This is a very different scenario than a 1$ CEO. The 1$ CEO actually takes a real pay cut and banks it all on their stock options. They are not trying to cheat on their taxes, though if their gamble pays off they do end up paying fewer taxes as a side benefit. They still pay all the taxes they are required to.
The CPA in the story was trying to cheat on his taxes. He took a salary that was far below the average compensation of a green CPA, let alone a CPA with 20 years experience. He then took an extra $380k in profit distributions over the course of two years. He did this specifically to avoid payroll taxes.
He might have gotten away with it if he payed himself $50k a year, but $24k was just too obvious. Why not just go for broke and pay yourself $1?
On the whole, however the taxes are fair. Individually they seem like a scam, but it works out pretty well.
The people who own 40% of the wealth in this country (the top 1% earners) pay roughly 40% of the taxes. That's with all their tricks and loopholes to get out of them, they still pay 40%. The people who own 3% of the wealth (the bottom 50% earners) pay about 3% of the taxes.
On the whole, it's fair. Individually it doesn't seem so, because a lot of those top 1% will be paying almost 50% of their income in taxes, while a huge portion of the bottom 50% pay 0% in taxes, but overall it works well.
Consumption based taxes would even things out individually, but would flip the scale on its head by class. Someone making $100 million a year isn't likely to spend more than $20-30 million, a frugal multi-millionaire may only spend $10 million. A 20% consumption tax would mean he is only paying 2% of his income in taxes.
Contrast that with someone living pay check to pay check, making $15,000 a year. They have to spend all of their money every year, so a 20% consumption tax would mean he pays 20% of his income.
You end up with the people who need every dime they can get their hands on to survive paying the highest percentage of their income in taxes. That can only be considered fair by the cruelest definitions of fair.
Options have restrictions on when and how they can be exercised. They have a value of zero if they cannot be exercised.
Buying and selling options is like gambling - the seller wants the "sure thing" of money now, and the buyer is betting that will be worth a lot more than he paid for them later. The buyer loses this bet if the company does not do as well as expected. It's vastly more risky than simply investing in stocks, but there is a potential to make huge profits - sometimes doubling or tripling your money.
The half dozen Revenue Acts (a new one being signed into law just a few years ago) and the Internal Revenue Code (codified statutory tax law) beg to differ.
The video seems to suggest income tax was illegal before the 16th amendment. This is clearly not the case, since income tax has been around since 1861, and the only time it ran afoul of the constitution was when a direct tax on property was not apportioned among the states by population. The 16th amendment removed that need and allowed all income tax from all sources to be unapportioned. It had nothing to do with the legality of the tax, only the way in which the federal government spent the tax dollars.
You do realize that the principle argument of "The Law That Never Was" is that the punctuation in the ratified 16th amendment documents was cleaned up, and therefore the ratification is invalid, right? In the US v. Thomas, the Supreme Court ruled on exactly the matter brought up in the video. Guess what they ruled? That the amendment is legitimate!
Slight differences in text and punctuation happen in pretty much every amendment to the constitution. So long as they are not egregious, they are authorized and the amendment goes into effect. I'm sure the same thing happened with the constitution itself. I'm sorry, but forgetting to capitalize the word "States" does not change the law.
It's probably the dumbest argument I've ever heard, and the amendment doesn't even deal with Congress's power to tax income (the constitution already gave it that power), making the point moot from the tax payer's perspective. It only deals with Congress's power to use that taxed income. If this argument were valid (it's not, Benson was convicted of fraud by a jury of his peers for perpetrating it) then a State could sue the federal government, but not an individual.
Seriously, you have to be an idiot to believe this load of crock. And I mean that in the traditional "can't possibly get any dumber than this" sense of the word, not the modern, friendly "you idiot" sense. Rocks would beat you in a battle of wits.
1. The top 1% owns about 40% of the wealth and pays about 40% of the taxes. The point was that the rich are paying their fair share, not that they are paying more than their fair share.
2. Dumb shit, payroll taxes are not levied against all income, they are only levied against payroll income (that's why they are called payroll taxes!). That means wage earners only. Someone who makes $10 million a year playing the stock market won't pay a dime in Medicare taxes or FICA, and the IRS is never going to ask for it. Nobody pays more than about $13k a year in FICA taxes anyway, it's capped. Medicare is 3% on any payroll distributions. Income taxes with such exceptions should be, and are, treated differently.
Options often also have a minimum share price before they can be exercised.
I.e stocks are $40 each right now, and the company gives him options that can be exercised at $50 after two years. That gives the CEO an incentive to both focus beyond next quarter's earnings and ensure the company is as profitable as possible after two years.
They keep giving the CEO these things though, so it's like dangling a carrot in front of him.
That and bonuses are how the $1 club makes its money, and it's usually a pretty good arrangement for the company. It really can't backfire any worse than a fixed salary (if the company goes under it's not like the salaried CEO pays anything either), and if done right it can provide a huge boost in morale and CEO effectiveness.
Why do you think the top companies out there do it? The CEOs of these companies are clearly personally invested in the company's success, and while stock options are probably not the cause of that personal investment they certainly reflect it.
It's probably not safe if you're taking $100,000 in company profits per year on top of that.
Clearly you aren't paying yourself enough in that case.
That's what got this guy in trouble, he was taking profits three to four times higher than his salary every year. The judge ruled his effective salary (which you could easily derive by looking at the minimum profit taken for the time period in question, and perhaps cutting it by 10-20%) was about $90,000 a year, and ordered that he pay taxes on that amount.
The obvious difference between this guy and the $1 club is the $1 club don't take the profits from the company. That was his mistake.
The $1 club gets paid in stock options, which have their own tax structure, and the occasional comped service. While it is a good way to avoid taxes, they are usually still taking a big hit in the pocket book for doing so. It can actually be pretty good for the company, too. In the case of Steve Jobs and Google's top three, their net worth is directly tied to how well the company performs, so if they are at all concerned about money they are going to try to make the company as profitable as possible to boost their stock values.
The Google CEOs are in the realm that a few million a year in salary is quite literally chump change. Taking the hit in salary to boost morale and their public image can mean an extra few million in stock values every year anyway. It's probably well worth it.
I'm really not sure how a non-public S-corp could pull off a similar feat. The best option is probably to have the S-corp comp everything you can think of, and once you've run out of things to comp figure out your salary from that. Taking leftover profits well in excess of your salary is asking for trouble.
and the written form of a sentence is less ambiguous than the spoken form.
I agree with just about everything else you said except for this. According the Oxford English Dictionary, the 500 most commonly used words have an average of 23 different meanings each (linky). This leaves a massive amount of room for ambiguity, allowing the same sentence to have a half dozen different meanings or more. Tone and emphasis play a huge part in disambiguating a sentence. The only way to disambiguate a written sentence is through context (which itself can be ambiguous) or completely re-structuring the sentence to remove the ambiguity.
An example of an intentionally ambiguous sentence by Lehigh professor Robert Thornton (for use in writing "recommendations" for unworthy students):
I would urge you to waste no time in making this candidate an offer of employment.
The student is intended to read that as "Don't waste any time, hurry up and offer this candidate a job." The actual meaning intended, however, is "Don't waste your time by offering this candidate a job."
The distinction is easy to make when spoken, by changing the tone of the statement, yet the only way to clarify it when written is to completely re-write the sentence (which, in this particular case, is entirely the point).
In English, there are also many words that can be pronounced different ways, each way giving them a distinct meaning (heteronyms);
It's far worse than that. Most words with multiple meanings are not pronounced differently at all. The word "round" has 70 distinct meanings, each of them pronounced exactly the same.
English grammar is easy until you start throwing in the exceptions. What makes it difficult is the fact that there is an exception (or two, or three) for everything. They usually aren't so uncommon that you don't see them on a regular basis, either. They are just uncommon enough that it can be very difficult to remember them. You need to know a lot more than just the rules in order to speak proper English. You also need to know all the exceptions and when they apply. Worse still, there are exceptions that apply in one case out of several apparently similar cases. Why? Just because that's the way it is. It's the exceptions that usually throw people. Worse is when people learn an exception in one case and believe it applies in all similar cases, when in fact it only applies in that one specific case.
One example that is so often screwed up it drives me insane:
Bill and I went to the coffee shop and bought espresso for Dan, Cheryl, Bill and me.
That is the correct way to write the sentence, yet it is extremely common for people to say "Bill and me went to the coffee shop". Upon learning their mistake (as this is often corrected immediately by anybody who knows better), the same person will often begin to say "for Dan, Cheryl, Bill, and I" which they had previously been saying correctly! And to people who don't know any better, using "I" in the objective case actually sounds better and less awkward than the correct "me"!
That's just one example, and that's not even a mistake of exceptions, it's just a common misunderstanding of the rules. Pronouns are a source of all kinds of trouble - people almost always screw up it's and its. That one is an exception to the rules. Verb tenses, particularly the perfect tenses, are often screwed up.
The easiest grammar I've ever seen is Japanese. They even go through the trouble of labeling the parts of the sentence when you write or speak it! Prepositions can be a little confusing, but it really isn't bad at all. The hardest part about it really is the yoda-like sentence structure. Once you figure that out it's downright glorious in its simplicity.
Should you really be upset at a group of people who are so fervently dedicated to helping you sound smarter?
The tools of correction may be cruel, but they are effective. Perhaps if you cared a little more about what you wrote the grammar nazi's would not be such a problem.
Nobody is saying you're stupid. They're just saying you sound stupid.;)
That's just science speak, the same as how "Theory of Gravity" doesn't really mean that gravity is a nebulous theory concocted by some dude high on drugs.
People only think things like that because they have no idea what a theory actually is. They generally confuse it with a hypothesis, which often actually is a nebulous thought concocted by some dude high on drugs. Then he tests it, and lo and behold it works! Then it is a theory, which may or may not hold up given time and further testing.
What we call scientific Laws are really just theories that are so basic, fundamental, and just plain old that nobody can even come up with a scenario in which they might not be completely accurate. Most of the big ones NewtonCase in point the "Theory of Gravity". It wasn't long ago that it was the "Law of Gravity". However, Einstein kind of screwed that up for Newton with Relativity, and black holes really screwed things up for Einstein. Now we have to have at least two theories of Gravity to cover the full spectrum of what Gravity affects, so it has kind of lost its status. That doesn't make Gravity any less real, however, and that should be quite obvious to just about anybody. The easy out is to re-define the "Law of Gravity" from Newton's original law to a much more simplified (and less useful) one, but the damage is done.
Deaf people have notoriously bad spelling. Case in point, here is a link to a "Yahoo Answers" question asking whether people thought deaf university students should be given leeway with spelling and grammar, when even foreign language students are not: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090702074259AAKDeM3
NASA research into sub-vocalization showed that even deaf people sub-vocalize - that is they twitch muscles related to the words they are reading. Those deaf people who have never heard the sounds simply sub-vocalize with their hands instead of their throat and mouths.
In other words, they have the exact same potential pitfalls that everyone else has. The only difference is they wiggle their fingers instead of wiggling their jaws.
Good spelling must be learned. It does not come naturally to anybody. The only reason people who learned to read phonetically have trouble spelling is because spelling was not emphasized. It should have been. How can you possibly expect to correctly spell a word in a language as mixed up and confused as English if you've never learned to spell? Even sight readers have this problem for any new word (which is much harder for them to learn than someone who learned phonetically - phonics shouldn't be neglected either). They simply know how to spell the words they know how to write, they don't know the rules for spelling or grammar any more than a phonetic reader.
The goal of sight reading is to pick up the phonetics naturally anyway. When that fails you get functional illiteracy - people who can read the 2,000-3,000 words the learned from all those "See Spot Run" books and have no way of learning new words. That's why the functional illiteracy rate in the US is estimated to be between 15% and 30%.
This is getting off topic, but the point is the only reason people can't spell is because their education was neglected. They cannot spell because they were not taught to spell correctly.
Blaming phonics is a cop out that is demonstrably false.
For a contrasting example, spelling bees don't exist in Japan. To say a word correctly is to spell it correctly. Good luck writing it though. It is entirely possible to learn to read Japanese without ever learning to speak it. In fact, if you can read Chinese, you can figure out Japanese (and vice versa). The only difference between the written languages is the sentence structure.
I have found Firefox's spell-checker has improved my spelling quite a bit.
Since the mechanism for correcting the spelling sucks (right click and choose) I usually go back and fix it myself. This imprints the correct spelling in my brain, and it generally only takes a few misspellings before I spell a word correctly the first time.
It's not perfect, but it does mean I'll eventually be as good Firefox's spellchecker - which I've noticed is often missing correct permutations of various words, by the way.
I naturally assume reading that many books means you are reading light material - novels and such. If you are reading academic textbooks at one page per minute, I'm jealous.
One page per minute of an average paperback novel is only 250 words per minute. This is pretty slow for such light reading. Most people should be able to hit around 500 wpm on something like a novel. 100-300 wpm is normal for heavy reading, like academic texts and such.
That means 7 300 page novels should be more like 2.5 hours of reading every day. Since the average American watches 5 hours of TV a night, I'd say sacrificing half of that to reading is not a bad thing at all. Even if you did take 5 hours of reading a night to hit 7 novels a week, I don't think it would be a bad trade.
People who do not communicate effectively are naturally less likely to be taken seriously in a written argument. Bad writing of any kind seriously distracts from the point you are trying to make, making your communication (and argument) weaker. I can usually get around it just fine, but there are still a number of cases where I can't stand to read someone's post simply because they couldn't bother to use any punctuation, or they decided that their entire post should be one big, run-on sentence.
Spelling mistakes I care less about, but fragments are especially bad. Native English speakers might realize that by "Type of thinking" the GP meant "This type of thinking", but what if a non-native reader came across that? They'd either scratch their head for a half hour trying to figure it out or just give up and ignore the argument. People who understand what you meant to say will almost certainly (and usually involuntarily) think less of your opinion for the simple fact that you sound like an idiot (note that this has absolutely no bearing on the actual argument).
Good writing is critical for effective communication. Frankly, in my opinion the GGP's point was severely damaged by the errors in his post. Had it been flawless, the point could only be argued on the merits. Instead the GP was able to come back with a "you're clearly just an idiot" attack, and you in turn had to defend him. This pulled me off the original post as well, simply to disagree with you.
Had the post been communicated effectively none of these distractions would have taken place, and we would simply be discussing whether or not the grammar nazi's add any value to the discussion.
You might think I disagree with the GGP, but I actually agree with him in principle. My point, however, is that arguments are not won with pure logic. If you are going to make an argument, it is best not to paint a giant bulls-eye on your back by committing serious and obvious grammatical mistakes.
I think you need a new dictionary, as irony has nothing to do with coincidence:
irony n pl -nies 1. the humorous or mildly sarcastic use of words to imply the opposite of what they normally mean 2. an instance of this, used to draw attention to some incongruity or irrationality 3. incongruity between what is expected to be and what actually is, or a situation or result showing such incongruity
"For" has a specific usage, and it applies in this case. In fact, even "for all intensive purposes" is correct grammatically. The problem is that phrase has a very different meaning than "for all intents and purposes", and it is often used in the wrong context. This makes the speaker sound like a complete idiot.
That's what clang_jangle was doing (and what you have so nicely spelled out here). It should have been quite clear after "orientate", but it was apparently lost on both Worthless_Comments and you.
Clang_jangle clearly assumed you guys would be smart enough to figure out that he was saying "for all intensive purposes" is not correct in the context in which it is generally used, and that the correct saying is "for all intents and purposes". Really, it's a well known saying, it should not have been this hard.
What I am doing now is exactly the same thing as what uneasyrider-taicho, who you replied to, was attempting to do. Even his not-so-subtle statement was misunderstood, which is sad.
Since subtle (and not-so-subtle) nuance (and not all that nuanced) seems to be completely lost on you (and Worthless_Comments), I have attempted to spell things out for you. I don't hold out much hope that you will understand. (In case you didn't get it, I am insulting your intelligence here. It's not as fun to spell it out, but I'm really not sure how much help you need to understand these things, so I'm covering my bases, so to speak.)
Slashdot Mirror
This happened in 2002-2003.
This is a very different scenario than a 1$ CEO. The 1$ CEO actually takes a real pay cut and banks it all on their stock options. They are not trying to cheat on their taxes, though if their gamble pays off they do end up paying fewer taxes as a side benefit. They still pay all the taxes they are required to.
The CPA in the story was trying to cheat on his taxes. He took a salary that was far below the average compensation of a green CPA, let alone a CPA with 20 years experience. He then took an extra $380k in profit distributions over the course of two years. He did this specifically to avoid payroll taxes.
He might have gotten away with it if he payed himself $50k a year, but $24k was just too obvious. Why not just go for broke and pay yourself $1?
On the whole, however the taxes are fair. Individually they seem like a scam, but it works out pretty well.
The people who own 40% of the wealth in this country (the top 1% earners) pay roughly 40% of the taxes. That's with all their tricks and loopholes to get out of them, they still pay 40%. The people who own 3% of the wealth (the bottom 50% earners) pay about 3% of the taxes.
On the whole, it's fair. Individually it doesn't seem so, because a lot of those top 1% will be paying almost 50% of their income in taxes, while a huge portion of the bottom 50% pay 0% in taxes, but overall it works well.
Consumption based taxes would even things out individually, but would flip the scale on its head by class. Someone making $100 million a year isn't likely to spend more than $20-30 million, a frugal multi-millionaire may only spend $10 million. A 20% consumption tax would mean he is only paying 2% of his income in taxes.
Contrast that with someone living pay check to pay check, making $15,000 a year. They have to spend all of their money every year, so a 20% consumption tax would mean he pays 20% of his income.
You end up with the people who need every dime they can get their hands on to survive paying the highest percentage of their income in taxes. That can only be considered fair by the cruelest definitions of fair.
You are misinformed.
Options have restrictions on when and how they can be exercised. They have a value of zero if they cannot be exercised.
Buying and selling options is like gambling - the seller wants the "sure thing" of money now, and the buyer is betting that will be worth a lot more than he paid for them later. The buyer loses this bet if the company does not do as well as expected. It's vastly more risky than simply investing in stocks, but there is a potential to make huge profits - sometimes doubling or tripling your money.
Most people aren't being taxed much at all, so...
The half dozen Revenue Acts (a new one being signed into law just a few years ago) and the Internal Revenue Code (codified statutory tax law) beg to differ.
The video seems to suggest income tax was illegal before the 16th amendment. This is clearly not the case, since income tax has been around since 1861, and the only time it ran afoul of the constitution was when a direct tax on property was not apportioned among the states by population. The 16th amendment removed that need and allowed all income tax from all sources to be unapportioned. It had nothing to do with the legality of the tax, only the way in which the federal government spent the tax dollars.
You do realize that the principle argument of "The Law That Never Was" is that the punctuation in the ratified 16th amendment documents was cleaned up, and therefore the ratification is invalid, right? In the US v. Thomas, the Supreme Court ruled on exactly the matter brought up in the video. Guess what they ruled? That the amendment is legitimate!
Slight differences in text and punctuation happen in pretty much every amendment to the constitution. So long as they are not egregious, they are authorized and the amendment goes into effect. I'm sure the same thing happened with the constitution itself. I'm sorry, but forgetting to capitalize the word "States" does not change the law.
It's probably the dumbest argument I've ever heard, and the amendment doesn't even deal with Congress's power to tax income (the constitution already gave it that power), making the point moot from the tax payer's perspective. It only deals with Congress's power to use that taxed income. If this argument were valid (it's not, Benson was convicted of fraud by a jury of his peers for perpetrating it) then a State could sue the federal government, but not an individual.
Seriously, you have to be an idiot to believe this load of crock. And I mean that in the traditional "can't possibly get any dumber than this" sense of the word, not the modern, friendly "you idiot" sense. Rocks would beat you in a battle of wits.
1. The top 1% owns about 40% of the wealth and pays about 40% of the taxes. The point was that the rich are paying their fair share, not that they are paying more than their fair share.
2. Dumb shit, payroll taxes are not levied against all income, they are only levied against payroll income (that's why they are called payroll taxes!). That means wage earners only. Someone who makes $10 million a year playing the stock market won't pay a dime in Medicare taxes or FICA, and the IRS is never going to ask for it. Nobody pays more than about $13k a year in FICA taxes anyway, it's capped. Medicare is 3% on any payroll distributions. Income taxes with such exceptions should be, and are, treated differently.
Options often also have a minimum share price before they can be exercised.
I.e stocks are $40 each right now, and the company gives him options that can be exercised at $50 after two years. That gives the CEO an incentive to both focus beyond next quarter's earnings and ensure the company is as profitable as possible after two years.
They keep giving the CEO these things though, so it's like dangling a carrot in front of him.
That and bonuses are how the $1 club makes its money, and it's usually a pretty good arrangement for the company. It really can't backfire any worse than a fixed salary (if the company goes under it's not like the salaried CEO pays anything either), and if done right it can provide a huge boost in morale and CEO effectiveness.
Why do you think the top companies out there do it? The CEOs of these companies are clearly personally invested in the company's success, and while stock options are probably not the cause of that personal investment they certainly reflect it.
It's probably not safe if you're taking $100,000 in company profits per year on top of that.
Clearly you aren't paying yourself enough in that case.
That's what got this guy in trouble, he was taking profits three to four times higher than his salary every year. The judge ruled his effective salary (which you could easily derive by looking at the minimum profit taken for the time period in question, and perhaps cutting it by 10-20%) was about $90,000 a year, and ordered that he pay taxes on that amount.
The obvious difference between this guy and the $1 club is the $1 club don't take the profits from the company. That was his mistake.
The $1 club gets paid in stock options, which have their own tax structure, and the occasional comped service. While it is a good way to avoid taxes, they are usually still taking a big hit in the pocket book for doing so. It can actually be pretty good for the company, too. In the case of Steve Jobs and Google's top three, their net worth is directly tied to how well the company performs, so if they are at all concerned about money they are going to try to make the company as profitable as possible to boost their stock values.
The Google CEOs are in the realm that a few million a year in salary is quite literally chump change. Taking the hit in salary to boost morale and their public image can mean an extra few million in stock values every year anyway. It's probably well worth it.
I'm really not sure how a non-public S-corp could pull off a similar feat. The best option is probably to have the S-corp comp everything you can think of, and once you've run out of things to comp figure out your salary from that. Taking leftover profits well in excess of your salary is asking for trouble.
and the written form of a sentence is less ambiguous than the spoken form.
I agree with just about everything else you said except for this. According the Oxford English Dictionary, the 500 most commonly used words have an average of 23 different meanings each (linky). This leaves a massive amount of room for ambiguity, allowing the same sentence to have a half dozen different meanings or more. Tone and emphasis play a huge part in disambiguating a sentence. The only way to disambiguate a written sentence is through context (which itself can be ambiguous) or completely re-structuring the sentence to remove the ambiguity.
An example of an intentionally ambiguous sentence by Lehigh professor Robert Thornton (for use in writing "recommendations" for unworthy students):
I would urge you to waste no time in making this candidate an offer of employment.
The student is intended to read that as "Don't waste any time, hurry up and offer this candidate a job." The actual meaning intended, however, is "Don't waste your time by offering this candidate a job."
The distinction is easy to make when spoken, by changing the tone of the statement, yet the only way to clarify it when written is to completely re-write the sentence (which, in this particular case, is entirely the point).
In English, there are also many words that can be pronounced different ways, each way giving them a distinct meaning (heteronyms);
It's far worse than that. Most words with multiple meanings are not pronounced differently at all. The word "round" has 70 distinct meanings, each of them pronounced exactly the same.
English grammar is easy until you start throwing in the exceptions. What makes it difficult is the fact that there is an exception (or two, or three) for everything. They usually aren't so uncommon that you don't see them on a regular basis, either. They are just uncommon enough that it can be very difficult to remember them. You need to know a lot more than just the rules in order to speak proper English. You also need to know all the exceptions and when they apply. Worse still, there are exceptions that apply in one case out of several apparently similar cases. Why? Just because that's the way it is. It's the exceptions that usually throw people. Worse is when people learn an exception in one case and believe it applies in all similar cases, when in fact it only applies in that one specific case.
One example that is so often screwed up it drives me insane:
Bill and I went to the coffee shop and bought espresso for Dan, Cheryl, Bill and me.
That is the correct way to write the sentence, yet it is extremely common for people to say "Bill and me went to the coffee shop". Upon learning their mistake (as this is often corrected immediately by anybody who knows better), the same person will often begin to say "for Dan, Cheryl, Bill, and I" which they had previously been saying correctly! And to people who don't know any better, using "I" in the objective case actually sounds better and less awkward than the correct "me"!
That's just one example, and that's not even a mistake of exceptions, it's just a common misunderstanding of the rules. Pronouns are a source of all kinds of trouble - people almost always screw up it's and its. That one is an exception to the rules. Verb tenses, particularly the perfect tenses, are often screwed up.
The easiest grammar I've ever seen is Japanese. They even go through the trouble of labeling the parts of the sentence when you write or speak it! Prepositions can be a little confusing, but it really isn't bad at all. The hardest part about it really is the yoda-like sentence structure. Once you figure that out it's downright glorious in its simplicity.
+1 Funny
Writing poorly makes you sound like a dumbass.
Should you really be upset at a group of people who are so fervently dedicated to helping you sound smarter?
The tools of correction may be cruel, but they are effective. Perhaps if you cared a little more about what you wrote the grammar nazi's would not be such a problem.
Nobody is saying you're stupid. They're just saying you sound stupid. ;)
That's just science speak, the same as how "Theory of Gravity" doesn't really mean that gravity is a nebulous theory concocted by some dude high on drugs.
People only think things like that because they have no idea what a theory actually is. They generally confuse it with a hypothesis, which often actually is a nebulous thought concocted by some dude high on drugs. Then he tests it, and lo and behold it works! Then it is a theory, which may or may not hold up given time and further testing.
What we call scientific Laws are really just theories that are so basic, fundamental, and just plain old that nobody can even come up with a scenario in which they might not be completely accurate. Most of the big ones NewtonCase in point the "Theory of Gravity". It wasn't long ago that it was the "Law of Gravity". However, Einstein kind of screwed that up for Newton with Relativity, and black holes really screwed things up for Einstein. Now we have to have at least two theories of Gravity to cover the full spectrum of what Gravity affects, so it has kind of lost its status. That doesn't make Gravity any less real, however, and that should be quite obvious to just about anybody. The easy out is to re-define the "Law of Gravity" from Newton's original law to a much more simplified (and less useful) one, but the damage is done.
The most important rule in English is this:
For every rule, there is an exception, even this one!
We're still much, much better off than a pictographic language, which a third of the world is still stuck with.
That's one thing we can certainly thank the Arabs for.
How the mighty have fallen.
You'd think by the second time you'd have learned not to read his posts any more.
Guess you aren't too bright.
Your teacher lied to you.
Deaf people have notoriously bad spelling. Case in point, here is a link to a "Yahoo Answers" question asking whether people thought deaf university students should be given leeway with spelling and grammar, when even foreign language students are not:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090702074259AAKDeM3
NASA research into sub-vocalization showed that even deaf people sub-vocalize - that is they twitch muscles related to the words they are reading. Those deaf people who have never heard the sounds simply sub-vocalize with their hands instead of their throat and mouths.
In other words, they have the exact same potential pitfalls that everyone else has. The only difference is they wiggle their fingers instead of wiggling their jaws.
Good spelling must be learned. It does not come naturally to anybody. The only reason people who learned to read phonetically have trouble spelling is because spelling was not emphasized. It should have been. How can you possibly expect to correctly spell a word in a language as mixed up and confused as English if you've never learned to spell? Even sight readers have this problem for any new word (which is much harder for them to learn than someone who learned phonetically - phonics shouldn't be neglected either). They simply know how to spell the words they know how to write, they don't know the rules for spelling or grammar any more than a phonetic reader.
The goal of sight reading is to pick up the phonetics naturally anyway. When that fails you get functional illiteracy - people who can read the 2,000-3,000 words the learned from all those "See Spot Run" books and have no way of learning new words. That's why the functional illiteracy rate in the US is estimated to be between 15% and 30%.
This is getting off topic, but the point is the only reason people can't spell is because their education was neglected. They cannot spell because they were not taught to spell correctly.
Blaming phonics is a cop out that is demonstrably false.
For a contrasting example, spelling bees don't exist in Japan. To say a word correctly is to spell it correctly. Good luck writing it though. It is entirely possible to learn to read Japanese without ever learning to speak it. In fact, if you can read Chinese, you can figure out Japanese (and vice versa). The only difference between the written languages is the sentence structure.
I have found Firefox's spell-checker has improved my spelling quite a bit.
Since the mechanism for correcting the spelling sucks (right click and choose) I usually go back and fix it myself. This imprints the correct spelling in my brain, and it generally only takes a few misspellings before I spell a word correctly the first time.
It's not perfect, but it does mean I'll eventually be as good Firefox's spellchecker - which I've noticed is often missing correct permutations of various words, by the way.
I naturally assume reading that many books means you are reading light material - novels and such. If you are reading academic textbooks at one page per minute, I'm jealous.
One page per minute of an average paperback novel is only 250 words per minute. This is pretty slow for such light reading. Most people should be able to hit around 500 wpm on something like a novel. 100-300 wpm is normal for heavy reading, like academic texts and such.
That means 7 300 page novels should be more like 2.5 hours of reading every day. Since the average American watches 5 hours of TV a night, I'd say sacrificing half of that to reading is not a bad thing at all. Even if you did take 5 hours of reading a night to hit 7 novels a week, I don't think it would be a bad trade.
Not really.
People who do not communicate effectively are naturally less likely to be taken seriously in a written argument. Bad writing of any kind seriously distracts from the point you are trying to make, making your communication (and argument) weaker. I can usually get around it just fine, but there are still a number of cases where I can't stand to read someone's post simply because they couldn't bother to use any punctuation, or they decided that their entire post should be one big, run-on sentence.
Spelling mistakes I care less about, but fragments are especially bad. Native English speakers might realize that by "Type of thinking" the GP meant "This type of thinking", but what if a non-native reader came across that? They'd either scratch their head for a half hour trying to figure it out or just give up and ignore the argument. People who understand what you meant to say will almost certainly (and usually involuntarily) think less of your opinion for the simple fact that you sound like an idiot (note that this has absolutely no bearing on the actual argument).
Good writing is critical for effective communication. Frankly, in my opinion the GGP's point was severely damaged by the errors in his post. Had it been flawless, the point could only be argued on the merits. Instead the GP was able to come back with a "you're clearly just an idiot" attack, and you in turn had to defend him. This pulled me off the original post as well, simply to disagree with you.
Had the post been communicated effectively none of these distractions would have taken place, and we would simply be discussing whether or not the grammar nazi's add any value to the discussion.
You might think I disagree with the GGP, but I actually agree with him in principle. My point, however, is that arguments are not won with pure logic. If you are going to make an argument, it is best not to paint a giant bulls-eye on your back by committing serious and obvious grammatical mistakes.
Damnit.
Your dictionary is fine, my posting is not.
I meant to post to one below yours.
Now I've ruined it.
I think you need a new dictionary, as irony has nothing to do with coincidence:
irony
n pl -nies
1. the humorous or mildly sarcastic use of words to imply the opposite of what they normally mean
2. an instance of this, used to draw attention to some incongruity or irrationality
3. incongruity between what is expected to be and what actually is, or a situation or result showing such incongruity
The really funny thing is that no it is not.
"For" has a specific usage, and it applies in this case. In fact, even "for all intensive purposes" is correct grammatically. The problem is that phrase has a very different meaning than "for all intents and purposes", and it is often used in the wrong context. This makes the speaker sound like a complete idiot.
That's what clang_jangle was doing (and what you have so nicely spelled out here). It should have been quite clear after "orientate", but it was apparently lost on both Worthless_Comments and you.
Clang_jangle clearly assumed you guys would be smart enough to figure out that he was saying "for all intensive purposes" is not correct in the context in which it is generally used, and that the correct saying is "for all intents and purposes". Really, it's a well known saying, it should not have been this hard.
What I am doing now is exactly the same thing as what uneasyrider-taicho, who you replied to, was attempting to do. Even his not-so-subtle statement was misunderstood, which is sad.
Since subtle (and not-so-subtle) nuance (and not all that nuanced) seems to be completely lost on you (and Worthless_Comments), I have attempted to spell things out for you. I don't hold out much hope that you will understand. (In case you didn't get it, I am insulting your intelligence here. It's not as fun to spell it out, but I'm really not sure how much help you need to understand these things, so I'm covering my bases, so to speak.)
He didn't say a kingdom, he said his kingdom. There is a huge difference.
Honestly if I could trade something imaginary for anything I'd totally do it. I mean, I could always imagine a new kingdom couldn't I?
It's like the guy who managed to get $5 for his air-guitar. Pretty sweet deal I think.