No. Of course not. But as long as it is possible to take the money from customers or employees and keep the profit the same or increase profit they will (or at least the vast majority of them will). Some companies have more elastic pricing ability. Some are in areas with more favorable labor situations. Some can squeeze suppliers [Walmart was famous for this] - pushing the same decisions down the line until there is nobody left to squeeze (ranchers, farmers for example). Some do all.
Regardless of what choices they have to live with for a certain time, their desire is to keep profit the same or increase it. Otherwise, why incorporate in the first place - they aren't a charity.
Direct corporate taxes are still paid by sales or services or giving less to the employees. It ends up coming out of the people's pockets somewhere and not the corporation unless the corporation is on the road to bankruptcy.
I haven't seen the clips, nor have I any particular desire to see the clips. But since I'm ignorant of the content, I have to ask the question... How was it different from a CNN video feed?
Wars have provided countless video feeds of people being killed. Missiles hitting targets in the early dawn hours... Munitions being dropped on positions... Whole divisions of mechanized forces being buried in sand by bombs...
I get the not wanting to glorify terrorism argument, and I agree to a point that eliminating the recognition factor for nuts that kill a lot of people might reduce the chances that a very tiny percentage of them would do their heinous deeds, but where does the news line get drawn. Any news organization worth its salt would have broken into its broadcast events with a breaking news story and if they had video, so much the better in their opinion. We decry the news organizations as being biased, and want the news fresh from an unbiased source. Well, this is the flip side of that.
While I do wish that Google didn't abandon/kill off so many things, how long would the list at Microsoft be of products that have been either purchased or developed in house and then killed or had their functionality for the rest of the world destroyed?
Then how many products that worked fine in version X of Windows are now broken due to lack of backward compatibility?
Then you could do the same thing with Linux or Apple or any other big company or group.
Blaming only Google for this annoying behavior seems a bit much.
Whether I agree or not, that ship sailed with Social Security and Medicare in the 30s. You can blame FDR for the precedent. Was it a good idea then? Did it fix a real problem the country had? How is this really any different? It all falls under the "general Welfare" clause. We are forced to send money to the government to hopefully get some money back one day in Social Security benefits. How is sending in premiums to handle health care any different? There were banks and stocks (although very shaky in the times of the Depression) but there were lots of private options to handle retirement - just like we have today in hospitals and doctors and pharmacies. Yet today we have Social Security and a host of other programs.
As I said - I don't care if it is government controlled or not. For all I care the private insurers can bid to control the fund every year. Whoever will pay the covered expenses at the lowest cost can have control next year while shouldering the responsibility for covering any under-funding of the reserves they goof on... There's lots of options for how to actually do it. The thing is to get it done.
There isn't any issue with separation of powers in this any more than there was an issue with separation of powers when Social Security was enacted. Congress wrote the legislation and the president signed it.
The chances of it happening with the fingers of the medical and insurers all through the Congress is about 0. Doesn't mean it wouldn't be a good idea.
The ability to go anywhere to get care instead of people being locked into a provider network will help. Having one payer will help with cost control. Medicare does work - there is one payout to the doctors. The clients can't be billed more. Push that concept out across the whole system of health care. If you are a medical provider, you work with the reimbursements that a single payer will pay based on their level of insurance. If it isn't covered, it isn't done. Wait till the next change window, pick a better level of care, and start paying the increased cost. Then get your procedure done. You can't hold out for someone else because there is no one else. All doctors and medical facilities only get reimbursed via the single payer. Make the reimbursements fair based on costs of living / doing business in a particular area and provide incentives for good work.
Single payer which I was proposing doesn't have to be private - it could just as well be government controlled like Medicare. But just because it is government controlled, it doesn't have to mean it is funded by taxes as implied. It can be funded in a similar model to Social Security, via an insurance premium based on what level of service a person signs up for. And if the levels of insurance are simplified and the coding for conditions is simplified, you can reduce a certain amount of the overhead that exists today. You would still have the same controls searching for fraud that you have today with Medicare, but you wouldn't have to be paying for shareholder's profits, wouldn't have quite as expensive a bureaucracy or so many, many different duplicated parts of a bureaucracy, or the whole sales side of the equation. All the medical side gets a small number of known forms to deal with to submit claims to one place. You just have to get the actuarial tables right and do better planning for the future than Social Security has done and balance it every year with enough ahead for paying for expected costs due to the aging population.
I agree as others have posted that there might not be a perfect system out there right now. But we have the capability to look at what is right and what is wrong in what is being done by other countries and try to get our first try better. The Obamacare wasn't it. It did nothing to force people to have insurance as the penalties weren't enough and there was nothing done to get rid of the Balkanization of the country with health networks. Maybe these ideas aren't perfect. But as I said - what we have is really bad for a large number of people. Co-pays are rising, reimbursed percentages are down, premiums are up, in-network and out-network trip people up due to the number of people involved and the weird hiring practices at hospitals, limits on pre-existing conditions always being a threat (even if there's a grace period for a while), worries about changing jobs due to losing benefits, negotiated benefits being yanked out from under you due to a company being bought out or taking bankruptcy, total limits on some treatments, and people operating under the illusion that they won't need treatment so don't need insurance and then getting in an accident, or having a child, or some other random thing happens and you're facing bankruptcy. Everyone needs covered and needs to be paying in to make it work.
Not quite. We just need one insurer that pays for everything. They can have two or three policies with defined levels of care with limits on the ability to move between plans. Everyone picks one. Everyone pays the premium to cover the costs for that plan (parents pay for kids to age 18). Roll up all the various insurance and government medical programs into this one insurer. Pick an unannounced date to price the stock on all private companies at one time and buy them out (or the fraction of their business that is medical out) and transfer the backing assets to the single insurer. Transfer the assets on account at the government (state and federal) and unions and corporations and everything else health related into that one insurer. Then each year adjust the premiums based on the costs seen and projected for the next year to keep the program 100% solvent. Add limits on tort actions. Make that insurer the only payer so every medical doctor or facility will know exactly what will be paid out for anyone based on which of the two or three policy levels they have selected. No in or out of network - every facility and doctor is by definition in network. Make the pharmacies use the same insurer for payment. Adjust reimbursed costs based on cost of living by location and adjust reimbursements paid from then on based on cost of living changes at each location. There would be some quirks to be worked out, but just go to single payer that covers everybody from birth to death and adjust premiums as needed and call it good. Let capitalism then work out how many MRI machines every local doctor really needs access to and the like. People are covered wherever they are in the country. Temporary visitors to the country could be charged a fee for accident type injuries during their stay here. Full time non-citizens living here could pick a plan just like anybody else. Big disruption in "the way we do things". Yes. But what we have now isn't working and isn't sustainable. Everyone actually "needs" good coverage regardless of age. When you are young, orthodontics are pricey. Glasses are pricey. Broken bones are always pricey. Pregnancy is pricey. Cover everybody. Adjust the tiers till things are workable - no reason to pay for pregnancy premiums when you aren't female or are but aren't in the childbearing years for example. Adjust a long term care rider based on your age. But other than a few things like that, keep the differences between the policies limited (think adding a pregnancy rider for example to a basic level of care policy). Simpler for everybody. You could even adjust the payouts based on the doctors and facilities overall success rate on the procedure to give experience a boost. Lots of possibilities, but it all starts with getting rid of the patchwork of insurance companies, massively overlapping facilities and equipment, and all of the in and out of network garbage there is.
Considering the early expansions of ARPANET to try to guarantee network survival in the event of nuclear attacks, going to a centralized hub for your country is a bit funny. Oh well, less to compromise or take out in the event of diplomacy failures.
It's not just a new line of work. People think retraining coal miners will solve everything but there are many coal mining locations where coal mining is the only industry supporting the towns in the area. If coal goes, many lives are affected beyond the miners, with no help offered to them. So you need to look at not only helping out coal mines but helping out whole communities. The same thing has happened across the crop belt as family farms have been bought up by corporations. A great many towns have disappeared. Just as with the family farm, most locations that mine coal aren't places corporations want to expand into to provide jobs in the first place, leading to more dislocations and skewing of the population statistics from small to large states.
Recent statistics say the average coal wage in this area is from $25/hour to $27/hour depending on the mine. There aren't many lines of work that pay that well without expensive training that the person is capable of handling. Your experience with trying to teach coding is a prime example.
I agree that natural gas and eventually recyclables are going to kill coal and that is one reason fewer people are taking it up as a career. But there are few careers that pay that well if you aren't college educated (and even many of those folks don't make that sort of money).
It does require money and time to do security analysis on old code. That is a fact of life. They're looking at migrating to Drupal 9 down the road, and 7 will be EOL'd. They're giving a long time duration warning for when EOL will happen.
That said, I haven't looked to see how many Drupal 7 modules haven't yet or won't be ported to Drupal 8. The module support is Drupal's Achilles heel if anything. The core isn't awful to move from release to release. But when large numbers of add-on modules are unsupported in the next release because the Drupal developers have changed things in annoying ways (even if for perfectly good reasons) it makes it tough to upgrade end user websites if there is no comparable functionality. You either drop those features or hope for the best, or if the functionality has been merged with core, you do a big database alteration to try to get the old functionality with the new core. With the number of severe security holes in 8 and 7 lately, hoping for the best isn't a good plan.
Only if Canada complained, and they are about as sparsely populated North of Montana as Montana is. Regardless, the ICC clause wouldn't work as an argument because such pollution isn't crossing a state border.
I suspect the prevailing winds most of the year are South to North. So any pollution they generate goes to Canada. There is probably little that does cross a state border. And at the rates wind blows through our state in the winter it is probably to diffuse to be measured at the border anyway. That doesn't mean it isn't there - just that it isn't easily seen.
You could always, you know, read the source and find out exactly what He does think about the state of the world - try Daniel, Revelation, assorted minor prophets, the Olivet prophecy recorded in a couple of the Gospels. That'd also give you a clue about what He thinks of worship of other gods (Norse mythology included).
If you're curious about superpowers or any of your second paragraph of questions, there's a lot of the rest of the Bible you could read. You'd find the superheros aren't really worth much compared to God.
It's all in where you live and the local choices you have. If you're in a big city with lots of choices - perhaps clustered in one of many malls - then no, shopping locally isn't a big issue (if you have transportation and time). For many smaller towns - throughout the fly-over states in particular - it is. Walmart has pretty good representation across the country - even in small towns. Sears and K-Mart - staples of yesterday - couldn't keep up and are mostly history. They weren't put out of business primarily by Amazon. They were put out of business by local brick and mortar Walmart stores (just like most mom and pop stores the writers here are championing were). Walmart, in turn, is facing competition with Amazon. Around and around it goes.
And the only reason they got money back was they did something in previous tax years that the government wanted them to do (build and grow) and in return for doing that got to depreciate assets (probably) over x years of taxes possibly leading to refunds if the credits and depreciation exceeded income. Have we benefited from Amazon getting as big as it has and thus having a negative income tax rate at certain times. Most would argue yes.
Should single mothers with kids get refundable tax credits (money back even with 0 tax liability)? The tax code says they can. They have a NEGATIVE income tax. Is it bad to help them or as a society are we OK with that? What's the difference?
Both the poor and the rich are making use of the tax code that Congress passed to the best of their ability. If you don't like it, stop re-electing your Representatives and Senators to Congress. Elect someone who will write a different tax code. There are many options. And while you're at it, elect some Congressmen and Presidents that don't spend as much money.
Taxes are ultimately paid by people. Corporate taxes are merely expense items. And unfortunately, there aren't enough wealthy people to cover the cost of government even if you tax their income at a high rate.
We need to look at eliminating payment for services rendered in any form other than salary or wages. Skip the payments of the well off by stock options. There is too much manipulation there and too much of tax favorable treatment. Get over the delusion they've foisted on people that somehow paying in stock will give them greater incentive to do the right thing for the company. Pay them the equivalent in dollars and let the people get a true appreciation of the real disparity in wages from the top to the bottom of the ladder.
Then make sure everyone is paying taxes. Push the pain down to the masses. The only way to get the debt situation headed in a different direction is to give the masses a reason to vote for someone who will actually stop spending money the country doesn't have for everything under the sun. We don't really need that many more aircraft carrier groups! We don't really need to be the world's policeman (or if we do take the territory on as a commonwealth or territory when done). As long as people feel no pain due to federal taxes they'll keep re-electing the people who keep pouring money down rat holes (and $8B for a wall qualifies). The rich getting richer isn't really the problem. The government deficit spending is the problem which is really about to hit GDP limits. The only way to do that is to wake the people up with more taxes. Unfortunately, those who write the tax laws are the ones who need to get booted out - catch-22.
Regardless of the size of the business, taxes are an expense item. And customers make that calculation all the time. Do I go drive around to 10 different local stores, try to find parking, walk to them in the wind and rain, see if they even carry an item I'm looking for, and then pay the same or higher price that Amazon is selling something for - or just click on amazon.com. Amazon is winning this battle for many things short of groceries and their purchase of Whole Foods gives them a entry there. And by the way, Amazon creates real jobs as well.
My comment was that too many years of expenses exceeding income leads to bankruptcy. Taxes are merely one expense. For many companies, you are correct that tax planning must come after "market will bear" comparisons. Amazon is to the point that people go to amazon.com to the exclusion of shopping on other on-line places or local retail for many items. For amazon, tax planning can indeed be dealt with by price adjustments and no consumer would bat an eye. At any rate, taxes are paid out of income or reducing expenses in other areas (benefits and payroll among the top candidates). So either way, corporate taxes hurt someone - consumers or employees - the most. They don't bother the big shareholders much.
Perhaps, but if they were "paying" taxes to the government, they'd just raise the price on their products and services by an appropriate amount until their profit margins were once again where they wanted them to be. Not all companies may be able to do that, but Amazon certainly can.
Taxes are expense items. Companies generally keep income >= expense or eventually they go under. Lots of that going around for what it's worth.
Land costs are so much less, Amazon wouldn't need 3 billion. Plus, since real estate costs are so much less the pay ongoing for employees would be lower. Granted an influx of 25,000 employees would increase city costs in many ways (schools, roads, utilities, and would temporarily spike house costs). Still, they are unlikely to come anywhere close to costs of living in NYC.
Competing in mobile requires the purchase of spectrum and building cell towers on a few select sites. Competing in broadband has huge right-of-way and construction costs associated with it. The spectrum is sold by the Federal government. The hard-line side of things is controlled by every individual municipality out there (along with right of ways along interstates or other routes for the fiber connecting you to the big players. And really, even in mobile there aren't that many competitors in many markets because of right of ways to construct cell towers and spectrum issues. Bandwidth is higher today. But bandwidth is higher in general for most customers only because the cable companies were able to run internet over cable. That's the only reason that is relevant to most people in the country. You aren't having to lease your own T1 for a measly 1.5 Mbps (compared to dialup) and in a lot of places the modern day equivalent to dial up that the phone companies offer isn't that much faster than dialup was. Once you start running internet over a cable system, you're at the mercy of the cable system for what they decide to upgrade in order to offer anything faster or whether they even want to serve an area. Our company is on the other side of the street from where cable is run. It has been a struggle to even get the local cable company to come and look at putting a connection over to any of our buildings on the block we are situated on (and we even have conduits running under the two of the facing streets. Comparing mobile to broadband is silly. It's like saying look at all the switch manufacturers we have (handsets)... Everything must be cool.
Never smoked anything heavy (or light for that matter).
You've read too much Asimov, Heinlein or other optimistic sci-fi authors. No matter what country you're in, there have been times that are worse than what we have now as well. Civil war, world war, plagues... Should we be doing better than we are? Of course. But not every outcome is better. Just look to history.
Room for spare parts and enough stuff on hand to change the mission on the fly?
Already did the port-a-potty size exploration eons ago and now sending something bigger with more monitoring capabilities to the spots that looked interesting?
Not saying I don't disagree with the port-a-potty size being best (and launch lots of them) instead of one big probe. But governments seem to go for the one big probe that everyone can have a part of building philosophy here. That's why we have so many cost overruns and under performing end results. The big science is best is why they're pushing for Mars colonies and moon colonies. Practical at some point in the future if we don't kill ourselves off first - possibly. Good plan now? No. It would prevent a very small selection of extinction events if they ever reached total self-sustainability, but that is a long way off.
Still firmly in the non-alien camp though. No reason to believe there isn't other intelligent life out there. No reason yet to believe there is either.
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No. Of course not. But as long as it is possible to take the money from customers or employees and keep the profit the same or increase profit they will (or at least the vast majority of them will). Some companies have more elastic pricing ability. Some are in areas with more favorable labor situations. Some can squeeze suppliers [Walmart was famous for this] - pushing the same decisions down the line until there is nobody left to squeeze (ranchers, farmers for example). Some do all.
Regardless of what choices they have to live with for a certain time, their desire is to keep profit the same or increase it. Otherwise, why incorporate in the first place - they aren't a charity.
Direct corporate taxes are still paid by sales or services or giving less to the employees. It ends up coming out of the people's pockets somewhere and not the corporation unless the corporation is on the road to bankruptcy.
I haven't seen the clips, nor have I any particular desire to see the clips. But since I'm ignorant of the content, I have to ask the question... How was it different from a CNN video feed?
Wars have provided countless video feeds of people being killed. Missiles hitting targets in the early dawn hours... Munitions being dropped on positions... Whole divisions of mechanized forces being buried in sand by bombs...
I get the not wanting to glorify terrorism argument, and I agree to a point that eliminating the recognition factor for nuts that kill a lot of people might reduce the chances that a very tiny percentage of them would do their heinous deeds, but where does the news line get drawn. Any news organization worth its salt would have broken into its broadcast events with a breaking news story and if they had video, so much the better in their opinion. We decry the news organizations as being biased, and want the news fresh from an unbiased source. Well, this is the flip side of that.
While I do wish that Google didn't abandon/kill off so many things, how long would the list at Microsoft be of products that have been either purchased or developed in house and then killed or had their functionality for the rest of the world destroyed?
Then how many products that worked fine in version X of Windows are now broken due to lack of backward compatibility?
Then you could do the same thing with Linux or Apple or any other big company or group.
Blaming only Google for this annoying behavior seems a bit much.
Whether I agree or not, that ship sailed with Social Security and Medicare in the 30s. You can blame FDR for the precedent. Was it a good idea then? Did it fix a real problem the country had? How is this really any different? It all falls under the "general Welfare" clause. We are forced to send money to the government to hopefully get some money back one day in Social Security benefits. How is sending in premiums to handle health care any different? There were banks and stocks (although very shaky in the times of the Depression) but there were lots of private options to handle retirement - just like we have today in hospitals and doctors and pharmacies. Yet today we have Social Security and a host of other programs.
As I said - I don't care if it is government controlled or not. For all I care the private insurers can bid to control the fund every year. Whoever will pay the covered expenses at the lowest cost can have control next year while shouldering the responsibility for covering any under-funding of the reserves they goof on... There's lots of options for how to actually do it. The thing is to get it done.
There isn't any issue with separation of powers in this any more than there was an issue with separation of powers when Social Security was enacted. Congress wrote the legislation and the president signed it.
The chances of it happening with the fingers of the medical and insurers all through the Congress is about 0. Doesn't mean it wouldn't be a good idea.
The ability to go anywhere to get care instead of people being locked into a provider network will help. Having one payer will help with cost control. Medicare does work - there is one payout to the doctors. The clients can't be billed more. Push that concept out across the whole system of health care. If you are a medical provider, you work with the reimbursements that a single payer will pay based on their level of insurance. If it isn't covered, it isn't done. Wait till the next change window, pick a better level of care, and start paying the increased cost. Then get your procedure done. You can't hold out for someone else because there is no one else. All doctors and medical facilities only get reimbursed via the single payer. Make the reimbursements fair based on costs of living / doing business in a particular area and provide incentives for good work.
Single payer which I was proposing doesn't have to be private - it could just as well be government controlled like Medicare. But just because it is government controlled, it doesn't have to mean it is funded by taxes as implied. It can be funded in a similar model to Social Security, via an insurance premium based on what level of service a person signs up for. And if the levels of insurance are simplified and the coding for conditions is simplified, you can reduce a certain amount of the overhead that exists today. You would still have the same controls searching for fraud that you have today with Medicare, but you wouldn't have to be paying for shareholder's profits, wouldn't have quite as expensive a bureaucracy or so many, many different duplicated parts of a bureaucracy, or the whole sales side of the equation. All the medical side gets a small number of known forms to deal with to submit claims to one place. You just have to get the actuarial tables right and do better planning for the future than Social Security has done and balance it every year with enough ahead for paying for expected costs due to the aging population.
I agree as others have posted that there might not be a perfect system out there right now. But we have the capability to look at what is right and what is wrong in what is being done by other countries and try to get our first try better. The Obamacare wasn't it. It did nothing to force people to have insurance as the penalties weren't enough and there was nothing done to get rid of the Balkanization of the country with health networks. Maybe these ideas aren't perfect. But as I said - what we have is really bad for a large number of people. Co-pays are rising, reimbursed percentages are down, premiums are up, in-network and out-network trip people up due to the number of people involved and the weird hiring practices at hospitals, limits on pre-existing conditions always being a threat (even if there's a grace period for a while), worries about changing jobs due to losing benefits, negotiated benefits being yanked out from under you due to a company being bought out or taking bankruptcy, total limits on some treatments, and people operating under the illusion that they won't need treatment so don't need insurance and then getting in an accident, or having a child, or some other random thing happens and you're facing bankruptcy. Everyone needs covered and needs to be paying in to make it work.
Not quite. We just need one insurer that pays for everything. They can have two or three policies with defined levels of care with limits on the ability to move between plans. Everyone picks one. Everyone pays the premium to cover the costs for that plan (parents pay for kids to age 18). Roll up all the various insurance and government medical programs into this one insurer. Pick an unannounced date to price the stock on all private companies at one time and buy them out (or the fraction of their business that is medical out) and transfer the backing assets to the single insurer. Transfer the assets on account at the government (state and federal) and unions and corporations and everything else health related into that one insurer. Then each year adjust the premiums based on the costs seen and projected for the next year to keep the program 100% solvent. Add limits on tort actions. Make that insurer the only payer so every medical doctor or facility will know exactly what will be paid out for anyone based on which of the two or three policy levels they have selected. No in or out of network - every facility and doctor is by definition in network. Make the pharmacies use the same insurer for payment. Adjust reimbursed costs based on cost of living by location and adjust reimbursements paid from then on based on cost of living changes at each location. There would be some quirks to be worked out, but just go to single payer that covers everybody from birth to death and adjust premiums as needed and call it good. Let capitalism then work out how many MRI machines every local doctor really needs access to and the like. People are covered wherever they are in the country. Temporary visitors to the country could be charged a fee for accident type injuries during their stay here. Full time non-citizens living here could pick a plan just like anybody else. Big disruption in "the way we do things". Yes. But what we have now isn't working and isn't sustainable. Everyone actually "needs" good coverage regardless of age. When you are young, orthodontics are pricey. Glasses are pricey. Broken bones are always pricey. Pregnancy is pricey. Cover everybody. Adjust the tiers till things are workable - no reason to pay for pregnancy premiums when you aren't female or are but aren't in the childbearing years for example. Adjust a long term care rider based on your age. But other than a few things like that, keep the differences between the policies limited (think adding a pregnancy rider for example to a basic level of care policy). Simpler for everybody. You could even adjust the payouts based on the doctors and facilities overall success rate on the procedure to give experience a boost. Lots of possibilities, but it all starts with getting rid of the patchwork of insurance companies, massively overlapping facilities and equipment, and all of the in and out of network garbage there is.
Considering the early expansions of ARPANET to try to guarantee network survival in the event of nuclear attacks, going to a centralized hub for your country is a bit funny. Oh well, less to compromise or take out in the event of diplomacy failures.
It's not just a new line of work. People think retraining coal miners will solve everything but there are many coal mining locations where coal mining is the only industry supporting the towns in the area. If coal goes, many lives are affected beyond the miners, with no help offered to them. So you need to look at not only helping out coal mines but helping out whole communities. The same thing has happened across the crop belt as family farms have been bought up by corporations. A great many towns have disappeared. Just as with the family farm, most locations that mine coal aren't places corporations want to expand into to provide jobs in the first place, leading to more dislocations and skewing of the population statistics from small to large states.
Recent statistics say the average coal wage in this area is from $25/hour to $27/hour depending on the mine. There aren't many lines of work that pay that well without expensive training that the person is capable of handling. Your experience with trying to teach coding is a prime example.
I agree that natural gas and eventually recyclables are going to kill coal and that is one reason fewer people are taking it up as a career. But there are few careers that pay that well if you aren't college educated (and even many of those folks don't make that sort of money).
Drupal 7 runs on php7.2.
It does require money and time to do security analysis on old code. That is a fact of life. They're looking at migrating to Drupal 9 down the road, and 7 will be EOL'd. They're giving a long time duration warning for when EOL will happen.
That said, I haven't looked to see how many Drupal 7 modules haven't yet or won't be ported to Drupal 8. The module support is Drupal's Achilles heel if anything. The core isn't awful to move from release to release. But when large numbers of add-on modules are unsupported in the next release because the Drupal developers have changed things in annoying ways (even if for perfectly good reasons) it makes it tough to upgrade end user websites if there is no comparable functionality. You either drop those features or hope for the best, or if the functionality has been merged with core, you do a big database alteration to try to get the old functionality with the new core. With the number of severe security holes in 8 and 7 lately, hoping for the best isn't a good plan.
Only if Canada complained, and they are about as sparsely populated North of Montana as Montana is. Regardless, the ICC clause wouldn't work as an argument because such pollution isn't crossing a state border.
I suspect the prevailing winds most of the year are South to North. So any pollution they generate goes to Canada. There is probably little that does cross a state border. And at the rates wind blows through our state in the winter it is probably to diffuse to be measured at the border anyway. That doesn't mean it isn't there - just that it isn't easily seen.
You could always, you know, read the source and find out exactly what He does think about the state of the world - try Daniel, Revelation, assorted minor prophets, the Olivet prophecy recorded in a couple of the Gospels. That'd also give you a clue about what He thinks of worship of other gods (Norse mythology included).
If you're curious about superpowers or any of your second paragraph of questions, there's a lot of the rest of the Bible you could read. You'd find the superheros aren't really worth much compared to God.
It's all in where you live and the local choices you have. If you're in a big city with lots of choices - perhaps clustered in one of many malls - then no, shopping locally isn't a big issue (if you have transportation and time). For many smaller towns - throughout the fly-over states in particular - it is. Walmart has pretty good representation across the country - even in small towns. Sears and K-Mart - staples of yesterday - couldn't keep up and are mostly history. They weren't put out of business primarily by Amazon. They were put out of business by local brick and mortar Walmart stores (just like most mom and pop stores the writers here are championing were). Walmart, in turn, is facing competition with Amazon. Around and around it goes.
And the only reason they got money back was they did something in previous tax years that the government wanted them to do (build and grow) and in return for doing that got to depreciate assets (probably) over x years of taxes possibly leading to refunds if the credits and depreciation exceeded income. Have we benefited from Amazon getting as big as it has and thus having a negative income tax rate at certain times. Most would argue yes.
Should single mothers with kids get refundable tax credits (money back even with 0 tax liability)? The tax code says they can. They have a NEGATIVE income tax. Is it bad to help them or as a society are we OK with that? What's the difference?
Both the poor and the rich are making use of the tax code that Congress passed to the best of their ability. If you don't like it, stop re-electing your Representatives and Senators to Congress. Elect someone who will write a different tax code. There are many options. And while you're at it, elect some Congressmen and Presidents that don't spend as much money.
Taxes are ultimately paid by people. Corporate taxes are merely expense items. And unfortunately, there aren't enough wealthy people to cover the cost of government even if you tax their income at a high rate.
We need to look at eliminating payment for services rendered in any form other than salary or wages. Skip the payments of the well off by stock options. There is too much manipulation there and too much of tax favorable treatment. Get over the delusion they've foisted on people that somehow paying in stock will give them greater incentive to do the right thing for the company. Pay them the equivalent in dollars and let the people get a true appreciation of the real disparity in wages from the top to the bottom of the ladder.
Then make sure everyone is paying taxes. Push the pain down to the masses. The only way to get the debt situation headed in a different direction is to give the masses a reason to vote for someone who will actually stop spending money the country doesn't have for everything under the sun. We don't really need that many more aircraft carrier groups! We don't really need to be the world's policeman (or if we do take the territory on as a commonwealth or territory when done). As long as people feel no pain due to federal taxes they'll keep re-electing the people who keep pouring money down rat holes (and $8B for a wall qualifies). The rich getting richer isn't really the problem. The government deficit spending is the problem which is really about to hit GDP limits. The only way to do that is to wake the people up with more taxes. Unfortunately, those who write the tax laws are the ones who need to get booted out - catch-22.
Or less than 0 with refundable tax credits.
Regardless of the size of the business, taxes are an expense item. And customers make that calculation all the time. Do I go drive around to 10 different local stores, try to find parking, walk to them in the wind and rain, see if they even carry an item I'm looking for, and then pay the same or higher price that Amazon is selling something for - or just click on amazon.com. Amazon is winning this battle for many things short of groceries and their purchase of Whole Foods gives them a entry there. And by the way, Amazon creates real jobs as well.
My comment was that too many years of expenses exceeding income leads to bankruptcy. Taxes are merely one expense. For many companies, you are correct that tax planning must come after "market will bear" comparisons. Amazon is to the point that people go to amazon.com to the exclusion of shopping on other on-line places or local retail for many items. For amazon, tax planning can indeed be dealt with by price adjustments and no consumer would bat an eye. At any rate, taxes are paid out of income or reducing expenses in other areas (benefits and payroll among the top candidates). So either way, corporate taxes hurt someone - consumers or employees - the most. They don't bother the big shareholders much.
Perhaps, but if they were "paying" taxes to the government, they'd just raise the price on their products and services by an appropriate amount until their profit margins were once again where they wanted them to be. Not all companies may be able to do that, but Amazon certainly can.
Taxes are expense items. Companies generally keep income >= expense or eventually they go under. Lots of that going around for what it's worth.
Land costs are so much less, Amazon wouldn't need 3 billion. Plus, since real estate costs are so much less the pay ongoing for employees would be lower. Granted an influx of 25,000 employees would increase city costs in many ways (schools, roads, utilities, and would temporarily spike house costs). Still, they are unlikely to come anywhere close to costs of living in NYC.
Competing in mobile requires the purchase of spectrum and building cell towers on a few select sites. Competing in broadband has huge right-of-way and construction costs associated with it. The spectrum is sold by the Federal government. The hard-line side of things is controlled by every individual municipality out there (along with right of ways along interstates or other routes for the fiber connecting you to the big players. And really, even in mobile there aren't that many competitors in many markets because of right of ways to construct cell towers and spectrum issues. Bandwidth is higher today. But bandwidth is higher in general for most customers only because the cable companies were able to run internet over cable. That's the only reason that is relevant to most people in the country. You aren't having to lease your own T1 for a measly 1.5 Mbps (compared to dialup) and in a lot of places the modern day equivalent to dial up that the phone companies offer isn't that much faster than dialup was. Once you start running internet over a cable system, you're at the mercy of the cable system for what they decide to upgrade in order to offer anything faster or whether they even want to serve an area. Our company is on the other side of the street from where cable is run. It has been a struggle to even get the local cable company to come and look at putting a connection over to any of our buildings on the block we are situated on (and we even have conduits running under the two of the facing streets. Comparing mobile to broadband is silly. It's like saying look at all the switch manufacturers we have (handsets)... Everything must be cool.
Never smoked anything heavy (or light for that matter).
Learning principles would be even better.
You've read too much Asimov, Heinlein or other optimistic sci-fi authors. No matter what country you're in, there have been times that are worse than what we have now as well. Civil war, world war, plagues... Should we be doing better than we are? Of course. But not every outcome is better. Just look to history.
Room for spare parts and enough stuff on hand to change the mission on the fly?
Already did the port-a-potty size exploration eons ago and now sending something bigger with more monitoring capabilities to the spots that looked interesting?
Not saying I don't disagree with the port-a-potty size being best (and launch lots of them) instead of one big probe. But governments seem to go for the one big probe that everyone can have a part of building philosophy here. That's why we have so many cost overruns and under performing end results. The big science is best is why they're pushing for Mars colonies and moon colonies. Practical at some point in the future if we don't kill ourselves off first - possibly. Good plan now? No. It would prevent a very small selection of extinction events if they ever reached total self-sustainability, but that is a long way off.
Still firmly in the non-alien camp though. No reason to believe there isn't other intelligent life out there. No reason yet to believe there is either.