Programmers are the equivalent of both architects and construction workers.
CS is trying to teach engineering. Engineers are the people who try to figuring out how to translate physical science into usable designs to tell architects what to do, some of which will eventually get incorporating into architectural design taught to everyone.
Likewise, CS is trying to figure out how to translate computer science in to usable designs to tell programmers what to do, some of which will eventually get incorporated into programming theory taught to everyone.
Computer science is also, confusingly, physics itself. Just like engineers sometimes have to run scientific experiments themselves and figuring out some property of a material, sometimes computer scientists have to run scientific experiments to figure stuff out.
programming = design using standards and materials + actual construction of that design
CS = figuring out the rules of computers + using those rules to invent standards and materials for programmers
Incidentally, the field of programming actually has figured out that it is both design and construction, and has come up with the title of 'architect' within itself.
You do not need to know 'computer science' to architect software, you just need to know how to put together the stuff that the computer scientists have come up with, just like architects generally don't worry that their buildings will collapse...they just follow the rules the engineers invented.
For both of those, with incredibly advanced designs, like a skyscraper or an AI, you'll probably need someone who is both an architect and an engineer. But generally you do not need an engineer to build a house.
Of course, this means we're currently training a fuckload of engineers and sending them off to install plumbing in houses, which we have somehow decided requires engineers.
Indeed. It's exactly the same trick with using powerless illegal immigrants, except the H1-B visa is legal.
I'm nearing the opinion that we should create a constitutional amendment that says anyone under the jurisdiction of the US for more than six month becomes an American citizen. Period.
Because the entire scam is to keep those people powerless. White collar, blue collar, migrant workers, it doesn't matter, it's all the exact fucking scam to one end:
Keep the workers powerless. At least, keep them powerless in America.
If they need to physically be here, make sure they're here illegally, or make sure that their employer can send them home at a whim. If they don't been to physically be here, well, don't have them here, or just have them here for their education and then send them home.
And this, of course, doesn't just fuck over those people, it fucks over citizens, who have hypothetical 'political power', but no actual money.
If you want to do something like that, check out 'I am Legend', which has an airborne disease turn the entire planet into 'vampires', except the protagonist, who is immune to it due to being bit by a vampire bat previously.
They are called 'vampires', but the 'dead' ones just appear to be somewhat smart zombies, although with vampire weaknesses.
Living ones are completely sentient normal vampires, which is the eventual origin of the book's title.
Don't confuse this with any of the movies, which tack on a happy ending. (Technically, the book has a happy ending too, but it's not really the happy ending you expect. Let's just say all the monsters end up dead, and everyone gets on with their lives rebuilding society.)
That's what I said. To spread diseases, you need a period of time in which people can unknowingly contact it. (And with zombiism, spread it without being incredibly obvious about it.)
This is why zombie movies always have someone who is bitten but covers it up, and then attacks everyone.
This works on a small scale, but it stupid on a large one, as that is exactly what quarantine is for.
And if there's a contact disease that kills people after a week or so, you don't even need zombies as a result...the world is fucked from that premise alone. (For reference, see the TV show Jeremiah, which had exactly that, except it only infected adults, and it killed almost every single one of them.)
I'm sure there are rules in which we can imagine an actual zombie outbreak getting larger, but at some point we've gotten away from the generally accepted concept of 'zombies'.
Even a few days don't work. Roughly 1 out of every 113 people die each year. That means one out of 41,000 each day. Let's say it takes five days to come back, and let's say the disease spreads amazingly fast and and a couple of towns are infected.
So each town maybe has one zombie wander into it every few days, and if they're five days old they clawed their way up through the dirt and are going to be obvious.
The problem with this scenario is that the victims of the zombies are not walking about. They're obviously laying there dead...and someone attacked them. So the police would look into it.
It might take a few days for people to figure out what exactly is going on, but it would happen, and the zombie would be killed. Like I said, zombies aren't subtle. (If we're talking subtle, it's really more a 'vampire apocalypse', not a zombie one.)
So we now have someone who was clearly undead. They're fricking rotted, and we just had a funeral for them last week! And they were running around attacking people.
Someone is going to say 'Holy shit, a zombie', especially if it's large scale situation, at which point everyone who helped bring the zombie in and got hurt has to fear for their lives. (If I understand these rules correctly, they are no danger, though.)
And someone is going to march over to the funeral home and stand watch over the people who, everyone now knows, were killed by zombies. At this point they discover all recently dead are missing, not just the zombie victims.
Someone would quickly leap to the conclusion that, hey, everyone's coming back from the dead, and all funerals would start including cremation or decapitation.
The only place where your scenario results in a number of zombies is a place where dead bodies could lay, undetected, long enough to turn into zombies, or a situation where a massive amount of people all die at once. Aka, it requires somewhere outside civilization. Once it actually hits civilization, 'everyone comes back' does worse than 'instant turn', simply because it has 'dead bodies that were attacked by zombies' laying around, instead of just 'missing people', which very incompetent police forces might not notice.
Sci fi writers like to invent scenarios and force people in them to behave in strange ways, which they justify with 'panic'.
In the actual world, if previous dead rotted people start attacking people, the problem wouldn't be that people run around like chickens with their head cut off, it's that everyone would say 'zombies' and some non-zombies would probably get killed also But they would also, near instantly, put guards on cemeteries and funeral homes. Or even giant fences around them.
With enough zombies, you do, indeed, have a total societal breakdown...but you can't actually get to that many zombies.
But it might not be worth the expense of hooking all the key readers up in the first place.
The way I understand that hotel locks work is that each door lock operates independently, and each key is programmed to open whatever lock for a specific amount of time. They're like normal hotel keys, but self-expiring.
I think each card is signed with a private key when programmed, and the lock has the public key. If you had a card duplicator, you could make identical copies of the keys you were handed, but they'd stop working at the same time as the original. (I seem to recall a few hacks before they started signing them.)
The locks remember who entered and when, but it's kept in the lock, not sent anywhere.
Now, I could be wrong about how that works, but if they are using such a system, it would be rather expensive to put any notification ability in it, because currently there's no connection between the lock and the hotel computers.
The fact that the 'personal exemption' lowers taxes is meaningless. Again, as I said before, Businesses count from profit, human beings count from income.
It doesn't matter what you can deduct. And the personal exemption is not even enough to buy food, much less shelter. It's $10 fucking dollars a day.
And I love how you seem to think it's proving your point that people's living expenses don't count as income generating, and that I'm arguing they do.
No I'm not, you moron. I'm arguing that that fact is absurd. People pay taxes on more than businesses pay taxes on. Businesses start at profits, human being start at income.
A business gets to do anything and count it against income. ANYTHING.
Every. Single. Thing. the business does counts against income. Things like hiring a lawyer to defend against a lawsuit because someone slipped on the floor, for a random example that doesn't actually produce 'income'.
For a human being? Hiring a lawyer for exactly the same purpose? That does not count against income.
The only way to actually have 'income' for a business is for that business to hand it over as dividends. (Or, yes, a few other ways that I don't feel like listing, all of which are voluntary.)
It's a simple fact, and you spend post after post both a) arguing I'm wrong, and then b) arguing that's what 'income' means, that the definition of income is 'Income left over after all business expenses, but not after other expenses. Oh, and everything a business does counts as a business expense, but not the exact same thing a human being does'.
It often causes animals to attack each other. That is, in fact, how the virus spreads.
It does this by causing inflammation of the brain, resulting in hallucinations, violent actions, paranoia, agitation, often resulting in a period of mania where they can attack randomly. At least in people, and animals seem to suffer basically the same
With people, it's less likely, humans just generally act weird and eventually pass out, but it has been known to occasionally happen with untreated rabies. However, unluckily for the virus, human beings do not usually attack each other with their mouths.
So even if people get that far in the infection, and they're one of the few people who manage to attack someone before falling into a coma, they usually do not manage to spread the disease. Almost no one gets rabies from other people.
Zombie apocalypses don't make much sense at all, unless zombieism (zombiism?) has a very long incubation period.
Why? Because zombies are horribly bad carriers of disease.
Think about what would actually happen. Let's assume some sort of worse case scenario, where zombies managed to overrun a small town or something. Let's say 100 people somehow get infected before people notice, which incidentally is incredibly high. Zombies are not subtle, and surely one of them would attack someone in sight of another person who could flee.
The word will get out, and at that point it's trivial to stop them from spreading, because zombies are very easy to identify. We'd put up quarantines, and only let the non-undead through.
Yes, some zombies would slip through, and, yes, they'd infect others, but once anyone actually knew what was happening, it would be common to start greeting people in the distance, 'I'm not a zombie!' 'Me neither!' 'Okay then, come over!'. I can even imagine people come up with some complicated hand waving that zombies don't do, depending on the rules. (Some have a rule that zombies remember stuff they did a lot in life, like open doors, so hand-waving may not work.)
But seriously, think about it. Zombieism is a great metaphor for a very contagious disease. But it's a rather sucky actual disease within the rules laid out for it. Actual diseases spread because people do not know they are infected, and neither do other people, and go about their business.
Zombies are obviously infected, and, what's more, don't drive from town to town or visit places by air or anything. Set up a fence already.
This is why all zombie fiction either starts with the zombies inexplicably already deeply entrenched, or is limited to a small area and over a small span of time, in a place where people are somehow greatly outnumbered by zombies, or have a cause of zombieism that effects a lot of people at once.
This is because it's nearly impossible to explain the actual spread of them across a large area in any reasonable way. I don't even mean 'the spread unchecked by man', although that would hinder them...but zombies are pretty shitty carriers of disease even when no one's against them.
Humans have cars, and will quickly leave zombie infested areas, while the zombies go after them. (Even 'fast zombies' can't beat a car.)
The only way a zombie apocalypse plausibly works is if something beside humans also carries it. Like birds or something.
The big thing you are missing is that for business and corporations, their profit is their income.
That's not what I'm 'missing', that's my point.
If their costs exceeds their revenue, they have no profit and thus no income.
That is not what 'income' means. Income is all money coming in. You can't randomly redefine it as 'profit' for business, and then not redefine it for human beings, and then claim it's the same thing.
Yes, I know that businesses call their income after cost of good sold 'taxable income'. But that's proving my point, in that they inexplicably have a bunch of untaxable income, namely, the income that corresponds with their costs, and then they have taxable income, the money left over. And then they have deductions on top of that.
Unlike human beings, whose income starts as all taxable (Baring weird exceptions.) and then get some deductions. Both of them get deductions, but they are starting at different places.
I don't understand why you don't grasp they aren't from the same place. It's like you're arguing that a road trip from Texas to Florida takes the same amount of time as a road trip from California to Florida, because both trips have added time because of rest stops long the way. Well, yes, they do, but they're still from different places.
I gave a very very concrete example, but I will give it again, even more specific:
If I am a human being who makes enough to pay taxes, and I wash a car and get paid $20 dollars, and I go out and buy $15 dollars worth of food and eat it, I pay taxes on the entire $20.
If I am corporation, and I get paid $20 to wash a car, and pay someone $15 to do that, I pay taxes...on the $5 profit. The rest was expenses. (Although the rest of the money does get taxed twice, once incoming as sales tax, and once outgoing as the employee pays income tax. But in neither case does the corporation pay those taxes.)
Do you really not understand this concept?
If the first examples, instead of $15 worth of food, I had bought $15 worth of cleaning supplies, I could deduct them...but that's a deduction. Businesses don't 'deduct' that, because they don't have to pay taxes on that to start with. Human beings and corporations are starting from different points in what is taxed, and human beings just have some deductions that let them get somewhere near what happens with businesses by default.
Of course, while they're doing that, businesses also get additional deductions too.
The exemption is a deduction for general living expenses encurred by natural people, things like food and shelter.
No, it's not. Standard deductions do not include food and shelter, or, for that matter, furniture or travel or 90% of the stuff people need to buy., This is trivially demonstrated by the fact you cannot deduct those if you itemize. Standard deductions are an average of the hypothetical things people can deduct, which do not include food or shelter. (Except sometimes mortgage payments.)
I'm not sure what sort of reasoning you arrived at to decide that food and shelter were were deductible, but have fun arguing with the IRS if you ever itemize deductions and try to include your groceries and your rent and your microwave.
The only needed 'cost' that people can normally deduct from their income, are medical expenses and taxes. (And they can defer taxes on retirement expenses...but still have to pay them.)
the employee didn't have the expenses generating the income a business has
You think people don't need food and shelter and a bed to generate an income?
It would explain why they both said the door was shut when it really wasn't, although you'd still think they might have noticed that.
You think someone closing the door for consensual sex might notice that, especially if she worked at the hotel and knew exactly how that worked.
OTOH, someone shoving the cleaning cart out of the way and closing the door to stop someone from fleeing might not notice that, and the person attempting to flee might not either.
Alternately, perhaps the cart didn't make it out of the way, and was still holding the door open. Perhaps the handle got caught in it.
Incidentally, I've seen maids prop open doors with their cart, but I thought they just didn't want to bring the carts into the room, but yet didn't want to leave it, unobserved, out in the hall. Plus it would be tricky to get stuff off the cart without having to unlock the door again.
I never realized they did it as a safety feature. It's doubly smart...it makes it hard to close the door, and if this hotel did it like the hotel I saw, and someone did close the door, the cart would end up outside the room, so that people could actually find the maid if she temporarily vanished in circumstances like this.
Incidentally, the idea of a maid in an expensive hotel deciding to, during cleaning, to randomly have sex with some visitor is idiotic. Maids tend to be on tight schedules. I can see some hypothetical 'come back later' scenario, but during cleaning is just stupid.
Erm, and often people staying at hotels will prop the doors open, too, especially if they're expecting a visitor.
And it's not like there are people sneaking into hotel rooms by following the legit people in. 'Please excuse me, I need to hide in your bathroom until you leave so I can rob you.' 'Quite all right, come in.'
There's rather a large difference between how hotel security works and how security for a building works. The biggest security question in a hotel is whether or not the cleaning staff, and other people with master keys, are trustworthy. That pretty much is the entire 'security' issue.
All the fancy electronic locks and stuff do is make things easier for customers to keep track of, and easier for the hotel to deal with lost or misplaced keys.
Could be worse; at least it's stuck open, not closed!
This is actually a replacement for the last one, which got stuck closed and overheated my engine and blew the head gasket.
27 mph, eh? No freeways for you!:-P (I know, you meant mpg; I just couldn't resist.)
I swear, 'mpg' is the word I typo most often, proportionally to how often I type it.
I owned a 2008 Jeep Wrangler a couple of years back, and there was a little dance that you could put the controls through to get it to display all of the OBD codes in the digital odometer display. I don't think you can clear them, but at least you can get a readout without having to visit a mechanic's.
Yes, all cars should be like that.
A lot of cars have a display now, and even the ones that don't should have a little LCD calculator display near the fuses or whatever that can display each error code and time stamp (I think they have that.), and let you push a button to move backwards and forwards through them. We're talking literally five dollars here.
No ability to reset them, that would drive the mechanics crazy because idiots would do that and then take their car in and no errors would be there.
I wish all cars did this!
Don't 'wish' it, wishing it will never get anyone anywhere. Say 'All cars should be required to do it', and maybe some politician will actually do that.
I had forgotten that modern cars had gotten more and more tetchy about errors, so, yeah, the Check Engine Light now could be a totally trivial issue. But I don't think I'd risk it unless I had a diagnostic reader and knew what it was.
It wouldn't be a trivial issue on my car, though. If the CEL comes on for me, something is really wrong. Like the engine has been replaced with a frozen turkey.
In fact, something is wrong with my car that it hasn't even detected...my thermostat is wedged on, which means the coolant system and fan are always operating, so the damn engine doesn't heat up unless I idle in place. I'm driving with my engine temp pinned all the way down at 100, which is probably hurting my gas mileage.
The car has completely failed to notice this.
OTOH, I'm still getting 27 mph, so whatever.
What I wish cars had is a mandatory display of error codes. It is really absurd to have to hook anything up to read them.
Heh, I'm actually driving around with a warning light on, and I've never found it annoying. Although sometimes it worries my passengers, who can't read it from their angle.
It's just the antilock brake warning, though. My antilock system is borken, and it's not worth fixing on a car that's almost two decades old and probably won't last another two years.
But, whatever. None of my previous cars had antilock, and that model car actually just had it as option. I know how to stop without them.
What is far more dangerous is the lack of airbags, and obviously I can't do anything about that.
People who drive around with the check engine light on, though...seriously? Why would anyone think that slightly was a good idea?
You do know that the rate at which capital gains is taxed is based on one's total income, right? Apparently not.
Yes I do, which is why I said 'people don't pay most capital gains until they hit higher tax brackets',.
The only time one doesn't pay capital gains is when one has held the investments for more than one year AND one has had no other income during the years.
And that's just wrong, since we're in stupid nitpicking land. You don't have to pay long term capital gains if you make less than $34,000, not 'have no income'. You're exempt if if you're in the 15% or less tax bracket, Mr. I-Know-Everything-About-Capital-Gains. Which is exactly what I said.
I don't normally do idiotic nitpicking like this, I would assume that by saying 'have no income', you meant 'have almost no income', and not debate the quibbling matter that, technically, people who do have some income are still exempt. Attempting to misread what the person you're talking to is a sign you're not actually attempting to reach the truth at all.
You did, however, specify a "superrich" individual in your example. I chose an arbitrary, hypothetical "superrich" person making one million dollars a year. Do you suggest that someone making one million dollars a year is not "superrich"?
They are indeed superrich, although in the actual world, almost no one has that much in 'income'. I just have no idea what the point of listing them was, because you started talking about their overall taxes, which I didn't mention at all. And then inexplicably started comparing it to how much money the other person makes.
I was talking about how much taxes they paid on their stock gains, which is, wait for it, 15%.
And it is perhaps worth pointing out that the superrich rarely have 'incomes' of $1,000,000 dollars. They earn their money, instead, using things like stock investments.
You know, that thing they pay only 15% tax rate on?
So, 10 years ago is very recent? Really? I prefer even more recent, and more importantly under the current tax laws. Now, then stop trying to use laws that are no longer in use to justify your arguments.
Did you even read what I said? I said that capital gains taxes were lower than the tax rate people paid, unless they were making under $16,000.
You are correct in that that was incorrect, it's currently closer to $39,000. I picked $16,000 as a random number in the second lowest tax bracket, but you are correct in that strictly speaking, people in the second lowest tax bracket are not paying a rate of 15%. They're only paying that on the income over $8,000, and less on the amount under, which means that only people in the 25% tax bracket hit an average rate of 15%.
Good point. You have won that argument, $16,000 was the wrong number. People making slightly over $16,000 are still paying a slightly lower rate than capital gains, although a rate of 12.8% is pretty close to 15%.
And that doesn't really change my point at all: We have decided to tax investments at a very low tax rate, despite the fact that they are often held by very rich people.
So, both people are earning $16,000.00 but one should be taxed more because why exactly? Just because one has one million dollars in investments and is living off the $16,000.00 in interest and not working at $8.00/hr?
YES. Someone who has a million dollars in investments and is living off $16,000 a year in interest should pay more in taxes than the guy working $8.00 an hour. Jesus Christ.
What is if that millionaire is a 69yo retiree?
What if that 69yo guy working $8 an hour wishes he was a retiree, but can't, because he wasn't able to invest any money because stock-owning millionaires aren't paying any goddamn taxes and he had to cover them?
I have let something go, but I suggest you research whether one has to pay capital gains AND income tax on INCOME from stock sale.
As opposed to magical fairies doing it for me? Uh, yes.
Or do you mean do I calculate it myself? Yes, I do. My grandmother is very knowledgeable about that, (She has a lot of investments.) and has managed to teach me most of how that.
Have you ever had to file something other than the 1040EZ?
I've only managed to use that three times, back when I was in college a decade ago, every other time I couldn't because of something random.
Do you own any stock?
Yes. Although not much public stock at the moment, I don't like the market at all. I do, however, own about a third of the company I work for.
Have you ever sold any stock you own?
Yes. Although I don't do that except when money runs short.
Have you ever had to claim capital gains?
Yes.
Right now, even if I did sell some stock, I wouldn't have to pay any capital gains (Assuming I actually made money on any stock, which I doubt I would if I sold them this year.), as I'm probably not going to break into 25% tax bracket this year. I didn't last year.
People are taxed on profit, the profit of the work.
No, they are not. They are taxed on their income. that's why it's called an income tax, as you pointed out.
I actually find it a little funny that you've forgotten how you started this conversation, which was by pointing out that people aren't taxed on profit, but on income. I pointed out that corporations, inexplicably and unfairly, are taxed on profit, at which point you appear to have forgotten where you were coming from and flipped around.
And, people do get to deduct "expenses".
Uh, no, they don't. Food, for example, is generally an expense, as in, a required thing that people have to buy. You can't deduct that.
People can deduce business expenses. Not 'expenses'.
Seriously, you act like business get to deduct everything and people don't get to deduct anything, but neither is true. Both people and business get to deduct items off their income for the purposes of determining tax.
Businesses do not 'deduct' expenses, because they are already just paying taxes on profit.
I really suggest you actually learn about the tax law because you are really looking like an idiot.
I really suggest you learn how businesses and people pay taxes, and what they are being taxed on. People have all income taxes. Businesses have profit taxed. It's not some debatable concept.
If a human being is given $1000 one month,and spends $700 on rent, and $200 on food, he is taxed on the entire $1000 dollars.
If a corporation is given $1000 on month, and spends $700 on rent, and $200 on food, it is taxed on the $100 left over profit. (And, on top of that, might have additional costs it can count against that profit that human beings cannot, like $10 deprecation for furniture or something. I think this is what you mean by business having 'deductions', although they are not called that.)
It's not debatable. One is an income tax, one is a profit tax. Both of them have additional things that can be excluded from the tax, but that doesn't change the fact that they are starting from very different places. With human beings, they start at the amount of money handed to that person during the year. With corporations, they start at the amount of money left over at the end of the year.
What you have described is a myth that idiots tell each other, and has been repeatedly shot down in court and has absolutely no basis in fact or law at all.
In fact, what you have repeated are mix of the Frivilous Tax Arguments that will result in the IRS fining you if you try to use them in court.
Now, you say "who have managed to wrangle a 15% tax rate for their income, which is in the form of stock gains". First off, what do you mean by "stock gains"? Do you mean an increase in the value of the stock they hold? Do you mean stock options? Do you mean dividend payments from held stock? Did the person in question earn any OTHER income?
Do you have no idea what 'the capital gain tax' is? I'm not going to explain it. In short, yes, an increase in the value of the stock they hold. Did you want me to say 'stock capital gains', I thought talking about taxing 'stock gains' was obvious what I was referring to.
And, yes, other income, people don't pay most capital gains until they hit higher tax brackets.
5% of an adjusted gross income (AGI) of US$1,000,000 is US$150,000 which 9.375 times the $16,000.00 income of which you say pays more in taxes. Even if one considers an AGI of $100,000 as one being superrich, at 15%, that is still $15,000.00, almost as much as the $16,000.00.
What the fuck are you talking about? Why did you invent a millionaire of thin air? How does that have anything to do with what I said?
My example is perhaps a little confusing, because $16,000 isn't actually the cutoff, that was just a random example. You're right, at that point they're still playing a total rate of 2.6% less than capital gains tax. They have to make about $39,000 to pay at least 15%, thanks to all sorts of recent tax cuts.
I will point out that that is very recent. In 2001, someone making $16,000 would be paying exactly a rate of 15%. Which is, in theory, exactly the same amount of taxes that a millionaire would pay on earning $16,000 in stock dividends.
And, of course, someone who had no income but with stock capital gains might even end up paying no taxes on them at all.
Your argument is a red herring. The tax is not on "what is left over". It is on what is earned, that is why it is called an income tax. You are trying to change the argument.
Correct. People get taxed on their income.
Meanwhile, the statement I made pointed out that businesses, SOMEHOW, do get taxed 'what is left over'. They get taxed on profit.
Which seemed entirely relevant in a discussion about what taxes are 'fair'.
While you are correct about the 16th amendment, you are completely wrong about how taxes work.
Taxes are mandatory, and has fuck all to do with whether or not you have a 'contract' with other people. Taxes have nothing to do with contract law.
You are required to pay taxes like you are required to follow any other law. If you do not, like if you do not follow any other law, you will be arrested. That is what 'laws' mean, and taxes are a law. Laws usually deal with prohibited behavior, but can, indeed, require it, and you can no more decide to not pay taxes than you can decide to not show up for jury duty.
And any government in the world can demand you pay them any taxes they want. Sweden, to pick a random country, could demand you pay them $100,000 a year, starting tomorrow, and have you arrested if you failed to do so.
Of course, if you aren't in Sweden, they'd have no way to enforce that. That is the actual reason that countries don't pass law involving people in other countries. They are certainly 'able' to do so, it's just not incredibly useful.
But that doesn't mean they can't 'legally' require you to do it. They can legally do that. They just can't practically do it.
Of course, the countries themselves may be legally prohibited by their own laws from doing that. It's entirely possible that some places have constitutional restrictions on imposing certain types of taxes.
The US, incidentally, does not have any such restrictions. The courts have held that the US, if it so chooses, can tax foreign income of citizens living abroad. If they live less than six months in the US, we choose not to tax them if they pay taxes somewhere else...but we could. (Although, of course, there's always the danger that they'd just not pay, and then never show back up in the US so we couldn't charge them with failure to pay taxes.)
And there's no reason we couldn't tax the income of non-citizens living abroad, either, except that it would be an utter waste of time and money to attempt to that.
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Actually, I think you're a bit off.
Programmers are the equivalent of both architects and construction workers.
CS is trying to teach engineering. Engineers are the people who try to figuring out how to translate physical science into usable designs to tell architects what to do, some of which will eventually get incorporating into architectural design taught to everyone.
Likewise, CS is trying to figure out how to translate computer science in to usable designs to tell programmers what to do, some of which will eventually get incorporated into programming theory taught to everyone.
Computer science is also, confusingly, physics itself. Just like engineers sometimes have to run scientific experiments themselves and figuring out some property of a material, sometimes computer scientists have to run scientific experiments to figure stuff out.
programming = design using standards and materials + actual construction of that design
CS = figuring out the rules of computers + using those rules to invent standards and materials for programmers
Incidentally, the field of programming actually has figured out that it is both design and construction, and has come up with the title of 'architect' within itself.
You do not need to know 'computer science' to architect software, you just need to know how to put together the stuff that the computer scientists have come up with, just like architects generally don't worry that their buildings will collapse...they just follow the rules the engineers invented.
For both of those, with incredibly advanced designs, like a skyscraper or an AI, you'll probably need someone who is both an architect and an engineer. But generally you do not need an engineer to build a house.
Of course, this means we're currently training a fuckload of engineers and sending them off to install plumbing in houses, which we have somehow decided requires engineers.
Indeed. It's exactly the same trick with using powerless illegal immigrants, except the H1-B visa is legal.
I'm nearing the opinion that we should create a constitutional amendment that says anyone under the jurisdiction of the US for more than six month becomes an American citizen. Period.
Because the entire scam is to keep those people powerless. White collar, blue collar, migrant workers, it doesn't matter, it's all the exact fucking scam to one end:
Keep the workers powerless. At least, keep them powerless in America.
If they need to physically be here, make sure they're here illegally, or make sure that their employer can send them home at a whim. If they don't been to physically be here, well, don't have them here, or just have them here for their education and then send them home.
And this, of course, doesn't just fuck over those people, it fucks over citizens, who have hypothetical 'political power', but no actual money.
Yes, animals (Or just mammals.) getting infected would pretty much screw us by itself.
Dead people are noticed, dead animals, not so much.
If you want to do something like that, check out 'I am Legend', which has an airborne disease turn the entire planet into 'vampires', except the protagonist, who is immune to it due to being bit by a vampire bat previously.
They are called 'vampires', but the 'dead' ones just appear to be somewhat smart zombies, although with vampire weaknesses.
Living ones are completely sentient normal vampires, which is the eventual origin of the book's title.
Don't confuse this with any of the movies, which tack on a happy ending. (Technically, the book has a happy ending too, but it's not really the happy ending you expect. Let's just say all the monsters end up dead, and everyone gets on with their lives rebuilding society.)
Teaching a zombie to drive a car opens Honda to an astonishingly level of civil and even criminal liability.
That's what I said. To spread diseases, you need a period of time in which people can unknowingly contact it. (And with zombiism, spread it without being incredibly obvious about it.)
This is why zombie movies always have someone who is bitten but covers it up, and then attacks everyone.
This works on a small scale, but it stupid on a large one, as that is exactly what quarantine is for.
And if there's a contact disease that kills people after a week or so, you don't even need zombies as a result...the world is fucked from that premise alone. (For reference, see the TV show Jeremiah, which had exactly that, except it only infected adults, and it killed almost every single one of them.)
I'm sure there are rules in which we can imagine an actual zombie outbreak getting larger, but at some point we've gotten away from the generally accepted concept of 'zombies'.
Even a few days don't work. Roughly 1 out of every 113 people die each year. That means one out of 41,000 each day. Let's say it takes five days to come back, and let's say the disease spreads amazingly fast and and a couple of towns are infected.
So each town maybe has one zombie wander into it every few days, and if they're five days old they clawed their way up through the dirt and are going to be obvious.
The problem with this scenario is that the victims of the zombies are not walking about. They're obviously laying there dead...and someone attacked them. So the police would look into it.
It might take a few days for people to figure out what exactly is going on, but it would happen, and the zombie would be killed. Like I said, zombies aren't subtle. (If we're talking subtle, it's really more a 'vampire apocalypse', not a zombie one.)
So we now have someone who was clearly undead. They're fricking rotted, and we just had a funeral for them last week! And they were running around attacking people.
Someone is going to say 'Holy shit, a zombie', especially if it's large scale situation, at which point everyone who helped bring the zombie in and got hurt has to fear for their lives. (If I understand these rules correctly, they are no danger, though.)
And someone is going to march over to the funeral home and stand watch over the people who, everyone now knows, were killed by zombies. At this point they discover all recently dead are missing, not just the zombie victims.
Someone would quickly leap to the conclusion that, hey, everyone's coming back from the dead, and all funerals would start including cremation or decapitation.
The only place where your scenario results in a number of zombies is a place where dead bodies could lay, undetected, long enough to turn into zombies, or a situation where a massive amount of people all die at once. Aka, it requires somewhere outside civilization. Once it actually hits civilization, 'everyone comes back' does worse than 'instant turn', simply because it has 'dead bodies that were attacked by zombies' laying around, instead of just 'missing people', which very incompetent police forces might not notice.
Sci fi writers like to invent scenarios and force people in them to behave in strange ways, which they justify with 'panic'.
In the actual world, if previous dead rotted people start attacking people, the problem wouldn't be that people run around like chickens with their head cut off, it's that everyone would say 'zombies' and some non-zombies would probably get killed also But they would also, near instantly, put guards on cemeteries and funeral homes. Or even giant fences around them.
With enough zombies, you do, indeed, have a total societal breakdown...but you can't actually get to that many zombies.
Well, yes.
But it might not be worth the expense of hooking all the key readers up in the first place.
The way I understand that hotel locks work is that each door lock operates independently, and each key is programmed to open whatever lock for a specific amount of time. They're like normal hotel keys, but self-expiring.
I think each card is signed with a private key when programmed, and the lock has the public key. If you had a card duplicator, you could make identical copies of the keys you were handed, but they'd stop working at the same time as the original. (I seem to recall a few hacks before they started signing them.)
The locks remember who entered and when, but it's kept in the lock, not sent anywhere.
Now, I could be wrong about how that works, but if they are using such a system, it would be rather expensive to put any notification ability in it, because currently there's no connection between the lock and the hotel computers.
The fact that the 'personal exemption' lowers taxes is meaningless. Again, as I said before, Businesses count from profit, human beings count from income.
It doesn't matter what you can deduct. And the personal exemption is not even enough to buy food, much less shelter. It's $10 fucking dollars a day.
And I love how you seem to think it's proving your point that people's living expenses don't count as income generating, and that I'm arguing they do.
No I'm not, you moron. I'm arguing that that fact is absurd. People pay taxes on more than businesses pay taxes on. Businesses start at profits, human being start at income.
A business gets to do anything and count it against income. ANYTHING.
Every. Single. Thing. the business does counts against income. Things like hiring a lawyer to defend against a lawsuit because someone slipped on the floor, for a random example that doesn't actually produce 'income'.
For a human being? Hiring a lawyer for exactly the same purpose? That does not count against income.
The only way to actually have 'income' for a business is for that business to hand it over as dividends. (Or, yes, a few other ways that I don't feel like listing, all of which are voluntary.)
It's a simple fact, and you spend post after post both a) arguing I'm wrong, and then b) arguing that's what 'income' means, that the definition of income is 'Income left over after all business expenses, but not after other expenses. Oh, and everything a business does counts as a business expense, but not the exact same thing a human being does'.
Which, incidentally, proves my fucking point.
Rabies.
It often causes animals to attack each other. That is, in fact, how the virus spreads.
It does this by causing inflammation of the brain, resulting in hallucinations, violent actions, paranoia, agitation, often resulting in a period of mania where they can attack randomly. At least in people, and animals seem to suffer basically the same
With people, it's less likely, humans just generally act weird and eventually pass out, but it has been known to occasionally happen with untreated rabies. However, unluckily for the virus, human beings do not usually attack each other with their mouths.
So even if people get that far in the infection, and they're one of the few people who manage to attack someone before falling into a coma, they usually do not manage to spread the disease. Almost no one gets rabies from other people.
Zombie apocalypses don't make much sense at all, unless zombieism (zombiism?) has a very long incubation period.
Why? Because zombies are horribly bad carriers of disease.
Think about what would actually happen. Let's assume some sort of worse case scenario, where zombies managed to overrun a small town or something. Let's say 100 people somehow get infected before people notice, which incidentally is incredibly high. Zombies are not subtle, and surely one of them would attack someone in sight of another person who could flee.
The word will get out, and at that point it's trivial to stop them from spreading, because zombies are very easy to identify. We'd put up quarantines, and only let the non-undead through.
Yes, some zombies would slip through, and, yes, they'd infect others, but once anyone actually knew what was happening, it would be common to start greeting people in the distance, 'I'm not a zombie!' 'Me neither!' 'Okay then, come over!'. I can even imagine people come up with some complicated hand waving that zombies don't do, depending on the rules. (Some have a rule that zombies remember stuff they did a lot in life, like open doors, so hand-waving may not work.)
But seriously, think about it. Zombieism is a great metaphor for a very contagious disease. But it's a rather sucky actual disease within the rules laid out for it. Actual diseases spread because people do not know they are infected, and neither do other people, and go about their business.
Zombies are obviously infected, and, what's more, don't drive from town to town or visit places by air or anything. Set up a fence already.
This is why all zombie fiction either starts with the zombies inexplicably already deeply entrenched, or is limited to a small area and over a small span of time, in a place where people are somehow greatly outnumbered by zombies, or have a cause of zombieism that effects a lot of people at once.
This is because it's nearly impossible to explain the actual spread of them across a large area in any reasonable way. I don't even mean 'the spread unchecked by man', although that would hinder them...but zombies are pretty shitty carriers of disease even when no one's against them.
Humans have cars, and will quickly leave zombie infested areas, while the zombies go after them. (Even 'fast zombies' can't beat a car.)
The only way a zombie apocalypse plausibly works is if something beside humans also carries it. Like birds or something.
The big thing you are missing is that for business and corporations, their profit is their income.
That's not what I'm 'missing', that's my point.
If their costs exceeds their revenue, they have no profit and thus no income.
That is not what 'income' means. Income is all money coming in. You can't randomly redefine it as 'profit' for business, and then not redefine it for human beings, and then claim it's the same thing.
Yes, I know that businesses call their income after cost of good sold 'taxable income'. But that's proving my point, in that they inexplicably have a bunch of untaxable income, namely, the income that corresponds with their costs, and then they have taxable income, the money left over. And then they have deductions on top of that.
Unlike human beings, whose income starts as all taxable (Baring weird exceptions.) and then get some deductions. Both of them get deductions, but they are starting at different places.
I don't understand why you don't grasp they aren't from the same place. It's like you're arguing that a road trip from Texas to Florida takes the same amount of time as a road trip from California to Florida, because both trips have added time because of rest stops long the way. Well, yes, they do, but they're still from different places.
I gave a very very concrete example, but I will give it again, even more specific:
If I am a human being who makes enough to pay taxes, and I wash a car and get paid $20 dollars, and I go out and buy $15 dollars worth of food and eat it, I pay taxes on the entire $20.
If I am corporation, and I get paid $20 to wash a car, and pay someone $15 to do that, I pay taxes...on the $5 profit. The rest was expenses. (Although the rest of the money does get taxed twice, once incoming as sales tax, and once outgoing as the employee pays income tax. But in neither case does the corporation pay those taxes.)
Do you really not understand this concept?
If the first examples, instead of $15 worth of food, I had bought $15 worth of cleaning supplies, I could deduct them...but that's a deduction. Businesses don't 'deduct' that, because they don't have to pay taxes on that to start with. Human beings and corporations are starting from different points in what is taxed, and human beings just have some deductions that let them get somewhere near what happens with businesses by default.
Of course, while they're doing that, businesses also get additional deductions too.
The exemption is a deduction for general living expenses encurred by natural people, things like food and shelter.
No, it's not. Standard deductions do not include food and shelter, or, for that matter, furniture or travel or 90% of the stuff people need to buy., This is trivially demonstrated by the fact you cannot deduct those if you itemize. Standard deductions are an average of the hypothetical things people can deduct, which do not include food or shelter. (Except sometimes mortgage payments.)
I'm not sure what sort of reasoning you arrived at to decide that food and shelter were were deductible, but have fun arguing with the IRS if you ever itemize deductions and try to include your groceries and your rent and your microwave.
The only needed 'cost' that people can normally deduct from their income, are medical expenses and taxes. (And they can defer taxes on retirement expenses...but still have to pay them.)
the employee didn't have the expenses generating the income a business has
You think people don't need food and shelter and a bed to generate an income?
You mean the one grandparent who sorta said something that implied she was at his birth, and then immediately corrected it the next sentence?
And has stubbornly maintained that position ever since, despite that misstatement of hers being continually quoted?
It would explain why they both said the door was shut when it really wasn't, although you'd still think they might have noticed that.
You think someone closing the door for consensual sex might notice that, especially if she worked at the hotel and knew exactly how that worked.
OTOH, someone shoving the cleaning cart out of the way and closing the door to stop someone from fleeing might not notice that, and the person attempting to flee might not either.
Alternately, perhaps the cart didn't make it out of the way, and was still holding the door open. Perhaps the handle got caught in it.
Incidentally, I've seen maids prop open doors with their cart, but I thought they just didn't want to bring the carts into the room, but yet didn't want to leave it, unobserved, out in the hall. Plus it would be tricky to get stuff off the cart without having to unlock the door again.
I never realized they did it as a safety feature. It's doubly smart...it makes it hard to close the door, and if this hotel did it like the hotel I saw, and someone did close the door, the cart would end up outside the room, so that people could actually find the maid if she temporarily vanished in circumstances like this.
Incidentally, the idea of a maid in an expensive hotel deciding to, during cleaning, to randomly have sex with some visitor is idiotic. Maids tend to be on tight schedules. I can see some hypothetical 'come back later' scenario, but during cleaning is just stupid.
Erm, and often people staying at hotels will prop the doors open, too, especially if they're expecting a visitor. And it's not like there are people sneaking into hotel rooms by following the legit people in. 'Please excuse me, I need to hide in your bathroom until you leave so I can rob you.' 'Quite all right, come in.'
There's rather a large difference between how hotel security works and how security for a building works. The biggest security question in a hotel is whether or not the cleaning staff, and other people with master keys, are trustworthy. That pretty much is the entire 'security' issue.
All the fancy electronic locks and stuff do is make things easier for customers to keep track of, and easier for the hotel to deal with lost or misplaced keys.
Could be worse; at least it's stuck open, not closed!
This is actually a replacement for the last one, which got stuck closed and overheated my engine and blew the head gasket.
27 mph, eh? No freeways for you! :-P (I know, you meant mpg; I just couldn't resist.)
I swear, 'mpg' is the word I typo most often, proportionally to how often I type it.
I owned a 2008 Jeep Wrangler a couple of years back, and there was a little dance that you could put the controls through to get it to display all of the OBD codes in the digital odometer display. I don't think you can clear them, but at least you can get a readout without having to visit a mechanic's.
Yes, all cars should be like that.
A lot of cars have a display now, and even the ones that don't should have a little LCD calculator display near the fuses or whatever that can display each error code and time stamp (I think they have that.), and let you push a button to move backwards and forwards through them. We're talking literally five dollars here.
No ability to reset them, that would drive the mechanics crazy because idiots would do that and then take their car in and no errors would be there.
I wish all cars did this!
Don't 'wish' it, wishing it will never get anyone anywhere. Say 'All cars should be required to do it', and maybe some politician will actually do that.
I had forgotten that modern cars had gotten more and more tetchy about errors, so, yeah, the Check Engine Light now could be a totally trivial issue. But I don't think I'd risk it unless I had a diagnostic reader and knew what it was.
It wouldn't be a trivial issue on my car, though. If the CEL comes on for me, something is really wrong. Like the engine has been replaced with a frozen turkey.
In fact, something is wrong with my car that it hasn't even detected...my thermostat is wedged on, which means the coolant system and fan are always operating, so the damn engine doesn't heat up unless I idle in place. I'm driving with my engine temp pinned all the way down at 100, which is probably hurting my gas mileage.
The car has completely failed to notice this.
OTOH, I'm still getting 27 mph, so whatever.
What I wish cars had is a mandatory display of error codes. It is really absurd to have to hook anything up to read them.
Heh, I'm actually driving around with a warning light on, and I've never found it annoying. Although sometimes it worries my passengers, who can't read it from their angle.
It's just the antilock brake warning, though. My antilock system is borken, and it's not worth fixing on a car that's almost two decades old and probably won't last another two years.
But, whatever. None of my previous cars had antilock, and that model car actually just had it as option. I know how to stop without them.
What is far more dangerous is the lack of airbags, and obviously I can't do anything about that.
People who drive around with the check engine light on, though...seriously? Why would anyone think that slightly was a good idea?
You do know that the rate at which capital gains is taxed is based on one's total income, right? Apparently not.
Yes I do, which is why I said 'people don't pay most capital gains until they hit higher tax brackets',.
The only time one doesn't pay capital gains is when one has held the investments for more than one year AND one has had no other income during the years.
And that's just wrong, since we're in stupid nitpicking land. You don't have to pay long term capital gains if you make less than $34,000, not 'have no income'. You're exempt if if you're in the 15% or less tax bracket, Mr. I-Know-Everything-About-Capital-Gains. Which is exactly what I said.
I don't normally do idiotic nitpicking like this, I would assume that by saying 'have no income', you meant 'have almost no income', and not debate the quibbling matter that, technically, people who do have some income are still exempt. Attempting to misread what the person you're talking to is a sign you're not actually attempting to reach the truth at all.
You did, however, specify a "superrich" individual in your example. I chose an arbitrary, hypothetical "superrich" person making one million dollars a year. Do you suggest that someone making one million dollars a year is not "superrich"?
They are indeed superrich, although in the actual world, almost no one has that much in 'income'. I just have no idea what the point of listing them was, because you started talking about their overall taxes, which I didn't mention at all. And then inexplicably started comparing it to how much money the other person makes.
I was talking about how much taxes they paid on their stock gains, which is, wait for it, 15%.
And it is perhaps worth pointing out that the superrich rarely have 'incomes' of $1,000,000 dollars. They earn their money, instead, using things like stock investments.
You know, that thing they pay only 15% tax rate on?
So, 10 years ago is very recent? Really? I prefer even more recent, and more importantly under the current tax laws. Now, then stop trying to use laws that are no longer in use to justify your arguments.
Did you even read what I said? I said that capital gains taxes were lower than the tax rate people paid, unless they were making under $16,000.
You are correct in that that was incorrect, it's currently closer to $39,000. I picked $16,000 as a random number in the second lowest tax bracket, but you are correct in that strictly speaking, people in the second lowest tax bracket are not paying a rate of 15%. They're only paying that on the income over $8,000, and less on the amount under, which means that only people in the 25% tax bracket hit an average rate of 15%.
Good point. You have won that argument, $16,000 was the wrong number. People making slightly over $16,000 are still paying a slightly lower rate than capital gains, although a rate of 12.8% is pretty close to 15%.
And that doesn't really change my point at all: We have decided to tax investments at a very low tax rate, despite the fact that they are often held by very rich people.
So, both people are earning $16,000.00 but one should be taxed more because why exactly? Just because one has one million dollars in investments and is living off the $16,000.00 in interest and not working at $8.00/hr?
YES. Someone who has a million dollars in investments and is living off $16,000 a year in interest should pay more in taxes than the guy working $8.00 an hour. Jesus Christ.
What is if that millionaire is a 69yo retiree?
What if that 69yo guy working $8 an hour wishes he was a retiree, but can't, because he wasn't able to invest any money because stock-owning millionaires aren't paying any goddamn taxes and he had to cover them?
I have let something go, but I suggest you research whether one has to pay capital gains AND income tax on INCOME from stock sale.
Have you ever had to file your own tax return?
As opposed to magical fairies doing it for me? Uh, yes.
Or do you mean do I calculate it myself? Yes, I do. My grandmother is very knowledgeable about that, (She has a lot of investments.) and has managed to teach me most of how that.
Have you ever had to file something other than the 1040EZ?
I've only managed to use that three times, back when I was in college a decade ago, every other time I couldn't because of something random.
Do you own any stock?
Yes. Although not much public stock at the moment, I don't like the market at all. I do, however, own about a third of the company I work for.
Have you ever sold any stock you own?
Yes. Although I don't do that except when money runs short.
Have you ever had to claim capital gains?
Yes.
Right now, even if I did sell some stock, I wouldn't have to pay any capital gains (Assuming I actually made money on any stock, which I doubt I would if I sold them this year.), as I'm probably not going to break into 25% tax bracket this year. I didn't last year.
People are taxed on profit, the profit of the work.
No, they are not. They are taxed on their income. that's why it's called an income tax, as you pointed out.
I actually find it a little funny that you've forgotten how you started this conversation, which was by pointing out that people aren't taxed on profit, but on income. I pointed out that corporations, inexplicably and unfairly, are taxed on profit, at which point you appear to have forgotten where you were coming from and flipped around.
And, people do get to deduct "expenses".
Uh, no, they don't. Food, for example, is generally an expense, as in, a required thing that people have to buy. You can't deduct that.
People can deduce business expenses. Not 'expenses'.
Seriously, you act like business get to deduct everything and people don't get to deduct anything, but neither is true. Both people and business get to deduct items off their income for the purposes of determining tax.
Businesses do not 'deduct' expenses, because they are already just paying taxes on profit.
I really suggest you actually learn about the tax law because you are really looking like an idiot.
I really suggest you learn how businesses and people pay taxes, and what they are being taxed on. People have all income taxes. Businesses have profit taxed. It's not some debatable concept.
If a human being is given $1000 one month,and spends $700 on rent, and $200 on food, he is taxed on the entire $1000 dollars.
If a corporation is given $1000 on month, and spends $700 on rent, and $200 on food, it is taxed on the $100 left over profit. (And, on top of that, might have additional costs it can count against that profit that human beings cannot, like $10 deprecation for furniture or something. I think this is what you mean by business having 'deductions', although they are not called that.)
It's not debatable. One is an income tax, one is a profit tax. Both of them have additional things that can be excluded from the tax, but that doesn't change the fact that they are starting from very different places. With human beings, they start at the amount of money handed to that person during the year. With corporations, they start at the amount of money left over at the end of the year.
You're a lying moron.
What you have described is a myth that idiots tell each other, and has been repeatedly shot down in court and has absolutely no basis in fact or law at all.
In fact, what you have repeated are mix of the Frivilous Tax Arguments that will result in the IRS fining you if you try to use them in court.
Now, you say "who have managed to wrangle a 15% tax rate for their income, which is in the form of stock gains". First off, what do you mean by "stock gains"? Do you mean an increase in the value of the stock they hold? Do you mean stock options? Do you mean dividend payments from held stock? Did the person in question earn any OTHER income?
Do you have no idea what 'the capital gain tax' is? I'm not going to explain it. In short, yes, an increase in the value of the stock they hold. Did you want me to say 'stock capital gains', I thought talking about taxing 'stock gains' was obvious what I was referring to.
And, yes, other income, people don't pay most capital gains until they hit higher tax brackets.
5% of an adjusted gross income (AGI) of US$1,000,000 is US$150,000 which 9.375 times the $16,000.00 income of which you say pays more in taxes. Even if one considers an AGI of $100,000 as one being superrich, at 15%, that is still $15,000.00, almost as much as the $16,000.00.
What the fuck are you talking about? Why did you invent a millionaire of thin air? How does that have anything to do with what I said?
My example is perhaps a little confusing, because $16,000 isn't actually the cutoff, that was just a random example. You're right, at that point they're still playing a total rate of 2.6% less than capital gains tax. They have to make about $39,000 to pay at least 15%, thanks to all sorts of recent tax cuts.
I will point out that that is very recent. In 2001, someone making $16,000 would be paying exactly a rate of 15%. Which is, in theory, exactly the same amount of taxes that a millionaire would pay on earning $16,000 in stock dividends.
And, of course, someone who had no income but with stock capital gains might even end up paying no taxes on them at all.
Did you forget the original statement you made?
Your argument is a red herring. The tax is not on "what is left over". It is on what is earned, that is why it is called an income tax. You are trying to change the argument.
Correct. People get taxed on their income.
Meanwhile, the statement I made pointed out that businesses, SOMEHOW, do get taxed 'what is left over'. They get taxed on profit.
Which seemed entirely relevant in a discussion about what taxes are 'fair'.
While you are correct about the 16th amendment, you are completely wrong about how taxes work.
Taxes are mandatory, and has fuck all to do with whether or not you have a 'contract' with other people. Taxes have nothing to do with contract law.
You are required to pay taxes like you are required to follow any other law. If you do not, like if you do not follow any other law, you will be arrested. That is what 'laws' mean, and taxes are a law. Laws usually deal with prohibited behavior, but can, indeed, require it, and you can no more decide to not pay taxes than you can decide to not show up for jury duty.
And any government in the world can demand you pay them any taxes they want. Sweden, to pick a random country, could demand you pay them $100,000 a year, starting tomorrow, and have you arrested if you failed to do so.
Of course, if you aren't in Sweden, they'd have no way to enforce that. That is the actual reason that countries don't pass law involving people in other countries. They are certainly 'able' to do so, it's just not incredibly useful.
But that doesn't mean they can't 'legally' require you to do it. They can legally do that. They just can't practically do it.
Of course, the countries themselves may be legally prohibited by their own laws from doing that. It's entirely possible that some places have constitutional restrictions on imposing certain types of taxes.
The US, incidentally, does not have any such restrictions. The courts have held that the US, if it so chooses, can tax foreign income of citizens living abroad. If they live less than six months in the US, we choose not to tax them if they pay taxes somewhere else...but we could. (Although, of course, there's always the danger that they'd just not pay, and then never show back up in the US so we couldn't charge them with failure to pay taxes.)
And there's no reason we couldn't tax the income of non-citizens living abroad, either, except that it would be an utter waste of time and money to attempt to that.