Taxing a couple who both work at a higher rate than a couple making the same amount when only a single person works is actually GOOD for the country.
Having one parent home to raise kids is GOOD for the country. Adding another incentive to have more families where both parents work is not a good thing. And if couples aren't going to have children, then tough.
Then when you sell stock, you should be able to put it into a tax-free escrow account for say, 10 days, and use that money to invest in other securities, but if you use it to buy a Rolls Royce or Lear Jet, it should be taxed at the standard Income rate.
Think of all the dot-commers out there with options, they have a choice - buy a new camcorder, or diversivy the holdings so you don't lose your shirt when Microsoft stomps your company. (the first option is "get your shirt NOW"). Either way you get the fuck taxed out of you. So what incentive is there to diversify?
Personally, I diversified by buying a nice big house. That way, if my stocks plummet, I still have a roof over my head, and an asset to sell in an emergency, but either way, I've got a nice big house. Otherwise, most of my money is still tied up in my Options. I can't afford to diversify without getting butt-reamed by the IRS. Capital Gains rate or no. If I dare to actually HOLD my stock, Alternative Minimum Tax fucks me over even worse. My options are doing nobody any good. I'm paralyzed. If there were a nice little escrow I could use to transfer my wealth, I could protect my holdings, and benefit other companies.
There is a tax based on value of assets, it's called Alternative Minumum Tax. As much of a communist as I sound like in my other posts, and as much as I agree that we need to KEEP the "death tax". I strongly believe that AMT is a big huge pile of shit that needs to be shovelled away immediately. The AMT is what is REALLY paralyzing the moderately wealthy, preventing them from taking risks with their capital, preventing them from doing anything constructive, and most of all, taking all the newly wealthy people out there, and shoving them firmly back into the middle-class. While at the same time, AMT doesn't really impact the super-rich, because though it probably sucks a big chunk out of the growth of their holdings, they still manage to live, and live well.
Pre-Reagan. I believe the super wealthy got taxed at even much higher rates. They still got by. I believe the private jet industry was still booming back then. But when Reagan changed the tax codes, there was a huge windfall for these people. "Reaganomics" claimed that with all this extra money, it would go into the economy, and "trickle-down" to the masses, because there would be more spending, more robust economy, more jobs, etc.
The fallout of this though was yes, there were more jobs, but most of the new jobs were service-industry jobs, low-wage jobs. Nothing you coould support a family on. At the same time, the normal "white-collar" kind of job that built this nation back in the 50's (which is what the republicans believe they want to return to - more like the 20's), was reduced. People would get laid off from $50k/yr jobs, and had to pick up two $15k/yr jobs to try to compensate.
We're not talking about the Millionaire Next Door. We're talking about the Billionaire Next Door. Millionaires are now middle class. We're not talking about people who risk it all, we're talking about people who risk 500 million, and don't even blink.
Stock options have been very good to me, and I still remember what it was like to be poor. It disgusts me to remember how banks and credit card companies used to treat me back when I was poor, and that some of my old friends who DIDN'T strike it rich, are still treated that way. Today, if I walked into my bank, they usually would recognize me, call me MISTER, and if I had an overdraft in my checking account, they usually let it slide. But I remember times in the past where an overdraft, even if it was the result of a clerical error or delay of a deposit due to obscure bank rules, would result in a major disruption, and many hours making phone calls to companies to assure them that the funds were coming. Plus fines, fees, derision, scorn, cancellations of service, reposessions, etc. The same goes for applying for loans, and all kinds of other opportunities. I'm rich and I'm telling you, it's just plain not FAIR the way poor people are treated. I have NO PROBLEM paying a proportionately higher tax rate than my fellow citezens who are less well off. I have NO PROBLEM knowing that my childrens' inheritence will be taxed highly when I pass on, knowing that they have a fair shake at competing and succeeding when they get out into the world. I'm concerned that if they fail, they'll fall into ruin. I'm really concerned about that, but I'd rather they work for what they get, than have it given to them on a silver platter, be it coming from me, or the government.
I don't mind paying taxes, as long as it is being used and spent wisely, and as long as people who have several orders of magnitude more wealth than I do, (who will never have to worry about spending it all, no matter how hard they try), are taxed at much higher rates. We all need food and shelter, and nice standards of living are gravy. Those who have earned a nice standard of living should be able to enjoy it too. But the Billionaire Next Door is maxed-out on his standard of living, they've got more money than they can possibly spend if they went on a non-stop 24x7 internet shopping spree. Why waste that money on a vault? Why not put some of it to use?
Some people are looking at money as a SURVIVAL issue. A fraction of a percent of income tax could mean life or death for a large number of very poor, borderline homeless people.
For the middle-class, they're still struggling, but they've replaced SURVIVAL with MAINTENANCE OF STANDARD OF LIVING. Certainly this justifies raising taxes a tad on them, because they won't starve, they just will have to cut back to 3 packs of pokemon cards a week for their kids, or they'll have to cut out the premium channels on cable. If a family member comes down with cancer or something, they're essentially screwed, even with good medical coverage. They're back in the soup-lines.
Then there's the upper-class, who have NO CONCEPT of survival anymore. It's taken for granted, a given. The only thing they are frightened of is a revolution or national invasion, and their government takes good care of them. Standard of living maintenance similarly has no meaning for them. They've replaced that impetus with something else, something else that I have no clue about, and I'm sure most people in this discussion don't either. Is it a contest to be the richest in the world? Is it a contest to establish an everlasting legacy of wealth for their family name? What is it? I don't know. But they certainly don't want to have to go down to the level where they have to go into a BMW dealership and have to decide on a 5 or 3 series. Especially if the evil government is robbing them of it. It certainly makes no sense to me why this impetus for a very rich person to become very much richer, is more important than perhaps thousands of people eating, or getting proper health care, or for fuck's sake, breathing clean air.
Especially when, eventually, if this money is kept hidden away from the consumer-level economy, it will weaken the government to the point where ecological regulation will become impossible, and without that, we will all, with 100% certainty, bake like potatoes, choke, shrivel up, and die. Private enterprise cannot do this task. Well, if humanity's survival isn't important enough, then I guess we need to cut the taxes. We all die anyway, at least those super-rich people will die happy.
If Mr. Goldshorts HAD put his money into the economy, it wouldn't be saved as inheritance, and wouldn't need to be taxed as inheritance, only on a Sales Tax basis.
Has the US ever gone to war to protect corporate interests overseas? Well, does Joe Poorboy own any stock in BufuCo? no, Ritchie Rich does. Joe Poorboy's SON gets drafted or more likely, is economically compelled to sign up (unlike Richie Rich's offspring), and has to go overseas to fight, and most likely die, to protect some company's assets from waking up one morning in a communist country.
Poor Americans end up fighting wars, at cost to the government, to protect the vast interests of the American rich overseas. Poor Americans live on PCB dumps, because the rich Americans' stock holdings are in companies that only look at the bottom line, and therefore do not give a rat's ass about the environment, so they dump crap on land, which devalues it, so the poor can afford to live there and drink contaminated water. And, of course, who pays to clean up the mess? The governement.
You'd think Jobs would be regretting his decision to kill-off Exponential.
Now THERE'S a bad business decision.
This all just proves one thing. It's not PPC that's broken. It's Motorola, and AIM that are broken. AIM doesn't allow any REAL competition between Motorola and IBM. Too bad that the entire computing world is held hostage by the whims of evil Bill Walker of Motorola.
Great, open source censorware - first thing it will block is Microsoft's site, of course, then any of Microsoft's partners, or any MS Fan site, MSNBC, NBC, Intuit, (ironically) Corel, then we have to ban all of Microsoft's stooges, Dell, Gateway, Compaq, and even Apple because Microsoft "owns" them too, (according to some/. poster I bantered with last week), then pretty much any company that doesn't provide source code, hardware companies with closed specs, then any server served with IIS, any server that serves non-standards-compliant HTML, any server that serves HTML not optimized for Mozilla's special features (c'mon, work with me here), but MOST IMPORTANTLY; goatse, any site containint the text: GRITS, Natalie Portman, bird, penis, penis-bird, Ogg, Sig11, or any site using a numeral 5 instead of the letter "S".
Of course, we'll all still be able to see our boobies.
I really don't understand why public grade schools and libraries NEED to have internet access?
I mean, yeah, I've been on the internet since 94 or thereabouts, back when it was just the internet, and it was still largely a tool of universities, and geeks, and the large computer firms were just getting started with putting up their own web pages. There was a LOT of good stuff on line, and from what I understand, back then, most of the pr0n was on usenet anyway.
The internet of that era was a tool of learning, of knowledge.
But the internet has changed, no doubt about it. It is a totally different animal than it was. Even though almost all of the old resources are still available, the most constructive bit is the clean parts of usenet, and email. The Web itself, is a huge waste of time as far as education goes. It's all corporatized, buy this, rent that, be part of my little plan to take over the world, download my web doohickey, etc. I don't think it has any place in education or the library. Except for email. Maybe connect these guys, but low-bandwidth, and shut off the web ports. Leave the censorship to parents and home computer systems. Yeah, there's a lot of neat stuff out there, but I just don't see it as all that important to anyone but Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft, and AOL. Putting school computers online just legitimizes the idea that public school merely indoctrinates our young into the American culture of consumerism. Gag.
Flouride in the water reduces IQ.
Deisel fuel particles increase allergies.
Magnetic fields from power lines cause cancer.
Oat Bran reduces cholesterol.
Video Games cause violence.
Napster causes musicians to stop making music.
The economy responds more to liberal economic policy than to cheap oil.
Unregulated soft money causes corruption in the US political system.
I've seen TV shows on this topic (like all of us have), and one factor that nobody here seems to be mentioning is that you can make a BIG difference in the amount of radiation that your head absorbs by the way you hold your phone. If you hold it so that the antenna is touching your head, (not as the designers intended, the mouthpiece needs to be infront of your mouth), then the difference of an inch or two is HUGE because of the inverse square law. If you hold the phone at an angle, allowing the antenna to point AWAY from your head (those tiny flip-phones do that already), it holds that antenna of death an inch or two further away, which really does make a huge difference in the amount of power - and supposedly this is what is responsible for the huge differences in reported radiation absorbtion some testers have seen - and claimed that the industry was underreporting their measurements, when really, it had to do with the position of the phone. It may also be the reason why some people are getting cancer and others are not, maybe they hold their phones differently.
Anyway, if I was forced to carry one of these damn things, I'd use a headset. I'd much rather have hip cancer than brain cancer.
It's possible that the mechanism for cancer formation isn't fully understood. Nor all the mechanisms and functions of various brain tissue.
So since we don't know of a mechanism for cell-phone emissions for causing cancer, neither can we explain the results of some of the studies, like the impact on reaction time, and memories that cell-phone emissions have been observed to produce.
Never let your model of the universe surpass or supplant your observations. When you do that, you are essentially a religious fanatic.
They did have one "free for all" a couple of weeks back, a bunch of lightweights. Turned out pretty lame, but the concept got me exited.
We need to get back to the flame-throwers and projectile weapons though. I mean, if this is going to be radio-controlled, what's the challenge? (beyond finding a driver who can fight his way out of a paper bag) just escalation in weaponry, right? Maybe make that lexan a bit thicker. ..
uh yeah, *you* go freeze your ass off on Mars. I'll watch as the mushroom cloud from the meteor impact on Mars vaporizes our first colony. It could happen either way.
Slashdot Mirror
The Government is people.
Just like Soylent Green.
"marriage penalty" is actually a misnomer.
Taxing a couple who both work at a higher rate than a couple making the same amount when only a single person works is actually GOOD for the country.
Having one parent home to raise kids is GOOD for the country. Adding another incentive to have more families where both parents work is not a good thing. And if couples aren't going to have children, then tough.
Then when you sell stock, you should be able to put it into a tax-free escrow account for say, 10 days, and use that money to invest in other securities, but if you use it to buy a Rolls Royce or Lear Jet, it should be taxed at the standard Income rate.
Think of all the dot-commers out there with options, they have a choice - buy a new camcorder, or diversivy the holdings so you don't lose your shirt when Microsoft stomps your company. (the first option is "get your shirt NOW"). Either way you get the fuck taxed out of you. So what incentive is there to diversify?
Personally, I diversified by buying a nice big house. That way, if my stocks plummet, I still have a roof over my head, and an asset to sell in an emergency, but either way, I've got a nice big house. Otherwise, most of my money is still tied up in my Options. I can't afford to diversify without getting butt-reamed by the IRS. Capital Gains rate or no. If I dare to actually HOLD my stock, Alternative Minimum Tax fucks me over even worse. My options are doing nobody any good. I'm paralyzed. If there were a nice little escrow I could use to transfer my wealth, I could protect my holdings, and benefit other companies.
There is a tax based on value of assets, it's called Alternative Minumum Tax. As much of a communist as I sound like in my other posts, and as much as I agree that we need to KEEP the "death tax". I strongly believe that AMT is a big huge pile of shit that needs to be shovelled away immediately. The AMT is what is REALLY paralyzing the moderately wealthy, preventing them from taking risks with their capital, preventing them from doing anything constructive, and most of all, taking all the newly wealthy people out there, and shoving them firmly back into the middle-class. While at the same time, AMT doesn't really impact the super-rich, because though it probably sucks a big chunk out of the growth of their holdings, they still manage to live, and live well.
Pre-Reagan. I believe the super wealthy got taxed at even much higher rates. They still got by. I believe the private jet industry was still booming back then. But when Reagan changed the tax codes, there was a huge windfall for these people. "Reaganomics" claimed that with all this extra money, it would go into the economy, and "trickle-down" to the masses, because there would be more spending, more robust economy, more jobs, etc.
The fallout of this though was yes, there were more jobs, but most of the new jobs were service-industry jobs, low-wage jobs. Nothing you coould support a family on. At the same time, the normal "white-collar" kind of job that built this nation back in the 50's (which is what the republicans believe they want to return to - more like the 20's), was reduced. People would get laid off from $50k/yr jobs, and had to pick up two $15k/yr jobs to try to compensate.
We're not talking about the Millionaire Next Door. We're talking about the Billionaire Next Door. Millionaires are now middle class. We're not talking about people who risk it all, we're talking about people who risk 500 million, and don't even blink.
Stock options have been very good to me, and I still remember what it was like to be poor. It disgusts me to remember how banks and credit card companies used to treat me back when I was poor, and that some of my old friends who DIDN'T strike it rich, are still treated that way. Today, if I walked into my bank, they usually would recognize me, call me MISTER, and if I had an overdraft in my checking account, they usually let it slide. But I remember times in the past where an overdraft, even if it was the result of a clerical error or delay of a deposit due to obscure bank rules, would result in a major disruption, and many hours making phone calls to companies to assure them that the funds were coming. Plus fines, fees, derision, scorn, cancellations of service, reposessions, etc. The same goes for applying for loans, and all kinds of other opportunities. I'm rich and I'm telling you, it's just plain not FAIR the way poor people are treated. I have NO PROBLEM paying a proportionately higher tax rate than my fellow citezens who are less well off. I have NO PROBLEM knowing that my childrens' inheritence will be taxed highly when I pass on, knowing that they have a fair shake at competing and succeeding when they get out into the world. I'm concerned that if they fail, they'll fall into ruin. I'm really concerned about that, but I'd rather they work for what they get, than have it given to them on a silver platter, be it coming from me, or the government.
I don't mind paying taxes, as long as it is being used and spent wisely, and as long as people who have several orders of magnitude more wealth than I do, (who will never have to worry about spending it all, no matter how hard they try), are taxed at much higher rates. We all need food and shelter, and nice standards of living are gravy. Those who have earned a nice standard of living should be able to enjoy it too. But the Billionaire Next Door is maxed-out on his standard of living, they've got more money than they can possibly spend if they went on a non-stop 24x7 internet shopping spree. Why waste that money on a vault? Why not put some of it to use?
There's a difference here.
Some people are looking at money as a SURVIVAL issue. A fraction of a percent of income tax could mean life or death for a large number of very poor, borderline homeless people.
For the middle-class, they're still struggling, but they've replaced SURVIVAL with MAINTENANCE OF STANDARD OF LIVING. Certainly this justifies raising taxes a tad on them, because they won't starve, they just will have to cut back to 3 packs of pokemon cards a week for their kids, or they'll have to cut out the premium channels on cable. If a family member comes down with cancer or something, they're essentially screwed, even with good medical coverage. They're back in the soup-lines.
Then there's the upper-class, who have NO CONCEPT of survival anymore. It's taken for granted, a given. The only thing they are frightened of is a revolution or national invasion, and their government takes good care of them. Standard of living maintenance similarly has no meaning for them. They've replaced that impetus with something else, something else that I have no clue about, and I'm sure most people in this discussion don't either. Is it a contest to be the richest in the world? Is it a contest to establish an everlasting legacy of wealth for their family name? What is it? I don't know. But they certainly don't want to have to go down to the level where they have to go into a BMW dealership and have to decide on a 5 or 3 series. Especially if the evil government is robbing them of it. It certainly makes no sense to me why this impetus for a very rich person to become very much richer, is more important than perhaps thousands of people eating, or getting proper health care, or for fuck's sake, breathing clean air.
Especially when, eventually, if this money is kept hidden away from the consumer-level economy, it will weaken the government to the point where ecological regulation will become impossible, and without that, we will all, with 100% certainty, bake like potatoes, choke, shrivel up, and die. Private enterprise cannot do this task. Well, if humanity's survival isn't important enough, then I guess we need to cut the taxes. We all die anyway, at least those super-rich people will die happy.
IF there was no FDA, we'd all be eating Soylent Green.
If Mr. Goldshorts HAD put his money into the economy, it wouldn't be saved as inheritance, and wouldn't need to be taxed as inheritance, only on a Sales Tax basis.
Has the US ever gone to war to protect corporate interests overseas? Well, does Joe Poorboy own any stock in BufuCo? no, Ritchie Rich does. Joe Poorboy's SON gets drafted or more likely, is economically compelled to sign up (unlike Richie Rich's offspring), and has to go overseas to fight, and most likely die, to protect some company's assets from waking up one morning in a communist country.
Poor Americans end up fighting wars, at cost to the government, to protect the vast interests of the American rich overseas. Poor Americans live on PCB dumps, because the rich Americans' stock holdings are in companies that only look at the bottom line, and therefore do not give a rat's ass about the environment, so they dump crap on land, which devalues it, so the poor can afford to live there and drink contaminated water. And, of course, who pays to clean up the mess? The governement.
Just a few examples.
You'd think Jobs would be regretting his decision to kill-off Exponential.
Now THERE'S a bad business decision.
This all just proves one thing. It's not PPC that's broken. It's Motorola, and AIM that are broken. AIM doesn't allow any REAL competition between Motorola and IBM. Too bad that the entire computing world is held hostage by the whims of evil Bill Walker of Motorola.
1GHz Power4 beats the crap out of a 500MHz G4 w/AltiVec. I don't care *what* you're trying to accomplish.
Great, open source censorware - first thing it will block is Microsoft's site, of course, then any of Microsoft's partners, or any MS Fan site, MSNBC, NBC, Intuit, (ironically) Corel, then we have to ban all of Microsoft's stooges, Dell, Gateway, Compaq, and even Apple because Microsoft "owns" them too, (according to some /. poster I bantered with last week), then pretty much any company that doesn't provide source code, hardware companies with closed specs, then any server served with IIS, any server that serves non-standards-compliant HTML, any server that serves HTML not optimized for Mozilla's special features (c'mon, work with me here), but MOST IMPORTANTLY; goatse, any site containint the text: GRITS, Natalie Portman, bird, penis, penis-bird, Ogg, Sig11, or any site using a numeral 5 instead of the letter "S".
Of course, we'll all still be able to see our boobies.
I really don't understand why public grade schools and libraries NEED to have internet access?
I mean, yeah, I've been on the internet since 94 or thereabouts, back when it was just the internet, and it was still largely a tool of universities, and geeks, and the large computer firms were just getting started with putting up their own web pages. There was a LOT of good stuff on line, and from what I understand, back then, most of the pr0n was on usenet anyway.
The internet of that era was a tool of learning, of knowledge.
But the internet has changed, no doubt about it. It is a totally different animal than it was. Even though almost all of the old resources are still available, the most constructive bit is the clean parts of usenet, and email. The Web itself, is a huge waste of time as far as education goes. It's all corporatized, buy this, rent that, be part of my little plan to take over the world, download my web doohickey, etc. I don't think it has any place in education or the library. Except for email. Maybe connect these guys, but low-bandwidth, and shut off the web ports. Leave the censorship to parents and home computer systems. Yeah, there's a lot of neat stuff out there, but I just don't see it as all that important to anyone but Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft, and AOL. Putting school computers online just legitimizes the idea that public school merely indoctrinates our young into the American culture of consumerism. Gag.
I agree that it's weak to worthless, but it's still *something*. It's not non-existant.
Flouride in the water reduces IQ.
Deisel fuel particles increase allergies.
Magnetic fields from power lines cause cancer.
Oat Bran reduces cholesterol.
Video Games cause violence.
Napster causes musicians to stop making music.
The economy responds more to liberal economic policy than to cheap oil.
Unregulated soft money causes corruption in the US political system.
I've seen TV shows on this topic (like all of us have), and one factor that nobody here seems to be mentioning is that you can make a BIG difference in the amount of radiation that your head absorbs by the way you hold your phone. If you hold it so that the antenna is touching your head, (not as the designers intended, the mouthpiece needs to be infront of your mouth), then the difference of an inch or two is HUGE because of the inverse square law. If you hold the phone at an angle, allowing the antenna to point AWAY from your head (those tiny flip-phones do that already), it holds that antenna of death an inch or two further away, which really does make a huge difference in the amount of power - and supposedly this is what is responsible for the huge differences in reported radiation absorbtion some testers have seen - and claimed that the industry was underreporting their measurements, when really, it had to do with the position of the phone. It may also be the reason why some people are getting cancer and others are not, maybe they hold their phones differently.
Anyway, if I was forced to carry one of these damn things, I'd use a headset. I'd much rather have hip cancer than brain cancer.
It's possible that the mechanism for cancer formation isn't fully understood. Nor all the mechanisms and functions of various brain tissue.
So since we don't know of a mechanism for cell-phone emissions for causing cancer, neither can we explain the results of some of the studies, like the impact on reaction time, and memories that cell-phone emissions have been observed to produce.
Never let your model of the universe surpass or supplant your observations. When you do that, you are essentially a religious fanatic.
Who are you talking to?
Are they stressing you out? Tell them to fuck off. Go on. Do it! It's good for you!
They did have one "free for all" a couple of weeks back, a bunch of lightweights. Turned out pretty lame, but the concept got me exited.
.
We need to get back to the flame-throwers and projectile weapons though. I mean, if this is going to be radio-controlled, what's the challenge? (beyond finding a driver who can fight his way out of a paper bag) just escalation in weaponry, right? Maybe make that lexan a bit thicker. .
Dont forget steroids, cybernetics, and DNA alteration!
what else it needs?
BattleBots versus inanimate objects. Like cars, soda machines, lawn mowers, watermelons, perhaps even a small, furry, endangered animal or something.
That would enormously increase the entertainment value.
No, it's the GOLDEN nut, you moron. Not the shriveled nut.
uh yeah, *you* go freeze your ass off on Mars. I'll watch as the mushroom cloud from the meteor impact on Mars vaporizes our first colony. It could happen either way.
70% of those meteorites would have fallen into the ocean, and thus protected from UV.