Then we disagree. I believe that the taxes paid to bring oil owned by the state of Alaska to the surface (regardless of who pumps it and who may own the pumping company) is a tax that is somehow linked to the state of Alaska, and you think it is a tax on Miami.
And that's just fine as long as you understand that "somehow linked to" is not the same as "paid for by" in this context. Cheers.
So if the tax is on an Alaskan company, paid for by the Alaskan company from a check drawn on an Alaskan bank, you are asserting that someone in Miami paid it.
Yes, if that company is a wholly owned subsidiary of a publicly traded international corporation, that's exactly what I'm saying. The dollars came out of the pockets of the parent company's shareholders in every state of the union. In fact, as a shareholder in some of those companies, I paid a larger percentage of those taxes than any Alaskan who doesn't hold shares in them. If those companies were privately held by people in Alaska, you'd have a point, but you yourself pointed out that those companies are actually owned by shareholders all over the world. That's where the money ultimately comes from, regardless of where the check is mailed from.
With your reasoning, the direct tax on the oil as it is removed from the ground is being paid not on the oil, but on someone in some foreign country in the form of reduced dividends. I think that's a spurious argument invented to prove a point that can't be proved without some twisted logic.
The question isn't what the tax is "on" but rather who pays the tax. That's the point you're missing entirely. If I levy a tax on your shoes but it's paid by some guy in Miami, there's no reason to bitch about the tax coming out of your pocket. The same is true for the oil. It doesn't matter if the tax is on "your oil" if that tax is paid by the oil company. The owners of the oil company pay the taxes, not the people of Alaska.
Now you aren't even listening. I stated it was paid by a local company, not the international corporation. Yes, the local company is probably a wholly owned subsidiary of an international corporation, but the name on the check sent to the federal government on the direct tax on the resource being extracted is an Alaskan company with few, if any, employees outside the state being paid on a resource owned by the Alaskan people.
No, I'm listening. It appears that you don't understand what a "wholly owned subsidiary" is in this case. Who do you think pays the taxes of a wholly owned subsidiary of a public corporation? Let me answer that for you: The shareholders of the public corporation do. Not the people of the state where the subsidiary operates or is incorporated. Think of it this way: If that tax were repealed, would you have more money in your pockets? Would the people of Alaska? No. The people who owned the corporation that paid the taxes would. The idea that we should credit Alaska with tax money paid by people outside Alaska is ridiculous for that reason.
Why would they list it as "federal taxes paid to Washington DC"?
Because people are stupid and it drives home the point that the money is being sent somewhere else.
For one, my federal taxes are paid to an address in California.
No they're not. They're mailed to an address in California. They're paid to the federal government in Washington DC. By your logic, I pay my taxes to my local post office because I drop the envelope there and anybody who says otherwise has a hidden agenda. That makes no sense.
But they already said "the federal government." If it is so accepted everywhere else in the world, then why the redundancy? Redundancy in such a study has meaning. Either it means they are as ignorant about the equating of "federal" with "Washington DC" as you claim I am, or they included it for some other purpose. What other purpose could they have included it for? You agree it is redundant, so you agree with me. Now it's just a discussion of why include such redundancies.
You're arguing over phrasing that's completely accurate because you complain that it's redundant as if that actually makes a difference. First, you're being paranoid. Second, you don't seem to have any numbers of your own. The fact is, the raw numbers don't lie. Alaskans aren't paying more out in federal taxes (to DC or Fresno or anywhere their envelopes might go) than they get back in federal appropriations. I'd be amazed if you could come up with some actual numbers that indicate that any significant portion of that oil tax burden is paid by Alaskans. In fact, I'm certain that you can't, because it isn't. Show me the numbers! Who pays this tax and how much of it is paid? When billions of dollars move around, there's always a paper trail. Where's the one showing all that money coming out of the pockets of Alaskan taxpayers and ending up in federal hands?
Your original point was that Alaskans pay more taxes to the federal government than they get back. That's clearly not true for income tax, and you've done nothing to show that Alaskans pay any appreciable burden of the various federal taxes on oil. I'd say that your original argument is pretty much sunk, regardless of whether the phrase "the federal government in Washington DC" is arguably redundant.
I agree. The whole "Washington DC" reference they brought up is false and emotionally charged. It's also quite redundant, as you point out all federal funds end up in the same place. So their incorrect listing of where those funds are paid to was nothing other than diversionary nonsense. As such, pointing out their lie and its nonsensical nature also appears to be silly.
What on earth are you talking about? Saying that the taxes are paid to Washington is 100% accurate, given that when we say "Washington DC" we mean "the federal government." I'm not sure if the idiom is somehow different in Alaska than it is everywhere else in the world, but that's what that means in most places. Similar to the fact that "The response from Washington was..." doesn't refer to a response from the mayor's office in Washington but rather the response from the federal government.
My point is that they are willing to use incorrect words in order to generate emotional responses. Do you feel that is true based on their inclusion of specifying where federal taxes are paid to?
Yes, I think that it's 100% true and makes complete sense. Significantly more sense than your complaint about the fact that your taxes are routed through Fresno on their way to accounts managed in Washington DC. I think you're just looking desperately for a reason to discredit a source that makes it obvious that you're wrong on this one.
All oil companies operating in Alaska have a separate corporation (usually wholly owned by the mother corporation or a partnership with local companies for regulatory benefits). The taxes paid by BP are paid by BP Alaska on operations in Alaska. I'm not talking about the gas pump taxes. I'm not talking about corporate income taxes. I'm not talking about dividends. I'm not talking about payroll taxes. I'm saying that for every barrel pumped from the ground, BP Alaska sends from its Alaskan account, some dollar amount to the federal government as taxes. This would be paid no matter what happens to the oil once it is out of the ground. It could be burned on the spot and never sold to anyone and never leave the state, and the taxes would still have to be paid on it. But I don't understand what you are talking about with the "burden" being on the people.
While I'm not familiar with this particular tax (I can't find it listed anywhere), you've basically pointed out that it's a tax paid by an international corporation and not by the people of Alaska. It hardly counts as a net export of Alaskan dollars to the federal government. That's my point.
The oil belongs to the people. The taxes are being paid on the oil that belongs to the residents. So the taxes are coming directly from the resident's property. Yes, it isn't as noticeable as if someone walks up to my front door and demands a check from me. But the way the agreements were written, the oil belongs to the state (and thus the residents thereof) and the oil companies buy it from the state as it is pumped from the ground (not technically a tax) and pay the feds a tax on the oil they pump up (technically a tax and isolated solely to operations/activities in the state of Alaska due regardless of any activities done with the oil later).
The oil belongs to the people until they sell it to the oil companies. The oil companies then pay some sort of tax on their operations. The dollars for those taxes come out of the pockets of shareholders all over the world. That's the key. The taxes aren't coming out of your pockets unless you're a shareholder in Shell or BP or the like. Accounting for it any other way would be ridiculous. That's why you can't find any actual accounting statements that make the point you're trying to make.
That's my point -- this lies outside the definition of "hypocrisy".
I see your overarching point, but WTF is your definition of "hypocrisy" if not "Saying one thing and doing another"? There's no rule that says, "It's not hypocrisy if you say one thing but do another but the thing you talked about is still a good idea," or "It's not hypocrisy if you say one thing and do another but still mean what you said (but didn't do)." What would qualify as hypocrisy under your definition?
I'm just guessing here, but based on what you're writing, you never bought into the claims that Al Gore is a hypocrite for living in a big house that uses a lot of electricity while advocating carbon reductions, did you?
You quoted www.taxfoundation.org. In that paper, they specifically state "taxes paid to Washington D.C." Well, I'm a resident of Alaska, and my taxes are mailed to Fresno, CA. I'm assuming they are knowingly lying about where the taxes are paid to in order to generate an emotional response regarding sending the taxes so far away.
Where you send the check to be processed is immaterial to where it ends up. I assure you that, as a Californian, I'm not getting any of your federal taxes when the paperwork is mailed to Fresno. In fact, depending on what form I fill out and whether or not I'm enclosing a check, I may mail my taxes to Fresno or to San Francisco, or to Dallas. None of those addresses makes the slightest difference in where those funds end up: in the hands of the US Treasury. I just don't see how your claim here is anything more than diversionary nonsense.
With respect to the $6B in oil taxes, the question is, who pays those taxes? Sure, the oil comes from Alaska, but where are the taxes actually paid? As far as I can tell, they're paid at the pump in fuel taxes, and they're paid by the oil companies in income taxes and by the shareholders as taxes on dividends. For example, Chevron Texaco extracts oil and gas in Alaska, but its headquarters is in California, it is incorporated in Delaware, and its shareholders are sprinkled all over the world. I can't think of any reason to claim that the people of Alaska are bearing the burden of the taxes on the oil it produces any more than the people of California are bearing the burden of WalMart's corporate income tax on the WalMart down the street from me, but maybe you can set me straight.
I don't totally disagree in theory, but as I see it,the problem with this is similar to the problem with encryption key escrow: If there's a hole in the security for the "good guys" the "bad guys" will figure out how to exploit it. If the government has a way to get your encryption keys, even assuming that they're always on their best behavior, you can bet that a smart kid somewhere will figure out how to get your keys as well, and you can't assume that he'll be on his best behavior. Likewise, if you program a blind spot into a virus / malware scanner, I don't think it's unreasonable to bet that the same kid will figure out a way to make his malware look benign enough to slip through the same hole.
It's a simple rule of security: If there's a low security path, the bad guys will take it. That's how they win. Assuming otherwise is silly.
Well, where I was going with the Walgreen's thing was that they have a duty to make at least a cursory check for illegal material.
There's a huge difference here, though. Walgreen's employees can't help but see the pictures they're printing. They can't just assume that they came out correctly, so they have to look at them. There's no way around it. If there's illegal material, they can't help but see it. No special effort is required.
Geek Squad agents are given voluntary access to their customers hard drives, and may have a duty, or at least a 'suggestion' to take a quick peek if they have the time. I have never worked for a Geek Squad, nor do I know anyone who has, so this is pure speculation, but not unreasonable.
I strongly disagree. It's not any more reasonable than an auto mechanic having a "duty" to go through your glove compartment looking for drug paraphernalia or a hotel maid going through your brief case to see if you're engaged in corporate espionage. If they have any duty or "suggestion" to riffle through a user's private files, then it should be spelled out before they hand their computer over. I'd be willing to be that "We're going to look through your personal documents" would be both a major surprise and a source of lost customers if they announced it.
My point is that this agent did not get in trouble with the Geek Squad for looking through the files of a customer. He got in trouble for keeping copies of some of these files after he'd already handed back the originals. Privacy wasn't the issue for anyone except the consumer and the/. membership.
That's the part that's stunning to me. It's like having your dentist stick his hand down your pants during the course of a cleaning and then having his boss apologize because his hand was cold. It misses the point entirely.
Like I said, I've done the system administration thing. While I have no illusions about how important or respectable the job was, I saw myself as having similar obligations to a doctor when it comes to being respectful of my users and keeping them informed when I had to do something that was even minimally invasive. Most of the system administrators I have known have seen it the same way. Unfortunately, while IT has become ubiquitous and many people put a lot of trust in the system, there's no understanding between the public and IT professionals when it comes to ethical behavior. IT support is often looked at like auto mechanics, and while they're very similar in many ways, the level of access they have to the intimate details of people's lives makes them much closer to doctors or lawyers. It's clear to me from the reaction to this that the public simply isn't informed enough to recognize that they need to hold their IT professionals to similar ethical standards. That's very sad.
Well, for starters, there aren't a lot of problems with your computer that might require them to look through your files. I've done the IT support thing and the only times I've ever done anything like that is to figure out why a user hit their quota unexpectedly or some similar problem. Even then, I never looked at file contents. There's just no reason to. Your tax guy *has* to look at your financial statements. Your photo printer *has* to look at your photos. Your IT support person looking through your personal files is no better than your dishwasher repair man going through your underwear drawer.
1) He's not "the standard bearer," he's just a senator.
But he is a senator who got into office campaigning on the Sanctity of Marriage. He'd be just a senator if he hadn't gotten all excited about a constitutional amendment to "protect" some idealized version of marriage that never actually existed.
2) I see something wrong with cheating on one's wife, whether one is "the standard bearer" or not.
I think that most of us agree. I think that where we disagree is that I see the humor in the fact that the group of people who scream and cry loudly about the sanctity of marriage, traditional morals, and how we need a government that will uphold the morals of the Christian majority seems to be full of people who aren't doing a particularly good job of living their lives that way.
3) Everyone knew Clinton was an adulterer going in. People wanted him kicked out of office for perjury and abuse of executive privelidge.
Well, I'd argue that some wanted him kicked out over perjury but most just wanted him out of office and found perjury to be the most likely way of making it happen.
Of course there's a connection between adultery and the sanctity of marriage. As far as the sanctity of marriage goes, he's apparently a bad husband but a good senator. You apparently don't care what kind of husband a senator is, but if they try to protect the sanctity of marriage as a senator, but fail to protect it as a husband, you will "point and laugh." That's your prerogative, but I don't believe it makes for any kind of argument against the validity of upholding those ideals in the first place.
I don't think that it in any way invalidates the position. I don't think that it's completely unconnected, though. I think that this is a good argument that questions of sexual morality shouldn't be front and center in political debate and certainly shouldn't be the most important thing on the docket. Remember Vitter's words: "I don't believe there's any issue that's more important than [gay marriage]." If you're going to make gay marriage a policy debate, go ahead. It's a valid point for a public policy discussion. But debate it with meaningful facts, not misty-eyed appeals to morality and traditional apple-pie values. If all you can conjure up is idealized images of the "sanctity of marriage" and essentially argue that you're "defending" marriage and the other side is anti-marriage, you're not just grandstanding and pushing questionable policy in order to get votes. You're also opening the door for sexual morality to be a legitimate discussion in public policy, and I have no pity for you when you get burned.
Personally I find this [rebuilding funds for New Orleans] a total waste of money also.
That's certainly not a crazy position to take, given the hazard inherent in building in certain areas there. I should point out, though, that New Orleans is a huge city and a vital port for US trade and if the alternative is building a bridge in the middle of nowhere so a few thousand people can skip a 7 minute ferry ride, I know where I'm going to send the check.
Ok, then how about Alaska just keeping the hundreds of billions of Federal tax dollars that are continuously sucked out of it without even close to a reasonable quantity of reinvestment in federal funds?
Every reference I can find indicates that Alaska gets far more back in federal money than it pays in in federal tax dollars. Do you have a different reference somewhere?
Believe it or not the reason for federal funds is to do large projects that need to be done. Have you ever noticed all of that infrastructure that you rely on everyday? Federal funds at work. So you are using a museum as a comparison? Those sorts of things are kind of important but I fail to see anyone thinking that compares to this type of project. Job training programs? If there is a chance that the people involved will become taxpayers then hell yes, federal funds should be used.
I personally don't question the need for federal investment. I question the wisdom of this particular program as it is egregiously expensive for the benefit received, which is concentrated in a very small area among a very small group of people. There are other places that might need $300M in funds for something less frivolous. Like rebuilding New Orleans, for example.
The city in question is packed into the base of a mountain and the ocean. There are no roads that lead there. The only way to get there is by boat or by plane, and if you take a plane you will still have to take a boat to get to town.
So, you've taken a plane to get into this area. You clearly don't have your car with you. Your choice is between a ferry that leaves every 30 minutes and paying hundreds of millions of dollars for a project nearly the size of the Golden Gate bridge. Let's think about the wisdom of that for a moment. Would a bridge be convenient? Certainly. Is it worth that much money? Only if you're not the one spending it.
Come to think of it, what about this: You're now the dictator in charge of Alaska. The federal government gives you $200M+ to spend any way you want. Would you build the bridge, or do something else with it? Is that bridge clearly the most important piece of infrastructure in the state? Obviously not. Now, expand that to the entire USA. Face it: this was a dumb idea. There are plenty of good ways to spend federal dollars on infrastructure. This wasn't one of them.
Admittedly there's a difference between someone who says, "You're an asshole if you (insert hideous misguided action here.)!" and someone who says, "I think life might be better if we all tried to avoid (insert same misguided action here.)."
That's pretty much the key point that the original poster is missing. I'm sure that there are plenty of people (I daresay most) who entered their marriage thinking that they'd never cheat and ended up cheating. Those people might well have said that cheating on their spouses would be a bad thing. It's a shame when that happens.
Vitter was not one of those people. He is one of those people who says things like "You're an asshole if you ___" trumpeting moral fitness and calling for people who have had affairs to step down from office. If you campaign on the "I'm moral and the other guy isn't" platform, I have zero pity for you. Don't call for somebody's resignation when he does it and then call yourself forgiven and keep on rolling when you do it. There's no "My family deserves privacy but his family doesn't" in non-hypocrite-land.
Like I said, his case isn't nearly as funny as Ted Haggard, but it's still enough schadenfreude to keep me going.
In particular, small numbers of very vocal people file lawsuits against the majority to get them to do what they want.
There's a key issue with your phrasing: The lawsuits are to *prevent* the majority from doing things, not to force them to do things. "Stop doing that!" is very different from, "Do this because I say so" in the context of abuse of government power. No, you can't use our taxpayer money to promote your religion. Cry me a river.
When you are being prersecuted by a branch of government that is not answerable to the people, it makes no difference how large the majority his who favors your side. It doesn't do you any good unless or until you take to arms.
If by "persecuted" you mean not being allowed to use government power and tax money to support one particular religion, then yes, I suppose you're being persecuted. I tend to think of it as "limiting abuse of government power" though.
Regardless of whether or not the "nutjob Christians" somehow made it possible, the fact that a town would be prevented by the Courts (with the help of the ACLU), in clear contradiction to the 1st amendment, from putting a manger display in the town square on Christmas, while facing no such restriction from placing any other kind of display in the same place, illustrates that Christianity is an ideology persecuted by a powerful minority in control of the judicial branch of government, with no legal recourse for the People to do anything about it.
First, I'd hardly say that having to take down a particular religious idol from public display is "persecution" when that idol is paid for by tax money and put on public land. Second, it's fascinating to me that the conservatives wail and scream about their tax dollars being "wasted" on programs that don't benefit them and that (they say) should be undertaken by private donations to private organizations that represent those interests. Then, the moment they get the opportunity to piss away public money on religious trinkets and decorations which serve no practical purpose other than to promote the majority religion and stroke the egos of the people in power, they jump on it.
"Health care for the poor? Fuck no! A sequined glow-in-the-dark Jesus idol? Where do I sign the check?" WTF??
$500M isn't that much, you know. We spend that for three days in Iraq.
It's a lot of money when you consider what else you can buy with it that will benefit a LOT more than 8000 people. I seem to remember a major port city called New Orleans being in ruin, for example.
The idea that someone is a hypocrite because they hire a prostitute while simultaneously being against prenatal murder and homosexual marriage is convoluted at best.
So you see nothing wrong with being the standard bearer for "family values" and the "sanctity of marriage" and cheating on your wife? You don't see anything particularly hypocritical about wanting Clinton to resign over an extramarital affair but doing the usual "I've been forgiven, so stay out of my family's business" tap dance when he's caught having one? Look, I don't care how screwed up the guy's personal life is when evaluating him as a leader, but I'm going to POINT AND LAUGH at the blatant hypocrisy of these holier-than-thou assholes and the hot water it gets them in. Admittedly, it's not as funny as Ted Haggard, but it's still a hoot.
No connection between "family values" and "sanctity of marriage" and cheating on your wife with a hooker? Please. I bet my wife would have something to say about that if I tried the argument.
The human mind is fortunately so divided that it can contemplate the ideal and the true before it itself embodies those things.
Some of our minds are more divided than others, apparently.
I dunno about the others, but, I'm very familiar with Huckabee. He's a nice guy, and a very down to earth guy. Probably so much so, you'll never see him get anywhere near to being elected nationally.
Given his position on the basic results of science, I should hope so. I have no reason to doubt that he's a nice guy, but so are a lot of people who aren't particularly bright or well-informed. I seriously hope that we can move away from our trend toward electing likable characters over smart, effective leaders.
I highly recommend the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City if you find yourself tempted to think that this war has been run with an eye toward good governance and oversight. Sadly, it wasn't written until after the last presidential election.
Serving in one of America's seven uniformed services, the SG serves the people at the pleasure of the President (Executive). He's there to take orders and perform assigned duties, not promote his personal agenda.
And that's why we're annoyed at the President. He had an expert in his employ and opted to ignore his expertise on a number of important issues. We're not questioning Bush's right to be a poor leader. We're questioning the way he did his job. If I hire an engineer to look over a design and ignore everything he says (and make sure that the people in charge never hear his criticisms), that reflects badly on me not on him, and it's my fault when the design fails. That makes me a failure at my job (and probably a Bad Person), even if I was well within my rights to do it.
My position is that in not listening to his experts or at least allowing true information from his experts to be heard by the electorate at large, President Bush failed as a leader. No, it wasn't illegal. Yes, he's allowed to do it. No, that doesn't make it any less of a failure.
Anyone that thinks the.03% of the atmospheric gases can cause some sort of calamity is just stupid.
Wow. I didn't realize it was so easy to be a climatologist. You just apply a simple rule of thumb and there's your answer. No need for things like "models" or "data" that may produce counterintuitive results.
A word to the clueless: Science often produces correct results that are not supported by a cursory common sense glance at the data. If science were all about common sense, we wouldn't bother paying scientists to do it for us. We'd just figure things out in our spare time as we needed to.
The idea that the President should take a poll to decide what to have for breakfast and "do the will of the people" leads to utter non-leadership.
I don't think that the grandparent said anything about the will of the people. The point of the post was that when given the choice between pandering to your base or making a decision that's objectively in the best interests of the nation, the President is supposed to do the latter. That necessarily involves listening to concrete data that may upset your worldview--like data that says that abstinence-only education is a dismal failure and it would be in the best interests of the nation to do away with it, regardless of whether it upsets religious conservatives like President Bush and his supporters.
You pointed out yourself that a good leader isn't a slave to the polls. This is a case of just that, but instead of being a slave to polls of the US in general, he's a slave to polls of his base. Rather than squelching data keeping it out of the hands of the electorate, a truly good leader would want any and all data on the table so he could use it to convince the electorate that he's right. That's what a leader does. There's a difference between leading people and tricking people or simply ordering them around. A leader brings people to his side of the argument and uses that support to get things done. Sadly, our politicians rarely lead.
What does this have to do with technology? This story is not Slashdot worthy, in my humble opinion.
Well, it's actually about science, which seems relevant to people who are interested in science and its role in society.
I guess the argument could be made that this is yet another example of censorship from the Bush administration, but frankly, it's not a very good one. Since when does the surgeon general speak authoritatively about global warming?
I agree that the global warming complaint is pathetic, but that's not the only issue brought up in the articles on this. Abstinence-only education and its measurable failure as a policy is a very relevant to the Surgeon General and public health policy. This stuff is important, even if it upsets you.
Finally, you may also notice that Slashdot has a "politics" section. Not surprisingly, you'll find politics there. It's also worth noting that Slashdot lets you customize what you see. For instance, Slashdot book reviews invariably suck, so I turned them off. If you're into political discussion with a bunch of engineering nerds, read it. If you're not, don't. Don't complain that a particular discussion isn't of interest to you in particular. That's just lame.
The coverage of this has amazed me. If you read (or watched) the testimony, what actually happened was that Surgeon Generals under the past FOUR presidents described how they were censored. It isn't unique to the Bush White House, it's a flaw in the whole system. Of course, you'll never hear the media criticize Clinton.
It's worth noting that Clinton isn't the president. He's retired. Out. No longer an issue. He had his shot. We don't bitch about James Polk very much either. This is just a wild guess, but I bet that in 4 years, you'll probably be seeing more headlines devoted to our next president than to Bush.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm listening. It appears that you don't understand what a "wholly owned subsidiary" is in this case. Who do you think pays the taxes of a wholly owned subsidiary of a public corporation? Let me answer that for you: The shareholders of the public corporation do. Not the people of the state where the subsidiary operates or is incorporated. Think of it this way: If that tax were repealed, would you have more money in your pockets? Would the people of Alaska? No. The people who owned the corporation that paid the taxes would. The idea that we should credit Alaska with tax money paid by people outside Alaska is ridiculous for that reason.
Because people are stupid and it drives home the point that the money is being sent somewhere else.
No they're not. They're mailed to an address in California. They're paid to the federal government in Washington DC. By your logic, I pay my taxes to my local post office because I drop the envelope there and anybody who says otherwise has a hidden agenda. That makes no sense.
You're arguing over phrasing that's completely accurate because you complain that it's redundant as if that actually makes a difference. First, you're being paranoid. Second, you don't seem to have any numbers of your own. The fact is, the raw numbers don't lie. Alaskans aren't paying more out in federal taxes (to DC or Fresno or anywhere their envelopes might go) than they get back in federal appropriations. I'd be amazed if you could come up with some actual numbers that indicate that any significant portion of that oil tax burden is paid by Alaskans. In fact, I'm certain that you can't, because it isn't. Show me the numbers! Who pays this tax and how much of it is paid? When billions of dollars move around, there's always a paper trail. Where's the one showing all that money coming out of the pockets of Alaskan taxpayers and ending up in federal hands?
Your original point was that Alaskans pay more taxes to the federal government than they get back. That's clearly not true for income tax, and you've done nothing to show that Alaskans pay any appreciable burden of the various federal taxes on oil. I'd say that your original argument is pretty much sunk, regardless of whether the phrase "the federal government in Washington DC" is arguably redundant.
Yes, I think that it's 100% true and makes complete sense. Significantly more sense than your complaint about the fact that your taxes are routed through Fresno on their way to accounts managed in Washington DC. I think you're just looking desperately for a reason to discredit a source that makes it obvious that you're wrong on this one.
While I'm not familiar with this particular tax (I can't find it listed anywhere), you've basically pointed out that it's a tax paid by an international corporation and not by the people of Alaska. It hardly counts as a net export of Alaskan dollars to the federal government. That's my point.
The oil belongs to the people until they sell it to the oil companies. The oil companies then pay some sort of tax on their operations. The dollars for those taxes come out of the pockets of shareholders all over the world. That's the key. The taxes aren't coming out of your pockets unless you're a shareholder in Shell or BP or the like. Accounting for it any other way would be ridiculous. That's why you can't find any actual accounting statements that make the point you're trying to make.
I'm just guessing here, but based on what you're writing, you never bought into the claims that Al Gore is a hypocrite for living in a big house that uses a lot of electricity while advocating carbon reductions, did you?
With respect to the $6B in oil taxes, the question is, who pays those taxes? Sure, the oil comes from Alaska, but where are the taxes actually paid? As far as I can tell, they're paid at the pump in fuel taxes, and they're paid by the oil companies in income taxes and by the shareholders as taxes on dividends. For example, Chevron Texaco extracts oil and gas in Alaska, but its headquarters is in California, it is incorporated in Delaware, and its shareholders are sprinkled all over the world. I can't think of any reason to claim that the people of Alaska are bearing the burden of the taxes on the oil it produces any more than the people of California are bearing the burden of WalMart's corporate income tax on the WalMart down the street from me, but maybe you can set me straight.
I don't totally disagree in theory, but as I see it,the problem with this is similar to the problem with encryption key escrow: If there's a hole in the security for the "good guys" the "bad guys" will figure out how to exploit it. If the government has a way to get your encryption keys, even assuming that they're always on their best behavior, you can bet that a smart kid somewhere will figure out how to get your keys as well, and you can't assume that he'll be on his best behavior. Likewise, if you program a blind spot into a virus / malware scanner, I don't think it's unreasonable to bet that the same kid will figure out a way to make his malware look benign enough to slip through the same hole.
It's a simple rule of security: If there's a low security path, the bad guys will take it. That's how they win. Assuming otherwise is silly.
I strongly disagree. It's not any more reasonable than an auto mechanic having a "duty" to go through your glove compartment looking for drug paraphernalia or a hotel maid going through your brief case to see if you're engaged in corporate espionage. If they have any duty or "suggestion" to riffle through a user's private files, then it should be spelled out before they hand their computer over. I'd be willing to be that "We're going to look through your personal documents" would be both a major surprise and a source of lost customers if they announced it.
That's the part that's stunning to me. It's like having your dentist stick his hand down your pants during the course of a cleaning and then having his boss apologize because his hand was cold. It misses the point entirely.
Like I said, I've done the system administration thing. While I have no illusions about how important or respectable the job was, I saw myself as having similar obligations to a doctor when it comes to being respectful of my users and keeping them informed when I had to do something that was even minimally invasive. Most of the system administrators I have known have seen it the same way. Unfortunately, while IT has become ubiquitous and many people put a lot of trust in the system, there's no understanding between the public and IT professionals when it comes to ethical behavior. IT support is often looked at like auto mechanics, and while they're very similar in many ways, the level of access they have to the intimate details of people's lives makes them much closer to doctors or lawyers. It's clear to me from the reaction to this that the public simply isn't informed enough to recognize that they need to hold their IT professionals to similar ethical standards. That's very sad.
Well, for starters, there aren't a lot of problems with your computer that might require them to look through your files. I've done the IT support thing and the only times I've ever done anything like that is to figure out why a user hit their quota unexpectedly or some similar problem. Even then, I never looked at file contents. There's just no reason to. Your tax guy *has* to look at your financial statements. Your photo printer *has* to look at your photos. Your IT support person looking through your personal files is no better than your dishwasher repair man going through your underwear drawer.
I think that most of us agree. I think that where we disagree is that I see the humor in the fact that the group of people who scream and cry loudly about the sanctity of marriage, traditional morals, and how we need a government that will uphold the morals of the Christian majority seems to be full of people who aren't doing a particularly good job of living their lives that way.
Well, I'd argue that some wanted him kicked out over perjury but most just wanted him out of office and found perjury to be the most likely way of making it happen.
I don't think that it in any way invalidates the position. I don't think that it's completely unconnected, though. I think that this is a good argument that questions of sexual morality shouldn't be front and center in political debate and certainly shouldn't be the most important thing on the docket. Remember Vitter's words: "I don't believe there's any issue that's more important than [gay marriage]." If you're going to make gay marriage a policy debate, go ahead. It's a valid point for a public policy discussion. But debate it with meaningful facts, not misty-eyed appeals to morality and traditional apple-pie values. If all you can conjure up is idealized images of the "sanctity of marriage" and essentially argue that you're "defending" marriage and the other side is anti-marriage, you're not just grandstanding and pushing questionable policy in order to get votes. You're also opening the door for sexual morality to be a legitimate discussion in public policy, and I have no pity for you when you get burned.
I personally don't question the need for federal investment. I question the wisdom of this particular program as it is egregiously expensive for the benefit received, which is concentrated in a very small area among a very small group of people. There are other places that might need $300M in funds for something less frivolous. Like rebuilding New Orleans, for example.
So, you've taken a plane to get into this area. You clearly don't have your car with you. Your choice is between a ferry that leaves every 30 minutes and paying hundreds of millions of dollars for a project nearly the size of the Golden Gate bridge. Let's think about the wisdom of that for a moment. Would a bridge be convenient? Certainly. Is it worth that much money? Only if you're not the one spending it.
Come to think of it, what about this: You're now the dictator in charge of Alaska. The federal government gives you $200M+ to spend any way you want. Would you build the bridge, or do something else with it? Is that bridge clearly the most important piece of infrastructure in the state? Obviously not. Now, expand that to the entire USA. Face it: this was a dumb idea. There are plenty of good ways to spend federal dollars on infrastructure. This wasn't one of them.
Vitter was not one of those people. He is one of those people who says things like "You're an asshole if you ___" trumpeting moral fitness and calling for people who have had affairs to step down from office. If you campaign on the "I'm moral and the other guy isn't" platform, I have zero pity for you. Don't call for somebody's resignation when he does it and then call yourself forgiven and keep on rolling when you do it. There's no "My family deserves privacy but his family doesn't" in non-hypocrite-land.
Like I said, his case isn't nearly as funny as Ted Haggard, but it's still enough schadenfreude to keep me going.
First, I'd hardly say that having to take down a particular religious idol from public display is "persecution" when that idol is paid for by tax money and put on public land. Second, it's fascinating to me that the conservatives wail and scream about their tax dollars being "wasted" on programs that don't benefit them and that (they say) should be undertaken by private donations to private organizations that represent those interests. Then, the moment they get the opportunity to piss away public money on religious trinkets and decorations which serve no practical purpose other than to promote the majority religion and stroke the egos of the people in power, they jump on it.
"Health care for the poor? Fuck no! A sequined glow-in-the-dark Jesus idol? Where do I sign the check?" WTF??
No connection between "family values" and "sanctity of marriage" and cheating on your wife with a hooker? Please. I bet my wife would have something to say about that if I tried the argument.
Some of our minds are more divided than others, apparently.
I highly recommend the book Imperial Life in the Emerald City if you find yourself tempted to think that this war has been run with an eye toward good governance and oversight. Sadly, it wasn't written until after the last presidential election.
My position is that in not listening to his experts or at least allowing true information from his experts to be heard by the electorate at large, President Bush failed as a leader. No, it wasn't illegal. Yes, he's allowed to do it. No, that doesn't make it any less of a failure.
A word to the clueless: Science often produces correct results that are not supported by a cursory common sense glance at the data. If science were all about common sense, we wouldn't bother paying scientists to do it for us. We'd just figure things out in our spare time as we needed to.
You pointed out yourself that a good leader isn't a slave to the polls. This is a case of just that, but instead of being a slave to polls of the US in general, he's a slave to polls of his base. Rather than squelching data keeping it out of the hands of the electorate, a truly good leader would want any and all data on the table so he could use it to convince the electorate that he's right. That's what a leader does. There's a difference between leading people and tricking people or simply ordering them around. A leader brings people to his side of the argument and uses that support to get things done. Sadly, our politicians rarely lead.
I agree that the global warming complaint is pathetic, but that's not the only issue brought up in the articles on this. Abstinence-only education and its measurable failure as a policy is a very relevant to the Surgeon General and public health policy. This stuff is important, even if it upsets you.
Finally, you may also notice that Slashdot has a "politics" section. Not surprisingly, you'll find politics there. It's also worth noting that Slashdot lets you customize what you see. For instance, Slashdot book reviews invariably suck, so I turned them off. If you're into political discussion with a bunch of engineering nerds, read it. If you're not, don't. Don't complain that a particular discussion isn't of interest to you in particular. That's just lame.