so: as an out of state business I don't care what your tax rates are per zip code - south dakota is so low on the radar that for a lot of companies its just cheaper to overpay the sales tax than figure it out. If a real state like California Texas or New York did something like that, there'd be hell to pay.
You misread. I was mocking the person from South Dakota with their version of complexity. I live in what you would term a "real state". And mine is hardly the only one with that complexity. In fact, I would guess that the three states you listed have the most complex sales tax combinations.
Why should I pay a tax when I buy something at Amazon when I don't use any of the infrastructure used in supporting a brick and mortar store like WalMart? Because it's not "fair"? If your infrastructure is that expensive, I suggest you find a better way of paying for it (or, I don't know, cutting spending perhaps?) other than whining that mail order/Internet orders need to be taxed.
Because sales taxes do not exist to defray the cost of the infrastructure that supports the sale. Your premise is thus flawed.
Sales taxes are mostly used to support the quality of life of the purchaser. In fact, it has entirely to do with the purchaser's obligations, not the seller's. That's why sales tax is added to the final price.
The government just forces stores to collect the taxes and forward it on their behalf. Becuase voluntary compliance (ala mail orders) is often neglected. Same reason your employer has to forward monies to the IRS; to reduce the likelihood of cheating.
And my infrastructure pays for parks I enjoy, roads I use, schools which educate the people around me so that they don't all turn to street crime, police to deal with the ones who do, etc. Taxes buy me civilization. I'd rather not pocket a few more bucks in returning for living a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
Why shouldn't employer-provided medical benefits be taxed? AFAIK, if they paid you the cash and you bought it in the free market, your income would be taxed. Why not eliminate this subsidy for getting your health insurance through your employer?
I'm not sure of the legal answer (IANAL), but the common sense answer is Illinois. That's where the good is being delivered to (a vital component of any sale, and the only thing that has a physical location). The rest is just accounting.
You're sending your mom a present, tack on a benefit to her roads and such.
That's what GP is saying. Sales tax is paid by the consumer. He's saying the consumer should also pay sales taxes based for their online purchases, to the consumer's district.
The State of South Dakota charges a different rate per city. PER CITY.
That's not very complex. Where I live, there's one sales tax, where I do most of my shopping, there's another. It's within the same city, but in a different section. Further down the road in the next city there's yet another tax. Same zip-code for all three. And my sales tax depends on what I buy (groceries are less than consumer goods are less than meals in resturants.) Oh, and my sales tax depends on the day that I make the purchase, thanks to sales tax holidays.
And yet, every company I do business with can keep up with it all. It's not so complex an intelligent worker couldn't fully code all the rules in a day. Less than two months for the entire country. And that's assuming that they don't all get outsourced to some common company where that's all they worry about.
As far as non-profits/sale tax exemptions, in that case you just pay the sales tax when you purchase, and get it back from the state at year end.
Complexity just isn't the issue you make it out to be.
Why would I or Amazon have to pay taxes twice or more for something? First Amazon would need to pay taxes at whatever locale they're at, then I would need to pay taxes on the same product in my home state, then also every state it goes through as it is getting shipped from Florida to Rhode Island?
You wouldn't. Amazon doesn't pay (sales) taxes at whatever locale they are at. And no state can charge a tax for shipping goods through the state (as mentioned in your Constitution excerpt), except as a fee for using the road system. That only leaves the final point of sale.
Why should ordering something over the internet and having it delivered to your door result in you paying less sales tax?
There is a reason intra-state purchases are not taxed. Read the constitution or so, you know the part where it says: The Congress shall have power . . . To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes
First, the word you are looking for is interstate. Intrastate purchases are taxed. Secondly, the interstate aspect of the transaction is not being taxed, rather it's the purchase in Rhode Island of a good that is.
I fail to see the distinction between paying sales tax on goods purchased at Amazon and goods purchased in a local Walmart (when discussing non-Washington/Arkansas residents). In either case you're purchasing an item in, e.g., RI and accepting delivery there. The actual charges are applied from a credit card company in Deleware to an account, which you will then pay later with a check drawn on some other corporation. Why should the Internet be magical?
Because of madoff, thousands will suffer through the last years of their lives living from social security check to check, will not have access to the medications they need or the mobility required to live a healthy senior life.
Madoff was evil, but this is nonsensical. The people he stole from were rich, and even losing fortunes in Madoff's scams and the stock markets, still have more than enough money for their personal needs.
A tectonic shift is a slow drift over time that has a sudden, jarring result one day. The metaphor seems apt.
Describing an increase in a discrete variable as a "quantum leap" is also accurate.
The problem is that some people misuse them to mean titanic shift/leap. That is incorrect. But in this case, as well as many others, the phrases can be used correctly.
In the 70's(?) everything was "hifi" and in the 90's everything was "laser". Sometimes though (stereos and pointers as easy examples) the terms were correctly applied.
If you need your speedometer to tell you if you're driving at a safe speed, perhaps you shouldn't be driving.
Well, if you're not used to the car, it's hard to get a feel for it. A moped at 35 feels like 100. This car at 45 felt like 100 too. I needed numbers to overcome that feeling in my stomach.
Supposedly cloud computing is "on demand" so, having more resources available when you need them (though who knows if it'll help in cases where bandwidth is a limitation) should resolve a lot of these problems
It might help when CNN gets pegged. But since it's coming out of a shared common pool of resources, it won't help when CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc. etc. etc. all get pegged.
so Nintendo can't be said to be forbidding opensource solely for being opensource, so there seems to be some sort of misunderstanding or miscommunication here.
Open-source isn't forbidden. Opening your source is forbidden. So BSD code, fine. GPL cannot be used because Nintendo won't allow you to republish the code.
Far more damaging than being used to the Imperial system is the name of the metric system. SI? That sounds foreign! Who puts the adjective after the noun... Communists (Comrade Doctor... Doctor is being used as an adjective to modify Comrade)!
Seriously though, I had the same problem that you have. I was driving a car once that only had km on the speedometer. I had to convert miles to km to know if I was going at reasonable, nevermind legal, speeds.
Hitler's primary, and ultimately fatal, mistake was underestimating the French and British will to fight for Poland.... and so went for Poland before his war machine was fully ready.
Germany's war machine was not full geared up, true. But Britain's and France's were in worse shape. And given that both countries had more production capability, it would have worked against Germany to wait.
In fact, it is sometimes seen as a British blunder to get involved as early as they did, as a few more years of prep would have helped them out dramatically.
The top three German mistakes were (in chronological order):
Letting the British escape at the Battle of the Bulge (Hitler overriding his commanders).
Attacking Russia before dealing with Britain.
Allowing Japan to attack the US, and get involved. That was a miscalculation of the highest order.
I've also seen on the list (although I'm not sure of it's veracity) that they could have carpet-bombed England into submission a lot faster, possibly before the US got involved, if Hitler had authorized a yet more deadly air campaign. There are all kinds of reasons (irrational love of the British?) posited as to why he did not.
You mean besides the sports teams? What geek doesn't pick the city in which he wants to live based on how their sports teams are doing there?
It's probably more important to geeks than any other segment. Most people are loyal to their hometown's team regardless of where they move. But geeks tend to follow sports more to fit in.
Where does this logic end and who gets to decide what life style is correct?
It never does. He believes in a totally free market, and hates welfare. He just is trying to convince people of his beliefs salami-style.
I don't honestly want to pay for problems that people create for themselves, but that is the price we pay to live in a Free Country that has progressive social reforms.
I don't even know why we wouldn't pay for them. No one sets off to become an alcoholic, or develop bad knees, or become obese from McDonalds.
If we agree that we want to live in a society that helps people, then we should live in a society that helps people make choices that avoid those consequences. By having free inserts that help cushion the knees or education about better jogging technique. By offering people who can barely survive something healthy that doesn't cost more than fast food (when you factor in the overhead of cooking at home, such as having a home, stove, gas, etc. McDonald's may be the logical choice). Maybe not having those choices available in a progressive society puts the onus more on society.
With alcoholism, there's AA... but that actually helps a lot of people. And it's also a physical addicition, so I'm not sure it belongs in the same category as the others.
I don't believe that Microsoft will take legal action against Debian or Miguel, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least considering Microsoft's recent suicidal business divisions.
What's mysterious about Microsoft's patent claims? They offered "fair and non-descriminary pricing" or what-have-you as a condition of getting.NET to be an ISO standard. Although not immediately obvious to me, I assume that's clear enough for someone out there to understand.
But to claim that Apple requires you to Control-click when that's been no more than an option for years just shows ignorance.
Okay... Apple requires either that you replace the mouse it ships with (bad choice Apple), move the mouse around further to get to menu options that would be available via right-click on a Windows machine (worst choice), or Control-click.
I'd rather have only one option (right-click) then a choice of three worse options.
Microsoft has not removed it from Windows, all they've done is hide it from a few of the places it comes into play. It's still there, as part of Windows Explorer and the Control Panel and Windows Update and Windows Media Player
Citation please? I thought Vista did just that.
Safari is just another application. I use Camino on my Mac Mini and Safari never pops up unrequested, the way Internet Explorer does no matter how hard I try and avoid it on Windows.
Never had IE pop up unless I asked it to. How does it happen to you.
Scalpers add value for ticket owners. If I own a ticket, and decide I don't want to go to the event anymore, I can sell it to a scalper. Without a scalper, I'd have to sell it myself. This ready secondary market benefits the ticket holder.
This could easily be handled without having the secondary market charge a premium.
Assume the box office is selling tickets to an event for $35. But people are willing to pay $100 for the event. Scalpers allocate the tickets to those who are willing to pay $100 for the ticket
Yes. The raise the price to $100. Capturing more of the surplus value to the consumer is good because... you flunked Econ 101 and think that makes that market more efficent? Hint, it doesn't, at least not any more than waiting in line does.
But, you say, the scalper also has to wait in line/be lucky on ticketmaster. The difference is scale... the scalper spreads that cost out over many people. But that cost is there to maximize the pleasure that the show/event provides, to ensure that the people who care the most get in. It does an end run around the system. If there were proxies who represented exactly one person in line, fine.
(All this of course comes at the expense of those who are willing to wait all night for the $35 ticket, but will not or cannot pay $100 for the ticket.)
And that's okay because?
They help allocate the good domains to those who are willing to pay for them. Just this weekend I heard of ancestry.com. I instantly knew what it was. That great name saved the business from having to build a brand. If it had been "avalea.com" instead, I would have said "what's that?" This domain should be allocated to someone who is willing to put the capital into building a good business with it.
As opposed to two guys in a garage who would have written the whole thing over a few years? One of the beautiful things about the infomation age is most entrepuners can trade time for money (or vice versa) to get things done. This allows far more companies to start. I fail to see why making it more expensive to introduce a new product (in this fashion) is good.
Besides, if that's your real objection, there are clever ways to allocate resources based on investment, without needing to be explicitly paid for. Make a class of domain names require a few colocated servers with failover, for instance. It requires that people invest serious capital, without draining that capital for no purpose.
A few hundred to a few thousand dollars is nothing to pay if a person really wants to build a business.
Ever try to start a business? Most new businesses have razor-thin margins, and that can easily bankrupt them.
Oh, no, you just heard about the VC backed businesses, not the 99.7% of businesses that are small and employ over half of the (non-agricultural) workforce.
you can't allow scripts granularly -by origin- for each page.
I find blocking scripts by origin globally to be sufficent. If I don't want your crappy ad scripts on one page, why would I want it on another? That, combined with Opera's block scripts on the site I'm looknig at, combine nicely.
Slashdot Mirror
You misread. I was mocking the person from South Dakota with their version of complexity. I live in what you would term a "real state". And mine is hardly the only one with that complexity. In fact, I would guess that the three states you listed have the most complex sales tax combinations.
Because sales taxes do not exist to defray the cost of the infrastructure that supports the sale. Your premise is thus flawed.
Sales taxes are mostly used to support the quality of life of the purchaser. In fact, it has entirely to do with the purchaser's obligations, not the seller's. That's why sales tax is added to the final price.
The government just forces stores to collect the taxes and forward it on their behalf. Becuase voluntary compliance (ala mail orders) is often neglected. Same reason your employer has to forward monies to the IRS; to reduce the likelihood of cheating.
And my infrastructure pays for parks I enjoy, roads I use, schools which educate the people around me so that they don't all turn to street crime, police to deal with the ones who do, etc. Taxes buy me civilization. I'd rather not pocket a few more bucks in returning for living a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
Why shouldn't employer-provided medical benefits be taxed? AFAIK, if they paid you the cash and you bought it in the free market, your income would be taxed. Why not eliminate this subsidy for getting your health insurance through your employer?
I'm not sure of the legal answer (IANAL), but the common sense answer is Illinois. That's where the good is being delivered to (a vital component of any sale, and the only thing that has a physical location). The rest is just accounting.
You're sending your mom a present, tack on a benefit to her roads and such.
That's what GP is saying. Sales tax is paid by the consumer. He's saying the consumer should also pay sales taxes based for their online purchases, to the consumer's district.
That's not very complex. Where I live, there's one sales tax, where I do most of my shopping, there's another. It's within the same city, but in a different section. Further down the road in the next city there's yet another tax. Same zip-code for all three. And my sales tax depends on what I buy (groceries are less than consumer goods are less than meals in resturants.) Oh, and my sales tax depends on the day that I make the purchase, thanks to sales tax holidays.
And yet, every company I do business with can keep up with it all. It's not so complex an intelligent worker couldn't fully code all the rules in a day. Less than two months for the entire country. And that's assuming that they don't all get outsourced to some common company where that's all they worry about.
As far as non-profits/sale tax exemptions, in that case you just pay the sales tax when you purchase, and get it back from the state at year end.
Complexity just isn't the issue you make it out to be.
You wouldn't. Amazon doesn't pay (sales) taxes at whatever locale they are at. And no state can charge a tax for shipping goods through the state (as mentioned in your Constitution excerpt), except as a fee for using the road system. That only leaves the final point of sale.
Why should ordering something over the internet and having it delivered to your door result in you paying less sales tax?
First, the word you are looking for is interstate. Intrastate purchases are taxed. Secondly, the interstate aspect of the transaction is not being taxed, rather it's the purchase in Rhode Island of a good that is.
I fail to see the distinction between paying sales tax on goods purchased at Amazon and goods purchased in a local Walmart (when discussing non-Washington/Arkansas residents). In either case you're purchasing an item in, e.g., RI and accepting delivery there. The actual charges are applied from a credit card company in Deleware to an account, which you will then pay later with a check drawn on some other corporation. Why should the Internet be magical?
Madoff was evil, but this is nonsensical. The people he stole from were rich, and even losing fortunes in Madoff's scams and the stock markets, still have more than enough money for their personal needs.
A tectonic shift is a slow drift over time that has a sudden, jarring result one day. The metaphor seems apt.
Describing an increase in a discrete variable as a "quantum leap" is also accurate.
The problem is that some people misuse them to mean titanic shift/leap. That is incorrect. But in this case, as well as many others, the phrases can be used correctly.
In the 70's(?) everything was "hifi" and in the 90's everything was "laser". Sometimes though (stereos and pointers as easy examples) the terms were correctly applied.
Well, if you're not used to the car, it's hard to get a feel for it. A moped at 35 feels like 100. This car at 45 felt like 100 too. I needed numbers to overcome that feeling in my stomach.
It might help when CNN gets pegged. But since it's coming out of a shared common pool of resources, it won't help when CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc. etc. etc. all get pegged.
Please change your sig. I have prior art.
Open-source isn't forbidden. Opening your source is forbidden. So BSD code, fine. GPL cannot be used because Nintendo won't allow you to republish the code.
Far more damaging than being used to the Imperial system is the name of the metric system. SI? That sounds foreign! Who puts the adjective after the noun... Communists (Comrade Doctor... Doctor is being used as an adjective to modify Comrade)!
Seriously though, I had the same problem that you have. I was driving a car once that only had km on the speedometer. I had to convert miles to km to know if I was going at reasonable, nevermind legal, speeds.
Germany's war machine was not full geared up, true. But Britain's and France's were in worse shape. And given that both countries had more production capability, it would have worked against Germany to wait.
In fact, it is sometimes seen as a British blunder to get involved as early as they did, as a few more years of prep would have helped them out dramatically.
The top three German mistakes were (in chronological order):
I've also seen on the list (although I'm not sure of it's veracity) that they could have carpet-bombed England into submission a lot faster, possibly before the US got involved, if Hitler had authorized a yet more deadly air campaign. There are all kinds of reasons (irrational love of the British?) posited as to why he did not.
In this economy, all internet posts are being cut down by 30%. Or more as in
It's probably more important to geeks than any other segment. Most people are loyal to their hometown's team regardless of where they move. But geeks tend to follow sports more to fit in.
It never does. He believes in a totally free market, and hates welfare. He just is trying to convince people of his beliefs salami-style.
I don't even know why we wouldn't pay for them. No one sets off to become an alcoholic, or develop bad knees, or become obese from McDonalds.
If we agree that we want to live in a society that helps people, then we should live in a society that helps people make choices that avoid those consequences. By having free inserts that help cushion the knees or education about better jogging technique. By offering people who can barely survive something healthy that doesn't cost more than fast food (when you factor in the overhead of cooking at home, such as having a home, stove, gas, etc. McDonald's may be the logical choice). Maybe not having those choices available in a progressive society puts the onus more on society.
With alcoholism, there's AA... but that actually helps a lot of people. And it's also a physical addicition, so I'm not sure it belongs in the same category as the others.
What's mysterious about Microsoft's patent claims? They offered "fair and non-descriminary pricing" or what-have-you as a condition of getting .NET to be an ISO standard. Although not immediately obvious to me, I assume that's clear enough for someone out there to understand.
If the software eject worked, which it only did sometimes. I kept a bent paperclip in the little "manual override" hole all the time.
Okay... Apple requires either that you replace the mouse it ships with (bad choice Apple), move the mouse around further to get to menu options that would be available via right-click on a Windows machine (worst choice), or Control-click.
I'd rather have only one option (right-click) then a choice of three worse options.
Citation please? I thought Vista did just that.
Never had IE pop up unless I asked it to. How does it happen to you.
And also become illegal. At least where I live, law recognizes that the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts.
A common mistake made by people in cases of copyright and harassment.
(Standard IANAL disclaimer)
This could easily be handled without having the secondary market charge a premium.
Yes. The raise the price to $100. Capturing more of the surplus value to the consumer is good because... you flunked Econ 101 and think that makes that market more efficent? Hint, it doesn't, at least not any more than waiting in line does.
But, you say, the scalper also has to wait in line/be lucky on ticketmaster. The difference is scale... the scalper spreads that cost out over many people. But that cost is there to maximize the pleasure that the show/event provides, to ensure that the people who care the most get in. It does an end run around the system. If there were proxies who represented exactly one person in line, fine.
And that's okay because?
As opposed to two guys in a garage who would have written the whole thing over a few years? One of the beautiful things about the infomation age is most entrepuners can trade time for money (or vice versa) to get things done. This allows far more companies to start. I fail to see why making it more expensive to introduce a new product (in this fashion) is good.
Besides, if that's your real objection, there are clever ways to allocate resources based on investment, without needing to be explicitly paid for. Make a class of domain names require a few colocated servers with failover, for instance. It requires that people invest serious capital, without draining that capital for no purpose.
Ever try to start a business? Most new businesses have razor-thin margins, and that can easily bankrupt them.
Oh, no, you just heard about the VC backed businesses, not the 99.7% of businesses that are small and employ over half of the (non-agricultural) workforce.
I find blocking scripts by origin globally to be sufficent. If I don't want your crappy ad scripts on one page, why would I want it on another? That, combined with Opera's block scripts on the site I'm looknig at, combine nicely.