It's not just a matter of morality or fairness, but that we've paid into these trusts our entire working lives and were forced to do so by the same law that ensures we have access to them in time of need.
No you haven't, you've just been lied to. What really happened was that the trust "loaned" the money to the treasury, which immediately spent it. It's gone. There are no resources behind the trust. It has no gold, no stocks, no real estate. All you've got is a bunch of IOUs from a treasury with no money -- in other words, all you've got is future tax revenue. Which means that it isn't at all you who paid for your social security benefits, it's whoever pays the taxes tomorrow. What you paid for is all the extra stuff the Congresses you voted for bought because it could cheaply borrow so much extra money as a result of the huge government debt sink in the social security trust without ever considering it would have to be paid back.
Now you want people who weren't old enough to vote for those Congresses who spent the money you paid to now pay the debt that you claim you're owed. Do you understand the flaw in the logic? The unfairness?
by blocking access to content owned by book publishers which Google has copied and stored
Isn't that required by the book publishers rather than Google?
by not allowing advertisers to use their own data about customers garnered from Google on other sites, such as those owned by Microsoft
Ah yes, if a large corporation does anything at all to protect the privacy of its users then it must be an antitrust violation.
I thought Microsoft was trying to improve its image these days. Did someone forget to tell them that the way to get the support of your customers is to make better stuff for less money, rather than to file blatantly anti-consumer lawsuits against the people who are doing what you should be doing?
It was just the first one. Marty took the Delorean, which at that time required plutonium to time travel, back to 1955 with no extra plutonium. Hence the reference:
Marty: Doc look, all we need is a little plutonium!
Doc: Oh! I'm sure that in 1985, plutonium is available at every corner drug store, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by. Marty, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you're stuck here.
At the end of the first movie the fission reactor had been replaced by a "Mr. Fusion" from the future that would run on empty soda cans and banana peals, and the plot of the second movie involved Biff from 2015 "borrowing" the time machine to give Biff from 1955 a 2015 sports almanac so that he could become rich by betting on sporting events and ruin the timeline.
In the third movie the Delorean is struck by lightning while flying in a storm, which sends Doc back to 1885 and damages the electronics, which can't be repaired with 1885 technology. So Doc leaves the Delorean in a cave for 1955 Doc to fix it. Then Marty goes back for 1885 Doc, at which point the problem becomes not a lack of plutonium but a lack of gasoline to get the car up to 88MPH.
You can't buy 10gig fiber gear at walmart. Today. Outside of Kansas. So far. That is likely to be the big problem, as there is probably a city full of bloatware installed bargain basement $250 PCs, so sticking a $300 card in a $250 PC with no firewall is going to be a bit... weird.
It seems likely that a FTTH provider would just supply a "modem" that converts from fiber to e.g. 1000Base-T ethernet.
It seems to me all the bureaucracy does is legitimize the evil. The company is still reading their employees emails, the ISP is still sending the NSA a copy of all your internet traffic, Sony is still sending everything you do on your PS3 to their servers, Microsoft is still tracking your Bing search history and sending it to the Chinese government, etc. But it's Corporate Lawyer Approved so it's all OK, right?
So I say again: We need systems that protect privacy inherently. Then we don't need an accursed bureaucracy or a series of witch hunts.
Their staff should know better, their law department should know better and they should already have accountability procedures in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
You actually want the soul-crushing bureaucracy that everyone hates about large organizations? Where every time you want to write three lines of code you have to get it cleared with the full board of directors and six battalions of lawyers?
Give me a break. If we want privacy then we need systems that protect privacy inherently, not witch hunts against whoever manages to remind us how poorly designed existing systems are.
I'm sure you could easily port NetHack and SuperTux to Android from *nix as well, but how much of a draw will that really be for the platform? The point isn't that there are zero XBOX games that could sensibly be ported to a phone, the point is that the platforms are very different and even if the code is portable, the format is likely to be very different. If the XBOX game is CPU or GPU hungry, it won't run well on a phone (or will kill the battery). If it includes gigabytes of graphical content, you won't be able to economically distribute it over the cellular network or store it on the tiny flash they put in phones. On and on.
It seems to me the problem is that phone-type games might run OK on an XBOX but "real" XBOX games won't run well on a phone. And the market for phone-type games running on XBOX is pretty small in dollar terms, both because the installed base of XBOX isn't really that big of a market when you're only making $1/pop and because people buy a console to play console-format games -- if you're going to buy a non-console game then you want it on your phone or laptop because it's more portable.
That's the short-term panic. What happens down the road when Congress is considering an energy bill? Anyone fear mongering about an event like this where there was no or minimal non-economic damage is going to look like a buffoon.
The real problem is the public perception driven by the media, but at least now the internet mitigates it to a much greater extent than it did 30 years ago because pseudoscience fear mongering gets evaluated by people who, at least some of them (not necessarily including myself), know what they're talking about and respond in a forum where everyone can read it.
Your game won't be *usable*, of course, since your game will be designed for a controller and not a touch screen.
I think that's the point. Who cares if you can port between two things that don't run the same kind of software? It's not like you're going to be playing Crysis on your phone. It's like having easy portability between Solaris and Android -- OK sure, but why?
Three Mile Island was a public relations disaster because it happened with a 5 year old reactor 12 days after the movie The China Syndrome was released in theaters which depicted plant operators as unscrupulous and incompetent, and because Three Mile Island was caused in part by human error.
Compare that to the current situation, where you have a 40 year old reactor and an incident caused by the most severe sort of natural disaster imaginable, yet no one is killed by radiation and the area is in no way rendered permanently uninhabitable. It's practically an advertisement for the safety of nuclear power, and we have all these defeatists saying how this will set things back forever and we might as well buy stock in coal.
I mean look at the anti-nuclear people -- they're running around calling this a huge disaster and overplaying everything. It's boy who cried wolf if there ever was one. If by the time this is all over no one has died as a result, they're going to look like the fear mongers they are and they'll have lost their credibility.
Just because it could have been very much worse doesn't mean this isn't a huge clusterfuck.
It sounds a lot like the fire code made sure that everyone made it out of the building alive but now you're upset because the fire department tracked mud on the carpet and soaked all your furniture with their fire hoses.
And now you want us to stop building houses and live in tents, never mind that the house that caught fire was made of wood and the houses being built today are made of brick.
Keep the radioisotopes contained in the vicinity of the reactor for a few days until the short half-life isotopes decay and the amount of radioactivity returns to lower levels?
Right, so then when the liability container corporation goes out of business, the it defaults on its debt to the asset holding company and the asset holding company is on the hook to the creditor. How does that help, exactly?
That's not borrowing money. That's having access to the money you would already have if you were a single company. What happens if you need actual credit?
Could you explain to me why virtually all of the largest and most innovative software firms are based in the US?
Good universities, concentration of peers in Silicon Valley, etc. It was that way before there were software patents in the US. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Intuit, Id and CA Technologies were all already major players by the 1980s. The remaining companies' success can hardly be attributed to software patents -- I mean RedHat, seriously? The RedHat that files court briefs against software patents pretty much any time the issue comes up?
Moreover, the existence of software patents in the US has absolutely nothing to do with the location of software developers. Software patents affect the market where software is distributed, not where it is developed. There is nothing preventing software developed in other countries from being patented in the US.
Now, with my many years of experience, because big business has laid lawyer minefields with software patents, I don't even think of publishing my own programs.
Isn't that the opposite of what you should do? I would think you should publish everything to make sure there is a public record of the prior art, to make it harder for these asshats to get and keep bad patents.
Or alternatively, pay an accountant. Set the company up so all the liabilities are here and all the assets are there. Ignore patent trolls, ignore any court judgements, and if and when anyone with a badge does ever come to collect, point them at the Pile-O'-Debt and tell them to knock themselves out.
This isn't theoretical - I've already been though a few employers who were set up in exactly that way. One of them simply 'phoenixed' the liable part of the business overnight: rename it, put it into administration, start a new business with the old business' name, and "re-hire" all the employees. Only the company number changed. Apparently perfectly legal stuff, at least in the UK.
How do you get credit as a company with all liabilities and no assets?
It seems like the basic problem is that some countries are only competitive because they have a low tax rate. Those countries have no incentive to harmonize their tax rates upwards because it would make them uncompetitive.
It's diminishing returns. A corporation will hire an army of accountants and set up foreign subsidiaries to reduce its tax burden from 35% to 5%. Will it do the same thing to reduce it from 5% to 2.5%? Probably not.
So the only way to compete for customers, investors, etc. is on price?
I don't see where I said that. I said higher taxes increase costs. If a corporation's money is going to taxes, it isn't going to lower prices, but it also isn't going to R&D, marketing, customer service, etc. All else equal, the company with the higher tax burden loses.
The downside is politicians getting labeled as "in the pocket of corporations" and economic devastation in tax havens.
If the same bill eliminates corporate income tax as imposes increased capital gains tax, I don't really think people would get too bent out of shape about it. Although I don't really like capital gains tax either -- it provides a disincentive for people to sell their stocks when they ought to, because selling causes the taxes to come due. I'd rather see something like a property tax on securities, so that you pay e.g. 0.5% of the total value of your securities every year instead of paying a larger percent of just the gains.
As for "economic devastation in tax havens," screw 'em. Any solution to this problem will cause that.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just a matter of morality or fairness, but that we've paid into these trusts our entire working lives and were forced to do so by the same law that ensures we have access to them in time of need.
No you haven't, you've just been lied to. What really happened was that the trust "loaned" the money to the treasury, which immediately spent it. It's gone. There are no resources behind the trust. It has no gold, no stocks, no real estate. All you've got is a bunch of IOUs from a treasury with no money -- in other words, all you've got is future tax revenue. Which means that it isn't at all you who paid for your social security benefits, it's whoever pays the taxes tomorrow. What you paid for is all the extra stuff the Congresses you voted for bought because it could cheaply borrow so much extra money as a result of the huge government debt sink in the social security trust without ever considering it would have to be paid back.
Now you want people who weren't old enough to vote for those Congresses who spent the money you paid to now pay the debt that you claim you're owed. Do you understand the flaw in the logic? The unfairness?
by blocking access to content owned by book publishers which Google has copied and stored
Isn't that required by the book publishers rather than Google?
by not allowing advertisers to use their own data about customers garnered from Google on other sites, such as those owned by Microsoft
Ah yes, if a large corporation does anything at all to protect the privacy of its users then it must be an antitrust violation.
I thought Microsoft was trying to improve its image these days. Did someone forget to tell them that the way to get the support of your customers is to make better stuff for less money, rather than to file blatantly anti-consumer lawsuits against the people who are doing what you should be doing?
It was just the first one. Marty took the Delorean, which at that time required plutonium to time travel, back to 1955 with no extra plutonium. Hence the reference:
Marty: Doc look, all we need is a little plutonium!
Doc: Oh! I'm sure that in 1985, plutonium is available at every corner drug store, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by. Marty, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you're stuck here.
At the end of the first movie the fission reactor had been replaced by a "Mr. Fusion" from the future that would run on empty soda cans and banana peals, and the plot of the second movie involved Biff from 2015 "borrowing" the time machine to give Biff from 1955 a 2015 sports almanac so that he could become rich by betting on sporting events and ruin the timeline.
In the third movie the Delorean is struck by lightning while flying in a storm, which sends Doc back to 1885 and damages the electronics, which can't be repaired with 1885 technology. So Doc leaves the Delorean in a cave for 1955 Doc to fix it. Then Marty goes back for 1885 Doc, at which point the problem becomes not a lack of plutonium but a lack of gasoline to get the car up to 88MPH.
You can't buy 10gig fiber gear at walmart. Today. Outside of Kansas. So far. That is likely to be the big problem, as there is probably a city full of bloatware installed bargain basement $250 PCs, so sticking a $300 card in a $250 PC with no firewall is going to be a bit ... weird.
It seems likely that a FTTH provider would just supply a "modem" that converts from fiber to e.g. 1000Base-T ethernet.
It seems to me all the bureaucracy does is legitimize the evil. The company is still reading their employees emails, the ISP is still sending the NSA a copy of all your internet traffic, Sony is still sending everything you do on your PS3 to their servers, Microsoft is still tracking your Bing search history and sending it to the Chinese government, etc. But it's Corporate Lawyer Approved so it's all OK, right?
So I say again: We need systems that protect privacy inherently. Then we don't need an accursed bureaucracy or a series of witch hunts.
Their staff should know better, their law department should know better and they should already have accountability procedures in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
You actually want the soul-crushing bureaucracy that everyone hates about large organizations? Where every time you want to write three lines of code you have to get it cleared with the full board of directors and six battalions of lawyers?
Give me a break. If we want privacy then we need systems that protect privacy inherently, not witch hunts against whoever manages to remind us how poorly designed existing systems are.
I'm sure you could easily port NetHack and SuperTux to Android from *nix as well, but how much of a draw will that really be for the platform? The point isn't that there are zero XBOX games that could sensibly be ported to a phone, the point is that the platforms are very different and even if the code is portable, the format is likely to be very different. If the XBOX game is CPU or GPU hungry, it won't run well on a phone (or will kill the battery). If it includes gigabytes of graphical content, you won't be able to economically distribute it over the cellular network or store it on the tiny flash they put in phones. On and on.
It seems to me the problem is that phone-type games might run OK on an XBOX but "real" XBOX games won't run well on a phone. And the market for phone-type games running on XBOX is pretty small in dollar terms, both because the installed base of XBOX isn't really that big of a market when you're only making $1/pop and because people buy a console to play console-format games -- if you're going to buy a non-console game then you want it on your phone or laptop because it's more portable.
That's the short-term panic. What happens down the road when Congress is considering an energy bill? Anyone fear mongering about an event like this where there was no or minimal non-economic damage is going to look like a buffoon.
The real problem is the public perception driven by the media, but at least now the internet mitigates it to a much greater extent than it did 30 years ago because pseudoscience fear mongering gets evaluated by people who, at least some of them (not necessarily including myself), know what they're talking about and respond in a forum where everyone can read it.
Your game won't be *usable*, of course, since your game will be designed for a controller and not a touch screen.
I think that's the point. Who cares if you can port between two things that don't run the same kind of software? It's not like you're going to be playing Crysis on your phone. It's like having easy portability between Solaris and Android -- OK sure, but why?
Three Mile Island was a public relations disaster because it happened with a 5 year old reactor 12 days after the movie The China Syndrome was released in theaters which depicted plant operators as unscrupulous and incompetent, and because Three Mile Island was caused in part by human error.
Compare that to the current situation, where you have a 40 year old reactor and an incident caused by the most severe sort of natural disaster imaginable, yet no one is killed by radiation and the area is in no way rendered permanently uninhabitable. It's practically an advertisement for the safety of nuclear power, and we have all these defeatists saying how this will set things back forever and we might as well buy stock in coal.
I mean look at the anti-nuclear people -- they're running around calling this a huge disaster and overplaying everything. It's boy who cried wolf if there ever was one. If by the time this is all over no one has died as a result, they're going to look like the fear mongers they are and they'll have lost their credibility.
molten core materials
The reaction was shut down a long time ago. There is coolant in all the reactors. By what process would "core materials" become "molten"?
Just because it could have been very much worse doesn't mean this isn't a huge clusterfuck.
It sounds a lot like the fire code made sure that everyone made it out of the building alive but now you're upset because the fire department tracked mud on the carpet and soaked all your furniture with their fire hoses.
And now you want us to stop building houses and live in tents, never mind that the house that caught fire was made of wood and the houses being built today are made of brick.
Keep the radioisotopes contained in the vicinity of the reactor for a few days until the short half-life isotopes decay and the amount of radioactivity returns to lower levels?
Right, so then when the liability container corporation goes out of business, the it defaults on its debt to the asset holding company and the asset holding company is on the hook to the creditor. How does that help, exactly?
That's not borrowing money. That's having access to the money you would already have if you were a single company. What happens if you need actual credit?
Could you explain to me why virtually all of the largest and most innovative software firms are based in the US?
Good universities, concentration of peers in Silicon Valley, etc. It was that way before there were software patents in the US. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, Intuit, Id and CA Technologies were all already major players by the 1980s. The remaining companies' success can hardly be attributed to software patents -- I mean RedHat, seriously? The RedHat that files court briefs against software patents pretty much any time the issue comes up?
Moreover, the existence of software patents in the US has absolutely nothing to do with the location of software developers. Software patents affect the market where software is distributed, not where it is developed. There is nothing preventing software developed in other countries from being patented in the US.
Now, with my many years of experience, because big business has laid lawyer minefields with software patents, I don't even think of publishing my own programs.
Isn't that the opposite of what you should do? I would think you should publish everything to make sure there is a public record of the prior art, to make it harder for these asshats to get and keep bad patents.
Or alternatively, pay an accountant. Set the company up so all the liabilities are here and all the assets are there. Ignore patent trolls, ignore any court judgements, and if and when anyone with a badge does ever come to collect, point them at the Pile-O'-Debt and tell them to knock themselves out.
This isn't theoretical - I've already been though a few employers who were set up in exactly that way. One of them simply 'phoenixed' the liable part of the business overnight: rename it, put it into administration, start a new business with the old business' name, and "re-hire" all the employees. Only the company number changed. Apparently perfectly legal stuff, at least in the UK.
How do you get credit as a company with all liabilities and no assets?
Boycott them anyway. At least you won't be one of the ones they charge "a hell of a lot more" to.
It seems like the basic problem is that some countries are only competitive because they have a low tax rate. Those countries have no incentive to harmonize their tax rates upwards because it would make them uncompetitive.
It's diminishing returns. A corporation will hire an army of accountants and set up foreign subsidiaries to reduce its tax burden from 35% to 5%. Will it do the same thing to reduce it from 5% to 2.5%? Probably not.
There is a name for taxing corporations on revenue rather than profits. It's called "sales tax." Is that what you intended?
So basically, countries compete with each other to sell themselves the cheapest to the corporations. I think our nations need to unionize.
You mean like the United Nations?
So the only way to compete for customers, investors, etc. is on price?
I don't see where I said that. I said higher taxes increase costs. If a corporation's money is going to taxes, it isn't going to lower prices, but it also isn't going to R&D, marketing, customer service, etc. All else equal, the company with the higher tax burden loses.
The downside is politicians getting labeled as "in the pocket of corporations" and economic devastation in tax havens.
If the same bill eliminates corporate income tax as imposes increased capital gains tax, I don't really think people would get too bent out of shape about it. Although I don't really like capital gains tax either -- it provides a disincentive for people to sell their stocks when they ought to, because selling causes the taxes to come due. I'd rather see something like a property tax on securities, so that you pay e.g. 0.5% of the total value of your securities every year instead of paying a larger percent of just the gains.
As for "economic devastation in tax havens," screw 'em. Any solution to this problem will cause that.