The real problem with the tax proposed in the article is that it is highly inefficient and imposes a significant dead-weight loss without any additional benefit. The poster is proposing a choice between two ways to collect a tax on a realized gain:
1) The current way: tax it when the asset is sold. 2) The proposed way: tax it periodically on the unrealized gain and presumably true-up when the asset is sold.
Both taxes should result in the same amount of taxes being collected (assuming away differences in short and long term rates) but the second method has the disadvantage that the collection of the tax has to be administered at least once and probably many times for a long held asset. This administration has a cost but no actual benefit. At best it is as inefficient as the current method. At worst it's many times less efficient depending on the frequency at which you assess the tax. For small capital gains it's easy to imagine that the cost of collecting the tax in any given time period could eclipse the revenue collected.
The scheme also has the problem that you're also probably going to have to _refund_ unrealized losses. In addition to the cost overhead of implementing refunds you've now impacted actual revenues collected in the assessment time period. Tax revenue gets harder to project/budget and in a period of economic contraction, this will magnify the reduction of tax income.
In the end, the current system is more efficient and a lot more predictable.
Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn in which the SCOTUS ruled that a crop grown on a private farm for private consumption could be regulated by the federal government.
Same for me. I have been very critical of Android in past posts and thus far my Karma's been just fine.
FYI, I've also had the problem of an extreme dry spell in mod points but I started getting them again a few weeks ago. I suspect an undiscovered and quietly fixed bug.:)
I've been casually interested in Mod systems over the years and my observations have been that systems without the ability to mod down tend to be more filled with crap than those that allow both. Trolling and flame-bait doesn't seem to last long on/. but it's endemic on sites w/o down mods.
One of the reasons I continue to read/. is that I can count on the comments being pretty well filtered for crap.
I agree. I've always been frustrated by the blame someone-else crowd (where someone-else = banks, government, both). This was greed from top to bottom with the NINJAs, flippers, and HELOC ATM borrowers as complicit in the implosion as anyone else.
This. I remember the first time I heard a pitch for an interest only mortgage on the radio. I was working on my MBA at the time and for a second I thought I'd managed to sleep through something really important in my finance and econ classes. Then I realized what was actually going on and nearly wrecked the car.
I've seen this request more than once now and I'm very wary of it. With apologies to former President Reagan: "Well, the trouble with our/. friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so."
It seems to me that "-1 Wrong" wouldn't be a very helpful mod in a lot of discussions here given the diversity of religiously held opinions.
OMG do not add avatars...They are a complete waste of screen space. I come for the comments and discussion, not stupid LOLcats animated gifs. I also don't care when you joined the site (although I can guess by your UID) or where your hometown is or whatever. If I really want to know that I can click on your name. Keep the focus on the discussion.
Agreed. When I had mod points I would often "mod up" comments that I didn't necessarily agree with because I thought they added something interesting to the discussion. One of the things I absolutely hate about mod systems on other sites is the very limited up or down voting. Simple up or down voting doesn't seem to promote or result in good discussions and it very often ends up eliminating any opinions that don't appeal to the prevailing conventional wisdom of the site.
/.'s system is the best moderation system out there even though I agree with other comments that there's room for improvement. Simplifying to simple up/down voting would be a big step backwards.
I'm in the same boat: I can't recall the last time I had mod points and I too have excellent karma. I haven't been asked to meta-mod in that time either.
All you grandpas complaining about these new-fangled tablets need to read and internalize Eponymous Coward's message. We're all thrilled that you have a big e-peen and that it's very important to you, but for a very large segment of the market the PC is just a huge PITA that people suffer through in order to get to what they really want: email and web browsing.
Tablets give them that: easy, instant-on access to email and the web and as a bonus all the hot Bird on Pig action they can stand. Tablets aren't going anywhere.
I think you're under-estimating the problem. Let's take as an example something that's probably a fairly common search in the market place: "alarm clock." When I conducted that search just now, I got 717 results back from Marketplace. I had to scroll down many pages to find one that wasn't rated at least four stars. Searching on Google gives you a bunch of contradictory opinions about so many different solutions it's difficult to decide if there's a consensus.
Apple's AppStore looks like it has a similar number of results (hard to tell; it only shows 25 at a time) but already on the first page I've got rankings that range from 3 to 5. Add in the fact that I can be reasonably confident that I can try any of those and not be pwnd by malware and the AppStore's looking a lot better than Marketplace especially if I was an unsophisticated smart phone user.
"I treat my phone like my home PC..."
Therein lies the basic problem: from a trust and security standpoint the (Windows) PC model is very very badly broken. Extending that model to mobile devices is a big step backwards. In fact, I believe most people wished their PC's behaved more like their smart phones: boots fast/always on, available when I want it, has the apps I like/want to use, secure without much effort from me, etc.
Apple gets this; Google doesn't. I had a chance to talk directly with one of Google's tablet developers a few weeks back and the idea that there's a trade-off between openness and security in the app space wasn't something he even wanted to discuss. It just wasn't on his radar; an unrestricted app store was the only way to go and there was no debating the subject. I don't think he seriously considered that security might be something that's important to his customers. When I look at Google's continued resistance to making Marketplace more secure, I don't believe his outlook is unusual.
I've said before that Google doesn't think it needs to care about this, but they should. They're leaving the door open to another third party who understands the "PC in the palm of my hand" model is a problem. Android helps to feed the data collection and correlation engine that is Google and mobile devices are becoming an increasingly important part of that picture. If they let an upstart come in and convert a frustrated Android user base they risk loosing that important input to their core business value. From where I'm sitting that's enough reason to tell developers to get stuffed and start curating Marketplace right away.
Google/Android's problem only gets worse the more popular Android becomes. Android is already a more appealing target to hack because of it's lax controls compared to Apple. When it dominates in market share (and I don't doubt it will) then it becomes an even more attractive target.
Android: Everything You Hate About Your PC In The Palm Of Your Hand!
In case you wanted to write your Senator but couldn't think of anything civil to say, here's what I wrote. Feel free to use it (or not) as a starting point:
I encourage you to withdraw support for Senate bill 978 amending Section 2319 of Title 18 "CRIMINAL INFRINGEMENT OF A COPYRIGHT."
Setting aside my personal objections to criminal (as opposed to civil) liabilities for copyright infringement, this proposed amendment has the following problems:
1) Section 1 (a) 2 (A) sets an unreasonably low threshold for criminal liability. Specifically 10 public performances is, for all practical purposes, the same as 1 public performance on today's Internet. This threshold, especially when coupled with the ambiguous definition of "perform publicly" as applied to the Internet, has the practical effect of making any posting of a copyrighted work to the Internet a criminal offense. (USC 17, chapter 1, section 106)
2) Section 1 (a) 2 (B) i & ii have the combined effect of setting a floor to pricing for all copyrighted works. Copyright holders, who are granted their rights "to promote the progress of science and useful arts," are effectively required by this law to set their licensing rates at the minimums set forth in the amended code in order to assure their access to remedies under this law.
Broadly speaking, I encourage you to revisit your position on criminal copyright infringement. I believe that our copyright laws have strayed from their intended purpose to "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" and, as currently enacted, result in grave economic damage to the United States by building up an entrenched lobby of rent seekers with great economic and legal power but who make a small contribution to the common weal.
I would encourage you instead to reduce criminal (not civil) penalties for copyright infringement and also to seriously consider reducing the duration of grants of copyright to no more than 21 years.
Fortunately there's an easy and succinct answer to your question: Nothing!
Oh, sure I suppose it's technically feasible that we could intentionally affect climate change on the planet, but practically speaking this will never be implemented. So stop worrying and start buying real estate in Canada!
Doing anything else is like NOT launching the life boats on the Titanic, because the no-one can agree how to patch the hole. The mind boggles.
(For simplicity's sake, replying to all the "Linux, WTF!" threads here.)
First off, I'm a Board member of LPI so I've got nothing against Linux; quite the opposite in fact.
Secondly, it's the culture of Linux that I'm referring to, not the OS per se. The things that are important to the Linux community, freedom and choice, are not important to the same degree to the majority of computing (mobile or otherwise) users. Hence my reference to the never-quite-here year of the Linux desktop. People don't stick to Windows because they necessarily like it better or they're ignorant of the alternatives, they stick with Windows because is good enough and more importantly it runs the apps they like and have come to trust. One thing they definitely do not like about Windows is the malware, but since nothing else runs the apps they like, they're stuck (for now).
Seriously, let's say Steve didn't ink an exclusive with AT&T in the US: pick your favorite carrier and boot up your iPhone. Exactly how successful do you think Android would have been in that scenario? My theory: not very. If people could get the bling they wanted running the apps they like, Android would be an also-ran fighting with WP7, WebOS, and MeeGo for Apple's table scraps. Android is currently successful because Apple's chosen to make their product distribution exclusive. Nature abhors a vacuum and Android lets every not-Apple cheaply and quickly produce a product that's a reasonable substitute for an iPhone to fill it.
Apple's ace-in-hole is the App Store: so long as people can get the apps they want and can trust the store not to leave them with malware, Apple's got a nifty Windows-like lock on consumers. (As a side note: I think this benefit was an after thought to Apple; I believe protecting their brand was the key driver for the App Store in Apple's eyes.) To some degree this helps to protect Apple from the fact that mobile technology is also now about fashion. Fashion is faddish and without the App Store to anchor customers, Apple's competitors have a reasonable chance of pulling customers away as fashions change. This is why having a trusted app store is so important to the Android community: it helps to make Android sticky through changes in fashion. However, if customers don't trust the app store and they can get what they want from a store they do trust, they're going to migrate there when things get painful, and malware is going to make Marketplace painful.
tl;dr:
o Freedom and choice aren't as important to most people as they are to the Linux community.
o Android's thriving because Apple intentionally left a vacuum in the market.
o With apologies to James Carville, "It's the app store, silly!"
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem with the tax proposed in the article is that it is highly inefficient and imposes a significant dead-weight loss without any additional benefit. The poster is proposing a choice between two ways to collect a tax on a realized gain:
1) The current way: tax it when the asset is sold.
2) The proposed way: tax it periodically on the unrealized gain and presumably true-up when the asset is sold.
Both taxes should result in the same amount of taxes being collected (assuming away differences in short and long term rates) but the second method has the disadvantage that the collection of the tax has to be administered at least once and probably many times for a long held asset. This administration has a cost but no actual benefit. At best it is as inefficient as the current method. At worst it's many times less efficient depending on the frequency at which you assess the tax. For small capital gains it's easy to imagine that the cost of collecting the tax in any given time period could eclipse the revenue collected.
The scheme also has the problem that you're also probably going to have to _refund_ unrealized losses. In addition to the cost overhead of implementing refunds you've now impacted actual revenues collected in the assessment time period. Tax revenue gets harder to project/budget and in a period of economic contraction, this will magnify the reduction of tax income.
In the end, the current system is more efficient and a lot more predictable.
Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn in which the SCOTUS ruled that a crop grown on a private farm for private consumption could be regulated by the federal government.
Nonsense. Your Pip-Boy 3000 will automatically detect and tabulate all of that information.
I think you picked a bad example city for your thought problem:
Chicago Mayor Trashes Politics of Waste Removal
(I hope that's not a paywalled link.)
Meta-modding still exists?
Same for me. I have been very critical of Android in past posts and thus far my Karma's been just fine.
FYI, I've also had the problem of an extreme dry spell in mod points but I started getting them again a few weeks ago. I suspect an undiscovered and quietly fixed bug. :)
I've been casually interested in Mod systems over the years and my observations have been that systems without the ability to mod down tend to be more filled with crap than those that allow both. Trolling and flame-bait doesn't seem to last long on /. but it's endemic on sites w/o down mods.
One of the reasons I continue to read /. is that I can count on the comments being pretty well filtered for crap.
Marry the cheerleader (football captain). That is all.
I agree. I've always been frustrated by the blame someone-else crowd (where someone-else = banks, government, both). This was greed from top to bottom with the NINJAs, flippers, and HELOC ATM borrowers as complicit in the implosion as anyone else.
This. I remember the first time I heard a pitch for an interest only mortgage on the radio. I was working on my MBA at the time and for a second I thought I'd managed to sleep through something really important in my finance and econ classes. Then I realized what was actually going on and nearly wrecked the car.
Or employers stop paying for mobile phones at all. Very few companies pay for broadband Internet access these days and that used to be fairly common.
Would it be too much overhead to make the "edited" link to a diff of the posts?
I've seen this request more than once now and I'm very wary of it. With apologies to former President Reagan: "Well, the trouble with our /. friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so."
It seems to me that "-1 Wrong" wouldn't be a very helpful mod in a lot of discussions here given the diversity of religiously held opinions.
Agreed.
OMG do not add avatars...They are a complete waste of screen space. I come for the comments and discussion, not stupid LOLcats animated gifs. I also don't care when you joined the site (although I can guess by your UID) or where your hometown is or whatever. If I really want to know that I can click on your name. Keep the focus on the discussion.
Agreed. When I had mod points I would often "mod up" comments that I didn't necessarily agree with because I thought they added something interesting to the discussion. One of the things I absolutely hate about mod systems on other sites is the very limited up or down voting. Simple up or down voting doesn't seem to promote or result in good discussions and it very often ends up eliminating any opinions that don't appeal to the prevailing conventional wisdom of the site.
I'm in the same boat: I can't recall the last time I had mod points and I too have excellent karma. I haven't been asked to meta-mod in that time either.
This. (Oh how I wish I had mod points.)
All you grandpas complaining about these new-fangled tablets need to read and internalize Eponymous Coward's message. We're all thrilled that you have a big e-peen and that it's very important to you, but for a very large segment of the market the PC is just a huge PITA that people suffer through in order to get to what they really want: email and web browsing.
Tablets give them that: easy, instant-on access to email and the web and as a bonus all the hot Bird on Pig action they can stand. Tablets aren't going anywhere.
/. (at #1) tops the WSJ in the list of about 20 news sources I consult every morning.
If you're going to write a book I challenge you to do it using only /. memes. (You can leave out the gostse though.)
Best of luck in wherever life takes you next.
Well said.
I think you're under-estimating the problem. Let's take as an example something that's probably a fairly common search in the market place: "alarm clock." When I conducted that search just now, I got 717 results back from Marketplace. I had to scroll down many pages to find one that wasn't rated at least four stars. Searching on Google gives you a bunch of contradictory opinions about so many different solutions it's difficult to decide if there's a consensus.
Apple's AppStore looks like it has a similar number of results (hard to tell; it only shows 25 at a time) but already on the first page I've got rankings that range from 3 to 5. Add in the fact that I can be reasonably confident that I can try any of those and not be pwnd by malware and the AppStore's looking a lot better than Marketplace especially if I was an unsophisticated smart phone user.
"I treat my phone like my home PC..."
Therein lies the basic problem: from a trust and security standpoint the (Windows) PC model is very very badly broken. Extending that model to mobile devices is a big step backwards. In fact, I believe most people wished their PC's behaved more like their smart phones: boots fast/always on, available when I want it, has the apps I like/want to use, secure without much effort from me, etc.
Apple gets this; Google doesn't. I had a chance to talk directly with one of Google's tablet developers a few weeks back and the idea that there's a trade-off between openness and security in the app space wasn't something he even wanted to discuss. It just wasn't on his radar; an unrestricted app store was the only way to go and there was no debating the subject. I don't think he seriously considered that security might be something that's important to his customers. When I look at Google's continued resistance to making Marketplace more secure, I don't believe his outlook is unusual.
I've said before that Google doesn't think it needs to care about this, but they should. They're leaving the door open to another third party who understands the "PC in the palm of my hand" model is a problem. Android helps to feed the data collection and correlation engine that is Google and mobile devices are becoming an increasingly important part of that picture. If they let an upstart come in and convert a frustrated Android user base they risk loosing that important input to their core business value. From where I'm sitting that's enough reason to tell developers to get stuffed and start curating Marketplace right away.
Google/Android's problem only gets worse the more popular Android becomes. Android is already a more appealing target to hack because of it's lax controls compared to Apple. When it dominates in market share (and I don't doubt it will) then it becomes an even more attractive target.
Android: Everything You Hate About Your PC In The Palm Of Your Hand!
In case you wanted to write your Senator but couldn't think of anything civil to say, here's what I wrote. Feel free to use it (or not) as a starting point:
I encourage you to withdraw support for Senate bill 978 amending Section 2319 of Title 18 "CRIMINAL INFRINGEMENT OF A COPYRIGHT."
Setting aside my personal objections to criminal (as opposed to civil) liabilities for copyright infringement, this proposed amendment has the following problems:
1) Section 1 (a) 2 (A) sets an unreasonably low threshold for criminal liability. Specifically 10 public performances is, for all practical purposes, the same as 1 public performance on today's Internet. This threshold, especially when coupled with the ambiguous definition of "perform publicly" as applied to the Internet, has the practical effect of making any posting of a copyrighted work to the Internet a criminal offense. (USC 17, chapter 1, section 106)
2) Section 1 (a) 2 (B) i & ii have the combined effect of setting a floor to pricing for all copyrighted works. Copyright holders, who are granted their rights "to promote the progress of science and useful arts," are effectively required by this law to set their licensing rates at the minimums set forth in the amended code in order to assure their access to remedies under this law.
Broadly speaking, I encourage you to revisit your position on criminal copyright infringement. I believe that our copyright laws have strayed from their intended purpose to "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" and, as currently enacted, result in grave economic damage to the United States by building up an entrenched lobby of rent seekers with great economic and legal power but who make a small contribution to the common weal.
I would encourage you instead to reduce criminal (not civil) penalties for copyright infringement and also to seriously consider reducing the duration of grants of copyright to no more than 21 years.
Thank you,
Fortunately there's an easy and succinct answer to your question: Nothing!
Oh, sure I suppose it's technically feasible that we could intentionally affect climate change on the planet, but practically speaking this will never be implemented. So stop worrying and start buying real estate in Canada!
Doing anything else is like NOT launching the life boats on the Titanic, because the no-one can agree how to patch the hole. The mind boggles.
(For simplicity's sake, replying to all the "Linux, WTF!" threads here.)
First off, I'm a Board member of LPI so I've got nothing against Linux; quite the opposite in fact.
Secondly, it's the culture of Linux that I'm referring to, not the OS per se. The things that are important to the Linux community, freedom and choice, are not important to the same degree to the majority of computing (mobile or otherwise) users. Hence my reference to the never-quite-here year of the Linux desktop. People don't stick to Windows because they necessarily like it better or they're ignorant of the alternatives, they stick with Windows because is good enough and more importantly it runs the apps they like and have come to trust. One thing they definitely do not like about Windows is the malware, but since nothing else runs the apps they like, they're stuck (for now).
Seriously, let's say Steve didn't ink an exclusive with AT&T in the US: pick your favorite carrier and boot up your iPhone. Exactly how successful do you think Android would have been in that scenario? My theory: not very. If people could get the bling they wanted running the apps they like, Android would be an also-ran fighting with WP7, WebOS, and MeeGo for Apple's table scraps. Android is currently successful because Apple's chosen to make their product distribution exclusive. Nature abhors a vacuum and Android lets every not-Apple cheaply and quickly produce a product that's a reasonable substitute for an iPhone to fill it.
Apple's ace-in-hole is the App Store: so long as people can get the apps they want and can trust the store not to leave them with malware, Apple's got a nifty Windows-like lock on consumers. (As a side note: I think this benefit was an after thought to Apple; I believe protecting their brand was the key driver for the App Store in Apple's eyes.) To some degree this helps to protect Apple from the fact that mobile technology is also now about fashion. Fashion is faddish and without the App Store to anchor customers, Apple's competitors have a reasonable chance of pulling customers away as fashions change. This is why having a trusted app store is so important to the Android community: it helps to make Android sticky through changes in fashion. However, if customers don't trust the app store and they can get what they want from a store they do trust, they're going to migrate there when things get painful, and malware is going to make Marketplace painful.
tl;dr:
o Freedom and choice aren't as important to most people as they are to the Linux community.
o Android's thriving because Apple intentionally left a vacuum in the market.
o With apologies to James Carville, "It's the app store, silly!"