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California Balks At Internet Sales Tax

Posted by kdawson on from the what's-$2B-among-friends dept.

bob_calder writes "California has walked away from $2 billion a year in revenue by declining to get on board with a group working to standardize tax rates so a national tax on Internet sales could eventually be implemented by Congress. Supporters of the tax think they still have a chance in New York, Texas, and Florida. At the moment the largest states pursuing the Streamlined Sales Tax Initiative are New Jersey, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. California didn't want to give up its autonomy in setting taxes to a coalition of smaller states."

2 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I thought us Aussies were taxed weird by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    I'd like a view of HER ovaries, if you know what I mean ;) ;)

  2. Important: Intel Opinion Center by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    As I'm sure many of you have noticed, Intel and OSTG went into some kind of marketing deal with the Intel "Opinion Center" on Slashdot. There is nothing inherently wrong with that as all of the "stories" (rehashed press releases) were posted in Intel's own section; none of them were on the front page or in any of the other sections. AMD had a similar deal a while ago, but that appears to have been over for a while now. The strange thing about Intel's deal is that the link on the front page is in a somewhat prominent position and has a different color scheme in order to make it stand out. But what is more interesting is that the link IS NOT A DIRECT LINK. Instead it redirects through DoubleClick for some reason. I am not trying to make this sound sinister, but I found that a little odd.

    Anyway, Intel posted a number of press releases and got a few comments here and there. But sometime last week they decided to get out of the deal. There is nothing wrong with that, but they DELETED all the previous stories and posted some lame excuse. Not that this means anything, but the comments on Intel's previous stories could still be viewed if you knew the exact url. In other words only the stories were deleted; the comments were not. This action generated a number of negative comments on the whole Intel "Opinion Center" idea. Today I went back to check on it and lo and behold they have DELETED ALL THE COMMENTS and marked the story as READ ONLY. While Slashdot claims that they can't or won't delete comments, I think it is pretty clear that things can be done if the price is right. Although I suppose we all already knew this from previous incidents, this time in particular it caught me by surprise. While a few of the comments were trolls, most of them voiced honest but negative opinions of the "Opinion Center". If you want to call it an "Opinion Center" then you should be ready to hear opinions. Otherwise just call a spade a spade: Intel "Marketing Center".

    I never liked the idea in the first place, but deleting all the previous stories AND comments AND marking it as read-only is really weak and speaks a lot about the integrity of both Intel and Slashdot. If you think Intel and Slashdot did the wrong thing here, please mod this comment up and post it in other stories. Thank you.