If you share a building with tons of other companies, and if the view out your window is a busy thoroughfare, is 'the notion of a shared responsibility in the collective metropolitan realm' near at heart and therefore contributing to some architectural faux-topia?
Oh wait, that's New York City, where nobody looks you in the eye and if somebody says 'Good Morning' to you then you get ready to defend yourself. 'Shared responsibility in a collective metropolitan realm' indeed. Or Los Angeles, where there are no thoroughfares because everybody drives everywhere anyway.
I also like the posts to the effect of 'architecture is art and discussing art is good.' I guess, but seriously, an 'architecture critic' for a newspaper? Theatre critics are at least answering the question 'should I go see this show,' but wtf is an architecture critic doing? 'Should I go hang out at this corporate campus?'
I am always amazed by the extent to which humans believe they are immune from the problems that the rest of the animal kingdom has to deal with, or else from the mechanisms used to solve those problems on account of our civilization.
'But Aquitaine,' you say, 'Isn't the whole point of civilization that we can rise above barbaric, survival-of-the-fittest brutality?'
Sure -- some of the time. But that doesn't change what we are or what we're doing on this planet, which is trying to survive a competition for limited resources with a minimum of suffering. Capitalism is a system that rewards many of the same traits that nature would reward you for -- innovation, wits, cleverness, but also deception. Government and civilization are the means through which we try to 'level the playing field,' either by creating artificial advantages for those who may need them, or else by removing advantages from those who have them. To a certain extent this is the very definition of 'humane,' but it can also be quite smart. One needn't look far to find a second- or third-generation heiress (or heir) to a fortune who is dumb as a post and won't amount to anything other than a flashy headline when they OD in their Manhattan loft one day. Similarly, there are plenty of smart, hardworking people out there who simply run into terrible luck, and for whom the cost of rescuing them is far less than the loss of value or production if you didn't. Technically, these are not 'pure capitalist' notions, but as the WSJ points out in an article just today -- 'pure' conservatism is pretty much a myth (subscription required) -- The net returns for some artificial control of free markets, both in measurable dollars and in harder-to-measure human life and happiness, are pretty much indisputable, and even Adam Smith and Madison knew that.
The difficulty arises when you establish an entity whose purpose is to design these controls and whose reward is commensurate with the greatest number of people advantaged in the short-term rather than the soundness of the control. Here you have two very easy examples: the private sector, when shareholders influence corporate decision-making for short-term reward without regard for long-term competition (or the environment, or any number of other long-term considerations), and the government, where Nancy Pelosi's reward has everything to do with the number of people she can 'cover' with government insurance and hardly anything to do with whether the mechanism she uses to cover them will put the country on an express train to where Greece and Portugal are hanging out right now.
This is not a weakness in either capitalism or communism; it's simple self-interest achieved via rhetoric and populism, and if the private sector is any more immune to it than the public sector, it's because the private sector has a built-in cycle of institutional death and birth occurring on a more regular basis than does government. If a big company starts doing dumb things, three medium-sized companies will (eventually, usually) step in because they did smart things. This is much harder in government, and the more necessity for it that there is, the more reactionary the movement that might ultimately achieve it will be, typically to everybody's detriment (see also: the guillotine).
So it gets a little tiring trying to reduce everything in politics to capitalism versus communism (or capitalism versus socialism); that war is over. There is no modern industrial society whose prosperity is not tied to a capitalist base, even if that base is then overwhelmingly restrained and regulated by a powerful government; statism is not mutually exclusive with capitalism -- it just redirects the output more artificially and less efficiently than the market would. Some of the time and in some ways, that's just what you want, because you're 'buying civilization' with it. Do it too much, and you're stifling the natural engin
The oil industry does not receive significant subsidies from the government. The idea that they do has been repeated so often by the likes of Rachel Maddow that everybody seems to believe it. Whether you believe in subsidizing green energy or not (and there are good arguments on both sides), it seems to me that you can't possibly have an informed opinion if you're not willing to do the most basic research on how our government approaches taxation and subsidization of the energy sector.
The two pieces to this 'inconvenient truth' are carrying over loss and the actual energy subsidies we do have. Carrying over loss is usually when you hear about other big companies receiving 'tax breaks' or 'subsidies' -- like GM or GE. Basically, if you lose a hundred million bucks in 2006, you get to write that off against a 100 mil profit in 2007 and pay zero taxes. This is not new and it's the basis of most taxes, which tax profits. There are some gross revenue taxes out there but they're pretty specifically targeted and even so are pretty ugly, since you can end up paying a tax on a transaction where you only made $100 but had to spend $500,000 to get there.
The other part is our actual national energy subsidies, which go almost entirely to 'green' energy. We do sometimes subsidize oil companies, but we typically also figure out ways to tax them that don't apply to other industries such that the oil companies do not come out ahead, and the oil companies have said that they'd much rather wipe out all the subsidies than receive any. Sorry it doesn't fit with the 'oil companies buy every election' worldview.
The stated purpose is actually to make road users pay for the roads they use. Fuel consumption does not come into that calculation at all, as fuel consumption has nothing to do with the cost of maintaining roads.
If it doesn't, it's only because nobody in the Dutch government made the very difficult logical leap of 'let's maintain the roads with a gasoline tax,' where you have a pretty direct correlation between gasoline consumed and roads used. Or else they did at first and then absconded with that revenue for some other purpose, which you'd easily find happening outside of Holland as well.
As the GP says, if the point of a gas tax is to reduce gas consumption, then there is indeed no reason to tax electrics because you've already won when somebody's driving an electric car (well, 'won' except that you probably subsidized their electric car, but they're using less gas, certainly).
If your goal is instead to make people pay for roads they use, plenty of countries have had EZPass for years now. The trouble is that you have to pick the roads you want to make toll roads, and you have to build toll booths. The government no doubt found that to be cumbersome and figured it'd be easier to just earn a flat percentage per mile traveled. It will create a huge bureaucracy, cost a fortune to operate, probably get hacked by 'no sir my car ain't movin' black hats, and give the government a complete record of your every move. What could possibly be wrong with that?
One man's freedom protester is another man's unlawful rioter.
How deep. Grow up.
How about this: in anything pretending to resemble a civilized society, smashing and destroying private property as a means to make your point counts as unlawful rioting.
It's amazing to me how much scrutiny anyone in authority gets (though deservedly so, in my book) but then how much latitude anyone who is ostensibly anti-authority gets. You can break shit, hack things, disseminate somebody else's private documents, so long as you're sticking it to the man.
A curious thing to consider, since the US is routinely cited as having some of the lowest effective taxes in the developed world,
Except for our corporate tax, which is among the highest in the world, and the fact that we tax earnings abroad (and most countries do not).
Our tax rates are lower than Europe's because our welfare state, while pretty heavily entrenched, is not as heavily entrenched as theirs. I think Russia might have a lower effective tax rate than we do on general income (and a flat tax? Can't remember).
Airbnb falsely make people feel safer than Craigslist and the current PR mess is complicating that.
The only people who are 'made' to feel safer by what is essentially nothing more than a matching service are people who feel that their apartment has 'energy' that is affected by 'burning sage' in the first place. San Francisco has a tremendous concentration of such people.
My heart goes out to this lady, but to make it to 29 years old and not perform due diligence on ANYBODY who is going to have unmonitored access to your home is the definition of irresponsible. 'Well, Airbnb wouldn't give me that information.' That didn't upset you at the time! If some company wants to rent out my apartment and isn't going to tell me who they're renting it to, then the correct response is 'no thank you,' no matter how spiffy their web site is or how friendly their customer service people are.
That seems a bit high to me, especially if you do some of the repairs yourself.
Not at all. If you have even a couple valuable things in your apartment, much less valuable jewelry or electronics, you're looking at about $20k in renter's insurance (which is not very expensive).
If you have tens of thousands of dollars in cabinets, then you're a strange person. But tens of thousands of dollars in destructible property in your home isn't unusual at all.
I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the millions of people that think that mankind can spew millions of toxic substances into the environment and possibly think that the earth has the mechanisms to deal with it on a time frame conducive to human life.
See, I think a reasonable baseline for people who don't know a lot about this subject is 'golly, it doesn't seem to make sense that we can just dump stuff into the ground or the air or the water with no consequences.' I'm with you so far.
Where I start to get alienated is the massive jump a lot of environmentalists make when they conclude that we shouldn't dump anything at all anyplace, and not only that, but that anyone who produces anything that requires energy or whose livelihood depends on it is like Cobra Commander cackling on a doomsday device. I don't think that 'most people' are unconcerned about the environment; I think 'most people' get turned off when they see protesters chaining themselves to a power plant because they don't approve of anything except solar and wind power. People who think it's OK for gas to double or triple in price because 'maybe then we'll understand how important this issue is.'
On the other side you have people like one couple in my town who drive around in a hummer in the suburbs for no reason I can see. I do think that's wasteful. I'm not sure that Beckham having his fourth child is an outrageous use of carbon as some people seem to think it is.
And carbon itself seems to be the big question. Again, it's easy to get folks on board when you're talking about dumping toxins into the water or the ground or the air. The argument in favor of cutting carbon emissions seems to be 'carbon retains some amount of heat, and the world seems to have more heat than it did, and we've been emitting a lot of carbon... so, carbon must be it!' It's a very reasonable hypothesis and that seems to be what a lot of the science is focused on: is this true (seems to me like it could well be), but more importantly, to what extent is this true?
I'd sign off on closing down every coal plant in this country if we could deregulate Nuclear enough so that it doesn't take 10 years to see an ROI on it. But I don't see a lot of environmentalists coming with me on that.
You know, whether or not the original article is BS, why is the very first point that the rebuttal piece linked above makes the fact that the original article uses the word 'alarmist' umpteen times? This is like counting the number of times the word 'denier' appears in the rebuttal. Both sides call each other names.
If you really believe that humans are not responsible for climate change in a significant capacity, and you see people running around talking about mass extinction and migration, then you'd probably call them alarmists.
If you really believe that humans are responsible for climate change in a significant capacity, and you see people running around dismissing climate change as nothing more than politics or researchers looking for more grants to keep their jobs in spite of the massive threat to, well, everything we know, love, and take for granted, then 'denier' is probably not even the meanest term you could come up with for them.
But talking about either one hasn't got anything to do with science, just like most schoolyard name-calling hasn't got anything to do with the science. There are industrial interests on both sides and not that many people who both care about solving the problem rather than calling a halt to civilization while also demonstrating the capacity and civility to talk about the issue without resorting to this kind of thing. Consequently, I can't help but wonder how many interested, semi-educated, but very-far-from-climate-experts like me there are out there who look at all this stuff and just scratch their heads.
, I can say you are the FIRST PERSON I’ve EVER HEARD say that.
That doesn't make me a liar. It makes you unaware.
The last 2-3 annual statements I've received from the SSA have had inserts to that effect. Trust me, I'd much rather have my money than score a political point.
Perhaps it has to do with your anticipated retirement year, e.g. if you're not due to retire till after they run out of money, they include the insert?
For a Government entity that won't even give a hint or speculate about cost of living increases until the consumer price index is officially out every year, you think they would actually have an official stance on something as completely undecided as what *if* congress doesn't fix the problem in the next 15 years? Right-O!
In a former job around 6-7 years ago, I worked for a major university that received a lot of state and federal grants, many of which were from the SSA and which included provisions about operating web sites on behalf of the SSA. These were not complex web sites, but they were totally clueless (as was everyone from the SSA that I ever dealt with, though in fairness we only dealt with two or three specific branches). We would get phone calls at 6AM demanding that we remove the SSA logo from a web site that we had done on their behalf, and then a phone call four hours later demanding that we put it back.
Even by government standards, these people had terrible attitudes. Every meeting with them began and ended with the SSA having the attitude that they were performing the most vital government service in existence, and therefore they knew everything about how it should be done -- not necessarily a bad position, but by definition not a terribly logical one if you are hiring outside groups to do certain jobs for you.
The paper statements they send out are a hoot, too. They have a little insert that says something to the effect of 'I've heard that Social Security will be insolvent by the year 20xx (usually around 2030). Will I stop receiving payments?'
'No! Social security will continue to operate as normal. If Congress does not authorize additional funding, you can expect to receive seventy cents on the dollar.'
Their definition of 'insolvent' must be 'nobody receives anything,' but I can lose 30% of what I'm 'owed' without government assistance.
Lots of posts here suggesting that Visa/MC shouldn't care what goes through their pipes, that it's not their job to worry about that stuff. There is a good argument for this, but then you open up another whole can of worms, which is that criminal enterprise just got a very easy way to raise and launder money.
There are a lot of hoops you have to go through these days to get set up to accept credit cards, at least relative to how it used to be (it's still not that hard). But the notion that the card companies shouldn't care who you are or what you're doing is a little naive. What if some illicit gambling or kiddie porn or mafia ring raised millions this way? Slashdot would be up in arms about how the card companies are just greedy shits who don't care about what is going through their pipes so long as they get their money.
But now, because it's wikileaks, it's 'oh why won't they leave us alone.' Well, you can't have it both ways. Either the card companies have some responsibility for checking out the organizations with whom they do business or they do not, and my layman's understanding is that, right now, they do. And if you're doing business with a company you have a reasonable suspicion is breaking the law, you are not only within your rights but probably well advised to cease doing business with them.
'But Aquitaine,' you say, 'isn't that carte blanche to just stop doing business with anybody you don't like? Can't you just claim that you have a reasonable suspicion that they're dirty and so protecting yourself?' Well, yes. That's the cost of doing business in a tort-heavy, regulated market such as most first-world countries today. It's a judgment call, and it's one that's actually pretty tough to make in this case. I remember thinking how cool Wikileaks was for years until Assange started becoming the posterchild. I'm not even talking about the Swede case - their laws on that stuff are pretty harsh - but just his personality. The guy is an anarchist, and for the life of me I don't understand how any reasonably intelligent person can support anarchy or the stuff an anarchist does, even if there's some crossover with legitimate whistle-blowing. But that's a different discussion.
Credit card companies are by no means a monopoly or a duopoly. There are four major companies in the US alone, and several more in Europe. It's not a big market just because it's got a high barrier to entry, but it's by no means impenetrable.
There may be a debate about whether Internet connectivity is a human right or requisite to citizenship.
There may? Only in speeches of pandering politicians and UN bureaucrats who declare anything that people want to be a 'human right.'
Low bandwidth may indeed be a constraint on economic growth, but making the case that low mobile bandwidth is a constraint is pretty difficult.
Roaming, mobile broadband is a luxury. With so many wifi spots around, there just aren't that many people for whom having service like this is really necessary, much less a human right.
I submit that city, region, state and national governments should quickly attempt to remove these trade barriers, and cities on their own should attempt to create barrier-free roaming agreements with each other. It is juvenile from a civilization perspective and an economic perspective for carriers to refuse interoperability and enforce rapacious fees when it hurts the governments and populations that make it possible for them to make such a profitable business.
Oh please. In other words, 'I demand the pinnacle of modern convenience everywhere that I go, the costs of providing that service be damned.'
Imagine that you're a telco. You've invested hundreds of millions in network infrastructure and your primary method of recouping that investment is through local subscribers with semi-predictable revenue, which companies and investors tend to like when they're spending enormous amounts of cash on running and expanding their network. A telco in another country - let's say just for this example that it's a small country - comes to you and wants a deal whereby their subscribers can get on your network and your subscribers can get on theirs. If the two networks are equal in size, then maybe you both have similar prices and fees, but if they're not, the larger company is giving away more in a deal like this because they're offering access to a huge network but only gaining access to a small one. The people who will be accessing your network in this manner are most likely not nor will ever be your subscribers, so you don't have a lot of incentive to keep them loyal.
It's very similar to when politicians raise taxes on rental cars and hotel rooms. The people who pay them aren't their constituents, so they can get away with much higher taxes -- except in the case of a telco, both sides are actually getting something, and like I say, mobile broadband everywhere you go is a lot less vital to the economy than rental cars and hotel rooms.
The problem is that sales tax is, at least on its face, a lot simpler than income tax (despite this whole thread and TFA). Even as a grumpy conservative, I much prefer consumption taxes to production taxes. I would rather do away with income tax and pay more sales tax and use something like the Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement.
I'm a big supporter of the flat tax simply because of its simplicity and the relatively fewer loopholes, but that's a separate issue - the feds can't tell the states that they can't have their own taxes, so there will always be a state-level capacity to tax. The feds can only regulate it inasmuch as it affects interstate commerce (which, these days, seems to be quite often)
You can summarize most of the comments as either 'California is dumb, they are losing revenue' or 'Amazon is a dirty cheat,' but neither of these (whether or not they're true) address the real problem, which is that our sales tax structure, which worked reasonably well when mail order was largely a complementary system to 'going out shopping,' doesn't work well at all when there are large groups of people for whom the majority of their shopping is done online and out of state -- but the solution here is not to simply say 'you must collect sales tax for everybody no matter where they are.' Amazon might be able to do this, but a small business never could. The burden of calculating the sales tax is bad enough (as you can't just plug in a zip code - it varies by municipality in many places) but the burden of actually remitting that tax to each and every state and local government is tremendous. This is why Amazon and other online retailers fight this stuff, because they just pass the actual tax itself on to you, the customer -- but their expense in the vast amounts of paperwork involved is considerable, particularly when their business model is built on streamlining things like this. Big box stores already have the mechanism in place to do this for each state where they operate (so it's quite understandable that they'd be peeved about somebody not having to do it...)
Some people suggest a federal VAT to replace state sales tax, but that's not the answer simply because the federal government can't tell the state governments that they can't have a tax. They can have a Federal VAT, sure, but there's no way to enforce the 'instead of' provision in the US that I'm aware of. I think the solution here is simply some technical genius. Get somebody like Google to work with the credit card companies and establish a tax clearinghouse that any merchant can plug in to, and then anybody who collects money online can take advantage of their existing ecommerce infrastructure to both calculate and deliver the correct amount of tax to the clearinghouse, which then tags it with the EIN of the employer and sends it directly to the state and/or local government, each of which would pay a small percentage or else a flat fee based on their size to run the clearinghouse. The added burden on the small business is minimal, though laws would have to be changed because you usually have to go through a process to collect sales tax for each state; they'd need to eliminate this for anybody using the online clearinghouse. But it can be done.
Instead, we'll just have the same discussion over and over again every time a state government tries to collect tax from the Amazons of the world. I don't blame Amazon, though. I think they're legally correct -- the idea of having a subsidiary company that has got nothing to do with the actual selling making you responsible for the sales tax is a stretch. But tax reform isn't sexy, and is unlikely enough in an off year - much less when an election year is right around the corner.
As the guy who hires people, and who will be dealing with this kind of thing pretty shortly, I would not only welcome their suggestion that they want to call their lawyer, but encourage them to do so.
Whether or not Skype is legally right here, it's not in any company's best interest to obfuscate important terms of employment. Some contracts are dozens of pages but attorneys who deal with this stuff know where the important bits are. The cost to my reputation among my employees as a business owner for doing something like this would far outweigh whatever stock I might claw back, even if that stock was worth a lot (as it probably is).
You offer stock or options either because you can't afford to pay top dollar in salary or because you're trying to get the top of the employee market. You won't be able to do either for long after a trick like this, though I guess that's a privilege that private equity firms can enjoy that owner/operators like me can't.
You're right about their influence on politics, but they have to work a lot harder to influence people than labor unions do - and nobody can make you join the AARP, whereas in quite a lot of the USA, union membership is mandatory for several sectors.
My wife mentioned last night that our family account had 86 eBooks on it after only a couple of years of owning a Kindle. We share it between us and her parents (using 3 of the 5 devices Amazon allows you to have on a single account).
We read a lot more than we used to (and we read a lot before), particularly because we don't have to bring big books on trips. We can share books between us even though her parents are on the other side of the country. Sure, we can't share them with strangers (not really, anyway), but in my book we're coming out ahead, paying less, using less space, and filling less of our house with books we've read already. Do I miss the bookshelf full of awesome books to talk about? Yes, definitely. But I don't miss it so much that I'd trade it for reading less than we're able to.
I recall a decade ago or so, Stallman was eccentric but interesting. This is just nonsense. Nobody is forcing anybody to use eBooks and we have a long way to go before it becomes at all unusual to own a physical copy. Unfortunately, humans keep reproducing and using more stuff, so it seems to me that we ought to be willing to trade some of the old niceties for improved efficiency and less waste, particularly if the net experience ends up better for some people (like me).
It's a fascinating thing to see a tech person turn status-quo luddite simply because he doesn't care for the manner of the change that is taking place. Even so, DRM and eBooks do have some controversial aspects and it's good to see them discussed, but that's not what's going on here -- the alternatives Stallman is proposing are wildly impractical and would never happen.
Microsoft is not running Skype yet. It takes months for these deals to go through. And TFA suggests that Skype has never gone down before, which is BS. 'Disappeared from the Internet'? Seriously?
The only useful thing in this submission is that I learned the word 'snaffled.'
Although I am a former accessibility consultant, I wasn't in it long enough to really have an expert opinion on gestures and whether or not standards would help anything.
What I can tell you is that guys like Nielsen make their money by auditing everything under the sun against these standards. In my day it was 508 and W3C (which are still valid today, but more easily satisfied, I think).
Some of what we did was really useful stuff in terms of educating other developers about how people would access the web with screen readers and some really fairly easy techniques to accommodate them and other people with disabilities.
But a lot of what we did was 'take this federal grant money to audit this state or local community college's web site so that they won't be sued under the ADA.' Your tax dollars paying for us to go around to institutions that could barely afford web developers (as they operate on your tax dollars) and tell them that yes, their web site could definitely allow them to be sued under the ADA.
It's definitely a dilemma though. There's a pretty easy argument that says that educational institutions should make their entire application process accessible. But as the technical guy in the process, I found that most of what went on was non-technical people talking to other non-technical people about how great the standards were and patting themselves on the back. We did a lot of 'sorry, you're not accessible' but very little 'let us give you a seminar on how to be accessible.'
I never met Nielsen, but he would make the news in our corner of the world a lot by going after some company or institution, declaring them inaccessible, and then hope to make a wagon of cash by getting hired by said company. That's how the industry is set up, though, so really I can't criticize him for it -- he would (rightly) say that too many people were totally ignorant of accessibility and so would use his reputation to put the spotlight on it and sometimes profit along the way. I just wonder how much stuff like Section 508 actually advanced usability.
Slashdot Mirror
I was a New Yorker for many years and would never suggest that they aren't friendly (and I'd take a New Yorker any day over a random LA stranger).
Friendly, yes. 'conscious of shared responsibility in a collective metropolitan realm' ... they'd punch you in face because you'd deserve it.
If you share a building with tons of other companies, and if the view out your window is a busy thoroughfare, is 'the notion of a shared responsibility in the collective metropolitan realm' near at heart and therefore contributing to some architectural faux-topia?
Oh wait, that's New York City, where nobody looks you in the eye and if somebody says 'Good Morning' to you then you get ready to defend yourself. 'Shared responsibility in a collective metropolitan realm' indeed. Or Los Angeles, where there are no thoroughfares because everybody drives everywhere anyway.
I also like the posts to the effect of 'architecture is art and discussing art is good.' I guess, but seriously, an 'architecture critic' for a newspaper? Theatre critics are at least answering the question 'should I go see this show,' but wtf is an architecture critic doing? 'Should I go hang out at this corporate campus?'
Google is also paying for their energy.
I am always amazed by the extent to which humans believe they are immune from the problems that the rest of the animal kingdom has to deal with, or else from the mechanisms used to solve those problems on account of our civilization.
'But Aquitaine,' you say, 'Isn't the whole point of civilization that we can rise above barbaric, survival-of-the-fittest brutality?'
Sure -- some of the time. But that doesn't change what we are or what we're doing on this planet, which is trying to survive a competition for limited resources with a minimum of suffering. Capitalism is a system that rewards many of the same traits that nature would reward you for -- innovation, wits, cleverness, but also deception. Government and civilization are the means through which we try to 'level the playing field,' either by creating artificial advantages for those who may need them, or else by removing advantages from those who have them. To a certain extent this is the very definition of 'humane,' but it can also be quite smart. One needn't look far to find a second- or third-generation heiress (or heir) to a fortune who is dumb as a post and won't amount to anything other than a flashy headline when they OD in their Manhattan loft one day. Similarly, there are plenty of smart, hardworking people out there who simply run into terrible luck, and for whom the cost of rescuing them is far less than the loss of value or production if you didn't. Technically, these are not 'pure capitalist' notions, but as the WSJ points out in an article just today -- 'pure' conservatism is pretty much a myth (subscription required) -- The net returns for some artificial control of free markets, both in measurable dollars and in harder-to-measure human life and happiness, are pretty much indisputable, and even Adam Smith and Madison knew that.
The difficulty arises when you establish an entity whose purpose is to design these controls and whose reward is commensurate with the greatest number of people advantaged in the short-term rather than the soundness of the control. Here you have two very easy examples: the private sector, when shareholders influence corporate decision-making for short-term reward without regard for long-term competition (or the environment, or any number of other long-term considerations), and the government, where Nancy Pelosi's reward has everything to do with the number of people she can 'cover' with government insurance and hardly anything to do with whether the mechanism she uses to cover them will put the country on an express train to where Greece and Portugal are hanging out right now.
This is not a weakness in either capitalism or communism; it's simple self-interest achieved via rhetoric and populism, and if the private sector is any more immune to it than the public sector, it's because the private sector has a built-in cycle of institutional death and birth occurring on a more regular basis than does government. If a big company starts doing dumb things, three medium-sized companies will (eventually, usually) step in because they did smart things. This is much harder in government, and the more necessity for it that there is, the more reactionary the movement that might ultimately achieve it will be, typically to everybody's detriment (see also: the guillotine).
So it gets a little tiring trying to reduce everything in politics to capitalism versus communism (or capitalism versus socialism); that war is over. There is no modern industrial society whose prosperity is not tied to a capitalist base, even if that base is then overwhelmingly restrained and regulated by a powerful government; statism is not mutually exclusive with capitalism -- it just redirects the output more artificially and less efficiently than the market would. Some of the time and in some ways, that's just what you want, because you're 'buying civilization' with it. Do it too much, and you're stifling the natural engin
The oil industry does not receive significant subsidies from the government. The idea that they do has been repeated so often by the likes of Rachel Maddow that everybody seems to believe it. Whether you believe in subsidizing green energy or not (and there are good arguments on both sides), it seems to me that you can't possibly have an informed opinion if you're not willing to do the most basic research on how our government approaches taxation and subsidization of the energy sector.
The two pieces to this 'inconvenient truth' are carrying over loss and the actual energy subsidies we do have. Carrying over loss is usually when you hear about other big companies receiving 'tax breaks' or 'subsidies' -- like GM or GE. Basically, if you lose a hundred million bucks in 2006, you get to write that off against a 100 mil profit in 2007 and pay zero taxes. This is not new and it's the basis of most taxes, which tax profits. There are some gross revenue taxes out there but they're pretty specifically targeted and even so are pretty ugly, since you can end up paying a tax on a transaction where you only made $100 but had to spend $500,000 to get there.
The other part is our actual national energy subsidies, which go almost entirely to 'green' energy. We do sometimes subsidize oil companies, but we typically also figure out ways to tax them that don't apply to other industries such that the oil companies do not come out ahead, and the oil companies have said that they'd much rather wipe out all the subsidies than receive any. Sorry it doesn't fit with the 'oil companies buy every election' worldview.
Source: http://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/oil-and-gas-company-tax-breaks/
The stated purpose is actually to make road users pay for the roads they use. Fuel consumption does not come into that calculation at all, as fuel consumption has nothing to do with the cost of maintaining roads.
If it doesn't, it's only because nobody in the Dutch government made the very difficult logical leap of 'let's maintain the roads with a gasoline tax,' where you have a pretty direct correlation between gasoline consumed and roads used. Or else they did at first and then absconded with that revenue for some other purpose, which you'd easily find happening outside of Holland as well.
As the GP says, if the point of a gas tax is to reduce gas consumption, then there is indeed no reason to tax electrics because you've already won when somebody's driving an electric car (well, 'won' except that you probably subsidized their electric car, but they're using less gas, certainly).
If your goal is instead to make people pay for roads they use, plenty of countries have had EZPass for years now. The trouble is that you have to pick the roads you want to make toll roads, and you have to build toll booths. The government no doubt found that to be cumbersome and figured it'd be easier to just earn a flat percentage per mile traveled. It will create a huge bureaucracy, cost a fortune to operate, probably get hacked by 'no sir my car ain't movin' black hats, and give the government a complete record of your every move. What could possibly be wrong with that?
One man's freedom protester is another man's unlawful rioter.
How deep. Grow up.
How about this: in anything pretending to resemble a civilized society, smashing and destroying private property as a means to make your point counts as unlawful rioting.
It's amazing to me how much scrutiny anyone in authority gets (though deservedly so, in my book) but then how much latitude anyone who is ostensibly anti-authority gets. You can break shit, hack things, disseminate somebody else's private documents, so long as you're sticking it to the man.
A curious thing to consider, since the US is routinely cited as having some of the lowest effective taxes in the developed world,
Except for our corporate tax, which is among the highest in the world, and the fact that we tax earnings abroad (and most countries do not).
Our tax rates are lower than Europe's because our welfare state, while pretty heavily entrenched, is not as heavily entrenched as theirs. I think Russia might have a lower effective tax rate than we do on general income (and a flat tax? Can't remember).
Airbnb falsely make people feel safer than Craigslist and the current PR mess is complicating that.
The only people who are 'made' to feel safer by what is essentially nothing more than a matching service are people who feel that their apartment has 'energy' that is affected by 'burning sage' in the first place. San Francisco has a tremendous concentration of such people.
My heart goes out to this lady, but to make it to 29 years old and not perform due diligence on ANYBODY who is going to have unmonitored access to your home is the definition of irresponsible. 'Well, Airbnb wouldn't give me that information.' That didn't upset you at the time! If some company wants to rent out my apartment and isn't going to tell me who they're renting it to, then the correct response is 'no thank you,' no matter how spiffy their web site is or how friendly their customer service people are.
That seems a bit high to me, especially if you do some of the repairs yourself.
Not at all. If you have even a couple valuable things in your apartment, much less valuable jewelry or electronics, you're looking at about $20k in renter's insurance (which is not very expensive).
If you have tens of thousands of dollars in cabinets, then you're a strange person. But tens of thousands of dollars in destructible property in your home isn't unusual at all.
I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the millions of people that think that mankind can spew millions of toxic substances into the environment and possibly think that the earth has the mechanisms to deal with it on a time frame conducive to human life.
See, I think a reasonable baseline for people who don't know a lot about this subject is 'golly, it doesn't seem to make sense that we can just dump stuff into the ground or the air or the water with no consequences.' I'm with you so far.
Where I start to get alienated is the massive jump a lot of environmentalists make when they conclude that we shouldn't dump anything at all anyplace, and not only that, but that anyone who produces anything that requires energy or whose livelihood depends on it is like Cobra Commander cackling on a doomsday device. I don't think that 'most people' are unconcerned about the environment; I think 'most people' get turned off when they see protesters chaining themselves to a power plant because they don't approve of anything except solar and wind power. People who think it's OK for gas to double or triple in price because 'maybe then we'll understand how important this issue is.'
On the other side you have people like one couple in my town who drive around in a hummer in the suburbs for no reason I can see. I do think that's wasteful. I'm not sure that Beckham having his fourth child is an outrageous use of carbon as some people seem to think it is.
And carbon itself seems to be the big question. Again, it's easy to get folks on board when you're talking about dumping toxins into the water or the ground or the air. The argument in favor of cutting carbon emissions seems to be 'carbon retains some amount of heat, and the world seems to have more heat than it did, and we've been emitting a lot of carbon ... so, carbon must be it!' It's a very reasonable hypothesis and that seems to be what a lot of the science is focused on: is this true (seems to me like it could well be), but more importantly, to what extent is this true?
I'd sign off on closing down every coal plant in this country if we could deregulate Nuclear enough so that it doesn't take 10 years to see an ROI on it. But I don't see a lot of environmentalists coming with me on that.
You know, whether or not the original article is BS, why is the very first point that the rebuttal piece linked above makes the fact that the original article uses the word 'alarmist' umpteen times? This is like counting the number of times the word 'denier' appears in the rebuttal. Both sides call each other names.
If you really believe that humans are not responsible for climate change in a significant capacity, and you see people running around talking about mass extinction and migration, then you'd probably call them alarmists.
If you really believe that humans are responsible for climate change in a significant capacity, and you see people running around dismissing climate change as nothing more than politics or researchers looking for more grants to keep their jobs in spite of the massive threat to, well, everything we know, love, and take for granted, then 'denier' is probably not even the meanest term you could come up with for them.
But talking about either one hasn't got anything to do with science, just like most schoolyard name-calling hasn't got anything to do with the science. There are industrial interests on both sides and not that many people who both care about solving the problem rather than calling a halt to civilization while also demonstrating the capacity and civility to talk about the issue without resorting to this kind of thing. Consequently, I can't help but wonder how many interested, semi-educated, but very-far-from-climate-experts like me there are out there who look at all this stuff and just scratch their heads.
Greece is also famous for its barriers to entry for new businesses. You have to know somebody, or bribe somebody, or both.
The problem in Greece is not the tax rate. It's the work rate and the 'free stuff' rate.
, I can say you are the FIRST PERSON I’ve EVER HEARD say that.
That doesn't make me a liar. It makes you unaware.
The last 2-3 annual statements I've received from the SSA have had inserts to that effect. Trust me, I'd much rather have my money than score a political point.
Perhaps it has to do with your anticipated retirement year, e.g. if you're not due to retire till after they run out of money, they include the insert?
For a Government entity that won't even give a hint or speculate about cost of living increases until the consumer price index is officially out every year, you think they would actually have an official stance on something as completely undecided as what *if* congress doesn't fix the problem in the next 15 years? Right-O!
Yes. I do and they do: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/
Your attitude reminds me a lot of the SSA. 'How dare you question us when we are about our very important business?!'
In a former job around 6-7 years ago, I worked for a major university that received a lot of state and federal grants, many of which were from the SSA and which included provisions about operating web sites on behalf of the SSA. These were not complex web sites, but they were totally clueless (as was everyone from the SSA that I ever dealt with, though in fairness we only dealt with two or three specific branches). We would get phone calls at 6AM demanding that we remove the SSA logo from a web site that we had done on their behalf, and then a phone call four hours later demanding that we put it back.
Even by government standards, these people had terrible attitudes. Every meeting with them began and ended with the SSA having the attitude that they were performing the most vital government service in existence, and therefore they knew everything about how it should be done -- not necessarily a bad position, but by definition not a terribly logical one if you are hiring outside groups to do certain jobs for you.
The paper statements they send out are a hoot, too. They have a little insert that says something to the effect of 'I've heard that Social Security will be insolvent by the year 20xx (usually around 2030). Will I stop receiving payments?'
'No! Social security will continue to operate as normal. If Congress does not authorize additional funding, you can expect to receive seventy cents on the dollar.'
Their definition of 'insolvent' must be 'nobody receives anything,' but I can lose 30% of what I'm 'owed' without government assistance.
Lots of posts here suggesting that Visa/MC shouldn't care what goes through their pipes, that it's not their job to worry about that stuff. There is a good argument for this, but then you open up another whole can of worms, which is that criminal enterprise just got a very easy way to raise and launder money.
There are a lot of hoops you have to go through these days to get set up to accept credit cards, at least relative to how it used to be (it's still not that hard). But the notion that the card companies shouldn't care who you are or what you're doing is a little naive. What if some illicit gambling or kiddie porn or mafia ring raised millions this way? Slashdot would be up in arms about how the card companies are just greedy shits who don't care about what is going through their pipes so long as they get their money.
But now, because it's wikileaks, it's 'oh why won't they leave us alone.' Well, you can't have it both ways. Either the card companies have some responsibility for checking out the organizations with whom they do business or they do not, and my layman's understanding is that, right now, they do. And if you're doing business with a company you have a reasonable suspicion is breaking the law, you are not only within your rights but probably well advised to cease doing business with them.
'But Aquitaine,' you say, 'isn't that carte blanche to just stop doing business with anybody you don't like? Can't you just claim that you have a reasonable suspicion that they're dirty and so protecting yourself?' Well, yes. That's the cost of doing business in a tort-heavy, regulated market such as most first-world countries today. It's a judgment call, and it's one that's actually pretty tough to make in this case. I remember thinking how cool Wikileaks was for years until Assange started becoming the posterchild. I'm not even talking about the Swede case - their laws on that stuff are pretty harsh - but just his personality. The guy is an anarchist, and for the life of me I don't understand how any reasonably intelligent person can support anarchy or the stuff an anarchist does, even if there's some crossover with legitimate whistle-blowing. But that's a different discussion.
Credit card companies are by no means a monopoly or a duopoly. There are four major companies in the US alone, and several more in Europe. It's not a big market just because it's got a high barrier to entry, but it's by no means impenetrable.
There may be a debate about whether Internet connectivity is a human right or requisite to citizenship.
There may? Only in speeches of pandering politicians and UN bureaucrats who declare anything that people want to be a 'human right.'
Low bandwidth may indeed be a constraint on economic growth, but making the case that low mobile bandwidth is a constraint is pretty difficult.
Roaming, mobile broadband is a luxury. With so many wifi spots around, there just aren't that many people for whom having service like this is really necessary, much less a human right.
I submit that city, region, state and national governments should quickly attempt to remove these trade barriers, and cities on their own should attempt to create barrier-free roaming agreements with each other. It is juvenile from a civilization perspective and an economic perspective for carriers to refuse interoperability and enforce rapacious fees when it hurts the governments and populations that make it possible for them to make such a profitable business.
Oh please. In other words, 'I demand the pinnacle of modern convenience everywhere that I go, the costs of providing that service be damned.'
Imagine that you're a telco. You've invested hundreds of millions in network infrastructure and your primary method of recouping that investment is through local subscribers with semi-predictable revenue, which companies and investors tend to like when they're spending enormous amounts of cash on running and expanding their network. A telco in another country - let's say just for this example that it's a small country - comes to you and wants a deal whereby their subscribers can get on your network and your subscribers can get on theirs. If the two networks are equal in size, then maybe you both have similar prices and fees, but if they're not, the larger company is giving away more in a deal like this because they're offering access to a huge network but only gaining access to a small one. The people who will be accessing your network in this manner are most likely not nor will ever be your subscribers, so you don't have a lot of incentive to keep them loyal.
It's very similar to when politicians raise taxes on rental cars and hotel rooms. The people who pay them aren't their constituents, so they can get away with much higher taxes -- except in the case of a telco, both sides are actually getting something, and like I say, mobile broadband everywhere you go is a lot less vital to the economy than rental cars and hotel rooms.
The problem is that sales tax is, at least on its face, a lot simpler than income tax (despite this whole thread and TFA). Even as a grumpy conservative, I much prefer consumption taxes to production taxes. I would rather do away with income tax and pay more sales tax and use something like the Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement.
I'm a big supporter of the flat tax simply because of its simplicity and the relatively fewer loopholes, but that's a separate issue - the feds can't tell the states that they can't have their own taxes, so there will always be a state-level capacity to tax. The feds can only regulate it inasmuch as it affects interstate commerce (which, these days, seems to be quite often)
You can summarize most of the comments as either 'California is dumb, they are losing revenue' or 'Amazon is a dirty cheat,' but neither of these (whether or not they're true) address the real problem, which is that our sales tax structure, which worked reasonably well when mail order was largely a complementary system to 'going out shopping,' doesn't work well at all when there are large groups of people for whom the majority of their shopping is done online and out of state -- but the solution here is not to simply say 'you must collect sales tax for everybody no matter where they are.' Amazon might be able to do this, but a small business never could. The burden of calculating the sales tax is bad enough (as you can't just plug in a zip code - it varies by municipality in many places) but the burden of actually remitting that tax to each and every state and local government is tremendous. This is why Amazon and other online retailers fight this stuff, because they just pass the actual tax itself on to you, the customer -- but their expense in the vast amounts of paperwork involved is considerable, particularly when their business model is built on streamlining things like this. Big box stores already have the mechanism in place to do this for each state where they operate (so it's quite understandable that they'd be peeved about somebody not having to do it...)
Some people suggest a federal VAT to replace state sales tax, but that's not the answer simply because the federal government can't tell the state governments that they can't have a tax. They can have a Federal VAT, sure, but there's no way to enforce the 'instead of' provision in the US that I'm aware of. I think the solution here is simply some technical genius. Get somebody like Google to work with the credit card companies and establish a tax clearinghouse that any merchant can plug in to, and then anybody who collects money online can take advantage of their existing ecommerce infrastructure to both calculate and deliver the correct amount of tax to the clearinghouse, which then tags it with the EIN of the employer and sends it directly to the state and/or local government, each of which would pay a small percentage or else a flat fee based on their size to run the clearinghouse. The added burden on the small business is minimal, though laws would have to be changed because you usually have to go through a process to collect sales tax for each state; they'd need to eliminate this for anybody using the online clearinghouse. But it can be done.
Instead, we'll just have the same discussion over and over again every time a state government tries to collect tax from the Amazons of the world. I don't blame Amazon, though. I think they're legally correct -- the idea of having a subsidiary company that has got nothing to do with the actual selling making you responsible for the sales tax is a stretch. But tax reform isn't sexy, and is unlikely enough in an off year - much less when an election year is right around the corner.
As the guy who hires people, and who will be dealing with this kind of thing pretty shortly, I would not only welcome their suggestion that they want to call their lawyer, but encourage them to do so.
Whether or not Skype is legally right here, it's not in any company's best interest to obfuscate important terms of employment. Some contracts are dozens of pages but attorneys who deal with this stuff know where the important bits are. The cost to my reputation among my employees as a business owner for doing something like this would far outweigh whatever stock I might claw back, even if that stock was worth a lot (as it probably is).
You offer stock or options either because you can't afford to pay top dollar in salary or because you're trying to get the top of the employee market. You won't be able to do either for long after a trick like this, though I guess that's a privilege that private equity firms can enjoy that owner/operators like me can't.
AARP is not a labor union. It's an NGO.
You're right about their influence on politics, but they have to work a lot harder to influence people than labor unions do - and nobody can make you join the AARP, whereas in quite a lot of the USA, union membership is mandatory for several sectors.
reposting after logging in, d'oh...
My wife mentioned last night that our family account had 86 eBooks on it after only a couple of years of owning a Kindle. We share it between us and her parents (using 3 of the 5 devices Amazon allows you to have on a single account).
We read a lot more than we used to (and we read a lot before), particularly because we don't have to bring big books on trips. We can share books between us even though her parents are on the other side of the country. Sure, we can't share them with strangers (not really, anyway), but in my book we're coming out ahead, paying less, using less space, and filling less of our house with books we've read already. Do I miss the bookshelf full of awesome books to talk about? Yes, definitely. But I don't miss it so much that I'd trade it for reading less than we're able to.
I recall a decade ago or so, Stallman was eccentric but interesting. This is just nonsense. Nobody is forcing anybody to use eBooks and we have a long way to go before it becomes at all unusual to own a physical copy. Unfortunately, humans keep reproducing and using more stuff, so it seems to me that we ought to be willing to trade some of the old niceties for improved efficiency and less waste, particularly if the net experience ends up better for some people (like me).
It's a fascinating thing to see a tech person turn status-quo luddite simply because he doesn't care for the manner of the change that is taking place. Even so, DRM and eBooks do have some controversial aspects and it's good to see them discussed, but that's not what's going on here -- the alternatives Stallman is proposing are wildly impractical and would never happen.
Microsoft is not running Skype yet. It takes months for these deals to go through. And TFA suggests that Skype has never gone down before, which is BS. 'Disappeared from the Internet'? Seriously?
The only useful thing in this submission is that I learned the word 'snaffled.'
Although I am a former accessibility consultant, I wasn't in it long enough to really have an expert opinion on gestures and whether or not standards would help anything.
What I can tell you is that guys like Nielsen make their money by auditing everything under the sun against these standards. In my day it was 508 and W3C (which are still valid today, but more easily satisfied, I think).
Some of what we did was really useful stuff in terms of educating other developers about how people would access the web with screen readers and some really fairly easy techniques to accommodate them and other people with disabilities.
But a lot of what we did was 'take this federal grant money to audit this state or local community college's web site so that they won't be sued under the ADA.' Your tax dollars paying for us to go around to institutions that could barely afford web developers (as they operate on your tax dollars) and tell them that yes, their web site could definitely allow them to be sued under the ADA.
It's definitely a dilemma though. There's a pretty easy argument that says that educational institutions should make their entire application process accessible. But as the technical guy in the process, I found that most of what went on was non-technical people talking to other non-technical people about how great the standards were and patting themselves on the back. We did a lot of 'sorry, you're not accessible' but very little 'let us give you a seminar on how to be accessible.'
I never met Nielsen, but he would make the news in our corner of the world a lot by going after some company or institution, declaring them inaccessible, and then hope to make a wagon of cash by getting hired by said company. That's how the industry is set up, though, so really I can't criticize him for it -- he would (rightly) say that too many people were totally ignorant of accessibility and so would use his reputation to put the spotlight on it and sometimes profit along the way. I just wonder how much stuff like Section 508 actually advanced usability.