Maybe so, but that's not why the system is the way it is. And I don't think our current politicians have enough foresight to be worried about this anyhow. I think it's simple inertia keeping us going on the path that made some real sense decades ago (insert union rant here).
The current school system is, in fact, a massive, well-documented, openly discussed at the time "conspiracy" to train kids to be good little manufacturing workers, with learning as a secondary goal. This wasn't evil at the time: manufacturing jobs were great jobs, once, long ago. But we need engineers now, and those are the great jobs, and the whole system actively discourages the curiosity and exploration and skepticism of authority needed to develop the engineering mindset.
Take a stand, have a moral compass, do the right thing, not the easy thing. "Just following orders" when herding the children into camps is not behavior anyone would consider laudable.
So, your priority isn't "fund the government" nor "do what's best for the nation" but "tax people I arbitrarily decide are bad as punishment". This why Democracy fails: pettiness over success.
Your argument is "the Sovereign should have all the power he wants, and every whim indulged, because the only other choice is anarchy, and life there is nasty brutish and short." Hobbes' Leviathan. The opposing political philosophy was voiced be Locke. Have you heard of him? Much of the US Declaration of Independence was copied from Locke's works.
What do you think it says that this nation was founded on the principle that your simple-minded view was so wrong that it's worth going to war over?
Sure, that never causes a problem. Why, every time it's been tried in history it has ended well. Wait, sorry, it always ends the other way, but hey, maybe this time will be different!
Were you joking? Jails in many cities in California now require you to pay for your stay, unless you want to be shipped to a state prison instead. We're not quite the statist utopia yet, but Cali comes close.
Yes, yes, we've heard it all before, it's those 99% of police who are bad apples that give the other 1% a bad name. Totally unfair of me to overgeneralize from several such occurrences in my actual life when arguing about someone else's fantasy.
That's easy. The only bit that is taxed is corporate income. Yet any money spent for redistribution, investment in the corporation, etc is not taxed. In short, the only part that's taxed is the money earned in a year and sitting in a bank account, dividends from stock for a year, etc. Taxing corporations motivates them to not sit on piles of cash but instead either (1) pay it as wages or dividends or (2) improve the company and presumably improve the economy/country.
Were you proposing a system? Or confused about today's system? It's an interesting proposal, but of course dividends are double-taxed today.
Overall, though, I think people are confused about why a corporation would "hoard" money in bad times. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the reserves needed to see you through a couple standard deviations of possible futures. We all benefit from corporations not going under if bad times continue, after all. So, unless you're actually a fan of bailouts, perhaps cut a company some slack when they build some reserves when facing uncertain times?
Why? If they're still hiring people in the US, still being taxed in the US, etc, why does it matter?
The executives want all the most important jobs close to them. All the top-tier engineering jobs, all the HR, product managers, senior corporate managers and other "useless overhead" jobs, all the jobs that pay really well tend to be where the corporate HQ is.
We "must" tax the corporation? What kind of goal is that? Do you see the end-goal of a government as being to tax everything it can as much as it can? Many people do, it seems.
How about, instead, the government works to grow the US economy as much as possible. More jobs, more income, the tax revenue thing will work out OK in the end.
. Don't like it, go somewhere like Somalia and conduct your business. Good riddance
No, you fool, how about we have more jobs here instead of your befuddled plan? Only a statist cares more about taxes than the health of the nation.
Did you have an argument to go with that assertion?
No system of taxation has ever gotten federal revenues above 19% of GDP for long, and corporate taxes are a fairly small portion of federal revenue to begin with. We only tax corporations out of some sense of social justice, not because it's a useful way to fund the government. The key ingredient to "saving the country" is to spend less that we actually take in in federal revenue. We can hypothesize all day about what might happen with some new tax plan, but long term if we don't spend less than we make, it will end in tears.
The proper goal and aim of the government is not to feather its own nest with larger taxes in the first place, but to grow the economy! I give 0 fucks whether corporations pay taxes here or not, the important thing is whether the incentives are to have jobs here or not - especially well-paying high-skill jobs! And each and every law that makes it more expensive to do business in America detracts from that,
But perhaps you had an argument along those lines?
First, their job is to make life safer for everyone and to prevent crime. They do that.
WTF? Someone actually believes this? *boggle*
I used to deliver pizza for a living. Sometimes you get mugged. Once as I returned to the store, battered and bleeding, there was a cop right there in the store, getting some free pizza.
He seemed annoyed that we interrupted his free-pizza-getting by asking him to at least write an incident report. He outright rejected the notion that the police should make the area safer, and instead chastised us for doing business in such a dangerous neighborhood. He also wrote me a ticket for something about my car. Presumably the only reason he didn't shake me down for the money I had on me was that someone else had already stole that.
0 interest in policing. 0 interest in making things safer. 0 interest in preventing crime in any way that required effort on his part. They don't do that. They take your money and extort businesses for free stuff. That's what the police do.
The real problem is that companies can be headquartered anywhere! America benefits hugely from having the US be the home of choice for corporate HQs. Lots of high-paying jibs here because of that. But enough BS like this and there simply won't be any large US corporations any more.
We don't need a corporate income tax anyhow. We tax wages, and we tax distributions via dividends and capital gains - what exactly do we accomplish by taxing the corporation itself? We're going to tax that same money anyhow, so we're better off keeping the US as the preferred HQ location for multinationals.
"disenchanted/upset customer"? Clearly, you haven't worked in tech support, or known anyone who has, or read any of the blogs or horror stories, or, really, informed yourself in any way about this. Humans have a bell curve of both "crazy" and "mean", and the tail end of either is not something you'd ever want to come into contact with.
My sympathies are with the Comcast tech support on this one. As bad as Comcast can be, which is at least 300 milli-Hitlers bad, the tail-end of the worst people to call customer support can be worse still. Or just too stupid to be allowed to own a computer.
Brady Haran is neither, but he puts actual scientists on his YouTube channels, and they talk about honest science (and occasional amusing trivia), with no CGI or celebrity required. No politics, no manufactured quotes, many Nobel prizes.
I'm not a fan of the television series, but do enjoy the books
I enjoyed the first few, but the latest book was rubbish and I've entirely lost interest in the story thanks to the pace of his writing. He doesn't seem to have much in the way of original plot ideas, so it's mostly about character moments, and you have to keep that sort of writing coming for me to stay interested in those characters.
The series, however, I rather enjoy. While it's probably the first series to ever make me say "there is such a thing as too much gratuitous nudity", the pacing is vastly better than the books, the important character moments are all there, and the gaps between seasons aren't so long that I forget who everyone is.
More fundamentally; the only reason to insist solar do baseload is quasi religious.
It's the only thing that can scale, unless fusion ever stops being "just 20 years away". Think of the energy needs of 11 billion people at American consumption levels (~40 TW), which isn't at all a far-fetched projection and of course it won't stop there. Even ground-based Solar hits scaling issues there - it's one thing to shade everything that's already paved, and maybe all the salt flats, but at some point you get significant ecological effects.
Oh, sure, for now, but Solar for now can't be baseload anyhow. Orbital can. It will be a while before panels get cheap enough and enough not reliant on scarce materials to scale. It seems inevitable now, but it's still a ways off. Meanwhile, private space efforts keep making progress. In 50 years, when solar has wide adoption and we're struggling with baseload at night, and in bad climates, I think orbital will be a viable choice vs nuclear or gas.
The only argument for space-based is "it's a way around NIMBY". PG&E did some serious research into it, as there's just no where in Northern California they're allowed to build a new power plant, and demand keeps rising. The main reason the plan failed is still NIMBY: They'd need a 1-block receiving station for the incoming power, and could never get that approved. Fuck California.
It's also useful in Northern latitudes. In Texas, ground-based makes perfect sense: lots of land, far enough south. In Seattle, not so much - even on the 12 clear days each year, you're too far north for much efficiency.
The chip requires a PIN to be entered. If you don';t do that correctly within three times, the card is rendered useless. And this does not have to be three consecutive times.
So even if you have the card, you are unable to do any purchases with it.
Turns out: not so much. As was predicted by the security community, there are flaws, and after a couple years the flaws were exploited, and the PIN is retrievable. This cycle has repeated (is chip-and-PIN in its 3rd generation now? it's at least the second).
Chip-and-PIN means only that the bank makes you liable for your stolen money, claiming "the card couldn't possibly have been stolen because magic". It solves a problem for the banks, and makes it worse for the consumer - shocking, I know.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe so, but that's not why the system is the way it is. And I don't think our current politicians have enough foresight to be worried about this anyhow. I think it's simple inertia keeping us going on the path that made some real sense decades ago (insert union rant here).
I love the fact that the Amazon reviews mock Kermit, Texas for this.
The current school system is, in fact, a massive, well-documented, openly discussed at the time "conspiracy" to train kids to be good little manufacturing workers, with learning as a secondary goal. This wasn't evil at the time: manufacturing jobs were great jobs, once, long ago. But we need engineers now, and those are the great jobs, and the whole system actively discourages the curiosity and exploration and skepticism of authority needed to develop the engineering mindset.
Take a stand, have a moral compass, do the right thing, not the easy thing. "Just following orders" when herding the children into camps is not behavior anyone would consider laudable.
So, your priority isn't "fund the government" nor "do what's best for the nation" but "tax people I arbitrarily decide are bad as punishment". This why Democracy fails: pettiness over success.
Your argument is "the Sovereign should have all the power he wants, and every whim indulged, because the only other choice is anarchy, and life there is nasty brutish and short." Hobbes' Leviathan. The opposing political philosophy was voiced be Locke. Have you heard of him? Much of the US Declaration of Independence was copied from Locke's works.
What do you think it says that this nation was founded on the principle that your simple-minded view was so wrong that it's worth going to war over?
They can create as much money as they wish
Sure, that never causes a problem. Why, every time it's been tried in history it has ended well. Wait, sorry, it always ends the other way, but hey, maybe this time will be different!
Sounds like a plan to cut off your nose to spiderface. Never spiderface: no good can come of that.
Were you joking? Jails in many cities in California now require you to pay for your stay, unless you want to be shipped to a state prison instead. We're not quite the statist utopia yet, but Cali comes close.
Yes, yes, we've heard it all before, it's those 99% of police who are bad apples that give the other 1% a bad name. Totally unfair of me to overgeneralize from several such occurrences in my actual life when arguing about someone else's fantasy.
That's easy. The only bit that is taxed is corporate income. Yet any money spent for redistribution, investment in the corporation, etc is not taxed. In short, the only part that's taxed is the money earned in a year and sitting in a bank account, dividends from stock for a year, etc. Taxing corporations motivates them to not sit on piles of cash but instead either (1) pay it as wages or dividends or (2) improve the company and presumably improve the economy/country.
Were you proposing a system? Or confused about today's system? It's an interesting proposal, but of course dividends are double-taxed today.
Overall, though, I think people are confused about why a corporation would "hoard" money in bad times. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the reserves needed to see you through a couple standard deviations of possible futures. We all benefit from corporations not going under if bad times continue, after all. So, unless you're actually a fan of bailouts, perhaps cut a company some slack when they build some reserves when facing uncertain times?
Why? If they're still hiring people in the US, still being taxed in the US, etc, why does it matter?
The executives want all the most important jobs close to them. All the top-tier engineering jobs, all the HR, product managers, senior corporate managers and other "useless overhead" jobs, all the jobs that pay really well tend to be where the corporate HQ is.
We "must" tax the corporation? What kind of goal is that? Do you see the end-goal of a government as being to tax everything it can as much as it can? Many people do, it seems.
How about, instead, the government works to grow the US economy as much as possible. More jobs, more income, the tax revenue thing will work out OK in the end.
. Don't like it, go somewhere like Somalia and conduct your business. Good riddance
No, you fool, how about we have more jobs here instead of your befuddled plan? Only a statist cares more about taxes than the health of the nation.
Did you have an argument to go with that assertion?
No system of taxation has ever gotten federal revenues above 19% of GDP for long, and corporate taxes are a fairly small portion of federal revenue to begin with. We only tax corporations out of some sense of social justice, not because it's a useful way to fund the government. The key ingredient to "saving the country" is to spend less that we actually take in in federal revenue. We can hypothesize all day about what might happen with some new tax plan, but long term if we don't spend less than we make, it will end in tears.
The proper goal and aim of the government is not to feather its own nest with larger taxes in the first place, but to grow the economy! I give 0 fucks whether corporations pay taxes here or not, the important thing is whether the incentives are to have jobs here or not - especially well-paying high-skill jobs! And each and every law that makes it more expensive to do business in America detracts from that,
But perhaps you had an argument along those lines?
First, their job is to make life safer for everyone and to prevent crime. They do that.
WTF? Someone actually believes this? *boggle*
I used to deliver pizza for a living. Sometimes you get mugged. Once as I returned to the store, battered and bleeding, there was a cop right there in the store, getting some free pizza.
He seemed annoyed that we interrupted his free-pizza-getting by asking him to at least write an incident report. He outright rejected the notion that the police should make the area safer, and instead chastised us for doing business in such a dangerous neighborhood. He also wrote me a ticket for something about my car. Presumably the only reason he didn't shake me down for the money I had on me was that someone else had already stole that.
0 interest in policing. 0 interest in making things safer. 0 interest in preventing crime in any way that required effort on his part. They don't do that. They take your money and extort businesses for free stuff. That's what the police do.
Of course not - nothing's free. And if the police officer executes you, your family will be billed for the bullet (as is the norm in statist utopias).
The real problem is that companies can be headquartered anywhere! America benefits hugely from having the US be the home of choice for corporate HQs. Lots of high-paying jibs here because of that. But enough BS like this and there simply won't be any large US corporations any more.
We don't need a corporate income tax anyhow. We tax wages, and we tax distributions via dividends and capital gains - what exactly do we accomplish by taxing the corporation itself? We're going to tax that same money anyhow, so we're better off keeping the US as the preferred HQ location for multinationals.
"disenchanted/upset customer"? Clearly, you haven't worked in tech support, or known anyone who has, or read any of the blogs or horror stories, or, really, informed yourself in any way about this. Humans have a bell curve of both "crazy" and "mean", and the tail end of either is not something you'd ever want to come into contact with.
My sympathies are with the Comcast tech support on this one. As bad as Comcast can be, which is at least 300 milli-Hitlers bad, the tail-end of the worst people to call customer support can be worse still. Or just too stupid to be allowed to own a computer.
Brady Haran is neither, but he puts actual scientists on his YouTube channels, and they talk about honest science (and occasional amusing trivia), with no CGI or celebrity required. No politics, no manufactured quotes, many Nobel prizes.
I'm not a fan of the television series, but do enjoy the books
I enjoyed the first few, but the latest book was rubbish and I've entirely lost interest in the story thanks to the pace of his writing. He doesn't seem to have much in the way of original plot ideas, so it's mostly about character moments, and you have to keep that sort of writing coming for me to stay interested in those characters.
The series, however, I rather enjoy. While it's probably the first series to ever make me say "there is such a thing as too much gratuitous nudity", the pacing is vastly better than the books, the important character moments are all there, and the gaps between seasons aren't so long that I forget who everyone is.
More fundamentally; the only reason to insist solar do baseload is quasi religious.
It's the only thing that can scale, unless fusion ever stops being "just 20 years away". Think of the energy needs of 11 billion people at American consumption levels (~40 TW), which isn't at all a far-fetched projection and of course it won't stop there. Even ground-based Solar hits scaling issues there - it's one thing to shade everything that's already paved, and maybe all the salt flats, but at some point you get significant ecological effects.
Oh, sure, for now, but Solar for now can't be baseload anyhow. Orbital can. It will be a while before panels get cheap enough and enough not reliant on scarce materials to scale. It seems inevitable now, but it's still a ways off. Meanwhile, private space efforts keep making progress. In 50 years, when solar has wide adoption and we're struggling with baseload at night, and in bad climates, I think orbital will be a viable choice vs nuclear or gas.
The only argument for space-based is "it's a way around NIMBY". PG&E did some serious research into it, as there's just no where in Northern California they're allowed to build a new power plant, and demand keeps rising. The main reason the plan failed is still NIMBY: They'd need a 1-block receiving station for the incoming power, and could never get that approved. Fuck California.
It's also useful in Northern latitudes. In Texas, ground-based makes perfect sense: lots of land, far enough south. In Seattle, not so much - even on the 12 clear days each year, you're too far north for much efficiency.
The chip requires a PIN to be entered. If you don';t do that correctly within three times, the card is rendered useless.
And this does not have to be three consecutive times.
So even if you have the card, you are unable to do any purchases with it.
Turns out: not so much. As was predicted by the security community, there are flaws, and after a couple years the flaws were exploited, and the PIN is retrievable. This cycle has repeated (is chip-and-PIN in its 3rd generation now? it's at least the second).
Chip-and-PIN means only that the bank makes you liable for your stolen money, claiming "the card couldn't possibly have been stolen because magic". It solves a problem for the banks, and makes it worse for the consumer - shocking, I know.
Just because the shady back-alley freeware does it, does not in any way make a good excuse for a AAA software vendor to do so
And AAA vendors don't. Adobe products are simply shady back-alley freeware as proven by their installer. Java too, of course.