I don't see this at all. RT has high scores on some pretty obscure, niche movies; they seem to like arty, symbolic, deep, foreign, etc.
What we really need pretty much for all review sites is a Netflix-like algorithm to sub-aggregate the reviews of people who are "similar" to the reader. The reader can do this manually by reading through a small sample of the total set of reviews, but that method is tedious and very dependent on sampling with small sample sizes. It would be great to have an algorithm to match up the reviews from like-minded reviewers based on inspection of past reviews from the reader and the total set of reviewers.
This isn't a tax cheat, at least not with respect to the U.S. The only reason the IRS tried to cash in on this is because the U.S. is almost unique in the world in taxing income that its citizens/corporations make abroad.
Isn't this particular case the exact opposite of what you're talking about? Amazon (and it's fellow transfer pricing compatriots) would like to claim that income earned in a particular country wasn't really earned in that country through accounting sleight of hand.
If individuals could legally use transfer pricing, the US government would financially collapse. Fortunately for US citizens, the laws prevent this calamity by only allowing this privilege of legal tax minimization to entities with income in the billions of dollars.
patently incorrect, you are confusing morals and ethics.
Hmm, well maybe, or we're just leveraging differing semantics. According to dictionary.com, ethics can mean "pertaining to or dealing with morals or the principles of morality" or "being in accordance with the rules or standards for right conduct or practice, especially the standards of a profession." I was using the first definition of ethics. The second definition suffers the same dilemma as adherence to governmental laws, since those "ethics" are basically professional laws.
Guess what?? Your ignorant opinion does not override the law.
I can't deny that I'm ignorant about many things and probably about most things in general. My main assertion in this thread is that the law does not proscribe ethics, an assertion that would seem to at least be anecdotally supported by various laws that are obviously not ethical in the context of contemporary sensibilities, e.g., laws that legalized slavery, the killing of Jews, etc.
It's perfectly ethical to follow the law in a free country like New Zealand and pay whatever taxes you owe. If the amount that you owe calculates to zero, then you are still acting ethically. The legislature is, of course, free to vote to change the tax laws, but there are often unintended consequences that come of it. Taxing your country's economic activity always produces less activity.
I disagree. In my opinion, governmental laws define the absolute minimum level of conduct that is allowed to avoid sanction. To say that I am a law-abiding citizen is equivalent to saying that I am as close to being a criminal as possible. The threshold of ethical behavior lies well beyond the lines of legality.
Google is at 5000 miles before a disengagement is required, compared to the 0.8 miles reported for Uber. Google also logged over half a million miles, compared to a couple of thousand of some of the other companies. So at least for the companies doing autonomous vehicle testing in public roads in California, no one come even close to Google.
But are we comparing similar driving environments and challenges? I only see Google cars on El Camino, driving slowly and mostly in the middle lane, i.e., among the least challenging of all driving environments. It would be perhaps more comparable to see how well Google cars perform with arbitrary start and end locations and keeping up with the flow of traffic.
While I don't like the idea that there is a small number of people judging what is true and not for the public to see, however as a culture we had abused our free speech rights creating a situation where checks and balances need to be put in.
While I can see the potential offense and actual harm in lies such as holocaust denial, I maintain that the existence of these lies is actually a symptom of vibrant free speech. I believe that lies and offensive speech are necessary in a free society because their absence indicates the existence of a de facto totalitarian squelching of free speech. Free speech within a proscribed realm of "truth" and "acceptability" is not free at all. It is vital that the right to hateful speech is vigorously protected both by the law and by society. The restriction of speech should only be prosecuted based on actual damages and not offense.
That hateful speech may incite some to violence or true discrimination must not be used to equate these thought crimes to the actual physical crimes. I don't trust anyone to proscribe the limits of truth and appropriate speech -- not the US, not China, not slashdot, and not Google.
"The outsourcing companies, Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, and Tata Consultancy in 2014 "used 21,695 visas, or more than 25 percent of all private-sector H-1B visas used that year."
While this statement might have been intended to highlight the dominance of H1-B visa usage by outsourcing companies, the truth goes far beyond that. In 2015, the top-8 companies receiving H1-B visas received 49539 or over 58% of the total visas. Of those 49539 visas, 48651 or over 98% went to Indian nationals. Furthermore, of those 49539 visa, only about 700 went to holders of graduate degrees from schools. That means that these top-8 outsourcing companies received over 75% of the 65000 non-graduate degree visas.
I'm not sure it does need to be case by case. If I'm a passenger in a taxi, I'm not liable for any accident. If I'm a "passenger" in a self driving car I should also not be liable.
What if I do something intentionally or unintentionally to distract or incapacitate the taxi driver, like hitting or arguing with the driver or shaking his seat, cranking up my boom box (yes, I'm from the 80's) really loud, etc.?
The car should know if it hasn't been maintained appropriately. If it needs servicing, it can go get it.
I think that self-maintaining cars would be really convenient. However, I can imagine that self-maintaining cars can be quite challenging. A self-maintaining car needs to balance the schedule of all users of the car, the availability of service providers, the economics of service and part selection based on the financial situation of the car owner, relative trust in available service providers, etc. And the owner would need to have trust in the car manufacturer that the car hasn't been programmed to maximize parts and service revenue for service providers (not that such a thing would ever happen...).
Sometimes the user is at fault. Maybe that means not updating software. Maybe that means after-market software or hardware modifications. Maybe that means extreme neglect of maintenance leading to mechanical failure (which happens now with non-self driving cars), assuming that self-maintaining cars will be way off in the future.
Not only can this be out of the user's control, it should be. The car should be constantly monitoring itself, and the car - being self driven - is capable of driving itself to be serviced, or calling a tow truck if it isn't capable of driving, with core functionality disabled if the car detects a state that means it can't guarantee a safe journey.
There's absolutely no reason not to take this out of the hands of the car "owner". The car doesn't have to be capable of servicing itself, it just needs to be capable of getting qualified people to provide that servicing.
I think that self-maintaining cars would be really convenient. However, I can imagine that self-maintaining cars can be quite challenging. A self-maintaining car needs to balance the schedule of all users of the car, the availability of service providers, the economics of service and part selection based on the financial situation of the car owner, relative trust in available service providers, etc. And the owner would need to have trust in the car manufacturer that the car hasn't been programmed to maximize parts and service revenue for service providers (not that such a thing would ever happen...).
so non dealer service or not paying for software updates = car manufacturers get's off.
So doing an jiffy lube vs paying dealer price for oil changes = unauthorized changes?
What if an software update needs a high cost CPU update or an new car as updates end after say 2-3 years? What if updates need an dealer install at dealer shop prices?
Shouldn't fault be determined on a case by case basis? It seems obvious that the self-driving car manufacturer cannot be held liable for all accidents involving their cars.
Sometimes the manufacturer is at fault through intentional design or manufacturing decisions. Sometimes failures occur because driving failures rates to very low rates may require car costs to rise to the level of general unaffordability, so some acceptable level of design safety based on industry standards or government regulations will be needed.
Sometimes the user is at fault. Maybe that means not updating software. Maybe that means after-market software or hardware modifications. Maybe that means extreme neglect of maintenance leading to mechanical failure (which happens now with non-self driving cars), assuming that self-maintaining cars will be way off in the future.
Sometimes the environment is at fault, such as falling trees, sinkholes, flash floods, deer on the highway, etc.
Sometimes other people are at fault, such as drunk drivers, kids shining lasers onto car cameras, saboteurs who mess with inter-car communications, saboteurs who mess with software updating procedures, people who intentionally cause accidents to collect insurance money, etc.
""In the 2015 fiscal year, for instance, the top 10 firms received 38% of all the H-1B visas in computer occupations alone. All these firms, except for Amazon and to a partial extent IBM, are outsourcers."
Maybe this is technically correct, but this statement is misleading.
In 2015, the top-8 firms received 49,539 H1-B visas or over 58% of the 85,000 nominal allotment. Of these, about 700 had advanced US degrees. All 8 were Indian outsourcing companies, and the overwhelming majority of the visa approvals went to Indian nationals, about 48,650 Indians from these top-8 firms.
Of course, the ironic thing was that a few years ago, my company was unable to obtain an H1-B visa for our new Indian worker who has an EE PhD from a top-5 US engineering school and is definitely top-notch. He was forced to apply for an outstanding researcher visa instead. Ironically, the low-paid, not outstanding Indians displaced the highly paid, very outstanding Indian.
Aggregate years are not years. "Nine women can't make a baby in one month."
It depends. The theoretical bathtub curve is real and simply says that there is an intrinsic constant failure rate that is dependent on the system and an assumed constant environment. That constant failure rate component always exists but is added to the effects of early-life failures and aging/wearout failures. The average failure rates due to early-life failures and wearout at any system age are never truly zero, but there is often an in-between period where both are near zero. This is where the constant failure rate becomes evident.
If the systems are monitored only (or mostly) in this age range that manifests a constant failure rate, then the elapsed time may be aggregated.
At least the authors of these rankings couch their results as "perceptions" of corruption, which might be different from actual corruption. There seems to be a correlation between the rankings and the broadness of economic prosperity among the masses in each country. If so, perhaps, the rankings are more a measure of apathy about corruption. People that have no economic complaints may not care about corruption, and that may be measured as a lack of perception of corruption.
Every society has been a completely "full democracy" based on the historical definition of full democracy as restricted to an elite ruling class. This is certainly the case for the prototypical full democracy of ancient Greece where slaves and women were non-participants in the full democracy.
There has never been a true full democracy of any society except for those societies of sufficiently small size, e.g., for my one-person society.
From the Time article: 'The [New York] Times found that nearly 20% of Trump supporters did not approve of freeing the slaves, according to a January YouGov/Economist poll that asked respondents if they supported or disapproved of “the executive order that freed all slaves in the states that were in rebellion against the federal government”—Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.'
Of course, the more detailed results from snopes.com says, "Of the 2,000 respondents, 53 percent said they strongly approved; 17 percent approved somewhat; 8 percent disapproved somewhat; 5 percent disapproved strongly; and 17 percent said they were not sure." So, 13% percentage disapproving was rounded up to "nearly 20%", but curiously the more accurate assertion that 30% did not approve was not used.
Furthermore, the snopes.com suggests from related polling that perhaps the opposition was more towards executive orders in general, i.e., opposition to the means of freeing the slaves rather than the actual freeing of the slaves. It also suggests that liberal Republicans were more likely to be white supremacists than conservative Republicans and that similar survey results were seen before Trump's presidency. Also, without a comparable survey of Clinton supporters, it's not clear that the results are not simply reflective of Americans in general.
People say that they don't want to pay for the big bundle of programming since they only want to watch a few specific shows. However, what they really mean is that want to pay less. If they could pay less and get the bundle, the complaints would largely vanish. The huge question is whether content production would be profitable at the consumer-desired price.
Tim Cook has been paid nearly $400 worth of Apple stock...
So almost 4 shares. Impressive.
What a few million shares between friends?:) Yes, he's been paid nearly $400 million in Apple stock, with another nearly $400 million in the next 5 years. That is definitely impressive, especially next to the measly $10 million or so for his salary.
What's so "incredible" about a $9 million salary for the CEO of one of the most valuable companies anywhere?
It's downright pedestrian compared to what many sports players get to throw a ball or make tackles, and it comes with a massively higher responsibility to boot.
Remember that Steve Job's salary was $1. Why? Because it's good PR, and it results in tremendous tax savings by shifting the income to capital gains. Tim Cook has been paid nearly $400 worth of Apple stock with another nearly $400 million upcoming in the next few years. His tax savings by paying capital gains taxes instead of income taxes will exceed his entire salary.
About 5 years ago I stumbled across a full internal accounting report of a local school district online. The biggest expense wasn't teacher salaries, classroom supplies, or building construction and maintenance. It was administrative salaries. Think about that. The administrators at the school - the people who sit in offices, push paper, and rarely interact with parents or kids - take a bigger chunk of the school's budget than the teachers.
It's possible that your suggestion that administrators claim a lack of funds for supplies in order to garner government support for budget increases may be true. However, the assertion that administrator salaries are greater than that of teachers is not believable. For example, for my local school district in the previous school year, teacher salaries were $65.5 million versus $8.7 million for administrators. I'm confident that it's similar for the vast majority of school districts simply because there many more teachers than administrators, and while administrator salaries are usually larger than teacher salaries, the ratio of average administrator to teacher salaries is far lower than the ratio of teachers to administrators.
Well, you made the claim that lawmakers wrote the law because of an ideological preference, and then implied that their ideology was irrelevant because it had secondary effects that the lawmakers did not (likely) anticipate.
I made no declarations about the intention of lawmakers, because they are irrelevant to my point. Additionally, the intention of lawmakers is also irrelevant, either directly or tangentially, for the companies. Companies based their decision on laws, regardless of the intention or motivation behind those laws.
Change the law to fit a different ideology - do away with the tax, for the sake of american workers - and by lucky coincidence, corporations will find it in their interest to repatriate a _massive_ amount of money.
Everybody wins but the politicians, who would rather drum up taxes by any other means than raising taxes on their constituents.
My main point was that companies will do what is in their best interests, and those interests are significantly affected by the relative tax offerings of all possible countries. The US could reduce its tax rate to zero, but if Ireland had a negative tax rate (i.e., a subsidy), the money would remain in Ireland. In fact, many cities, states, and countries compete on the basis of offering the highest negative tax rate.
If a US-educated, US-residing workforce designs a product, and that product is then sourced, manufactured, shipped, sold, serviced, and recycled, ENTIRELY overseas, how much of that profit is actually owed to the US government at all?
One could make a case that those US-educated US-residing employees are already paying the "fair burden" of tax dollars simply by raking in a boatload of cash from foreign shores and then paying a large hunk of that in income tax. Why call them dodgers, when you could call them heroes, because they are pulling money into the US economy without creating any wear on the local public infrastructure to source, manufacture, sell, service, or recycle anything.
But this is an entirely different issue about the fairness of tax policies. I was simply commenting about the economic incentives of the current reality. Apple dodges taxes because it can do so legally, not because it thinks the US scheme is unfair. If the US scheme were somehow fairer in Apple's eyes, would they abrogate their fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders to maximize corporate value and voluntarily decline to avail themselves of the Irish tax haven?
Part of the issue is that the U.S. has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. If it were lowered, companies would probably be more willing to bring back money or not try to store it overseas because there would be no financial advantage towards doing so.
This is not correct. The entire issue is that there is at least one country in the entire world that is willing to levy a lower rate. The problem isn't that the rest of the EU countries have lower tax rates than the US, it's that Ireland has a much lower rate. The rest of the EU has zero impact on the Ireland situation (other than ostensibly complaining about Ireland's low rates).
The other issue is that there are advantages to operating in the US. If there weren't, these corporations would simply move entirely to Ireland or other tax havens. The immorality of the situation is that these companies want the benefits without paying the fees. Yes, I know that they're operating within the letter of the law, and I'm sure that the lawmakers wrote the law that way because they feel so strongly about the issue ideologically and not for any other reason...
"China, will say, "Give us our money for all the bonds we've been buying from you." That then sends us into an economic depression as we have to come up with ways to pay those bondholders or do what Trump thinks is good business sense and throw up our hands and default. "
Which causes China's economy to tank. They simply will not do that when they rely on the US so heavily. They can't afford to.
The holders of US treasury bonds can't simply return them for a refund. They have to sell them to other buyers. So, there is no direct impact on the US federal budget. However, dumping a large number of bonds on the market puts downward pressure on the bonds, which increases the yield, which then in turn affects things like mortgage rates.
China has dumped large (tens of $ billions) in some months. However, they can't dump them too quickly or they would have to sell at a discount.
That fake chargers cut corners that lead to unsafe designs is not a surprise. However, I wonder if Android devices suffer from a similar problem. Is there something inherent about the Apple design that leads to a higher probability of unsafe knock-offs, or is the current focus on Apple chargers simply a matter of more media attention devoted to Apple at the moment?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see this at all. RT has high scores on some pretty obscure, niche movies; they seem to like arty, symbolic, deep, foreign, etc.
What we really need pretty much for all review sites is a Netflix-like algorithm to sub-aggregate the reviews of people who are "similar" to the reader. The reader can do this manually by reading through a small sample of the total set of reviews, but that method is tedious and very dependent on sampling with small sample sizes. It would be great to have an algorithm to match up the reviews from like-minded reviewers based on inspection of past reviews from the reader and the total set of reviewers.
This isn't a tax cheat, at least not with respect to the U.S. The only reason the IRS tried to cash in on this is because the U.S. is almost unique in the world in taxing income that its citizens/corporations make abroad.
Isn't this particular case the exact opposite of what you're talking about? Amazon (and it's fellow transfer pricing compatriots) would like to claim that income earned in a particular country wasn't really earned in that country through accounting sleight of hand.
If individuals could legally use transfer pricing, the US government would financially collapse. Fortunately for US citizens, the laws prevent this calamity by only allowing this privilege of legal tax minimization to entities with income in the billions of dollars.
patently incorrect, you are confusing morals and ethics.
Hmm, well maybe, or we're just leveraging differing semantics. According to dictionary.com, ethics can mean "pertaining to or dealing with morals or the principles of morality" or "being in accordance with the rules or standards for right conduct or practice, especially the standards of a profession." I was using the first definition of ethics. The second definition suffers the same dilemma as adherence to governmental laws, since those "ethics" are basically professional laws.
Guess what?? Your ignorant opinion does not override the law.
I can't deny that I'm ignorant about many things and probably about most things in general. My main assertion in this thread is that the law does not proscribe ethics, an assertion that would seem to at least be anecdotally supported by various laws that are obviously not ethical in the context of contemporary sensibilities, e.g., laws that legalized slavery, the killing of Jews, etc.
It's perfectly ethical to follow the law in a free country like New Zealand and pay whatever taxes you owe. If the amount that you owe calculates to zero, then you are still acting ethically. The legislature is, of course, free to vote to change the tax laws, but there are often unintended consequences that come of it. Taxing your country's economic activity always produces less activity.
I disagree. In my opinion, governmental laws define the absolute minimum level of conduct that is allowed to avoid sanction. To say that I am a law-abiding citizen is equivalent to saying that I am as close to being a criminal as possible. The threshold of ethical behavior lies well beyond the lines of legality.
This is the official Autonomous Vehicle Disengagement Report for California
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/...
Google is at 5000 miles before a disengagement is required, compared to the 0.8 miles reported for Uber. Google also logged over half a million miles, compared to a couple of thousand of some of the other companies. So at least for the companies doing autonomous vehicle testing in public roads in California, no one come even close to Google.
But are we comparing similar driving environments and challenges? I only see Google cars on El Camino, driving slowly and mostly in the middle lane, i.e., among the least challenging of all driving environments. It would be perhaps more comparable to see how well Google cars perform with arbitrary start and end locations and keeping up with the flow of traffic.
While I don't like the idea that there is a small number of people judging what is true and not for the public to see, however as a culture we had abused our free speech rights creating a situation where checks and balances need to be put in.
While I can see the potential offense and actual harm in lies such as holocaust denial, I maintain that the existence of these lies is actually a symptom of vibrant free speech. I believe that lies and offensive speech are necessary in a free society because their absence indicates the existence of a de facto totalitarian squelching of free speech. Free speech within a proscribed realm of "truth" and "acceptability" is not free at all. It is vital that the right to hateful speech is vigorously protected both by the law and by society. The restriction of speech should only be prosecuted based on actual damages and not offense.
That hateful speech may incite some to violence or true discrimination must not be used to equate these thought crimes to the actual physical crimes. I don't trust anyone to proscribe the limits of truth and appropriate speech -- not the US, not China, not slashdot, and not Google.
"The outsourcing companies, Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, and Tata Consultancy in 2014 "used 21,695 visas, or more than 25 percent of all private-sector H-1B visas used that year."
While this statement might have been intended to highlight the dominance of H1-B visa usage by outsourcing companies, the truth goes far beyond that. In 2015, the top-8 companies receiving H1-B visas received 49539 or over 58% of the total visas. Of those 49539 visas, 48651 or over 98% went to Indian nationals. Furthermore, of those 49539 visa, only about 700 went to holders of graduate degrees from schools. That means that these top-8 outsourcing companies received over 75% of the 65000 non-graduate degree visas.
I'm not sure it does need to be case by case. If I'm a passenger in a taxi, I'm not liable for any accident. If I'm a "passenger" in a self driving car I should also not be liable.
What if I do something intentionally or unintentionally to distract or incapacitate the taxi driver, like hitting or arguing with the driver or shaking his seat, cranking up my boom box (yes, I'm from the 80's) really loud, etc.?
The car should know if it hasn't been maintained appropriately. If it needs servicing, it can go get it.
I think that self-maintaining cars would be really convenient. However, I can imagine that self-maintaining cars can be quite challenging. A self-maintaining car needs to balance the schedule of all users of the car, the availability of service providers, the economics of service and part selection based on the financial situation of the car owner, relative trust in available service providers, etc. And the owner would need to have trust in the car manufacturer that the car hasn't been programmed to maximize parts and service revenue for service providers (not that such a thing would ever happen ...).
Not only can this be out of the user's control, it should be. The car should be constantly monitoring itself, and the car - being self driven - is capable of driving itself to be serviced, or calling a tow truck if it isn't capable of driving, with core functionality disabled if the car detects a state that means it can't guarantee a safe journey.
There's absolutely no reason not to take this out of the hands of the car "owner". The car doesn't have to be capable of servicing itself, it just needs to be capable of getting qualified people to provide that servicing.
I think that self-maintaining cars would be really convenient. However, I can imagine that self-maintaining cars can be quite challenging. A self-maintaining car needs to balance the schedule of all users of the car, the availability of service providers, the economics of service and part selection based on the financial situation of the car owner, relative trust in available service providers, etc. And the owner would need to have trust in the car manufacturer that the car hasn't been programmed to maximize parts and service revenue for service providers (not that such a thing would ever happen ...).
so non dealer service or not paying for software updates = car manufacturers get's off.
So doing an jiffy lube vs paying dealer price for oil changes = unauthorized changes?
What if an software update needs a high cost CPU update or an new car as updates end after say 2-3 years? What if updates need an dealer install at dealer shop prices?
Shouldn't fault be determined on a case by case basis? It seems obvious that the self-driving car manufacturer cannot be held liable for all accidents involving their cars.
Sometimes the manufacturer is at fault through intentional design or manufacturing decisions. Sometimes failures occur because driving failures rates to very low rates may require car costs to rise to the level of general unaffordability, so some acceptable level of design safety based on industry standards or government regulations will be needed.
Sometimes the user is at fault. Maybe that means not updating software. Maybe that means after-market software or hardware modifications. Maybe that means extreme neglect of maintenance leading to mechanical failure (which happens now with non-self driving cars), assuming that self-maintaining cars will be way off in the future.
Sometimes the environment is at fault, such as falling trees, sinkholes, flash floods, deer on the highway, etc.
Sometimes other people are at fault, such as drunk drivers, kids shining lasers onto car cameras, saboteurs who mess with inter-car communications, saboteurs who mess with software updating procedures, people who intentionally cause accidents to collect insurance money, etc.
""In the 2015 fiscal year, for instance, the top 10 firms received 38% of all the H-1B visas in computer occupations alone. All these firms, except for Amazon and to a partial extent IBM, are outsourcers."
Maybe this is technically correct, but this statement is misleading.
In 2015, the top-8 firms received 49,539 H1-B visas or over 58% of the 85,000 nominal allotment. Of these, about 700 had advanced US degrees. All 8 were Indian outsourcing companies, and the overwhelming majority of the visa approvals went to Indian nationals, about 48,650 Indians from these top-8 firms.
Of course, the ironic thing was that a few years ago, my company was unable to obtain an H1-B visa for our new Indian worker who has an EE PhD from a top-5 US engineering school and is definitely top-notch. He was forced to apply for an outstanding researcher visa instead. Ironically, the low-paid, not outstanding Indians displaced the highly paid, very outstanding Indian.
Aggregate years are not years.
"Nine women can't make a baby in one month."
It depends. The theoretical bathtub curve is real and simply says that there is an intrinsic constant failure rate that is dependent on the system and an assumed constant environment. That constant failure rate component always exists but is added to the effects of early-life failures and aging/wearout failures. The average failure rates due to early-life failures and wearout at any system age are never truly zero, but there is often an in-between period where both are near zero. This is where the constant failure rate becomes evident.
If the systems are monitored only (or mostly) in this age range that manifests a constant failure rate, then the elapsed time may be aggregated.
At least the authors of these rankings couch their results as "perceptions" of corruption, which might be different from actual corruption. There seems to be a correlation between the rankings and the broadness of economic prosperity among the masses in each country. If so, perhaps, the rankings are more a measure of apathy about corruption. People that have no economic complaints may not care about corruption, and that may be measured as a lack of perception of corruption.
Every society has been a completely "full democracy" based on the historical definition of full democracy as restricted to an elite ruling class. This is certainly the case for the prototypical full democracy of ancient Greece where slaves and women were non-participants in the full democracy.
There has never been a true full democracy of any society except for those societies of sufficiently small size, e.g., for my one-person society.
From the Time article: 'The [New York] Times found that nearly 20% of Trump supporters did not approve of freeing the slaves, according to a January YouGov/Economist poll that asked respondents if they supported or disapproved of “the executive order that freed all slaves in the states that were in rebellion against the federal government”—Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.'
Of course, the more detailed results from snopes.com says, "Of the 2,000 respondents, 53 percent said they strongly approved; 17 percent approved somewhat; 8 percent disapproved somewhat; 5 percent disapproved strongly; and 17 percent said they were not sure." So, 13% percentage disapproving was rounded up to "nearly 20%", but curiously the more accurate assertion that 30% did not approve was not used.
Furthermore, the snopes.com suggests from related polling that perhaps the opposition was more towards executive orders in general, i.e., opposition to the means of freeing the slaves rather than the actual freeing of the slaves. It also suggests that liberal Republicans were more likely to be white supremacists than conservative Republicans and that similar survey results were seen before Trump's presidency. Also, without a comparable survey of Clinton supporters, it's not clear that the results are not simply reflective of Americans in general.
People say that they don't want to pay for the big bundle of programming since they only want to watch a few specific shows. However, what they really mean is that want to pay less. If they could pay less and get the bundle, the complaints would largely vanish. The huge question is whether content production would be profitable at the consumer-desired price.
So almost 4 shares. Impressive.
What a few million shares between friends? :) Yes, he's been paid nearly $400 million in Apple stock, with another nearly $400 million in the next 5 years. That is definitely impressive, especially next to the measly $10 million or so for his salary.
What's so "incredible" about a $9 million salary for the CEO of one of the most valuable companies anywhere?
It's downright pedestrian compared to what many sports players get to throw a ball or make tackles, and it comes with a massively higher responsibility to boot.
Remember that Steve Job's salary was $1. Why? Because it's good PR, and it results in tremendous tax savings by shifting the income to capital gains. Tim Cook has been paid nearly $400 worth of Apple stock with another nearly $400 million upcoming in the next few years. His tax savings by paying capital gains taxes instead of income taxes will exceed his entire salary.
About 5 years ago I stumbled across a full internal accounting report of a local school district online. The biggest expense wasn't teacher salaries, classroom supplies, or building construction and maintenance. It was administrative salaries. Think about that. The administrators at the school - the people who sit in offices, push paper, and rarely interact with parents or kids - take a bigger chunk of the school's budget than the teachers.
It's possible that your suggestion that administrators claim a lack of funds for supplies in order to garner government support for budget increases may be true. However, the assertion that administrator salaries are greater than that of teachers is not believable. For example, for my local school district in the previous school year, teacher salaries were $65.5 million versus $8.7 million for administrators. I'm confident that it's similar for the vast majority of school districts simply because there many more teachers than administrators, and while administrator salaries are usually larger than teacher salaries, the ratio of average administrator to teacher salaries is far lower than the ratio of teachers to administrators.
Well, you made the claim that lawmakers wrote the law because of an ideological preference, and then implied that their ideology was irrelevant because it had secondary effects that the lawmakers did not (likely) anticipate.
I made no declarations about the intention of lawmakers, because they are irrelevant to my point. Additionally, the intention of lawmakers is also irrelevant, either directly or tangentially, for the companies. Companies based their decision on laws, regardless of the intention or motivation behind those laws.
Change the law to fit a different ideology - do away with the tax, for the sake of american workers - and by lucky coincidence, corporations will find it in their interest to repatriate a _massive_ amount of money.
Everybody wins but the politicians, who would rather drum up taxes by any other means than raising taxes on their constituents.
My main point was that companies will do what is in their best interests, and those interests are significantly affected by the relative tax offerings of all possible countries. The US could reduce its tax rate to zero, but if Ireland had a negative tax rate (i.e., a subsidy), the money would remain in Ireland. In fact, many cities, states, and countries compete on the basis of offering the highest negative tax rate.
It's more ideological than you think.
If a US-educated, US-residing workforce designs a product, and that product is then sourced, manufactured, shipped, sold, serviced, and recycled, ENTIRELY overseas, how much of that profit is actually owed to the US government at all?
One could make a case that those US-educated US-residing employees are already paying the "fair burden" of tax dollars simply by raking in a boatload of cash from foreign shores and then paying a large hunk of that in income tax. Why call them dodgers, when you could call them heroes, because they are pulling money into the US economy without creating any wear on the local public infrastructure to source, manufacture, sell, service, or recycle anything.
But this is an entirely different issue about the fairness of tax policies. I was simply commenting about the economic incentives of the current reality. Apple dodges taxes because it can do so legally, not because it thinks the US scheme is unfair. If the US scheme were somehow fairer in Apple's eyes, would they abrogate their fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders to maximize corporate value and voluntarily decline to avail themselves of the Irish tax haven?
Part of the issue is that the U.S. has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. If it were lowered, companies would probably be more willing to bring back money or not try to store it overseas because there would be no financial advantage towards doing so.
This is not correct. The entire issue is that there is at least one country in the entire world that is willing to levy a lower rate. The problem isn't that the rest of the EU countries have lower tax rates than the US, it's that Ireland has a much lower rate. The rest of the EU has zero impact on the Ireland situation (other than ostensibly complaining about Ireland's low rates).
The other issue is that there are advantages to operating in the US. If there weren't, these corporations would simply move entirely to Ireland or other tax havens. The immorality of the situation is that these companies want the benefits without paying the fees. Yes, I know that they're operating within the letter of the law, and I'm sure that the lawmakers wrote the law that way because they feel so strongly about the issue ideologically and not for any other reason ...
"China, will say, "Give us our money for all the bonds we've been buying from you." That then sends us into an economic depression as we have to come up with ways to pay those bondholders or do what Trump thinks is good business sense and throw up our hands and default. "
Which causes China's economy to tank. They simply will not do that when they rely on the US so heavily. They can't afford to.
The holders of US treasury bonds can't simply return them for a refund. They have to sell them to other buyers. So, there is no direct impact on the US federal budget. However, dumping a large number of bonds on the market puts downward pressure on the bonds, which increases the yield, which then in turn affects things like mortgage rates.
China has dumped large (tens of $ billions) in some months. However, they can't dump them too quickly or they would have to sell at a discount.
That fake chargers cut corners that lead to unsafe designs is not a surprise. However, I wonder if Android devices suffer from a similar problem. Is there something inherent about the Apple design that leads to a higher probability of unsafe knock-offs, or is the current focus on Apple chargers simply a matter of more media attention devoted to Apple at the moment?