Re:Corporations aren't evil. They're not anything.
on
IRS Auditing Google
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· Score: 1
Corporations shouldn't be taxed, period. Money that comes OUT of that corporation through stock dividends and wages and bonuses and perks should be taxed. And that should all be taxed as plain old income, not special kinds of income like "capital gains" that has lower rates to compensate for corporate taxes already taken out.
A corporation does have a bank account(s), and once stocks, wages, perks, costs, etc.. are paid, there is still profit left over going into the bank. You're saying that basic corporate profit (after expenses, wages, etc..) shouldn't be taxed?
I have never been convinced that these tax cuts ever actually generated the claimed outcomes. In fact, from what I've seen, it generates the exact opposite outcomes.
There's never been any proof that tax cuts this low stimulate the economy. The best I've ever found is CBO scoring on certain tax cuts that say for every dollar cut, you put 60 cents back into the economy. Not exactly a good deal, considering things like food stamps put 1.2 dollars back into the economy.
The real data does seem to support your assertion that the opposite occurs. Data since 1979.
Natural processes may have also played a role in cooling off Europe: a decrease in solar activity, an increase in volcanic activity or colder oceans capable of absorbing more carbon dioxide. These phenomena better explain regional climate patterns during the Little Ice Age, says Michael Mann, a climate researcher at Pennsylvania State University in State College.
I will never understand the need for college educated knowledge workers to need union protections.
I guess you haven't been in a situation where unpaid overtime was expected of you? Video game programmer? Or gone through a corporate takeover or downsizing?
A for-profit business will always seek to pay the least amount possible to its workers while maximizing productivity. That is just common business sense. The single only thing pushing back against that is unions. Even the unions you don't belong to are helping set what is considered standard pay and benefits. Weekends, paid over time, sick days, those are all still standards because unions exist.
Without some unionization, say good bye to the benefits I listed above. Sure, it won't happen over night, but recession by recession, it surely will. Every time it becomes and employers market, they can get away with giving employees less and less.
I have to second you on API's with their more business oriented services. We just migrated a few hundred thousand email accounts to Gmail from an internal web server, and it was way more difficult than I thought it would be.
There are client libraries for java, php, python, and.net. Each of them have a different and incomplete implementation of the API's methods available. None of them had any adequate Solaris support for the various quirks you run into. The bulk upload tool only handles 2500 users or so at a time. The Directory Sync Tool ran out of java heap for weeks trying to deal with 300k+ users. And I dare anyone to find a 2-step Oauth example, anywhere, that is complete, working, and could be used against the provisioning or email API. Why Oauth you say? Well if you dare to touch a large number of accounts using your domain's admin user/pass account, google throws back captcha's at your server side process....
In the context of his plea for platform development over product development though, a hiring bar is almost required. Because while the team needs skills x,y,z, the company as a whole needs that team's product to be a platform that can seamlessly work with other teams' efforts. That requires that every new team member be familiar with web services (and all the other platform stuff he mentioned) or shows a willingness to learn and work in that direction.
You could get a way with having the teams still do the hiring, but they'd need to hire partially for the company's needs as well as their own needs. I think he was complaining more about the results of 'team hiring' at Amazon more than 'team hiring' itself.
He's obviously the one person best suited to figure it out. He knows more about the range of topics that he has studied than his parents or his teachers.
The one concern I do have is that for all the academic and extracurricular activities, the one thing he needs to learn to be HAPPY in life is how to relate to others.
And that is exactly why he isn't the person best suited to figuring it out. I'm been involved in my niece's life since she was born. Every new thing is scary, first time away from the parents, first day of pre-school, first day of kindergarten, etc.. If she did what she wanted, she'd be a hermit.
He might be doing extracurricular activities, but are they only the ones he wants to do? Chess club for example? If so, if I were his parent, I'd try to balance the academic and extracurricular activities that he chooses with those I choose for him, based on experience. Like, he picks college science class A and Chess Club, and I ask him to try a college philosophy class and some community club or social city sports team.
At that young of an age, he has plenty of time to learn all the hardcore science he wants. What he really needs is to develop social skills, the connection between physical health and happiness, a perspective on life beyond himself and his pursuits (philosophy, social sciences like Anthropology, etc...). All which may scare him to try, which is where a parent comes in: to sell the idea, give him confidence, and gently push him to try new things. Pass/fail, no pressure, etc...
I wonder if offering rewards to parents (versus students) would have a greater or worse outcome in student success? That'd be an interesting experiment.
Sounds like you did something wrong in terms of strategy, applications, something... I was (trying to remember, been a while) around 6th or 7th in my class of 2200, all honors, class officer, etc.. and I got more than half of expensive private college paid for. My parents made upper middle class salaries.
One thing I found curious, was that the private college offered me more than the state school. Maybe you should have applied more places and been more aggressive with scholarship seeking?
I'd like the parent link to open the parent right above the post I clicked the link in, using something like css show/hide. It's annoying when the thread is long, and it jumps you up several pages. It can take a while to scroll down to pick up where you left off.
OK, the new way, the care will perhaps be rendered in more appropriate and efficient settings than the emergency room..
That is the entire point. Preventative care is orders of magnitude more efficient than waiting until a condition becomes an emergency.
As long as our society believes that anyone (that includes illegal immigrants, by law) with an emergency should be treated, whether they can pay or not, I'd rather have a system that attempts that care in the least expensive way possible.
I posted above about this based on a couple books (that may have been too much pop and not enough fact) I read ~10 years ago on the scrolls.
Didn't the small team put in charge of working with the scrolls both deny access to other leading researchers, as well as disregarded any offers of help that could have sped up the release of material? They did trickle out pieces once reconstruction/translation was done, but because they didn't let anyone else help, it took 60+ years instead of say, 10, or 20.
I doubt it was a conspiracy of any sorts, but it seems like they were unusually controlling (and a bit jerk'ish considering the historical value that these documents have to a major religion).
I didn't read the article, but I did read a couple books on the scrolls about 10 years ago, so I might be remembering things incorrectly...
It is certainly true that for part of the past few decades, the scrolls have been in the hands of a few specialists. This is not for the purposes of power in some grand sense, however, but for the sake of publications for those who have control over them.
But I recall that was exactly why other specialists were angered over their handling. Taking 30+ years to release photos to other researchers was considered hoarding by many in the academic community. Certain things trickled out sooner, but it took a very long time for the vast majority of it to be released to academia. 1991 I think.
Which of course fueled all sorts of conspiracy theories, like they were 'cleaning' or destroying things unfavorable to the catholic church. But conspiracy crud aside, I think there were quite a few instances where the controlling team denied access to other leading researchers which isn't very normal to begin with (decades), but is even more odd considering the historical value those works have to so many people.
The more I search for the data/studies describing what is 'talking pointed' and spewed out of politicians' mouths, the more liberal I become.
Congratulations, you've defined "confirmation bias".
he Republican party seems very happy to live in a perpetual state of contradiction. Their Ideology is more important to them than facts.
You're an absolute fool is you think this is isolated to one side. If I may give an example, liberals are quick to point out how low taxes haven't done anything to spur the economy. But then when using the exact same argmuent against them by saying "stimulus spending has done nothing to spur the economy", they hand-wave and make up some kind of bullshit excuse like "well, it would have been alot worse without it" or "well, we didn't do enough of it", the infamous tiger-repellant rock defense (not at all realizing the exact same defense defeats the whole ineffective low taxes argument.
The day you realize how blinded both sided are by ideology will be the day you can begin calling yourself a moderate.
Look at how many Republican politicians believe in creationism and disregard the scientific consensus about climate change. I find it highly unlikely that a person could be a creationist and at the same time somehow have a good grasp of economic theory. It's possible, yes, but if someone is running around saying that the sky is red, I'm less likely to believe them when they want to discuss other issues.
Of course both sides have ideologies that sometimes cause reality to be ignored, but I find it incredible that you don't think the Republican side is way, way more likely to disregard facts.
Each time people like you and I debate/discuss (whatever we're doing:)) something like this, we can each toss out examples of bad decisions from either political party (or good decisions). But look at the totality of each party. Surely you can't say they have equal amounts of right and wrong decisions?
Moderate, to me, seems like a cop out in a lot of cases. Reality exists, and any given problem usually has solutions that are supported by historical or recent evidence. That means you can't just sit in the middle saying, both sides are wrong. Likewise, you can't sit in the middle and say "just take the middle ground between both proposals".
If you set out to bake a cake, and had to accept proposals from two ideologically opposed sides, and you wanted to average them, or find a middle ground, you'd end up with a mess. A recipe is a recipe. You need all the parts to make it work.
That's why things like health insurance reform are so screwy. Too much compromise. It implemented flour, sugar, water, and no eggs. Mandating insurance (via the tax system) without cost control (single payer or other solutions) is a recipe for problems. But it was considered the more 'moderate' version of what Obama really wanted.
If you moved to Miami, you'd better learn Spanish if you want to assimilate. http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/spanish_miamis_primary_language/
The US has always been a melting pot, with concentrated pockets of immigrants. Those pockets eventually blend together, but it happens over the course of generations.
It looks like Redhat default apache install has those settings by default./usr/sbin/httpd -l Compiled in modules:
core.c
prefork.c
http_core.c
mod_so.c
Education is particularly idealistic anyway, and the ideals slant a certain way
I think a more accurate statement is: reality has a well known liberal bias.
The more I search for the data/studies describing what is 'talking pointed' and spewed out of politicians' mouths, the more liberal I become. The Republican party seems very happy to live in a perpetual state of contradiction. Their Ideology is more important to them than facts.
and start talking about how poor people should get paid by very rich people just because rich people don't need all that money, and what nonsense.
It becomes less and less nonsensical if you look at historical tax rates and the performance of our economy during those different times (or on the flip side, check out the results of the Chicago School of Economics implementing their ideas in South America a few decades ago).
Economics aside, here's another set of reasons: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcFDF87-SdQ (starts at about the 50 second mark). In summary: you don't get rich in a vacuum. The larger your company, the more you rely on public funded services to support your business (for instance, if you have a large factory that delivers widgets, you use the public roads a lot more than an individual). Its only fair that you pay more.
Another reason that the very rich having higher (and by higher, I mean at least pre-Bush tax cuts) taxes isn't nonsense: Higher tax rates encourage investment in your business, because that is tax deductable. What happened when Bush lowered the capital gains taxes, and overall taxes, was that it made much more sense for people like the Koch brothers, to funnel profit into long term gains (15% tax now) instead of reinvesting in their company or higher more workers.
If the wealthy create jobs, explain this: http://www.businessinsider.com/koch-bros-rachel-maddow-gop-jobs-2011-9 The same is true of many large companies right now. The wealth isn't 'trickling down' at all. Profits are being hoarded in low tax schemes and not being invested back into the business.
"perhaps 5 or 6 a sortie, against 300 or 400 enemy destroyed"
I'm pretty sure that if the F-22's used missiles, ran out, afterburned back to base to reload, rinse, repeat, there would be zero loses. But I get your point in general.
I think your point is accurate as long as the 2 sides have technologies which are separated by some small gap. In your example, both have the technology of military flight, and the difference between the two techs is X. But at some point past X, there are zero fatalities for the advanced side. If, for instance, we had a world wide grid of satellites with pin point accurate lasers and radar/tracking technology that could see through clouds/stealth, no amount of planes could hurt us (unless you want to get into absurd numbers:))
What happens in that situation, isn't that the enemy attempts to out produce you, but they resort to guerilla tactics.
"explore space, fix diseases, take out 3rd world dictators, rebuild nations, build high speed rail lines, research electric cars, take of the mentally ill"
And each of those is made easier by larger investments into scientific research. We should be heavily funding all sorts of research, space flight included, for the trickle down effects into other areas.
Although I suppose we should be cautious and not get too advanced:) (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forever_Peace).
Slashdot Mirror
Corporations shouldn't be taxed, period. Money that comes OUT of that corporation through stock dividends and wages and bonuses and perks should be taxed. And that should all be taxed as plain old income, not special kinds of income like "capital gains" that has lower rates to compensate for corporate taxes already taken out.
A corporation does have a bank account(s), and once stocks, wages, perks, costs, etc.. are paid, there is still profit left over going into the bank. You're saying that basic corporate profit (after expenses, wages, etc..) shouldn't be taxed?
I have never been convinced that these tax cuts ever actually generated the claimed outcomes. In fact, from what I've seen, it generates the exact opposite outcomes.
There's never been any proof that tax cuts this low stimulate the economy. The best I've ever found is CBO scoring on certain tax cuts that say for every dollar cut, you put 60 cents back into the economy. Not exactly a good deal, considering things like food stamps put 1.2 dollars back into the economy.
The real data does seem to support your assertion that the opposite occurs. Data since 1979.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph
From the article:
Natural processes may have also played a role in cooling off Europe: a decrease in solar activity, an increase in volcanic activity or colder oceans capable of absorbing more carbon dioxide. These phenomena better explain regional climate patterns during the Little Ice Age, says Michael Mann, a climate researcher at Pennsylvania State University in State College.
I will never understand the need for college educated knowledge workers to need union protections.
I guess you haven't been in a situation where unpaid overtime was expected of you? Video game programmer? Or gone through a corporate takeover or downsizing?
A for-profit business will always seek to pay the least amount possible to its workers while maximizing productivity. That is just common business sense. The single only thing pushing back against that is unions. Even the unions you don't belong to are helping set what is considered standard pay and benefits. Weekends, paid over time, sick days, those are all still standards because unions exist.
Without some unionization, say good bye to the benefits I listed above. Sure, it won't happen over night, but recession by recession, it surely will. Every time it becomes and employers market, they can get away with giving employees less and less.
I have to second you on API's with their more business oriented services. We just migrated a few hundred thousand email accounts to Gmail from an internal web server, and it was way more difficult than I thought it would be.
http://code.google.com/googleapps/domain/gdata_provisioning_api_v2.0_reference.html
There are client libraries for java, php, python, and .net. Each of them have a different and incomplete implementation of the API's methods available. None of them had any adequate Solaris support for the various quirks you run into. The bulk upload tool only handles 2500 users or so at a time. The Directory Sync Tool ran out of java heap for weeks trying to deal with 300k+ users. And I dare anyone to find a 2-step Oauth example, anywhere, that is complete, working, and could be used against the provisioning or email API. Why Oauth you say? Well if you dare to touch a large number of accounts using your domain's admin user/pass account, google throws back captcha's at your server side process....
In the context of his plea for platform development over product development though, a hiring bar is almost required. Because while the team needs skills x,y,z, the company as a whole needs that team's product to be a platform that can seamlessly work with other teams' efforts. That requires that every new team member be familiar with web services (and all the other platform stuff he mentioned) or shows a willingness to learn and work in that direction.
You could get a way with having the teams still do the hiring, but they'd need to hire partially for the company's needs as well as their own needs. I think he was complaining more about the results of 'team hiring' at Amazon more than 'team hiring' itself.
Ron Paul has correctly identified the root causes of many of our problems. He is honest, and he sticks to his very clear beliefs.
The problem for many of us, despite him correctly and honestly pointing out the problems, is that we don't like his proposed solutions.
He's obviously the one person best suited to figure it out. He knows more about the range of topics that he has studied than his parents or his teachers.
The one concern I do have is that for all the academic and extracurricular activities, the one thing he needs to learn to be HAPPY in life is how to relate to others.
And that is exactly why he isn't the person best suited to figuring it out. I'm been involved in my niece's life since she was born. Every new thing is scary, first time away from the parents, first day of pre-school, first day of kindergarten, etc.. If she did what she wanted, she'd be a hermit.
He might be doing extracurricular activities, but are they only the ones he wants to do? Chess club for example? If so, if I were his parent, I'd try to balance the academic and extracurricular activities that he chooses with those I choose for him, based on experience. Like, he picks college science class A and Chess Club, and I ask him to try a college philosophy class and some community club or social city sports team.
At that young of an age, he has plenty of time to learn all the hardcore science he wants. What he really needs is to develop social skills, the connection between physical health and happiness, a perspective on life beyond himself and his pursuits (philosophy, social sciences like Anthropology, etc...). All which may scare him to try, which is where a parent comes in: to sell the idea, give him confidence, and gently push him to try new things. Pass/fail, no pressure, etc...
I wonder if offering rewards to parents (versus students) would have a greater or worse outcome in student success? That'd be an interesting experiment.
Sounds like you did something wrong in terms of strategy, applications, something... I was (trying to remember, been a while) around 6th or 7th in my class of 2200, all honors, class officer, etc.. and I got more than half of expensive private college paid for. My parents made upper middle class salaries.
One thing I found curious, was that the private college offered me more than the state school. Maybe you should have applied more places and been more aggressive with scholarship seeking?
I'd like the parent link to open the parent right above the post I clicked the link in, using something like css show/hide. It's annoying when the thread is long, and it jumps you up several pages. It can take a while to scroll down to pick up where you left off.
The distinction here is that health care ,,,
We are talking about health insurance, not health care.
And that's why single payer makes so much more sense. The government should directly give free health care to its citizens.
But as long as we insist on having private insurance companies, the only way to 'promote the general welfare' is by easing access to health insurance.
I worked for a hospital for 5 years. The vast majority are not turned away.
I was downsized because of that fact.
OK, the new way, the care will perhaps be rendered in more appropriate and efficient settings than the emergency room. .
That is the entire point. Preventative care is orders of magnitude more efficient than waiting until a condition becomes an emergency.
As long as our society believes that anyone (that includes illegal immigrants, by law) with an emergency should be treated, whether they can pay or not, I'd rather have a system that attempts that care in the least expensive way possible.
I posted above about this based on a couple books (that may have been too much pop and not enough fact) I read ~10 years ago on the scrolls.
Didn't the small team put in charge of working with the scrolls both deny access to other leading researchers, as well as disregarded any offers of help that could have sped up the release of material? They did trickle out pieces once reconstruction/translation was done, but because they didn't let anyone else help, it took 60+ years instead of say, 10, or 20.
I doubt it was a conspiracy of any sorts, but it seems like they were unusually controlling (and a bit jerk'ish considering the historical value that these documents have to a major religion).
I didn't read the article, but I did read a couple books on the scrolls about 10 years ago, so I might be remembering things incorrectly...
It is certainly true that for part of the past few decades, the scrolls have been in the hands of a few specialists. This is not for the purposes of power in some grand sense, however, but for the sake of publications for those who have control over them.
But I recall that was exactly why other specialists were angered over their handling. Taking 30+ years to release photos to other researchers was considered hoarding by many in the academic community. Certain things trickled out sooner, but it took a very long time for the vast majority of it to be released to academia. 1991 I think.
Which of course fueled all sorts of conspiracy theories, like they were 'cleaning' or destroying things unfavorable to the catholic church. But conspiracy crud aside, I think there were quite a few instances where the controlling team denied access to other leading researchers which isn't very normal to begin with (decades), but is even more odd considering the historical value those works have to so many people.
Thanks for the clarification.
Congratulations, you've defined "confirmation bias".
You're an absolute fool is you think this is isolated to one side. If I may give an example, liberals are quick to point out how low taxes haven't done anything to spur the economy. But then when using the exact same argmuent against them by saying "stimulus spending has done nothing to spur the economy", they hand-wave and make up some kind of bullshit excuse like "well, it would have been alot worse without it" or "well, we didn't do enough of it", the infamous tiger-repellant rock defense (not at all realizing the exact same defense defeats the whole ineffective low taxes argument.
The day you realize how blinded both sided are by ideology will be the day you can begin calling yourself a moderate.
Look at how many Republican politicians believe in creationism and disregard the scientific consensus about climate change. I find it highly unlikely that a person could be a creationist and at the same time somehow have a good grasp of economic theory. It's possible, yes, but if someone is running around saying that the sky is red, I'm less likely to believe them when they want to discuss other issues.
Of course both sides have ideologies that sometimes cause reality to be ignored, but I find it incredible that you don't think the Republican side is way, way more likely to disregard facts.
Each time people like you and I debate/discuss (whatever we're doing:)) something like this, we can each toss out examples of bad decisions from either political party (or good decisions). But look at the totality of each party. Surely you can't say they have equal amounts of right and wrong decisions?
Moderate, to me, seems like a cop out in a lot of cases. Reality exists, and any given problem usually has solutions that are supported by historical or recent evidence. That means you can't just sit in the middle saying, both sides are wrong. Likewise, you can't sit in the middle and say "just take the middle ground between both proposals".
If you set out to bake a cake, and had to accept proposals from two ideologically opposed sides, and you wanted to average them, or find a middle ground, you'd end up with a mess. A recipe is a recipe. You need all the parts to make it work.
That's why things like health insurance reform are so screwy. Too much compromise. It implemented flour, sugar, water, and no eggs. Mandating insurance (via the tax system) without cost control (single payer or other solutions) is a recipe for problems. But it was considered the more 'moderate' version of what Obama really wanted.
If you moved to Miami, you'd better learn Spanish if you want to assimilate.
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/spanish_miamis_primary_language/
The US has always been a melting pot, with concentrated pockets of immigrants. Those pockets eventually blend together, but it happens over the course of generations.
It looks like Redhat default apache install has those settings by default. /usr/sbin/httpd -l
Compiled in modules:
core.c
prefork.c
http_core.c
mod_so.c
It often IS Liberal Brainwashing
Education is particularly idealistic anyway, and the ideals slant a certain way
I think a more accurate statement is: reality has a well known liberal bias.
The more I search for the data/studies describing what is 'talking pointed' and spewed out of politicians' mouths, the more liberal I become. The Republican party seems very happy to live in a perpetual state of contradiction. Their Ideology is more important to them than facts.
and start talking about how poor people should get paid by very rich people just because rich people don't need all that money, and what nonsense.
It becomes less and less nonsensical if you look at historical tax rates and the performance of our economy during those different times (or on the flip side, check out the results of the Chicago School of Economics implementing their ideas in South America a few decades ago).
Economics aside, here's another set of reasons: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcFDF87-SdQ (starts at about the 50 second mark).
In summary: you don't get rich in a vacuum. The larger your company, the more you rely on public funded services to support your business (for instance, if you have a large factory that delivers widgets, you use the public roads a lot more than an individual). Its only fair that you pay more.
Another reason that the very rich having higher (and by higher, I mean at least pre-Bush tax cuts) taxes isn't nonsense: Higher tax rates encourage investment in your business, because that is tax deductable. What happened when Bush lowered the capital gains taxes, and overall taxes, was that it made much more sense for people like the Koch brothers, to funnel profit into long term gains (15% tax now) instead of reinvesting in their company or higher more workers.
If the wealthy create jobs, explain this: http://www.businessinsider.com/koch-bros-rachel-maddow-gop-jobs-2011-9
The same is true of many large companies right now. The wealth isn't 'trickling down' at all. Profits are being hoarded in low tax schemes and not being invested back into the business.
"perhaps 5 or 6 a sortie, against 300 or 400 enemy destroyed"
I'm pretty sure that if the F-22's used missiles, ran out, afterburned back to base to reload, rinse, repeat, there would be zero loses. But I get your point in general.
I think your point is accurate as long as the 2 sides have technologies which are separated by some small gap. In your example, both have the technology of military flight, and the difference between the two techs is X. But at some point past X, there are zero fatalities for the advanced side. If, for instance, we had a world wide grid of satellites with pin point accurate lasers and radar/tracking technology that could see through clouds/stealth, no amount of planes could hurt us (unless you want to get into absurd numbers:))
What happens in that situation, isn't that the enemy attempts to out produce you, but they resort to guerilla tactics.
"explore space, fix diseases, take out 3rd world dictators, rebuild nations, build high speed rail lines, research electric cars, take of the mentally ill"
And each of those is made easier by larger investments into scientific research. We should be heavily funding all sorts of research, space flight included, for the trickle down effects into other areas.
Although I suppose we should be cautious and not get too advanced:) (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forever_Peace).
http://www.csudh.edu/oliver/smt310-handouts/solarpan/pvpayback.htm
Old Thread, so no one will likely see this, but just how much profit do these 'job creators' need before they start creating jobs?
http://www.businessinsider.com/koch-bros-rachel-maddow-gop-jobs-2011-9
It is similar for many of the wealthiest corporations and people. Record setting profits in the last 5-10 years, yet they continue to lay off workers.