This is one of those things were I think it should be legal (free will) but only if the person left instructions stating so in their will.
How do you plan to allow for children or those lacking adequate mental capacity who under the law are not permitted to make such declarations. We should just torture them because they aren't able to make such statements on their own behalf? Why do they need to be in a coma? What about those who are paralyzed or incapacitated. My mother suffers from ALS and is slowly being trapped in her own body in about the most horrifying way possible. Her mind is fine but she doesn't want to live like that forever and it should be her right to die whenever she feels it is time.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that it should be permitted but it's a little more complicated than what you propose.
If solar is doing so great then why does it need subsidies?
Because it is still a developing technology. Doing great does not mean it has no further to go or that it does not need help. Without subsidies it is difficult in the short run to justify investments in energy that cannot return a profit as long as cheap fossil fuels are available. Given that it is clean energy it is clearly in the interest of society at large to invest in and accelerate the development of the technology to make it cost competitive as quickly as possible. Furthermore subsidies for technology development frequently more than pay for themselves in economic growth in the long run. (see NASA and NIH for examples)
Solar will eventually become cost effective without subsidies, lets wait for that to happen.
It is not at all clear that it will become cost competitive in a useful time frame without subsidies. Without subsidies many of the investments would never get made because a positive return would be impossible. Furthermore the longer we wait the more pollution is released. The clock is not our friend here.
Please, explain why people need all this navigation. I simply don't understand it. I can start any place in the continental United States, refer to Rand McNally, and maybe write a few notes on a scrap of paper. I can drive ANYWHERE in ConUS or mainland Canada, without any further guidance.
Because I can have someone give me just an address or a point of interest and I can get anywhere on the globe without having to consult an atlas or ask anyone for some (probably sketchy) directions. I've got a fairly good sense of direction but many people do not and GPS helps them greatly. Furthermore if I miss a turn (which happens to everyone) or need to take an unexpected detour it lets me know and gives me a detailed revised route immediately. Best of all I don't have to carry around a bunch of paper maps since both my car and phone have GPS built in. I use a GPS because it is FAR easier. I'm perfectly capable of getting someplace without GPS. I lived without GPS for most of my life but today there is no reason for me to do so today under normal circumstances. Why would I waste my time and energy worrying about navigation when I don't have to even if I'm good at it? I have far more productive things to do with my time. If I want to test my navigational skill I'll take up orienteering.
Well when I'm out cycling I make a point of pausing at those things.
Then in most places you are unambiguously breaking the law.
And "pause" is most fitting for the situation, imo.
Regardless of whether it is sensible or not, you are behaving in a manner contrary to the rules of the road as well as the expectations of everyone else you share the road with. If you want to get the laws changed then please help do so. Until then please obey the law and help cyclists everywhere. It's pretty hard to argue that we deserve equal rights on the road when asshats everywhere are breaking the law on a regular basis.
Not sure if this is the legal way to do things, but it makes sense so fuck 'em.
In most places it is not legal and your attitude on the matter is what keeps cyclists from having the high ground in this debate. The sign says stop and that is exactly what you are supposed to do. Cyclists who don't are self indulgent idiots who give cyclists everywhere a bad name.
Well, as a bicyclist I have the right to treat stop signs as yield sign
Not in most places you do not. Stop signs are stop signs and the rules are the same for bicycles as for automobiles. You stop at a stop sign the same as everyone else. If you do not then in most places you are breaking the law and being the sort of asshat who gives cyclists a bad name. I am aware local laws permit what you describe in some places but it is not widely true nor is it clear that it is a good idea in general.
However, in the real world I would see too many problems with devices (and hosts) that wouldn't follow or implement the spec properly for this to work reliably.
You could make the exact same argument about pretty much any spec. There is always the possibility that someone will not implement it correctly and the market tends to weed out those devices. There is no insurmountable technical problem in doing 100 watt USB. There would need to be some changes in the controllers and the cables would have to be beefed up to handle the extra power but those are pretty straightforward problems to solve. Furthermore it would allow laptops to be powered by a USB cable instead of having to carry a power cord and transformer. It even makes wiring a building for DC power feasible at the consumer level. Picture having your outlets with on AC outlet and on USB DC outlet that can supply up to 100 watts. That would solve a lot of problems.
What astonishes me is that they have all this cash and they don't seem to be inventing anything new or creating any new markets. That's the bigger sign of distress at the company.
No new markets? For crying out loud the iPad was released just 3 years ago. That for all practical purposes created the tablet market as we know it today. It's absurd that anyone should really expect Apple to create completely new multi-billion dollar businesses from scratch every year or they are somehow in danger of going out of business. I'm pretty sure you have no idea how difficult it is to productively invest a cash hoard the size of the one Apple has. It's virtually impossible.
When you get to the size of Apple or Google or Microsoft there simply aren't that many investments you can make that will move the needle. Apple made something like $156 billion in revenue in 2012. Apple's trailing twelve month growth rate is 9.2% which is effectively the same thing as creating a $14 billion company from scratch. FYI a company with $14 billion in revenue would be in the top 200 companies in the Fortune 500. That means Apple *grew* by the entire size of eBay last year. How easy do you think that is to do? What business do you think Apple should do that is going to generate $14 billion in the next year?
Exactly. Where else in the USA could they possibly find a lower cost of living?
Not really a big consideration. As long as the employees can get to work the company doesn't really need to care much. The company gets tax benefits because if Apple moves out of Cupertino (which they easily could do) then Cupertino gets zero tax revenue and might even lose additional spillover revenues from restaurants, hotels, etc. Last time I checked some revenue is better than no revenue.
what's the rationale behind giving them benefits? would they move away if they didn't? unlikely, really.
Actually it would be relatively easy for Apple to relocate. They don't have to go across the country though they probably could if needed. They could just go to the next town over. The rationale is that some tax revenue is better than no tax revenue. Furthermore there is additional tax and income benefit to other local businesses like restaurants, hotels, etc.
I'd like to see a gizmo that could not only measure the current available, but act as a universal adaptor for those sorts of devices.
The answer is not a different gizmo to work around existing limitations in the spec but updating the USB spec to reflect real world conditions and handle more power and handle power more gracefully than it does now. There is some evidence that this might occur in the near future.
Which (blankety-blank-censored-blank) is no longer available. And since the cables are no longer made or sold and since they were notoriously prone to fail means that I've been trickle-charging my unit for about a year now.
Exactly why I avoid devices with weird custom cables whenever possible in consumer electronics. It's been my experience that unless a custom cable is so popular as to become a standard itself (like Apple's Lightning) that eventually you are going to run into a problem. Furthermore it adds to the cost of the device (custom cables = $) and it usually means that the company making the device had lazy and/or incompetent engineers. Now admittedly the USB spec is pretty flawed, particularly when it comes to power, but even so I've still seen lots of devices that could have used standard USB (or Firewire etc) had they taken the time to do so.
Now sometimes the standard needs to be updated. I think USB should be beefed up to handle up to 100 watts with all due haste.
Bear in mind that my day job is to run a company that makes custom cables. Think about that. I make a living off of custom cables, have the ability and equipment to make a copy of pretty much any cable, and I still think they are a bad idea for most consumer electronics.
Encrypting is useful, but then comes the very nasty thing that comes with it: Key management.
This hits the nail right on the head. Encrypting is an important thing to do but if they hand over the keys (intentionally or not) then all the encryption in the world means nothing. And frankly key management is the most difficult piece of the puzzle because of the human factor. Only one person has to be compromised and all your encryption is for naught. Furthermore under our current legal framework with national security letters, people can probably be compelled to hand over encryption keys and risk jail time if they speak up about it to anyone.
Corporate taxes are just a way to tax more money from 'the people' while getting idiots like yourself to cheer it on.
In many cases you are quite correct but that logic falls apart somewhat (though not completely) when you are talking about large multi-nationals where the company owners might not be citizens of the taxing country. The mere fact that Apple is headquartered in the US means relatively little by itself. Apple really is a bunch of companies under an umbrella company. Figuring out just how profitable the Italian subsidiary of Apple happens to be is a shockingly imprecise exercise that gets into all kinds of transfer pricing and other arcane accounting prone to fudging even by well intentioned people. (I'm a certified accountant so I ought to know) So owning a piece of a multinational can end up being a tax evasion strategy (by keeping the money in the company) unless you tax the corporation directly in certain cases.
Avoidance is a synonym for evasion. A distinction without a difference whether it is legal or not. They might be obeying the letter of the law but it is tax evasion nonetheless.
Sometimes the right person you hired goes wrong further down the track for no fault of yours, or theirs for that matter. Shit happens, people change.
As I said, sometimes people aren't what they seem. It's not a question of fault. My statement stands. If you have to fire someone that means you either hired the wrong person or you didn't train them adequately. Either way it is the fault of the person hiring at the end of the day.
Spoken like a true noob that never had to hire anyone.
Really? You know how many people I have hired? No, you would just prefer to be rude to someone you know nothing about. Let me give you some hints. I run a manufacturing company, I've started 5 other businesses, and as of the time I type this I have about 20 direct reports. I hire people almost weekly and have interviewed enough people that there is comma in the number. Furthermore of the full time people (not temps) I have hired in the last 4 years I have had precisely two who I have had to later fire and none who have left of their own accord.
I stand by what I said. If you are focused on removing people you have already hired and spent the money to train rather than improving your recruiting and training then you are making a very expensive mistake. If you find you have hired the wrong person, regardless of the reasons, you need to remove that person as soon as possible. Waiting until the next round of performance reviews is a disaster waiting to happen. I've seen it too many times to count.
Hiring is imperfect even under the best of circumstances.
Of course it is. Anyone who has run a business (and I have) knows this. Nevertheless if you have a bad hire that means either you didn't train the well enough or you hired the wrong person. Nobody is going to get them all right but stack ranking is not the solution to the problem. Stack ranking merely creates new problems. It creates all sorts of perverse incentives which mostly don't benefit the company or the people working for it.
the best hiring process known to man, which takes several years of assessments, relies in numerous tests, and candidates are chosen by a dedicated committee of experts whose compensation is directly tied to performance often results in disastrous hires. It is called the sports draft and every year there are plenty of draft busts in all sports
I disagree strongly that sports drafts are the best process known. I've been recruited and played division 1 college sports. I've spend more time than you can imagine around people who evaluate sports talent for a living. I understand sports recruiting first hand probably better than anyone reading this. I even coach a sports team and have for most of the last two decades. Sports recruiting and talent evaluation even at the professional level is not really all that different from that of other businesses who take their talent selection seriously.
If those people with (comparatively) unlimited resources still make mistakes, what hope does a company have on a one day interview?
So don't do a one day interview. We use probationary periods, temp-to-hire, multiple interviews, get people through trusted referrals, test their relevant skills, try to evaluate their ability to work on a team and much more. And my current company is relatively small. Hiring the right people is THE most important thing any manager does. If a manager can assemble and train a well performing team then they have no hope whatsoever of succeeding in business. It's hard and imperfect but you can have a very good "batting average" and when you make the occasional mistake deal with it right away instead of creating some horrible structure that twists the company culture into something you don't want it to be.
It had nothing at all to do with race and everything to do with free verses nonfree .
A distinction without a difference. It had EVERYTHING to do with race and only the willfully stupid could believe otherwise. Seriously, if you think racism had nothing to do with that part of the Constitution, which was written by white aristocratic slave owners whose slaves were black people, then you sir are either a troll an idiot or both.
If you have to fire someone it can only mean one of two things. Either you didn't train the person well enough or you hired the wrong person. If you abstract what is going on enough all firings ultimately fall into one of those two categories, both of which are a ultimately the responsibility of management. This is why stack ranking is a bad idea. If you didn't train the person well enough then improve your training program. If the person was the wrong person for the job (insufficient work ethic, incompetent, unethical etc) then improve your recruiting program. Stack ranking treats the symptom instead of the disease. It takes emphasis away from focusing on hiring the right people and training them well.
No company will get every hire right (some people just aren't what they seem to be) but creating a culture where everyone is playing a game of "devil take the hindmost" will get people to worry less about getting the right person because if they are wrong they won't last. Hiring someone only to break them off later means someone made a very expensive mistake.
Madison himself wrote extensively on exactly how that phrase was suppose to be interpreted, and he should know best, given that he wrote the fucking Constitution of the United States.
How the Constitution is to be interpreted is the function of the Supreme Court. The interpretation of the Constitution is not fixed in stone for all eternity and that is the strength of the document. But by all means, let's not look at it based on modern society. Let's worship some guy who has been dead for 200 years and blindly follow what he said even though he lived in a world which was almost unrecognizably different from the one you and I live in.
We're not all the same. I oppose the ACA, not only because it gets the government, the IRS, and the DHS involved in my personal healthcare decisions
The government is already involved in your healthcare decisions. There is NO possible way they could not be. Healthcare is a finite resource with nearly infinite demand. Without the government being involved how do you think we could safely evaluate the efficacy of medicines? Who would insure the poor or the elderly? (Certainly not private insurance companies unless they are forced to) How do you prevent hospitals from turning away indigent patients because they cannot pay? Do you not realize that ALL insurance companies basically follow medicare when it comes to pricing?
The government is a necessary part of health care for EVERY country on earth because governments are the only party involved that has the potential to be a neutral arbiter. We can have a reasonable debate about what should be an appropriate extent of government involvement but pretending that somehow it is possible to separate the government from healthcare regulations is just patently absurd. You claim they are somehow infringing on your "freedoms" but if you have an alternative plan to provide insurance to everyone you have failed to provide it.
because also it takes away my freedom to make my own decisions regarding how I live my own life
What freedom are you being denied? The "freedom" to not get insurance and thus be a leach on society?
puts even more tax on the already-burdened middle class, and limits the charity care that the lower middle class/poor are already receiving.
We are ALREADY paying to support medical care for the uninsured through higher insurance premiums. Since everyone is going to use medical care it is absurd to not have everyone participate in the insurance pool. There is NOTHING preventing charities from continuing to provide care and the only reason many of them needed to was because we were excluding poor people from the right to receive health insurance.
Therein lies the problem, people wouldn't be happy with only being left alone by the government, oh no. They want their own lifestyles mandated onto everyone else.
And you think the right is somehow any different? They don't want the government to be uninvolved. They want the government to be involved in the way THEY want, according to their philosophies and ethics. I think the right is fundamentally conflicted because they claim to want government to go away except when something they don't like bothers them.
Abortion is a balance of rights between the mother and the unborn child. Obviously, her opinion rests on the unborn child having full rights as a human being, so she is basically supporting murder being illegal. Do you support murder being illegal?
So you think a fetus is a person. Ok let's roll with that and say that a fetus is a person from the moment of conception. Following your logic answer the following:
1) Do you then think that if a mother smokes or drinks and the child becomes handicapped as a result that the mother should be put in jail for child abuse? Do you support child abuse being legal? (see how I framed that issue the same way you did?) 2) How about if the fetus develops in such a way that it is a life threatening danger to the mother. Is the mother committing murder if she aborts the fetus to save her own life? Or should the mother commit suicide to save the life of the fetus so that she does not commit "murder"? 3) Is the fetus guilty of murder/manslaughter if it kills the mother? (Remember the fetus is a person under your logic so a person just killed a person) 4) How about if the mother is raped and the implanted fetus eventually kills the mother. Is the rapist then guilty of murder too? 5) If a mother takes birth control pills and thus prevents the zygote from forming when it would have otherwise. Is the mother guilty of murder? 6) If a child is born prematurely because of some action of the mother and dies during the birth is the mother guilty of murder?
These questions are of course absurd just like yours is. The real question is when does a fetus attain legal standing as a person? I would argue that if the fetus is not viable outside of the mother then all legal rights should be retained by the mother up to and including abortion of the fetus. Until such time as a fetus can reasonably be expected to survive independently, any discussion of its rights as an individual is absurd because it is not an individual. It is effectively a parasite. If the mother wishes to go through with the pregnancy then that should be her right. If she doesn't then that should be her right as well.
article 1 section 2 states non free people count as 3/5 a person and indians don't count for its purpose of assigning representatives and taxes. It was put in place to stop the over representation of people not allowed to vote
It was put in place to prevent southern states from counting slaves and thus increasing their census count and thus their representation in congress based on that census count. It had nothing to do with whether they could vote or not. Women and children couldn't vote but you'll note that they were still counted.
Outside of indians not being taxed, it had nothing to do with race as whites were also slaves at the time too.
Really? You're seriously going to go with that? Virtually all slaves were black at the time the Constitution was written and you are seriously going to argue it had nothing to do with race? Wow... Just wow.
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This is one of those things were I think it should be legal (free will) but only if the person left instructions stating so in their will.
How do you plan to allow for children or those lacking adequate mental capacity who under the law are not permitted to make such declarations. We should just torture them because they aren't able to make such statements on their own behalf? Why do they need to be in a coma? What about those who are paralyzed or incapacitated. My mother suffers from ALS and is slowly being trapped in her own body in about the most horrifying way possible. Her mind is fine but she doesn't want to live like that forever and it should be her right to die whenever she feels it is time.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that it should be permitted but it's a little more complicated than what you propose.
If solar is doing so great then why does it need subsidies?
Because it is still a developing technology. Doing great does not mean it has no further to go or that it does not need help. Without subsidies it is difficult in the short run to justify investments in energy that cannot return a profit as long as cheap fossil fuels are available. Given that it is clean energy it is clearly in the interest of society at large to invest in and accelerate the development of the technology to make it cost competitive as quickly as possible. Furthermore subsidies for technology development frequently more than pay for themselves in economic growth in the long run. (see NASA and NIH for examples)
Solar will eventually become cost effective without subsidies, lets wait for that to happen.
It is not at all clear that it will become cost competitive in a useful time frame without subsidies. Without subsidies many of the investments would never get made because a positive return would be impossible. Furthermore the longer we wait the more pollution is released. The clock is not our friend here.
Please, explain why people need all this navigation. I simply don't understand it. I can start any place in the continental United States, refer to Rand McNally, and maybe write a few notes on a scrap of paper. I can drive ANYWHERE in ConUS or mainland Canada, without any further guidance.
Because I can have someone give me just an address or a point of interest and I can get anywhere on the globe without having to consult an atlas or ask anyone for some (probably sketchy) directions. I've got a fairly good sense of direction but many people do not and GPS helps them greatly. Furthermore if I miss a turn (which happens to everyone) or need to take an unexpected detour it lets me know and gives me a detailed revised route immediately. Best of all I don't have to carry around a bunch of paper maps since both my car and phone have GPS built in. I use a GPS because it is FAR easier. I'm perfectly capable of getting someplace without GPS. I lived without GPS for most of my life but today there is no reason for me to do so today under normal circumstances. Why would I waste my time and energy worrying about navigation when I don't have to even if I'm good at it? I have far more productive things to do with my time. If I want to test my navigational skill I'll take up orienteering.
Well when I'm out cycling I make a point of pausing at those things.
Then in most places you are unambiguously breaking the law.
And "pause" is most fitting for the situation, imo.
Regardless of whether it is sensible or not, you are behaving in a manner contrary to the rules of the road as well as the expectations of everyone else you share the road with. If you want to get the laws changed then please help do so. Until then please obey the law and help cyclists everywhere. It's pretty hard to argue that we deserve equal rights on the road when asshats everywhere are breaking the law on a regular basis.
Not sure if this is the legal way to do things, but it makes sense so fuck 'em.
In most places it is not legal and your attitude on the matter is what keeps cyclists from having the high ground in this debate. The sign says stop and that is exactly what you are supposed to do. Cyclists who don't are self indulgent idiots who give cyclists everywhere a bad name.
Well, as a bicyclist I have the right to treat stop signs as yield sign
Not in most places you do not. Stop signs are stop signs and the rules are the same for bicycles as for automobiles. You stop at a stop sign the same as everyone else. If you do not then in most places you are breaking the law and being the sort of asshat who gives cyclists a bad name. I am aware local laws permit what you describe in some places but it is not widely true nor is it clear that it is a good idea in general.
Imagine chess replacing actual war.
Imagine unicorns playing leapfrog. Roughly the same likelihood of actually occurring.
I realize that they have to make money, but I find the sponsor logos on their jackets rather tacky.
What do you propose as an alternative from up there on your high horse? If you've got a better idea, let's hear it.
However, in the real world I would see too many problems with devices (and hosts) that wouldn't follow or implement the spec properly for this to work reliably.
You could make the exact same argument about pretty much any spec. There is always the possibility that someone will not implement it correctly and the market tends to weed out those devices. There is no insurmountable technical problem in doing 100 watt USB. There would need to be some changes in the controllers and the cables would have to be beefed up to handle the extra power but those are pretty straightforward problems to solve. Furthermore it would allow laptops to be powered by a USB cable instead of having to carry a power cord and transformer. It even makes wiring a building for DC power feasible at the consumer level. Picture having your outlets with on AC outlet and on USB DC outlet that can supply up to 100 watts. That would solve a lot of problems.
What astonishes me is that they have all this cash and they don't seem to be inventing anything new or creating any new markets. That's the bigger sign of distress at the company.
No new markets? For crying out loud the iPad was released just 3 years ago. That for all practical purposes created the tablet market as we know it today. It's absurd that anyone should really expect Apple to create completely new multi-billion dollar businesses from scratch every year or they are somehow in danger of going out of business. I'm pretty sure you have no idea how difficult it is to productively invest a cash hoard the size of the one Apple has. It's virtually impossible.
When you get to the size of Apple or Google or Microsoft there simply aren't that many investments you can make that will move the needle. Apple made something like $156 billion in revenue in 2012. Apple's trailing twelve month growth rate is 9.2% which is effectively the same thing as creating a $14 billion company from scratch. FYI a company with $14 billion in revenue would be in the top 200 companies in the Fortune 500. That means Apple *grew* by the entire size of eBay last year. How easy do you think that is to do? What business do you think Apple should do that is going to generate $14 billion in the next year?
One of Parkinson's Laws is that the demise of a corporation follows not long after construction of headquarters.
It's called having an edifice complex.
Exactly. Where else in the USA could they possibly find a lower cost of living?
Not really a big consideration. As long as the employees can get to work the company doesn't really need to care much. The company gets tax benefits because if Apple moves out of Cupertino (which they easily could do) then Cupertino gets zero tax revenue and might even lose additional spillover revenues from restaurants, hotels, etc. Last time I checked some revenue is better than no revenue.
what's the rationale behind giving them benefits? would they move away if they didn't? unlikely, really.
Actually it would be relatively easy for Apple to relocate. They don't have to go across the country though they probably could if needed. They could just go to the next town over. The rationale is that some tax revenue is better than no tax revenue. Furthermore there is additional tax and income benefit to other local businesses like restaurants, hotels, etc.
I'd like to see a gizmo that could not only measure the current available, but act as a universal adaptor for those sorts of devices.
The answer is not a different gizmo to work around existing limitations in the spec but updating the USB spec to reflect real world conditions and handle more power and handle power more gracefully than it does now. There is some evidence that this might occur in the near future.
Which (blankety-blank-censored-blank) is no longer available. And since the cables are no longer made or sold and since they were notoriously prone to fail means that I've been trickle-charging my unit for about a year now.
Exactly why I avoid devices with weird custom cables whenever possible in consumer electronics. It's been my experience that unless a custom cable is so popular as to become a standard itself (like Apple's Lightning) that eventually you are going to run into a problem. Furthermore it adds to the cost of the device (custom cables = $) and it usually means that the company making the device had lazy and/or incompetent engineers. Now admittedly the USB spec is pretty flawed, particularly when it comes to power, but even so I've still seen lots of devices that could have used standard USB (or Firewire etc) had they taken the time to do so.
Now sometimes the standard needs to be updated. I think USB should be beefed up to handle up to 100 watts with all due haste.
Bear in mind that my day job is to run a company that makes custom cables. Think about that. I make a living off of custom cables, have the ability and equipment to make a copy of pretty much any cable, and I still think they are a bad idea for most consumer electronics.
Encrypting is useful, but then comes the very nasty thing that comes with it: Key management.
This hits the nail right on the head. Encrypting is an important thing to do but if they hand over the keys (intentionally or not) then all the encryption in the world means nothing. And frankly key management is the most difficult piece of the puzzle because of the human factor. Only one person has to be compromised and all your encryption is for naught. Furthermore under our current legal framework with national security letters, people can probably be compelled to hand over encryption keys and risk jail time if they speak up about it to anyone.
Ha-ha. Who do you think pays the money to the corporations that they then hand it to the government?
You are talking about tax incidence.
Corporate taxes are just a way to tax more money from 'the people' while getting idiots like yourself to cheer it on.
In many cases you are quite correct but that logic falls apart somewhat (though not completely) when you are talking about large multi-nationals where the company owners might not be citizens of the taxing country. The mere fact that Apple is headquartered in the US means relatively little by itself. Apple really is a bunch of companies under an umbrella company. Figuring out just how profitable the Italian subsidiary of Apple happens to be is a shockingly imprecise exercise that gets into all kinds of transfer pricing and other arcane accounting prone to fudging even by well intentioned people. (I'm a certified accountant so I ought to know) So owning a piece of a multinational can end up being a tax evasion strategy (by keeping the money in the company) unless you tax the corporation directly in certain cases.
Technically it's tax avoidance
Avoidance is a synonym for evasion. A distinction without a difference whether it is legal or not. They might be obeying the letter of the law but it is tax evasion nonetheless.
Sometimes the right person you hired goes wrong further down the track for no fault of yours, or theirs for that matter. Shit happens, people change.
As I said, sometimes people aren't what they seem. It's not a question of fault. My statement stands. If you have to fire someone that means you either hired the wrong person or you didn't train them adequately. Either way it is the fault of the person hiring at the end of the day.
Spoken like a true noob that never had to hire anyone.
Really? You know how many people I have hired? No, you would just prefer to be rude to someone you know nothing about. Let me give you some hints. I run a manufacturing company, I've started 5 other businesses, and as of the time I type this I have about 20 direct reports. I hire people almost weekly and have interviewed enough people that there is comma in the number. Furthermore of the full time people (not temps) I have hired in the last 4 years I have had precisely two who I have had to later fire and none who have left of their own accord.
I stand by what I said. If you are focused on removing people you have already hired and spent the money to train rather than improving your recruiting and training then you are making a very expensive mistake. If you find you have hired the wrong person, regardless of the reasons, you need to remove that person as soon as possible. Waiting until the next round of performance reviews is a disaster waiting to happen. I've seen it too many times to count.
Hiring is imperfect even under the best of circumstances.
Of course it is. Anyone who has run a business (and I have) knows this. Nevertheless if you have a bad hire that means either you didn't train the well enough or you hired the wrong person. Nobody is going to get them all right but stack ranking is not the solution to the problem. Stack ranking merely creates new problems. It creates all sorts of perverse incentives which mostly don't benefit the company or the people working for it.
the best hiring process known to man, which takes several years of assessments, relies in numerous tests, and candidates are chosen by a dedicated committee of experts whose compensation is directly tied to performance often results in disastrous hires. It is called the sports draft and every year there are plenty of draft busts in all sports
I disagree strongly that sports drafts are the best process known. I've been recruited and played division 1 college sports. I've spend more time than you can imagine around people who evaluate sports talent for a living. I understand sports recruiting first hand probably better than anyone reading this. I even coach a sports team and have for most of the last two decades. Sports recruiting and talent evaluation even at the professional level is not really all that different from that of other businesses who take their talent selection seriously.
If those people with (comparatively) unlimited resources still make mistakes, what hope does a company have on a one day interview?
So don't do a one day interview. We use probationary periods, temp-to-hire, multiple interviews, get people through trusted referrals, test their relevant skills, try to evaluate their ability to work on a team and much more. And my current company is relatively small. Hiring the right people is THE most important thing any manager does. If a manager can assemble and train a well performing team then they have no hope whatsoever of succeeding in business. It's hard and imperfect but you can have a very good "batting average" and when you make the occasional mistake deal with it right away instead of creating some horrible structure that twists the company culture into something you don't want it to be.
It had nothing at all to do with race and everything to do with free verses nonfree .
A distinction without a difference. It had EVERYTHING to do with race and only the willfully stupid could believe otherwise. Seriously, if you think racism had nothing to do with that part of the Constitution, which was written by white aristocratic slave owners whose slaves were black people, then you sir are either a troll an idiot or both.
If you have to fire someone it can only mean one of two things. Either you didn't train the person well enough or you hired the wrong person. If you abstract what is going on enough all firings ultimately fall into one of those two categories, both of which are a ultimately the responsibility of management. This is why stack ranking is a bad idea. If you didn't train the person well enough then improve your training program. If the person was the wrong person for the job (insufficient work ethic, incompetent, unethical etc) then improve your recruiting program. Stack ranking treats the symptom instead of the disease. It takes emphasis away from focusing on hiring the right people and training them well.
No company will get every hire right (some people just aren't what they seem to be) but creating a culture where everyone is playing a game of "devil take the hindmost" will get people to worry less about getting the right person because if they are wrong they won't last. Hiring someone only to break them off later means someone made a very expensive mistake.
Madison himself wrote extensively on exactly how that phrase was suppose to be interpreted, and he should know best, given that he wrote the fucking Constitution of the United States.
How the Constitution is to be interpreted is the function of the Supreme Court. The interpretation of the Constitution is not fixed in stone for all eternity and that is the strength of the document. But by all means, let's not look at it based on modern society. Let's worship some guy who has been dead for 200 years and blindly follow what he said even though he lived in a world which was almost unrecognizably different from the one you and I live in.
We're not all the same. I oppose the ACA, not only because it gets the government, the IRS, and the DHS involved in my personal healthcare decisions
The government is already involved in your healthcare decisions. There is NO possible way they could not be. Healthcare is a finite resource with nearly infinite demand. Without the government being involved how do you think we could safely evaluate the efficacy of medicines? Who would insure the poor or the elderly? (Certainly not private insurance companies unless they are forced to) How do you prevent hospitals from turning away indigent patients because they cannot pay? Do you not realize that ALL insurance companies basically follow medicare when it comes to pricing?
The government is a necessary part of health care for EVERY country on earth because governments are the only party involved that has the potential to be a neutral arbiter. We can have a reasonable debate about what should be an appropriate extent of government involvement but pretending that somehow it is possible to separate the government from healthcare regulations is just patently absurd. You claim they are somehow infringing on your "freedoms" but if you have an alternative plan to provide insurance to everyone you have failed to provide it.
because also it takes away my freedom to make my own decisions regarding how I live my own life
What freedom are you being denied? The "freedom" to not get insurance and thus be a leach on society?
puts even more tax on the already-burdened middle class, and limits the charity care that the lower middle class/poor are already receiving.
We are ALREADY paying to support medical care for the uninsured through higher insurance premiums. Since everyone is going to use medical care it is absurd to not have everyone participate in the insurance pool. There is NOTHING preventing charities from continuing to provide care and the only reason many of them needed to was because we were excluding poor people from the right to receive health insurance.
Therein lies the problem, people wouldn't be happy with only being left alone by the government, oh no. They want their own lifestyles mandated onto everyone else.
And you think the right is somehow any different? They don't want the government to be uninvolved. They want the government to be involved in the way THEY want, according to their philosophies and ethics. I think the right is fundamentally conflicted because they claim to want government to go away except when something they don't like bothers them.
This is WAY off topic but what the heck...
Abortion is a balance of rights between the mother and the unborn child. Obviously, her opinion rests on the unborn child having full rights as a human being, so she is basically supporting murder being illegal. Do you support murder being illegal?
So you think a fetus is a person. Ok let's roll with that and say that a fetus is a person from the moment of conception. Following your logic answer the following:
1) Do you then think that if a mother smokes or drinks and the child becomes handicapped as a result that the mother should be put in jail for child abuse? Do you support child abuse being legal? (see how I framed that issue the same way you did?)
2) How about if the fetus develops in such a way that it is a life threatening danger to the mother. Is the mother committing murder if she aborts the fetus to save her own life? Or should the mother commit suicide to save the life of the fetus so that she does not commit "murder"?
3) Is the fetus guilty of murder/manslaughter if it kills the mother? (Remember the fetus is a person under your logic so a person just killed a person)
4) How about if the mother is raped and the implanted fetus eventually kills the mother. Is the rapist then guilty of murder too?
5) If a mother takes birth control pills and thus prevents the zygote from forming when it would have otherwise. Is the mother guilty of murder?
6) If a child is born prematurely because of some action of the mother and dies during the birth is the mother guilty of murder?
These questions are of course absurd just like yours is. The real question is when does a fetus attain legal standing as a person? I would argue that if the fetus is not viable outside of the mother then all legal rights should be retained by the mother up to and including abortion of the fetus. Until such time as a fetus can reasonably be expected to survive independently, any discussion of its rights as an individual is absurd because it is not an individual. It is effectively a parasite. If the mother wishes to go through with the pregnancy then that should be her right. If she doesn't then that should be her right as well.
article 1 section 2 states non free people count as 3/5 a person and indians don't count for its purpose of assigning representatives and taxes. It was put in place to stop the over representation of people not allowed to vote
It was put in place to prevent southern states from counting slaves and thus increasing their census count and thus their representation in congress based on that census count. It had nothing to do with whether they could vote or not. Women and children couldn't vote but you'll note that they were still counted.
Outside of indians not being taxed, it had nothing to do with race as whites were also slaves at the time too.
Really? You're seriously going to go with that? Virtually all slaves were black at the time the Constitution was written and you are seriously going to argue it had nothing to do with race? Wow... Just wow.