It's really wonderful in the short term. In the longer term when the current production wells dry up and billions of dollars are needed to discover more oil in Venezuela, I hope the country has the capital and the expertise to develop those new wells, because there's no way any foreign oil company or investor will even dream of getting involved.
Debt repayment by PCS will not be inflationary. Starting new spending is inflationary.
Bullshit.
Even if we ignore the complex -- and I suspect fundamentally specious -- arguments about how debt repayment won't be inflationary, it will cause new spending. Magically retiring all of the existing debt will erase any incentive for Congress to even pretend to ensure tax revenues meet expenditures. Why bother, when they can keep wallowing in pork and just rely on more magical PCS hacking to erase their debts?
I think the argument that debt repayment won't be inflationary is crap, too, but anyone with a brain has to see that it will stoke the furnace of new spending, guaranteed.
paying the kids their allowance (which is funny, because they mostly give it back to me and tell me to deposit it into their bank account, for which they have ATM cards
I just do an account-to-account transfer to pay allowance.
This sounds so gimp like. Like a teen at school trying to get in with the popular set. Or Dobby from Harry Potter.
It's just pragmatism. For every programmer competent to work on the kernel there are a thousand wannabes, so some vetting process is required. In companies, this is done via resumes and interviews -- and then generally by giving new software engineers projects of low importance so you can vet their work before trusting them with stuff that could break the business. Same thing, just a different context.
Seriously, if as an enthusiast I submitted a patch that broke user space and got a beat down from Linus I'd be a bit sad.
As an "enthusiast" your userspace-breaking patch would never have made it to Linus. It would have had to go through the maintainer of its respective subsystem -- and perhaps more than one -- who would have caught the problem and told you to fix it. Likely much more nicely.
What happened here was a senior, experienced submitter did something really dumb, and it was a huge problem because he was sufficiently trusted not to do such dumb things that there was no one watching closely enough to catch it. Linus doesn't have enough hours in the day to thoroughly review everything that comes through, he has to make judgment calls based on the degree of trust he has in the source. Mauro let him down in a big way, then compounded it by trying to make excuses for it.
Another way to build credibility is to take on some of the janitor tasks which they already know they need to have done. Then once you've shown that you do a good job and don't break stuff, you're more likely to get listened to.
Nope. Linus has been Linus his whole life. This "story" isn't anything new. Oddly enough, Linux keeps marching onward, with plenty of contributors who are both volunteers and paid by various corporations to contribute work.
It's more than that.
Linux powers tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars worth of systems. It's unbelievably huge, and it's almost inconceivable that all of the megacorporations whose business depends so deeply on it didn't snatch control of the whole thing away from the lone kid who started it as a hobby project long ago. I mean, who would have predicted that even after it had become so important, Linux would still be maintained by the one guy who started it, rather than some joint committee of top-tier OS engineers -- probably dominated by IBM?
Not only is that not what's happened, but as far as I can see none of those megacorps even try to tell Linus what to do. They submit patches, humbly formatted and refactored into the form Linus wants, and they butter him up with conference tickets, free hardware and the like, and they even compete for the right to pay him a salary.
Why is that? Because whatever anyone says about him, his style, his attitude, his people skills or even his code... the results are fantastic. Linux not only works very well, it does so across an amazing variety of hardware platforms, and the design -- and Linus' good taste and fanatical attention to detail -- have proven to be able to support virtually any new idea that's worth implementing.
Love Linus or hate him... don't mess it up. Luckily, Linus is an egotistical bastard who doesn't care what anyone thinks anyway, so mere words aren't likely to change anything.
For that matter, unless they can find ways to dramatically increase the bandwidth, I don't want in-flight Internet to become cheap either. Please keep it expensive enough that most people will choose not to use it, so it'll be fast enough for those of us who are trying to get work done. Or maybe introduce tiered pricing so that those who need the higher speeds can get it.
except capital gains pile up quicker than dividends and capital gains rate is much lower than one you pay on dividends
The GGP was proposing to tax retained earnings as income, so I thought it was obvious that to have the same effect you'd need to tax capital gains as income. Actually, they're taxed as income now, if they're short-term gains.
"Suggesting no corporate taxation is not the same as suggesting no taxation."
True. But suggesting corporations do not benefit from the services supplied by government, and therefore have no obligation to help pay for them, is ridiculous. That's the implication of advocating no corporate taxation.
You apparently failed to read beyond the first line of my post.
It further encourages companies to move all operations to places with low wage labor. Taxing profit, wages, and cap gains all have purpose. If a company is extracting money from a country, they should pay for what makes that country worth selling to.
Offshoring doesn't change the argument at all. They can offshore whether they pay corporate taxes or not.
This puzzles me. Does this mean that if I call my local police to report somebody (unlawfully) breaking into my home, the police are not obligated to respond to my call and defend me from criminal attack?
Correct. They have no legal obligation.
Or to put the question another way, why do the cops bother to come when I call 911, if they have no duty to do so? It's been my experience that they do respond.
Well, it is their job, and if they do it badly enough the voters might get upset and replace the police commissioner/chief/sheriff. But if they choose not to come help you or, if as is more likely, they come and decide to wait outside until they're sure the situation is safe, you (or your remaining family) can't sue them.
Any retained earnings by the corporation (profits not passed through to investors) should be taxed as if it were earned income.
That's not necessary. Profits not paid out as dividends get passed through to investors another way, in the form of higher share values. If investors are taxed on capital gains, they'll pay those taxes when the gains are realized. Plus, eventually the corporation will either spend that money or pay it out, at which point it will be taxed.
the police are obliged to protect your personal property and your life
No, they're not. Numerous court rulings, all the way to the Supreme Court, make it clear that the police have no duty whatsoever to defend you. Lots of them are nice guys and will if they happen to be in the right place at the right time, but they have no obligation to do it, and many of them won't.
But to argue that we should pay zero taxes make NO SENSE WHATSOEVER.
Suggesting no corporate taxation is not the same as suggesting no taxation.
For if we don't pay taxes you better be prepared to pay Vinny down the street a bit of money to make sure that you don't get mugged, robbed, or killed.
Even if Facebook were paying more in taxes, that money wouldn't be paying police in my town. It wouldn't even be paying police in the town where Facebook's employees live. Or fire departments, or roads, etc. Taxes paid by Facebook employees, however, do pay for government services where they live.
Focus on taxing the money at the point it gets transferred to individuals and the only way the taxes can be avoided is to move the people... but if they move the people they move the costs as well as the revenues. Note that companies can't work around this by giving employees (or executives) cars, houses, etc., because those sorts of benefits are treated as taxable income.
Counties and cities can, and should, also use property taxes to get the cash required to maintain roads and other local infrastructure used by corporations and their employees.
Set corporate taxes to zero and focus on taxing the money as it flows out. This would include taxing capital gains. Then corporations would have no reason to move to Dublin... unless they really are looking to use Irish labor.
Google docs is in the ~1993 stage of office suites.
Office suites in 1993 had real-time collaboration?
I understand what you mean, but I think your comment overlooks both features that were common in 1993 word processors and the huge benefits (for many workflows) of the collaboration capabilities of Docs. Do not underestimate the efficiencies that can be achieved in a meeting where everyone can edit the spreadsheet or document around which the meeting revolves. And with the Docs/Hangout integration, the meeting can even be distributed. The versioning of Docs is something else that 1993 word processors didn't have, at all, and is very valuable.
Whether or not the cloud-ish features of Docs are useful to you depends on what you're trying to do. If they are, though, Docs is light years ahead of 1993 word processors.
Part 4, the Markup Language Reference, weighs in at 5756 pages -- 5756 pages -- to define "every element and attribute, the hierarchy of parent/child relationships for elements, and additional semantics as appropriate"
And it's incomplete!
There are numerous elements whose function isn't spelled out. Instead, the "spec" just points to previous implementations of Word and says "do it like that".
I'm glad some people actually like living their corporate lives in a straight jacket... I for one, do not. It's called lowest-common denominator programming and it's what is wrong the world. If smoeone can't understand something, no can use it.
What exactly are you referring to? Exceptions in C++? If so, did you actually read the rationale in the style guide? Its conclusion is that exceptions are a good thing on balance, but that retrofitting them onto a large code base (hundreds of millions of lines of code) which was not written to be exception-safe is not feasible. It's not a matter of being straight-jacketed, it's a matter of making appropriate engineering tradeoffs in a context where extreme scalability and reliability is a basic requirement, and agility is a critical business goal.
"Lowest common denominator" is not a good description of the programming done at Google, BTW.
Slashdot Mirror
It's really wonderful in the short term. In the longer term when the current production wells dry up and billions of dollars are needed to discover more oil in Venezuela, I hope the country has the capital and the expertise to develop those new wells, because there's no way any foreign oil company or investor will even dream of getting involved.
I notice that you ignored my core point completely.
Debt repayment by PCS will not be inflationary. Starting new spending is inflationary.
Bullshit.
Even if we ignore the complex -- and I suspect fundamentally specious -- arguments about how debt repayment won't be inflationary, it will cause new spending. Magically retiring all of the existing debt will erase any incentive for Congress to even pretend to ensure tax revenues meet expenditures. Why bother, when they can keep wallowing in pork and just rely on more magical PCS hacking to erase their debts?
I think the argument that debt repayment won't be inflationary is crap, too, but anyone with a brain has to see that it will stoke the furnace of new spending, guaranteed.
Where Americans seem to think in a "reasonable doubt" methodology from our courts
Actually, accidents are handled in civil court, so it's a "preponderance of the evidence" methodology.
paying the kids their allowance (which is funny, because they mostly give it back to me and tell me to deposit it into their bank account, for which they have ATM cards
I just do an account-to-account transfer to pay allowance.
This sounds so gimp like. Like a teen at school trying to get in with the popular set. Or Dobby from Harry Potter.
It's just pragmatism. For every programmer competent to work on the kernel there are a thousand wannabes, so some vetting process is required. In companies, this is done via resumes and interviews -- and then generally by giving new software engineers projects of low importance so you can vet their work before trusting them with stuff that could break the business. Same thing, just a different context.
When hundreds of millions of users and embedded devices run your code
I think your estimate is an order of magnitude too low.
Because it will generate 700-800 comments.
Seriously, if as an enthusiast I submitted a patch that broke user space and got a beat down from Linus I'd be a bit sad.
As an "enthusiast" your userspace-breaking patch would never have made it to Linus. It would have had to go through the maintainer of its respective subsystem -- and perhaps more than one -- who would have caught the problem and told you to fix it. Likely much more nicely.
What happened here was a senior, experienced submitter did something really dumb, and it was a huge problem because he was sufficiently trusted not to do such dumb things that there was no one watching closely enough to catch it. Linus doesn't have enough hours in the day to thoroughly review everything that comes through, he has to make judgment calls based on the degree of trust he has in the source. Mauro let him down in a big way, then compounded it by trying to make excuses for it.
Another way to build credibility is to take on some of the janitor tasks which they already know they need to have done. Then once you've shown that you do a good job and don't break stuff, you're more likely to get listened to.
Nope. Linus has been Linus his whole life. This "story" isn't anything new. Oddly enough, Linux keeps marching onward, with plenty of contributors who are both volunteers and paid by various corporations to contribute work.
It's more than that.
Linux powers tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars worth of systems. It's unbelievably huge, and it's almost inconceivable that all of the megacorporations whose business depends so deeply on it didn't snatch control of the whole thing away from the lone kid who started it as a hobby project long ago. I mean, who would have predicted that even after it had become so important, Linux would still be maintained by the one guy who started it, rather than some joint committee of top-tier OS engineers -- probably dominated by IBM?
Not only is that not what's happened, but as far as I can see none of those megacorps even try to tell Linus what to do. They submit patches, humbly formatted and refactored into the form Linus wants, and they butter him up with conference tickets, free hardware and the like, and they even compete for the right to pay him a salary.
Why is that? Because whatever anyone says about him, his style, his attitude, his people skills or even his code... the results are fantastic. Linux not only works very well, it does so across an amazing variety of hardware platforms, and the design -- and Linus' good taste and fanatical attention to detail -- have proven to be able to support virtually any new idea that's worth implementing.
Love Linus or hate him... don't mess it up. Luckily, Linus is an egotistical bastard who doesn't care what anyone thinks anyway, so mere words aren't likely to change anything.
For that matter, unless they can find ways to dramatically increase the bandwidth, I don't want in-flight Internet to become cheap either. Please keep it expensive enough that most people will choose not to use it, so it'll be fast enough for those of us who are trying to get work done. Or maybe introduce tiered pricing so that those who need the higher speeds can get it.
You're thinking of this supreme court case: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/28scotus.html?_r=0
Among others, yes.
except capital gains pile up quicker than dividends and capital gains rate is much lower than one you pay on dividends
The GGP was proposing to tax retained earnings as income, so I thought it was obvious that to have the same effect you'd need to tax capital gains as income. Actually, they're taxed as income now, if they're short-term gains.
"Suggesting no corporate taxation is not the same as suggesting no taxation."
True. But suggesting corporations do not benefit from the services supplied by government, and therefore have no obligation to help pay for them, is ridiculous. That's the implication of advocating no corporate taxation.
You apparently failed to read beyond the first line of my post.
It further encourages companies to move all operations to places with low wage labor. Taxing profit, wages, and cap gains all have purpose. If a company is extracting money from a country, they should pay for what makes that country worth selling to.
Offshoring doesn't change the argument at all. They can offshore whether they pay corporate taxes or not.
This puzzles me. Does this mean that if I call my local police to report somebody (unlawfully) breaking into my home, the police are not obligated to respond to my call and defend me from criminal attack?
Correct. They have no legal obligation.
Or to put the question another way, why do the cops bother to come when I call 911, if they have no duty to do so? It's been my experience that they do respond.
Well, it is their job, and if they do it badly enough the voters might get upset and replace the police commissioner/chief/sheriff. But if they choose not to come help you or, if as is more likely, they come and decide to wait outside until they're sure the situation is safe, you (or your remaining family) can't sue them.
Any retained earnings by the corporation (profits not passed through to investors) should be taxed as if it were earned income.
That's not necessary. Profits not paid out as dividends get passed through to investors another way, in the form of higher share values. If investors are taxed on capital gains, they'll pay those taxes when the gains are realized. Plus, eventually the corporation will either spend that money or pay it out, at which point it will be taxed.
the police are obliged to protect your personal property and your life
No, they're not. Numerous court rulings, all the way to the Supreme Court, make it clear that the police have no duty whatsoever to defend you. Lots of them are nice guys and will if they happen to be in the right place at the right time, but they have no obligation to do it, and many of them won't.
But to argue that we should pay zero taxes make NO SENSE WHATSOEVER.
Suggesting no corporate taxation is not the same as suggesting no taxation.
For if we don't pay taxes you better be prepared to pay Vinny down the street a bit of money to make sure that you don't get mugged, robbed, or killed.
Even if Facebook were paying more in taxes, that money wouldn't be paying police in my town. It wouldn't even be paying police in the town where Facebook's employees live. Or fire departments, or roads, etc. Taxes paid by Facebook employees, however, do pay for government services where they live.
Focus on taxing the money at the point it gets transferred to individuals and the only way the taxes can be avoided is to move the people... but if they move the people they move the costs as well as the revenues. Note that companies can't work around this by giving employees (or executives) cars, houses, etc., because those sorts of benefits are treated as taxable income.
Counties and cities can, and should, also use property taxes to get the cash required to maintain roads and other local infrastructure used by corporations and their employees.
Set corporate taxes to zero and focus on taxing the money as it flows out. This would include taxing capital gains. Then corporations would have no reason to move to Dublin... unless they really are looking to use Irish labor.
Google docs is in the ~1993 stage of office suites.
Office suites in 1993 had real-time collaboration?
I understand what you mean, but I think your comment overlooks both features that were common in 1993 word processors and the huge benefits (for many workflows) of the collaboration capabilities of Docs. Do not underestimate the efficiencies that can be achieved in a meeting where everyone can edit the spreadsheet or document around which the meeting revolves. And with the Docs/Hangout integration, the meeting can even be distributed. The versioning of Docs is something else that 1993 word processors didn't have, at all, and is very valuable.
Whether or not the cloud-ish features of Docs are useful to you depends on what you're trying to do. If they are, though, Docs is light years ahead of 1993 word processors.
If you're writing technical books, Docs is the wrong tool, as is Word. Use LaTeX.
Let us not forget that some large companies, with many thousand employees, have gone over to Google Apps.
Including Google.
Part 4, the Markup Language Reference, weighs in at 5756 pages -- 5756 pages -- to define "every element and attribute, the hierarchy of parent/child relationships for elements, and additional semantics as appropriate"
And it's incomplete!
There are numerous elements whose function isn't spelled out. Instead, the "spec" just points to previous implementations of Word and says "do it like that".
I'm glad some people actually like living their corporate lives in a straight jacket... I for one, do not. It's called lowest-common denominator programming and it's what is wrong the world. If smoeone can't understand something, no can use it.
What exactly are you referring to? Exceptions in C++? If so, did you actually read the rationale in the style guide? Its conclusion is that exceptions are a good thing on balance, but that retrofitting them onto a large code base (hundreds of millions of lines of code) which was not written to be exception-safe is not feasible. It's not a matter of being straight-jacketed, it's a matter of making appropriate engineering tradeoffs in a context where extreme scalability and reliability is a basic requirement, and agility is a critical business goal.
"Lowest common denominator" is not a good description of the programming done at Google, BTW.