Dying before the end of your fertile life, infertility, lack of success finding a mate etc all help. Education seems to select you out of the gene pool to since education is negatively correlated to birth rates. You don't have to die, you just need to have less than replacement level births and things will work themselves out over a few dozen generations.
A lot of companies? I think most companies. No one will renew bonds to someone that doesn't have any revenue. No one will keep their money invested in a company with no chance of a return for at least 2 years. Some people do invest long term but they still expect there to be at least some chance of making money in the next couple. CEOs and execs with compensation tied to performance would just leave. Some of them would be responsible sure, but it would be hard to make the case to blame the head of HR for the head of manufacturing deciding to "just poor that down the drain". But their compensation and job security would be out the window.
I think there should be individual liability as much as possible. Find the manager or employee that came up with the dumb idea and throw them in jail. Fine the company if they knowingly let it happen but if they didn't know company level fines aren't really fair.
It has also been a long time since the board (which is supposed to represent the shareholders) has worked properly. Boards are just a bunch of mutual entanglements that pay the members green fees for the most part. I'll get the CEO of our biggest partner to site on our board. Wow and you'll be sure to get an objective opinion of what business the company should pursue too right?
Next up: the vast majority of shareholder votes are not being used by the shareholders they are the institutional investors (mutual funds, ETFs, pensions etc) voting on behalf of the true shareholders. The large->majority of people that own a piece of a company have no idea who is on the board, what they do etc. Even when you do know that their is a decision going on it is usually to late to do anything other than penalize them after the fact. If your company pisses away 20M on a candidates PAC that you don't like (or just don't like the political activism in the corporate space as a matter of principle) too bad, it has already been done if you don't like it sell your shares, but your share of the 20M has already been spent.
The previous poster is right the concept of personhood of a corporation is ridiculous and a stretch of the 14th amendment. People do form associations but that doesn't mean that everything that a group believes becomes a virtual person. Pick any topic and there will be a significant portion of the stakeholders that think differently. Companies piss away investors money on whatever pet project they chose and then hide behind a individuals right to free speech. It is ridiculous.
I live in Canada but I'm sure cities do the same things everywhere. My town is growing really quickly (from 80k to 120k in 10 years). There subdivisions going up all the time. The city wants to raise our property taxes by ~6% a year for the next few years since "because of our rapid growth our current water treatment facilities are insufficient". They give tax breaks to developers to build, they advertise the city as a great place to live and then when the people come they expect the EXISTING residents to pay for the new peoples water treatment plant. It is crazy. Politicians want to feel powerful by having all sorts of great things happening in their city, ward whatever but they don't want to make the people causing the growth to pay for it (by for example having a surcharge on developers to cover the fractional cost of water treatment facilities that their buildings are going to use). Oh but 10 years down the road once we've all paid for the new infrastructure they'll have 50% more citizens to pay taxes to keep new projects going all the time. The taxes that were raised to pay for the infrastructure will never go away the money will just be spent on parks, rec centres etc.
I'm all for police, fire etc the so called "essential services", but growth and pet projects like skating rinks and parks should be paid for by the users. If a neighborhood wants a park that bad the 50 homeowners can put their money together and buy a plot of land and make a park. The guy that sits on his couch all day shouldn't have to pay for a park so someone else's kids can have somewhere to play (which to be honest in my area would be at best 8 months a year because of weather). Since when can't kids run in a field/forest or whatever but need tended lawns and swing sets and such is beyond me. Heck when I was a kid 25 years ago we climbed trees not 10k jungle gyms and I'm pretty sure it was just as much fun.
I think that is what it will end up coming to when the legislature figures out the internet (give it 20 years;-)). Since you are a virtual store and have no physical presence we deem you to be located wherever the current customer is located. Thus you need to charge that customers state sales tax. If you don't like it than block your site from processing orders from that state. It is a similar thing to how they want to make companies responsible for making sure that their site doesn't infringe US law even if it is based outside of the US, or that porn sites comply to US record keeping laws etc. Don't like it don't do business with our citizens seems to be the name of the game.
I don't get why Fair Tax proposals focus on a sales tax as the method. To me that is crazy you have likely trillions of transactions a year in a country the size of the US. Assuming the whole population worked and got paid weekly you'd only have ~15B paychecks to tax/audit. It would be much easier to knock on the doors of big companies and confirm that their 10k+ employees had their taxes withheld correctly than to go to the 10k+ employees and ask for receipts for everything they bought, or even just ask for pay stubs. If the employer is responsible for collection the IRS would have a much easier time providing over-site: there is a order of magnitude (at least) fewer companies than people earning income and even than with limited resources you could go after the Apple, GE, HP etc of the world and get a large percentage of the working population with a few dozen businesses. Businesses would have an incentive to report correctly because they get a write-off for the salaries (if they over report than the employees will have an incentive to complain about it). Both employees and employers would have incentives to push the reporting as close to the true value as possible.
In a sales tax model the opposite is the case. If things are done under the table the buyer and seller can find a middle point that they both can live with. The typical plumber "I'll fix it for 100 cash or 130 cheque" kind of thing. They find a point in the middle where the plumber makes more money than they would if he paid taxes on the transaction and the home owner gets a deal on the service. Contractors will always be a hard one to enforce but you can at least make sure that those people that are employees or stockholders in companies pay taxes on money they get. The only real way I can think of getting contractors in the loop for sure would be to eliminate paper currency so everything is recorded which is a privacy nightmare, but then again once the government has a right to tax your income you have little privacy anyways since they need to know where you work, usually ask for lots of personal info when it comes to determining which tax breaks you get etc.
If you still want to encourage people to save then offer tax free savings accounts. Employee enrolls in a program with an investment firm or whatever, gives the paperwork to his employer to have his taxes at source reduced and problem solved. I'd axe all other sorts of tax complications write offs for home interest, children, charities, etc. Let the market decide what is important don't use the tax code to artificially make some transactions more desirable.
I think that if $6767 is less than 30% of what you earn at least $22556 which is above the poverty line for a family of 4. If you could charge a 30% tax and actually have the rich pay that 30% not 14% or something because of it all being dividends, capital gains and flavor of the month tax shelters the country would be much much better off. 30% would probably not be necessary under that scenario as the real take of the US currently is 26.9% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP#cite_note-0). Somewhere between 23-30 would probably be what is needed to get things to work out. You'd have a huge savings in effort complying and enforcing the tax code though I think. Easiest really to take the money at source though not at sales: 30% withheld by companies on your pay, 30% withheld by brokerage when you sell stock etc. It would illiminate the problem of having to track down people doing things under the table to avoid the sales taxes: for the most part the people paying you are very public and relatively few in number versus: every citizen and every combination of transactions.
Doesn't your estate still have to file taxes for your final year including the closing out of your liabilities? They do in Canada and your estate can end up having to pay taxes (which of course would have to come out of any inheritance).
Pretty sure it is the same in Canada. Whenever you trade goods for money or "goods in kind" they are deemed as being sold and need to be evaluated at current market price (so no giving your art collection to your kid for the cost you paid for it 20 years ago even though it is worth more now). If you made a profit you pay, if you made a loss you can use it to offset current or future capital gains.
Heck you can even be considered to have "sold" a property that you've just changed uses of and have always had title on. For example if you own a house, start renting it then move back in and use it for yourself you have "sold" it twice: once on conversion to a rental property and once on the way back. You can sell your primary residence capital gains free so the first one you get away with, but on the way back your property might have increased in market value that increase is a capital gain to your "business" (even if you didn't register as one) and taxable.
If the US really lets people get away with this it is crazy.
The German approach is very sadistic agreed. Their can't be any discussions of the motives, whether some things were right in Nazi politics etc. No it's become a religion to blame themselves for the war to the point of pissing away billions of euros to help out other EU countries that run themselves like idiots because Germany can't be seen as being aggressive or just say "not my problem" about anything now can they?
It isn't just inefficiencies like a VM layer I don't think, some things baked into a cheap that can run in a few cycles could take 10's of instructions to run on a different architecture using the basic instructions. At some point inefficient becomes unusable. It is the same thing with government programs: if the government is rationing towelette paper and start doing a bad job people switch from the government to the black market. If something doesn't meet your needs (in the sense of meeting your minimum requirements) it won't meet your needs (in the sense of being used at all).
This is the beauty of AMD, Intel and others going into details of why they are technically superior in a certain way. Then when cornered they say: yeah we're about the same but you can get a "faster" chip from us a little cheaper than the other guy. CPUs have become commodities in most people eyes: how much "make it go" do I get for my $200?
I agree there are some dumb software patents out there but I wouldn't go so far as to separate software in general from other patents. Software the majority of the cost is in engineering time and just the cost of very creative people coming up with cool ideas. The cost is all upfront. A new mechanical widget on the other hand sure can have a lot of design thought involved too but a lot of the cost and need for patent protection is that there needs to be the followup expenses of a factory to produce the widget and the company needs to be sure to get that money back too.
But I'd argue that software has a compatible proportion of expenses it is just a lot of it goes into the process of innovation up front, development and testing time, cost of servers and dev tools better than factory worker wages for the grunt developers on the project etc.If the patent protection time is shorter for software than physical goods software shops end up having to make there money on a shorter timescale which would mean they'd have to raise prices. If there was no patent or other protections their would be little incentive to innovate as your competitors would only be ~6 months from having a version out with your new feature which is likely less than the tech cycle for your customers' IT shops or a customer buying a replacement gadget. Patents are not perfect but I think they are better than the alternative: risk of attempting innovations compounded with risk of getting a return before your competitors knock off your R&D.
Is they are not legitimate until the court provides an order. Because someone is wearing a $100 uniform with a $5 badge doesn't make things legitimate without going through normal process.
Because it is being suggested that the test questions can change to give a different level of difficulty instead. Then you need to do the magic someone else in this thread alluded to that happens with CPA exams in Cali to figure out a weird blend of the difficulty of the questions and the number of right answers for each one to figure out who passes.
In a testing environment you either know the material to the level needed to pass or you don't. The teaching time is over now it is pass or fail. After the test is done you'll know what the kids no and what they need to learn and provided there is still time left in the course you can review the material they don't know, if it is the end of the year than the kid is going to math camp instead of football camp for summer.
There are 3.34E22 molecules of H20 in one gram of water. That is a hundred billion or so times more particles that are in this simulation. Astro calcs have just been including more and more particles since the first one with 2 interacting particles. The number of (stars/solar systems/galaxies/clusters/super clusters etc) that each of those particles is supposed to represent has just been getting smaller as we have faster and faster computers.
Because telling little Jimmy he got the question wrong would make him feel bad so instead lets piss away money so we can predict failure before it happens and be sure to water down the test just enough so Jimmy never needs to find out he sucks at math.
"If we can detect when they are going to fail, maybe we can change the text or switch the question to give them another one at a different level of difficulty, but also to keep them engaged,"
What is it with our current society that we can't accept the fact that we will fail sometimes that not all people will "get" a particular subject and within normal variations that is okay etc. I think they need to test the assertion that someone that gets a question wrong occasionally is not going to be engaged. I think it is more likely a more "squishy" reasoning "oh clearly when people are told they are wrong they'll feel bad and we don't want that". Personally it is the things I get wrong that keep my studying: once I start getting everything right I find it hard to keep working through the next 20 questions on the same topic that the prof assigned.
In science they retract things but ever notice how they never pay the grant money back?:-) The other side of it is the whole tenure thing: have nut job ideas but don't get caught long enough and all of a sudden you become immune to being fired, having to do relevant work etc.
I don't know if I agree that science funding has increased. It has moved around in most countries from pure science to "practical science". Which in turn makes people that want to do pure science having to come up with a hand wavy argument why their project is going to cure AIDS or cut gas requirements by 50%. That is a big problem because pure science should still be done and shouldn't have to justify itself by using what medical/engineering problem it will solve.
It is just like politics. You target your grant request to something that has lots of money going into it. So you aren't studying the growth of an earth worm you are studying "the mechanism whereby c elegans regulates its cell division with direct relevance to the understanding of how human breast tissue becomes malignant.". But really for the next 5 years you'll be looking at worms not working on how to apply it to humans, you just don't mention that part.
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Dying before the end of your fertile life, infertility, lack of success finding a mate etc all help. Education seems to select you out of the gene pool to since education is negatively correlated to birth rates. You don't have to die, you just need to have less than replacement level births and things will work themselves out over a few dozen generations.
That Charles Heston is an evil greedy corporate monster?
A lot of companies? I think most companies. No one will renew bonds to someone that doesn't have any revenue. No one will keep their money invested in a company with no chance of a return for at least 2 years. Some people do invest long term but they still expect there to be at least some chance of making money in the next couple. CEOs and execs with compensation tied to performance would just leave. Some of them would be responsible sure, but it would be hard to make the case to blame the head of HR for the head of manufacturing deciding to "just poor that down the drain". But their compensation and job security would be out the window.
I think there should be individual liability as much as possible. Find the manager or employee that came up with the dumb idea and throw them in jail. Fine the company if they knowingly let it happen but if they didn't know company level fines aren't really fair.
It has also been a long time since the board (which is supposed to represent the shareholders) has worked properly. Boards are just a bunch of mutual entanglements that pay the members green fees for the most part. I'll get the CEO of our biggest partner to site on our board. Wow and you'll be sure to get an objective opinion of what business the company should pursue too right?
Next up: the vast majority of shareholder votes are not being used by the shareholders they are the institutional investors (mutual funds, ETFs, pensions etc) voting on behalf of the true shareholders. The large->majority of people that own a piece of a company have no idea who is on the board, what they do etc. Even when you do know that their is a decision going on it is usually to late to do anything other than penalize them after the fact. If your company pisses away 20M on a candidates PAC that you don't like (or just don't like the political activism in the corporate space as a matter of principle) too bad, it has already been done if you don't like it sell your shares, but your share of the 20M has already been spent.
The previous poster is right the concept of personhood of a corporation is ridiculous and a stretch of the 14th amendment. People do form associations but that doesn't mean that everything that a group believes becomes a virtual person. Pick any topic and there will be a significant portion of the stakeholders that think differently. Companies piss away investors money on whatever pet project they chose and then hide behind a individuals right to free speech. It is ridiculous.
I live in Canada but I'm sure cities do the same things everywhere. My town is growing really quickly (from 80k to 120k in 10 years). There subdivisions going up all the time. The city wants to raise our property taxes by ~6% a year for the next few years since "because of our rapid growth our current water treatment facilities are insufficient". They give tax breaks to developers to build, they advertise the city as a great place to live and then when the people come they expect the EXISTING residents to pay for the new peoples water treatment plant. It is crazy. Politicians want to feel powerful by having all sorts of great things happening in their city, ward whatever but they don't want to make the people causing the growth to pay for it (by for example having a surcharge on developers to cover the fractional cost of water treatment facilities that their buildings are going to use). Oh but 10 years down the road once we've all paid for the new infrastructure they'll have 50% more citizens to pay taxes to keep new projects going all the time. The taxes that were raised to pay for the infrastructure will never go away the money will just be spent on parks, rec centres etc.
I'm all for police, fire etc the so called "essential services", but growth and pet projects like skating rinks and parks should be paid for by the users. If a neighborhood wants a park that bad the 50 homeowners can put their money together and buy a plot of land and make a park. The guy that sits on his couch all day shouldn't have to pay for a park so someone else's kids can have somewhere to play (which to be honest in my area would be at best 8 months a year because of weather). Since when can't kids run in a field/forest or whatever but need tended lawns and swing sets and such is beyond me. Heck when I was a kid 25 years ago we climbed trees not 10k jungle gyms and I'm pretty sure it was just as much fun.
I think that is what it will end up coming to when the legislature figures out the internet (give it 20 years ;-)). Since you are a virtual store and have no physical presence we deem you to be located wherever the current customer is located. Thus you need to charge that customers state sales tax. If you don't like it than block your site from processing orders from that state. It is a similar thing to how they want to make companies responsible for making sure that their site doesn't infringe US law even if it is based outside of the US, or that porn sites comply to US record keeping laws etc. Don't like it don't do business with our citizens seems to be the name of the game.
I don't get why Fair Tax proposals focus on a sales tax as the method. To me that is crazy you have likely trillions of transactions a year in a country the size of the US. Assuming the whole population worked and got paid weekly you'd only have ~15B paychecks to tax/audit. It would be much easier to knock on the doors of big companies and confirm that their 10k+ employees had their taxes withheld correctly than to go to the 10k+ employees and ask for receipts for everything they bought, or even just ask for pay stubs. If the employer is responsible for collection the IRS would have a much easier time providing over-site: there is a order of magnitude (at least) fewer companies than people earning income and even than with limited resources you could go after the Apple, GE, HP etc of the world and get a large percentage of the working population with a few dozen businesses. Businesses would have an incentive to report correctly because they get a write-off for the salaries (if they over report than the employees will have an incentive to complain about it). Both employees and employers would have incentives to push the reporting as close to the true value as possible.
In a sales tax model the opposite is the case. If things are done under the table the buyer and seller can find a middle point that they both can live with. The typical plumber "I'll fix it for 100 cash or 130 cheque" kind of thing. They find a point in the middle where the plumber makes more money than they would if he paid taxes on the transaction and the home owner gets a deal on the service. Contractors will always be a hard one to enforce but you can at least make sure that those people that are employees or stockholders in companies pay taxes on money they get. The only real way I can think of getting contractors in the loop for sure would be to eliminate paper currency so everything is recorded which is a privacy nightmare, but then again once the government has a right to tax your income you have little privacy anyways since they need to know where you work, usually ask for lots of personal info when it comes to determining which tax breaks you get etc.
If you still want to encourage people to save then offer tax free savings accounts. Employee enrolls in a program with an investment firm or whatever, gives the paperwork to his employer to have his taxes at source reduced and problem solved. I'd axe all other sorts of tax complications write offs for home interest, children, charities, etc. Let the market decide what is important don't use the tax code to artificially make some transactions more desirable.
I think that if $6767 is less than 30% of what you earn at least $22556 which is above the poverty line for a family of 4. If you could charge a 30% tax and actually have the rich pay that 30% not 14% or something because of it all being dividends, capital gains and flavor of the month tax shelters the country would be much much better off. 30% would probably not be necessary under that scenario as the real take of the US currently is 26.9% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP#cite_note-0). Somewhere between 23-30 would probably be what is needed to get things to work out. You'd have a huge savings in effort complying and enforcing the tax code though I think. Easiest really to take the money at source though not at sales: 30% withheld by companies on your pay, 30% withheld by brokerage when you sell stock etc. It would illiminate the problem of having to track down people doing things under the table to avoid the sales taxes: for the most part the people paying you are very public and relatively few in number versus: every citizen and every combination of transactions.
Doesn't your estate still have to file taxes for your final year including the closing out of your liabilities? They do in Canada and your estate can end up having to pay taxes (which of course would have to come out of any inheritance).
Pretty sure it is the same in Canada. Whenever you trade goods for money or "goods in kind" they are deemed as being sold and need to be evaluated at current market price (so no giving your art collection to your kid for the cost you paid for it 20 years ago even though it is worth more now). If you made a profit you pay, if you made a loss you can use it to offset current or future capital gains.
Heck you can even be considered to have "sold" a property that you've just changed uses of and have always had title on. For example if you own a house, start renting it then move back in and use it for yourself you have "sold" it twice: once on conversion to a rental property and once on the way back. You can sell your primary residence capital gains free so the first one you get away with, but on the way back your property might have increased in market value that increase is a capital gain to your "business" (even if you didn't register as one) and taxable.
If the US really lets people get away with this it is crazy.
Ah but in theory at least lawyers can't make laws and they can't render verdicts.
Corporations are people my friend.
The German approach is very sadistic agreed. Their can't be any discussions of the motives, whether some things were right in Nazi politics etc. No it's become a religion to blame themselves for the war to the point of pissing away billions of euros to help out other EU countries that run themselves like idiots because Germany can't be seen as being aggressive or just say "not my problem" about anything now can they?
be illegal to read?
It isn't just inefficiencies like a VM layer I don't think, some things baked into a cheap that can run in a few cycles could take 10's of instructions to run on a different architecture using the basic instructions. At some point inefficient becomes unusable. It is the same thing with government programs: if the government is rationing towelette paper and start doing a bad job people switch from the government to the black market. If something doesn't meet your needs (in the sense of meeting your minimum requirements) it won't meet your needs (in the sense of being used at all).
This is the beauty of AMD, Intel and others going into details of why they are technically superior in a certain way. Then when cornered they say: yeah we're about the same but you can get a "faster" chip from us a little cheaper than the other guy. CPUs have become commodities in most people eyes: how much "make it go" do I get for my $200?
I agree there are some dumb software patents out there but I wouldn't go so far as to separate software in general from other patents. Software the majority of the cost is in engineering time and just the cost of very creative people coming up with cool ideas. The cost is all upfront. A new mechanical widget on the other hand sure can have a lot of design thought involved too but a lot of the cost and need for patent protection is that there needs to be the followup expenses of a factory to produce the widget and the company needs to be sure to get that money back too.
But I'd argue that software has a compatible proportion of expenses it is just a lot of it goes into the process of innovation up front, development and testing time, cost of servers and dev tools better than factory worker wages for the grunt developers on the project etc.If the patent protection time is shorter for software than physical goods software shops end up having to make there money on a shorter timescale which would mean they'd have to raise prices. If there was no patent or other protections their would be little incentive to innovate as your competitors would only be ~6 months from having a version out with your new feature which is likely less than the tech cycle for your customers' IT shops or a customer buying a replacement gadget. Patents are not perfect but I think they are better than the alternative: risk of attempting innovations compounded with risk of getting a return before your competitors knock off your R&D.
Welcome to my die motherfucker list.
Is they are not legitimate until the court provides an order. Because someone is wearing a $100 uniform with a $5 badge doesn't make things legitimate without going through normal process.
Because it is being suggested that the test questions can change to give a different level of difficulty instead. Then you need to do the magic someone else in this thread alluded to that happens with CPA exams in Cali to figure out a weird blend of the difficulty of the questions and the number of right answers for each one to figure out who passes.
In a testing environment you either know the material to the level needed to pass or you don't. The teaching time is over now it is pass or fail. After the test is done you'll know what the kids no and what they need to learn and provided there is still time left in the course you can review the material they don't know, if it is the end of the year than the kid is going to math camp instead of football camp for summer.
There are 3.34E22 molecules of H20 in one gram of water. That is a hundred billion or so times more particles that are in this simulation. Astro calcs have just been including more and more particles since the first one with 2 interacting particles. The number of (stars/solar systems/galaxies/clusters/super clusters etc) that each of those particles is supposed to represent has just been getting smaller as we have faster and faster computers.
Because telling little Jimmy he got the question wrong would make him feel bad so instead lets piss away money so we can predict failure before it happens and be sure to water down the test just enough so Jimmy never needs to find out he sucks at math.
"If we can detect when they are going to fail, maybe we can change the text or switch the question to give them another one at a different level of difficulty, but also to keep them engaged,"
What is it with our current society that we can't accept the fact that we will fail sometimes that not all people will "get" a particular subject and within normal variations that is okay etc. I think they need to test the assertion that someone that gets a question wrong occasionally is not going to be engaged. I think it is more likely a more "squishy" reasoning "oh clearly when people are told they are wrong they'll feel bad and we don't want that". Personally it is the things I get wrong that keep my studying: once I start getting everything right I find it hard to keep working through the next 20 questions on the same topic that the prof assigned.
In science they retract things but ever notice how they never pay the grant money back? :-) The other side of it is the whole tenure thing: have nut job ideas but don't get caught long enough and all of a sudden you become immune to being fired, having to do relevant work etc.
I don't know if I agree that science funding has increased. It has moved around in most countries from pure science to "practical science". Which in turn makes people that want to do pure science having to come up with a hand wavy argument why their project is going to cure AIDS or cut gas requirements by 50%. That is a big problem because pure science should still be done and shouldn't have to justify itself by using what medical/engineering problem it will solve.
It is just like politics. You target your grant request to something that has lots of money going into it. So you aren't studying the growth of an earth worm you are studying "the mechanism whereby c elegans regulates its cell division with direct relevance to the understanding of how human breast tissue becomes malignant.". But really for the next 5 years you'll be looking at worms not working on how to apply it to humans, you just don't mention that part.