Again, you call something 'lunacy' without going through the court cases, that in fact DEFINE what INCOME is.
16th amendment does no such thing.
There are of-course a large number of other problems there that I touch upon, but you are clearly incapable of understanding words in English language.
"nutcase", good to know nothing changes on/., same old, same old.
Though after all the years, you think I do not in fact exercise what I believe in? By the way, you should be happy that people can in fact move their money somewhere you'd call a 'tax shelter', if there was no way for anybody to hide from government taxes, the taxes on everybody would be much higher.
It's very simple, without the competition there is a monopoly. Even within the USA, various States have different tax rates (and some have no State income taxes at all), and so there is competition even inside there, which shows you how it works. Push the people enough and they move their money, they move themselves even. That's what keeps every State from constantly raising the taxes higher and higher, they know people have a choice and can leave.
Same thing exactly applies to 'tax havens', without them there is nothing to prevent governments from raising taxes ever higher.
Kill tax havens and you kill your economy as well though, you'll kill savings and investment (though in case of USA, Japan and Europe they are successful at that just with inflation and existing taxes and regulations).
You are talking about things that you didn't in fact think about. You should go read the 16th, then go read the link to my comment where I explain that what is in the amendment is not in fact authorisation to collect an income tax. It is an allowance to tax 'income' (without defining what that is) without apportionment.
It was left up to the courts to define what income was, and I talk about the court cases and SCOTUS decisions in my comment, which show that SCOTUS explained that an unapportioned tax cannot be direct, so it must be an indirect tax. Eventually the court explained that in order to have an 'indirect income' is by dis-associating a person from his income, and that was possible to do through a corporate balance sheet, so the 'income tax' in fact was explained to be a corporate profit tax.
There is no individual profit, individually you have incomes, not profits, otherwise you have to be able to subtract your own costs (depreciation of your body is part of it) from your revenues.
Again, you can read the comment, obviously you commented without doing it, otherwise you would at the minimum come back with something meaningful to say rather than that, whatever that was.
Interstate commerce tax imposed by USA Congress is a constitutional tax, it's an excise, an import even, a duty, basically a federal sales tax is legal if it is uniform.
What is in fact illegal is an income tax, payroll tax, Medicare tax, death tax, those are in fact illegal taxes but the system doesn't care about the legality of it, it just imposes itself.
By the way saying that a tax is 'regressive' means approving discrimination. You want to apply laws differently to different people based on their specific circumstances, that's injustice and discrimination.
The Federal tax must be uniform, the USA Constitution does not give authority to the Congress to prevent individual States, counties, municipalities from collecting their own taxes.
The question is whether this law going to force Amazon (and the rest) to collect taxes for localities where Amazon has no physical presence? That would be unconstitutional, federal government cannot force a retailer to collect local taxes.
Federally Constitutional excise tax is not a local sales tax. Also there is an interesting question about legality of forcing the seller to collect the tax, even if it is Constitutional. Of-course the government has no problem turning bankers and financial types into unpaid FBI and IRS agents, so forcing an online store to be one is not out of their character, they don't have a problem with it.
Wow, so deep. Computer is the Internet, Internet is the computer.
Mainframes are specialised equipment, server farms are almost generic computers with redundancies. The real difference is the cost. Today's server farms would cost many factors more if they were built with specialised mainframes, there is no other real difference, they are really there for the same purpose.
All systems expand to the limit of all available energy. Your government health care system will never be enough, it always has to grow its spending and the increase in demand will grow with it to eat up all of the available resources.
Insurance based system on the other hand is not even supposed to be a health care system. Insurance is there to cover you for cases that you cannot afford to pay for yourself out of pocket, that's the entire premise of insurance. Treating it as if it is a managed health care account is the wrong way to run insurance.
You SHOULD have your managed health care account and you should manage it by yourself, not as a collective, it's up to you how you spread out your resources and how you pay for your routine health care needs. Insurance is there to cover you in cases of catastrophic failure.
If you don't understand what I am talking about realise that you have car insurance not for the purposes of putting fuel into your tank, replacing tires or doing routine checks and oil changes, it's there first of all as a liability coverage to insure that you don't go bankrupt in case somebody sues you, because you are involved in some road accident. Fixing your car is a secondary added product benefit in case you decide to pay for it.
What people should do is get the most coverage they can for catastrophic events and get it as cheaply as possible by signing up for the largest deductible they can get (and afford).
Insurance should be insurance, normal health care should be bought out of pocket like all other products and services, that's the way to make sure that the prices don't skyrocket and people can actually afford health care (with an added benefit of reducing government spending, lowering taxes and being able to manage your own individual freedoms).
Don't pay attention to that, J2EE is a crutch, it is an attempt to replace an actual architectural thought with a copy paste solution. It's not worth the trouble, it creates more problems than it solves and it forces people into a rigid pattern of thought that does not actually allow them to look at the real business problem they are trying to solve. The architect is reduced to a typist with J2EE, every step is predetermined, the so called 'scalability' is not in fact achieved, the only they it ends up doing is replicating the entire application across a set of servers and pushing the session objects into every node, that's the gist of their ability to 'scale'. It only scales vertically, it misses what ideas like MapReduce provide (for example), horizontal scalability.
Also J2EE recycles the same approach to data treatment from project to project, so everything is as slow as the slowest data access component (so they insert more and more layers between their entity beans and the physical database in hope they'll boost the performance) and in reality in most cases what is needed is an actual architectural solution that takes into account the specifics of the business problem, but that is completely avoided, totally neglected by the so called 'architects' that stick to the cut and paste J2EE paradigm. They completely forgot (if they ever knew) what the hell architect is supposed to do in the first place.
This is by the way how big shops like Oracle end up charging even more money by breaking the legs of the architectural team and then handing them yet another crutch, something like AquaLogic Data Services (Oracle Data Services now).
Today you can take a look at any so called 'enterprise' application and see tons and tons and tons of 'infrastructure' and almost no actual logic and in reality everything is just data in a database somewhere, and all the layers of manipulations and transformations are supposedly designed to 'scale' and in fact they are the bottleneck, they are the reason that the systems are slow.
But hey, it's enterprise, so you can always rely on the idiots that buy it to throw more money at the hardware when this shit inevitably grinds to a halt.
But when it gets to big applications, and you are architecting an application, JEE makes it so much easier to deliver quality.
- this is just a false statement, that's why you are confused.
It is easy to deliver the same shit over and over with J2EE, that is true, however there is much LESS architectural thought going into designing applications that follow exactly the same predetermined path because of the constraints, limits and specific requirements of the J2EE paradigm than if you actually throw away that crutch and start thinking about the real problem at hand, what is the application you are building, how exactly will you have to scale it, in what sense is it going to be scalable.
Your idea is the exact backward idea that if somebody is trying to architecture something, they have to go the specific predetermined J2EE way. In reality what you end up with is a very rigid construct that is less likely to be scalable and maintainable than an application that is in fact designed with the context of the application in mind.
J2EE is basically a copying machine, it doesn't require architectural skills at all, that's the point of it.
I disagree, I actually built an EJB container long ago, so no lack of understanding of what that is, however AFAIC it is all about truly architecting a solution that fits the purpose, the 'one size fit all' ideology of EJBs is fine of-course, for 'enterprise', which is synonymous with 'no original thought is allowed', but if you want an actual good solution you don't do it this way.
I stick to Tomcat, never mind EJBs, don't need them. The fewer components and compilation steps the better AFAIC. You have to choose what to use for a connection pool and have a good grip on your own transaction handling of-course, but that's really not a problem, it's blown out of proportion.
I would argue that American involvement in WWI is what inevitably led to WWII. If USA abstained during WWI, Kaiser would have stayed in power one way (by winning) or another (with an eventual truce). USA entered that war, changed the balance of power and Kaiser lost, Germany was forced to pay the reparations, the economy was screwed and that's what provided the necessary background for the rise of Hitler.
I believe that you are serious, now here is my absolutely serious counterproposal.
I would like to see a Bad Motherfucker political party.
Here is what it would entail:
1. You have to physically fight your way through the ranks to achieve authority. The number of fights and who fights whom is secondary, I think drawing straws is not a bad idea.
2. To become a party leader you have to proves yourself by surviving in the party for a minimum of 3 years (minimum 2 fights a month) and killing at least 5 other members with your bare hands.
3. To become party nominee for the POTUS, you have to have at the minimum 5 years and 12 dead bodies behind you.
4. There should be an element of surprise mixed into this in order to ensure some level of luck, so in some random situations one or both of the politicians get some type of a weapon for their next fight.
5. Anybody that knowingly breaks the law or tries to pass a piece of legislation that takes away freedoms of individuals gets blown up by a land mine.
If you are a Justice Party then you should be about true justice.
So let's do this: 1. Strict government adherence to the set Law, the Constitution. 2. No deviation from the Law for the government, for the politicians. 3. All laws must apply in exactly the same manner to all individuals. 4. No discrimination against individuals based on any personal circumstances, you can't have justice if you don't apply the law in exactly the same way to all people. 5. No retroactive laws under any circumstances. 6. In order to pass any legislation, it must FIRST pass against ALL the tests of the existing Law, unit test your legislation against all Laws so to speak. 7. Never allow your sentiments to override your Laws. 8. Have a Law based party, anybody that violates the Law must be immediately removed from his or her position of power. 9. Strict separation of power between branches, so do not allow the Executive branch actually come up with the Law as it happens right now on daily basis, where some bureaucrat that is given authority to run something also decides on the details of the actual Law that is supposed to govern his actions. 10. All your actions must pass the muster of all the Laws right in front of the eyes of the public, I am talking about complete transparency on every decision.
So those are your commandments if you are talking about real justice.
But let me take a wild guess, you are not talking about real justice, you are talking about discrimination and outcomes that you want to base on your preferences. When you say "Justice" what you really mean is discrimination against individuals based on their personal circumstances for the purpose of achieving your goals, whatever they are (so called 'just society', which is simply another socialist party).
I don't believe my list of 10 suggestions will make it into your platform.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, you call something 'lunacy' without going through the court cases, that in fact DEFINE what INCOME is.
16th amendment does no such thing.
There are of-course a large number of other problems there that I touch upon, but you are clearly incapable of understanding words in English language.
What open now reading blogosphere panopticum O'Hara.
Special /. edition
That's not my comment, take the blinders off.
"nutcase", good to know nothing changes on /., same old, same old.
Though after all the years, you think I do not in fact exercise what I believe in? By the way, you should be happy that people can in fact move their money somewhere you'd call a 'tax shelter', if there was no way for anybody to hide from government taxes, the taxes on everybody would be much higher.
It's very simple, without the competition there is a monopoly. Even within the USA, various States have different tax rates (and some have no State income taxes at all), and so there is competition even inside there, which shows you how it works. Push the people enough and they move their money, they move themselves even. That's what keeps every State from constantly raising the taxes higher and higher, they know people have a choice and can leave.
Same thing exactly applies to 'tax havens', without them there is nothing to prevent governments from raising taxes ever higher.
Kill tax havens and you kill your economy as well though, you'll kill savings and investment (though in case of USA, Japan and Europe they are successful at that just with inflation and existing taxes and regulations).
You are talking about things that you didn't in fact think about. You should go read the 16th, then go read the link to my comment where I explain that what is in the amendment is not in fact authorisation to collect an income tax. It is an allowance to tax 'income' (without defining what that is) without apportionment.
It was left up to the courts to define what income was, and I talk about the court cases and SCOTUS decisions in my comment, which show that SCOTUS explained that an unapportioned tax cannot be direct, so it must be an indirect tax. Eventually the court explained that in order to have an 'indirect income' is by dis-associating a person from his income, and that was possible to do through a corporate balance sheet, so the 'income tax' in fact was explained to be a corporate profit tax.
There is no individual profit, individually you have incomes, not profits, otherwise you have to be able to subtract your own costs (depreciation of your body is part of it) from your revenues.
Again, you can read the comment, obviously you commented without doing it, otherwise you would at the minimum come back with something meaningful to say rather than that, whatever that was.
Interstate commerce tax imposed by USA Congress is a constitutional tax, it's an excise, an import even, a duty, basically a federal sales tax is legal if it is uniform.
What is in fact illegal is an income tax, payroll tax, Medicare tax, death tax, those are in fact illegal taxes but the system doesn't care about the legality of it, it just imposes itself.
By the way saying that a tax is 'regressive' means approving discrimination. You want to apply laws differently to different people based on their specific circumstances, that's injustice and discrimination.
That's not what Constitution does, you should read the link that I provided, though it's not a short comment, if you can read you'll find your answer.
The Federal tax must be uniform, the USA Constitution does not give authority to the Congress to prevent individual States, counties, municipalities from collecting their own taxes.
The question is whether this law going to force Amazon (and the rest) to collect taxes for localities where Amazon has no physical presence? That would be unconstitutional, federal government cannot force a retailer to collect local taxes.
Federally Constitutional excise tax is not a local sales tax. Also there is an interesting question about legality of forcing the seller to collect the tax, even if it is Constitutional. Of-course the government has no problem turning bankers and financial types into unpaid FBI and IRS agents, so forcing an online store to be one is not out of their character, they don't have a problem with it.
They have to keep pretending that they have a 'strong dollar policy'.
With attitude like that
all you are going to get
is nigger dick.
As long as the tax is uniform, Congress can levy such an indirect a tax on transactions.
Of-course they are not going to repeal the unconstitutional taxes that exist today, so for example income tax, payroll and Medicare taxes stay.
I said:
there is no other real difference, they are really there for the same purpose.
.
By 'specialised' I do mean they have more hardware built in to achieve higher levels of data throughput and error correction.
Wow, so deep. Computer is the Internet, Internet is the computer.
Mainframes are specialised equipment, server farms are almost generic computers with redundancies. The real difference is the cost. Today's server farms would cost many factors more if they were built with specialised mainframes, there is no other real difference, they are really there for the same purpose.
All systems expand to the limit of all available energy. Your government health care system will never be enough, it always has to grow its spending and the increase in demand will grow with it to eat up all of the available resources.
Insurance based system on the other hand is not even supposed to be a health care system. Insurance is there to cover you for cases that you cannot afford to pay for yourself out of pocket, that's the entire premise of insurance. Treating it as if it is a managed health care account is the wrong way to run insurance.
You SHOULD have your managed health care account and you should manage it by yourself, not as a collective, it's up to you how you spread out your resources and how you pay for your routine health care needs. Insurance is there to cover you in cases of catastrophic failure.
If you don't understand what I am talking about realise that you have car insurance not for the purposes of putting fuel into your tank, replacing tires or doing routine checks and oil changes, it's there first of all as a liability coverage to insure that you don't go bankrupt in case somebody sues you, because you are involved in some road accident. Fixing your car is a secondary added product benefit in case you decide to pay for it.
What people should do is get the most coverage they can for catastrophic events and get it as cheaply as possible by signing up for the largest deductible they can get (and afford).
Insurance should be insurance, normal health care should be bought out of pocket like all other products and services, that's the way to make sure that the prices don't skyrocket and people can actually afford health care (with an added benefit of reducing government spending, lowering taxes and being able to manage your own individual freedoms).
app server: .... 2.6.29.6-213.fc11.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jul 7 21:02:57 EDT 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Linux
14:16:03 up 63 days, 21:19, 1 user, load average: 0.15, 0.10, 0.03
db server: .... 2.6.29.6-213.fc11.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jul 7 21:02:57 EDT 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Linux
14:16:37 up 63 days, 21:20, 1 user, load average: 1.86, 1.51, 1.65
forced a reboot a couple of months ago due to power outage, before that couple stayed up for 184 days.
Don't pay attention to that, J2EE is a crutch, it is an attempt to replace an actual architectural thought with a copy paste solution. It's not worth the trouble, it creates more problems than it solves and it forces people into a rigid pattern of thought that does not actually allow them to look at the real business problem they are trying to solve. The architect is reduced to a typist with J2EE, every step is predetermined, the so called 'scalability' is not in fact achieved, the only they it ends up doing is replicating the entire application across a set of servers and pushing the session objects into every node, that's the gist of their ability to 'scale'. It only scales vertically, it misses what ideas like MapReduce provide (for example), horizontal scalability.
Also J2EE recycles the same approach to data treatment from project to project, so everything is as slow as the slowest data access component (so they insert more and more layers between their entity beans and the physical database in hope they'll boost the performance) and in reality in most cases what is needed is an actual architectural solution that takes into account the specifics of the business problem, but that is completely avoided, totally neglected by the so called 'architects' that stick to the cut and paste J2EE paradigm. They completely forgot (if they ever knew) what the hell architect is supposed to do in the first place.
This is by the way how big shops like Oracle end up charging even more money by breaking the legs of the architectural team and then handing them yet another crutch, something like AquaLogic Data Services (Oracle Data Services now).
Today you can take a look at any so called 'enterprise' application and see tons and tons and tons of 'infrastructure' and almost no actual logic and in reality everything is just data in a database somewhere, and all the layers of manipulations and transformations are supposedly designed to 'scale' and in fact they are the bottleneck, they are the reason that the systems are slow.
But hey, it's enterprise, so you can always rely on the idiots that buy it to throw more money at the hardware when this shit inevitably grinds to a halt.
But when it gets to big applications, and you are architecting an application, JEE makes it so much easier to deliver quality.
- this is just a false statement, that's why you are confused.
It is easy to deliver the same shit over and over with J2EE, that is true, however there is much LESS architectural thought going into designing applications that follow exactly the same predetermined path because of the constraints, limits and specific requirements of the J2EE paradigm than if you actually throw away that crutch and start thinking about the real problem at hand, what is the application you are building, how exactly will you have to scale it, in what sense is it going to be scalable.
Your idea is the exact backward idea that if somebody is trying to architecture something, they have to go the specific predetermined J2EE way. In reality what you end up with is a very rigid construct that is less likely to be scalable and maintainable than an application that is in fact designed with the context of the application in mind.
J2EE is basically a copying machine, it doesn't require architectural skills at all, that's the point of it.
Yes, and I spent years building applications that used various types of servers and as I said, after about a decade of that I prefer Tomcat.
I disagree, I actually built an EJB container long ago, so no lack of understanding of what that is, however AFAIC it is all about truly architecting a solution that fits the purpose, the 'one size fit all' ideology of EJBs is fine of-course, for 'enterprise', which is synonymous with 'no original thought is allowed', but if you want an actual good solution you don't do it this way.
I stick to Tomcat, never mind EJBs, don't need them. The fewer components and compilation steps the better AFAIC. You have to choose what to use for a connection pool and have a good grip on your own transaction handling of-course, but that's really not a problem, it's blown out of proportion.
I would argue that American involvement in WWI is what inevitably led to WWII. If USA abstained during WWI, Kaiser would have stayed in power one way (by winning) or another (with an eventual truce). USA entered that war, changed the balance of power and Kaiser lost, Germany was forced to pay the reparations, the economy was screwed and that's what provided the necessary background for the rise of Hitler.
Because nondiscrimination before Law is not what "justice" is about in the modern definition
Nondiscrimination immediately eliminates graduated (so called 'progressive') income tax.
Nondiscrimination means you can't treat people differently whether they are employers or employees.
I can go on, but you get the point.
I wouldn't target non-government civilians under any circumstances.
I believe that you are serious, now here is my absolutely serious counterproposal.
I would like to see a Bad Motherfucker political party.
Here is what it would entail:
1. You have to physically fight your way through the ranks to achieve authority. The number of fights and who fights whom is secondary, I think drawing straws is not a bad idea.
2. To become a party leader you have to proves yourself by surviving in the party for a minimum of 3 years (minimum 2 fights a month) and killing at least 5 other members with your bare hands.
3. To become party nominee for the POTUS, you have to have at the minimum 5 years and 12 dead bodies behind you.
4. There should be an element of surprise mixed into this in order to ensure some level of luck, so in some random situations one or both of the politicians get some type of a weapon for their next fight.
5. Anybody that knowingly breaks the law or tries to pass a piece of legislation that takes away freedoms of individuals gets blown up by a land mine.
If you are a Justice Party then you should be about true justice.
So let's do this:
1. Strict government adherence to the set Law, the Constitution.
2. No deviation from the Law for the government, for the politicians.
3. All laws must apply in exactly the same manner to all individuals.
4. No discrimination against individuals based on any personal circumstances, you can't have justice if you don't apply the law in exactly the same way to all people.
5. No retroactive laws under any circumstances.
6. In order to pass any legislation, it must FIRST pass against ALL the tests of the existing Law, unit test your legislation against all Laws so to speak.
7. Never allow your sentiments to override your Laws.
8. Have a Law based party, anybody that violates the Law must be immediately removed from his or her position of power.
9. Strict separation of power between branches, so do not allow the Executive branch actually come up with the Law as it happens right now on daily basis, where some bureaucrat that is given authority to run something also decides on the details of the actual Law that is supposed to govern his actions.
10. All your actions must pass the muster of all the Laws right in front of the eyes of the public, I am talking about complete transparency on every decision.
So those are your commandments if you are talking about real justice.
But let me take a wild guess, you are not talking about real justice, you are talking about discrimination and outcomes that you want to base on your preferences. When you say "Justice" what you really mean is discrimination against individuals based on their personal circumstances for the purpose of achieving your goals, whatever they are (so called 'just society', which is simply another socialist party).
I don't believe my list of 10 suggestions will make it into your platform.