned down, will you now write an EU grant proposal?

Answers to this comment after the click.

What about your intellectual property?

So first of all, I don’t know wether the idea to use MMOGs for political and economical change was really first formulated here. Serious games and economical simulations had been around for a while, so the idea might have easily been stated somewhere else first – I give a little overview over games and their history in the draft (see also this blogpost). If an idea can be stated easily then it is usually considered as “unoriginal” because it appears to have emerged rather within an incremental process than as a truly new thing. So just as the idea for a closed preprint archive the idea to use MMOGs in this context appears to be not overly original. The same holds true for “the idea” of a scientific platform, or a global scientific collaboration tool which had actually been around for quite a while and it would be totally weird to claim intellectual property for all of this. In fact I even had myself -unsuccessfully though- set up a small global collaboration platform about 10 years ago..

In short: It is useful to state ideas in order to stimulate a development however the crucial point here is to extract relevant structures for a working solution. This is the more important the bigger the project.

So my article On the need for a global academic internet platform was in part intended to stimulate a discussion, however it proposed also an outline of a structural framework – one of the main features being that it should be scalable, rather open and to a great extend based on already existing infrastructure.

It seems also that your scientific platform idea had been picked up for that ICTfutur grant proposal.

Unfortunately I hadn’t found much on the concrete structures of the ICTFutur platforms. Maybe I had overseen something, in particular not everything (like the article Linking science and arts: Intimate science, shared spaces and living experiments) was accessible to me – but I went to quite a bit of the pdf’s. Here is the main idea for the Global Particpatory Platform of FuturICT:

Global Participatory Platform in Practice – Crowd sourcing and interface

The main idea behind the GPP is to allow the stakeholders – scientists, policy analysts, software developers and the ordinary citizen – to harness the knowledge and creativity of multiple minds as the communication, coordination, cooperation and the social, economic and political participation of citizens is promoted. By building on the principles of Wikipedia and Web 2.0, this will go beyond what is currently possible through existing eGovernance platforms. The goal is to engender a beneficial human-information symbiosis, with the GPP featuring mixed reality systems, where it will be almost impossible to distinguish between the real and virtual world. The GPP use techniques employed in multi-player online games; for example where scientists will be able to explore simulations for different designs of shopping malls, airports, or city centres in addition to trying out different financial architectures, or voting systems.

and

In order to make derive a public good from data and models, the FuturICT project will develop a new ecosystem, one which delivers access to data, quality analytical tools and effective communication systems. This ecosystem will have the capability of social sensing and social thinking…

For a 1 billion Euro grant proposal this unfortunately appears to me to be not enough. The principal idea of a (europe based) “collider” or “knowledge accelerator” as it is fromulated in the FuturICT proposals appears to me also very different from my proposal, which envisages rather more globally distributed structures.

From the Early Outline of the FuturICT Proposal:

The FuturIcT Flagship will build a knowledge accelerator to address the challenges for humankind in the 21st century. This will include the creation of the following:

• Integrated data collection, modelling, simulation, visualization, design, and decision-support tools for complex systems, based on novel approaches such as “possibilistic” simulation concepts (multiple world view, parallel world scenarios,…)
• Social super-computing, including a socio-economic modelling language
• An innovation accelerator changing the scientific production paradigm, to support efficient
progress and investments in science and technology
• A peer-to-peer reputation and privacy-respecting recommender system…..

But lets’s turn to your next question:

The FuturICT application for 1 billion Euros had though been turned down, will you now write an EU grant proposal?

I actually had written and helped out with quite some grant proposals, to a great extend actually usually not for myself (alone). I had even helped (that was partially part of my job) to write (EU) grants for other individuals and frankly speaking these were sometimes quite a nightmare, like I remember that the EU grants included several calls to Brussels.

So, I thus now wonder a bit about the ICTFutur proposal. Comparing to usual EU grant applications and especially to the amount of money involved it appears to be quite sparse. But as said I may have overlooked something.

But to answer your question: No, I currently do not intend to apply for grants for such an endevour. That is first I am not in academia anymore, so I am anyway not eligible for applying, secondly I think quite some more thoughts need still to be invested. I still do think that it makes sense to connect academic researchers and this can be done and is done already now. Like I think that alone collecting and identifying researchers, like via ORCID is a useful thing. It was already mentioned in the article, but should be repeated again – the development of better software tools is here and for the more active collaboration parts crucial. I also think that initiatives and guidelines to make scientific data better accessible are important, unfortunately alone the access to scientific publications is a problem, see e.g. the problems documented at the EU survey on scientific information in the digital age” (via irights.info) or the comment on psychology today (via John Baez on google+). The collaboration part is even more difficult, even if there of course exists examples of online collaboration (like e.g. the Azimuth project). That is social sharing may rather be on the decline as had been pointed out by scholarly kitchen (also via John Baez on google+) and I think the whole academic system have been getting more and more into trouble in recent years.

These tendencies in academia are in my opinion due to a global socio-economic shift which is currently taking place (see e.g. the last randform post Hurries for humans in physis). And it appears to me that this shift is deeply rooted in human perception and human nature and the roles humans have in evolution. For that reason I am currently digressing a bit in my article draft and e.g. investigate the roles of machines and humans in evolution a little bit more in depth. I think this investigation is important, also if it may eventually postpone the (pre) publication of the game article forever.

Read the rest of this entry »

As described in the last german TAX post I was trying to get information about german income taxes, in particular I wanted to get the concrete formulas. I asked via fragdenstaat.org at the Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung: BPB) for that information, since they have a webpage about income taxes. This page however cited only a little phrase, with the names of the different income zones before I wrote the letter, but luckily it got meanwhile at least a little revamped. However the page still doesn’t show the formulas, moreover it is not very up-to-date. In addition the BPB was not only not able to help me with my request, but I was told that:

” In Bezug auf weitere steuerrechtliche Auskünfte bitte ich Sie, von Anfragen bei der bpb Abstand zu nehmen, weil wir definitiv nicht dafür zuständig sind.”

(translation without guarantee: with regard to further tax law requests I ask you to precind from sending further requests to BPB, because we are definitly not in charge for this.)

I should maybe also mention that I asked a representative of the ministry of economics for the formulas, who said I should ask a tax consultant.
As already said in the comment at fragdenstaat.de I had then finally found formulas for the taxes 2010-2012 (after a long search). The formulas are on the site of the ministry for finance with the taxcalculator and you can get the formulas if you type in any income, and then hit the button “BERECHNEN”. I couldnt however find the formulas for the original draft for the taxes for 2013 from February last year, neither the formulas for the new draft as of december 12 last year for the taxes for 2013. Mr. Liebig, who runs the website www.lohn-info.de had however found them and had included the numbers on his site, so I wrote him an email and asked him for the links.
I have meanwhile got an answer from Mr. Liebig who had kindly send me the links via email.

A document which describes the taxes for the upcoming year, as of 121212 is at the website of the Bundesrat.

A document which was the old draft for the 2013 taxes and which was intended to mitigate the impact of higher taxes due to BRACKET CREEP is at
http://dip21.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/17/086/1708683.pdf

I meanwhile included the new numbers into the formulas. Details (in german) and the mathics code can be found after the click.

The result in short: If I didn’t miscalculate then there are tax reductions of 8-24 Euros/year for the incomes above 13500 Euros per year. For incomes of 8100 Euro to 13500 Euros there is a tax increase of about 15 Euros/per year. The procentual bracket creep (not sure wether this is called this way, please look at formulas) is for 6% income increase maximaly about 2.5%, for 2% income increase it is about 0.8%.

Ich habe jetzt mal die neuen Zahlen angeguckt und eingegeben um u.a. genauer zu sehen wie sehr sich die kalte Progression bemerkbar macht. (Ich hoffe ich habe mich dabei nicht vertippt und habe die Zahlen extra nicht als Variable gesetzt, damit man Tippfehlerschneller sieht)

Der mathics code ist unten man braucht in nur in die Maus pasten by www.mathics.net einpasten, shift-return drücken und bekommt die Ergebnisse.

Die prozentuale kalte Progression -hoffe das heisst so, was ich meine ist das hier:
fProgression[Einkommen_]:=(Steuer2013[Einkommen+Prozent*Einkommen]-Steuer2012[Einkommen])/Einkommen

ergibt bei einer Lohnerhöhung von 2% ungefähr 8 promille und
bei einer Lohnerhöhung von 6% ungefähr 2,5 Prozent des Einkommens.

Die genaue Kurve kann man sich mit dem Befehl

Clear[Einkommen,Prozent]
Prozent:=0.06
Plot[fProgression[x],{x, 10000, 100000}]

anzeigen lassen (hier ist z.b. die prozentuale Progression bei einer Gerhaltserhöhung um 6% in den Grenzen von 10000 Euro Einkommen bis 100000 Euro Einkommen). Leider ist der mathics PLOT Befehl noch etwas kränkelnd.

Bedenklicher als die kalte Progression fand ich allerdings, dass
Steuererhöhungen in der unteren Progresssionszone stattfanden.

Das kann man durch den Befehl:

Simplify[fUntProgZone2013[x]-fUntProgZone2012[x]]
Simplify[fUntProgZone2012Entwurf[x]-fUntProgZone2012[x]]
Simplify[fObProgZone2013[x]-fObProgZone2012[x]]
Simplify[fErstPropZone2013[x]-fErstPropZone2012[x]]

feststellen. Das Ergebnis ist
15.1340205527999 – 0.00579944639999997 ⁢ Floor [ x ] + 2.15299999999999 × 10 -7 ⁢ Floor [ x ] 2.
- 8.86576383720001 – 1.47800000000001 × 10 -7 ⁢ Floor [ x ] 2. + 0.000104559600000016 ⁢ Floor [ x ]
- 24
- 24

Das heisst in der unteren Progressionszone (Einkommen von ca 8100 Euro bis 13500) ergibt sich eine Einkommenssteuer die in 2013 ca. 15-16 Euro pro Jahr höher ist als in 2012 für die weiteren Einkommenszonen eine Steuerersparnis von ca. 8 bzw ab einem Einkommen von ca. 54000 eine Ersparnis von 24 Euro

Ich bitte alle hier die Zahlen und Rechnungen nochmal nachzuprüfen.

Der Code ist frei verwendbar und weitergebbar unter Einfügung des
Copyright Textes

Die Anfertigung der Anfragen, des Programmierens etc. hat mehrere Tage Zeit in Anspruch genommen.

————————-COPYRIGHT TEXT——–
Copyright (C) <2013 N. Kutz>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
——————————————–

Der untenstehende Code kann by mathics.net eingepastet
werden:

Clear[fNullZone2012, fUntProgZone2012, fObProgZone2012, fErstPropZone2012, fZweitPropZone2012,xvar2012,yvar2012,zvar2012]
Clear[fNullZone2013, fUntProgZone2013, fObProgZone2013, fErstPropZone2013, fZweitPropZone2013,xvar2013,yvar2013,zvar2013, Steuer2012, Steuer2013]

xvar2012[x_] := Floor[x]
yvar2012[x_] := 0.0001*(Floor[x]-8004)
zvar2012[x_] := 0.0001*(Floor[x]-13469)
fNullZone2012[x_] := 0
fUntProgZone2012[x_] := (912.17 * yvar2012[x] + 1400) * yvar2012[x]
fObProgZone2012[x_] := (228.74 * zvar2012[x] + 2397) * zvar2012[x] + 1038
fErstPropZone2012[x_] := 0.42 * xvar2012[x] – 8172
fZweitPropZone2012[x_] := 0.45 * xvar2012[x] – 15694
Steuer2012[x_]:= If[x<8005,fNullZone2012[x],If[x<13470,fUntProgZone2012[x], If[x<52882,fObProgZone2012[x], If[x<250731,fErstPropZone2012[x],
fZweitPropZone2012[x]]]]]

xvar2012E[x_] := Floor[x]
yvar2012E[x_] := 0.0001*(Floor[x]-8130)
zvar2012E[x_] := 0.0001*(Floor[x]-13685)
fNullZone2012Entwurf[x_] := 0
fUntProgZone2012Entwurf[x_] := (897.39 * yvar2012E[x] + 1400) * yvar2012E[x]
fObProgZone2012Entwurf[x_] := (225.14 * zvar2012E[x] + 2397) * zvar2012E[x] + 1055
fErstPropZone2012Entwurf[x_] := 0.42 * xvar2012E[x] – 8303
fZweitPropZone2012Entwurf[x_] := 0.45 * xvar2013[x] – 15803
Steuer2012Entwurf[x_]:=If[x<8131,fNullZone2012Entwurf[x],If[x<13686,fUntProgZone2012Entwurf[x], If[x<53728,fObProgZone2012Entwurf[x], If[x<250000,fErstPropZone2012Entwurf[x],
fZweitPropZone2012Entwurf[x]]]]]

xvar2013[x_] := Floor[x]
yvar2013[x_] := 0.0001*(Floor[x]-8130)
zvar2013[x_] := 0.0001*(Floor[x]-13469)
fNullZone2013[x_] := 0
fUntProgZone2013[x_] := (933.70 * yvar2013[x] + 1400) * yvar2013[x]
fObProgZone2013[x_] := (228.74 * zvar2013[x] + 2397) * zvar2013[x] + 1014
fErstPropZone2013[x_] := 0.42 * xvar2013[x] – 8196
fZweitPropZone2013[x_] := 0.45 * xvar2013[x] – 15718
Steuer2013[x_]:=If[x<8131,fNullZone2013[x],If[x<13470,fUntProgZone2013[x], If[x<52882,fObProgZone2013[x], If[x<250731,fErstPropZone2013[x],
fZweitPropZone2013[x]]]]]

Dann passiert erstmal nichts, denn das Programm hat erstmal die Daten bekommen.

Ab hier kommen die Befehle mit denen man sich verschiedene Sachen angucken kann.

————————–
Ein Graph der jeweiligen Steuern (hier zwischen 0 und 100000 Euro)

Plot[Steuer2012[x],{x, 0, 100000}]
Plot[Steuer2013[x],{x, 0, 100000}]
Plot[{Steuer2012[x], Steuer2013[x]},{x, 0, 20000}]
Plot[{Steuer2012[x], Steuer2012Entwurf[x]},{x, 0, 20000}]

—————————
Hier werden die verschiedenen Einkommenszonen von einander abgezogen:

Simplify[fUntProgZone2013[x]-fUntProgZone2012[x]]
Simplify[fUntProgZone2012Entwurf[x]-fUntProgZone2012[x]]
Simplify[fObProgZone2013[x]-fObProgZone2012[x]]
Simplify[fErstPropZone2013[x]-fErstPropZone2012[x]]

—————————-
Hier sind Berechnungen zur kalten Progression (Prozent ist hierbei der Prozentsatz einer Einkomenserhöhung):

Clear[fProgression, Einkommen, Prozent]
fProgression[Einkommen_]:=(Steuer2013[Einkommen+Prozent*Einkommen]-Steuer2012[Einkommen])/Einkommen
Einkommen := 100000
Prozent:=0.02
Steuer2012Entwurf[Einkommen+Prozent*Einkommen]-Steuer2012[Einkommen]
Steuer2013[Einkommen+Prozent*Einkommen]-Steuer2012[Einkommen]
fProgression[Einkommen]

—————–
Und hier nochmal ein Graph zur kalten Progression:

Clear[Einkommen,Prozent]
Prozent:=0.06
Plot[fProgression[x],{x, 10000, 100000}]