If that legislation supports Fundie Evangelical Protestant Christianity, then it violates the first amendment.
You fail Precedent 101. This is the standard left-wing view of the establishment clause - that government has to have zero contact with all religion lest it be seen as 'respecting its establishment.' If this were actually the case, Bush's 'faith-based' community groups would never have got off the ground. The government deals with religion all the time; legislation is allowed to 'support' religion so long as it isn't supporting only one religion. I agree with you that this is a terrible use of taxpayer dollars, but on general 'wtf is government doing getting involved with this' grounds. Unfortunately, government has been taking our money to advance other people's agendas for decades.
Once the government has your tax dollars, they can and will spend them on just about whatever they want. The notion that you as a taxpaying citizen should have to approve of it is fantasy. My tax dollars go towards bailing people out of mortgages that I don't believe in (the people or the mortgages) and a dozen other things I don't care for - but the Constitution only says that Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. They haven't made a law that does either of these things -- as other posters have pointed out, provided that a non-Christian (or non-religious) park with similar projections for employment and tourism would carry equal weight, the fact that this is a ridiculous Protestant orgy of ignorance isn't relevant to the State.
What if my religion prohibits usury? Can I sue to dismantle Fannie and Freddie? 'cause I'd convert to that.
The US government did not take down this web site. Amazon decided they did not want to do business with Wikileaks. The First Amendment doesn't say that you are required to offer business services to anyone just because their speech is protected. The gov't would have needed a court order to force Amazon to take down the site, which Amazon would have been free to fight - this would have been true in most European countries as well.
Why is it that, when Amazon is doing something like patenting something obvious, it's a tyrannical, soulless corporation, but when it's hosting wikileaks, they're suddenly 'American citizens threatened with prosecution'? If you are in the hosting business, you have to make judgments about what you are and aren't willing to host, and what you are and aren't willing to fight for in court. Every major hosting business has at least a pretty good idea of where this line is for them. They have an obligation to their employees and their shareholders, and spending a lot of time and resources defending Wikileaks puts that at risk. It might still be worth it, depending on your point of view, but that's their decision.
I suspect that what happened is that Wikileaks signed up via some automated form or low-level employee and that the executives upstairs didn't even know they were hosting Wikileaks until they got a call from Lieberman or read about it in the news. And because this round of leaks isn't exactly the Pentagon Papers, they made the determination that there was very little benefit to Amazon, Amazon's employees, or the United States (in their view) and so pulled the plug.
In China or Russia, if a high level government official calls you and asks you to do something, prosecution is probably the least of the implied threats.
Sure, a bus driver who will kill everyone on the bus if he goes below 55mph for most of the route. And who can drive without being able to see anything outside the bus.
The free market is a delusion at best. If government kept it's hands entirely out of a market, you'd have to result to hired goons to deal with a contract dispute because contract enforcement is a function of government.
Come on. This is spurious. The free market depends on rule of law, which presumes contract enforcement. There are plenty of arguments against free market capitalism, but this isn't one of them. The government's role as legal adjudicator and peacekeeper is entirely separate from its role in regulating certain markets. I don't know any educated argument (even among libertarians) that suggests government ought to stop running a civil court.
'Streamlined and never capricious' in most cases does mean less regulation.
Just google 'power plant canceled.' Regulations absolutely do not mean that plants will pay for themselves - in many cases they mean that customers will pay a rate set by the government no matter what, and your tax dollars will pick up the difference. Just like they do with mortgage rates via Fannie and Freddie in the housing market.
It would be a safe investment in a free market. But electricity isn't anywhere close to a free market, and despite being a proponent of the free market, I recognize a few good reasons why it's not the best industry for this -- but our present answer of over-regulation is even worse.
The trouble is the number of people who have to sign off on any new power plant construction. If you think of the ideal market version of a power company, you'd have different companies, each with different investments in a variety of technologies in the hopes of reducing the all-powerful cost per kWh. The nuclear guys would have a huge up-front cost but much, much smaller long-term costs, provided that nothing explodes or melts down. The coal and oil guys would have the best short-term deals (and 'short term' here might be anywhere from 10 to 100 years, depending on who you ask) but even skeptics like myself know that 'sustainable' is a great idea.
If you want to reduce the amount of corruption in any industry, you need to lower the barriers to entry so that it's an attractive industry for new companies, because energetic and honest people will have at least one big advantage over the slow-moving incumbent business. This is easier said than done with a utility because it can take a decade or more for a new plant to come online, and most of that time is spent in the regulatory process. You've got the environmental impact studies, which probably all of us can agree should be done but none of us can agree on how to interpret or what conclusions we ought to draw from them. You've got 50 different sets of rules about who is allowed to produce versus transmit energy, with a lot of state-run utilities handling transmission but some also controlling production as well. And then you've got a significant opposition to any type of power plant these days that isn't solar, wind, or hydroelectric (along with some opposition to those after they're built and people realize they make noise/are eyesores/aren't perfect). So you have the perfect storm where, even if you get investors today to pick up the tab for a new plant, a change in local, state, or federal elected officials between now and when you're done could doom the whole thing, to say nothing of an arbitrary ruling from the EPA that decides whatever choice you made on the 'how shall we produce energy' side of the equation is a bad one.
Look at the question from the angle of 'would I invest my life savings in this?' Like you said, it seems like a sure bet, doesn't it? And people do invest in utilities, certainly, because the local, transmission part of the equation is seen as stable because it isn't going anywhere. The production side is less so because it's such a politically charged issue. There's not enough certainty today to gamble on nuclear vs. coal vs. something else, much less any guarantee that, even if there were any certainty today, it would still be there in 2012 or 2014.
Yeah, because all you need to build a new power plant is some money. Oh wait, except that it's one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country, particularly in California, and that you're asking investors to wait a very, very long time for a return on their investment.
This nonsense about 'California power companies pocketed all their profits when they should've been building plants' is not even very imaginative leftist fantasy. California has had a huge demand for electricity for years now. In any normal market, that would equalize with supply over time, but California suffers from a paralyzing combination of regulatory bodies and NIMBY. There is a post above this one that explains how even the supposed 'de-regulation' of the California energy market a while back was in fact just a re-regulation (in that wholesale prices were deregulated but retail prices were not). But don't let that get in the way of your populist righteousness.
The notion that they are 'causing damage' by departing is no different than the notion that Ireland is 'causing damage' by undertaking an action that might cause them to leave. Is Ireland raising taxes 'dictating' to private companies? No, of course not - it's a choice they are empowered to make and one with very obvious consequences.
You are presupposing that the government is the hero and that the companies are some evil or else childish entities that need to do what's best for the government.
The government is for the people, not the other way around.
'If you raise taxes, I will move' is hardly 'attempting to dictate.' It is the prerogative of any private person or entity to move for whatever reason they like, whether or not it is a good idea. This happens all the time -- look at the number of businesses moving out of California and to places like Texas.
I'm astounded at the number of posts claiming that all of Ireland's problems are due primarily to its low corporate tax rate, as if those were the only two things that foreigners know about Ireland and so therefore one must have caused the other.
Do they genuinely believe that scientific and technical fields require any less mental agility and analytic abilites?
It isn't a question of less or more, but simply different skills -- though there is definitely crossover (and probably more than either side would like to admit).
My first job was as a programmer and now I run a web design business where I still spend about 80% of my time writing code. Of course, I also took several semesters of CS in college, but then part of 'liberal arts' is that you're supposed to still have some science training as well... something else that gets left out a lot, or else people take a survey course in geology and that somehow does it.
Following logic in written arguments or rhetoric is a different skill from following code or the logic behind a proof -- but if you're good at one, you probably have the capacity to be good at the other, if not necessarily the training.
My take on what liberal arts is supposed to be is that you should know a little bit about everything, at least such that you can hold an intelligent conversation with someone in any field and have a fundamental (if not very complex) grasp of what they do. To some people, this makes you a dilettante, but frankly I've found it pretty useful over the years -- and I've run a business, been a professional actor, written tons of code, written for the Onion, written marriage ceremonies, learned to fly an airplane, and been an amateur game designer. I've probably never been in the top ten percent of any one of those things, but I'm fine with that.
Another article from a few years ago by a paper-mill writer pointed out an aspect of this I hadn't thought of before: people generally don't write good essays because they don't read essays on a regular basis.
That's because you are supposed to learn to write in grade school, aka 'grammar school,' and not in college. The school I went to recognized that most incoming freshmen don't know how to write and so required all students in all majors to take two semesters worth of writing seminars (100-level English courses). That's two semesters you probably should've spent learning actual material instead of re-treading over what your K-12 education failed to teach you.
I was a liberal arts major at an Ivy League school and graduated with a BA in English. I later lived for a year or so with a fellow graduate who had taken a job for one of these paper mills for the money. I saw the kind of people who ran the place as well as the kind of people who needed work done.
All the points about how this is easier with a humanities degree because you're not being tested in class are correct, but they're not a complete picture. Liberal arts degrees are indeed much easier to get than a science degree for the simple reason that you can't BS your way through math and physics (at least nowhere near as much as you can through the humanities). But a humanities education isn't meant to train you as a scientist or for a specific career, or a group or specific careers. It's meant to give you the intellectual tools to analyze anything. It's meant to make you intellectually agile, so that you can learn new (and possibly completely unrelated) fields very quickly. It's meant to give you a sense of what it means to be a damn human being and to give you the chops to appreciate arguments and ideas that might be contrary to your own, and to get to the bottom of why that is.
My experience was that, if you did the work and applied yourself, you got exactly that. But the nature of the work is such that there are not as many external factors forcing you to do the kinds of things you have to do in organic chem. It used to be that this kind of intellectual laziness would mean you washed out, but these days, even at an Ivy, you have to be pretty terrible for that to happen. I've seen resumes and letters from some of my fellow graduates with English degrees -- people who, presumably, ought to be expert writers -- and they aren't. Sometimes it's just because they're lazy, and sometimes it's because they got all their credits studying ultra-specific intellectual theory, whether it's queer theory, post-modernist theory, feminist theory, or anything else that makes for interesting graduate work but shouldn't be forming the entire basis of your undergraduate curriculum. But the grad students are pretty much forced into claiming an intellectual niche and working it to death, and that is reflected in the classes they teach. All of this in the name of a 'broad' intellectual base!
My recollection is that my friend was not writing papers for top tier schools most of the time, but it did happen. I remember that a lot of her clients were in one- or two- year master's programs (and sometimes MBAs) and almost always had the attitude that they just couldn't be bothered to do it themselves. Even if it started out as a single occasion where some kid just couldn't finish one paper on time, it became like a gateway drug.
And the people who ran the paper mill were absolute scumbags. This one was in NYC. They would withhold payment from their writers, promise things like health insurance and not deliver, and otherwise screw the people doing the work as much as possible so that their margins would be as high as possible. But they always had work.
Almost certain? Did you see the margin by which Perry clobbered the democrat for governor? I don't think Texas raising taxes is 'almost certain' in the least.
The draw to Texas (where I am going in 2012, as it happens) is partially taxes but also a government that is stable in the long term. Texas has a moderately high sales tax (about 6%, I think) but I don't think you'll see an income tax there anytime soon; Perry is a very popular governor and likely to remain so. The whole idea of a large role for the State government just doesn't fit with Texans very well, though of course there are some reciprocal problems with that approach. But 'no jobs' isn't one of those problems.
I wouldn't overestimate the companies already there, either. I'm sure they're a good draw, but the important thing is how much the government encourages new investment and entrepreneurs. There just aren't many states left that really do. If Texas did turn into a high-tax nanny state, sure, some companies would stay (just like some stay in California) but you'd see the same migration from TX to places like Florida or New Hampshire that you're seeing from CA to TX now. Businesses will pack up and leave, even if it's at a slow pace, and -- more importantly -- new businesses will start up elsewhere. I don't like making my decision about where to live in the USA based on things like that, but I'd be an idiot to ignore it.
Also, PA is not an ideal place for business. It's just so much better than NY or NJ that the regulatory environment it does have is tough to criticize.
There's more to this than just 'high taxes = people leave.' It's a combination of taxes and the regulatory environment. Plenty of states have an income tax and that doesn't drive businesses out, though Washington is one of the few states without any income tax (along with Texas, New Hampshire, Florida, and maybe one or two others I'm forgetting) -- and that definitely does attract businesses. Pennsylvania has a small income tax - right around 3% - and nobody is going to pack up and leave over 3%, particularly when 3% is paradise next to New York and New Jersey rates.
But what you see in California and New York is a government that feels it is indispensable to all business. One good example in New York is Yoga -- you now need to be licensed by the state to run a Yoga studio. wtf? What possible interest does the state have in regulating Yoga? Or you'll see some interesting ideas, like NYC's policy of making any restaurant with more than a couple locations be required to post nutritional information for everything it sells, morph into terrible ideas like forbidding restaurants from cooking with certain fats. A big enough gov't will go overnight from requiring transparent disclosure (something most Slashdottians can probably get behind) to 'well, we really know best' and telling you how you need to run your private business.
I run a small business in a very unregulated sector (web development) but the amount of garbage you have to put up with in New York is what drove me out. It wasn't any one thing, though the taxes were terrible, the health insurance market was terrible (so highly regulated that there was almost no competition since nobody could be bothered to put up with the State running the insurance market), and the government basically looks at you like its personal piggy bank. Raise enough barriers and people will leave. It's been going on in California for years now.
Yeah, as other posters said, there is probably no assumption at all that using a different browser makes you a different kind of person or more credit-worthy -- but it takes five seconds for them to query their loan databases and see that Safari users are less delinquent than FF users. This happens all the time for wild guesses about credit. People are so sensitive about actual credit checks that we've basically put anyone who has an interest in our credit in the position of going 'well, I don't know why this is the case, but I see that it is the case, so let's advertise a slightly more accurate rate based on this weird piece of information we do have.'
And no, of course they won't ask you what browser you're using if you actually apply. The difference is that an actual credit application is going to be based on data where they actually do know the correlations and the likely causation -- and it's pretty straightforward stuff. How many jobs have you had, what did they pay, do you move around a lot, have you paid off other loans on time, do you make regular credit card payments, et cetera. Just the types of things you would want to know if you were going to lend somebody a thousand or ten thousand bucks.
Interestingly, this is the type of stuff that they're not allowed to ask you for health insurance. There are actuaries who can take a personal, financial, and medical history and tell you with a reasonable degree of certainty what your medical expenses are likely to be over your lifetime. But because these questions are things like 'are you gay' or 'are you fat' (the latter obviously having much more directly to do with your health) society has decided that we can't ask those questions and so have to make predictions using less data.
Or, in the case of states like New York and California, no data at all, because the only things they're allowed to know about you are your age, your gender, and if you smoke.
This is just the advertised rate, which is always based on parlor tricks and weird math. Your actual rate is calculated after your application and credit check are reviewed, and neither of those things care what browser you use.
This makes sense if you think about it. The bank wants to advertise a rate that is appropriate to you, but it doesn't know much about you until you apply. So it has to guess based on the very limited information it does have. Otherwise -- and this still happens all the time -- you see an ad that says 'Low low 2% APR!' and then you apply and find out that you qualify for 6% APR and get pissed off. If looking at your USER_AGENT reduces the spread between what they promise and what they get, it makes sense for them to do it. But don't let that get in the way of your populist rage.
The business is a separate legal entity, a "legal person" if you will.
It is, but only because I've filed as an LLC. When I was a sole proprietor, there was no separate entity, no legal person. And in many respects, as a 'disregarded entity' (a specific sort of LLC), the only circumstances under which there is a separate, legal person is for the purpose of liability or suit -- financially, there is no separate entity.
The idea is, or at least was supposed to be, in exchange for limiting the liability of a large number of stock holders that do not directly control the corporation, that corporation agrees to a number of conditions.
This is simply wrong. Companies are not 'chartered' by the state at all. To form an LLC, you don't even need a charter or, in many states, an operating agreement. You just need to file as an LLC. This is a one or two-page document and a filing fee. That the state handles this is practical matter of paperwork for legal and tax purposes. They don't ask what you're doing and they certainly don't put any conditions on you to do it.
The 'idea' of a limited liability company was (and is) that you can start up a company (presumably with assets that come from either your personal wealth or another company) and that the maximum you can be liable for is the assets of the LLC. This is how corporations work as well, but being an LLC simplifies your legal and tax requirements quite a lot (note 'simplifies' and not necessarily 'lessens').
Before my company was an LLC, I was a sole proprietorship, which is certainly the most straightforward of the many types of businesses. The biggest problem with being a sole proprietor is that, instead of an arbitrary distinction between your assets and your company's assets, there is no distinction whatsoever (even if you make one in your books). If you get sued or go bankrupt, you can lose your life savings, your house, your car, anything that's in your name.
If you are a large LLC with many stockholders then even your 'limited' liability is still very large, because the company's assets are never exempt from liability. It just means that you can't personally destroy the members of an LLC via suit or bankruptcy -- you can only destroy the LLC.
I'm not sure I agree with your characterization of a corporation as 'chartered by the state.' If, in fact, your business is in service to the state, or depends wholly on the state for revenue, then I see your point. But I am not in business because the state asked me to be. My business has nothing to do with the state, doesn't do any work for the state, and while we benefit 'the people' we do so directly and not in the form of government service.
That we have limited liability (as we do) is not some magical benefit given to us by the state, but simply a form of legal organization under the law to encourage investment and business exactly like mine. To suggest that we in some way owe something back to the state beyond the same taxes everybody else pays such that we deserve a muzzle on our speech is quite a logical jump.
The other reply mentioned 'when your company has publicly traded shares, or a significant foreign interest.' The foreign interest part is certainly a no-brainer, but foreign interests are already permitted from making contributions to political campaigns (despite Obama's rhetoric that the GOP is doing this -- it has been illegal for a very long time).
A publicly traded company is definitely more of a gray area. I'm not sure I want to argue that they should enjoy the same freedoms that a privately owned company does, but that's more out of ignorance than any conviction that this sentiment is correct. If I invest my money in a publicly traded company, I'm essentially saying 'here, take my money and do what you want with it, and I will enjoy the benefit of any growth you enjoy proportionate to my contribution.' I can also vote on several things as a shareholder, so if the company starts doing things I don't like, I can exercise that power or simply sell my stock -- just like I can stop patronizing a company that supports politics or policies I don't agree with if I know that they're contributing to them (as I should, since mandatory disclosure is definitely a good idea).
My business is just me (technically) plus a few contractors. At what point are we and our interests no longer individuals? When I hire my first full-time employee? My tenth? My twentieth?
As a disregarded entity (the technical term for 'I pay personal income tax on everything rather than corporate taxes') there is a lot of co-mingling between my personal funds and my business, mostly because I can wave my hand and decide to pay myself whenever I want, since I have to pay income tax on all of it anyway. Should I be restricted from spending some or all of that money on political contributions or PACs?
Obviously, the larger my business gets, the more likely its interests will start diverging (or at least running parallel as a separate entity) to my personal interests, but that's perfectly normal. I still have to earn money, and once I've earned that money, why should anyone other than me decide what causes I can support with it?
I worked in IT for Cornell both as a student and for a short time after graduating (8 years ago). This honestly isn't news.
Hardly any employee computers have this kind of stuff on them to begin with. Most of it is stored on servers and not in a format you can say 'dump to Excel on my laptop.' I did some work with the admissions database as a student and I had to promise in writing in triplicate that I would be very careful with that data Or Else and even so, I never needed to download any of it. If I'd suddenly started sporting the admissions database on my laptop they'd have probably sent in the cops.
The number of people who actually need this stuff on their local system is probably paltry, but they now have to be seen to 'do something' and so subject everybody's computer to this stuff. Cornell IT used to be huge and decentralized and the skill levels were all over the map - Cornell is the only big employer in the area and so the pay sucks (it's better if you're a developer). We had some great people and some really terrible people, probably like most large institutions. I really wonder how many employees actually need this kind of thing in the first place, though - seems like HR and admissions would cover it, and in both places I'm not sure that you'd need to download bulk data to use offline.
Can't find the OP but just to echo the above reply about the boonies being cheaper. I lived in NYC for 6 years, running a small business.
In NYC your state and local (within the 5 boroughs) income taxes will range from 5-11% between a very high state income tax, local NYC income tax, the new 'metropolitan commuter transportation authority' tax (that's just on businesses/business income, though), and don't forget a sales tax well north of 8%. Add to that a private insurance market that is absolutely terrible because you can just wait to get sick before you get insurance -- they have 'must issue' and can't turn you down for prior conditions (though they can make you wait a year for prior conditions). Your taxes do subsidize your health insurance if you make under $2k a month, which in NYC means you're miserable for many other reasons. Consequently the cheapest private insurance you can buy runs about $300/month for a healthy adult male (more if you want Rx). $300 is actually below the average for the private market in NYC, too.
Compare to neighboring Pennsylvania, which falls squarely in the middle in terms of tax-friendly states (though it's very much in debt right now like a lot of states). I'm in the Lehigh Valley: no local taxes, a 3% state income tax, a 6% sales tax, and a decent-sized insurance market so that I can get health, dental, and vision insurance for myself AND my wife for $200/mo (as opposed to the $300 for just me) -- granted we have a much higher deductible here, but that was our choice -- in NYC you don't HAVE a choice because the insurance market is so awful as the state has driven out most of the insurance business. I wouldn't take 10x as much salary as I get now to run an insurance company in New York.
It was great not having a car in NYC but monthly metrocards are due to head north of $100, so even if you have no kids, between you and your spouse you're blowing $200/mo on transportation, which is a car payment right there. Electricity is heinously expensive in the city as well.
NYC has some good schools, yes, but you and your children will be putting in so much effort to get your child into one of those schools for the 5th grade as the rest of the country does to get their child into college. There are great schools in lots of places around the country... not a reason to move to NYC.
There are certainly boonies where there are nothing to do but the notion that you have to be in an urban center like NYC or Northern VA or Los Angeles to have the perks you describe is ridiculous. I miss the huge diversity of food and entertainment in NYC, sure, but I had it in my 20s when I could rent and go out all the time -- when you actually look to buy a place and settle down, the math doesn't come out in NYC's favor. Though to be fair to NYC, a lot of that is New York State's fault.
Uh, supply-side economics has nothing to do with eliminating unlimited access fees. Supply side economics simply says that, by lowering the barriers to entry in the market (barriers typically being taxes and regulation), you will encourage growth and thus have a greater supply and lower prices.
Cutting supply so that your product is not as affordable, even if it means a short-term profit boost, has nothing to do with supply side economics.
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Read the establishment clause.
Establishment clause
There is nothing in there that says that public officials aren't allowed to talk about religion.
If that legislation supports Fundie Evangelical Protestant Christianity, then it violates the first amendment.
You fail Precedent 101. This is the standard left-wing view of the establishment clause - that government has to have zero contact with all religion lest it be seen as 'respecting its establishment.' If this were actually the case, Bush's 'faith-based' community groups would never have got off the ground. The government deals with religion all the time; legislation is allowed to 'support' religion so long as it isn't supporting only one religion. I agree with you that this is a terrible use of taxpayer dollars, but on general 'wtf is government doing getting involved with this' grounds. Unfortunately, government has been taking our money to advance other people's agendas for decades.
Once the government has your tax dollars, they can and will spend them on just about whatever they want. The notion that you as a taxpaying citizen should have to approve of it is fantasy. My tax dollars go towards bailing people out of mortgages that I don't believe in (the people or the mortgages) and a dozen other things I don't care for - but the Constitution only says that Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. They haven't made a law that does either of these things -- as other posters have pointed out, provided that a non-Christian (or non-religious) park with similar projections for employment and tourism would carry equal weight, the fact that this is a ridiculous Protestant orgy of ignorance isn't relevant to the State.
What if my religion prohibits usury? Can I sue to dismantle Fannie and Freddie? 'cause I'd convert to that.
The US government did not take down this web site. Amazon decided they did not want to do business with Wikileaks. The First Amendment doesn't say that you are required to offer business services to anyone just because their speech is protected. The gov't would have needed a court order to force Amazon to take down the site, which Amazon would have been free to fight - this would have been true in most European countries as well.
Why is it that, when Amazon is doing something like patenting something obvious, it's a tyrannical, soulless corporation, but when it's hosting wikileaks, they're suddenly 'American citizens threatened with prosecution'? If you are in the hosting business, you have to make judgments about what you are and aren't willing to host, and what you are and aren't willing to fight for in court. Every major hosting business has at least a pretty good idea of where this line is for them. They have an obligation to their employees and their shareholders, and spending a lot of time and resources defending Wikileaks puts that at risk. It might still be worth it, depending on your point of view, but that's their decision.
I suspect that what happened is that Wikileaks signed up via some automated form or low-level employee and that the executives upstairs didn't even know they were hosting Wikileaks until they got a call from Lieberman or read about it in the news. And because this round of leaks isn't exactly the Pentagon Papers, they made the determination that there was very little benefit to Amazon, Amazon's employees, or the United States (in their view) and so pulled the plug.
In China or Russia, if a high level government official calls you and asks you to do something, prosecution is probably the least of the implied threats.
a pilot is no different than a bus driver
Sure, a bus driver who will kill everyone on the bus if he goes below 55mph for most of the route. And who can drive without being able to see anything outside the bus.
The free market is a delusion at best. If government kept it's hands entirely out of a market, you'd have to result to hired goons to deal with a contract dispute because contract enforcement is a function of government.
Come on. This is spurious. The free market depends on rule of law, which presumes contract enforcement. There are plenty of arguments against free market capitalism, but this isn't one of them. The government's role as legal adjudicator and peacekeeper is entirely separate from its role in regulating certain markets. I don't know any educated argument (even among libertarians) that suggests government ought to stop running a civil court.
'Streamlined and never capricious' in most cases does mean less regulation.
Just google 'power plant canceled.' Regulations absolutely do not mean that plants will pay for themselves - in many cases they mean that customers will pay a rate set by the government no matter what, and your tax dollars will pick up the difference. Just like they do with mortgage rates via Fannie and Freddie in the housing market.
It would be a safe investment in a free market. But electricity isn't anywhere close to a free market, and despite being a proponent of the free market, I recognize a few good reasons why it's not the best industry for this -- but our present answer of over-regulation is even worse.
The trouble is the number of people who have to sign off on any new power plant construction. If you think of the ideal market version of a power company, you'd have different companies, each with different investments in a variety of technologies in the hopes of reducing the all-powerful cost per kWh. The nuclear guys would have a huge up-front cost but much, much smaller long-term costs, provided that nothing explodes or melts down. The coal and oil guys would have the best short-term deals (and 'short term' here might be anywhere from 10 to 100 years, depending on who you ask) but even skeptics like myself know that 'sustainable' is a great idea.
If you want to reduce the amount of corruption in any industry, you need to lower the barriers to entry so that it's an attractive industry for new companies, because energetic and honest people will have at least one big advantage over the slow-moving incumbent business. This is easier said than done with a utility because it can take a decade or more for a new plant to come online, and most of that time is spent in the regulatory process. You've got the environmental impact studies, which probably all of us can agree should be done but none of us can agree on how to interpret or what conclusions we ought to draw from them. You've got 50 different sets of rules about who is allowed to produce versus transmit energy, with a lot of state-run utilities handling transmission but some also controlling production as well. And then you've got a significant opposition to any type of power plant these days that isn't solar, wind, or hydroelectric (along with some opposition to those after they're built and people realize they make noise/are eyesores/aren't perfect). So you have the perfect storm where, even if you get investors today to pick up the tab for a new plant, a change in local, state, or federal elected officials between now and when you're done could doom the whole thing, to say nothing of an arbitrary ruling from the EPA that decides whatever choice you made on the 'how shall we produce energy' side of the equation is a bad one.
Look at the question from the angle of 'would I invest my life savings in this?' Like you said, it seems like a sure bet, doesn't it? And people do invest in utilities, certainly, because the local, transmission part of the equation is seen as stable because it isn't going anywhere. The production side is less so because it's such a politically charged issue. There's not enough certainty today to gamble on nuclear vs. coal vs. something else, much less any guarantee that, even if there were any certainty today, it would still be there in 2012 or 2014.
Yeah, because all you need to build a new power plant is some money. Oh wait, except that it's one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country, particularly in California, and that you're asking investors to wait a very, very long time for a return on their investment.
This nonsense about 'California power companies pocketed all their profits when they should've been building plants' is not even very imaginative leftist fantasy. California has had a huge demand for electricity for years now. In any normal market, that would equalize with supply over time, but California suffers from a paralyzing combination of regulatory bodies and NIMBY. There is a post above this one that explains how even the supposed 'de-regulation' of the California energy market a while back was in fact just a re-regulation (in that wholesale prices were deregulated but retail prices were not). But don't let that get in the way of your populist righteousness.
The notion that they are 'causing damage' by departing is no different than the notion that Ireland is 'causing damage' by undertaking an action that might cause them to leave. Is Ireland raising taxes 'dictating' to private companies? No, of course not - it's a choice they are empowered to make and one with very obvious consequences.
You are presupposing that the government is the hero and that the companies are some evil or else childish entities that need to do what's best for the government.
The government is for the people, not the other way around.
I wish I had an 'overrated' mod point.
'If you raise taxes, I will move' is hardly 'attempting to dictate.' It is the prerogative of any private person or entity to move for whatever reason they like, whether or not it is a good idea. This happens all the time -- look at the number of businesses moving out of California and to places like Texas.
I'm astounded at the number of posts claiming that all of Ireland's problems are due primarily to its low corporate tax rate, as if those were the only two things that foreigners know about Ireland and so therefore one must have caused the other.
Do they genuinely believe that scientific and technical fields require any less mental agility and analytic abilites?
It isn't a question of less or more, but simply different skills -- though there is definitely crossover (and probably more than either side would like to admit).
My first job was as a programmer and now I run a web design business where I still spend about 80% of my time writing code. Of course, I also took several semesters of CS in college, but then part of 'liberal arts' is that you're supposed to still have some science training as well ... something else that gets left out a lot, or else people take a survey course in geology and that somehow does it.
Following logic in written arguments or rhetoric is a different skill from following code or the logic behind a proof -- but if you're good at one, you probably have the capacity to be good at the other, if not necessarily the training.
My take on what liberal arts is supposed to be is that you should know a little bit about everything, at least such that you can hold an intelligent conversation with someone in any field and have a fundamental (if not very complex) grasp of what they do. To some people, this makes you a dilettante, but frankly I've found it pretty useful over the years -- and I've run a business, been a professional actor, written tons of code, written for the Onion, written marriage ceremonies, learned to fly an airplane, and been an amateur game designer. I've probably never been in the top ten percent of any one of those things, but I'm fine with that.
Another article from a few years ago by a paper-mill writer pointed out an aspect of this I hadn't thought of before: people generally don't write good essays because they don't read essays on a regular basis.
That's because you are supposed to learn to write in grade school, aka 'grammar school,' and not in college. The school I went to recognized that most incoming freshmen don't know how to write and so required all students in all majors to take two semesters worth of writing seminars (100-level English courses). That's two semesters you probably should've spent learning actual material instead of re-treading over what your K-12 education failed to teach you.
I was a liberal arts major at an Ivy League school and graduated with a BA in English. I later lived for a year or so with a fellow graduate who had taken a job for one of these paper mills for the money. I saw the kind of people who ran the place as well as the kind of people who needed work done.
All the points about how this is easier with a humanities degree because you're not being tested in class are correct, but they're not a complete picture. Liberal arts degrees are indeed much easier to get than a science degree for the simple reason that you can't BS your way through math and physics (at least nowhere near as much as you can through the humanities). But a humanities education isn't meant to train you as a scientist or for a specific career, or a group or specific careers. It's meant to give you the intellectual tools to analyze anything. It's meant to make you intellectually agile, so that you can learn new (and possibly completely unrelated) fields very quickly. It's meant to give you a sense of what it means to be a damn human being and to give you the chops to appreciate arguments and ideas that might be contrary to your own, and to get to the bottom of why that is.
My experience was that, if you did the work and applied yourself, you got exactly that. But the nature of the work is such that there are not as many external factors forcing you to do the kinds of things you have to do in organic chem. It used to be that this kind of intellectual laziness would mean you washed out, but these days, even at an Ivy, you have to be pretty terrible for that to happen. I've seen resumes and letters from some of my fellow graduates with English degrees -- people who, presumably, ought to be expert writers -- and they aren't. Sometimes it's just because they're lazy, and sometimes it's because they got all their credits studying ultra-specific intellectual theory, whether it's queer theory, post-modernist theory, feminist theory, or anything else that makes for interesting graduate work but shouldn't be forming the entire basis of your undergraduate curriculum. But the grad students are pretty much forced into claiming an intellectual niche and working it to death, and that is reflected in the classes they teach. All of this in the name of a 'broad' intellectual base!
My recollection is that my friend was not writing papers for top tier schools most of the time, but it did happen. I remember that a lot of her clients were in one- or two- year master's programs (and sometimes MBAs) and almost always had the attitude that they just couldn't be bothered to do it themselves. Even if it started out as a single occasion where some kid just couldn't finish one paper on time, it became like a gateway drug.
And the people who ran the paper mill were absolute scumbags. This one was in NYC. They would withhold payment from their writers, promise things like health insurance and not deliver, and otherwise screw the people doing the work as much as possible so that their margins would be as high as possible. But they always had work.
Was there really any doubt that the ban was a purely political decision in the first place?
Almost certain? Did you see the margin by which Perry clobbered the democrat for governor? I don't think Texas raising taxes is 'almost certain' in the least.
The draw to Texas (where I am going in 2012, as it happens) is partially taxes but also a government that is stable in the long term. Texas has a moderately high sales tax (about 6%, I think) but I don't think you'll see an income tax there anytime soon; Perry is a very popular governor and likely to remain so. The whole idea of a large role for the State government just doesn't fit with Texans very well, though of course there are some reciprocal problems with that approach. But 'no jobs' isn't one of those problems.
I wouldn't overestimate the companies already there, either. I'm sure they're a good draw, but the important thing is how much the government encourages new investment and entrepreneurs. There just aren't many states left that really do. If Texas did turn into a high-tax nanny state, sure, some companies would stay (just like some stay in California) but you'd see the same migration from TX to places like Florida or New Hampshire that you're seeing from CA to TX now. Businesses will pack up and leave, even if it's at a slow pace, and -- more importantly -- new businesses will start up elsewhere. I don't like making my decision about where to live in the USA based on things like that, but I'd be an idiot to ignore it.
Also, PA is not an ideal place for business. It's just so much better than NY or NJ that the regulatory environment it does have is tough to criticize.
California isn't a magnet for anyone these days. People are leaving the state in droves (and going to places like Texas).
http://blog.american.com/?p=15579
There's more to this than just 'high taxes = people leave.' It's a combination of taxes and the regulatory environment. Plenty of states have an income tax and that doesn't drive businesses out, though Washington is one of the few states without any income tax (along with Texas, New Hampshire, Florida, and maybe one or two others I'm forgetting) -- and that definitely does attract businesses. Pennsylvania has a small income tax - right around 3% - and nobody is going to pack up and leave over 3%, particularly when 3% is paradise next to New York and New Jersey rates.
But what you see in California and New York is a government that feels it is indispensable to all business. One good example in New York is Yoga -- you now need to be licensed by the state to run a Yoga studio. wtf? What possible interest does the state have in regulating Yoga? Or you'll see some interesting ideas, like NYC's policy of making any restaurant with more than a couple locations be required to post nutritional information for everything it sells, morph into terrible ideas like forbidding restaurants from cooking with certain fats. A big enough gov't will go overnight from requiring transparent disclosure (something most Slashdottians can probably get behind) to 'well, we really know best' and telling you how you need to run your private business.
I run a small business in a very unregulated sector (web development) but the amount of garbage you have to put up with in New York is what drove me out. It wasn't any one thing, though the taxes were terrible, the health insurance market was terrible (so highly regulated that there was almost no competition since nobody could be bothered to put up with the State running the insurance market), and the government basically looks at you like its personal piggy bank. Raise enough barriers and people will leave. It's been going on in California for years now.
Yeah, as other posters said, there is probably no assumption at all that using a different browser makes you a different kind of person or more credit-worthy -- but it takes five seconds for them to query their loan databases and see that Safari users are less delinquent than FF users. This happens all the time for wild guesses about credit. People are so sensitive about actual credit checks that we've basically put anyone who has an interest in our credit in the position of going 'well, I don't know why this is the case, but I see that it is the case, so let's advertise a slightly more accurate rate based on this weird piece of information we do have.'
And no, of course they won't ask you what browser you're using if you actually apply. The difference is that an actual credit application is going to be based on data where they actually do know the correlations and the likely causation -- and it's pretty straightforward stuff. How many jobs have you had, what did they pay, do you move around a lot, have you paid off other loans on time, do you make regular credit card payments, et cetera. Just the types of things you would want to know if you were going to lend somebody a thousand or ten thousand bucks.
Interestingly, this is the type of stuff that they're not allowed to ask you for health insurance. There are actuaries who can take a personal, financial, and medical history and tell you with a reasonable degree of certainty what your medical expenses are likely to be over your lifetime. But because these questions are things like 'are you gay' or 'are you fat' (the latter obviously having much more directly to do with your health) society has decided that we can't ask those questions and so have to make predictions using less data.
Or, in the case of states like New York and California, no data at all, because the only things they're allowed to know about you are your age, your gender, and if you smoke.
This is just the advertised rate, which is always based on parlor tricks and weird math. Your actual rate is calculated after your application and credit check are reviewed, and neither of those things care what browser you use.
This makes sense if you think about it. The bank wants to advertise a rate that is appropriate to you, but it doesn't know much about you until you apply. So it has to guess based on the very limited information it does have. Otherwise -- and this still happens all the time -- you see an ad that says 'Low low 2% APR!' and then you apply and find out that you qualify for 6% APR and get pissed off. If looking at your USER_AGENT reduces the spread between what they promise and what they get, it makes sense for them to do it. But don't let that get in the way of your populist rage.
The business is a separate legal entity, a "legal person" if you will.
It is, but only because I've filed as an LLC. When I was a sole proprietor, there was no separate entity, no legal person. And in many respects, as a 'disregarded entity' (a specific sort of LLC), the only circumstances under which there is a separate, legal person is for the purpose of liability or suit -- financially, there is no separate entity.
The idea is, or at least was supposed to be, in exchange for limiting the liability of a large number of stock holders that do not directly control the corporation, that corporation agrees to a number of conditions.
This is simply wrong. Companies are not 'chartered' by the state at all. To form an LLC, you don't even need a charter or, in many states, an operating agreement. You just need to file as an LLC. This is a one or two-page document and a filing fee. That the state handles this is practical matter of paperwork for legal and tax purposes. They don't ask what you're doing and they certainly don't put any conditions on you to do it.
The 'idea' of a limited liability company was (and is) that you can start up a company (presumably with assets that come from either your personal wealth or another company) and that the maximum you can be liable for is the assets of the LLC. This is how corporations work as well, but being an LLC simplifies your legal and tax requirements quite a lot (note 'simplifies' and not necessarily 'lessens').
Before my company was an LLC, I was a sole proprietorship, which is certainly the most straightforward of the many types of businesses. The biggest problem with being a sole proprietor is that, instead of an arbitrary distinction between your assets and your company's assets, there is no distinction whatsoever (even if you make one in your books). If you get sued or go bankrupt, you can lose your life savings, your house, your car, anything that's in your name.
If you are a large LLC with many stockholders then even your 'limited' liability is still very large, because the company's assets are never exempt from liability. It just means that you can't personally destroy the members of an LLC via suit or bankruptcy -- you can only destroy the LLC.
I'm not sure I agree with your characterization of a corporation as 'chartered by the state.' If, in fact, your business is in service to the state, or depends wholly on the state for revenue, then I see your point. But I am not in business because the state asked me to be. My business has nothing to do with the state, doesn't do any work for the state, and while we benefit 'the people' we do so directly and not in the form of government service.
That we have limited liability (as we do) is not some magical benefit given to us by the state, but simply a form of legal organization under the law to encourage investment and business exactly like mine. To suggest that we in some way owe something back to the state beyond the same taxes everybody else pays such that we deserve a muzzle on our speech is quite a logical jump.
The other reply mentioned 'when your company has publicly traded shares, or a significant foreign interest.' The foreign interest part is certainly a no-brainer, but foreign interests are already permitted from making contributions to political campaigns (despite Obama's rhetoric that the GOP is doing this -- it has been illegal for a very long time).
A publicly traded company is definitely more of a gray area. I'm not sure I want to argue that they should enjoy the same freedoms that a privately owned company does, but that's more out of ignorance than any conviction that this sentiment is correct. If I invest my money in a publicly traded company, I'm essentially saying 'here, take my money and do what you want with it, and I will enjoy the benefit of any growth you enjoy proportionate to my contribution.' I can also vote on several things as a shareholder, so if the company starts doing things I don't like, I can exercise that power or simply sell my stock -- just like I can stop patronizing a company that supports politics or policies I don't agree with if I know that they're contributing to them (as I should, since mandatory disclosure is definitely a good idea).
My business is just me (technically) plus a few contractors. At what point are we and our interests no longer individuals? When I hire my first full-time employee? My tenth? My twentieth?
As a disregarded entity (the technical term for 'I pay personal income tax on everything rather than corporate taxes') there is a lot of co-mingling between my personal funds and my business, mostly because I can wave my hand and decide to pay myself whenever I want, since I have to pay income tax on all of it anyway. Should I be restricted from spending some or all of that money on political contributions or PACs?
Obviously, the larger my business gets, the more likely its interests will start diverging (or at least running parallel as a separate entity) to my personal interests, but that's perfectly normal. I still have to earn money, and once I've earned that money, why should anyone other than me decide what causes I can support with it?
I worked in IT for Cornell both as a student and for a short time after graduating (8 years ago). This honestly isn't news.
Hardly any employee computers have this kind of stuff on them to begin with. Most of it is stored on servers and not in a format you can say 'dump to Excel on my laptop.' I did some work with the admissions database as a student and I had to promise in writing in triplicate that I would be very careful with that data Or Else and even so, I never needed to download any of it. If I'd suddenly started sporting the admissions database on my laptop they'd have probably sent in the cops.
The number of people who actually need this stuff on their local system is probably paltry, but they now have to be seen to 'do something' and so subject everybody's computer to this stuff. Cornell IT used to be huge and decentralized and the skill levels were all over the map - Cornell is the only big employer in the area and so the pay sucks (it's better if you're a developer). We had some great people and some really terrible people, probably like most large institutions. I really wonder how many employees actually need this kind of thing in the first place, though - seems like HR and admissions would cover it, and in both places I'm not sure that you'd need to download bulk data to use offline.
Can't find the OP but just to echo the above reply about the boonies being cheaper. I lived in NYC for 6 years, running a small business.
In NYC your state and local (within the 5 boroughs) income taxes will range from 5-11% between a very high state income tax, local NYC income tax, the new 'metropolitan commuter transportation authority' tax (that's just on businesses/business income, though), and don't forget a sales tax well north of 8%. Add to that a private insurance market that is absolutely terrible because you can just wait to get sick before you get insurance -- they have 'must issue' and can't turn you down for prior conditions (though they can make you wait a year for prior conditions). Your taxes do subsidize your health insurance if you make under $2k a month, which in NYC means you're miserable for many other reasons. Consequently the cheapest private insurance you can buy runs about $300/month for a healthy adult male (more if you want Rx). $300 is actually below the average for the private market in NYC, too.
Compare to neighboring Pennsylvania, which falls squarely in the middle in terms of tax-friendly states (though it's very much in debt right now like a lot of states). I'm in the Lehigh Valley: no local taxes, a 3% state income tax, a 6% sales tax, and a decent-sized insurance market so that I can get health, dental, and vision insurance for myself AND my wife for $200/mo (as opposed to the $300 for just me) -- granted we have a much higher deductible here, but that was our choice -- in NYC you don't HAVE a choice because the insurance market is so awful as the state has driven out most of the insurance business. I wouldn't take 10x as much salary as I get now to run an insurance company in New York.
It was great not having a car in NYC but monthly metrocards are due to head north of $100, so even if you have no kids, between you and your spouse you're blowing $200/mo on transportation, which is a car payment right there. Electricity is heinously expensive in the city as well.
NYC has some good schools, yes, but you and your children will be putting in so much effort to get your child into one of those schools for the 5th grade as the rest of the country does to get their child into college. There are great schools in lots of places around the country ... not a reason to move to NYC.
There are certainly boonies where there are nothing to do but the notion that you have to be in an urban center like NYC or Northern VA or Los Angeles to have the perks you describe is ridiculous. I miss the huge diversity of food and entertainment in NYC, sure, but I had it in my 20s when I could rent and go out all the time -- when you actually look to buy a place and settle down, the math doesn't come out in NYC's favor. Though to be fair to NYC, a lot of that is New York State's fault.
Uh, supply-side economics has nothing to do with eliminating unlimited access fees. Supply side economics simply says that, by lowering the barriers to entry in the market (barriers typically being taxes and regulation), you will encourage growth and thus have a greater supply and lower prices.
Cutting supply so that your product is not as affordable, even if it means a short-term profit boost, has nothing to do with supply side economics.