I never said it should be either zero effort or zero cost.
My original comment was related to your request for a list of other "regulations" that make it difficult to start a business in the US.
My example pointed out that 60% of our start up costs were related to government regulations. I followed up with the fact that states find regulations so burdensome that they've adopted organizations designed to guide people through those regulations. I also replied that a market has been created to provide services to make it easier and, finally, I pointed out that the IRS is the face of unmanageable regulations.
I never argued for zero regulations or cost but to claim that there's little to no regulatory barrier to starting a business is a bit of a stretch.
Multiple jurisdictions doing things differently. One state demands one set of documents and another state demands another. Same thing happens at the county/parish levels and at the town levels.
The $1,500 wasn't spent to "figure out the gov't stuff", it was to expedite it. Any particular regulatory requirement is easy to understand and, with time, compliance isn't difficult. Getting ALL regulatory components managed in an efficient manner and, in particular, making sure none are missed is another story entirely.
If the regulations weren't a burden then why do the states need to establish the SBTDC organizations to begin with?
This is a common argument that stems from, I believe, not only a lack of historical context but also the absence of actually reading the plain language of the Bill of Rights or in understanding it's underlying architecture and design purpose.
Most people don't know the preamble to the Bill of Rights which starts:
"The Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution."
For some reason, there exists a widely held belief that the Bill of Rights grants rights to the people when, in actuality, the Bill of Rights places specific restrictions on the government. The plain language of the individual amendments support the preamble:
Amendment I - "Congress shall make no law..." Amendment II - "...shall not be infringed." Amendment III - "No Soldier shall..." Amendment IV - "...shall not be violated..."
The Bill of Rights is not a list of rights retained by the people but is rather a list of prohibitions placed upon the government so they don't misconstrue and, therefore, misapply, the powers the document granted to the government.
The overall architecture of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights does not in any way support the argument that the second amendment is a grant of power to state militias. In Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court finally acknowledged as such.
You should take this opportunity to read the U.S. Constitution and its amendments. You may gain an appreciation for the beauty of the document and what it actually means. You may even gain a better appreciation for the argument many of us espouse about the presumption of liberty.
It cost us about $10,000 to start that business. $4,000 was spent on the material we needed, web site, logos, etc.
$6,000 was spent, mostly on legal fees, on licenses and making sure we adhered to government regulations at multiple levels.
Those things we needed to build the business that came from private parties (bank accounts, uniforms, office supplies, etc.) could be satisfied in a matter of days. The longest and most difficult was getting an extended validation SSL for our web site - that took two weeks because we needed a letter from our attorney.
Anything we needed from a government agency took months with multiple calls.
All items that came from the private sector came from companies that wanted our business and we had choices of providers. This created an incentive for good service and responsiveness.
All items that came from regulatory agencies generally came from organizations that said this is how it is, live with it and you better not fail any of the steps or you, literally, won't be in business.
I can say that there was one agency that approached the problem like the private sector and that was a state agency responsible for issuing state-level trade and service marks. This particular state had a web-site and 24 hour response to our applications.
We used a particular service to walk us through the various government regulations at a total cost of about $1,500. Without that service it would have taken months and months just to figure out what regulations we needed to follow and, frankly, we probably wouldn't have even attempted the exercise.
Living in the US I may or may not keep the Vita depending on how much future business I wanted to do with the company and probably some other vague emotion I happened to be feeling at that particular moment. I would look at my returning the product about the same as returning too much change given to me at a cash register - I generally return that stuff. If the company threatened legal action then they could just fuck off. I don't take to kindly to a company screwing up and then threatening me because of their error.
However, whether or not I kept it, I would demand that I receive the product I did order or a refund.
If I ordered product A and paid for product A I expect to receive product A whether or not the company sent me a different product I didn't order.
The only incentive I can think of to simplify the tax system is to require all elected officials to personally fill out their own tax returns - no paid preparers allowed, no advice allowed.
I actually think this should be required across all government agencies. We might see a different attitude towards the structure of the government if members of congress had to wait in line at the post office, the passport office or the immigration checkpoints.
The IRS is filled with humans as employees. The government has created a tax system that is overly complex which makes it easy to find simple errors in any complex return. Combine the potential for abuse with the scale of the system and it doesn't become too hard to find a large number of people who have had negative experiences.
You'll never reach 100% honesty on either side of the equation and in a system as large as ours it doesn't take a large percentage to correspond to a large number of individuals.
Re:mall cops for the most part are not real cops a
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R2-D2: Mall Cop
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· Score: 4, Interesting
They have the same law enforcement power that you and I have, assuming you're not a law enforcement officer. Whether you choose to exercise it or not you have the power to affect a citizen's arrest in most jurisdictions.
The biggest difference between a law enforcement officer making an arrest and a citizen doing the same thing is liability. The law enforcement officer is likely to receive qualified immunity such that if the officer followed his or her training and department policies no personal liability will attach to the officer. You, on the other hand, will face the full brunt of any mistakes you make.
Short of conducting an actual arrest, most law enforcement interactions are based on voluntary cooperation until a threshold is crossed giving the law enforcement officer probable cause to make a formal arrest.
Anyone can have a voluntary interaction with any other person. I could approach you and ask for consent to search your car. You would almost certainly refuse such a request. What gets weird is when most people are approached by a figure of authority, such as a person in a uniform, they tend to comply. A good, from the police department's perspective, law enforcement officer can get almost anyone to consent to a search.
The issue is that until a warrant is issued or an arrest is made there is very little difference between a law enforcement officer, a uniformed security guard or me asking to search you or your car. There are some areas related to preservation of evidence and officer safety that give law enforcement some additional latitude but those situations generally require the officer has legal reason, and thus authority, to seize you meaning you are not free to go. The detention short of an arrest is one of the things law enforcement can do that you, I and the mall security guard should not attempt.
The other big difference is that we, collectively or collectively enough, have decided to give law enforcement officers guns, sticks, handcuffs and a system to make it more and more difficult to refuse the voluntary interaction.
But you, Joe_Dragon, and that mall security guard have a lot more law enforcement authority than you may believe. Liability and safety concerns, though, generally lead to employer policies prohibiting mall security guards from doing anything other than Observe and Report.
Certainly physics dictates that lower levels of energy should cause lower levels of damage and, therefore, accidents that occur at lower speeds should have less damage and fewer fatalities.
The problem, though, is human behavior. Those same studies indicate that experienced drivers will tend to drive near the design limits of the road and, therefore, those studies recommend setting the speed limit 5-10 mph below the roads design point.
The bigger question which is also raised is at what cost are we willing to accept lower speeds. We could totally eliminate traffic fatalities by eliminating traffic. Even allowing traffic, the closer to zero the speed of the cars then the lower the fatalities.
My personal opinion is that we are targeting the wrong issue. It's generally not speed alone that causes the accidents but speed combined with something else: unsafe lane changes, following too closely and driving aggressively. The flip side are people who have no clue about driving and do things that help promote some of those behaviors.
I'd be very happy with variable speed limits including some areas of the country with no limit if it was combined with exceedingly heavy punishment for the other issues such as distracted driving, unsafe lane changes, etc.
I think the 80 mph speed limit between El Paso and San Antonio is too low in many places. On the other hand, the 60 mph through Houston is often hard to reach in a reasonably safe manner.
My greatest fear and disappointment is that we have created a driving culture in the U.S. that lacks serious responsibility amongst the individual drivers forcing all of us to drive to the lowest common denominator of safety.
The first study you cite isn't related to lower speeds but lower speed variances and, in the first page abstract, says, "...accident rates do not necessarily increase with an increase in average speed but do increase with an increase in speed variance."
The third study really speaks about speed limits on urban roads, where the majority of accidents occur, rather than interstates.
The Solomon Curve speaks more directly to the real issue of speed and accidents and relates to speed differentials. Solomon's results have been duplicated many times and the issue is that there is a higher likelihood of being in an accident as an individual's speed varies from the average speed. Interestingly, going much slower than the average speed seems to indicate a higher likelihood of being involved in an accident.
I spend a lot of time driving across country and the worst places in my experience are the interstates in urban areas. Those areas tend to have artificially lower speed limits to deal with maximum traffic capacity for rush hour. When driving through these areas during non-rush hour times I would feel that I would be run over if I drove anywhere near the speed limit. The first study you cite specifically talks about finding the ideal speed limit related to the highway speed design point and that artificially setting the speed limit too low related to the design point increases the probability of accidents.
Simply having a lower speed limit does not, in itself, result in lower accident rates.
They are almost certainly not offered way below par. Par value for Oracle stock is $0.01 per share.
Perhaps you meant his stock options were issued below market value. Doing so would be a huge problem for Oracle and Larry.
I think Ellison's stock options are NQSOs (non-qualified stock options). There's an extremely low possibility he was issued ISOs (Incentive Stock Options) - I say low possibility because ISOs are complex for both the company and the recipient.
NQSOs are issued to many employees at Oracle and they all fall under a filed stock option plan. The options must be issued at market value. The market value used by Oracle used to be the closing price on the day the option was issued. (There are other IRS approved methods for determining market value such as sampling lowest closing price over a 30-day period).
When Larry gets an option each option is priced at the market closing price on the date issued. Yesterday's close was $33.50.
Larry can exercise his options in one of two ways after the defined vesting period has occurred. (The vesting period for Oracle's stock options is 4 years which means he is permitted to exercise 25% of the granted options each year starting after 1 year has passed. The options expire after 10 years - if he doesn't exercise them he loses them.)
Larry can do a same-day-sale exercise. In this case he would use the value of immediately selling the shares on the open market to purchase the options. If he was granted 1,000 shares at an exercise price of $33.50 and the current market price is $43.50 then on the first year he could get $2,500 in income. (Exercising 250 shares with a same-day-sale netting $10 per share.)
With a same-day-sale he would pay ordinary income taxes on the $2,500.
Larry could also simply purchase the shares with his own money. In this case he would have to pay $83,750 to buy the 250 shares available to him. If he holds those 250 shares for less than two-years then he would owe ordinary income tax on the difference between what he paid and the price at which he sold them. If, however, he holds those shares for more than two years then he would pay the capital gains rate on those shares.
Larry will only make money if the price of the stock increases. In the case of a same-day exercise he takes no risk with his personal money and has to pay ordinary income tax on the profit. In the case of an outright purchase then he is placing his personal money at risk on the value of the company increasing over time and would only owe capital gains taxes on any profit if he risks his money for at least two years.
If, as others have argued here, the stock loses 99% of its value then Larry would make nothing and, if he had purchased the stock outright he would lose 99% of his personal money tied to that particular option.
I don't know what he does today but he used to wait until near the end of the exercise period (10 years) before purchasing the stock outright rather than a same-day exercise.
I think it's more that we have an expectation that someone is "supposed to be looking out for us."
When we have an expectation that the government should take the role of parent and have been conditioned that said government gives us our rights then we end up with a feeling that we have no control over what they do or want to do.
The charges of what has happened are outrageous enough even absent an actual conspiracy.
We are lost. We, collectively, believe we serve the government in exchange for some level of security and diminishment of personal responsibility.
It took us a while to get here and it will take multiple generations before we can get back to government as the subservient and enough outrage about loss of personal liberty to prevent these types of abuses.
It is unfortunate that those who are the most outraged and most willing to do something about it are labeled as the fringe of the fringe.
Certainly this varies from country to country, but, in the U.S. roads, sanitation, aqueducts, etc. are paid by local taxes (states, counties and municipalities) and fees.
We (the U.S.) ended up with a corrupt system where the national government takes a lot of revenue from the individual states and then funnels it right back to those states for some of those projects.
The majority of national-level taxes collected and debt incurred in the U.S. go to income redistribution via one program or another.
Actually, the House has passed a number of budgets. All have been shot down by the Senate or have not been brought to a vote. Even if they had been accepted by the Senate they would be vetoed by Obama.
There hasn't been a real budget passed pretty much since Obama took office. The old budgeting model was to have a budget for each individual agency or, sometimes, groups of agencies. The last few years have seen continuing resolutions; its very name tells you what it is: a resolution to continue last year's spending with no formal budgeting process.
What the House is attempting now is a combination of old fashioned budgeting with the current continuing resolution model - pass an individual continuing resolution for each department. The Senate is rejecting those.
This is how policing and fire fighting started to begin with. Neighbors would band together and volunteer to patrol the streets to prevent crime. Some rural areas still use an emergency siren to summon the area's volunteer fire fighting force; first one to the station drives the truck.
At some point we decided we wanted a dedicated force so we banded together and started paying the police and fire fighters as professionals. But they were still our neighbors and friends and part of the community.
When our communities became too large for everyone to know one another and our local management organization, the government, became too large to care we ended up in the situation we have today of us and them. There are people who really believe the government "gives" us protection in the form of police officers and fire fighters. Those who believe this forget that we banded together to create those institutions to serve us and save us the trouble of having to volunteer ourselves.
Once the government became a foundational institution we just assumed that "they" had the responsibility to protect "us", we accepted that unions were formed to negotiate with "us" and we assume that we're prohibited from protecting ourselves.
The professionalization of the police and fire fighting organizations are what allowed huge parts of the population to justify their abdication of personal responsibility.
I can't argue against that professionalization because of the efficiencies it should deliver. I can, however, argue that community policing is sorely needed in many parts of this country. Any profession, unionized or not, is going to fight against competition.
We need to remind "them" that we didn't give them a monopoly on protecting us and we certainly didn't abdicate our own right of self protection and preservation.
The San Francisco Fire Chief just banned fire helmet mounted cameras after helmet-cam footage from the Asiana crash became public. Some say it was done to protect the privacy of victims, others to protect the city from liability as in this case where one of the victims was still alive when run over by a responding fire truck.
The lowest survey numbers come from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a part of the U.S. Department of Justice. They put the number of defensive uses of a firearm at about 225 per day (335,000 times between 2007 and 2011). There are other surveys that put the numbers much, much higher. http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4616
I live in Arizona and spend a lot of time in Louisiana. I carry my pistol almost always, sometimes concealed and sometimes openly. I often go into Phoenix SkyHarbor Airport openly carrying my pistol and have asked police officers for directions while doing so - no one batted an eye. I've done this recently and I've done it often. It is not illegal to carry a loaded firearm in the non-secure areas of airports in many states.
As to your question, "WHY?" I almost always carry and I'm not going to disarm because I'm going into an airport to greet someone arriving. The more natural question to me is, "Why not?" If I go every where else like this and it's legal why would I treat the airport any differently. I don't understand your conclusion that a "sidearm at best is NO help at all and at worst could cause a huge problem." I'd prefer to rely on my close to 300 hours of defensive pistol training over the P.O.S.T. standards of 24 hours for many police departments.
Regarding the adult conversation about what to do about the crazy people, I agree - why aren't we talking about the "crazy people" problem?
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4616), between 2007 and 2011, people used firearms over 335,000 times to defend against crime - averages about 225 times per day in the U.S. 235,700 times a firearm was used to defend against violent crime and just over 100,000 times to defend against property crime.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics isn't the only organization that conducts these surveys. However, their numbers are the lowest of the formal surveys that have been conducted.
To defend our country in the absence of a standing army, we must allow the civilians to arm themselves to serve in the army when it is assembled".
This is one of the scarier statements I've read, "...we must allow the civilians to arm themselves...". The statement itself shows the low level of understanding of the U.S. Constitution in this country.
The Bill of Rights gives zero, none, no rights to the people. There are no rights in the Bill of Rights that "allow civilians" to do something. It is just the opposite that is true. Read the preamble to the Bill of Rights and you may get a better understanding that the Bill of Rights is not a grant from the government to the people but, rather, further restrictions on the national government placed there by the people.
Too many people believe the 1st amendment gives them the right to free speech. It does not. The language of the 1st amendment is prohibitory on the national government, "Congress shall make no law..."
The 2nd amendment is also a prohibition on the national government, "...shall not be infringed."
The people gave permission to the government to have guns, not the other way around. The type of argument posited here scares me because it sounds like:
"Well, the government gave us this right early on because of some specific issues we had related to having a standing army and since we no longer have those issues then the government can just take away the right. Let's just get rid of the 2nd amendment and we can all live in peace."
To me, it's as if people believe the government was always there and decided to give us stuff: rights, schools, highways, fire departments, health care, police departments, etc., etc. The fact is that we decided to create a government in order to better manage those things we created. As this concept of government-as-benefactor grows people are losing sight of the liberty they have as individuals and turning to the government in a mother-may-I mode hoping upon hope the government grants them what they want.
California really doesn't care about science behind labeling, hence the signs in stores that say, "This product contains products known to the state of California to cause cancer." The sign doesn't say known to science, accepted by science, proven by some scientific method - it says that the legislature voted one day and decided it was bad. This causes truly bad chemicals to be mixed in with a larger body of not-so-bad chemicals and that just causes people to ignore all the warnings.
Pretty soon they'll have a sign that says, "Warning, this product contains:" followed by the periodic table.
However, if I faced the same threats as the President then yes, I would be entitled to Sidewinder missiles. Although I think it unlikely they are actually sidewinders given that sidewinders are meant to be aircraft mounted.
I have the right to defend my life and the lives of those around me from whatever threat presents itself.
Committing to the project without even the most basic understanding of what it entails. I've worked for enough of those managers and on enough of those projects that I don't expect this one to see the light of day either.
In this case, Obama is just another pointy-haired blatherskite wondering why the systems aren't already up and running.
I own a number of AR-15s, yet I am not obsessed with owning them.
It should come as no surprise that the market (those of us who own AR-15s) favors efficiency, standards and economies of scale.
The AR-15 is often referred to as a platform because it has a base design that allows for the attachment of various devices.
Those devices include slings (for easier carrying), optics (for easier and faster target acquisition), adjustable stocks (to fit people of different sizes and different clothing choices), etc., etc. The fact that the market has standardized around this platform is what makes it effective, less expensive and more efficient.
Why do those who are opposed to so-called "assault weapons" refuse to recognize the efficiency of the market delivering a user-friendly firearm? That, essentially, is what an AR-15 has become.
Why do you believe that someone who has an AR-15 is desperate to be scary rather than efficient?
The AR-15 is a low-power rifle that is easy to manage by people of many sizes and capabilities. Its modularity delivers efficiency in the platform, the fact that someone finds its looks to be scary puzzles me. I understand if someone's afraid of guns, I don't understand why someone's afraid of one particular gun over another just because of its appearance.
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I never said it should be either zero effort or zero cost.
My original comment was related to your request for a list of other "regulations" that make it difficult to start a business in the US.
My example pointed out that 60% of our start up costs were related to government regulations. I followed up with the fact that states find regulations so burdensome that they've adopted organizations designed to guide people through those regulations. I also replied that a market has been created to provide services to make it easier and, finally, I pointed out that the IRS is the face of unmanageable regulations.
I never argued for zero regulations or cost but to claim that there's little to no regulatory barrier to starting a business is a bit of a stretch.
Multiple jurisdictions doing things differently. One state demands one set of documents and another state demands another. Same thing happens at the county/parish levels and at the town levels.
The $1,500 wasn't spent to "figure out the gov't stuff", it was to expedite it. Any particular regulatory requirement is easy to understand and, with time, compliance isn't difficult. Getting ALL regulatory components managed in an efficient manner and, in particular, making sure none are missed is another story entirely.
If the regulations weren't a burden then why do the states need to establish the SBTDC organizations to begin with?
A company that provides a service for money I consider a business. I've built more than one and fully understand the IRS issues.
But then again, isn't the IRS is just the face of more regulations making it difficult to start a business?
This is a common argument that stems from, I believe, not only a lack of historical context but also the absence of actually reading the plain language of the Bill of Rights or in understanding it's underlying architecture and design purpose.
Most people don't know the preamble to the Bill of Rights which starts:
"The Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution."
For some reason, there exists a widely held belief that the Bill of Rights grants rights to the people when, in actuality, the Bill of Rights places specific restrictions on the government. The plain language of the individual amendments support the preamble:
Amendment I - "Congress shall make no law..."
Amendment II - "...shall not be infringed."
Amendment III - "No Soldier shall..."
Amendment IV - "...shall not be violated..."
The Bill of Rights is not a list of rights retained by the people but is rather a list of prohibitions placed upon the government so they don't misconstrue and, therefore, misapply, the powers the document granted to the government.
The overall architecture of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights does not in any way support the argument that the second amendment is a grant of power to state militias. In Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court finally acknowledged as such.
You should take this opportunity to read the U.S. Constitution and its amendments. You may gain an appreciation for the beauty of the document and what it actually means. You may even gain a better appreciation for the argument many of us espouse about the presumption of liberty.
We just started a training business last year.
It cost us about $10,000 to start that business. $4,000 was spent on the material we needed, web site, logos, etc.
$6,000 was spent, mostly on legal fees, on licenses and making sure we adhered to government regulations at multiple levels.
Those things we needed to build the business that came from private parties (bank accounts, uniforms, office supplies, etc.) could be satisfied in a matter of days. The longest and most difficult was getting an extended validation SSL for our web site - that took two weeks because we needed a letter from our attorney.
Anything we needed from a government agency took months with multiple calls.
All items that came from the private sector came from companies that wanted our business and we had choices of providers. This created an incentive for good service and responsiveness.
All items that came from regulatory agencies generally came from organizations that said this is how it is, live with it and you better not fail any of the steps or you, literally, won't be in business.
I can say that there was one agency that approached the problem like the private sector and that was a state agency responsible for issuing state-level trade and service marks. This particular state had a web-site and 24 hour response to our applications.
We used a particular service to walk us through the various government regulations at a total cost of about $1,500. Without that service it would have taken months and months just to figure out what regulations we needed to follow and, frankly, we probably wouldn't have even attempted the exercise.
Living in the US I may or may not keep the Vita depending on how much future business I wanted to do with the company and probably some other vague emotion I happened to be feeling at that particular moment. I would look at my returning the product about the same as returning too much change given to me at a cash register - I generally return that stuff. If the company threatened legal action then they could just fuck off. I don't take to kindly to a company screwing up and then threatening me because of their error.
However, whether or not I kept it, I would demand that I receive the product I did order or a refund.
If I ordered product A and paid for product A I expect to receive product A whether or not the company sent me a different product I didn't order.
The only incentive I can think of to simplify the tax system is to require all elected officials to personally fill out their own tax returns - no paid preparers allowed, no advice allowed.
I actually think this should be required across all government agencies. We might see a different attitude towards the structure of the government if members of congress had to wait in line at the post office, the passport office or the immigration checkpoints.
The IRS is filled with humans as employees. The government has created a tax system that is overly complex which makes it easy to find simple errors in any complex return. Combine the potential for abuse with the scale of the system and it doesn't become too hard to find a large number of people who have had negative experiences.
You'll never reach 100% honesty on either side of the equation and in a system as large as ours it doesn't take a large percentage to correspond to a large number of individuals.
They have the same law enforcement power that you and I have, assuming you're not a law enforcement officer. Whether you choose to exercise it or not you have the power to affect a citizen's arrest in most jurisdictions.
The biggest difference between a law enforcement officer making an arrest and a citizen doing the same thing is liability. The law enforcement officer is likely to receive qualified immunity such that if the officer followed his or her training and department policies no personal liability will attach to the officer. You, on the other hand, will face the full brunt of any mistakes you make.
Short of conducting an actual arrest, most law enforcement interactions are based on voluntary cooperation until a threshold is crossed giving the law enforcement officer probable cause to make a formal arrest.
Anyone can have a voluntary interaction with any other person. I could approach you and ask for consent to search your car. You would almost certainly refuse such a request. What gets weird is when most people are approached by a figure of authority, such as a person in a uniform, they tend to comply. A good, from the police department's perspective, law enforcement officer can get almost anyone to consent to a search.
The issue is that until a warrant is issued or an arrest is made there is very little difference between a law enforcement officer, a uniformed security guard or me asking to search you or your car. There are some areas related to preservation of evidence and officer safety that give law enforcement some additional latitude but those situations generally require the officer has legal reason, and thus authority, to seize you meaning you are not free to go. The detention short of an arrest is one of the things law enforcement can do that you, I and the mall security guard should not attempt.
The other big difference is that we, collectively or collectively enough, have decided to give law enforcement officers guns, sticks, handcuffs and a system to make it more and more difficult to refuse the voluntary interaction.
But you, Joe_Dragon, and that mall security guard have a lot more law enforcement authority than you may believe. Liability and safety concerns, though, generally lead to employer policies prohibiting mall security guards from doing anything other than Observe and Report.
Certainly physics dictates that lower levels of energy should cause lower levels of damage and, therefore, accidents that occur at lower speeds should have less damage and fewer fatalities.
The problem, though, is human behavior. Those same studies indicate that experienced drivers will tend to drive near the design limits of the road and, therefore, those studies recommend setting the speed limit 5-10 mph below the roads design point.
The bigger question which is also raised is at what cost are we willing to accept lower speeds. We could totally eliminate traffic fatalities by eliminating traffic. Even allowing traffic, the closer to zero the speed of the cars then the lower the fatalities.
My personal opinion is that we are targeting the wrong issue. It's generally not speed alone that causes the accidents but speed combined with something else: unsafe lane changes, following too closely and driving aggressively. The flip side are people who have no clue about driving and do things that help promote some of those behaviors.
I'd be very happy with variable speed limits including some areas of the country with no limit if it was combined with exceedingly heavy punishment for the other issues such as distracted driving, unsafe lane changes, etc.
I think the 80 mph speed limit between El Paso and San Antonio is too low in many places. On the other hand, the 60 mph through Houston is often hard to reach in a reasonably safe manner.
My greatest fear and disappointment is that we have created a driving culture in the U.S. that lacks serious responsibility amongst the individual drivers forcing all of us to drive to the lowest common denominator of safety.
The first study you cite isn't related to lower speeds but lower speed variances and, in the first page abstract, says, "...accident rates do not necessarily increase with an increase in average speed but do increase with an increase in speed variance."
The third study really speaks about speed limits on urban roads, where the majority of accidents occur, rather than interstates.
The Solomon Curve speaks more directly to the real issue of speed and accidents and relates to speed differentials. Solomon's results have been duplicated many times and the issue is that there is a higher likelihood of being in an accident as an individual's speed varies from the average speed. Interestingly, going much slower than the average speed seems to indicate a higher likelihood of being involved in an accident.
I spend a lot of time driving across country and the worst places in my experience are the interstates in urban areas. Those areas tend to have artificially lower speed limits to deal with maximum traffic capacity for rush hour. When driving through these areas during non-rush hour times I would feel that I would be run over if I drove anywhere near the speed limit. The first study you cite specifically talks about finding the ideal speed limit related to the highway speed design point and that artificially setting the speed limit too low related to the design point increases the probability of accidents.
Simply having a lower speed limit does not, in itself, result in lower accident rates.
They are almost certainly not offered way below par. Par value for Oracle stock is $0.01 per share.
Perhaps you meant his stock options were issued below market value. Doing so would be a huge problem for Oracle and Larry.
I think Ellison's stock options are NQSOs (non-qualified stock options). There's an extremely low possibility he was issued ISOs (Incentive Stock Options) - I say low possibility because ISOs are complex for both the company and the recipient.
NQSOs are issued to many employees at Oracle and they all fall under a filed stock option plan. The options must be issued at market value. The market value used by Oracle used to be the closing price on the day the option was issued. (There are other IRS approved methods for determining market value such as sampling lowest closing price over a 30-day period).
When Larry gets an option each option is priced at the market closing price on the date issued. Yesterday's close was $33.50.
Larry can exercise his options in one of two ways after the defined vesting period has occurred. (The vesting period for Oracle's stock options is 4 years which means he is permitted to exercise 25% of the granted options each year starting after 1 year has passed. The options expire after 10 years - if he doesn't exercise them he loses them.)
Larry can do a same-day-sale exercise. In this case he would use the value of immediately selling the shares on the open market to purchase the options. If he was granted 1,000 shares at an exercise price of $33.50 and the current market price is $43.50 then on the first year he could get $2,500 in income. (Exercising 250 shares with a same-day-sale netting $10 per share.)
With a same-day-sale he would pay ordinary income taxes on the $2,500.
Larry could also simply purchase the shares with his own money. In this case he would have to pay $83,750 to buy the 250 shares available to him. If he holds those 250 shares for less than two-years then he would owe ordinary income tax on the difference between what he paid and the price at which he sold them. If, however, he holds those shares for more than two years then he would pay the capital gains rate on those shares.
Larry will only make money if the price of the stock increases. In the case of a same-day exercise he takes no risk with his personal money and has to pay ordinary income tax on the profit. In the case of an outright purchase then he is placing his personal money at risk on the value of the company increasing over time and would only owe capital gains taxes on any profit if he risks his money for at least two years.
If, as others have argued here, the stock loses 99% of its value then Larry would make nothing and, if he had purchased the stock outright he would lose 99% of his personal money tied to that particular option.
I don't know what he does today but he used to wait until near the end of the exercise period (10 years) before purchasing the stock outright rather than a same-day exercise.
Subsidizing un-employment slows re-entry to the work force.
I think it's more that we have an expectation that someone is "supposed to be looking out for us."
When we have an expectation that the government should take the role of parent and have been conditioned that said government gives us our rights then we end up with a feeling that we have no control over what they do or want to do.
The charges of what has happened are outrageous enough even absent an actual conspiracy.
We are lost. We, collectively, believe we serve the government in exchange for some level of security and diminishment of personal responsibility.
It took us a while to get here and it will take multiple generations before we can get back to government as the subservient and enough outrage about loss of personal liberty to prevent these types of abuses.
It is unfortunate that those who are the most outraged and most willing to do something about it are labeled as the fringe of the fringe.
Certainly this varies from country to country, but, in the U.S. roads, sanitation, aqueducts, etc. are paid by local taxes (states, counties and municipalities) and fees.
We (the U.S.) ended up with a corrupt system where the national government takes a lot of revenue from the individual states and then funnels it right back to those states for some of those projects.
The majority of national-level taxes collected and debt incurred in the U.S. go to income redistribution via one program or another.
Actually, the House has passed a number of budgets. All have been shot down by the Senate or have not been brought to a vote. Even if they had been accepted by the Senate they would be vetoed by Obama.
There hasn't been a real budget passed pretty much since Obama took office. The old budgeting model was to have a budget for each individual agency or, sometimes, groups of agencies. The last few years have seen continuing resolutions; its very name tells you what it is: a resolution to continue last year's spending with no formal budgeting process.
What the House is attempting now is a combination of old fashioned budgeting with the current continuing resolution model - pass an individual continuing resolution for each department. The Senate is rejecting those.
This is how policing and fire fighting started to begin with. Neighbors would band together and volunteer to patrol the streets to prevent crime. Some rural areas still use an emergency siren to summon the area's volunteer fire fighting force; first one to the station drives the truck.
At some point we decided we wanted a dedicated force so we banded together and started paying the police and fire fighters as professionals. But they were still our neighbors and friends and part of the community.
When our communities became too large for everyone to know one another and our local management organization, the government, became too large to care we ended up in the situation we have today of us and them. There are people who really believe the government "gives" us protection in the form of police officers and fire fighters. Those who believe this forget that we banded together to create those institutions to serve us and save us the trouble of having to volunteer ourselves.
Once the government became a foundational institution we just assumed that "they" had the responsibility to protect "us", we accepted that unions were formed to negotiate with "us" and we assume that we're prohibited from protecting ourselves.
The professionalization of the police and fire fighting organizations are what allowed huge parts of the population to justify their abdication of personal responsibility.
I can't argue against that professionalization because of the efficiencies it should deliver. I can, however, argue that community policing is sorely needed in many parts of this country. Any profession, unionized or not, is going to fight against competition.
We need to remind "them" that we didn't give them a monopoly on protecting us and we certainly didn't abdicate our own right of self protection and preservation.
The San Francisco Fire Chief just banned fire helmet mounted cameras after helmet-cam footage from the Asiana crash became public. Some say it was done to protect the privacy of victims, others to protect the city from liability as in this case where one of the victims was still alive when run over by a responding fire truck.
The lowest survey numbers come from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a part of the U.S. Department of Justice. They put the number of defensive uses of a firearm at about 225 per day (335,000 times between 2007 and 2011). There are other surveys that put the numbers much, much higher. http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4616
I live in Arizona and spend a lot of time in Louisiana. I carry my pistol almost always, sometimes concealed and sometimes openly. I often go into Phoenix SkyHarbor Airport openly carrying my pistol and have asked police officers for directions while doing so - no one batted an eye. I've done this recently and I've done it often. It is not illegal to carry a loaded firearm in the non-secure areas of airports in many states.
As to your question, "WHY?" I almost always carry and I'm not going to disarm because I'm going into an airport to greet someone arriving. The more natural question to me is, "Why not?" If I go every where else like this and it's legal why would I treat the airport any differently. I don't understand your conclusion that a "sidearm at best is NO help at all and at worst could cause a huge problem." I'd prefer to rely on my close to 300 hours of defensive pistol training over the P.O.S.T. standards of 24 hours for many police departments.
Regarding the adult conversation about what to do about the crazy people, I agree - why aren't we talking about the "crazy people" problem?
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4616), between 2007 and 2011, people used firearms over 335,000 times to defend against crime - averages about 225 times per day in the U.S. 235,700 times a firearm was used to defend against violent crime and just over 100,000 times to defend against property crime.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics isn't the only organization that conducts these surveys. However, their numbers are the lowest of the formal surveys that have been conducted.
To defend our country in the absence of a standing army, we must allow the civilians to arm themselves to serve in the army when it is assembled".
This is one of the scarier statements I've read, "...we must allow the civilians to arm themselves...". The statement itself shows the low level of understanding of the U.S. Constitution in this country.
The Bill of Rights gives zero, none, no rights to the people. There are no rights in the Bill of Rights that "allow civilians" to do something. It is just the opposite that is true. Read the preamble to the Bill of Rights and you may get a better understanding that the Bill of Rights is not a grant from the government to the people but, rather, further restrictions on the national government placed there by the people.
Too many people believe the 1st amendment gives them the right to free speech. It does not. The language of the 1st amendment is prohibitory on the national government, "Congress shall make no law..."
The 2nd amendment is also a prohibition on the national government, "...shall not be infringed."
The people gave permission to the government to have guns, not the other way around. The type of argument posited here scares me because it sounds like:
"Well, the government gave us this right early on because of some specific issues we had related to having a standing army and since we no longer have those issues then the government can just take away the right. Let's just get rid of the 2nd amendment and we can all live in peace."
To me, it's as if people believe the government was always there and decided to give us stuff: rights, schools, highways, fire departments, health care, police departments, etc., etc. The fact is that we decided to create a government in order to better manage those things we created. As this concept of government-as-benefactor grows people are losing sight of the liberty they have as individuals and turning to the government in a mother-may-I mode hoping upon hope the government grants them what they want.
California really doesn't care about science behind labeling, hence the signs in stores that say, "This product contains products known to the state of California to cause cancer." The sign doesn't say known to science, accepted by science, proven by some scientific method - it says that the legislature voted one day and decided it was bad. This causes truly bad chemicals to be mixed in with a larger body of not-so-bad chemicals and that just causes people to ignore all the warnings.
Pretty soon they'll have a sign that says, "Warning, this product contains:" followed by the periodic table.
Nice straw man.
However, if I faced the same threats as the President then yes, I would be entitled to Sidewinder missiles. Although I think it unlikely they are actually sidewinders given that sidewinders are meant to be aircraft mounted.
I have the right to defend my life and the lives of those around me from whatever threat presents itself.
Committing to the project without even the most basic understanding of what it entails. I've worked for enough of those managers and on enough of those projects that I don't expect this one to see the light of day either.
In this case, Obama is just another pointy-haired blatherskite wondering why the systems aren't already up and running.
I own a number of AR-15s, yet I am not obsessed with owning them.
It should come as no surprise that the market (those of us who own AR-15s) favors efficiency, standards and economies of scale.
The AR-15 is often referred to as a platform because it has a base design that allows for the attachment of various devices.
Those devices include slings (for easier carrying), optics (for easier and faster target acquisition), adjustable stocks (to fit people of different sizes and different clothing choices), etc., etc. The fact that the market has standardized around this platform is what makes it effective, less expensive and more efficient.
Why do those who are opposed to so-called "assault weapons" refuse to recognize the efficiency of the market delivering a user-friendly firearm? That, essentially, is what an AR-15 has become.
Why do you believe that someone who has an AR-15 is desperate to be scary rather than efficient?
The AR-15 is a low-power rifle that is easy to manage by people of many sizes and capabilities. Its modularity delivers efficiency in the platform, the fact that someone finds its looks to be scary puzzles me. I understand if someone's afraid of guns, I don't understand why someone's afraid of one particular gun over another just because of its appearance.