My apologies; you used a double negative in your earlier reply about corporate taxes, and I got confused. I didn't realize you agreed with me (FWIW, I knew about the payroll tax).
What do you think about a national sales tax in lieu of an income tax? Although it might not eliminate double taxation entirely, I imagine it'd go a long way in that direction. I suspect that we're only a few years from another major tax code overhaul, like the one in 1986; maybe the idea will gain some traction in Congress.
Thanks for the interesting discussion. I learned a few more things about taxes (always a good thing), and even though we didn't see eye-to-eye, we managed to avoid degenerating into a flame war.
Hooray! A serious answer. I feared that getting modded as Funny ruined my chances of anyone taking me seriously.
Three years, eh? No escape from the upgrade treadmill. Oh, well. So it goes.
Another note: if you're using a Unix box, this is less important, esp. if you limit yourself to more traditional applications such as emacs, mutt, slrn, nethack &c. Any modern machine is more than fast enough to run them. It's stuff like GNOME and KDE which eat resources--but even they seem to be slimming of late.
Wow, I thought I was the only one who ever used "&c."
I've been dual-booting for a year or so, and at this point, Windows is just for games. It would've taken a long time to wean myself from it, but an accident with fdisk sort of caused a "cold turkey" effect.
I've been leery of upgrading to GNOME 2 specifically because of the bloat factor. Sort of defensively, I've been moving toward more text-based software. If GNUCash had an ncurses front-end, I might be able to ditch X altogether.
You say this as if it were inherently evil. As I said before, it's the only reasonable way to ensure that I don't get taxed for things I don't use.
And, companies pay much, much more in taxes than you do.
Good. If corporations weren't immortal , amoral entities with quasi-citizen status then I'd feel bad about taxing them. As it stands, it's my opinion that if corporations have the same rights I do (free speech protection, right to petition Congress, etc.), then they should have the same obligations.
Good lord, what companies have you been working for? All the projects I have worked on professionally have been released except two...
We obviously work at different companies. I work for an RBOC, and I've lost count of the number of development projects that get canned less than a month before going live. So far, I've been lucky; nothing of mine has ever been pulled, although the one project was threatened. Then our manager decreed that everyone would work 12x7 until the customers were happy.
Number one reason for cancelled projects: The users don't know what they want. ("This isn't anything like what we requested!" "Really? The requirements document says otherwise. Plus, you seemed perfectly happy with last week's demo.").
Excise tax is a yearly tax you pay for owning a car.
You mean like when I renew my registration? I just got that lovely bill in the mail last week.:-(
If you lease a car, you get a tax hike in the lease once per year.
I don't remember that happening, but I do recall that each lease payment I made had something like a 5% tax added onto it.
Entertainment tax: Many states/cities have an additional tax charged on hotel rooms and restaurant tabs to help pay for city expenses
Oh! OK. Thanks for the info.
Yes, you do in fact get hit with charges from Mutual Fund investments for the buying and selling of shares withing the fund
Huh. I guess I just don't understand MFs at all. I thought those were just the trading fees the MFs charged you, not taxes. I guess I'll have to be more cautious once I'm in a position to start investing.
Don't get me started on how those taxes are wasted.
Hey, don't get me started. I could go on for hours about all sorts of waste of taxpayer money.
Because you don't fly doesn't mean someone else isn't paying a disproportionate amount of the taxes,...
Personally, I don't see a problem: if you use a service and I don't, then you should pay for it, and I shouldn't. Similarly for cigarettes, alcohol, and luxury items.
...including businesses
Oh. Out of curiosity, are you of the opinion that business profits shouldn't be taxed at all? If so, I'm afraid we'll simply have to agree to disagree.
Water and Sewage: I pay INCOME TAX. No, I don't expect those things for free, but it is an additional tax above and beyond your paycheck taxes
The house I grew up in had a cistern and septic tank. Pulling water and sewage taxes out of my parents' paychecks would've been a little unfair, in my view.
I mentioned sales tax, though I admit it's easy to overlook it in the list. I didn't think of those taxes you listed because I don't pay most of them:
Real estate: I rent.
Excise taxes: Don't know what this is.
Gas: It was my understanding that gas stations got charged this, not the consumer. Wait a sec: are you referring to gas for the automobile, or methane??
Airport: I don't fly that often.
Cigarette: don't smoke.
Alcohol: rarely drink.
Entertainment: was unaware of any such thing.
Leased vehicles: I should've remembered this one, but it slipped my mind.
Water and sewage (and, I'm assuming, garbage collection): Again, I rent.
Electricity and telephone: slipped my mind.
Luxury: I don't own any luxuries
Capital gains: no investments other than 401(k). BTW, pardon my ignorance, but isn't losing money a capital loss?
Tolls, etc.: don't live anywhere near toll roads.
Some of these are admittedly dumb, but really, do you expect the city to dispose of your sewage for free?
Also, I think a lot of these taxes are easily avoidable. I have to say, I still don't understand why people think buying a house is a good idea.
Williams: ... Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.
Henry V: So, if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise do sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the imputation of his wickedness by your rule, should be imposed upon his father that sent him: or if a servant, under his master's command transporting a sum of money, be assailed by robbers and die in many irreconciled iniquities, you may call the business of the master the author of the servant's damnation: but this is not so: the king is not
bound to answer the particular endings of his
soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master of
his servant; for they purpose not their death, when they purpose their services.... Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own.
...we allow thousands of Illegal Immigrants into the country...
"Allow"? I was under the impression that they snuck in.
...speak our language...
Which language is "ours"? I was under the impression that your comment was written in a language called "English", not "American".
...paying out 50%+ of your income to taxes...
Bullshit. Even combining federal, state, local, sales, and social security taxes, you're not paying 50%. If it were, then "Tax Freedom Day" would be July 02 or later. It isn't.
This is not a particlarly fast machine, an Athlon 1400 I think,...
*sigh*
I must be getting old; until I read your comment, it didn't occur to me that my Pentium-III 550, a scant four years old (was not willing to spring for the 650) was anything less than blinding in its speed (hey, after a 486-66, it is!). So, just how often am I supposed to replace my machine to keep it reasonable?
Did the Bible use decimal notation for its numbers? The New Testament was written mostly in Ancient Greek (that's why Simon's nickname, "The Rock," ends up as Peter (rock == petros)). I always figured decimal notation came later, and that they'd use something more like Roman numerals (DCLXVI), or some non-decimal grouping words, like "four gross, four score, and a dozen, less two."
If I were a parent I could also maybe see it for my kids (young kids, not necessarily teenagers).
Might I suggest that it shouldn't even be done then? What happens when little Billy reaches his teenage years and his parents have long forgotten about the chip that it turned out they never needed? Depending on how young he was, he may not even know it's there. I find that very disturbing.
So publishing trade secrets is ok as long as you add journalistic commentary?
Actually, publishing trade secrets is perfectly OK as long you weren't one of the people who signed an NDA to get access to them. Responsibility for keeping trade secrets a secret falls on the corporation, not the general public.
I am Jack's pet peeve. I send Jack into spastic fits over unimportant matters. Without me, Jack wouldn't feel compelled to tell you that Sony was the company that made Betamax, and the case you're referring to is properly called Sony Corp. v Universal City Studios. 464 U.S. 417, 104 S. Ct. 774, 78 L. Ed. 2nd 574 [1984] (Sony Corp. v Universal City Studios for short). I make Jack an unpleasant person to be around.
To divide by 3 and multiply by 12 (12/3), you multiply by 4.
Yes, but you have to go to the extra effort of knowing that since you're converting feet to inches, the numerator is twelve, but if you're converting gallons to quarts, it's four. I'm not saying you have to be a genius to keep track of all these conversion ratios; I just think it's less of a hassle to say, "Let's divide by three and be done with it."
Ever worked with floating point numbers?
Ugh. Don't get me started. They're the bane of my existence. Okay, I will concede you have a point that if exact measures are available, you take them, but I really think that the software example you give only further emphasizes my point that in the real world, exact values don't happen.
To take your example of cutting a board, what about the 1/16 of an inch or so that gets obliterated by the saw? I mean, that sawdust has to come somewhere.
Oh, Hell, I give up: You prefer elegance, whereas I prefer simplicity. The ironic thing is that five years ago, I would've been arguing on your side. I guess I'm just fickle.
Prior Restraint: what's intuitive about, "To divide by three, multiply by four"?
dvdeug: Ad hominem, ad hominem, ad hominem.
How does this answer my question?
Prior Restraint: what's a seventh of a foot?
dvdeug: I can't ever in my life remember dividing a real world object into sevenths.... at least Imperial users would keep it as 1/7, instead of.142857...
I apologize, I must not have made my point very clearly. My reference to sevenths was an attempt to point out that obsessing over having "exact" measures is pointless. Our instruments are only so precise. Most people I know just pick a number of significant digits and go with it, so 1/3 ends up as 0.33 and 1/7 becomes 0.14.
Prior Restraint: You're taking this far too personally.
dvdeug: You wrote a personal attack as a response
I did? I try not to do that. If you're referring to the second grade comment, I'm sorry if you took personally. I just didn't understand how someone could be "stumped" when asked to divide by three.
I promise to make an honest attempt to be more civil in the future.
I just finished reading Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces. These are fairly old texts, admittedly, so I hope one can forgive my "antiquated and unfortunate view." Could you recommend a relatively (no pun intended) accessible text which discusses mass-invariant physics? I would be much obliged.
Quick, Sparky, what's a third of a meter? Stumped?
Um, no. It's 33 1/3 cm. I learned fractions in the second grade.
Quick, Sparky, what's a seventh of a foot? Stumped? What is the obsession Imperial proponents have with the number three? This isn't numerology, you know.
What's a third of a yard? 1 foot!
I only know this because it was drilled into my head repeatedly in grade school.
What's a third of 4 feet? 16 inches! What's a third of 5 feet? 20 inches!
How did you do these conversions? Yes, they have no remainder, but they aren't in the least bit obvious to anyone. I mean, what's intuitive about, "To divide by three, multiply by four"?
Know how often somebody needs to convert between yards and miles? NEVER!
Actually, this particular problem crops up for me from time to time. In any event, why is converting from feet to miles more rational than converting yards to miles?
Or between inches and miles? WHAT's THE POINT?!?
Again, why is feet to miles better? It isn't, really. You appear to be basing your argument on what you were taught rather than what makes the most sense.
Know how often someone needs to take a measurement and divide it nicely into halfs, thirds, quarters and the like? ALL THE TIME!
Define "nicely". Do you mean exactly? I hope not, because the whole idea of exact measurements is preposterous. Or do you mean evenly (without remainder)? Who cares? What's the difference between the mental exertion of remembering, "Okay, a third of a kilometer is 333 1/3 m" and "Okay, a third of a mile is 1760 feet"? I was able to do 1000/3 in my head instantly, but 5280/3 required me to get a calculator. Why is remembering the presence of a fraction so much more offensive to you than remembering an arbitrary list of conversion ratios?
Geez... who would devise a measuring system that can't even be divided by 3 easily.
Why can't I divide a week by two (or three, for that matter)? Why is a week the only measurement I can divide by seven? Three is just another number; it isn't magical.
Idiots.
You're taking this far too personally. It's just a measuring system; nobody made fun of your mom, or anything.
And mass is always the same, no matter what acceleration due to gravity is.
Actually, that's not correct. I realize you're pointing out that mass and weight are two different things, but acceleration of any kind affects mass due to relativity.
and 100F was supposed to be human body temperature, but I guess the guy was running a fever at the time or something:)
I had been told it was the body temperature of a cow or some such, but I'm not sufficiently confident to challenge you on it.
david duncan scott said: Remember, if you can't either pack it or leave it within ten minutes, it owns you.
Thank you! You've just summed up quite eloquently an idea that had been germinating in the back of my mind for several months now. If you don't mind, I think this'll end up in my rotating ~/.signature list.
*sigh* I hate it when a perfectly good rant is ruined by facts.:-)
I am glad to see they finally got around to it; obviously, I stopped trying to access their site shortly before Halloween. Thanks for correcting me, but I'm afraid they've already lost me as a customer. I have too many credit cards as it is, and theirs is the least useful of the bunch.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, last reply. I promise.
My apologies; you used a double negative in your earlier reply about corporate taxes, and I got confused. I didn't realize you agreed with me (FWIW, I knew about the payroll tax).
What do you think about a national sales tax in lieu of an income tax? Although it might not eliminate double taxation entirely, I imagine it'd go a long way in that direction. I suspect that we're only a few years from another major tax code overhaul, like the one in 1986; maybe the idea will gain some traction in Congress.
Thanks for the interesting discussion. I learned a few more things about taxes (always a good thing), and even though we didn't see eye-to-eye, we managed to avoid degenerating into a flame war.
Every three years is pretty standard.
Hooray! A serious answer. I feared that getting modded as Funny ruined my chances of anyone taking me seriously.
Three years, eh? No escape from the upgrade treadmill. Oh, well. So it goes.
Another note: if you're using a Unix box, this is less important, esp. if you limit yourself to more traditional applications such as emacs, mutt, slrn, nethack &c. Any modern machine is more than fast enough to run them. It's stuff like GNOME and KDE which eat resources--but even they seem to be slimming of late.
Wow, I thought I was the only one who ever used "&c."
I've been dual-booting for a year or so, and at this point, Windows is just for games. It would've taken a long time to wean myself from it, but an accident with fdisk sort of caused a "cold turkey" effect.
I've been leery of upgrading to GNOME 2 specifically because of the bloat factor. Sort of defensively, I've been moving toward more text-based software. If GNUCash had an ncurses front-end, I might be able to ditch X altogether.
I have the dubious fortune of being salaried; I get paid just for showing up, but overtime is non-existent.
(double taxation)
You say this as if it were inherently evil. As I said before, it's the only reasonable way to ensure that I don't get taxed for things I don't use.
And, companies pay much, much more in taxes than you do.
Good. If corporations weren't immortal , amoral entities with quasi-citizen status then I'd feel bad about taxing them. As it stands, it's my opinion that if corporations have the same rights I do (free speech protection, right to petition Congress, etc.), then they should have the same obligations.
Good lord, what companies have you been working for? All the projects I have worked on professionally have been released except two...
We obviously work at different companies. I work for an RBOC, and I've lost count of the number of development projects that get canned less than a month before going live. So far, I've been lucky; nothing of mine has ever been pulled, although the one project was threatened. Then our manager decreed that everyone would work 12x7 until the customers were happy.
Number one reason for cancelled projects: The users don't know what they want. ("This isn't anything like what we requested!" "Really? The requirements document says otherwise. Plus, you seemed perfectly happy with last week's demo.").
Excise tax is a yearly tax you pay for owning a car.
You mean like when I renew my registration? I just got that lovely bill in the mail last week. :-(
If you lease a car, you get a tax hike in the lease once per year.
I don't remember that happening, but I do recall that each lease payment I made had something like a 5% tax added onto it.
Entertainment tax: Many states/cities have an additional tax charged on hotel rooms and restaurant tabs to help pay for city expenses
Oh! OK. Thanks for the info.
Yes, you do in fact get hit with charges from Mutual Fund investments for the buying and selling of shares withing the fund
Huh. I guess I just don't understand MFs at all. I thought those were just the trading fees the MFs charged you, not taxes. I guess I'll have to be more cautious once I'm in a position to start investing.
Don't get me started on how those taxes are wasted.
Hey, don't get me started. I could go on for hours about all sorts of waste of taxpayer money.
Because you don't fly doesn't mean someone else isn't paying a disproportionate amount of the taxes,...
Personally, I don't see a problem: if you use a service and I don't, then you should pay for it, and I shouldn't. Similarly for cigarettes, alcohol, and luxury items.
Oh. Out of curiosity, are you of the opinion that business profits shouldn't be taxed at all? If so, I'm afraid we'll simply have to agree to disagree.
Water and Sewage: I pay INCOME TAX. No, I don't expect those things for free, but it is an additional tax above and beyond your paycheck taxes
The house I grew up in had a cistern and septic tank. Pulling water and sewage taxes out of my parents' paychecks would've been a little unfair, in my view.
I mentioned sales tax, though I admit it's easy to overlook it in the list. I didn't think of those taxes you listed because I don't pay most of them:
Some of these are admittedly dumb, but really, do you expect the city to dispose of your sewage for free?
Also, I think a lot of these taxes are easily avoidable. I have to say, I still don't understand why people think buying a house is a good idea.
Might I suggest Henry V instead?
"Allow"? I was under the impression that they snuck in.
Which language is "ours"? I was under the impression that your comment was written in a language called "English", not "American".
Bullshit. Even combining federal, state, local, sales, and social security taxes, you're not paying 50%. If it were, then "Tax Freedom Day" would be July 02 or later. It isn't.
This is not a particlarly fast machine, an Athlon 1400 I think,...
*sigh*
I must be getting old; until I read your comment, it didn't occur to me that my Pentium-III 550, a scant four years old (was not willing to spring for the 650) was anything less than blinding in its speed (hey, after a 486-66, it is!). So, just how often am I supposed to replace my machine to keep it reasonable?
Revelations... was [] written in approximately AD 90.
Whoops. I knew that. Really, I swear! [*hangs head in shame*]
Thanks for the link; interesting and informative, even if it turns out not to be relevant.
Did the Bible use decimal notation for its numbers? The New Testament was written mostly in Ancient Greek (that's why Simon's nickname, "The Rock," ends up as Peter (rock == petros)). I always figured decimal notation came later, and that they'd use something more like Roman numerals (DCLXVI), or some non-decimal grouping words, like "four gross, four score, and a dozen, less two."
If I were a parent I could also maybe see it for my kids (young kids, not necessarily teenagers).
Might I suggest that it shouldn't even be done then? What happens when little Billy reaches his teenage years and his parents have long forgotten about the chip that it turned out they never needed? Depending on how young he was, he may not even know it's there. I find that very disturbing.
The TCPA specification is designed to be platform and OS agnostic.
My concern about this statement is the implicit assumption that the specification will be faithfully followed.
Quoth the Anonymous Coward:
Quoth ESR:
Discuss.
So publishing trade secrets is ok as long as you add journalistic commentary?
Actually, publishing trade secrets is perfectly OK as long you weren't one of the people who signed an NDA to get access to them. Responsibility for keeping trade secrets a secret falls on the corporation, not the general public.
How many times does it have to be said? Evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics!
:-P
Didn't Sony v. Betamax already prove this?
I am Jack's pet peeve. I send Jack into spastic fits over unimportant matters. Without me, Jack wouldn't feel compelled to tell you that Sony was the company that made Betamax, and the case you're referring to is properly called Sony Corp. v Universal City Studios. 464 U.S. 417, 104 S. Ct. 774, 78 L. Ed. 2nd 574 [1984] (Sony Corp. v Universal City Studios for short). I make Jack an unpleasant person to be around.
To divide by 3 and multiply by 12 (12/3), you multiply by 4.
Yes, but you have to go to the extra effort of knowing that since you're converting feet to inches, the numerator is twelve, but if you're converting gallons to quarts, it's four. I'm not saying you have to be a genius to keep track of all these conversion ratios; I just think it's less of a hassle to say, "Let's divide by three and be done with it."
Ever worked with floating point numbers?
Ugh. Don't get me started. They're the bane of my existence. Okay, I will concede you have a point that if exact measures are available, you take them, but I really think that the software example you give only further emphasizes my point that in the real world, exact values don't happen.
To take your example of cutting a board, what about the 1/16 of an inch or so that gets obliterated by the saw? I mean, that sawdust has to come somewhere.
Oh, Hell, I give up: You prefer elegance, whereas I prefer simplicity. The ironic thing is that five years ago, I would've been arguing on your side. I guess I'm just fickle.
Prior Restraint: what's intuitive about, "To divide by three, multiply by four"?
dvdeug: Ad hominem, ad hominem, ad hominem.
How does this answer my question?
Prior Restraint: what's a seventh of a foot?
dvdeug: I can't ever in my life remember dividing a real world object into sevenths. ... at least Imperial users would keep it as 1/7, instead of .142857...
I apologize, I must not have made my point very clearly. My reference to sevenths was an attempt to point out that obsessing over having "exact" measures is pointless. Our instruments are only so precise. Most people I know just pick a number of significant digits and go with it, so 1/3 ends up as 0.33 and 1/7 becomes 0.14.
Prior Restraint: You're taking this far too personally.
dvdeug: You wrote a personal attack as a response
I did? I try not to do that. If you're referring to the second grade comment, I'm sorry if you took personally. I just didn't understand how someone could be "stumped" when asked to divide by three.
I promise to make an honest attempt to be more civil in the future.
I just finished reading Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces. These are fairly old texts, admittedly, so I hope one can forgive my "antiquated and unfortunate view." Could you recommend a relatively (no pun intended) accessible text which discusses mass-invariant physics? I would be much obliged.
Quick, Sparky, what's a third of a meter? Stumped?
Um, no. It's 33 1/3 cm. I learned fractions in the second grade.
Quick, Sparky, what's a seventh of a foot? Stumped? What is the obsession Imperial proponents have with the number three? This isn't numerology, you know.
What's a third of a yard? 1 foot!
I only know this because it was drilled into my head repeatedly in grade school.
What's a third of 4 feet? 16 inches! What's a third of 5 feet? 20 inches!
How did you do these conversions? Yes, they have no remainder, but they aren't in the least bit obvious to anyone. I mean, what's intuitive about, "To divide by three, multiply by four"?
Know how often somebody needs to convert between yards and miles? NEVER!
Actually, this particular problem crops up for me from time to time. In any event, why is converting from feet to miles more rational than converting yards to miles?
Or between inches and miles? WHAT's THE POINT?!?
Again, why is feet to miles better? It isn't, really. You appear to be basing your argument on what you were taught rather than what makes the most sense.
Know how often someone needs to take a measurement and divide it nicely into halfs, thirds, quarters and the like? ALL THE TIME!
Define "nicely". Do you mean exactly? I hope not, because the whole idea of exact measurements is preposterous. Or do you mean evenly (without remainder)? Who cares? What's the difference between the mental exertion of remembering, "Okay, a third of a kilometer is 333 1/3 m" and "Okay, a third of a mile is 1760 feet"? I was able to do 1000/3 in my head instantly, but 5280/3 required me to get a calculator. Why is remembering the presence of a fraction so much more offensive to you than remembering an arbitrary list of conversion ratios?
Geez... who would devise a measuring system that can't even be divided by 3 easily.
Why can't I divide a week by two (or three, for that matter)? Why is a week the only measurement I can divide by seven? Three is just another number; it isn't magical.
Idiots.
You're taking this far too personally. It's just a measuring system; nobody made fun of your mom, or anything.
And mass is always the same, no matter what acceleration due to gravity is.
Actually, that's not correct. I realize you're pointing out that mass and weight are two different things, but acceleration of any kind affects mass due to relativity.
and 100F was supposed to be human body temperature, but I guess the guy was running a fever at the time or something :)
I had been told it was the body temperature of a cow or some such, but I'm not sufficiently confident to challenge you on it.
david duncan scott said:
Remember, if you can't either pack it or leave it within ten minutes, it owns you.
Thank you! You've just summed up quite eloquently an idea that had been germinating in the back of my mind for several months now. If you don't mind, I think this'll end up in my rotating ~/.signature list.
*sigh* I hate it when a perfectly good rant is ruined by facts. :-)
I am glad to see they finally got around to it; obviously, I stopped trying to access their site shortly before Halloween. Thanks for correcting me, but I'm afraid they've already lost me as a customer. I have too many credit cards as it is, and theirs is the least useful of the bunch.