Take the fines in the form of equity. It hits the owners (shareholders) by diluting their equity. And with enough equity, the government can become an activist shareholder and move around a few managers or set pay.
Governments have significant conflicts of interest and are generally not well equipped to manage corporations. If you are a competitor to a company that has the government as a shareholder, you can easily find yourself in a very bad situation because it is no longer a level playing field. The government can change the laws to favor the company they own.
Look how GM and the banks screamed when the bailout was given in the form of equity.
The government did not take an equity stake in most banks. They did give them some loan covenants which the banks were not happy about but frankly who cares about that? There are always going to be people complaining about anything that doesn't completely favor them financially. GM did not scream about giving up an equity stake because that was obviously going to be part of the terms. You rescue a company from death and you expect a say in what it does until you recoup your investment. The alternative was liquidation of GM plus most of their supply base and probably Ford and Chrysler as well since they share suppliers. Even Toyota said that GM being liquidated would be a grave problem for them. The government pretty much had to take an equity stake to ensure performance and the only reason they still have one is because they are hoping to not take a big loss for the taxpayers in the process.
Take the boards and the CEOs responsible to jail if you want to make a dent in this, all the fines will do is tack on a fine tax to their products.
Do you seriously think there would be no negative consequences from making company officers personally liable for the actions of the company regardless of whether they personally were the cause? The ENTIRE reason corporations exist is to shield the shareholders and employees of the company from many forms of personal liability. Without this shield much of modern commerce would not be possible because the risk would simply be too high. Even if they were willing to accept the risk, prices of their products would have to be higher to absorb the higher levels of risk. Company officers would be liable for the actions of other people that they cannot possibly hope to control completely.
There are circumstances where the corporate veil can be pierced (and rightfully so) but we need to be extremely cautious about when and how. Sure you could "solve" fraud problems in the manner you propose but unless you are very careful and put significant limits on the personal liability, you would almost certainly kill the corporation in the process.
I want the New York Times, the media corporation, to have free speech.
All the people that work the the Times do have free speech so in principle you already have what you want. You just don't want to limit the individual's right to free speech because it happens under the aegis of a corporation.
Since there's no organizational scheme, I assume that the human workers have to be told turn by turn where to go?
There is an organizational scheme, it's just not by by product and workers will be told where to go regardless of what storage system the company uses. I implemented a version of this about 10 years ago in our warehouse for an auction company I owned. Basically you build a warehouse with identifiers on the shelving system. Then you assign a random and (this is the important bit) uniformly distributed code to each box/pallet/SKU that you store. You can't tell where a product is by the product, you have to look up the location in the computer but after that it's easy to find. This system works really well when you have a wide array of rapidly changing merchandise that you can't predict arrival times or quantities for. Amazon would be a great fit for a warehousing system like this.
This kind of storage scheme means that the human workers are simply meat waldos serving the computer software that runs the place.
That's true for pretty much all warehouses regardless of organizational scheme. Once you get to a warehouse of any size you have to have a computer to direct where to find merchandise to pick to an order. Even if the worker knows where to get it they still will need direction from the computer on quantities to pick.
The criticism of that idea is that you'd be reinforcing the superstitious beliefs of people who already believe in homeopathy.
A better criticism is that it costs real money and real resources to administer this "treatment" which can and should be better spent on something proven to actually work. Money and time are in finite supply and I would be rightly pissed off if my tax dollars were used to pay for treatments that are demonstrably bogus and unethical.
Military spending is a red herring. Yes it can be cut. But even if we completely eliminated it we'd still be on a path to bankruptcy due to the above entitlements.
No it is most definitely NOT a red herring and your argument could apply equally to Medicare or Social Security which. Each of those three programs account for around 20% of the federal budget. You could apply your exact same argument to Medicare since it accounts for close to the same amount of cash as the Defense budget. If we accept your argument, even if we eliminated Medicare completely (ignoring the obvious devastation that would cause) it wouldn't balance the budget at current taxation levels. Some combination of cuts to Defense and Medicare are inevitable unless we significantly increase taxation. (I'm less worried about SS since it can easily be fixed and still is self funding)
It needs to cut its budget by 50% or more. Many programs and federal departments need eliminated entirely.
The only programs that truly matter as far as the deficit is concerned are Medicare/Medicaid, Defense and Social Security. Those three together account for about two-thirds of the US budget. Get those programs under control and the problem is solved. All other discretionary spending combined accounts for less than 20% of the budget. Either we need to raise taxes to fully fund the programs we seem to want or we need to cut those programs to a level of taxation we are willing to accept. Either way will work but any argument about anything beyond Medicare and Defense (Social Security is easy to fix and self funding) is either naive or political pandering.
That's only some $650,000 per person that the government has borrowed on behalf of each and every one of you. No problem, right?
A meaningless statistic. As big as the debt is as a percent of GDP, we've had larger debts in our past that have been dealt with just fine, most notably after WWII. That doesn't mean it isn't serious but your attempt to frame the issue doesn't really address how the debt would be dealt with. Corporations pay quite a lot of tax and can be made to pay more if need be. A relatively small percentage of the population has a vast portion of the nation's wealth. Furthermore all the debt the US government has is denominated in US dollars which can be created at will (with some fairly serious negative effects).
For the last 12 years, they've pointed out over and over that the primary cause of our budget woes is Medicare/Medicaid and to a lesser extent Social Security.
Forgetting about a couple of unfunded wars are we? Or a military that outspends the combined budget of the next 15 largest militaries combined for no obvious reason? Medicare and Defense are the big budget problems. Social Security not so much.
Social Security is not funded like Medicare or Defense. It was only last year that expenses exceeded non-interest income and it won't be until 2021 at present funding that total expenses exceed total revenues. Social Security is fully funded and what funding problems it has are fairly easy to fix. Of the biggest government expenditures Social Security is quite literally the least of our problems. Extend the age to receive benefits and a few other simple tweaks to funding and it will be fine.
I can't say it has never happened but I've certainly never heard anyone use GIF as a verb and I'm old enough to remember when GIF images were a new thing. Never even occurred to me that anyone would use it as a verb.
Of course I resolutely refuse to use Google as a verb as well. Google is a company name and the activity I'm usually doing with their website is called "searching" which is a perfectly satisfactory verb that even works when using a website not made by Google.
Yes. I use OO to connect via ODBC to our company database daily for financial statements, receivables and the like. Works rather well actually. You can connect OpenOffice Calc (and LibreOffice) to all kinds of databases rather easily.
Very mature insulting people because they dare point out that the holy Star Wars trilogy might (gasp shock horror) have some flaws.
The above is the kind of often repeated comment made by a wanna-be movie expert who knows he will be laughed out of the room if he just says Star Wars is crap so he tries to dress it up by saying the 2nd movie was okay because of (never actually specify because that takes knowledge) and the 1st was just popular.
Who said it was crap? I said it was a good movie with a shallow plot with breakthrough FX for its day that hasn't aged especially well. All of that is true It ISN"T a deep story and wasn't really meant to be. It was meant to be a rollicking fun summer popcorn film and it was. The FX were amazing by the standards of the 1970s. Star Wars didn't win an academy award for Best Screenplay, it won for Special Effects. It's ok to acknowledge the flaws of a work of art and still love the work.
Empire Strikes Back was technically a better movie but it was a sequel to. It never had the same impact, it was amazingly succesful but it was riding on the tails of a far greater movie. Not because the first was the best but because it was the first.
THE most iconic scene in all of the Star Wars movies is when you find out that Darth Vader is Luke's father. You admit it yourself, Empire is a better movie. That doesn't imply that Episode IV is a bad movie. It is a great movie and a tremendously influential one. Every sci-fi movie since owes a debt to Star Wars. And your argument that because it was first it is "greater" doesn't hold much water. The first Star Trek movie is complete crap but the second movie is widely acknowledged to be a terrific film.
As for all the hating on Ewoks, that just become a meme for people to scared of getting beat up by nerds if they dish Star Wars to hate on something popular.
Or if we go with an actually logical and simple answer, the reason people hate the Ewoks is because the Ewoks were a badly conceived and poorly executed plot device that simply didn't work very well. They strain one's suspension of disbelief which is really saying something in a universe where The Force exists.
You know I really don't get what everyone hates so much about the Ewoks.
I think because they strain one's suspension of disbelief. Lucas's original idea of using Wookies to beat up on the Empire troops made FAR more sense and was frankly kinda badass. The Ewoks moved clumsily (in spite of having actors in the costumes), looked harmless and you just really couldn't buy them beating up imperial troops. Most of ROTJ works except for the bits that involve the Ewoks. They just strain the credibility of the story too much which is really saying something in a sci-fi universe.
They're way less ridiculous than the droid torture chamber, or the idea that a hut would find human anatomy any less repulsive than humans find his
You can take those out of the movie and it wouldn't really matter.
Star Wars came up with the concept of movie merchandizing and licensing. The concept did not exist before that film.
I can prove otherwise by the amount of movie memorabilia and toys that predates Star Wars. I used to own an auction company some years ago and sold lots of it. Movie merchandising went to a whole new level with Star Wars but George Lucas hardly invented it. To continue the Apple analogy like Steve Jobs didn't invent the GUI, Lucas didn't invent merchandising. They popularized it and brought it to much wider audiences. Plus merchandising isn't worth much unless the movie has a popularity of its own. Star Wars was a phenomenal box office success, the likes of which had rarely been seen before.
It's a pretty basic good vs evil adventure story with a plot as deep as a kleenex. The special effects were outstanding for the '70s but haven't held up with time we well as those from Empire and Jedi. The acting was decent and the cast worked well together. I think calling it "brilliant" is rather generous but it remains a pretty good movie if you can overlook the aging FX and paper thin plot. I think it was hugely influential and important but it isn't in my top 10 best sci-fi movies at this point. (you may of course disagree since it's just my top 10, not anything objective) Empire however is however easily among the 10 best I've ever seen and I still enjoy watching it even to this day.
Hollywood has introduced typical Hollywood people which will take Star Wars, a film loved by many in part because it departed from the Hollywood norm, and turn it into the same old Hollywood dreck.
I think you have that backwards a bit. Star Wars CHANGED the "Hollywood norm". I am old enough that I saw Episode IV in theaters in the 1970s. Perhaps you aren't old enough to remember it (apologies if you are) but Star Wars changed sci-fi movies, particularly space adventures. It was a change equivalent to the magnitude of the change the iPhone had on the cell phone market. Almost everything since was influenced by the Star Wars movies and much of it for the better. It isn't that Star Wars did something different and then went back. It's that Hollywood changed to match Star Wars and so it was difficult for it to stand out anymore.
Furthermore, George Lucas reached the limit of his talent but not his ego. There were signs of this in Return of the Jedi with the Ewoks and things got worse after that. However the Star Wars universe is pretty rich ground for good story telling so perhaps there is hope that in more capable hands we will see some new movies worthy of the impact of the originals.
The only one that comes close to being a masterpiece is Empire Strikes Back. Ep IV was good for its day but hasn't aged well - even so it is still probably my second favorite of the series. I'm old enough that I saw it in theaters the first time it was released in the 70s. ROTJ was going well until the Ewoks came on screen. The only one of the prequels that is bearable is Episode III - I like it about as much as ROTJ which is to say it is fun but not great.
US has the highest corporate tax rate in the world
The statutory rate is not the same thing as the effective rate which actually gets paid. The effective US corporate tax rate is just 12.1% of profits in 2011 which is the lowest number in 40 years. The 10 most profitable companies in the US last year paid, on average, approximately 9% tax.
While I think that our tax code is a mess and needs serious reform, the notion that taxes in the US are the highest in the world is demonstrably false political propaganda. The 35% number you cite is a meaningless number which is only useful for political soundbites.
You need the VC money to "get big fast". If you try to grow organically, you will get crushed by those with better judgement.
Think so? I've worked with a lot of VCs and I assure you that most of them would disagree with you. Most companies are not actually venture backed. Venture capital is only useful for companies with particular funding needs. A typical VC investment will be between $2 million up to maybe $50 million, have a 3-5 year investment horizon, and will be VERY expensive with the VC demanding 25%-60% of the company if not more. Most companies do not fit into the model for VC funding and in fact if you can avoid it you really do not want VC funding because the cost of capital is so extraordinarily high.
Venture Capital funding is just one of many avenues to fund a business. It is a form of Private Equity but not the only one and certainly not the only way to build a successful tech company. VC money is extremely expensive and VC backed companies demonstrably do not succeed at a higher rate than non-VC backed companies.
VC's are trending down, Kickstarter is trending up. Isn't this how it should be?
Apples and oranges. Companies that need and can get VC funding aren't generally the sort that are going to get kickstarter funding. VC funding for the most part is for much bigger dollar amounts. Kickstarter is swell but it is more like a form of Angel investing and works on a smaller scale. (Not saying it's less important, just that it isn't how one is likely to get funding for a company like a biotech venture) Furthermore a lot of what VCs do isn't just providing funding. VCs provide a lot of management resources and expertise to try to grow the company. VC funding is expensive but it makes sense for certain types of businesses.
First, Silicon Valley sent the silicon (fabs) to Asia.
Nice sound bite except it isn't actually true. Yes a lot of chips are made in Asia but a lot are made in the US. Intel, Cypress, Freescale,IBM and more all have large scale and very competitive chip fab in the US.
Then, they outsourced labor to Asia.
Yes, the labor intensive assembly work. Would you rather pay $15/hour in the US or $1/hour in Asia? If you can find a way to get the work done in the US for similar cost, fame and fortune await you. For more automated work (like chip fabrication), much of the production is in the US. The US has a nearly $4 trillion manufacturing sector.
Then most start-ups needed an "Asian talent connection" (H1-B visa, India/China engineering, etc.) to get funding.
Citation needed. I have worked with a lot of tech startups and they do NOT need Indian or Chinese talent to get funding.
Since the killer 1938 hurricane we haven't had a single strong storm
Care to make a statement that isn't easily refuted by 20 seconds of searching on wikipedia? The 1938 storm may have been the strongest but it wasn't even close to the only strong storm to hit NYC.
Second, building a highly automated plant is NEVER about labor costs.
I'm a certified cost accountant and that is complete nonsense. Decisions regarding automation are almost always about labor costs. Above a certain volume of production it (often) becomes cheaper to automate production than to hire additional labor. Classically you have a high up front tooling cost but production is much cheaper once the line is running.
It is about avoiding import duties. Assemble it in the US and it is a US product exempt from import duties and hence cheaper.
Import duties are typically less of an issue (depending on the product - there are exceptions) than exchange rate risk. Japan builds a lot of cars in the US primarily because it eliminates exchange rate risk to them. It's a form of built in hedge. The Yen is very strong right now so it is expensive to export cars made in Japan to the US. Build them in the US and this problem goes away. If the Yen was cheap relative to the Dollar they would make more cars in Japan.
It cost more to rail a container from LA to NY than it does to ship it from China to NY
Source? My own experience says that is nonsense. I run a manufacturing company that buys stuff from Japan and China as well as domestically. I've worked doing global sourcing from Mexico, China and India. Domestic freight is almost always cheaper and always considerably faster. Furthermore you probably aren't going to use rails to ship stuff domestically, you'll probably use a LTL or FTL truck, not a container so it is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.
The rail networks are laid out in a way that there isn't much capacity for this 'flyover country.' Major rail lines connect LA, Chicago, Houston, and Newark
No capacity? BNSF, CSX, Union Pacific and the rest will be very surprised to hear that.
Everywhere not in close proximity to one of these cities is expensive as hell to ship to and from.
Slashdot Mirror
Take the fines in the form of equity. It hits the owners (shareholders) by diluting their equity. And with enough equity, the government can become an activist shareholder and move around a few managers or set pay.
Governments have significant conflicts of interest and are generally not well equipped to manage corporations. If you are a competitor to a company that has the government as a shareholder, you can easily find yourself in a very bad situation because it is no longer a level playing field. The government can change the laws to favor the company they own.
Look how GM and the banks screamed when the bailout was given in the form of equity.
The government did not take an equity stake in most banks. They did give them some loan covenants which the banks were not happy about but frankly who cares about that? There are always going to be people complaining about anything that doesn't completely favor them financially. GM did not scream about giving up an equity stake because that was obviously going to be part of the terms. You rescue a company from death and you expect a say in what it does until you recoup your investment. The alternative was liquidation of GM plus most of their supply base and probably Ford and Chrysler as well since they share suppliers. Even Toyota said that GM being liquidated would be a grave problem for them. The government pretty much had to take an equity stake to ensure performance and the only reason they still have one is because they are hoping to not take a big loss for the taxpayers in the process.
Take the boards and the CEOs responsible to jail if you want to make a dent in this, all the fines will do is tack on a fine tax to their products.
Do you seriously think there would be no negative consequences from making company officers personally liable for the actions of the company regardless of whether they personally were the cause? The ENTIRE reason corporations exist is to shield the shareholders and employees of the company from many forms of personal liability. Without this shield much of modern commerce would not be possible because the risk would simply be too high. Even if they were willing to accept the risk, prices of their products would have to be higher to absorb the higher levels of risk. Company officers would be liable for the actions of other people that they cannot possibly hope to control completely.
There are circumstances where the corporate veil can be pierced (and rightfully so) but we need to be extremely cautious about when and how. Sure you could "solve" fraud problems in the manner you propose but unless you are very careful and put significant limits on the personal liability, you would almost certainly kill the corporation in the process.
I want the New York Times, the media corporation, to have free speech.
All the people that work the the Times do have free speech so in principle you already have what you want. You just don't want to limit the individual's right to free speech because it happens under the aegis of a corporation.
Since there's no organizational scheme, I assume that the human workers have to be told turn by turn where to go?
There is an organizational scheme, it's just not by by product and workers will be told where to go regardless of what storage system the company uses. I implemented a version of this about 10 years ago in our warehouse for an auction company I owned. Basically you build a warehouse with identifiers on the shelving system. Then you assign a random and (this is the important bit) uniformly distributed code to each box/pallet/SKU that you store. You can't tell where a product is by the product, you have to look up the location in the computer but after that it's easy to find. This system works really well when you have a wide array of rapidly changing merchandise that you can't predict arrival times or quantities for. Amazon would be a great fit for a warehousing system like this.
This kind of storage scheme means that the human workers are simply meat waldos serving the computer software that runs the place.
That's true for pretty much all warehouses regardless of organizational scheme. Once you get to a warehouse of any size you have to have a computer to direct where to find merchandise to pick to an order. Even if the worker knows where to get it they still will need direction from the computer on quantities to pick.
The criticism of that idea is that you'd be reinforcing the superstitious beliefs of people who already believe in homeopathy.
A better criticism is that it costs real money and real resources to administer this "treatment" which can and should be better spent on something proven to actually work. Money and time are in finite supply and I would be rightly pissed off if my tax dollars were used to pay for treatments that are demonstrably bogus and unethical.
Military spending is a red herring. Yes it can be cut. But even if we completely eliminated it we'd still be on a path to bankruptcy due to the above entitlements.
No it is most definitely NOT a red herring and your argument could apply equally to Medicare or Social Security which. Each of those three programs account for around 20% of the federal budget. You could apply your exact same argument to Medicare since it accounts for close to the same amount of cash as the Defense budget. If we accept your argument, even if we eliminated Medicare completely (ignoring the obvious devastation that would cause) it wouldn't balance the budget at current taxation levels. Some combination of cuts to Defense and Medicare are inevitable unless we significantly increase taxation. (I'm less worried about SS since it can easily be fixed and still is self funding)
It needs to cut its budget by 50% or more. Many programs and federal departments need eliminated entirely.
The only programs that truly matter as far as the deficit is concerned are Medicare/Medicaid, Defense and Social Security. Those three together account for about two-thirds of the US budget. Get those programs under control and the problem is solved. All other discretionary spending combined accounts for less than 20% of the budget. Either we need to raise taxes to fully fund the programs we seem to want or we need to cut those programs to a level of taxation we are willing to accept. Either way will work but any argument about anything beyond Medicare and Defense (Social Security is easy to fix and self funding) is either naive or political pandering.
That's only some $650,000 per person that the government has borrowed on behalf of each and every one of you. No problem, right?
A meaningless statistic. As big as the debt is as a percent of GDP, we've had larger debts in our past that have been dealt with just fine, most notably after WWII. That doesn't mean it isn't serious but your attempt to frame the issue doesn't really address how the debt would be dealt with. Corporations pay quite a lot of tax and can be made to pay more if need be. A relatively small percentage of the population has a vast portion of the nation's wealth. Furthermore all the debt the US government has is denominated in US dollars which can be created at will (with some fairly serious negative effects).
For the last 12 years, they've pointed out over and over that the primary cause of our budget woes is Medicare/Medicaid and to a lesser extent Social Security.
Forgetting about a couple of unfunded wars are we? Or a military that outspends the combined budget of the next 15 largest militaries combined for no obvious reason? Medicare and Defense are the big budget problems. Social Security not so much.
Social Security is not funded like Medicare or Defense. It was only last year that expenses exceeded non-interest income and it won't be until 2021 at present funding that total expenses exceed total revenues. Social Security is fully funded and what funding problems it has are fairly easy to fix. Of the biggest government expenditures Social Security is quite literally the least of our problems. Extend the age to receive benefits and a few other simple tweaks to funding and it will be fine.
There used to be a joke "beware of geeks bearing gifs" but not even geeks get it anymore.
Maybe you youngsters. Get off my lawn...
Seriously, does anyone do that?
I can't say it has never happened but I've certainly never heard anyone use GIF as a verb and I'm old enough to remember when GIF images were a new thing. Never even occurred to me that anyone would use it as a verb.
Of course I resolutely refuse to use Google as a verb as well. Google is a company name and the activity I'm usually doing with their website is called "searching" which is a perfectly satisfactory verb that even works when using a website not made by Google.
does OO do that?
Yes. I use OO to connect via ODBC to our company database daily for financial statements, receivables and the like. Works rather well actually. You can connect OpenOffice Calc (and LibreOffice) to all kinds of databases rather easily.
Very mature insulting people because they dare point out that the holy Star Wars trilogy might (gasp shock horror) have some flaws.
The above is the kind of often repeated comment made by a wanna-be movie expert who knows he will be laughed out of the room if he just says Star Wars is crap so he tries to dress it up by saying the 2nd movie was okay because of (never actually specify because that takes knowledge) and the 1st was just popular.
Who said it was crap? I said it was a good movie with a shallow plot with breakthrough FX for its day that hasn't aged especially well. All of that is true It ISN"T a deep story and wasn't really meant to be. It was meant to be a rollicking fun summer popcorn film and it was. The FX were amazing by the standards of the 1970s. Star Wars didn't win an academy award for Best Screenplay, it won for Special Effects. It's ok to acknowledge the flaws of a work of art and still love the work.
Empire Strikes Back was technically a better movie but it was a sequel to. It never had the same impact, it was amazingly succesful but it was riding on the tails of a far greater movie. Not because the first was the best but because it was the first.
THE most iconic scene in all of the Star Wars movies is when you find out that Darth Vader is Luke's father. You admit it yourself, Empire is a better movie. That doesn't imply that Episode IV is a bad movie. It is a great movie and a tremendously influential one. Every sci-fi movie since owes a debt to Star Wars. And your argument that because it was first it is "greater" doesn't hold much water. The first Star Trek movie is complete crap but the second movie is widely acknowledged to be a terrific film.
As for all the hating on Ewoks, that just become a meme for people to scared of getting beat up by nerds if they dish Star Wars to hate on something popular.
Or if we go with an actually logical and simple answer, the reason people hate the Ewoks is because the Ewoks were a badly conceived and poorly executed plot device that simply didn't work very well. They strain one's suspension of disbelief which is really saying something in a universe where The Force exists.
You know I really don't get what everyone hates so much about the Ewoks.
I think because they strain one's suspension of disbelief. Lucas's original idea of using Wookies to beat up on the Empire troops made FAR more sense and was frankly kinda badass. The Ewoks moved clumsily (in spite of having actors in the costumes), looked harmless and you just really couldn't buy them beating up imperial troops. Most of ROTJ works except for the bits that involve the Ewoks. They just strain the credibility of the story too much which is really saying something in a sci-fi universe.
They're way less ridiculous than the droid torture chamber, or the idea that a hut would find human anatomy any less repulsive than humans find his
You can take those out of the movie and it wouldn't really matter.
Star Wars came up with the concept of movie merchandizing and licensing. The concept did not exist before that film.
I can prove otherwise by the amount of movie memorabilia and toys that predates Star Wars. I used to own an auction company some years ago and sold lots of it. Movie merchandising went to a whole new level with Star Wars but George Lucas hardly invented it. To continue the Apple analogy like Steve Jobs didn't invent the GUI, Lucas didn't invent merchandising. They popularized it and brought it to much wider audiences. Plus merchandising isn't worth much unless the movie has a popularity of its own. Star Wars was a phenomenal box office success, the likes of which had rarely been seen before.
...Episode IV was fairly well brilliant.
It's a pretty basic good vs evil adventure story with a plot as deep as a kleenex. The special effects were outstanding for the '70s but haven't held up with time we well as those from Empire and Jedi. The acting was decent and the cast worked well together. I think calling it "brilliant" is rather generous but it remains a pretty good movie if you can overlook the aging FX and paper thin plot. I think it was hugely influential and important but it isn't in my top 10 best sci-fi movies at this point. (you may of course disagree since it's just my top 10, not anything objective) Empire however is however easily among the 10 best I've ever seen and I still enjoy watching it even to this day.
Hollywood has introduced typical Hollywood people which will take Star Wars, a film loved by many in part because it departed from the Hollywood norm, and turn it into the same old Hollywood dreck.
I think you have that backwards a bit. Star Wars CHANGED the "Hollywood norm". I am old enough that I saw Episode IV in theaters in the 1970s. Perhaps you aren't old enough to remember it (apologies if you are) but Star Wars changed sci-fi movies, particularly space adventures. It was a change equivalent to the magnitude of the change the iPhone had on the cell phone market. Almost everything since was influenced by the Star Wars movies and much of it for the better. It isn't that Star Wars did something different and then went back. It's that Hollywood changed to match Star Wars and so it was difficult for it to stand out anymore.
Furthermore, George Lucas reached the limit of his talent but not his ego. There were signs of this in Return of the Jedi with the Ewoks and things got worse after that. However the Star Wars universe is pretty rich ground for good story telling so perhaps there is hope that in more capable hands we will see some new movies worthy of the impact of the originals.
IV through VI were masterpieces
The only one that comes close to being a masterpiece is Empire Strikes Back. Ep IV was good for its day but hasn't aged well - even so it is still probably my second favorite of the series. I'm old enough that I saw it in theaters the first time it was released in the 70s. ROTJ was going well until the Ewoks came on screen. The only one of the prequels that is bearable is Episode III - I like it about as much as ROTJ which is to say it is fun but not great.
US has the highest corporate tax rate in the world
The statutory rate is not the same thing as the effective rate which actually gets paid. The effective US corporate tax rate is just 12.1% of profits in 2011 which is the lowest number in 40 years. The 10 most profitable companies in the US last year paid, on average, approximately 9% tax.
While I think that our tax code is a mess and needs serious reform, the notion that taxes in the US are the highest in the world is demonstrably false political propaganda. The 35% number you cite is a meaningless number which is only useful for political soundbites.
You need the VC money to "get big fast". If you try to grow organically, you will get crushed by those with better judgement.
Think so? I've worked with a lot of VCs and I assure you that most of them would disagree with you. Most companies are not actually venture backed. Venture capital is only useful for companies with particular funding needs. A typical VC investment will be between $2 million up to maybe $50 million, have a 3-5 year investment horizon, and will be VERY expensive with the VC demanding 25%-60% of the company if not more. Most companies do not fit into the model for VC funding and in fact if you can avoid it you really do not want VC funding because the cost of capital is so extraordinarily high.
Venture Capital funding is just one of many avenues to fund a business. It is a form of Private Equity but not the only one and certainly not the only way to build a successful tech company. VC money is extremely expensive and VC backed companies demonstrably do not succeed at a higher rate than non-VC backed companies.
VC's are trending down, Kickstarter is trending up. Isn't this how it should be?
Apples and oranges. Companies that need and can get VC funding aren't generally the sort that are going to get kickstarter funding. VC funding for the most part is for much bigger dollar amounts. Kickstarter is swell but it is more like a form of Angel investing and works on a smaller scale. (Not saying it's less important, just that it isn't how one is likely to get funding for a company like a biotech venture) Furthermore a lot of what VCs do isn't just providing funding. VCs provide a lot of management resources and expertise to try to grow the company. VC funding is expensive but it makes sense for certain types of businesses.
First, Silicon Valley sent the silicon (fabs) to Asia.
Nice sound bite except it isn't actually true. Yes a lot of chips are made in Asia but a lot are made in the US. Intel, Cypress, Freescale,IBM and more all have large scale and very competitive chip fab in the US.
Then, they outsourced labor to Asia.
Yes, the labor intensive assembly work. Would you rather pay $15/hour in the US or $1/hour in Asia? If you can find a way to get the work done in the US for similar cost, fame and fortune await you. For more automated work (like chip fabrication), much of the production is in the US. The US has a nearly $4 trillion manufacturing sector.
Then most start-ups needed an "Asian talent connection" (H1-B visa, India/China engineering, etc.) to get funding.
Citation needed. I have worked with a lot of tech startups and they do NOT need Indian or Chinese talent to get funding.
Since the killer 1938 hurricane we haven't had a single strong storm
Care to make a statement that isn't easily refuted by 20 seconds of searching on wikipedia? The 1938 storm may have been the strongest but it wasn't even close to the only strong storm to hit NYC.
Second, building a highly automated plant is NEVER about labor costs.
I'm a certified cost accountant and that is complete nonsense. Decisions regarding automation are almost always about labor costs. Above a certain volume of production it (often) becomes cheaper to automate production than to hire additional labor. Classically you have a high up front tooling cost but production is much cheaper once the line is running.
It is about avoiding import duties. Assemble it in the US and it is a US product exempt from import duties and hence cheaper.
Import duties are typically less of an issue (depending on the product - there are exceptions) than exchange rate risk. Japan builds a lot of cars in the US primarily because it eliminates exchange rate risk to them. It's a form of built in hedge. The Yen is very strong right now so it is expensive to export cars made in Japan to the US. Build them in the US and this problem goes away. If the Yen was cheap relative to the Dollar they would make more cars in Japan.
It cost more to rail a container from LA to NY than it does to ship it from China to NY
Source? My own experience says that is nonsense. I run a manufacturing company that buys stuff from Japan and China as well as domestically. I've worked doing global sourcing from Mexico, China and India. Domestic freight is almost always cheaper and always considerably faster. Furthermore you probably aren't going to use rails to ship stuff domestically, you'll probably use a LTL or FTL truck, not a container so it is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.
The rail networks are laid out in a way that there isn't much capacity for this 'flyover country.' Major rail lines connect LA, Chicago, Houston, and Newark
No capacity? BNSF, CSX, Union Pacific and the rest will be very surprised to hear that.
Everywhere not in close proximity to one of these cities is expensive as hell to ship to and from.
Demonstrably not true.
Yes but detroit is a shit hole of desperation and low wages
Really? Oakland County which neighbors Detroit City is one of the 10 wealthiest counties in the US.