I'm pretty certain that Ghandi put a lot of energy into boycotts of various sorts, pretty similar to what we have here. It's not like people are pushing to have the guy executed.
I can fully understand gay people saying to a business, "I'm not going to give you or your leadership money and influence that they then turn around and use against me."
Governor: You homosexuals will have all the exact same rights as married couples, but, instead of referring to you as "married", you can be... butt buddies.
[long silence]
Governor: Instead of being "man and wife", you'll be... butt buddies. You won't be "betrothed", you'll be...
[makes quote with his fingers]
Governor:...butt buddies. Get it? Instead of a "bride and groom", you'd be...
I agree that hyperinflation of the type that the grandparent was proposing would be really bad for everybody, not because of the first order wealth effects but because it would just cause economic chaos and ruin. I was just responding to the idea of a "clean" price increase across the board. Anything with a time lag has all sorts of second and third order effects.
In any case, within the more typical ranges we see, it really is just rolled into interest rate risk. Anybody who bet on high inflation several years ago has taken a loss and anybody who bet on low inflation is doing pretty well.
A few things change. People who have long-term contracts to deliver goods or services at pre-agreed prices (labor contratcs, commodities futures) get screwed as well. Also, the value of debt and savings balances will decrease rapidly. Inflation transfers wealth from lenders to borrowers.
I've purchased a couple of cars through CarsDirect.com to avoid that hassle and been pretty happy with the results. An aggressive negotiator might be able to do better, but realistically, I see the online model as the eventual endgame here. More and more people are buying through intermediaries that provide a fixed price, so eventuallly the only people who go into dealers and haggle are going to be the real sharks who are willing to go 6 hours without a bathroom break to get a rock bottom price. Once the dealers lose the easy marks from their customer base, the "haggle and lie" model will have to give way to something else.
I'm pleased to see Tesla adding just one more nail to the coffin. A system that can't survive price transparency deserves to go down the toilet.
Discovering the mechanism by which Aspirin works earned some researchers a Nobel Prize over 30 years ago. It's not a mystery. The mechanism for quinine is not quite as well nailed down, but it has definitely been subjected to scientific tests of its effectiveness.
I think the primary reason is that if you can tax something, you can destroy it with carefully designed taxes. Congress may not have the power to ban religion X, but they may be able to craft a tax on churches that only hits religion X and hits it hard enough to make it really hard for that one religion to operate.
So we're not talking about a safety net at all, then--just a prudent savings and investment strategy. That's fine, but it's also not quite the same thing Social Security was there to provide, and I generally think that people who are proposing turning Social Security into a big investment pool are looking for a free lunch that isn't there, macroeconomically.
That being said, I'd love to see the 401(k) as it is totally obliterated and replaced with something far more competitive (or a straight up government-managed account like the one you propose). If I said to you that I was starting a company whose niche was to offer people saving for retirement a small selection of investment products, most of which have higher fees than the typical competitive product outside of my listing, you'd probably tell me that it's a bad idea because I would get no customers. But if I add a substantial government subsidy to encourage investors to buy my crappy funds and set up the system to make sure that investors don't choose me themselves but rather have their employer pick me based on the amount I charge the employer to manage those funds, it's a goldmine. As far as I can tell, the 401(k) is basically just a Rube Goldberg machine for funnelling taxpayer money to 401(k) management companies.
I strongly suspect that you're right. Corporations are crazy malleable shape-shifters that can do all sorts of crazy stuff to lower their tax incidence, so why bother trying to extract it from them? Just wait for the money to end up in the hands of investors and tax the investors. There's a much smaller set of things a human being can do to avoid taxes, and it has the added advantage of progressive taxation. With a straight up corporate income tax, grandma's penson plan pays the same tax Warren Buffet does on a per-share basis. This is not a big win.
If you're choosing your own investments (even from a set selected by the government), how does the safety net side of it work? Is there some sort of guarantee at work?
Or, in terms that are more easily melded with the types of things we do today: We start you at a low salary while you train, but we immediately give you bonus that vests over N years to make up for it if you stay for the long haul and don't bail right after your training. As far as I can see, deferred compensation with a vesting schedule is the norm rather than the exception in this industry, so why not just balance the numbers to make training people worthwhile?
If there was a "getting work done" set of questions that worked reliably in an interview, I'm sure every employer would use the shit out of it. But there isn't. For tech people, it's better than for most other jobs because at least there's a set of questions that are a necessary but insufficient condition for decent productivity. Hiring somebody who bombs those questions but is a snappy dresser is indeed stupid. But given the choice between two candidates with the basic technical chops, I'll choose the one who seems to be able to size up the office culture over the one who seems to be missing that skill any day of the week.
Choosing to wear a t-shirt and jeans over a suit is not the same thing as walking around in your underwear in public.
If the norms for where you're going are to wear a suit and no to wear a t-shirt and jeans, the difference is really only one of degree and not kind. Most children learn pretty early that there are things you wear to some places and not others. They get that wearing your Batman costume on Halloween is OK but wearing it to school is not. Adults who don't quite pick up that skill stand out, and not in a good way.
and if you're dating girls that use your fashion as the first cut, then all I can say is I hope you enjoy getting raped in divorce court.
I have no idea how we jumped from "sees your obvious inability to recognize basic norms for appropriate dress" to "use your fashion as a first cut" but there you go, I guess. If you show up to take your girl out to French Laundry on a big date wearing a sweatshirt, jeans and flip flops, she won't be judging you on wearing a sweatshirt, jeans and flip flops. She'll be judging you for being a bozo who just doesn't get it it.
I'll definitely take a step back and say that I'm all for allowing employees to wear pretty much whatever they want if they're not customer-facing, and that companies that enforce strict dress codes when they don't need to are pouring money down the drain for no reason. But if you show up for an interview at a place that has at least some minimal standards for professional dress and you totally blow it off, being surprised or morally outraged when your interviewer thinks, "Well, this guy doesn't have a clue" is not really a fair reaction.
Exactly. This is definitely the type of thing that needs to change very early in life--not at hiring time. Engineering is a field that benefits from spending much of your young life preparing for it. You have to learn your math and science as a kid. You have to be interested in how things work and spend time figuring things out and doing things your friends think are uncool. You have to take college prep classes and do well on tests. You have to do your homework and ignore what the other kids are doing. In short, you have to start making really good life-altering decisions when most people are too young and immature to make good life-altering decisions.
It helps to go to a good safe school that stresses math and science. It helps to have friends who have similar interests and to avoid kids who will make your life miserable if you work hard and do well in classes. It helps to have educated, disciplined parents who set a good example. If you have none of those things, you're starting way behind in a game that's very hard to win from behind. Among my colleagues, there were a few who "weren't ready" for college and did other stuff before going back to school and becoming damn good engineers. But they're the exception. Most of them have been on this track their entire lives.
If you want to beat the drum about a lack of diversity in engineering, you need to start way back at the start of the pipeline because that's where the vast majority of your engineering candidates are made or broken.
When I ask basic questions that anyone with a decent CS or CE degree should be able to answer they fall flat on their face regardless of race and these are for more senior positions.
This was my experince too. We start every candidate (even really senior ones) with a short written "find your ass with both hands" quiz that they take quietly on their own. We give it a quick skim and they either move on to interviewing with the team or a short interview with a team member and an out-the-door handshake. It's embedded C work, so it's very basic pointer stuff (4 lines of C code--point the pointer at a variable, increment, reassign, what happens?) or basic threading conceptual work. Can you traverse a linked list? Can you tell me what the ^ operator does to these two variables? My experience is that candidates either completly ace it or they crash and burn. The few times we've let a mistake slide because of an otherwise decent interview have all resulted in employees that don't make it. Given our resume pool (small company outside the most desirable locations), our failure rate is probably 75%.
I have no idea why this is or how we can produce so many people with resumes but no skills. One of my senior colleagues walked one of those guys out the door and came back and said, "I'm pretty sure there's about the same number real of programmers today as there was in 1982. We just get more applicants these days."
Perhaps just as important, when you come to an interview knowingly dressing below what is expected, you're basically saying, "I find your norms to be slightly inconvenent, so I'm going to disrespect them in a really overt way." I don't expect programmers to look snappy every day at the office, but an interview is a special occasion when both sides are supposed to be on their best behavior. They're supposed to make an effort to be respectful to each other and show some appreciation for the opportunity to start a new business relationship.
You don't show up on your first date wearing nothing but your underwear, even if you might eventually lounge around the house that way once you're living together. Showing up in your briefs that would immediately get you flagged as somebody with either no manners or no concept of appropriate behavior.
Exactly this. It's not like American universities are churning out black engineers by the million, only to have them ignored by HP. HP works with the applicant population they receive. If he wants to make a change, he can't pressure HP into making more black engineers appear out of nowhere. He has to work on creating more of them so HP can hire them. If he wanted to head out to black communitites and push the idea that math and science are cool and drum up scholarships to get kids into engineeirng school, I'd send him a donation right now. But what he's doing now is just more self-agrandizing wanking.
Calling them an estate tax is a nondescriptive euphemism that doesn't tell you the rate at which it's collected. I currently have an estate - why isn't it taxed by estate taxes?
If having an estate that is not taxed makes "estate tax" a bad description, why does having a death that is not taxed (which is the vast majority of case) not make "death tax" an equally bad term? The short version is that "death tax" played well in focus groups because it made voters think that they were all going to pay it and "estate tax" isn't something that sounds like they'd be on the hook for. Say what you will about it being a "euphamism" the voters were much more correct in the latter case than in the former.
Two guys earn $50k/yr through their lives and die after working 40 years. One spends all his money and dies penniless - he pays no taxes upon death.
Both of those guys would pay exactly the same federal estate tax of zero unless the saver was putting all of his money into early-days Apple stock. State taxes may vary.
In any case, there are all sorts of ways for two people to pay different amounts of taxes over a lifetime of earning the same amount. There's nothing particularly special about an estate tax in that sense. Would it be better to drop the estate tax and let the recipients treat it as ordinary income? I doubt you'd get much buy-in from the people who are currently on the hook for estate taxes for that.
Exactly. It really seems like a lot of people don't understand exemptions, tax brackets, and effective tax rates. Worse, I've seen editorials in major newspapers that make the same elementary mistakes. I wonder how much public opinion would shift on these matters if everybody actually understood how those calculations are really done.
As for the kids, that is money that could have gone to give the kids a better childhood or pay for college. Instead, dad saved it for retirement. But he died before he could retire, so now the government gets it instead of him or the kids. It's sick.
You realize that we're talking about a tax with a $5,000,000 exemption in the US, right? Poor Tiny Tim's college and Chrismas Goose money fall well underneath that cutoff.
The estate tax is a tax on the estate, not on income. It's taxed at a higher rate than any income.
Factoring in the $5M exemption, the effective rate is usually far lower than it would be if it were treated as income. Taking your own examplte of a $10M estate, you're looking at $2M in taxes which is a 20% effective rate. That same $10M at ordinary income rates would mostly be taxed at the top marginal rate which is far higher. I'm all for complaining about the estate tax being potentially thorny for cashflow/business reasons, but let's not pretend that it's not a much nicer allternative to ordinary income taxes in most situtations.
This problem was more severe when you have lots of family run farms, where a large portion of the estate was in the value of the land, but exists today with many small businesses.
Has anybody really looked at the data on this? Becuase the best reference I can see on it indicates that it's problematic, but not exactly a major issue. It's the type of thing that should be pretty easily resolvable in other ways (long term payment plans, etc.) that don't involve eliminating the estate tax.
Either that or people see cameras on them and are less likely to run or resist arrest. But most likely a mixture of the two. I'm sure there's a lot of misbehavior on both sides when the cameras are off. It looks like the cameras are a big win for everybody.
This is the best part of it IMO. It doesn't matter whose fault the problems were. Was it the suspect misbehaving? Was it an abusive cop? Is it a liar trying to get an officer in trouble after the fact? On the whole, it's a mix of all of them, but we don't need to know the actual mix to appreciate the fact that it seems to be better for everybody.
It's very hard for police unions to fight against something that clearly reduces their physical danger and exposure to complaints. If they save face by pretending that the cameras are making the "bad guys" behave and that it wasn't a police problem in the first place, that's fine by me.
My wife bought most of our HDMI cables at Ross and TJ Maxx. HDMI cables are exaclty the sort of commodity item with a ridiculous markup that the overflow sellers tend to carry at reasonable prices.
...can be adjusted and even eliminated by a simple majority vote of Congress and the stroke of the pen of the President.
That's basically true of any law. Why is this a big problem? Congress could eliminate the FDIC tomorrow. Or shut down the Interstate Highway system. Or ground all aircraft permanently. It's a pretty good bet that they won't do any of those things, though.
And every penny just goes straight to the Federal Government - nothing back to any taxpayer.
I'm reasonably certain that the Social Security Administration cuts a check to a private citizen now and then.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty certain that Ghandi put a lot of energy into boycotts of various sorts, pretty similar to what we have here. It's not like people are pushing to have the guy executed.
I can fully understand gay people saying to a business, "I'm not going to give you or your leadership money and influence that they then turn around and use against me."
Governor: You homosexuals will have all the exact same rights as married couples, but, instead of referring to you as "married", you can be... butt buddies.
[long silence]
Governor: Instead of being "man and wife", you'll be... butt buddies. You won't be "betrothed", you'll be...
[makes quote with his fingers]
Governor: ...butt buddies. Get it? Instead of a "bride and groom", you'd be...
[makes quote with his fingers again]
Governor: ...butt buddies.
I agree that hyperinflation of the type that the grandparent was proposing would be really bad for everybody, not because of the first order wealth effects but because it would just cause economic chaos and ruin. I was just responding to the idea of a "clean" price increase across the board. Anything with a time lag has all sorts of second and third order effects.
In any case, within the more typical ranges we see, it really is just rolled into interest rate risk. Anybody who bet on high inflation several years ago has taken a loss and anybody who bet on low inflation is doing pretty well.
A few things change. People who have long-term contracts to deliver goods or services at pre-agreed prices (labor contratcs, commodities futures) get screwed as well. Also, the value of debt and savings balances will decrease rapidly. Inflation transfers wealth from lenders to borrowers.
I've purchased a couple of cars through CarsDirect.com to avoid that hassle and been pretty happy with the results. An aggressive negotiator might be able to do better, but realistically, I see the online model as the eventual endgame here. More and more people are buying through intermediaries that provide a fixed price, so eventuallly the only people who go into dealers and haggle are going to be the real sharks who are willing to go 6 hours without a bathroom break to get a rock bottom price. Once the dealers lose the easy marks from their customer base, the "haggle and lie" model will have to give way to something else.
I'm pleased to see Tesla adding just one more nail to the coffin. A system that can't survive price transparency deserves to go down the toilet.
Discovering the mechanism by which Aspirin works earned some researchers a Nobel Prize over 30 years ago. It's not a mystery. The mechanism for quinine is not quite as well nailed down, but it has definitely been subjected to scientific tests of its effectiveness.
I think the primary reason is that if you can tax something, you can destroy it with carefully designed taxes. Congress may not have the power to ban religion X, but they may be able to craft a tax on churches that only hits religion X and hits it hard enough to make it really hard for that one religion to operate.
So we're not talking about a safety net at all, then--just a prudent savings and investment strategy. That's fine, but it's also not quite the same thing Social Security was there to provide, and I generally think that people who are proposing turning Social Security into a big investment pool are looking for a free lunch that isn't there, macroeconomically.
That being said, I'd love to see the 401(k) as it is totally obliterated and replaced with something far more competitive (or a straight up government-managed account like the one you propose). If I said to you that I was starting a company whose niche was to offer people saving for retirement a small selection of investment products, most of which have higher fees than the typical competitive product outside of my listing, you'd probably tell me that it's a bad idea because I would get no customers. But if I add a substantial government subsidy to encourage investors to buy my crappy funds and set up the system to make sure that investors don't choose me themselves but rather have their employer pick me based on the amount I charge the employer to manage those funds, it's a goldmine. As far as I can tell, the 401(k) is basically just a Rube Goldberg machine for funnelling taxpayer money to 401(k) management companies.
I strongly suspect that you're right. Corporations are crazy malleable shape-shifters that can do all sorts of crazy stuff to lower their tax incidence, so why bother trying to extract it from them? Just wait for the money to end up in the hands of investors and tax the investors. There's a much smaller set of things a human being can do to avoid taxes, and it has the added advantage of progressive taxation. With a straight up corporate income tax, grandma's penson plan pays the same tax Warren Buffet does on a per-share basis. This is not a big win.
If you're choosing your own investments (even from a set selected by the government), how does the safety net side of it work? Is there some sort of guarantee at work?
Or, in terms that are more easily melded with the types of things we do today: We start you at a low salary while you train, but we immediately give you bonus that vests over N years to make up for it if you stay for the long haul and don't bail right after your training. As far as I can see, deferred compensation with a vesting schedule is the norm rather than the exception in this industry, so why not just balance the numbers to make training people worthwhile?
If the norms for where you're going are to wear a suit and no to wear a t-shirt and jeans, the difference is really only one of degree and not kind. Most children learn pretty early that there are things you wear to some places and not others. They get that wearing your Batman costume on Halloween is OK but wearing it to school is not. Adults who don't quite pick up that skill stand out, and not in a good way.
I have no idea how we jumped from "sees your obvious inability to recognize basic norms for appropriate dress" to "use your fashion as a first cut" but there you go, I guess. If you show up to take your girl out to French Laundry on a big date wearing a sweatshirt, jeans and flip flops, she won't be judging you on wearing a sweatshirt, jeans and flip flops. She'll be judging you for being a bozo who just doesn't get it it.
I'll definitely take a step back and say that I'm all for allowing employees to wear pretty much whatever they want if they're not customer-facing, and that companies that enforce strict dress codes when they don't need to are pouring money down the drain for no reason. But if you show up for an interview at a place that has at least some minimal standards for professional dress and you totally blow it off, being surprised or morally outraged when your interviewer thinks, "Well, this guy doesn't have a clue" is not really a fair reaction.
Exactly. This is definitely the type of thing that needs to change very early in life--not at hiring time. Engineering is a field that benefits from spending much of your young life preparing for it. You have to learn your math and science as a kid. You have to be interested in how things work and spend time figuring things out and doing things your friends think are uncool. You have to take college prep classes and do well on tests. You have to do your homework and ignore what the other kids are doing. In short, you have to start making really good life-altering decisions when most people are too young and immature to make good life-altering decisions.
It helps to go to a good safe school that stresses math and science. It helps to have friends who have similar interests and to avoid kids who will make your life miserable if you work hard and do well in classes. It helps to have educated, disciplined parents who set a good example. If you have none of those things, you're starting way behind in a game that's very hard to win from behind. Among my colleagues, there were a few who "weren't ready" for college and did other stuff before going back to school and becoming damn good engineers. But they're the exception. Most of them have been on this track their entire lives.
If you want to beat the drum about a lack of diversity in engineering, you need to start way back at the start of the pipeline because that's where the vast majority of your engineering candidates are made or broken.
This was my experince too. We start every candidate (even really senior ones) with a short written "find your ass with both hands" quiz that they take quietly on their own. We give it a quick skim and they either move on to interviewing with the team or a short interview with a team member and an out-the-door handshake. It's embedded C work, so it's very basic pointer stuff (4 lines of C code--point the pointer at a variable, increment, reassign, what happens?) or basic threading conceptual work. Can you traverse a linked list? Can you tell me what the ^ operator does to these two variables? My experience is that candidates either completly ace it or they crash and burn. The few times we've let a mistake slide because of an otherwise decent interview have all resulted in employees that don't make it. Given our resume pool (small company outside the most desirable locations), our failure rate is probably 75%.
I have no idea why this is or how we can produce so many people with resumes but no skills. One of my senior colleagues walked one of those guys out the door and came back and said, "I'm pretty sure there's about the same number real of programmers today as there was in 1982. We just get more applicants these days."
Perhaps just as important, when you come to an interview knowingly dressing below what is expected, you're basically saying, "I find your norms to be slightly inconvenent, so I'm going to disrespect them in a really overt way." I don't expect programmers to look snappy every day at the office, but an interview is a special occasion when both sides are supposed to be on their best behavior. They're supposed to make an effort to be respectful to each other and show some appreciation for the opportunity to start a new business relationship.
You don't show up on your first date wearing nothing but your underwear, even if you might eventually lounge around the house that way once you're living together. Showing up in your briefs that would immediately get you flagged as somebody with either no manners or no concept of appropriate behavior.
Exactly this. It's not like American universities are churning out black engineers by the million, only to have them ignored by HP. HP works with the applicant population they receive. If he wants to make a change, he can't pressure HP into making more black engineers appear out of nowhere. He has to work on creating more of them so HP can hire them. If he wanted to head out to black communitites and push the idea that math and science are cool and drum up scholarships to get kids into engineeirng school, I'd send him a donation right now. But what he's doing now is just more self-agrandizing wanking.
$5.34 million if you die this year.
If having an estate that is not taxed makes "estate tax" a bad description, why does having a death that is not taxed (which is the vast majority of case) not make "death tax" an equally bad term? The short version is that "death tax" played well in focus groups because it made voters think that they were all going to pay it and "estate tax" isn't something that sounds like they'd be on the hook for. Say what you will about it being a "euphamism" the voters were much more correct in the latter case than in the former.
Both of those guys would pay exactly the same federal estate tax of zero unless the saver was putting all of his money into early-days Apple stock. State taxes may vary.
In any case, there are all sorts of ways for two people to pay different amounts of taxes over a lifetime of earning the same amount. There's nothing particularly special about an estate tax in that sense. Would it be better to drop the estate tax and let the recipients treat it as ordinary income? I doubt you'd get much buy-in from the people who are currently on the hook for estate taxes for that.
Exactly. It really seems like a lot of people don't understand exemptions, tax brackets, and effective tax rates. Worse, I've seen editorials in major newspapers that make the same elementary mistakes. I wonder how much public opinion would shift on these matters if everybody actually understood how those calculations are really done.
You realize that we're talking about a tax with a $5,000,000 exemption in the US, right? Poor Tiny Tim's college and Chrismas Goose money fall well underneath that cutoff.
Factoring in the $5M exemption, the effective rate is usually far lower than it would be if it were treated as income. Taking your own examplte of a $10M estate, you're looking at $2M in taxes which is a 20% effective rate. That same $10M at ordinary income rates would mostly be taxed at the top marginal rate which is far higher. I'm all for complaining about the estate tax being potentially thorny for cashflow/business reasons, but let's not pretend that it's not a much nicer allternative to ordinary income taxes in most situtations.
Has anybody really looked at the data on this? Becuase the best reference I can see on it indicates that it's problematic, but not exactly a major issue. It's the type of thing that should be pretty easily resolvable in other ways (long term payment plans, etc.) that don't involve eliminating the estate tax.
Either that or people see cameras on them and are less likely to run or resist arrest. But most likely a mixture of the two. I'm sure there's a lot of misbehavior on both sides when the cameras are off. It looks like the cameras are a big win for everybody.
This is the best part of it IMO. It doesn't matter whose fault the problems were. Was it the suspect misbehaving? Was it an abusive cop? Is it a liar trying to get an officer in trouble after the fact? On the whole, it's a mix of all of them, but we don't need to know the actual mix to appreciate the fact that it seems to be better for everybody.
It's very hard for police unions to fight against something that clearly reduces their physical danger and exposure to complaints. If they save face by pretending that the cameras are making the "bad guys" behave and that it wasn't a police problem in the first place, that's fine by me.
My wife bought most of our HDMI cables at Ross and TJ Maxx. HDMI cables are exaclty the sort of commodity item with a ridiculous markup that the overflow sellers tend to carry at reasonable prices.
That's basically true of any law. Why is this a big problem? Congress could eliminate the FDIC tomorrow. Or shut down the Interstate Highway system. Or ground all aircraft permanently. It's a pretty good bet that they won't do any of those things, though.
I'm reasonably certain that the Social Security Administration cuts a check to a private citizen now and then.