I'm not clear on this either. GoDaddy, a 3rd-party service provider located in Arizona is ordered to take down a website owned by the party named in a lawsuit in New Jersey. To me, it seems the same as ordering a landlord to shut down a store because it sells counterfeit Gucci bags, and in this case the landlord is not located in the jurisdiction. Does The Star's printer have to stop printing their magazine with every defamation and libel case received?
While your at it, can you provide the price of electricity in the U.S. 3 years ago? Prices have risen everywhere on energy, including in China. Even China Daily reported 8.5% annual inflation rates.
China has a very high tax rate that everyone pays to reduce the prices of things like electricity, or the raw materials that supply the electric plants. This only on the surface has the appearance of reducing the costs, but instead just redistributes the costs and really ends up being a wash.
The theory that there is no pollution regulation or controls in China is totally wrong. Half of our manufacturing costs, outside of raw materials, is pollution control. We have a full water treatment plant and huge activated charcoal air cleaners that maintain a vacuum on the whole factory. The workers are given fresh clothes every morning, go through an elaborately designed shower facility after every shift and their blood is tested weekly. Certainly there are other factories that are not nearly as good as the one I work with, but they are being forced out of business by the Chinese government, which is sincerely trying to reduce the pollution in the country, although not all provinces are yet embracing the policy, most are and the rest will be.
It should be considered still that cost is also an absolute measure. The actual difference in cost on a per piece basis of something manufactured using electricity purchased for.0031/kw-h or.15/kw-h is negligible when considering the difference in cost between an employee that costs $1/hr and an employee that costs $30/hr, so with 1,000 workers that's a rate of $1,000/hr instead of $30,000/hr or $10,000/shift instead of $300,000/shift. This is what makes the difference between making things here and making things there. In the lead-acid battery industry, nobody makes automotive batteries for less than the U.S. manufacturers. The reason is that they are vertically integrated, meaning they supply their own refined lead, and their manufacturing lines are nearly completely mechanized. They receive virtually no subsidies and yet they supply the lion's share of of the 65,000,000 automotive batteries sold in the U.S. every year, and they manufacture a product that is very messy to make.
The issue is labor costs, pure and simple. Until we rectify that situation the U.S. will continue to see manufacturing move abroad. China is only one country. There are many, many others chomping at the bit to have the same growth that China has received. It's a classic game of whack-a-mole.
It really isn't energy, it's labor and cost of doing business. Energy is relatively the same price around the world. The raw materials used to produce the energy are not substantially different from a factory's perspective.
The raw material is lead and the product is lead-acid batteries. Lead is produced and refined in many countries around the world. Here in the U.S., 98% of the lead sold is recycled and refined.
There may be a large real estate bubble in China, but very few people there own real estate. Additionally, the savings rate there is huge, so even if the real estate market crashes, it isn't going to create the cash crunch that we have.
I seriously doubt that a change in currency will do much for manufacturing in the U.S. The cost of doing business here due to regulations such as the minimum wage and workers compensation, along with the other liabilities such as employee law suits, combined with the high tax rates makes this a very undesirable place to do any manufacturing. I had a part quoted at $60,000 just to make the tool for it here in the U.S., but making the same tool in China was $2000. If the exchange rate drops to 3:1, that still puts the price in China of $6000.
It is highly unlikely that China's trade to us will go down by 100%. Additionally, their trade with other countries has been rising. If China leaves the dollar, it would be under conditions that everyone is happy with. The quantitative easing games that the central banks play with each other is going to cause our inflation problem to infect participating economies, which will not go well with the constituents, especially for the poor ones and the ones on fixed and subsidized government incomes, of which there are a shit-ton in Europe.
I work with a Chinese factory that is a leader in its niche.
We are seeing unusual trends in our primary raw material that makes up 50-80% of the manufacturing cost. Normally it is more expensive than on the worldwide market because of the high import tariffs in China intended to protect the local producers. However, since last summer the cost of the raw material has been less than the worldwide market. Demand in our niche has been constant for us since it's a staple product for many third-world and developing countries, and to a certain extent, first-world nations. The web page I use to check the prices, which I have been doing every day for the last four years, also shows prices on other raw materials and I have observed the trend to be the same. IMHO, this evidence is in contrast to any reports I've read about a bubble in China - the bubble is in the rest of the world. I think what is more likely to happen is China and OPEC will decide to start trading in some other currency, and the Chinese will instantly become more wealthy, and the U.S. more poor.
China's largest trade 'partner' is the EU, and the U.S. makes up less than 18% of its export business. China can manufacture most of everything it consumes, so increasing prices for the U.S. does not directly equate to increasing prices for the Chinese, and the reduction in trade with the U.S. would hurt the U.S. more than it would hurt China.
Not completely true. The maglev that runs from Pudong airport to Shanghai varies greatly in speed based on the weather. I've seen it run at 230 km/h one day and 470 km/h the next.
This isn't as cool as the INDUSTORIOUS CLOCK and the artist could have looped two 12-hour recordings. Now how about you creativity experts come up with some original comments?
Federally de-fund roads and make transportation private - all of it. The Federal Government has decided what our primary form of transportation is by dumping trillions into a road system. If they stopped dishing out all those tax dollars to public transportation and, at the very least, simultaneously deregulated rail, then we would see a huge boon in other more efficient types of transportation. This would substantially reduce such problems as texting while driving. It would also reduce pollution and shipping costs - and thus the cost of the goods being shipped. For example, I work in the importing business and it is currently less expensive to ship a container of goods from Los Angeles to Dallas via truck than rail, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever except for the fact that the Government controls the laying of rail and unions control the rail already laid.
I ride a motorcycle and I can see quite well into other vehicles on the road, and my observation is that here in the SF Bay Area there has been no reduction in cell phone usage while driving since the passage of the various laws. I think that, if anything, the laws have made it more dangerous because drivers who probably are not competent to drive and talk are now also trying to avoid getting caught on the phone by the po-po.
I had completely forgotten about the law and I was calling someone on craigslist to arrange picking up a filing cabinet. I arrived at his house and there was nobody home, so I called him and he told me to "just a sec. I'm trying to avoid this cop - I don't want him to see me." And I'm like, dude, I'm just here for the filing cabinet....
Again, the only arguments to be presented are ad hominem. If the publication is so poor, the presenter so feeble-minded, and the argument so flawed, then the superior logic and outstanding dataset of the opposition should easily be able to disprove his claims.
Researchers and, well, anyone, will get money from almost any source they can. Even though I do not track the money pouring into AGW research, I am quite certain a substantial portion of it is not coming from sources without motive. That is how research money is found.
Let's look at the entire paragraph from the Wikipedia article that you partially quoted (even though I'm not fan of using Wikipedia as evidence):
On July 6, 2009 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a preliminary report that charted data from 70 stations that SurfaceStations.org identified as 'good' or 'best' against the rest of the dataset surveyed at that time, and concluded, "clearly there is no indication from this analysis that poor station exposure has imparted a bias in the U.S. temperature trends."[12] Watts issued a rebuttal in which he asserted that the preliminary analysis excluded new data on quality of surface stations, and criticized the use of homogenized data from the stations, which in his view accounts for the creation of two nearly identical graphs.[13][14]
The emphasis on homogenized is mine. I strongly recommend reading his rebuttal, especially the portion describing how this homogenizing process leads to basically comparing old data with old data.
The rebuttal included a very serious rejection of the evidence. Wikipedia has a history of being edited by people with a certain viewpoint, as the numerous comments to that slashdot article support, so we cannot be certain that evidence in opposition has not been edited out of the article, nor can we know that this particular legislation was not also supported by some other activities (such as private litigation).
You present a logical fallacy; my not suggesting other means does not mean that your argument is correct.
So it is on you to prove that:
a. The constitution allows the laws to be enforced
b. The Federal Government's policies will be better written and better enforced than the states' policies
c. The science is correct
d. We can pay for whatever it is your suggesting
The EPA has, time and time again, stopped California's Air Resources Board from implementing environmental control measures. Were it not for the EPA, there would be much stricter standards in California than we have now. The state of California is, constitutionally, completely within its rights to implement such policies, and the Federal Government is completely outside the constitution in stopping them.
The states regularly change and update their constitutions. So, should the understanding of the physical universe change with respect to global climate change, or anything else, they are more likely to change their policies along with the understood changes. Imagine how much longer we would have been bleeding people if the constitution included a clause for a health care department.
Federal Government policies are heavily manipulated by large, national special interests. States are most strongly manipulated by the local special interests, and getting all 50 sates to do any one thing by national special interests is a daunting task, virtually impossible. Thus, the integrity of the laws created would, on average, be higher at the state level.
There are enormous holes in the science, including the fact that the accuracy of the temperature data is highly suspect [pdf]. If it cannot even be proven that we know what the temperatures are actually doing, how can there be any discussion on anyone's equations?
We cannot afford the proposals, so we will have to take on more debt to pay for them. This means we're also going to have economic activity to pay for the interest on that debt, which is going to incur some sort or increased cost to the environment. I posit that the full costs cannot be quantified. Not only do we not have the money to cover the explicit costs, we won't be able to afford the implicit costs, such as the increase in crime and homelessness that will come from the shrinking economy that is most likely to occur under the legislation.
I find interesting the things that the AGW movement does not lobby for, such as increasing efficiency by eliminating regulations. If the world is truly in peril, why wouldn't we drop things such as Sarbanes-Oxley? Or how about eliminating regulations on cars, especially safety regulations? I can ride a motorcycle that essentially has no safety features, but a car has to have all sorts of ridiculous things that add to the weight and reduce the efficiency, especially when you factor in supply chain costs and maintenance costs.
The AGW proponents don't work very hard to oppose wars, and some even seem to want to increase participation in wars. If fossil fuels are truly the death of life on Earth, then ending wars would do miracles in reducing the 'carbon footprint'. The military has absolutely no care for the efficiency of anything they do (I was in the Navy for 6 years, so I speak from experience). There are also incredible amounts of all kinds pollutants, many of which fall into the AGW blacklist, as well as the general "this stuff willgive you cancer" list, and not to mention the blowback from those wars causing thi
Let's have some light shone on the temperature data and how it is collected: From Surfacestations.org[pdf], a project to survey all 1221 of the climate-monitoring stations in the U.S.:
During the past few years I recruited a team of more than 650 volunteers to visually inspect and photographically
document more than 860 of these temperature stations. We were shocked by what we found.
We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads,
on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at
wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.
In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own
siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.
This way when the debate finally is over, the statements about such can be true.
Of course, this does overshadow the real debate, which is whether or not Governments are the right organizations to correct any issues, which, if we look at similar historic pollution agreements, they have failed miserably.
I used to regularly edit articles, though I rarely, if ever, made any new ones. But during the 2008 general elections I went to the Obama page to learn more about him. I was blown away to see what was the cleanest, most beautifully designed and positive page I've ever seen in Wikipedia. Not even Ghandi's page gave me the same feeling. Then I took a look at the discussion page and saw a huge number of people angry that they could not edit the page and many had their accounts suspended. Clearly anyone who did not add content that reflected Obama in a positive light would find themselves mired in Wikipedia litigation and essentially unable to really respond because they hadn't passed the Wikipedia bar exam.
After seeing this I stopped contributing content and money to Wikipedia and I only use it to look up things that are straight facts - like frog species and mountain heights.
BTW, I did not support either candidate in the election, so I really didn't care who won.
I don't recall the case, but I believe that the NY law flies in the face of a Supreme Court ruling. This article linked in the story specifically discusses California and the Kindle subsidiary.
It is not in California's interest to bust every single person not paying use tax in Internet purchases, especially when there's already a minor tax revolt in progress. It's a check box on the tax return and nobody pays it.
Hm, ethical decision-making on paying money to the government... I'll leave that one for members of the Obama administration to respond to, especially the guy who oversees the IRS.
Nah, I'm safe in California. If some federal judge determines that the Kindle subsidiary's being located here requires Amazon to pay sales tax, then Amazon will uproot the subsidiary. That is the one and only presence they have here. In other news, California's unemployment rate is 12.5%.
I read the reviews on Amazon and buy elsewhere all the time, and then review on Amazon. Among other things, I noticed Target was $20 more expensive on Sonicare toothbrushes - Target loves you. Although I happen to have a Wal-Mart and a Target on the same road.
The 9.25% sales tax that I pay through wal-mart.com makes Amazon with shipping the same price, though less on more expensive items. Wal-mart.com takes over a week for site-to-store and Amazon takes only 2 days. Which would you choose?
Slashdot Mirror
No - I'm not really an importer. I have a services company to help foreign firms increase business in the U.S.
"Congress shall make no law..." (emphasis added) means the states can make their own laws with regards to everything after that statement.
I'm not clear on this either. GoDaddy, a 3rd-party service provider located in Arizona is ordered to take down a website owned by the party named in a lawsuit in New Jersey. To me, it seems the same as ordering a landlord to shut down a store because it sells counterfeit Gucci bags, and in this case the landlord is not located in the jurisdiction. Does The Star's printer have to stop printing their magazine with every defamation and libel case received?
While your at it, can you provide the price of electricity in the U.S. 3 years ago? Prices have risen everywhere on energy, including in China. Even China Daily reported 8.5% annual inflation rates.
China has a very high tax rate that everyone pays to reduce the prices of things like electricity, or the raw materials that supply the electric plants. This only on the surface has the appearance of reducing the costs, but instead just redistributes the costs and really ends up being a wash.
The theory that there is no pollution regulation or controls in China is totally wrong. Half of our manufacturing costs, outside of raw materials, is pollution control. We have a full water treatment plant and huge activated charcoal air cleaners that maintain a vacuum on the whole factory. The workers are given fresh clothes every morning, go through an elaborately designed shower facility after every shift and their blood is tested weekly. Certainly there are other factories that are not nearly as good as the one I work with, but they are being forced out of business by the Chinese government, which is sincerely trying to reduce the pollution in the country, although not all provinces are yet embracing the policy, most are and the rest will be.
It should be considered still that cost is also an absolute measure. The actual difference in cost on a per piece basis of something manufactured using electricity purchased for .0031/kw-h or .15/kw-h is negligible when considering the difference in cost between an employee that costs $1/hr and an employee that costs $30/hr, so with 1,000 workers that's a rate of $1,000/hr instead of $30,000/hr or $10,000/shift instead of $300,000/shift. This is what makes the difference between making things here and making things there. In the lead-acid battery industry, nobody makes automotive batteries for less than the U.S. manufacturers. The reason is that they are vertically integrated, meaning they supply their own refined lead, and their manufacturing lines are nearly completely mechanized. They receive virtually no subsidies and yet they supply the lion's share of of the 65,000,000 automotive batteries sold in the U.S. every year, and they manufacture a product that is very messy to make.
The issue is labor costs, pure and simple. Until we rectify that situation the U.S. will continue to see manufacturing move abroad. China is only one country. There are many, many others chomping at the bit to have the same growth that China has received. It's a classic game of whack-a-mole.
It really isn't energy, it's labor and cost of doing business. Energy is relatively the same price around the world. The raw materials used to produce the energy are not substantially different from a factory's perspective.
The raw material is lead and the product is lead-acid batteries. Lead is produced and refined in many countries around the world. Here in the U.S., 98% of the lead sold is recycled and refined.
There may be a large real estate bubble in China, but very few people there own real estate. Additionally, the savings rate there is huge, so even if the real estate market crashes, it isn't going to create the cash crunch that we have.
I seriously doubt that a change in currency will do much for manufacturing in the U.S. The cost of doing business here due to regulations such as the minimum wage and workers compensation, along with the other liabilities such as employee law suits, combined with the high tax rates makes this a very undesirable place to do any manufacturing. I had a part quoted at $60,000 just to make the tool for it here in the U.S., but making the same tool in China was $2000. If the exchange rate drops to 3:1, that still puts the price in China of $6000.
It is highly unlikely that China's trade to us will go down by 100%. Additionally, their trade with other countries has been rising. If China leaves the dollar, it would be under conditions that everyone is happy with. The quantitative easing games that the central banks play with each other is going to cause our inflation problem to infect participating economies, which will not go well with the constituents, especially for the poor ones and the ones on fixed and subsidized government incomes, of which there are a shit-ton in Europe.
I work with a Chinese factory that is a leader in its niche.
We are seeing unusual trends in our primary raw material that makes up 50-80% of the manufacturing cost. Normally it is more expensive than on the worldwide market because of the high import tariffs in China intended to protect the local producers. However, since last summer the cost of the raw material has been less than the worldwide market. Demand in our niche has been constant for us since it's a staple product for many third-world and developing countries, and to a certain extent, first-world nations. The web page I use to check the prices, which I have been doing every day for the last four years, also shows prices on other raw materials and I have observed the trend to be the same. IMHO, this evidence is in contrast to any reports I've read about a bubble in China - the bubble is in the rest of the world. I think what is more likely to happen is China and OPEC will decide to start trading in some other currency, and the Chinese will instantly become more wealthy, and the U.S. more poor.
China's largest trade 'partner' is the EU, and the U.S. makes up less than 18% of its export business. China can manufacture most of everything it consumes, so increasing prices for the U.S. does not directly equate to increasing prices for the Chinese, and the reduction in trade with the U.S. would hurt the U.S. more than it would hurt China.
Not completely true. The maglev that runs from Pudong airport to Shanghai varies greatly in speed based on the weather. I've seen it run at 230 km/h one day and 470 km/h the next.
This isn't as cool as the INDUSTORIOUS CLOCK and the artist could have looped two 12-hour recordings. Now how about you creativity experts come up with some original comments?
Federally de-fund roads and make transportation private - all of it. The Federal Government has decided what our primary form of transportation is by dumping trillions into a road system. If they stopped dishing out all those tax dollars to public transportation and, at the very least, simultaneously deregulated rail, then we would see a huge boon in other more efficient types of transportation. This would substantially reduce such problems as texting while driving. It would also reduce pollution and shipping costs - and thus the cost of the goods being shipped. For example, I work in the importing business and it is currently less expensive to ship a container of goods from Los Angeles to Dallas via truck than rail, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever except for the fact that the Government controls the laying of rail and unions control the rail already laid.
I ride a motorcycle and I can see quite well into other vehicles on the road, and my observation is that here in the SF Bay Area there has been no reduction in cell phone usage while driving since the passage of the various laws. I think that, if anything, the laws have made it more dangerous because drivers who probably are not competent to drive and talk are now also trying to avoid getting caught on the phone by the po-po.
I had completely forgotten about the law and I was calling someone on craigslist to arrange picking up a filing cabinet. I arrived at his house and there was nobody home, so I called him and he told me to "just a sec. I'm trying to avoid this cop - I don't want him to see me." And I'm like, dude, I'm just here for the filing cabinet....
Don't hold events at theaters.
Again, the only arguments to be presented are ad hominem. If the publication is so poor, the presenter so feeble-minded, and the argument so flawed, then the superior logic and outstanding dataset of the opposition should easily be able to disprove his claims.
Researchers and, well, anyone, will get money from almost any source they can. Even though I do not track the money pouring into AGW research, I am quite certain a substantial portion of it is not coming from sources without motive. That is how research money is found.
Let's look at the entire paragraph from the Wikipedia article that you partially quoted (even though I'm not fan of using Wikipedia as evidence):
On July 6, 2009 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a preliminary report that charted data from 70 stations that SurfaceStations.org identified as 'good' or 'best' against the rest of the dataset surveyed at that time, and concluded, "clearly there is no indication from this analysis that poor station exposure has imparted a bias in the U.S. temperature trends."[12] Watts issued a rebuttal in which he asserted that the preliminary analysis excluded new data on quality of surface stations, and criticized the use of homogenized data from the stations, which in his view accounts for the creation of two nearly identical graphs.[13][14]
The emphasis on homogenized is mine. I strongly recommend reading his rebuttal, especially the portion describing how this homogenizing process leads to basically comparing old data with old data.
Where is the Hartland Institute link? And you choose to debate a link instead of the data, interesting...
The rebuttal included a very serious rejection of the evidence. Wikipedia has a history of being edited by people with a certain viewpoint, as the numerous comments to that slashdot article support, so we cannot be certain that evidence in opposition has not been edited out of the article, nor can we know that this particular legislation was not also supported by some other activities (such as private litigation).
You present a logical fallacy; my not suggesting other means does not mean that your argument is correct.
So it is on you to prove that:
a. The constitution allows the laws to be enforced
b. The Federal Government's policies will be better written and better enforced than the states' policies
c. The science is correct
d. We can pay for whatever it is your suggesting
The EPA has, time and time again, stopped California's Air Resources Board from implementing environmental control measures. Were it not for the EPA, there would be much stricter standards in California than we have now. The state of California is, constitutionally, completely within its rights to implement such policies, and the Federal Government is completely outside the constitution in stopping them.
The states regularly change and update their constitutions. So, should the understanding of the physical universe change with respect to global climate change, or anything else, they are more likely to change their policies along with the understood changes. Imagine how much longer we would have been bleeding people if the constitution included a clause for a health care department.
Federal Government policies are heavily manipulated by large, national special interests. States are most strongly manipulated by the local special interests, and getting all 50 sates to do any one thing by national special interests is a daunting task, virtually impossible. Thus, the integrity of the laws created would, on average, be higher at the state level.
There are enormous holes in the science, including the fact that the accuracy of the temperature data is highly suspect [pdf]. If it cannot even be proven that we know what the temperatures are actually doing, how can there be any discussion on anyone's equations?
We cannot afford the proposals, so we will have to take on more debt to pay for them. This means we're also going to have economic activity to pay for the interest on that debt, which is going to incur some sort or increased cost to the environment. I posit that the full costs cannot be quantified. Not only do we not have the money to cover the explicit costs, we won't be able to afford the implicit costs, such as the increase in crime and homelessness that will come from the shrinking economy that is most likely to occur under the legislation.
I find interesting the things that the AGW movement does not lobby for, such as increasing efficiency by eliminating regulations. If the world is truly in peril, why wouldn't we drop things such as Sarbanes-Oxley? Or how about eliminating regulations on cars, especially safety regulations? I can ride a motorcycle that essentially has no safety features, but a car has to have all sorts of ridiculous things that add to the weight and reduce the efficiency, especially when you factor in supply chain costs and maintenance costs.
The AGW proponents don't work very hard to oppose wars, and some even seem to want to increase participation in wars. If fossil fuels are truly the death of life on Earth, then ending wars would do miracles in reducing the 'carbon footprint'. The military has absolutely no care for the efficiency of anything they do (I was in the Navy for 6 years, so I speak from experience). There are also incredible amounts of all kinds pollutants, many of which fall into the AGW blacklist, as well as the general "this stuff willgive you cancer" list, and not to mention the blowback from those wars causing thi
Amen!
Wikipedia...
Let's have some light shone on the temperature data and how it is collected:
From Surfacestations.org[pdf], a project to survey all 1221 of the climate-monitoring stations in the U.S.:
During the past few years I recruited a team of more than 650 volunteers to visually inspect and photographically document more than 860 of these temperature stations. We were shocked by what we found.
We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.
In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.
And let's not forget the international methods of survey.
This way when the debate finally is over, the statements about such can be true.
Of course, this does overshadow the real debate, which is whether or not Governments are the right organizations to correct any issues, which, if we look at similar historic pollution agreements, they have failed miserably.
I used to regularly edit articles, though I rarely, if ever, made any new ones. But during the 2008 general elections I went to the Obama page to learn more about him. I was blown away to see what was the cleanest, most beautifully designed and positive page I've ever seen in Wikipedia. Not even Ghandi's page gave me the same feeling. Then I took a look at the discussion page and saw a huge number of people angry that they could not edit the page and many had their accounts suspended. Clearly anyone who did not add content that reflected Obama in a positive light would find themselves mired in Wikipedia litigation and essentially unable to really respond because they hadn't passed the Wikipedia bar exam.
After seeing this I stopped contributing content and money to Wikipedia and I only use it to look up things that are straight facts - like frog species and mountain heights.
BTW, I did not support either candidate in the election, so I really didn't care who won.
I don't recall the case, but I believe that the NY law flies in the face of a Supreme Court ruling. This article linked in the story specifically discusses California and the Kindle subsidiary.
It is not in California's interest to bust every single person not paying use tax in Internet purchases, especially when there's already a minor tax revolt in progress. It's a check box on the tax return and nobody pays it.
Hm, ethical decision-making on paying money to the government... I'll leave that one for members of the Obama administration to respond to, especially the guy who oversees the IRS.
Nah, I'm safe in California. If some federal judge determines that the Kindle subsidiary's being located here requires Amazon to pay sales tax, then Amazon will uproot the subsidiary. That is the one and only presence they have here. In other news, California's unemployment rate is 12.5%.
I read the reviews on Amazon and buy elsewhere all the time, and then review on Amazon. Among other things, I noticed Target was $20 more expensive on Sonicare toothbrushes - Target loves you. Although I happen to have a Wal-Mart and a Target on the same road.
The 9.25% sales tax that I pay through wal-mart.com makes Amazon with shipping the same price, though less on more expensive items. Wal-mart.com takes over a week for site-to-store and Amazon takes only 2 days. Which would you choose?