Upon further reflection and (more) careful reading, I realized that misunderstood your argument.
But the basis of your argument is still flawed. Everything required to calculate sales tax is (has to be!) published. RI has a sales tax on goods (not services), but it excludes clothing and most groceries. In order to allow shopkeepers to calculate the sales tax they offer this absurdly detailed website:
It may be difficult to keep track of all the published laws across thousands of jurisdictions, and so paying a third party may be the virtually required. But it's no different than trying to calculate your own corporate taxes. All the information is there but it requires a lot of time and effort to apply it and to keep up with the changes. The lawyers that run the government have created a system that requires us all to hire lawyers when we interact with some very important parts of the government.
That's a different argument. You might also argue that it's unreasonable for the government to coerce private employers to withhold taxes from your paycheck. It may be unreasonable, but it's legal. And frankly, if it ever became illegal, the compliance with tax law would drop so fast they'd make it legal again just so their congressional paychecks would clear.
I don't know what the compliance rate with the RI Use Tax (self-reported on purchases made out-of-state or online) is, but my understanding is that it's very, very low. (Not that we're paragons on law-abiding virtue up here, but even taking that into account it's low.)
For the zillionth time, RHODE ISLAND IS TRYING TO COLLECT TAX FROM RHODE ISLANDERS! It has nothing to do with out-of-state anything. RI is trying to force amazon to collect RI sales tax from RI residents (or at least people with RI shipping addresses) by claiming that amazon has affiliates based in RI, and thus has a physical presence just like Walmart or Target.
It's a consumption tax. The WHOLE GOD-DAMNED POINT is to tax consumers in that locale. Taxing earnings based on the location of the business is called a corporate income tax, and they do that, too.
If you buy something from a RI-based affiliate, you wouldn't have to pay RI sales taxes. Amazon cut off links because RI is claiming that -- because some of the affiliates are in RI -- amazon has a physical presence in the state and therefore amazon needs to collect sales tax FROM RHODE ISLANDERS.
Do you understand that retailers don't pay sales taxes, but they just collect them on behalf of the taxing authority? The state of Rhode Island wants to tax the residents of Rhode Island when they spend money in Rhode Island or spend money on things that they will be using in Rhode Island and then they want to use the money to pay for sewers and schools and police (and corruption and graft and bribes) in Rhode Island.
I can't make you drink it, but I'll even bring you to the watering hole: It's called a "consumption tax".
Just as my mortgage holder doesn't calculate or pay my real estate taxes (they outsource it to a specialized third party), retailers don't need to calculate my sales tax. The "it's too hard and confusing" argument is just a weak attempt to justify keeping a competitive advantages. Walmart, Target, Sears, Home Depot, Toys 'R' Us, et al operate in all 50 states (or nearly so) and they're all capable of collecting sales tax on their internet transactions. If they can do it, Amazon can do it.
The point is that my state (RI) has a law that says if I live here and I buy something I owe sales/use tax on it, no matter where I buy it from. Since enforcement against taxpayers is nearly impossible, going after the big retailers makes sense. Even if I don't much like it.
I think I've found my counter-argument for "You need to delete pages from Wikipedia so it doesn't just become a catch-all for garbage." If that is in any way useful or educational then they might as well bring back all the Pokemon pages, too.
Frankly I have MORE confidence in Wikipedia now that I know it's run by real humans who used good judgment. And this is probably the first time I've ever said anything good about the site's editors. Not to mention the fact that -- believe it or not -- there are approximately a zillion OTHER websites where one could go to try to get the reporter killed. In fact, if you really wanted the Taliban to kill the reporter and you couldn't get anybody to help, you could open an account on Blogger and start a "David Rohde has been KIDNAPPED!" blog. With a modicum of technical ability, you could even build a home server to host the information yourself.
But of course, you would have to be an utter asshole to acquire information about somebody who's life is in danger and who's affairs are none of your business, and to know that people are trying to keep it a secret to protect his life, and then to broadcast the information just because "the people have the right to know!" (Or would the point be just to announce that you know something they don't?)
I remapped my Caps Lock key to be an escape key (for vi). It's great unless I'm trying to type in a CONSTANT_NAME (I'm old-school). I had to learn how to twiddle an entire word in vi to make up for not having Caps Lock.
So if you program computers but won't use a real editor, Caps Lock is useful. Therefore the Caps Lock key should be left off the keyboard and instead packaged separately with Visual Studio and XCode.
First of all, I think your argument has more or less merit depending on the artwork in question. For something like The Lord of the Rings, perhaps you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't slow down and experience the whole thing. But if you're watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture, fast-forwarding is simply efficient. (I thought it dragged in fast forward.) Your argument presumes that all parts of all artwork are equally worthy, but I don't think this is always true.
Second, there's a time for thinking and a time for not thinking. It wasn't until my third child that I realized why America's Funniest Videos is on at 8:00 on Friday. It has no plot to remember, no characters to keep track of, no storyline that lasts more than 30 seconds, and it mostly consists of sledding accidents and people getting hit in the crotch. There has never been a show that demands less from its audience. (So as to retain some shred of credibility, I don't watch AFV (my kids do). But I've seen enough of it to appreciate its utter simplicity.)
Third, in this particular case we're not always talking about skipping something because it's boring or because you want to get to the good bit. If I need to spend hours "practicing" a game to get past a difficult mission then it's the game that's flawed. Demanding that I pay $50 for the right to play a game is one thing. Demanding that I spend 50 hours of toy guitar practice before I can play all the songs on the disk, or demanding that I play 50 boring quest or racing missions before I can unlock Las Venturas and play virtual video poker is...poor customer service? Poor game design?
The fundamental argument is the right of the artist to control how you experience his art vs the right of the consumer to experience the art on his terms. By your logic, it would be lazy to skip songs on a CD to get to the song you actually want to hear. Certain artists may agree because they carefully wrote and sequenced the songs to achieve a certain effect. But ultimately I believe that I should be the one to make the decision.
The purpose of a video game (for most people) is to have fun. I'd hardly call skipping the parts that aren't fun "intellectually lazy". It's more like "pragmatically efficient".
Interesting. GTA 3 could be $49.99, and a "100%" save game file could be an additional $19.99. I'd consider it. And it's not like you can't just get one for free off of the Internet anyway. (They'd need to add some extra bonuses beside just the normal 100% completion bonuses.)
Which brings up a related design flaw which would have made this unworkable with GTA 3. If I really enjoy a mission I should be able to replay it over and over again without using an old save game. Going back to the early missions with later weapons would be fun, which IIRC is the whole point.
"When I was a kid...I liked it because it was a challenge."
Exactly. But as an adult life has enough challenges already. Games are the only thing where I even have the option of saying "this is too hard, let's skip it."
/I'd kill for that power in the rest of my life...
There's nothing more frustrating (in the gaming world) than playing a game for hours just to unlock a part of the game I already paid for! Slogging through a dozen crappy songs just to unlock Anthrax and Megedeth was no fun at all. I paid for Guitar Hero. If the very first thing I want to do is play Free Bird on Expert then it's my right. (Or at least it should be.)
A lot of game companies don't seem to understand this, but a lot of gamers are adults with other interests and responsibilities. Spending hours "practicing" so that I can master a video game is not in the cards.
But in all seriousness, I look forward to the day when my wife says "I bought myself a necklace" without agonizing over whether she should waste the money on herself. I also look forward to the day when the day after Christmas isn't a disappointment because she didn't get the ONE thing she really wanted even though she didn't tell anyone about it and won't just go out and buy it for herself.
(I once watched my mother-in-law nearly faint with delight because somebody bought her a $5 pair of SOCKS that she had seen in the store two months prior. I can't imagine seeing something cheap in the store, and then leaving the store without them in hopes that somebody else would buy them for me. Weird)
(I also can't imagine getting excited about socks, but that's just me.)
You've obviously never had a girlfriend. Women (to make a broad (no pun intended) generalization) can't spend their own money on themselves without feeling guilty. So watching a man do it makes them feel like little kids in GameStop watching grown-ups come in and buy whatever they want without having to ask permission or wait for their birthday or anything.
I don't trust the government to protect my rights, but in this case they may have a point. Threatening people with bodily harm is illegal, and freedom of speech is not a valid defense. If you choose to break the law, then you're giving the cops permission to hunt you down and prosecute you, "anonymous" or not. (Even if the law is a bad one and the cops are thugs controlled by a petty dictator.) (Iran, et al.)
Which doesn't mean that I think anonymity is bad; I just think that you should learn a little bit about the law and about search warrants and about technology before you start your life of crime. (True anonymity is necessary to defend freedom, even if it means a thousand Cletuses and Bubbas can use it, too.)
Slashdot Mirror
Upon further reflection and (more) careful reading, I realized that misunderstood your argument.
But the basis of your argument is still flawed. Everything required to calculate sales tax is (has to be!) published. RI has a sales tax on goods (not services), but it excludes clothing and most groceries. In order to allow shopkeepers to calculate the sales tax they offer this absurdly detailed website:
RI Taxable Grocery Items
It may be difficult to keep track of all the published laws across thousands of jurisdictions, and so paying a third party may be the virtually required. But it's no different than trying to calculate your own corporate taxes. All the information is there but it requires a lot of time and effort to apply it and to keep up with the changes. The lawyers that run the government have created a system that requires us all to hire lawyers when we interact with some very important parts of the government.
That's a different argument. You might also argue that it's unreasonable for the government to coerce private employers to withhold taxes from your paycheck. It may be unreasonable, but it's legal. And frankly, if it ever became illegal, the compliance with tax law would drop so fast they'd make it legal again just so their congressional paychecks would clear. I don't know what the compliance rate with the RI Use Tax (self-reported on purchases made out-of-state or online) is, but my understanding is that it's very, very low. (Not that we're paragons on law-abiding virtue up here, but even taking that into account it's low.)
Only Amazon needs to subscribe to it. They're the ones processing the order and handling the money.
Based on your income
Realized via amazon
You could
Actually buy
Not just one, but
Two coffees.
(Go ahead and mod this off-topic...)
For the zillionth time, RHODE ISLAND IS TRYING TO COLLECT TAX FROM RHODE ISLANDERS! It has nothing to do with out-of-state anything. RI is trying to force amazon to collect RI sales tax from RI residents (or at least people with RI shipping addresses) by claiming that amazon has affiliates based in RI, and thus has a physical presence just like Walmart or Target.
It's a consumption tax. The WHOLE GOD-DAMNED POINT is to tax consumers in that locale. Taxing earnings based on the location of the business is called a corporate income tax, and they do that, too.
If you buy something from a RI-based affiliate, you wouldn't have to pay RI sales taxes. Amazon cut off links because RI is claiming that -- because some of the affiliates are in RI -- amazon has a physical presence in the state and therefore amazon needs to collect sales tax FROM RHODE ISLANDERS.
Do you understand that retailers don't pay sales taxes, but they just collect them on behalf of the taxing authority? The state of Rhode Island wants to tax the residents of Rhode Island when they spend money in Rhode Island or spend money on things that they will be using in Rhode Island and then they want to use the money to pay for sewers and schools and police (and corruption and graft and bribes) in Rhode Island.
I can't make you drink it, but I'll even bring you to the watering hole: It's called a "consumption tax".
That whole argument is a bunch of bull. Two minutes with Google found these:
Avalara
CyberSource
CCH Group
Just as my mortgage holder doesn't calculate or pay my real estate taxes (they outsource it to a specialized third party), retailers don't need to calculate my sales tax. The "it's too hard and confusing" argument is just a weak attempt to justify keeping a competitive advantages. Walmart, Target, Sears, Home Depot, Toys 'R' Us, et al operate in all 50 states (or nearly so) and they're all capable of collecting sales tax on their internet transactions. If they can do it, Amazon can do it.
The point is that my state (RI) has a law that says if I live here and I buy something I owe sales/use tax on it, no matter where I buy it from. Since enforcement against taxpayers is nearly impossible, going after the big retailers makes sense. Even if I don't much like it.
I think I've found my counter-argument for "You need to delete pages from Wikipedia so it doesn't just become a catch-all for garbage." If that is in any way useful or educational then they might as well bring back all the Pokemon pages, too.
Frankly I have MORE confidence in Wikipedia now that I know it's run by real humans who used good judgment. And this is probably the first time I've ever said anything good about the site's editors. Not to mention the fact that -- believe it or not -- there are approximately a zillion OTHER websites where one could go to try to get the reporter killed. In fact, if you really wanted the Taliban to kill the reporter and you couldn't get anybody to help, you could open an account on Blogger and start a "David Rohde has been KIDNAPPED!" blog. With a modicum of technical ability, you could even build a home server to host the information yourself.
But of course, you would have to be an utter asshole to acquire information about somebody who's life is in danger and who's affairs are none of your business, and to know that people are trying to keep it a secret to protect his life, and then to broadcast the information just because "the people have the right to know!" (Or would the point be just to announce that you know something they don't?)
Why stop there? The IBM Selectric is a bunch of new-fangled nonsense. In my telegraph office the keyboard only had one key and WE LIKED IT.
--.- . -..
And although the Home and End are basically broken (yes, BROKEN) you can use Beanie-Home and Beanie-End to go the beginning and end of a line.
But that doesn't make it OK for Apple to screw up the keys in the first place.
I remapped my Caps Lock key to be an escape key (for vi). It's great unless I'm trying to type in a CONSTANT_NAME (I'm old-school). I had to learn how to twiddle an entire word in vi to make up for not having Caps Lock.
So if you program computers but won't use a real editor, Caps Lock is useful. Therefore the Caps Lock key should be left off the keyboard and instead packaged separately with Visual Studio and XCode.
First of all, I think your argument has more or less merit depending on the artwork in question. For something like The Lord of the Rings, perhaps you're doing yourself a disservice if you don't slow down and experience the whole thing. But if you're watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture, fast-forwarding is simply efficient. (I thought it dragged in fast forward.) Your argument presumes that all parts of all artwork are equally worthy, but I don't think this is always true.
Second, there's a time for thinking and a time for not thinking. It wasn't until my third child that I realized why America's Funniest Videos is on at 8:00 on Friday. It has no plot to remember, no characters to keep track of, no storyline that lasts more than 30 seconds, and it mostly consists of sledding accidents and people getting hit in the crotch. There has never been a show that demands less from its audience. (So as to retain some shred of credibility, I don't watch AFV (my kids do). But I've seen enough of it to appreciate its utter simplicity.)
Third, in this particular case we're not always talking about skipping something because it's boring or because you want to get to the good bit. If I need to spend hours "practicing" a game to get past a difficult mission then it's the game that's flawed. Demanding that I pay $50 for the right to play a game is one thing. Demanding that I spend 50 hours of toy guitar practice before I can play all the songs on the disk, or demanding that I play 50 boring quest or racing missions before I can unlock Las Venturas and play virtual video poker is...poor customer service? Poor game design?
The fundamental argument is the right of the artist to control how you experience his art vs the right of the consumer to experience the art on his terms. By your logic, it would be lazy to skip songs on a CD to get to the song you actually want to hear. Certain artists may agree because they carefully wrote and sequenced the songs to achieve a certain effect. But ultimately I believe that I should be the one to make the decision.
The purpose of a video game (for most people) is to have fun. I'd hardly call skipping the parts that aren't fun "intellectually lazy". It's more like "pragmatically efficient".
Interesting. GTA 3 could be $49.99, and a "100%" save game file could be an additional $19.99. I'd consider it. And it's not like you can't just get one for free off of the Internet anyway. (They'd need to add some extra bonuses beside just the normal 100% completion bonuses.)
Which brings up a related design flaw which would have made this unworkable with GTA 3. If I really enjoy a mission I should be able to replay it over and over again without using an old save game. Going back to the early missions with later weapons would be fun, which IIRC is the whole point.
"When I was a kid...I liked it because it was a challenge."
/I'd kill for that power in the rest of my life...
Exactly. But as an adult life has enough challenges already. Games are the only thing where I even have the option of saying "this is too hard, let's skip it."
There's nothing more frustrating (in the gaming world) than playing a game for hours just to unlock a part of the game I already paid for! Slogging through a dozen crappy songs just to unlock Anthrax and Megedeth was no fun at all. I paid for Guitar Hero. If the very first thing I want to do is play Free Bird on Expert then it's my right. (Or at least it should be.)
A lot of game companies don't seem to understand this, but a lot of gamers are adults with other interests and responsibilities. Spending hours "practicing" so that I can master a video game is not in the cards.
I think he meant "Tyra Banks". Her emergence will drive demand for broadband, or something.
Cute. I'd mod you up if I could.
But in all seriousness, I look forward to the day when my wife says "I bought myself a necklace" without agonizing over whether she should waste the money on herself. I also look forward to the day when the day after Christmas isn't a disappointment because she didn't get the ONE thing she really wanted even though she didn't tell anyone about it and won't just go out and buy it for herself.
(I once watched my mother-in-law nearly faint with delight because somebody bought her a $5 pair of SOCKS that she had seen in the store two months prior. I can't imagine seeing something cheap in the store, and then leaving the store without them in hopes that somebody else would buy them for me. Weird)
(I also can't imagine getting excited about socks, but that's just me.)
You've obviously never had a girlfriend. Women (to make a broad (no pun intended) generalization) can't spend their own money on themselves without feeling guilty. So watching a man do it makes them feel like little kids in GameStop watching grown-ups come in and buy whatever they want without having to ask permission or wait for their birthday or anything .
I don't trust the government to protect my rights, but in this case they may have a point. Threatening people with bodily harm is illegal, and freedom of speech is not a valid defense. If you choose to break the law, then you're giving the cops permission to hunt you down and prosecute you, "anonymous" or not. (Even if the law is a bad one and the cops are thugs controlled by a petty dictator.) (Iran, et al.) Which doesn't mean that I think anonymity is bad; I just think that you should learn a little bit about the law and about search warrants and about technology before you start your life of crime. (True anonymity is necessary to defend freedom, even if it means a thousand Cletuses and Bubbas can use it, too.)
If your mechanic is licking your A/C filter to see what the mysterious white goo tastes like, then he's not going to be freaked out by much...
Actually, I think that what I did might have been illegal in the US, too.
;-)
And I believe you misunderstood my last point. Preface the sentence with "According to Micheal Lynton,..."
(I also have my music collection available on the Internet so I can listen to it from work. I'm a regular Jesse James!)