I have worked with two large nonprofits that rely on Google Maps to varying degrees, in some cases for mission-critical purposes and in other cases for ancillary tasks.
From my developer's POV, Maps API is easy to use and the terms of service are more than fair, given that they're providing a tremendous service. Google Maps is one of those life-changing technologies (which Google did not invent, of course, but which they have perfected more than their competitors, IMO) and I wouldn't take it for granted.
Both applied for (and one has received) the 'Premier' grants. Both dealt with the same single Google employee, who was very helpful, but who would sometimes take months to reply to an email. My sense is (and this isn't surprising) that Google is so overwhelmed with these applications from non-profits that they just don't have the people to process them all. I'm sure they're doing something about this but it was a little surprising to see such a popular program (the Nonprofits premier grants) run by a handful of people.
I'm glad they're moving to this model, though. I'd rather build in the Maps API to a client application and start getting alerted when we're going over limits than just have it shut down or refuse a request.
As a class, business owners, small, medium, or large, are the most conservative people in the US. Ergo, as a class, "you" tend to support the status quo, other than a tweak here or there to advance "your" perceived interests. Hence, that's how I interpreted your cynicism and your carrot rather than stick approach.
The only avenue in which my politics enter into this equation at all is that I'm not going to sign off on anything that means I have to lay people off unless somebody can make a strong case for it without insinuating that, simply because I'm responsible for people other than myself, I'm somehow too shortsighted to come around to your enlightened viewpoint.
'm not really interested in selling you on the economics of climate change in this forum. If you don't see it, or are tired of sorting out the evidence from the baloney, that's fine.
I'm not tired of it in the least. Other replies to my OP have offered some insightful remarks and cited some interesting studies. I'm just tired of internet jerks who think that ad hominem attacks are a substitute for argument. You aren't being asked to do much -- recycle, don't buy an SUV, stuff anyone with an ounce of responsibility has been doing for a decade - but you have no problem asking me (or 'me' in the 'class' sense) to make drastic changes to how we do business that will unquestionably result in people who rely on us for their well being to lose their jobs. And you can't even be bothered to do anything other than act self-righteous about the fact that, yeah, I have some questions about this doomsday scenario on whose account you're asking me to make these sacrifices.
Seems to me that you're more interested in congratulating yourself on how much better you are than conservatives (which I must be, because there are no liberal business owners...? huh?) than in dialogue. You can take that attitude and fuck right off with it.
2% of GDP is about two million jobs. That's a tremendous sacrifice, and a very tough case to make - but if that's what has to be done, then that's what has to be done, right?
I don't see a lot of politicians who favor things like cap and trade talking about that, though (unsurprisingly). I see them making the claim that we can make the necessary adjustments without anybody actually having to pay a price except for 'big business' and 'billionaires,' but those two million jobs won't be CEOs - it'll be middle class workers in industries most affected by the regulations required to pull off what you're talking about.
Even if you accept the Stern Review, though (and thank you for that link), you're still left with the problem that it's no good if just the UK, or even just the UK, the US, Canada, and Western Europe commit to the necessary changes. You need every industrialized country in the world to sign on, and honestly sign on, because otherwise the countries that don't play nice will be able to undercut the whole rest of the world in output and cost of doing business.
I can certainly accept the possibility that the Stern review is correct (though it seems to have its share of detractors) but even then, I agree with another response to my OP that we're much better at solving problems like 'we need an energy source that doesn't belch xyz emissions, pronto' than we are at making huge, collective sacrifices. We've already got high unemployment in Europe and in the US - you would need to be a dictator to be able to get away with laying off two million more in the US alone. So what do we do?
You'd like climate mitigation that doesn't require much of anything from you, and that's not going to be possible, whichever way it goes.
It isn't going to hurt me. My business is a service business and the worst we'll feel from cap and trade is increased energy costs, and we can afford those. I thought I distanced myself from a big personal investment in the outcome here by pointing this out earlier, but I guess you saw 'business owner' and assumed 'greedy corporate pig.'
What massive, pervasive governmental intervention are you talking about? The only massive, pervasive governmental intervention I'm aware of is the Clean Air act, which was done for smog and health reasons and not climate change reasons, and fuel efficiency standards, which I will freely admit did spur more fuel efficient vehicles than the free market would have, because in an unregulated market you wouldn't see that kind of investment in fuel efficiency until it became far more cost-prohibitive to get fossil fuels out of the ground.
I'm not an expert on this stuff, so I'm not accusing you of fabricating governmental intervention - I'm honestly curious what it is you're talking about when you give the government credit for the 'status quo.'
I also have yet to see any convincing evidence that climate change is going to 'hit like a hurricane' except for the UN studies a while back talking about millions of climate refugees that a) never happened and b) got scrubbed from the UN's web site as it was an embarrassing prediction. There is a political and industrial agenda behind the notion that we absolutely must do something right now just as there is a political and industrial agenda behind the notion that the whole thing is overblown and what we're doing now is working just fine. My point is that it's very, very difficult to separate fact and legitimate science (on both sides) from people who either just grew up thinking that all industry is evil and raping the Earth -- that is to say, most people my own age who went to liberal arts universities, as I did -- or people who are so bitter and jaded and accustomed to hearing people from the first group shrieking about whatever it is they're doing that they overlook the very real possibility that something major may really need to be done about this problem ASAP.
You have said nothing insightful and cited nothing of use. You've made an ad hominem attack on me and my motives about which you could not be more mistaken. If cap and trade were enacted tomorrow, it won't be me who suffers, because web services aren't going to bear the brunt of it. It will be two million jobs in the part of our economy that actually still create products. That is the cost of the massive, pervasive change you are talking about, and it's foolish to pretend otherwise. So if you want to make your case, then the case to be made is 'this is such an important problem, and the consequences of doing nothing so severe, that a 2% reduction in GDP (which comes out to about two million jobs) is really the least worst course.'
Possibly the case for AGW would be working out better if it had more adherents who could patiently explain to people like me what the terms of the discussion are and what our options are, and fewer people whose entire social network consists of people who agree with them and whose only means of dealing with anyone who questions their dogma is to personally attack them.
By the way, as I have to head out of town for a while and won't have a chance to continue this delightful conversation, and since you already reduced it to ad hominen attacks, people like your father are the reason why good schools and people who are actually more concerned with the children than with their union are getting sued by the NAACP (but winning, thankfully). There's nothing that the NEA and AFT hate more than successful, non-union schools. The people whose lottery I'm writing now have five lawsuits pending but are in the top 5% of public schools in New York, despite their almost exclusively Harlem & Bronx demographic. Which you'd know if you were interested in facts.
If I were the son of a CEO talking about corporate pay practices you wouldn't even give me the time of day. People like you assume that everybody behind a charter school or a non-union effort is just out to bilk teachers or make themselves rich, probably because of fifty years of people like your dad doing just that for themselves. They aren't getting rich. They're teaching kids, and they're doing it ten times more effectively than your dad's union has ever let people do it.
Due process doesn't mean you are entitled to hit your employer with a six figure tab to fire you, but I guess talking to a union shill about entitlements is a waste of time.
The Center for Union Facts is citing major newspapers. Are they also bullshit organizations? 47 out of 100,000 being fired is a very clear number: it means that, in NY and NJ, about 0.5 to 0.6% of teachers are fired (not laid off) every year. Compare this to any part of the private sector and you see that teachers get 'due process' an order of magnitude more than anybody else, except perhaps other government workers.
My solution is that a school, as an employer, should have the same freedom in hiring and firing as any business, if not more freedom. Even using the term 'due process' is misleading; that refers to your rights when you are involved in a criminal case. You can make a case about a shitty principal firing a teacher without cause. That happens in every job, and while it's hardly a good thing, the solution to it is not to take away from the institution the ability to hire and fire based on merit.
'Due process' in the civilian job market is a union invention. For everybody else, if they do their job poorly, they'll get a warning or two and then fired, and the only way lawyers get involved is if the person losing their job thinks they got shafted. There is no reason whatever that teachers should be exempt from this, and even if there were, that reason is not worth spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on litigation every time somebody needs to be let go.
Imagine if we actually spent all that money paying good teachers rather than providing an army of lawyers to every shitty teacher.
Fair assumptions but I don't know that the answer is as simple as you say.
It's still a political problem as well as an engineering one, unless the political solution is 'let's invest tons of resources into new stuff that doesn't pollute as much as old stuff' and not any retardation of human activity (and this would not please a big chunk of the electorate).
Humans are bad at long-term decisions even when it will affect their own lifetime. We're even worse at long-term decisions that will affect people who haven't been born yet. Corporations get a lot of crap for this when they make decisions that benefit their shareholders in the short-term, but this isn't just a corporate thing. Give us a problem to solve and we're all over it. Tell us that we have to pay double for gas or that taxes are going through the roof so that we are better global citizens (while citizens in Indonesia, India, and China aren't doing the same things) and you're going to have a hard time.
Think CO2 is that one magic thing that will not have consequences ?
The extent to which CO2 has consequences or not has surely got nothing to do with the facile suggestion that, because some by-products are harmful, we should cease... what? Existing? Every industrial process has by-products. I don't think anyone suggests that these are 'good' things. The point is to mitigate the level of bad things, and to do that, we have to know which ones are bad, and how bad they are.
I haven't taken the position that CO2 has no effect on the environment, but reasoning like this is why debates on AGW go into the toilet. You aren't trying to analyze the effect of CO2 on the environment, you're just taking the tired, far-left position that having ANY impact on the planet whatever is terrible. You're also retroactively making the assumption that, every time we come up with a new technology, we know right away what its effects on the environment will be. Sometimes we do, and sometimes greedy people don't care and employ it anyway. But this kind of 'humans are ruining the earth with their technology' fearmongering doesn't bring us any closer a mechanism through which we might actually try and determine what the impact of anything we use in our daily lives is on the environment.
Question #1: Is the Earth appreciably warmer lately? Answer: Yes. There seems to have been some skepticism over this question but this appears to be where the nutjobs on the 'denier' side fell (we'll get to the nutjobs on the other side in a minute). To some extent we 'already knew this,' but the point of this study appears to have been that we need to start from this point -- that if we can't even agree whether the Earth is warmer, we certainly aren't going to agree on why or what to do about it.
Question #2: Is it our fault, i.e. is it anthropogenic global warming (AGW)? Answer: This study doesn't have anything to say about that, but as others have pointed out, it is 'consistent with AGW models.' This seems to be the most difficult question because there are so many variables. The earth is warmer, sure; but it's been warmer before without our having done anything to it and the crucial piece of information that would easily answer this question -- what would temperatures be if we hadn't been mucking about doing things for the last 200 years -- would require a control planet. I've been trying to educate myself about global warming for a while but it's been very difficult filtering through the noise and vitriol. It doesn't seem possible to me that can conclusively answer this question, and to some people, that's a reason to forget the whole thing -- but the realization that we can't prove it doesn't excuse us from having to make a decision. It just means that we have to make a decision with imperfect information.
(Question #2A would be 'if the Earth has been warmer before, is it necessarily a bad thing that it's warm again -- is that just a natural cycle? This is an interesting question but let's set it aside for the moment. Even if we assume that there is a natural cycle, let's still also assume that what we're concerned with here is the extent to which humans are changing that natural cycle, not whether 1 degree celsius is going to cause an apocalypse.)
Question #3: To what extent should we handicap our own consumption of natural resources or industrial production to alleviate AGW? If we aren't entirely certain about our answer to #2, it's difficult, but by no means impossible to make a quantitative analysis of the 'value' of reducing carbon emissions by, say, one ton a year. But this question is so political that it'd be tough to have a reasonable conversation about it even if it didn't depend on equally, but differently perplexing questions like #2, because it allows for a scenario where an elected leader has to make a judgment call that is going to favor the environment over his or her constituents' jobs. We don't like to think about it in those terms -- we prefer to just imagine that everyone will buy a Prius or bicycle to work -- but it's important to realize how far-reaching these decisions are. It's also quite naive to imagine that industrial interests only exist on one side of this equation. The green industry has just as many crooks in it as the oil industry does, as any industry does, because it is composed of homo sapiens. Throwing money at solar and wind is well and good, but it's a luxury that a rich country ('rich' being relative these days) like the United States can afford; it's a joke to imagine that India or Indonesia or China are going to handicap their economies when they've only just lately (to varying degrees) got round to having economies in the first place. That's not to say that they won't invest in wind and solar (China certainly has) but this is merely diversifying their own energy portfolio -- reducing their dependency on oil -- which is related to but not the same as pursuing green energy for its own sake.
Speaking as an American business owner for a moment, it's tough for me to accept that the solution here is to make it even more expensive to conduct business via something like cap-and-trade, though not because it will affect my own business (it won't, much). This is clearly a problem that requires huge expenditures of capital to solve, and a
You vastly oversimplify the results vs. spending as well, and the positive results of charter schools. Those schools select who they admit, for one. I could find you the right group of students and only have them wear uniforms and have great results too. Charter schools are not well regulated and don't always have success rates better than the public schools.
Charter school admission in New York State (and at least parts of NJ) is by lottery. And before you pipe up the union line of 'the lotteries are rigged so they can pick and choose,' they are not; I should know, I am writing the lottery software right now. The lotteries are rigged: in favor of people who don't speak english or who are currently in failing school districts (this is public knowledge).
There is a Stanford study that compares 'all charter schools' to 'all public schools' and finds that they don't outperform public schools. This is not a useful comparison when the whole point of a charter school is to do things differently from other schools. Some charter schools are poorly run. The point of the system is that, if they fail, they lose their charter (NJ revoked at least five this year).
As to your incredulous comment that public unions have no power in education, how much do you think it costs to fire one teacher? Here are some facts for you:
The New York Daily News reports that “over the past three years [2007-2010], just 88 out of some 80,000 city schoolteachers have lost their jobs for poor performance.”
Newsweek reported that only 0.1 percent of teachers were dismissed for performance-related reasons between 2005 and 2008.
In 2003, one Los Angeles union representative said: “If I’m representing them, it’s impossible to get them out. It’s impossible. Unless they commit a lewd act.”
One New Jersey union representative was even blunter about the work his organization does to keep bad teachers in the classroom, saying: “I’ve gone in and defended teachers who shouldn’t even be pumping gas.”
In ten years, only about 47 out of 100,000 teachers were actually terminated from New Jersey’s schools. Original research conducted by the Center for Union Facts (CUF) confirms that almost no one ever gets fired in Newark, New Jersey’s largest school district, no matter how bad. Over four recent years, CUF discovered, Newark’s school district successfully fired about one out of every 3,000 tenured teachers annually. Graduation statistics indicate that the district needs much stronger medicine: Between the 2001-2002 and the 2004-2005 school years, Newark’s graduation rate (not counting the diplomas “earned” through New Jersey’s laughable remedial exam) was a mere 30.6 percent.
In the 2006-2007 school year, for example, New York City fired only 10 of its 55,000 tenured teachers. The cost to eliminate those employees averages out to $163,142, according to Education Week. In New York State, the average is $128,941. In Illinois, Scott Reeder of the Small Newspaper Group found it costs an average of $219,504 in legal fees alone to get a termination case past all the union-supported hurdles
Whatever you 'know from your father' is not the case today, if it ever was.
But it simply isn't true. The politicians are too far removed from any school system to have any sizable effect
Would that it were so. I work firsthand with primary education in NYC and it is definitely true here. Watch 'The Lottery' on Netflix - it's a biased look, to be sure, but it's nonetheless an accurate picture. I have talked to teachers and school officials. I work with this stuff all the time. You are kidding yourself.
I can't speak to the situation in higher ed as the unions are less influential and sometimes non-existent there, but it's not apples to apples as higher ed is funded differently from primary ed. I worked for a while for one of the state funded schools up at Cornell and while their financing and politics were byzantine, it didn't seem to have as much to do with unions (at least back in 2003 when I was there). Except for being called 'education,' it had nothing to do with how the K-12 public school system is run.
I don't think unions should be a non-issue. I think the union structure only works when you have two sides keeping each other in check, and that clearly isn't the case with public unions, as I pointed out and as you did not even try to refute. It's not tough to understand. You are making the liberal assumption that, simply because unions are good, that will somehow contravene the natural laws that make every organization -- that is to say, unions, corporations, any group of people -- grab the biggest piece of the pie they can. Again, unions themselves aren't the villains. I am a union member myself, though not the teachers' union. Their job is to grab the biggest piece of the pie and we should not be surprised when they do. The problem is simply that we cannot expect anything like a fair negotiation when the two parties at the table are in bed together. This is how NYC can spend $13,500 per year per student - more than tuition at many private schools - and still have abysmal results. But the charter schools that rank in the top 5-10% in the state whose only difference is that kids wear uniforms, have a longer day, and no teacher's unions? They get death threats and lawsuits.
A contract is a document negotiated by both sides and is quite capitalist in nature
This is only true when both sides are representing their respective interests in good faith. That is to say, when a worker (or a union) negotiates a contract with management, both sides have some competing interests and some overlapping interests. Contracts are great at addressing situations like these because everybody ultimately wants an outcome where a contract is signed and therefore everybody has incentive to give and take to reach that end.
When the teacher's union negotiates a contract with the government, there is nobody representing the school's interest in good faith. They negotiate with elected state officials, who are beholden to unions as a sizable voting bloc. Certainly the elected officials still have a duty to try and do right for the public, but even assuming you have a perfectly fair and rational governor (or other state pol) who can produce a contract that fairly rewards teachers while not endangering the school system's financing, there is every incentive for the union to say 'if we throw our political weight behind the person running against you, he will promise us a better deal.' Because people running for office, regardless of party, will make exactly those kinds of promises. A private sector union is going up against management that knows there is a point where the company simply cannot turn a profit if it offers too sweet a deal and so the union's job is to get the sweetest deal it can for its members that falls short of that point. A public sector union knows that the equivalent point at which a school system might go bankrupt is going to be kicked down the street for years if not decades because laying off teachers and shuttering schools for lack of money is political death to the pols who have to order them. Only now, when we have some fairly egregious examples (in places like New Jersey) of public unions choosing to keep perks for their senior members rather than avert layoffs, are politicians able to get away with doing anything about it at all.
This isn't a dig on unions or elected officials. This is normal human behavior. Unions and contracts only work when both sides have something to gain and something to lose to incentivize them to reach a fair outcome. The part of this system that is 'capitalist' in nature is that it sets two or more groups in a relationship that is simultaneously cooperative (working together) and competitive (each wanting bigger pieces of the reward) and relies on each to keep the other in check, much like the Constitution relies on the three branches of government to keep each other in check. The moment one of those two sides becomes completely beholden to the other, you end up with robber barons (management has too much influence) or the disaster that is public education (public sector unions with too much influence).
Are you high? What evidence is there that in the decade or more that government has been answerable to a union for real?
A school cannot scratch its ass unless the union contract permits it to. Length of school day, the number of school days, when the school year starts, the number of minutes spent teaching versus preparing, hiring, firing -- effectively, all 'operations' at a public school -- are determined by a union contract.
I don't know about you, but in my book, that makes government answerable to a union 'for real.'
You, and people like you, believe that corporate citizens should be given special treatment, because of the benefits they bring to the economy.
I don't accept the notion of a 'corporate citizen.' I run two small corporations. The one and only reason they are corporations is so that, for accounting and legal reasons, there is a line between 'stuff belonging to Aquitaine' and 'stuff belonging to AquitaineCorp' so that if my businesses fail, I will be out of a job and a lot of money, but I will not have to worry that I might lose my house and enter personal bankruptcy. Even so, running a company is a huge gamble, because it means you're putting in well north of what most people would accept in a salaried job and you may not see any corresponding payoff for a long time, if ever. But that makes sense - it was my choice to go into business for myself.
At no point in the last five years of running a business have my personal feelings about who should be given what kind of treatment entered into the equation. There are really only a couple choices once you start doing any significant amount of business each year (say, north of $20,000), and those are 'what flavor of corporation' choices. If you don't incorporate, you're personally liable for everything your business does. This is fine in a small company but not fine in a larger one where you'd be making one person (or even a dozen people) personally liable for hundreds if not thousands of corporate agents. This is impossible and you'd be sending honest people to jail on a regular basis.
You, and people like you, believe that corporate citizens should be given special treatment, because of the benefits they bring to the economy. However, such benefits could not be realized without the human citizens that work for them. Why shouldn't they be treated equally under the law?
I don't know how you would make them equal under tax law because they aren't the same things, even if you try to give them the same name. One person and a salary is not a 'payroll of one' because you say it is. You are not contractually obligated to yourself for your salary; your employer is, and if they don't pay it, you can sue the them. A person and his or her family has expenses but these are not comparable to the cost of doing business. This isn't apples and oranges - it's apples and rocket ships. Under no circumstances does one person ever have to be on the hook to pay thousands of people thousands of dollars every month. A person does not have to, in the course of providing for themselves and their families, acquire very much in the way of machinery, office space, an HR department, attorneys, permits, and property -- and when a person does occasionally need those things, they need one of them, and it's a big deal.
I, and people like me -- that is, people who actually run corporations and have a passing familiarity with the legal and financial requirements of doing so -- understand that a corporation is not the same thing as a human being, whether or not there is some legal universe in which they may be equated for the purpose of application of certain laws. It's hilarious to me that a lot of people who want to see an end to corporate lobbying (of which I would be one) also want the government to hand out billions of dollars to green energy companies and other political favorites. If you want people to stop trying to take over the gravy train, stop running the gravy train every hour.
We've given them unparalleled power over our lives, over our government, with next to no accountability, and in return have become serfs at best, slaves at worst, to legal fictions created by the greedy and self-centered, aided and abetted by the politicians we've trusted for so long to represent us.
I guess that sounds good if you're occupying Wall Street but it's irrelevant as well as meaningless to somebody whose day-to-day concerns involve making payroll and trying to run the kind of shop where
We used to call that "income averaging", however, this was repealed in 1986 for individuals. Just another case where corporations get preferential treatment over individuals.
You seem to suggest that corporations and people should be treated the same way under tax laws. Maybe this comes from the facile suggestion that 'corporations are people' because of Citizens United, but it has no bearing on actual corporate accounting or taxes.
which means, in effect I'm "really" only paying 3.5% of total revenue.
You aren't supposed to pay 35% of revenue. Taxes are paid on profits. If you want to start taxing gross receipts (and some localities do) then you just drove every industry with high costs and high income out of your area, because nobody is going to pay a gross receipts tax if they're making $10,000,000 but spending $9,500,000 to do it.
This is similar to the tax problem where you have one person who is paid a salary of $250,000 compared to the small business (let's assume it's a sole-member LLC and a disregarded entity) with a $250,000 profit. Both are treated identically under the tax code right now, but they're not identical in any practical sense.
Most people would consider one person being paid a salary of $250,000 every year pretty wealthy. But the salaried guy is only responsible for himself and his family. He doesn't have to cover payroll. If you have more than one or two employees, $250k will vanish pretty quickly if business goes south for even a few months. You are not a 'wealthy' small business for two reasons: your potential outlays are an order of magnitude greater than a person responsible only for himself and his family, and your income stream is an order of magnitude less stable than somebody's salary, dependent as it is on your business succeeding.
As for your example, if you made $1 million in profits last year but had $900,000 in deductions, you didn't make $1 million in profits, you made $100,000 in profits. Tax shelters are a little different and to use them effectively (and legally) you have to be a pretty big company and do business overseas (as well as having overseas tax shelters) because while your tax shelter is convenient for avoiding US tax, it's very inconvenient if you want to use any of that money in the united states. So not really an option for a US small or medium business.
Unless you're suggesting that corporations shouldn't have deductions? Which ones, specifically? Perhaps you're a fan of Cain's 9-9-9 plan, then, because it eliminates most deductions in the tax code?
The biggest corporations have enough people and tricks to pay 0%.
No corporation in the United States pays zero percent corporate income tax on income realized in the united states in a year during which they had a net profit unless they carried over a loss from a previous year. In other words:
NET profit: Lose 100 mil in 2006 - Tax bill $0 Profit 50 mil in 2007 - Tax bill $0 Profit 100 mil in 2008 - Tax bill 35% * 50 mil
Where you start to get into complex loopholes is when you make money offshore. If AquitaineCorp makes $100 mil in the UK and keeps it in the UK, we'd pay UK tax. If we then wanted to bring some of that money home, we'd also have to pay US tax and we are one of the few countries in the world to do that. The loophole here is that if you set up an office in Bermuda or some place with no corporate tax, which is possible when you deal in intangibles like royalties, you can just park the money earned there and you don't pay US tax on it -- of course, you can't pay your US guys with it or invest in anything in the US with it without 'realizing it,' so it's not without price - you can spend it abroad, in countries that don't tax money realized outside their borders.
The basis of the system actually isn't that complicated, but 'BIG CORPORATIONS PAY 0% TAX' makes for a better sound byte, which I guess is good enough for you.
A 'huge' percentage do not pay zero percent. You are undoubtedly regurgitating a figure about how GE paid no taxes a few years ago. It's because they carried over the loss from a previous year. If you lose 100 mil in 2006 and profit 50 mil in 2007, you pay no taxes on the 50 mil because of your prior losses.
If this sounds unfair to you, imagine what would happen if it didn't work this way. Enormous business decisions would revolve around artificial time spans just to keep their profit (and loss) as close to zero each year as possible. At the end of a bad year, everybody would sell the farm. You'd have even more artificial tax-induced decisions than we already have.
A huge percentage of corporations are not gigantic multinational corporations like GE. They are small or medium businesses that don't have offshore offices or highly-paid tax accountants. They do their corporate taxes on turbotax and they pay 35%. I will soon be one of them as my business is changing from a sole-member LLC to a partnership next year. Guess that makes me part of the 1%...
but there's no evidence that non-union charter schools are doing any better in producing well prepared students.
You are referring to the Stanford study that compared all public schools with all charter schools. This is an extremely difficult metric, because education is primarily run by states, not the feds, and so it's difficult to compare even a public school in New York with a public school in Texas, much less a charter school, when the whole point of a charter school is that you get a temporary charter from the state to run your school how you like. This is important: In the archetypal charter school arrangement, while the organization running the school is bound by state law with respect to certain things (particularly admissions), the idea is that you are being given license to run the place how you think is best. This means that, while the operations and budget (if not performance and outcome) of one New York City public school probably has a lot in common with another New York City public school, the same cannot be assumed of charter schools. Each charter organization does things differently, and not all of their decisions are going to be good ones.
The chief difference is that, if a charter school does poorly, it can lose its charter after a few years. Closing a public school, on the other hand, is a very difficult, political process, and who's to say that it's going to be replaced with anything better? This is the only thing just about every charter school has in common: accountability.
You have to compare apples to apples, though. Look at your local schools. The best-performing public schools are typically in wealthy areas. They're not the best because they get the most money (in NY and NJ, it's quite often the case that the worst schools get the most money) but because of demographics -- students from upper-middle class families with attentive parents do well, those schools prosper and attract good teachers, cycle continues. Why not look at the best charter schools that don't have the demographic advantage, that serve poor neighborhoods, and still come out in the top 1% of the state, ahead even of some of the top private schools?
I urge you to look into what schools like these are actually doing to produce these results, and particularly what the problems they face are. Their #1 obstacle is the United Federation of Teachers. They have been sued by the NAACP for 'segregation' even though their schools are overwhelmingly black and latino -- segregation is the strategy that the NAACP has been using in lawsuits against schools and school districts that increase school choice or that favor charters or vouchers. The group in the above link (which was covered in 'The Lottery') gets ten applicants for every seat they have and the UFT busses in protestors to keep them from applying to the city for additional space in closed-down public schools.
So you're right that charters aren't a magic bullet. A charter just says 'here is freedom to run a school. Don't eff it up.' But some of the best charter schools have results that could be easily reproduced - if we wanted to.
Why is paying a portion of your health care costs bad for you, when it's what everybody else has to do already?
As a small business owner, I have to pay 100% of my healthcare costs, and because I don't get a group policy, what I do pay for sucks because it's on the individual market. This is my choice (after all, I could quit my business and get a 9-5 job) but you don't see me in the streets bitching about it.
I don't blame unions for advocating to get everything they can get. That's their job, in the same way that management's job is to get the most out of their workers. This system only works when authority is distributed between both sides. When management is the government and directly answerable to the union as a large voting bloc, there isn't even any pretense that this is a fair give-and-take scenario unless government is willing to completely alienate a tremendous bloc of voters with a lot of controversy - like Walker in Wisconsin. How much easier would his job have been if he'd shrugged his shoulders and said 'this isn't worth it'?
If you worked for me, I would certainly appreciate the opportunity to keep you, and I wouldn't feel bitter in the least if you came to me and said 'x company is offering more money to do the same thing and it's a better fit with my life.' Yes, if I'm a douchebag, I can agree to match or beat their offer and then quietly seek to replace you, but a company's reputation among its employees hits the toilet pretty fast the moment everybody stops trusting the boss. It's my job to make sure that nobody ever stops and asks 'would Aquitaine try to replace me just because I made him match an offer another company made?'
When I hire somebody, I definitely want the opportunity to earn their loyalty -- but I know that they, like everybody, have an obligation to themselves and to their families to do right by all of them, and that's tough when they're in competition with one another. So I don't think you 'owe' your current employer any more than the customary two weeks' notice unless you feel that they've really gone the extra mile on your behalf in the past, which some small businesses will do. Even then, I'd rather have a valuable employee realize it's time to move on than regret not having done so and turn into a rotten, depressed employee.
, as repeatedly confirmed by courts at every level when applied to a government funded institution.
Could you provide an example of a government employee's first amendment rights extending to posting whatever he or she likes at his workplace?
'Government funded' institution it may be, but the venue for the speech is not the employee's property, and so it seems to me that the university can put up or take down pretty much anything it wants, subject to your usual ACLU lawsuits about what is and isn't acceptable to display on government property.
We have Presidents ordering the assassination of American Citizens,
The Supreme court has held that once you raise arms (or conspire to raise arms) in rebellion, your citizenship does not entitle you to due process (Ex Parte Quirin, 1942):
the law of war draws a distinction between the armed forces and the peaceful populations of belligerent nations and also between those who are lawful and unlawful combatants. Lawful combatants are subject to capture and detention as prisoners of war by opposing military forces. Unlawful combatants are likewise subject to capture and detention, but in addition they are subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals for acts which render their belligerency unlawful. The spy who secretly and without uniform passes the military lines of a belligerent in time of war, seeking to gather military information and communicate it to the enemy, or an enemy combatant who without uniform comes secretly through the lines for the purpose of waging war by destruction of life or property, are familiar examples of belligerents who are generally deemed not to be entitled to the status of prisoners of war, but to be offenders against the law of war subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals.
As for the 'state actor,' perhaps that would hold water if the state was suppressing private speech, but this is an office door at a public university. My layman's understanding of the law in that case is that the state has no obligation to permit this guy to put whatever he likes on a door just because he works there.
What if the guy was a facist? Is he allowed to post facist propaganda on his office door? Anti-homosexual posters?
On principle I side with the forces of Post Whatever You Damn Please On Your Office Door, but isn't there a certain amount of hilarity in how far removed from reality both of these people are in how they approached this issue?
The public safety officer is hewing to the absolute letter of the law with no interest in exercising any kind of critical thinking or good judgment, and the prof leaps directly to 'OMG I AM A VICTIM YOU ARE TRAMPLING MY RIGHTS' as if they'd shut down a newspaper or burned books rather than removing a piece of Hollywood memorabilia from an office door.
It seems to me that a dry, P. J. O'Rourke or Jon Stewart style response might have been better suited to pointing out the absurdity of the situation, instead of the 'I am being victimized by the man' clarion call, but as other posters have said, this is Madison.
"because New York fucking rules", and you'll be saying pretty much the same thing...
Not in the least. One is a direct endorsement (Which, having lived there, I would gladly approve of.) The other is academic euphemism, all wind and no meaning. New Yorkers do tend to love New York (as do other people living in most decent cities, as you pointed out). It's one thing to approve of your city and have that in common with your neighbor. It's quite another to then suggest that you have a responsibility to that city to build a private structure that puts everyone inside in contact with everyone outside because hey, we love this town!
That might be a nice perk, but the point of an office complex is to do the job the company does. There is also an aesthetic argument toward not making private property an eyesore, of course, just as every homeowner's association wants to do. But 'shared responsibility in a collective metropolitan realm'? This is only intellectual in the modern, void-of-intelligence sense of 'intellectual.' It's flowery nonsense that is disconnected from anybody's everyday life, blue collar or white.
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I have worked with two large nonprofits that rely on Google Maps to varying degrees, in some cases for mission-critical purposes and in other cases for ancillary tasks.
From my developer's POV, Maps API is easy to use and the terms of service are more than fair, given that they're providing a tremendous service. Google Maps is one of those life-changing technologies (which Google did not invent, of course, but which they have perfected more than their competitors, IMO) and I wouldn't take it for granted.
Both applied for (and one has received) the 'Premier' grants. Both dealt with the same single Google employee, who was very helpful, but who would sometimes take months to reply to an email. My sense is (and this isn't surprising) that Google is so overwhelmed with these applications from non-profits that they just don't have the people to process them all. I'm sure they're doing something about this but it was a little surprising to see such a popular program (the Nonprofits premier grants) run by a handful of people.
I'm glad they're moving to this model, though. I'd rather build in the Maps API to a client application and start getting alerted when we're going over limits than just have it shut down or refuse a request.
As a class, business owners, small, medium, or large, are the most conservative people in the US. Ergo, as a class, "you" tend to support the status quo, other than a tweak here or there to advance "your" perceived interests. Hence, that's how I interpreted your cynicism and your carrot rather than stick approach.
The only avenue in which my politics enter into this equation at all is that I'm not going to sign off on anything that means I have to lay people off unless somebody can make a strong case for it without insinuating that, simply because I'm responsible for people other than myself, I'm somehow too shortsighted to come around to your enlightened viewpoint.
'm not really interested in selling you on the economics of climate change in this forum. If you don't see it, or are tired of sorting out the evidence from the baloney, that's fine.
I'm not tired of it in the least. Other replies to my OP have offered some insightful remarks and cited some interesting studies. I'm just tired of internet jerks who think that ad hominem attacks are a substitute for argument. You aren't being asked to do much -- recycle, don't buy an SUV, stuff anyone with an ounce of responsibility has been doing for a decade - but you have no problem asking me (or 'me' in the 'class' sense) to make drastic changes to how we do business that will unquestionably result in people who rely on us for their well being to lose their jobs. And you can't even be bothered to do anything other than act self-righteous about the fact that, yeah, I have some questions about this doomsday scenario on whose account you're asking me to make these sacrifices.
Seems to me that you're more interested in congratulating yourself on how much better you are than conservatives (which I must be, because there are no liberal business owners...? huh?) than in dialogue. You can take that attitude and fuck right off with it.
2% of GDP is about two million jobs. That's a tremendous sacrifice, and a very tough case to make - but if that's what has to be done, then that's what has to be done, right?
I don't see a lot of politicians who favor things like cap and trade talking about that, though (unsurprisingly). I see them making the claim that we can make the necessary adjustments without anybody actually having to pay a price except for 'big business' and 'billionaires,' but those two million jobs won't be CEOs - it'll be middle class workers in industries most affected by the regulations required to pull off what you're talking about.
Even if you accept the Stern Review, though (and thank you for that link), you're still left with the problem that it's no good if just the UK, or even just the UK, the US, Canada, and Western Europe commit to the necessary changes. You need every industrialized country in the world to sign on, and honestly sign on, because otherwise the countries that don't play nice will be able to undercut the whole rest of the world in output and cost of doing business.
I can certainly accept the possibility that the Stern review is correct (though it seems to have its share of detractors) but even then, I agree with another response to my OP that we're much better at solving problems like 'we need an energy source that doesn't belch xyz emissions, pronto' than we are at making huge, collective sacrifices. We've already got high unemployment in Europe and in the US - you would need to be a dictator to be able to get away with laying off two million more in the US alone. So what do we do?
You'd like climate mitigation that doesn't require much of anything from you, and that's not going to be possible, whichever way it goes.
It isn't going to hurt me. My business is a service business and the worst we'll feel from cap and trade is increased energy costs, and we can afford those. I thought I distanced myself from a big personal investment in the outcome here by pointing this out earlier, but I guess you saw 'business owner' and assumed 'greedy corporate pig.'
What massive, pervasive governmental intervention are you talking about? The only massive, pervasive governmental intervention I'm aware of is the Clean Air act, which was done for smog and health reasons and not climate change reasons, and fuel efficiency standards, which I will freely admit did spur more fuel efficient vehicles than the free market would have, because in an unregulated market you wouldn't see that kind of investment in fuel efficiency until it became far more cost-prohibitive to get fossil fuels out of the ground.
I'm not an expert on this stuff, so I'm not accusing you of fabricating governmental intervention - I'm honestly curious what it is you're talking about when you give the government credit for the 'status quo.'
I also have yet to see any convincing evidence that climate change is going to 'hit like a hurricane' except for the UN studies a while back talking about millions of climate refugees that a) never happened and b) got scrubbed from the UN's web site as it was an embarrassing prediction. There is a political and industrial agenda behind the notion that we absolutely must do something right now just as there is a political and industrial agenda behind the notion that the whole thing is overblown and what we're doing now is working just fine. My point is that it's very, very difficult to separate fact and legitimate science (on both sides) from people who either just grew up thinking that all industry is evil and raping the Earth -- that is to say, most people my own age who went to liberal arts universities, as I did -- or people who are so bitter and jaded and accustomed to hearing people from the first group shrieking about whatever it is they're doing that they overlook the very real possibility that something major may really need to be done about this problem ASAP.
You have said nothing insightful and cited nothing of use. You've made an ad hominem attack on me and my motives about which you could not be more mistaken. If cap and trade were enacted tomorrow, it won't be me who suffers, because web services aren't going to bear the brunt of it. It will be two million jobs in the part of our economy that actually still create products. That is the cost of the massive, pervasive change you are talking about, and it's foolish to pretend otherwise. So if you want to make your case, then the case to be made is 'this is such an important problem, and the consequences of doing nothing so severe, that a 2% reduction in GDP (which comes out to about two million jobs) is really the least worst course.'
Possibly the case for AGW would be working out better if it had more adherents who could patiently explain to people like me what the terms of the discussion are and what our options are, and fewer people whose entire social network consists of people who agree with them and whose only means of dealing with anyone who questions their dogma is to personally attack them.
By the way, as I have to head out of town for a while and won't have a chance to continue this delightful conversation, and since you already reduced it to ad hominen attacks, people like your father are the reason why good schools and people who are actually more concerned with the children than with their union are getting sued by the NAACP (but winning, thankfully). There's nothing that the NEA and AFT hate more than successful, non-union schools. The people whose lottery I'm writing now have five lawsuits pending but are in the top 5% of public schools in New York, despite their almost exclusively Harlem & Bronx demographic. Which you'd know if you were interested in facts.
If I were the son of a CEO talking about corporate pay practices you wouldn't even give me the time of day. People like you assume that everybody behind a charter school or a non-union effort is just out to bilk teachers or make themselves rich, probably because of fifty years of people like your dad doing just that for themselves. They aren't getting rich. They're teaching kids, and they're doing it ten times more effectively than your dad's union has ever let people do it.
Due process doesn't mean you are entitled to hit your employer with a six figure tab to fire you, but I guess talking to a union shill about entitlements is a waste of time.
The Center for Union Facts is citing major newspapers. Are they also bullshit organizations? 47 out of 100,000 being fired is a very clear number: it means that, in NY and NJ, about 0.5 to 0.6% of teachers are fired (not laid off) every year. Compare this to any part of the private sector and you see that teachers get 'due process' an order of magnitude more than anybody else, except perhaps other government workers.
My solution is that a school, as an employer, should have the same freedom in hiring and firing as any business, if not more freedom. Even using the term 'due process' is misleading; that refers to your rights when you are involved in a criminal case. You can make a case about a shitty principal firing a teacher without cause. That happens in every job, and while it's hardly a good thing, the solution to it is not to take away from the institution the ability to hire and fire based on merit.
'Due process' in the civilian job market is a union invention. For everybody else, if they do their job poorly, they'll get a warning or two and then fired, and the only way lawyers get involved is if the person losing their job thinks they got shafted. There is no reason whatever that teachers should be exempt from this, and even if there were, that reason is not worth spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on litigation every time somebody needs to be let go.
Imagine if we actually spent all that money paying good teachers rather than providing an army of lawyers to every shitty teacher.
Fair assumptions but I don't know that the answer is as simple as you say.
It's still a political problem as well as an engineering one, unless the political solution is 'let's invest tons of resources into new stuff that doesn't pollute as much as old stuff' and not any retardation of human activity (and this would not please a big chunk of the electorate).
Humans are bad at long-term decisions even when it will affect their own lifetime. We're even worse at long-term decisions that will affect people who haven't been born yet. Corporations get a lot of crap for this when they make decisions that benefit their shareholders in the short-term, but this isn't just a corporate thing. Give us a problem to solve and we're all over it. Tell us that we have to pay double for gas or that taxes are going through the roof so that we are better global citizens (while citizens in Indonesia, India, and China aren't doing the same things) and you're going to have a hard time.
Think CO2 is that one magic thing that will not have consequences ?
The extent to which CO2 has consequences or not has surely got nothing to do with the facile suggestion that, because some by-products are harmful, we should cease ... what? Existing? Every industrial process has by-products. I don't think anyone suggests that these are 'good' things. The point is to mitigate the level of bad things, and to do that, we have to know which ones are bad, and how bad they are.
I haven't taken the position that CO2 has no effect on the environment, but reasoning like this is why debates on AGW go into the toilet. You aren't trying to analyze the effect of CO2 on the environment, you're just taking the tired, far-left position that having ANY impact on the planet whatever is terrible. You're also retroactively making the assumption that, every time we come up with a new technology, we know right away what its effects on the environment will be. Sometimes we do, and sometimes greedy people don't care and employ it anyway. But this kind of 'humans are ruining the earth with their technology' fearmongering doesn't bring us any closer a mechanism through which we might actually try and determine what the impact of anything we use in our daily lives is on the environment.
Question #1: Is the Earth appreciably warmer lately? Answer: Yes. There seems to have been some skepticism over this question but this appears to be where the nutjobs on the 'denier' side fell (we'll get to the nutjobs on the other side in a minute). To some extent we 'already knew this,' but the point of this study appears to have been that we need to start from this point -- that if we can't even agree whether the Earth is warmer, we certainly aren't going to agree on why or what to do about it.
Question #2: Is it our fault, i.e. is it anthropogenic global warming (AGW)? Answer: This study doesn't have anything to say about that, but as others have pointed out, it is 'consistent with AGW models.' This seems to be the most difficult question because there are so many variables. The earth is warmer, sure; but it's been warmer before without our having done anything to it and the crucial piece of information that would easily answer this question -- what would temperatures be if we hadn't been mucking about doing things for the last 200 years -- would require a control planet. I've been trying to educate myself about global warming for a while but it's been very difficult filtering through the noise and vitriol. It doesn't seem possible to me that can conclusively answer this question, and to some people, that's a reason to forget the whole thing -- but the realization that we can't prove it doesn't excuse us from having to make a decision. It just means that we have to make a decision with imperfect information.
(Question #2A would be 'if the Earth has been warmer before, is it necessarily a bad thing that it's warm again -- is that just a natural cycle? This is an interesting question but let's set it aside for the moment. Even if we assume that there is a natural cycle, let's still also assume that what we're concerned with here is the extent to which humans are changing that natural cycle, not whether 1 degree celsius is going to cause an apocalypse.)
Question #3: To what extent should we handicap our own consumption of natural resources or industrial production to alleviate AGW? If we aren't entirely certain about our answer to #2, it's difficult, but by no means impossible to make a quantitative analysis of the 'value' of reducing carbon emissions by, say, one ton a year. But this question is so political that it'd be tough to have a reasonable conversation about it even if it didn't depend on equally, but differently perplexing questions like #2, because it allows for a scenario where an elected leader has to make a judgment call that is going to favor the environment over his or her constituents' jobs. We don't like to think about it in those terms -- we prefer to just imagine that everyone will buy a Prius or bicycle to work -- but it's important to realize how far-reaching these decisions are. It's also quite naive to imagine that industrial interests only exist on one side of this equation. The green industry has just as many crooks in it as the oil industry does, as any industry does, because it is composed of homo sapiens. Throwing money at solar and wind is well and good, but it's a luxury that a rich country ('rich' being relative these days) like the United States can afford; it's a joke to imagine that India or Indonesia or China are going to handicap their economies when they've only just lately (to varying degrees) got round to having economies in the first place. That's not to say that they won't invest in wind and solar (China certainly has) but this is merely diversifying their own energy portfolio -- reducing their dependency on oil -- which is related to but not the same as pursuing green energy for its own sake.
Speaking as an American business owner for a moment, it's tough for me to accept that the solution here is to make it even more expensive to conduct business via something like cap-and-trade, though not because it will affect my own business (it won't, much). This is clearly a problem that requires huge expenditures of capital to solve, and a
You vastly oversimplify the results vs. spending as well, and the positive results of charter schools. Those schools select who they admit, for one. I could find you the right group of students and only have them wear uniforms and have great results too. Charter schools are not well regulated and don't always have success rates better than the public schools.
Charter school admission in New York State (and at least parts of NJ) is by lottery. And before you pipe up the union line of 'the lotteries are rigged so they can pick and choose,' they are not; I should know, I am writing the lottery software right now. The lotteries are rigged: in favor of people who don't speak english or who are currently in failing school districts (this is public knowledge).
There is a Stanford study that compares 'all charter schools' to 'all public schools' and finds that they don't outperform public schools. This is not a useful comparison when the whole point of a charter school is to do things differently from other schools. Some charter schools are poorly run. The point of the system is that, if they fail, they lose their charter (NJ revoked at least five this year).
As to your incredulous comment that public unions have no power in education, how much do you think it costs to fire one teacher? Here are some facts for you:
Whatever you 'know from your father' is not the case today, if it ever was.
But it simply isn't true. The politicians are too far removed from any school system to have any sizable effect
Would that it were so. I work firsthand with primary education in NYC and it is definitely true here. Watch 'The Lottery' on Netflix - it's a biased look, to be sure, but it's nonetheless an accurate picture. I have talked to teachers and school officials. I work with this stuff all the time. You are kidding yourself.
I can't speak to the situation in higher ed as the unions are less influential and sometimes non-existent there, but it's not apples to apples as higher ed is funded differently from primary ed. I worked for a while for one of the state funded schools up at Cornell and while their financing and politics were byzantine, it didn't seem to have as much to do with unions (at least back in 2003 when I was there). Except for being called 'education,' it had nothing to do with how the K-12 public school system is run.
I don't think unions should be a non-issue. I think the union structure only works when you have two sides keeping each other in check, and that clearly isn't the case with public unions, as I pointed out and as you did not even try to refute. It's not tough to understand. You are making the liberal assumption that, simply because unions are good, that will somehow contravene the natural laws that make every organization -- that is to say, unions, corporations, any group of people -- grab the biggest piece of the pie they can. Again, unions themselves aren't the villains. I am a union member myself, though not the teachers' union. Their job is to grab the biggest piece of the pie and we should not be surprised when they do. The problem is simply that we cannot expect anything like a fair negotiation when the two parties at the table are in bed together. This is how NYC can spend $13,500 per year per student - more than tuition at many private schools - and still have abysmal results. But the charter schools that rank in the top 5-10% in the state whose only difference is that kids wear uniforms, have a longer day, and no teacher's unions? They get death threats and lawsuits.
A contract is a document negotiated by both sides and is quite capitalist in nature
This is only true when both sides are representing their respective interests in good faith. That is to say, when a worker (or a union) negotiates a contract with management, both sides have some competing interests and some overlapping interests. Contracts are great at addressing situations like these because everybody ultimately wants an outcome where a contract is signed and therefore everybody has incentive to give and take to reach that end.
When the teacher's union negotiates a contract with the government, there is nobody representing the school's interest in good faith. They negotiate with elected state officials, who are beholden to unions as a sizable voting bloc. Certainly the elected officials still have a duty to try and do right for the public, but even assuming you have a perfectly fair and rational governor (or other state pol) who can produce a contract that fairly rewards teachers while not endangering the school system's financing, there is every incentive for the union to say 'if we throw our political weight behind the person running against you, he will promise us a better deal.' Because people running for office, regardless of party, will make exactly those kinds of promises. A private sector union is going up against management that knows there is a point where the company simply cannot turn a profit if it offers too sweet a deal and so the union's job is to get the sweetest deal it can for its members that falls short of that point. A public sector union knows that the equivalent point at which a school system might go bankrupt is going to be kicked down the street for years if not decades because laying off teachers and shuttering schools for lack of money is political death to the pols who have to order them. Only now, when we have some fairly egregious examples (in places like New Jersey) of public unions choosing to keep perks for their senior members rather than avert layoffs, are politicians able to get away with doing anything about it at all.
This isn't a dig on unions or elected officials. This is normal human behavior. Unions and contracts only work when both sides have something to gain and something to lose to incentivize them to reach a fair outcome. The part of this system that is 'capitalist' in nature is that it sets two or more groups in a relationship that is simultaneously cooperative (working together) and competitive (each wanting bigger pieces of the reward) and relies on each to keep the other in check, much like the Constitution relies on the three branches of government to keep each other in check. The moment one of those two sides becomes completely beholden to the other, you end up with robber barons (management has too much influence) or the disaster that is public education (public sector unions with too much influence).
Are you high? What evidence is there that in the decade or more that government has been answerable to a union for real?
A school cannot scratch its ass unless the union contract permits it to. Length of school day, the number of school days, when the school year starts, the number of minutes spent teaching versus preparing, hiring, firing -- effectively, all 'operations' at a public school -- are determined by a union contract.
I don't know about you, but in my book, that makes government answerable to a union 'for real.'
You, and people like you, believe that corporate citizens should be given special treatment, because of the benefits they bring to the economy.
I don't accept the notion of a 'corporate citizen.' I run two small corporations. The one and only reason they are corporations is so that, for accounting and legal reasons, there is a line between 'stuff belonging to Aquitaine' and 'stuff belonging to AquitaineCorp' so that if my businesses fail, I will be out of a job and a lot of money, but I will not have to worry that I might lose my house and enter personal bankruptcy. Even so, running a company is a huge gamble, because it means you're putting in well north of what most people would accept in a salaried job and you may not see any corresponding payoff for a long time, if ever. But that makes sense - it was my choice to go into business for myself.
At no point in the last five years of running a business have my personal feelings about who should be given what kind of treatment entered into the equation. There are really only a couple choices once you start doing any significant amount of business each year (say, north of $20,000), and those are 'what flavor of corporation' choices. If you don't incorporate, you're personally liable for everything your business does. This is fine in a small company but not fine in a larger one where you'd be making one person (or even a dozen people) personally liable for hundreds if not thousands of corporate agents. This is impossible and you'd be sending honest people to jail on a regular basis.
You, and people like you, believe that corporate citizens should be given special treatment, because of the benefits they bring to the economy. However, such benefits could not be realized without the human citizens that work for them. Why shouldn't they be treated equally under the law?
I don't know how you would make them equal under tax law because they aren't the same things, even if you try to give them the same name. One person and a salary is not a 'payroll of one' because you say it is. You are not contractually obligated to yourself for your salary; your employer is, and if they don't pay it, you can sue the them. A person and his or her family has expenses but these are not comparable to the cost of doing business. This isn't apples and oranges - it's apples and rocket ships. Under no circumstances does one person ever have to be on the hook to pay thousands of people thousands of dollars every month. A person does not have to, in the course of providing for themselves and their families, acquire very much in the way of machinery, office space, an HR department, attorneys, permits, and property -- and when a person does occasionally need those things, they need one of them, and it's a big deal.
I, and people like me -- that is, people who actually run corporations and have a passing familiarity with the legal and financial requirements of doing so -- understand that a corporation is not the same thing as a human being, whether or not there is some legal universe in which they may be equated for the purpose of application of certain laws. It's hilarious to me that a lot of people who want to see an end to corporate lobbying (of which I would be one) also want the government to hand out billions of dollars to green energy companies and other political favorites. If you want people to stop trying to take over the gravy train, stop running the gravy train every hour.
We've given them unparalleled power over our lives, over our government, with next to no accountability, and in return have become serfs at best, slaves at worst, to legal fictions created by the greedy and self-centered, aided and abetted by the politicians we've trusted for so long to represent us.
I guess that sounds good if you're occupying Wall Street but it's irrelevant as well as meaningless to somebody whose day-to-day concerns involve making payroll and trying to run the kind of shop where
This is how corporations used to be. The government would allow them to exist to fill a specific market need
In the Soviet Union, perhaps. This has never been the case in the United States.
We used to call that "income averaging", however, this was repealed in 1986 for individuals. Just another case where corporations get preferential treatment over individuals.
You seem to suggest that corporations and people should be treated the same way under tax laws. Maybe this comes from the facile suggestion that 'corporations are people' because of Citizens United, but it has no bearing on actual corporate accounting or taxes.
which means, in effect I'm "really" only paying 3.5% of total revenue.
You aren't supposed to pay 35% of revenue. Taxes are paid on profits. If you want to start taxing gross receipts (and some localities do) then you just drove every industry with high costs and high income out of your area, because nobody is going to pay a gross receipts tax if they're making $10,000,000 but spending $9,500,000 to do it.
This is similar to the tax problem where you have one person who is paid a salary of $250,000 compared to the small business (let's assume it's a sole-member LLC and a disregarded entity) with a $250,000 profit. Both are treated identically under the tax code right now, but they're not identical in any practical sense.
Most people would consider one person being paid a salary of $250,000 every year pretty wealthy. But the salaried guy is only responsible for himself and his family. He doesn't have to cover payroll. If you have more than one or two employees, $250k will vanish pretty quickly if business goes south for even a few months. You are not a 'wealthy' small business for two reasons: your potential outlays are an order of magnitude greater than a person responsible only for himself and his family, and your income stream is an order of magnitude less stable than somebody's salary, dependent as it is on your business succeeding.
As for your example, if you made $1 million in profits last year but had $900,000 in deductions, you didn't make $1 million in profits, you made $100,000 in profits. Tax shelters are a little different and to use them effectively (and legally) you have to be a pretty big company and do business overseas (as well as having overseas tax shelters) because while your tax shelter is convenient for avoiding US tax, it's very inconvenient if you want to use any of that money in the united states. So not really an option for a US small or medium business.
Unless you're suggesting that corporations shouldn't have deductions? Which ones, specifically? Perhaps you're a fan of Cain's 9-9-9 plan, then, because it eliminates most deductions in the tax code?
The biggest corporations have enough people and tricks to pay 0%.
No corporation in the United States pays zero percent corporate income tax on income realized in the united states in a year during which they had a net profit unless they carried over a loss from a previous year. In other words:
NET profit:
Lose 100 mil in 2006 - Tax bill $0
Profit 50 mil in 2007 - Tax bill $0
Profit 100 mil in 2008 - Tax bill 35% * 50 mil
Where you start to get into complex loopholes is when you make money offshore. If AquitaineCorp makes $100 mil in the UK and keeps it in the UK, we'd pay UK tax. If we then wanted to bring some of that money home, we'd also have to pay US tax and we are one of the few countries in the world to do that. The loophole here is that if you set up an office in Bermuda or some place with no corporate tax, which is possible when you deal in intangibles like royalties, you can just park the money earned there and you don't pay US tax on it -- of course, you can't pay your US guys with it or invest in anything in the US with it without 'realizing it,' so it's not without price - you can spend it abroad, in countries that don't tax money realized outside their borders.
The basis of the system actually isn't that complicated, but 'BIG CORPORATIONS PAY 0% TAX' makes for a better sound byte, which I guess is good enough for you.
A 'huge' percentage do not pay zero percent. You are undoubtedly regurgitating a figure about how GE paid no taxes a few years ago. It's because they carried over the loss from a previous year. If you lose 100 mil in 2006 and profit 50 mil in 2007, you pay no taxes on the 50 mil because of your prior losses.
If this sounds unfair to you, imagine what would happen if it didn't work this way. Enormous business decisions would revolve around artificial time spans just to keep their profit (and loss) as close to zero each year as possible. At the end of a bad year, everybody would sell the farm. You'd have even more artificial tax-induced decisions than we already have.
A huge percentage of corporations are not gigantic multinational corporations like GE. They are small or medium businesses that don't have offshore offices or highly-paid tax accountants. They do their corporate taxes on turbotax and they pay 35%. I will soon be one of them as my business is changing from a sole-member LLC to a partnership next year. Guess that makes me part of the 1%...
but there's no evidence that non-union charter schools are doing any better in producing well prepared students.
You are referring to the Stanford study that compared all public schools with all charter schools. This is an extremely difficult metric, because education is primarily run by states, not the feds, and so it's difficult to compare even a public school in New York with a public school in Texas, much less a charter school, when the whole point of a charter school is that you get a temporary charter from the state to run your school how you like. This is important: In the archetypal charter school arrangement, while the organization running the school is bound by state law with respect to certain things (particularly admissions), the idea is that you are being given license to run the place how you think is best. This means that, while the operations and budget (if not performance and outcome) of one New York City public school probably has a lot in common with another New York City public school, the same cannot be assumed of charter schools. Each charter organization does things differently, and not all of their decisions are going to be good ones.
The chief difference is that, if a charter school does poorly, it can lose its charter after a few years. Closing a public school, on the other hand, is a very difficult, political process, and who's to say that it's going to be replaced with anything better? This is the only thing just about every charter school has in common: accountability.
You have to compare apples to apples, though. Look at your local schools. The best-performing public schools are typically in wealthy areas. They're not the best because they get the most money (in NY and NJ, it's quite often the case that the worst schools get the most money) but because of demographics -- students from upper-middle class families with attentive parents do well, those schools prosper and attract good teachers, cycle continues. Why not look at the best charter schools that don't have the demographic advantage, that serve poor neighborhoods, and still come out in the top 1% of the state, ahead even of some of the top private schools?
Here you go.
I urge you to look into what schools like these are actually doing to produce these results, and particularly what the problems they face are. Their #1 obstacle is the United Federation of Teachers. They have been sued by the NAACP for 'segregation' even though their schools are overwhelmingly black and latino -- segregation is the strategy that the NAACP has been using in lawsuits against schools and school districts that increase school choice or that favor charters or vouchers. The group in the above link (which was covered in 'The Lottery') gets ten applicants for every seat they have and the UFT busses in protestors to keep them from applying to the city for additional space in closed-down public schools.
So you're right that charters aren't a magic bullet. A charter just says 'here is freedom to run a school. Don't eff it up.' But some of the best charter schools have results that could be easily reproduced - if we wanted to.
Why is paying a portion of your health care costs bad for you, when it's what everybody else has to do already?
As a small business owner, I have to pay 100% of my healthcare costs, and because I don't get a group policy, what I do pay for sucks because it's on the individual market. This is my choice (after all, I could quit my business and get a 9-5 job) but you don't see me in the streets bitching about it.
I don't blame unions for advocating to get everything they can get. That's their job, in the same way that management's job is to get the most out of their workers. This system only works when authority is distributed between both sides. When management is the government and directly answerable to the union as a large voting bloc, there isn't even any pretense that this is a fair give-and-take scenario unless government is willing to completely alienate a tremendous bloc of voters with a lot of controversy - like Walker in Wisconsin. How much easier would his job have been if he'd shrugged his shoulders and said 'this isn't worth it'?
If you worked for me, I would certainly appreciate the opportunity to keep you, and I wouldn't feel bitter in the least if you came to me and said 'x company is offering more money to do the same thing and it's a better fit with my life.' Yes, if I'm a douchebag, I can agree to match or beat their offer and then quietly seek to replace you, but a company's reputation among its employees hits the toilet pretty fast the moment everybody stops trusting the boss. It's my job to make sure that nobody ever stops and asks 'would Aquitaine try to replace me just because I made him match an offer another company made?'
When I hire somebody, I definitely want the opportunity to earn their loyalty -- but I know that they, like everybody, have an obligation to themselves and to their families to do right by all of them, and that's tough when they're in competition with one another. So I don't think you 'owe' your current employer any more than the customary two weeks' notice unless you feel that they've really gone the extra mile on your behalf in the past, which some small businesses will do. Even then, I'd rather have a valuable employee realize it's time to move on than regret not having done so and turn into a rotten, depressed employee.
, as repeatedly confirmed by courts at every level when applied to a government funded institution.
Could you provide an example of a government employee's first amendment rights extending to posting whatever he or she likes at his workplace?
'Government funded' institution it may be, but the venue for the speech is not the employee's property, and so it seems to me that the university can put up or take down pretty much anything it wants, subject to your usual ACLU lawsuits about what is and isn't acceptable to display on government property.
We have Presidents ordering the assassination of American Citizens,
The Supreme court has held that once you raise arms (or conspire to raise arms) in rebellion, your citizenship does not entitle you to due process (Ex Parte Quirin, 1942):
the law of war draws a distinction between the armed forces and the peaceful populations of belligerent nations and also between those who are lawful and unlawful combatants. Lawful combatants are subject to capture and detention as prisoners of war by opposing military forces. Unlawful combatants are likewise subject to capture and detention, but in addition they are subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals for acts which render their belligerency unlawful. The spy who secretly and without uniform passes the military lines of a belligerent in time of war, seeking to gather military information and communicate it to the enemy, or an enemy combatant who without uniform comes secretly through the lines for the purpose of waging war by destruction of life or property, are familiar examples of belligerents who are generally deemed not to be entitled to the status of prisoners of war, but to be offenders against the law of war subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals.
As for the 'state actor,' perhaps that would hold water if the state was suppressing private speech, but this is an office door at a public university. My layman's understanding of the law in that case is that the state has no obligation to permit this guy to put whatever he likes on a door just because he works there.
What if the guy was a facist? Is he allowed to post facist propaganda on his office door? Anti-homosexual posters?
On principle I side with the forces of Post Whatever You Damn Please On Your Office Door, but isn't there a certain amount of hilarity in how far removed from reality both of these people are in how they approached this issue?
The public safety officer is hewing to the absolute letter of the law with no interest in exercising any kind of critical thinking or good judgment, and the prof leaps directly to 'OMG I AM A VICTIM YOU ARE TRAMPLING MY RIGHTS' as if they'd shut down a newspaper or burned books rather than removing a piece of Hollywood memorabilia from an office door.
It seems to me that a dry, P. J. O'Rourke or Jon Stewart style response might have been better suited to pointing out the absurdity of the situation, instead of the 'I am being victimized by the man' clarion call, but as other posters have said, this is Madison.
"because New York fucking rules", and you'll be saying pretty much the same thing...
Not in the least. One is a direct endorsement (Which, having lived there, I would gladly approve of.) The other is academic euphemism, all wind and no meaning. New Yorkers do tend to love New York (as do other people living in most decent cities, as you pointed out). It's one thing to approve of your city and have that in common with your neighbor. It's quite another to then suggest that you have a responsibility to that city to build a private structure that puts everyone inside in contact with everyone outside because hey, we love this town!
That might be a nice perk, but the point of an office complex is to do the job the company does. There is also an aesthetic argument toward not making private property an eyesore, of course, just as every homeowner's association wants to do. But 'shared responsibility in a collective metropolitan realm'? This is only intellectual in the modern, void-of-intelligence sense of 'intellectual.' It's flowery nonsense that is disconnected from anybody's everyday life, blue collar or white.