There's a classic quip about that. "A liberal is someone who will give you the shirt off of someone else's back."
That would mean the conservative equivalent is "A conservative is someone who will take your shirt and tell you to get a job so you can buy another one".
That being said it kinda dodges the question of why they need more HB1s after laying off a ton of people whom presumably had the necessary qualifications.
You cannot presume that. While it's certainly possible that some of them did have the necessary qualifications, it is also quite possible (likely even) that most did not. If you fire an engineer you cannot replace them with an accountant or even necessarily a different engineer with a different skill set. Even if they did have the qualifications that does not mean they were available and willing to work in the jobs that Microsoft had available. To make up an example, if they fire some guy in Finland from Nokia because they want the development to take place in the US, it's quite likely the guy might not want to move to the US to take the job that is available. Maybe he has family and cannot easily relocate.
The person has to have the right qualifications, be available to do the work, be willing to locate themselves to where the work is and cost the right amount.
If we had any legitimacy in the Government, I would expect the Government to be asking why Microsoft just terminated 18,000 employees (including no-competes preventing their hire at MS or anywhere else) and is now requesting 1,000 more foreign workers.
You can ask the question but the answer is simple. (whether the answer is actually honest or not is a different issue) What Microsoft would say is that those 18,000 workers didn't have the skill sets needed by the company going forward. If you fire an accountant you cannot replace him with an engineer. Not all people and jobs are interchangeable. I personally have had to fire people and hire different people precisely for this reasons. Even if they are lying through their teeth, this answer provides nearly impenetrable plausible deniability.
That's the problem with liberals like Gates. They are very good at telling others how to be responsible citizens but consider themselves exempt from that
And you think "conservatives" don't do exactly the same thing? Bit of a double standard you have there. One standard will work just fine.
Corporations want infrastructure, rule of the law, and educated workforce that comes with doing business in US while paying third-world wages and hiding income in tax shelters. You can't have it both ways.
So far they very clearly have been able to have it both ways. Sad but true.
Now let's be fair that Microsoft in general is not paying "third world wages". You only have to look at their financial statements to prove that. They generally pay their employees fairly well. That said, I think they are being more than a little disingenuous in claiming they need workers from overseas when they have net profit margins well in excess of 20%. Microsoft's problems aren't with their costs but with their revenue streams and no amount of cheap overseas talent is going to solve that problem.
who later explained that about 60% of Microsoft's workforce is in the U.S., yet it makes 68% of its profits overseas
Which is pretty much irrelevant when it comes to software. There is no need at all in software to match development costs to geographic locations. It's one of the beautiful things about being in that industry. That's why you can have a development team in India for a product that isn't even sold there and it still makes sense. It's not a tangible good you export.
Now if they cannot get the right talent for the right price domestically then sure they might have to look elsewhere but frankly I doubt that is really the core problem for Microsoft. If they are having trouble getting good talent I think it has a lot more to do with the fact that people are well aware they have a pretty toxic corporate culture where everyone has to have their knives out at all times and so much of the best talent decides to work elsewhere. Microsoft is just not an attractive place to work compared with Apple or Google or some of the other top IT firms.
It's also a little disingenuous to claim you need cheaper talent when you have net profit margins well above 20%. Microsoft's problems are not rooted in their cost structure but in their revenue streams. Their problems are that their key revenue streams (Windows and Office) are tied to tightly to the PC market and they haven't been able to translate them very well to the mobile market. They spent so many years trying to maximize their monopoly on the PC they they found it difficult to acknowledge that mobile devices have different requirements and to relax their grip so that they could grow. Microsoft saw the opportunity in mobile 10-15 years ago but kept trying to cram a PC into a mobile device with predictably bad results.
I'm sorry. My mother had one of those. One of the worst interfaces on a smartphone I've ever had the miserable experience of using. Absolutely hated working with it when she needed something fixed.
It makes me look with pity upon iOS / Android / Windows Phone users.
Can you hear the sound of the rest of us not caring?
a BB is **not** a toy, you use it for doing business
I use my iPhone for "doing business" quite successfully thanks. I could say the same about quite a few Android phones I've worked with too. BB has precisely zero features that make it better than the alternatives for "doing business" that are relevant to me. It does however have quite a few things I don't like that make it worse for me for non-business use though.
1. They don't spy on you and give all your data to Apple. 2. They don't spy on you and give all your data to Google.
No I'm sure they give the data to someone else I'd rather not have it, like the NSA or foreign governments. If you actually trust any smartphone vendor to keep your data private you're being naive.
3. They don't leak all your nude selfies to the internet as was recently demonstrated with many celebrities.
Yeah that's a really big problem for most of us... [/sarcasm]
Look, if you care about the security of your data, don't use smartphones.
You can make consumption taxes just as progressive as you wish. The most trivially obvious measure you can take toward this end is to exempt clothing and food expenses. Most state sales taxes do at least some of this. Clothing and food you buy simply ring up as untaxed on the register.
That doesn't make the tax progressive. It just means that you are reducing how regressive it is. Unless it is a pure luxury tax, pretty much all general sales taxes are regressive to some degree. If you tax some items and not others that simply means that some items are not taxed and the remainder are taxed regressively.
You pay a small amount of sales tax during the year? You get a lot of it back. Maybe all of it. Perhaps, more than you paid.
Terrific. Who is going to keep track of all this? How do you plan to verify what people spent, where they spent it and on how much? That is a HUGE administrative burden and frankly most people cannot handle it. If you think people are going to suddenly keep super careful records of their retail purchases you are delusional. If you are going to the trouble to keep track of people's income levels to determine who gets a rebate then you might as well just tax the income directly like we already do.
You say rebates won't cut it because you have to pay now, and only get your rebates later? Fine. You can issue prebates.
If you give tax credits against the sales tax based on income you still aren't making the tax progressive. You are simply giving a really complicated refund based on income so you've essentially turned a sales tax into an income tax and you're right back where we are now with a lot of needless administrative burden along the way.
Look up "Fair Tax". This has all been long since figured out.
The "Fair Tax" idea is a delusional idea that would require a Constitutional amendment and a politically impossible complete overhaul of the tax system to even be legal. The tax incidence of such a system is incredibly unclear and proponents seem to support it more out of ideology rather than any unbiased analysis.
If you make $24k a year, you don't pay income tax and most likely get a nice wad a cash courtesy of the U.S. Tax payers.
Many taxpayers don't pay federal income tax but they do pay state income tax, local income tax, sales tax, gasoline tax, property taxes, excise taxes, utility taxes (phones, electricity etc), sin taxes, payroll taxes (FICA, Social Security, Medicare), and quite a few more. Let's not pretend that poor people don't pay any taxes shall we?
And if you think the Earned Income Tax Credit is a "nice wad of cash" I think you don't know the meaning of the term. It's not a lot of money.
You are also missing out on the idea that capital gains will be taxed at the same rate as income.
Capital gains behaves fundamentally different than regular income and it is bad policy to treat them as identical. You can (often) defer capital gains by simply not selling the asset. You (generally) cannot defer income. Even if the nominal rates are the same the effective rate on capital gains will be less because the (generally wealthy) people they most often affect don't need to realize the gains until it is convenient for them.
For example, allow a person to own one home tax free.
Most local governments are funded predominately by property taxes mostly on primary residences. How exactly do you propose to replace that funding?
I see lots of people here proposing various tax schemes that sound logical until you actually think through the second order effects. You cannot simply say don't tax homes until you've addressed what to do with the public services that are being funded by those taxes currently. Furthermore you have to work through what sort of incentives not taxing homes would have on people's behavior. Are you creating unintentional tax loop holes? Chances are very good that you are. The notion of not imposing a tax on your primary residence an ok idea by itself but there are a LOT of follow-on consequences to doing that that have to be considered.
Don't tax food or medicine. OK, the discrepancy just halved. Wow. I'm a wizard. Look at how fast I fixed that.
Great. Where are you going to make up the revenue shortfall? Now you'll have to raise taxes on something else because the need for the tax revenue didn't magically disappear. Furthermore if you start exempting things you are now creating tax loopholes as well as the incentive for politicians to start exempting more and more items.
You could not be more wrong. It is not only possible it happens all the time. You don't even have to do anything illegal to dodge a sales tax. It can be as easy as buying from another state or country. Most states have Use tax laws and those get widely ignored. It is nearly impossible to design a sales tax program with no loopholes of any kind even if you are trying to do so. And I assure you that some loopholes would be baked in on purpose. Any accountant worth his/her retainer would be able to tell you in less than a minute how to get around significant amounts of sales tax.
I am not aware of any merchants that dodge sales tax
Then you don't know very many merchants. Happens all the time. I'm an accountant and I've seen it with my own eyes. Plenty of sales tax simply does not get reported. You don't even need to take my word for it. 30 seconds on google will back up what I'm saying.
but if it is a problem start imposing fines on merchants and book them for tax evasion.
It is a problem, they already do impose fines and if you think solving the problem is simply a matter of imposing fines then you are quite naive.
It should be quite easy actually.
Easy? Not at all. First off having a Federal sales tax would require a change to the Constitution to even be legal. Right now only the States can impose a sales tax. How easy do you think it is to change the Constitution? Then even if you somehow manage that little trick, you have to have every merchant in the entire country would have to institute new processes for collection, processing and remittance of tax which is a HUGE expense and definitely not easy. Worse, you would have to basically re-engineer the IRS or create an entirely new federal department to handle the tax receipts that are no longer based on income. I'm telling you this because I'm one of the people who would have to take care of this issue. Even if it is the right thing to do (I don't think it is) if you think it is easy or trivial you have no idea what you are talking about.
Merchants already have systems that deal with sales tax (in most of the states atleast)
State and local tax. They have no system in place to deal with a Federal sales tax. Even if you piggyback on the existing systems they would require substantial retrofitting, training, new equipment and new procedures. This is NOT a trivial endeavor.
Only tax based on use (i.e. Sales Tax) Problem solved in one fell swoop.
Not even remotely. First off, the richest people don't actually spend a lot of what they earn. Sales taxes are by their very nature regressive taxes so your proposal is basically a proposal to reduce taxes on the wealthy and increase them on the poor. Furthermore, going to a single taxation method is a recipe for problems. Sales tax revenue can fluctuate quite a bit depending on what is happening in the economy but the end use of tax revenue cannot fluctuate as quickly. People still need public services regardless of how well the economy is doing and generally speaking good public services require relatively stable funding. That is why we tax on multiple sources including property, sales, excise, income and others. This keeps the tax revenues relatively stable through diversification which is a good thing. While sales tax should be an important part of the equation, going to a sales tax only taxation program is Bad Policy. It sounds like a good idea on a first pass but once you really think about and understand the issues involved you'll realize it isn't so simple.
Tax evasions now impossible
HAHAHAHAHA... Wait.. you were serious weren't you? Going to a strict sales tax would in no way, shape or form eliminate tax evasion. It would only change the tactics used to avoid taxation. The simplest tactics are to just buy less stuff or to buy it from people who don't collect and report the sales tax to the government. Congratulations, you've simultaneously hurt the economy AND de-funded public services.
That's not what I remember. I remember everyone in the 90s buying Amazon stock, and their revenue going up and up and up.
Yes it did. However their profits did not. The only reason nobody cared at the time was that everyone else was doing the same thing. The dotcom bubble was a strange little era. Companies with nonsensical business models were going public with ludicrous valuations because everyone was afraid they would miss the Next Big Thing. If you started Amazon today I'm dubious investors would permit the company the same latitude they did back then.
Although the stock did have a little problem around 2000, I wonder what happened then.
The bottom crashed out of the stock market and they nearly got dragged under. If you were of a gambling mind you could have gotten Amazon stock for a very very low price at that time.
You're right, because no computer company has ever turned itself around from almost going bankrupt to being the most valuable company in the US while still remaining public....
Just because someone else managed a very difficult trick doesn't mean that it is repeatable, likely or a good idea. To use a basketball analogy that's like pointing out that someone else managed to sink a basket from the other side of the court and thinking "why doesn't anyone else do that?" You don't bet the company on trying to replicate the long shot improbable success of another company.
He pretty much HAS to start responding to market demand, vs. dictating what he thinks people SHOULD want.
If that were the case then he should start offering thicker phones with a bigger battery. The fact that companies like Mophie actually have a business model strongly indicates there is a demand out there for phones with enough batter to last more than half a day.
Jobs was a big believer in the concept that people don't really know what they need or want.
And he is largely correct. If I were to go around my office and ask people what they would like that would make their job better, I will largely get blank stares or some extremely modest improvement to something they were already doing like a more comfy chair. People are REALLY REALLY bad in general about being technology visionaries. Henry Ford said it best when he said "If I asked customers what they wanted they would answer a faster horse".
Where this viewpoint is most often wrong is when you are talking about incrementally improving an existing product they are already familiar with. People often have well formed and informed opinions in that case. They can tell you that they like a bigger or smaller screen on a device they already know and use. They have NO idea if they will like something totally new (or seemingly new) like ApplePay.
For the price of an iPhone, you could have two decent Android phones and a couple of cheap tablets.
I'll bite. First question is which iPhone are we talking about here? 5, 5S, 6 or 6plus? With what memory capacity? Second, go ahead and prove it. Find me two "decent" (meaning similar specs to the iPhone) Android phones and two "cheap" tablets at unsubsidized prices that cost the same as an iPhone. Only restriction is that it has to be something that is actually useful because I cannot fathom any reason to buy something that will gather dust.
It's not. It's basically an ill defined pejorative for "people who do things I don't like" with a dash of a superiority complex thrown in. They think the other person has a superiority complex so they beat them to the punch with their own. Basically if you call someone a hipster you are probably covering up your own insecurity and couldn't think of a more creative insult.
That'll be the next killer "feature" (which is ironic, as phones from 10-15 years ago always had a battery life of 3+ days).
They had great battery life because you couldn't actually do much with them.
That said I REALLY wish the phone manufacturers would get off this thinner=better treadmill and make a phone with a thicker battery that will actually last at least a day. The fact that companies like Mophie have a successful business selling cases with built in batteries is all you need to know to understand that lots of customers actually value battery life over thin and light.
Do smartphone specs even matter for the average smartphone user anymore?
Generally speaking no they do not. I would argue that they never really did aside from plainly obvious things like screen size or ability to access data. Certain features are basically table stakes (good screen, camera, adequate storage, etc) but it's pointless to pay for features I'm not going to need or use. Sure I'm happy if the phone is faster but I don't really give a crap how many Mhz the processor has or how much RAM it has unless it somehow gets in my way. I want enough performance that I can do the activities I want without the perception that the phone is holding me back. Whether the Samsung or the Apple device has marginally higher screen resolution is not something I care about at all unless the difference is very noticeable.
Personally though I wish the phone makers (Apple I'm looking at you) would get over this obsession with making the phone as thin as possible and put a bigger battery in the damn things. There is a reason companies like Mophie are making a lot of money selling battery cases. Lots of us value longer battery life over thinness and weight.
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There's a classic quip about that. "A liberal is someone who will give you the shirt off of someone else's back."
That would mean the conservative equivalent is "A conservative is someone who will take your shirt and tell you to get a job so you can buy another one".
That being said it kinda dodges the question of why they need more HB1s after laying off a ton of people whom presumably had the necessary qualifications.
You cannot presume that. While it's certainly possible that some of them did have the necessary qualifications, it is also quite possible (likely even) that most did not. If you fire an engineer you cannot replace them with an accountant or even necessarily a different engineer with a different skill set. Even if they did have the qualifications that does not mean they were available and willing to work in the jobs that Microsoft had available. To make up an example, if they fire some guy in Finland from Nokia because they want the development to take place in the US, it's quite likely the guy might not want to move to the US to take the job that is available. Maybe he has family and cannot easily relocate.
The person has to have the right qualifications, be available to do the work, be willing to locate themselves to where the work is and cost the right amount.
If we had any legitimacy in the Government, I would expect the Government to be asking why Microsoft just terminated 18,000 employees (including no-competes preventing their hire at MS or anywhere else) and is now requesting 1,000 more foreign workers.
You can ask the question but the answer is simple. (whether the answer is actually honest or not is a different issue) What Microsoft would say is that those 18,000 workers didn't have the skill sets needed by the company going forward. If you fire an accountant you cannot replace him with an engineer. Not all people and jobs are interchangeable. I personally have had to fire people and hire different people precisely for this reasons. Even if they are lying through their teeth, this answer provides nearly impenetrable plausible deniability.
That's the problem with liberals like Gates. They are very good at telling others how to be responsible citizens but consider themselves exempt from that
And you think "conservatives" don't do exactly the same thing? Bit of a double standard you have there. One standard will work just fine.
Corporations want infrastructure, rule of the law, and educated workforce that comes with doing business in US while paying third-world wages and hiding income in tax shelters. You can't have it both ways.
So far they very clearly have been able to have it both ways. Sad but true.
Now let's be fair that Microsoft in general is not paying "third world wages". You only have to look at their financial statements to prove that. They generally pay their employees fairly well. That said, I think they are being more than a little disingenuous in claiming they need workers from overseas when they have net profit margins well in excess of 20%. Microsoft's problems aren't with their costs but with their revenue streams and no amount of cheap overseas talent is going to solve that problem.
who later explained that about 60% of Microsoft's workforce is in the U.S., yet it makes 68% of its profits overseas
Which is pretty much irrelevant when it comes to software. There is no need at all in software to match development costs to geographic locations. It's one of the beautiful things about being in that industry. That's why you can have a development team in India for a product that isn't even sold there and it still makes sense. It's not a tangible good you export.
Now if they cannot get the right talent for the right price domestically then sure they might have to look elsewhere but frankly I doubt that is really the core problem for Microsoft. If they are having trouble getting good talent I think it has a lot more to do with the fact that people are well aware they have a pretty toxic corporate culture where everyone has to have their knives out at all times and so much of the best talent decides to work elsewhere. Microsoft is just not an attractive place to work compared with Apple or Google or some of the other top IT firms.
It's also a little disingenuous to claim you need cheaper talent when you have net profit margins well above 20%. Microsoft's problems are not rooted in their cost structure but in their revenue streams. Their problems are that their key revenue streams (Windows and Office) are tied to tightly to the PC market and they haven't been able to translate them very well to the mobile market. They spent so many years trying to maximize their monopoly on the PC they they found it difficult to acknowledge that mobile devices have different requirements and to relax their grip so that they could grow. Microsoft saw the opportunity in mobile 10-15 years ago but kept trying to cram a PC into a mobile device with predictably bad results.
I use a Blackberry. A BB Bold, to be precise.
I'm sorry. My mother had one of those. One of the worst interfaces on a smartphone I've ever had the miserable experience of using. Absolutely hated working with it when she needed something fixed.
It makes me look with pity upon iOS / Android / Windows Phone users.
Can you hear the sound of the rest of us not caring?
a BB is **not** a toy, you use it for doing business
I use my iPhone for "doing business" quite successfully thanks. I could say the same about quite a few Android phones I've worked with too. BB has precisely zero features that make it better than the alternatives for "doing business" that are relevant to me. It does however have quite a few things I don't like that make it worse for me for non-business use though.
1. They don't spy on you and give all your data to Apple. 2. They don't spy on you and give all your data to Google.
No I'm sure they give the data to someone else I'd rather not have it, like the NSA or foreign governments. If you actually trust any smartphone vendor to keep your data private you're being naive.
3. They don't leak all your nude selfies to the internet as was recently demonstrated with many celebrities.
Yeah that's a really big problem for most of us... [/sarcasm]
Look, if you care about the security of your data, don't use smartphones.
Fixed that for you.
The official chemical name IS Aluminium with Aluminum being an alternate spelling.
Demonstrably not true.
Especially considering I haven't heard much criticism of the current generation of Windows Phones, except for that pertaining to lack of apps.
I think someone would have to actually buy one for anyone to criticize it...
If everyone pays a flat sales tax rate, the people who spend more will bear most of the economic burden.
So you are creating an incentive for everyone to pay less and you think that will somehow help the economy? Curious bit of logic you have there.
You can make consumption taxes just as progressive as you wish. The most trivially obvious measure you can take toward this end is to exempt clothing and food expenses. Most state sales taxes do at least some of this. Clothing and food you buy simply ring up as untaxed on the register.
That doesn't make the tax progressive. It just means that you are reducing how regressive it is. Unless it is a pure luxury tax, pretty much all general sales taxes are regressive to some degree. If you tax some items and not others that simply means that some items are not taxed and the remainder are taxed regressively.
You pay a small amount of sales tax during the year? You get a lot of it back. Maybe all of it. Perhaps, more than you paid.
Terrific. Who is going to keep track of all this? How do you plan to verify what people spent, where they spent it and on how much? That is a HUGE administrative burden and frankly most people cannot handle it. If you think people are going to suddenly keep super careful records of their retail purchases you are delusional. If you are going to the trouble to keep track of people's income levels to determine who gets a rebate then you might as well just tax the income directly like we already do.
You say rebates won't cut it because you have to pay now, and only get your rebates later? Fine. You can issue prebates.
If you give tax credits against the sales tax based on income you still aren't making the tax progressive. You are simply giving a really complicated refund based on income so you've essentially turned a sales tax into an income tax and you're right back where we are now with a lot of needless administrative burden along the way.
Look up "Fair Tax". This has all been long since figured out.
The "Fair Tax" idea is a delusional idea that would require a Constitutional amendment and a politically impossible complete overhaul of the tax system to even be legal. The tax incidence of such a system is incredibly unclear and proponents seem to support it more out of ideology rather than any unbiased analysis.
If you make $24k a year, you don't pay income tax and most likely get a nice wad a cash courtesy of the U.S. Tax payers.
Many taxpayers don't pay federal income tax but they do pay state income tax, local income tax, sales tax, gasoline tax, property taxes, excise taxes, utility taxes (phones, electricity etc), sin taxes, payroll taxes (FICA, Social Security, Medicare), and quite a few more. Let's not pretend that poor people don't pay any taxes shall we?
And if you think the Earned Income Tax Credit is a "nice wad of cash" I think you don't know the meaning of the term. It's not a lot of money.
You are also missing out on the idea that capital gains will be taxed at the same rate as income.
Capital gains behaves fundamentally different than regular income and it is bad policy to treat them as identical. You can (often) defer capital gains by simply not selling the asset. You (generally) cannot defer income. Even if the nominal rates are the same the effective rate on capital gains will be less because the (generally wealthy) people they most often affect don't need to realize the gains until it is convenient for them.
For example, allow a person to own one home tax free.
Most local governments are funded predominately by property taxes mostly on primary residences. How exactly do you propose to replace that funding?
I see lots of people here proposing various tax schemes that sound logical until you actually think through the second order effects. You cannot simply say don't tax homes until you've addressed what to do with the public services that are being funded by those taxes currently. Furthermore you have to work through what sort of incentives not taxing homes would have on people's behavior. Are you creating unintentional tax loop holes? Chances are very good that you are. The notion of not imposing a tax on your primary residence an ok idea by itself but there are a LOT of follow-on consequences to doing that that have to be considered.
Don't tax food or medicine. OK, the discrepancy just halved. Wow. I'm a wizard. Look at how fast I fixed that.
Great. Where are you going to make up the revenue shortfall? Now you'll have to raise taxes on something else because the need for the tax revenue didn't magically disappear. Furthermore if you start exempting things you are now creating tax loopholes as well as the incentive for politicians to start exempting more and more items.
It is impossible.
You could not be more wrong. It is not only possible it happens all the time. You don't even have to do anything illegal to dodge a sales tax. It can be as easy as buying from another state or country. Most states have Use tax laws and those get widely ignored. It is nearly impossible to design a sales tax program with no loopholes of any kind even if you are trying to do so. And I assure you that some loopholes would be baked in on purpose. Any accountant worth his/her retainer would be able to tell you in less than a minute how to get around significant amounts of sales tax.
I am not aware of any merchants that dodge sales tax
Then you don't know very many merchants. Happens all the time. I'm an accountant and I've seen it with my own eyes. Plenty of sales tax simply does not get reported. You don't even need to take my word for it. 30 seconds on google will back up what I'm saying.
but if it is a problem start imposing fines on merchants and book them for tax evasion.
It is a problem, they already do impose fines and if you think solving the problem is simply a matter of imposing fines then you are quite naive.
It should be quite easy actually.
Easy? Not at all. First off having a Federal sales tax would require a change to the Constitution to even be legal. Right now only the States can impose a sales tax. How easy do you think it is to change the Constitution? Then even if you somehow manage that little trick, you have to have every merchant in the entire country would have to institute new processes for collection, processing and remittance of tax which is a HUGE expense and definitely not easy. Worse, you would have to basically re-engineer the IRS or create an entirely new federal department to handle the tax receipts that are no longer based on income. I'm telling you this because I'm one of the people who would have to take care of this issue. Even if it is the right thing to do (I don't think it is) if you think it is easy or trivial you have no idea what you are talking about.
Merchants already have systems that deal with sales tax (in most of the states atleast)
State and local tax. They have no system in place to deal with a Federal sales tax. Even if you piggyback on the existing systems they would require substantial retrofitting, training, new equipment and new procedures. This is NOT a trivial endeavor.
Only tax based on use (i.e. Sales Tax) Problem solved in one fell swoop.
Not even remotely. First off, the richest people don't actually spend a lot of what they earn. Sales taxes are by their very nature regressive taxes so your proposal is basically a proposal to reduce taxes on the wealthy and increase them on the poor. Furthermore, going to a single taxation method is a recipe for problems. Sales tax revenue can fluctuate quite a bit depending on what is happening in the economy but the end use of tax revenue cannot fluctuate as quickly. People still need public services regardless of how well the economy is doing and generally speaking good public services require relatively stable funding. That is why we tax on multiple sources including property, sales, excise, income and others. This keeps the tax revenues relatively stable through diversification which is a good thing. While sales tax should be an important part of the equation, going to a sales tax only taxation program is Bad Policy. It sounds like a good idea on a first pass but once you really think about and understand the issues involved you'll realize it isn't so simple.
Tax evasions now impossible
HAHAHAHAHA... Wait.. you were serious weren't you? Going to a strict sales tax would in no way, shape or form eliminate tax evasion. It would only change the tactics used to avoid taxation. The simplest tactics are to just buy less stuff or to buy it from people who don't collect and report the sales tax to the government. Congratulations, you've simultaneously hurt the economy AND de-funded public services.
That's not what I remember. I remember everyone in the 90s buying Amazon stock, and their revenue going up and up and up.
Yes it did. However their profits did not. The only reason nobody cared at the time was that everyone else was doing the same thing. The dotcom bubble was a strange little era. Companies with nonsensical business models were going public with ludicrous valuations because everyone was afraid they would miss the Next Big Thing. If you started Amazon today I'm dubious investors would permit the company the same latitude they did back then.
Although the stock did have a little problem around 2000, I wonder what happened then.
The bottom crashed out of the stock market and they nearly got dragged under. If you were of a gambling mind you could have gotten Amazon stock for a very very low price at that time.
You're right, because no computer company has ever turned itself around from almost going bankrupt to being the most valuable company in the US while still remaining public....
Just because someone else managed a very difficult trick doesn't mean that it is repeatable, likely or a good idea. To use a basketball analogy that's like pointing out that someone else managed to sink a basket from the other side of the court and thinking "why doesn't anyone else do that?" You don't bet the company on trying to replicate the long shot improbable success of another company.
LOL, that sounds like a very hipster thing to say. Sounds very meta.
Is that meant to be a recursive insult because, you know... pot, kettle, black...
He pretty much HAS to start responding to market demand, vs. dictating what he thinks people SHOULD want.
If that were the case then he should start offering thicker phones with a bigger battery. The fact that companies like Mophie actually have a business model strongly indicates there is a demand out there for phones with enough batter to last more than half a day.
Jobs was a big believer in the concept that people don't really know what they need or want.
And he is largely correct. If I were to go around my office and ask people what they would like that would make their job better, I will largely get blank stares or some extremely modest improvement to something they were already doing like a more comfy chair. People are REALLY REALLY bad in general about being technology visionaries. Henry Ford said it best when he said "If I asked customers what they wanted they would answer a faster horse".
Where this viewpoint is most often wrong is when you are talking about incrementally improving an existing product they are already familiar with. People often have well formed and informed opinions in that case. They can tell you that they like a bigger or smaller screen on a device they already know and use. They have NO idea if they will like something totally new (or seemingly new) like ApplePay.
For the price of an iPhone, you could have two decent Android phones and a couple of cheap tablets.
I'll bite. First question is which iPhone are we talking about here? 5, 5S, 6 or 6plus? With what memory capacity? Second, go ahead and prove it. Find me two "decent" (meaning similar specs to the iPhone) Android phones and two "cheap" tablets at unsubsidized prices that cost the same as an iPhone. Only restriction is that it has to be something that is actually useful because I cannot fathom any reason to buy something that will gather dust.
I've never been convinced it's well defined.
It's not. It's basically an ill defined pejorative for "people who do things I don't like" with a dash of a superiority complex thrown in. They think the other person has a superiority complex so they beat them to the punch with their own. Basically if you call someone a hipster you are probably covering up your own insecurity and couldn't think of a more creative insult.
That'll be the next killer "feature" (which is ironic, as phones from 10-15 years ago always had a battery life of 3+ days).
They had great battery life because you couldn't actually do much with them.
That said I REALLY wish the phone manufacturers would get off this thinner=better treadmill and make a phone with a thicker battery that will actually last at least a day. The fact that companies like Mophie have a successful business selling cases with built in batteries is all you need to know to understand that lots of customers actually value battery life over thin and light.
Do smartphone specs even matter for the average smartphone user anymore?
Generally speaking no they do not. I would argue that they never really did aside from plainly obvious things like screen size or ability to access data. Certain features are basically table stakes (good screen, camera, adequate storage, etc) but it's pointless to pay for features I'm not going to need or use. Sure I'm happy if the phone is faster but I don't really give a crap how many Mhz the processor has or how much RAM it has unless it somehow gets in my way. I want enough performance that I can do the activities I want without the perception that the phone is holding me back. Whether the Samsung or the Apple device has marginally higher screen resolution is not something I care about at all unless the difference is very noticeable.
Personally though I wish the phone makers (Apple I'm looking at you) would get over this obsession with making the phone as thin as possible and put a bigger battery in the damn things. There is a reason companies like Mophie are making a lot of money selling battery cases. Lots of us value longer battery life over thinness and weight.