Yes. A flat tax is not regressive when combined with an appropriate level of a fixed distribution, it is instead a smooth progressive tax.
The numbers I started off with as a rough estimate are $2000/yr ($400 for dependent children), 50% flat tax (personal and business), 25% VAT. Eliminate welfare, unemployment, SNAP, etc. Keep SS for now but phase out slowly. Add Universal Healthcare. Eliminate taxes on dividends, capital gains, but add in a day-trader/high-speed trading transaction tax. Eliminate minimum wage entirely.
Add in low cost (but not free) universal lifetime education opportunities (on top of what will be available on-line) both academic and vocational. Establish minimum network connectivity at a fixed price.
Estate taxes are another subject, their purpose is more about preventing too much accumulation of wealth and is very nuanced, I'd like to see it go but it perhaps can't be eliminated entirely.
To get actual tax rates, take total government spending (including the UBI), take 50% of it as a flat tax against personal and business income, the other 50% from a VAT.
Some people will just sit around playing video games and writing comments on-line, but so what? Do businesses really want that person working for them anyway?
As automation reduces the need for human labor to be able to support everyone, a job will no longer be a necessity, it will be a luxury. You'll be THRILLED to have a job and pay taxes, giving you much more disposable income than others. If you can't find a job, perhaps you'll start your own businesses. People will have much more mobility, they'll be able to move to that place with no jobs (and thus housing is cheap) which will then actually start bringing jobs to it. City too expensive? No problem. Some low paying jobs might actually start to pay more simply because no one will take them since they don't have to in order to survive. Free market, baby!
It actually should boost a free market economy, and what's the alternative as automation takes over more and more jobs? Creating makework jobs to satisfy an outmoded Puritan Work Ethic (if you aren't suffering and working hard, you're a bad person and should be made to suffer, unless of course you're rich in which case you must be a good person and don't have to suffer and work hard).
You can't call this basic income, when there's at least one string attached - unemployment. This is basic welfare.
No, it's not, it's "a study". They're studying how a UBI of specific amount affects behavior in a specific group of people. More studies will need to be done, of course, including selecting a random group of people without regard to their income/asset levels, and varying the amount received per month, but this is a first step.
You really want a higher resolution than microseconds. The clock_gettime() system call returns the number of seconds and nanoseconds in two separate values. If you return the number of nanoseconds in a 64-bit signed value, you have a range of only +/- 292 years, which is limiting if you want to use it for historical dates or longer term future dates.
With a 64-bit signed seconds value you can go +/- 292 billion years. With a 64-bit value for the fractional part, you could easily increase the resolution to attoseconds (1E-18, 60 bits). Both those limits are not very constraining.
There are mods to ntpd and the time conversion libraries that do this. System clock is in real seconds since epoch, you only need to worry about leap seconds when converting between system clock and display (wall) time, which also handles time zones and leap years and everything else weird. Anyone who is dividing by 86400 to convert system clock to years, days, hours, minutes, seconds is doing it wrong. You can still divide by 86400 (or 3600 or 60) to display roughly how many hours, minutes or days a particular interval was, of course.
NTP could support this, or an auxiliary protocol defined, to distribute time conversion table changes (so with leap seconds as well as legal changes to daylight savings or other time zone changes), and to update the current difference between TAI and UTC. This would be useful even if we end up dropping DST or leap second adjustments.
Currently TAI and UTC differ by 36 seconds. For "current time", simply having that value available is sufficient for most applications that don't store the system clock value, and any that do are most likely already using a proper time conversion library.
Simply adding the ability to retrieve the clock as either "unix time (UTC-based)" or "elapsed time (TAI-based)" and convert between the two and use either as input to the time conversion routines would make it simple to update existing programs and databases. At the same time, converting once and for all to a 64-bit signed time value for seconds would help immensely with the next big time-handling crisis in about 21 years.
I fear that Google is just papering over the problem and making things more difficult to properly solve.
So now being a racist is "daring to think different"? Wow.
So it's worse to generalize that a group of people are "deplorable", because that isn't criminal, than it is to generalize that a group of people are criminals? Would you rather have someone say that "Trump supporters are rapists, they're murderers, and some, I assume, are good people"?
She said half of Trump supporters were deplorable, that's only one quarter of the country, not half. If you look at the polling on various positions of Trump supporters, that's probably low.
It's also the case that a lot of deplorable categories are strongly attracted to Trump (e.g. "alt right").
In other words, Trump supporters are racists, they're bigots, they're stupid and gullible, and some of them, I assume, are good people. Or is that just not PC to say things like that unless you're Trump?
I did do the research about a year ago, but I don't have all the numbers at hand anymore.
UBI of $2000/month per adult, $800/month per child, flat tax of about 45-50% on all income, pretty much no deductions, no taxes on capital gains or interest/dividend income (but no deduction on interest/dividend payments or capital losses), elimination of gift/estate taxes, a VAT of about 25%, instead of deducting charitable contributions the organization gets a percentage of all contributions in additional funds directly from the government, eliminate welfare/SNAP, eliminate minimum wage. Single-payer universal healthcare would be available.
If we want to continue to subsidize certain things like home loan interest, they'd be direct reductions in the interest rate rather than deductions from your taxable income. All income, except the UBI itself, would be subject to the flat tax, paid directly by the employer.
Corporate taxes would be at the same rate as the personal income tax rate, with only direct costs deductible (not business lunches or advertising or corporate jets except to the extent they can be shown to actually save money over alternative transportation). This is where capital gains and dividend payments are taxed. Depreciation of actual working assets would be allowed as ongoing expenses as long as any resale of those assets is counted as income.
The income tax (personal and corporate) would be automatically set to provide 50% of the annual budget needs, while the VAT would provide the other 50% (based on the previous two-year period's numbers or similar).
Most individuals would never need to file a tax return. Payments would all be electronic to save on costs to administer.
Eliminating capital gains and dividend income is reasonable because you're collecting the taxes through a different route - and basing the country's budget and economy on the vagaries of the stock market is insane. Taxing everything at the source eliminates most ways of avoiding taxes. If a business is paying someone under the table to avoid taxes, they are just going to be paying a higher tax themselves since those payments won't be legitimate business expenses. Etc.
Yeah, living on $24000/year for a single person might not be great, but it would give people the freedom to move to places where prices are lower without worrying about whether there will be jobs there to support them. Once they move there, of course, then more jobs will become available as the economy picks up in the low-priced areas.
A UBI turns a flat tax into a progressive tax. UBI of $24,000 and flat tax of 50% means someone with income of $48,000 is paying 0% tax, $100,000 is paying 26% tax, a couple earning $120,000 total is paying 12%, a couple with two kidswith $250,000 total income is 30%, at $1,000,000 for one person the effective rate is 48%.
One store I go to just enabled chip, processing, I was surprised that I needed to sign for a relatively small transaction, they have a $50 limit without signature with swipe. At least some other stores I use that have started using the chip allow most transactions (e.g. under $25) without a signature.
About 50% of the stores I go to regularly now use the chip, and none of them take more than 5-10 seconds to process once the transaction is rung up. With swipe, yeah, it often only takes 1-2 seconds, and I could swipe and put my card away as soon as we started, but so far all the ones I've used the chip with let me insert the card whenever I want. The only difference is I can't put it away immediately.
People will be much more able and willing to pack up and move out of the expensive places when they have the security of having the UBI until they can find a job at the new location. People who aren't willing to move out will benefit as those who do move reduce the demand on lower cost housing, and raise the demand for jobs.
Flat tax combined with fixed payment becomes progressive.
E.g. with $2000/month payment and 30% flat tax, effective tax rate at $80,000 is zero, is negative below that, and increases towards a max of 30% above. At $120,000 it's at an effective rate of 10%, at $480,000 it's 25%, at $1,000,000 it's at 27.6%.
You give everyone the UBI because that eliminates any incentive to cheat. You don't need to take money under the table while working at below-market rates in order to retain the payment. The whole point of the UBI is thst it's Universal and Unconditional.
You pay for it through taxes, so the effect of the UBI for you would be to lower your tax burden paying for it. Such a payment turns a regressive flat tax into a progressive tax. A flat tax also reduces the ability to cheat the system, and is much less expensive to administer and comply with. Many UBI proposals are combined with flat tax proposals.
Example, $1000/month, flat tax of 25% (personal, corporate, plus a VAT). You earn $120,000/year, you live with someone who isn't employed, and have two kids. Your take-home pay is reduced from $10,000 to $7,500/month (reducing your other taxes and lowering your tax bracket), but your UBI received is $3333 (dependent children receiving 1/3 the full amount). You'll also be getting Universal Healthcare (though you can pay for more if you want). Prices for things you buy might go up around 25% from the VAT (which would actually be done by taking 20% of the price you pay as a tax through the seller), but unless you spend more than $3000/month on stuff subject to the VAT, you're still ahead (even before taking into account your other taxes going down).
Above figures are rough, based on current GDP, take-home salaries, retail sales figures, and health care costs, but should be fairly close.
Actually, with a UBI allowing people to move to less expensive areas, the economies of such small towns will boom, leading to more jobs, which will then be available to those new people. Rather than be stuck at 10k or whatever, they'll be able to afford even more, leading to a growth in housing (leading to more jobs), making way for more jobless people to move there, and so on.
Most people WANT to work, to get more, to improve their life. Few dream of retiring to the luxuriant lifestyle of 10k/year.
A more realistic figure is about $2000/month, get there by starting small ($100/month) and increase it by $100 every 4 months or so. Fund with a flat tax (corporate, personal, and VAT), set to recover exactly the amount required. It should be around 1.8% or so for $100/month. UBI and the flat tax amount would not be reported as income, so your taxable income (and tax bracket) would go down, and of course you'd also be getting the UBI back to offset those additional taxes. Reduce the minimum wage by about $0.50/hr for each $100/month of UBI. Dependent children get 1/3 of the payment for an adult.
Reduce budget for other programs as the need (and eligibility) is reduced, which then lowers the remaining taxes. You'd still want a Universal Healthcare program, including assistance for people who are still unable to manage their lives even with a UBI.
Your scholarship, the money to pay for your lab work, even the very existence of that college is due in large part to resources provided by society precisely so people could benefit as you have. If you hadn't been able to come to this country, and you were now living in poverty somewhere with no opportunities, would that have been a reflection on your worth? Sure, congratulations, some of what you have now is very much through your own talents and determination, but you also were lucky enough to be in a position where that even mattered. One illness, one missed opportunity, could have prevented you from succeeding.
Unless you survived on your own after being born "naked and afraid" in the wilderness, you are not a self-made person, you are the beneficiary of millions of people before you.
Many UBI methods are combined with a flat tax. One way of phasing it in (which is almost certainly going to be necessary, as a straight jump to a full UBI would be disruptive) would be to start off small (say, $100/month distributed), funded entirely by a very small flat tax.
The UBI itself would never be taxed itself, nor counted as income for setting tax brackets. The amount that is taken out by the flat tax is also not not reportable as income. The tax rate itself would set to be be exactly what's needed to cover the payments, and would be on corporate profits, personal income, and as an added VAT, all at the same rate.
You could distribute $100/month ($1200/year) for about a 1.8% flat tax/VAT rate while leaving everything else alone, then adjust other spending (and thus the need for other taxes) as the UBI increasingly reduces the need for other services. You can also start to adjust minimum wage rates as the UBI increases (e.g. by around $0.50/hour for each $100/month of UBI being distributed, delayed by a year).
So, at $1,000/month, you'd be at around 18%, $2,000/month ($24,000/year) around 36%. At that rate, if you're making less than $70,000/year, you would be receiving as much in UBI payments as you're paying in salary. You'd also be paying more for purchased items because of the VAT, but that's before taking into account lower additional taxes (that you currently already pay) as the government reduces costs of other programs, reduced prices of good through the reduction in minimum wage, etc. Some of that reduction would be automatic as your reportable income (and tax bracket) go down as the flat tax increases.
I'd like to see the elimination of capital gains tax because the budget of the country shouldn't depend on the whims of the market. You'd also eliminate the primary means of gaming the tax system. Instead, add a very small transaction tax (0.05% - 0.1%, perhaps.
With a flat tax system, you eliminate most deductions. Instead, use direct subsidies for things we want to encourage (e.g. subsidize lower interest rates on home mortgages, but only up to a certain amount for the loan). For charitible contributions, make direct matching funds (e.g. at 20% of total contributions) instead of giving tax deductions, meaning contributions from rich people are no longer being subsidized by everyone else, everyone's contributions are as valuable regardless of how much money you make. The VAT rate could be made lower for food and medicine and other basic necessities. Much more directly subsidizing things would be better than our current indirect subsidy through income tax policy where your subsidy is higher the richer you are.
You'd still need additional mechanisms - Universal Healthcare would still need to exist (and could be the primary solution for almost all circumstances beyond the norm, whether mental or physical needs). You wouldn't eliminate Social Security, you'd phase it out over time (people who have paid into it for their entire lives shouldn't just lose it arbitrarily). Inexpensive education (including online) and communication (computers and internet), affordable housing, public transportation, there are still many things that we'd want to have government doing.
$24,000/year seems to me a reasonable goal. Most people want a significantly higher standard of living than that will provide, so there's still plenty of motivation to do something useful, with no disincentives to making additional money. Rich people don't say "hey, I have plenty, I'm going to stop trying to make more money" - if having $24,000/year was enough to keep people from working, they'd already be doing it, there are plenty of people with a couple million in assets that could just kick back and live the grand dream of surviving on $24,000/year.
You are misunderstanding the fair-use factor 3, the amount copied. That isn't a positive defense, at best it is neutral: Google can say "We copied no more than necessary." But Oracle will try to argue that they did copy more than necessary.
None of them are positive defenses. All are factors that weigh more or less in favor of fair use or against it. They are also not exhaustive, the jury can use other factors as well. Read the jury instructions.
Amount used (in comparison to the infringed work) is an important factor. The amount of copied material compared to the rest of the infringing work is also a factor, it goes to "the purpose and character of use" - if most of your work is just copied material, it weight against fair use. In Sega, the entire ROM was copied many times in it's entirety, even downloaded from the Internet, for an explicitly commercial use, yet they won on fair use with those two factors completely against them. One factor was that none of the protected material actually ended up in the finished product, other than a very small piece of code that was challenged on trademark but not copyright (and Sega lost on that as well). The other factor was the use and purpose of the copying.
The Java API is clearly HIGHLY functional, and Google clearly copied the absolute minimum required to use it. The only copied material is the names and the relationships between the names, and changing a single character of any of those names would cause that portion of the API, and quite possibly the whole system, to completely fail. Hard to get more functional than that.
Indeed, rather than show that the API was "the heart" of Android, Oracle's demonstration served to show how functional it is (especially since ANY section of code removed from Android, whether from the API or anywhere else, would also make it fail).
The "nature of the copyrighted work" is clearly functional. You don't decide you want to replace the API in your project because you're tired of looking at this one and would like something fresh and new. You don't buy a product that uses Java inside for the artfully selected names like java.net.HttpURLConnection.setChunkedStreamingMode(), and if all the names were changed to AAAAA AAAAB AAAAC, etc. it would be just as functional, except it would be hard to write code for (so, again, the names are functional).
It may take creativity to create it, but the work is functional, and the purpose for copying it is for the function.
In brief, when considering merger for copyright protection, you need to consider the options available to Sun when they originally wrote Java: there were plenty of ways they could have written any of those APIs.
The CAFC confused merger with scènes à faire. Merger is independent of point of view, it either is or it isn't.
The API is an abstraction, it is an idea, protection is not supposed to "extend" to it. The expression is indeed copyrighted, but the idea expressed is not protected.
The CAFC said that the "idea" was "an API", but that isn't what is expressed by the source code. The source code expresses a very specific API, the Java API. That is the "idea" that is not protected, whether you call it a process, a system, or a method of operation, 102(b) says the idea is not protected.
Look at Baker v Selden or Bikram, the idea was not "an accounting system" or "a sequence of yoga poses" the way the CAFC would have you believe. In Bikram the Ninth completely rejected that the idea of "the Sequence" could be protected even though there were any number of ways it could have been created. Bikram was just about the idea being used, but once you have the ruling that the idea is not protected, merger can come into play. For example, expressing the Sequence as a simple list of each of the 26 poses by name would not be protected expression, as almost any expres
The size is mostly irrelevant though. In one case (Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises) someone copied 400 words out of a 200,000 word book (the supreme court ruled against them). As one judge said, "you can't escape guilt by showing how much you didn't copy." You have to look at the importance of the copying, and whether they used more than necessary for the purpose.
As a general principle, yes, but all the factors are weighed. It was the same percentage, but it was stand-alone paragraphs and sentences, not scattered individual names that don't stand on their own. They also were a much larger portion of the infringing work, it was not functional, it wasn't yet published, it reduced demand for the original.
That's not really what is meant by transformative. Here Google's approach was to say, "Before we did this, Java couldn't be used on mobile. We created a new work that allowed people to use Java on mobile." Oracle's counter-argument was to show phones that did have J2SE on mobile (SavaJe, Blackberry).
Oracle wouldn't allow Google to license JavaSE for a phone.
It was transformative because they created entirely new implementation code, and used the existing API in new ways. That it wasn't transformative in the same way a parody is transformative is, I submit, entirely due to the highly functional nature of the work.
Oracle's counter to this was to quote Google's own expert witness, Joshua Bloch, who said, "Writing a program is very much a creative process." [...] The appellate court also pointed out that just because cod is functional, that doesn't prevent it from being creative (otherwise basically no code could be copyrighted, since it's all functional).
102(b) doesn't say "unless it's really creative". The actual expression (the source code) doesn't lose protection unless there's merger - which was the case here because any changes to the actual declarations would change the functionality. 97% of the code retained protection, which is why Google had to write their own.
Another way to say it is that, given the API specification, there is no creativity required to turn it into the declaring code. For example, I offer the javap program.
The court is supposed to look at potential income lost here. If your argument were correct, it would mean the GPL is meaningless because anyone could claim the market value was zero. You can't just take code and not follow the license.
No, the GPL has requirements other than money, and no one has ever thought it restricted reimpkementing an API. It works just fine, and many open source projects have reimplemented APIs without license.
OpenJDK was released with the Classpath exception. Oracle had already reduced any potential income with OpenJDK, having two free alternatives with almost identical licensing requirements wouldn't have hurt the market more than having just OpenJDK.
I don't know why you think this. clean room is a technique to ensure that no more was copied than necessary, which would weigh favorably on fair use factor three (or at least prevent it from weighing negatively, since the amount copied is at best a neutral factor).
A clean room requires functional specifications, the Java API itself, to be passed in. That API was ruled to be protected, thus there'd be nothing to pass in that was clean. If they passed it in anyway, they would have produced exactly the same code that was found infringing (except maybe without the rangeCheck oops, which didn't make any difference). It was already the case that no more than was necessary was copied.
True, they did accidentally copy one method, and Oracle agreed to accept $0 in damages.
Clean room is how you avoid infringement entirely, in which case fair use isn't even brought up. In this case, the CAFC made the whole process of clean room implementation impossible anyway.
Google is indeed for profit, however giving away the code (including source code) at no cost isn't particularly indicative of commercial use and exploitation. A company donating money to education can deduct it from their taxes even though it generates commercially valuable good will or even mind share and future customers. Plenty of open source is sold, and even more is used for commercial purposes.
It most certainly was for interoperability, otherwise there was no reason to use it at all. There are plenty of Java libraries that work fine with just those 37 packages, and interoperability with developer's skills is also something a jury might well find relevant - Oracle doesn't own their skills and training.
The reason Google didn't take a license was that Sun would only license JavaME for use on a mobile device (which, by the way, was also not interoperable with JavaSE).
Google's use was also transformative. They selected out a useful subset of the Java API, rewrote all of the actual implementation and documentation (97% of the code), then wrote a whole lot more more new APIs using the old APIs in new ways; together the old APIs and new APIs presented a lot of new capabilities that seem to have done a lot better than JavaME in the smartphone area.
The nature of the copyrighted work was highly functional, a factor strongly in favor of fair use. Oracle even proved it, just change a single name by a single character and the whole thing won't work.
The total amount that was actually used from Oracle's API code was very tiny, less than 0.2%, just the names and relationships between those names, in 37 packages out of 166, so maybe 20% of 3% of 22%. That's 20 (scattered) words out of 10,000.
As for market impact, Oracle had OpenJDK available for free as well, licensed under GPLv2+CE. Anyone who wanted to use JavaSE could already get it for free - and if the additional parts of the API were that important to people in any significant number, OpenJDK would be much more desirable than Google's truncated implementation.
No, clean room wouldn't have made a difference. Google in fact was found to not infringe on any of the "implementation code", it was the declarations that were found by the appeals court to infringe. There is no way to write those declarations another way without changing the API, so a clean room would not give any different result. It was the API itself that was found to be protected, so no matter how you try to do it, the information needed by the clean room is "dirty". A clean room implementation is impossible given the CAFC decision.
If you're putting $300 billion dollars into the economy every month (or whatever level it would be), you have to take almost that much out or you have uncontrolled inflation.
You have no income, net $50,000. You have income of $100,000, net $100,000, tax rate 0% You have income of $200,000, net $150,000, tax rate 25% You have income of $500,000, net $300,000, tax rate 40%
Paying a Basic Income close to what it actually costs people to live right now wouldn't increase prices by much, if any.
Paying a Basic Income of $1 million would increase what it actually costs people to live to around $1 million.
That's why you calibrate it to what prices are right now, and you phase it in so that disruption can be controlled.
Why would people demand more money to do construction work? It already pays pretty well, and the people doing it are now going to need less, so they might even accept a lower rate. People aren't going to spend their entire UBI on rent, and at the level where demand will actually increase (cheap housing), rent going above where it is now will simply not be competitive.
Why would rent go up $1000? Do you think competition suddenly disappears?
People aren't going to be spending their entire monthly amount on rent. Rent may go up a little in response to increased demand, but it would only be the really cheap places that currently homeless people could now afford. In response, there would be an increase in construction, leading to increases in construction jobs.
What do you mean by skimming? Everyone gets the same amount. The only fraud would be people who aren't supposed to get it (non-citizens or whatever) or people collecting on non-existent or dead people. Much easier than the current systems.
There's much less incentive to commit crimes. Your basic income is cut off while you're incarcerated.
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Yes. A flat tax is not regressive when combined with an appropriate level of a fixed distribution, it is instead a smooth progressive tax.
The numbers I started off with as a rough estimate are $2000/yr ($400 for dependent children), 50% flat tax (personal and business), 25% VAT. Eliminate welfare, unemployment, SNAP, etc. Keep SS for now but phase out slowly. Add Universal Healthcare. Eliminate taxes on dividends, capital gains, but add in a day-trader/high-speed trading transaction tax. Eliminate minimum wage entirely.
Add in low cost (but not free) universal lifetime education opportunities (on top of what will be available on-line) both academic and vocational. Establish minimum network connectivity at a fixed price.
Estate taxes are another subject, their purpose is more about preventing too much accumulation of wealth and is very nuanced, I'd like to see it go but it perhaps can't be eliminated entirely.
To get actual tax rates, take total government spending (including the UBI), take 50% of it as a flat tax against personal and business income, the other 50% from a VAT.
Some people will just sit around playing video games and writing comments on-line, but so what? Do businesses really want that person working for them anyway?
As automation reduces the need for human labor to be able to support everyone, a job will no longer be a necessity, it will be a luxury. You'll be THRILLED to have a job and pay taxes, giving you much more disposable income than others. If you can't find a job, perhaps you'll start your own businesses. People will have much more mobility, they'll be able to move to that place with no jobs (and thus housing is cheap) which will then actually start bringing jobs to it. City too expensive? No problem. Some low paying jobs might actually start to pay more simply because no one will take them since they don't have to in order to survive. Free market, baby!
It actually should boost a free market economy, and what's the alternative as automation takes over more and more jobs? Creating makework jobs to satisfy an outmoded Puritan Work Ethic (if you aren't suffering and working hard, you're a bad person and should be made to suffer, unless of course you're rich in which case you must be a good person and don't have to suffer and work hard).
You can't call this basic income, when there's at least one string attached - unemployment. This is basic welfare.
No, it's not, it's "a study". They're studying how a UBI of specific amount affects behavior in a specific group of people. More studies will need to be done, of course, including selecting a random group of people without regard to their income/asset levels, and varying the amount received per month, but this is a first step.
You really want a higher resolution than microseconds. The clock_gettime() system call returns the number of seconds and nanoseconds in two separate values. If you return the number of nanoseconds in a 64-bit signed value, you have a range of only +/- 292 years, which is limiting if you want to use it for historical dates or longer term future dates.
With a 64-bit signed seconds value you can go +/- 292 billion years. With a 64-bit value for the fractional part, you could easily increase the resolution to attoseconds (1E-18, 60 bits). Both those limits are not very constraining.
There are mods to ntpd and the time conversion libraries that do this. System clock is in real seconds since epoch, you only need to worry about leap seconds when converting between system clock and display (wall) time, which also handles time zones and leap years and everything else weird. Anyone who is dividing by 86400 to convert system clock to years, days, hours, minutes, seconds is doing it wrong. You can still divide by 86400 (or 3600 or 60) to display roughly how many hours, minutes or days a particular interval was, of course.
NTP could support this, or an auxiliary protocol defined, to distribute time conversion table changes (so with leap seconds as well as legal changes to daylight savings or other time zone changes), and to update the current difference between TAI and UTC. This would be useful even if we end up dropping DST or leap second adjustments.
Currently TAI and UTC differ by 36 seconds. For "current time", simply having that value available is sufficient for most applications that don't store the system clock value, and any that do are most likely already using a proper time conversion library.
Simply adding the ability to retrieve the clock as either "unix time (UTC-based)" or "elapsed time (TAI-based)" and convert between the two and use either as input to the time conversion routines would make it simple to update existing programs and databases. At the same time, converting once and for all to a 64-bit signed time value for seconds would help immensely with the next big time-handling crisis in about 21 years.
I fear that Google is just papering over the problem and making things more difficult to properly solve.
Trump won because he sucks, is a terrible person and quite possibly will start WWIII. Nothing Clinton has done is even remotely close.
So now being a racist is "daring to think different"? Wow.
So it's worse to generalize that a group of people are "deplorable", because that isn't criminal, than it is to generalize that a group of people are criminals? Would you rather have someone say that "Trump supporters are rapists, they're murderers, and some, I assume, are good people"?
She said half of Trump supporters were deplorable, that's only one quarter of the country, not half. If you look at the polling on various positions of Trump supporters, that's probably low.
It's also the case that a lot of deplorable categories are strongly attracted to Trump (e.g. "alt right").
In other words, Trump supporters are racists, they're bigots, they're stupid and gullible, and some of them, I assume, are good people. Or is that just not PC to say things like that unless you're Trump?
I did do the research about a year ago, but I don't have all the numbers at hand anymore.
UBI of $2000/month per adult, $800/month per child, flat tax of about 45-50% on all income, pretty much no deductions, no taxes on capital gains or interest/dividend income (but no deduction on interest/dividend payments or capital losses), elimination of gift/estate taxes, a VAT of about 25%, instead of deducting charitable contributions the organization gets a percentage of all contributions in additional funds directly from the government, eliminate welfare/SNAP, eliminate minimum wage. Single-payer universal healthcare would be available.
If we want to continue to subsidize certain things like home loan interest, they'd be direct reductions in the interest rate rather than deductions from your taxable income. All income, except the UBI itself, would be subject to the flat tax, paid directly by the employer.
Corporate taxes would be at the same rate as the personal income tax rate, with only direct costs deductible (not business lunches or advertising or corporate jets except to the extent they can be shown to actually save money over alternative transportation). This is where capital gains and dividend payments are taxed. Depreciation of actual working assets would be allowed as ongoing expenses as long as any resale of those assets is counted as income.
The income tax (personal and corporate) would be automatically set to provide 50% of the annual budget needs, while the VAT would provide the other 50% (based on the previous two-year period's numbers or similar).
Most individuals would never need to file a tax return. Payments would all be electronic to save on costs to administer.
Eliminating capital gains and dividend income is reasonable because you're collecting the taxes through a different route - and basing the country's budget and economy on the vagaries of the stock market is insane. Taxing everything at the source eliminates most ways of avoiding taxes. If a business is paying someone under the table to avoid taxes, they are just going to be paying a higher tax themselves since those payments won't be legitimate business expenses. Etc.
Yeah, living on $24000/year for a single person might not be great, but it would give people the freedom to move to places where prices are lower without worrying about whether there will be jobs there to support them. Once they move there, of course, then more jobs will become available as the economy picks up in the low-priced areas.
A UBI turns a flat tax into a progressive tax. UBI of $24,000 and flat tax of 50% means someone with income of $48,000 is paying 0% tax, $100,000 is paying 26% tax, a couple earning $120,000 total is paying 12%, a couple with two kidswith $250,000 total income is 30%, at $1,000,000 for one person the effective rate is 48%.
One store I go to just enabled chip, processing, I was surprised that I needed to sign for a relatively small transaction, they have a $50 limit without signature with swipe. At least some other stores I use that have started using the chip allow most transactions (e.g. under $25) without a signature.
About 50% of the stores I go to regularly now use the chip, and none of them take more than 5-10 seconds to process once the transaction is rung up. With swipe, yeah, it often only takes 1-2 seconds, and I could swipe and put my card away as soon as we started, but so far all the ones I've used the chip with let me insert the card whenever I want. The only difference is I can't put it away immediately.
People will be much more able and willing to pack up and move out of the expensive places when they have the security of having the UBI until they can find a job at the new location. People who aren't willing to move out will benefit as those who do move reduce the demand on lower cost housing, and raise the demand for jobs.
Flat tax combined with fixed payment becomes progressive.
E.g. with $2000/month payment and 30% flat tax, effective tax rate at $80,000 is zero, is negative below that, and increases towards a max of 30% above. At $120,000 it's at an effective rate of 10%, at $480,000 it's 25%, at $1,000,000 it's at 27.6%.
You give everyone the UBI because that eliminates any incentive to cheat. You don't need to take money under the table while working at below-market rates in order to retain the payment. The whole point of the UBI is thst it's Universal and Unconditional.
You pay for it through taxes, so the effect of the UBI for you would be to lower your tax burden paying for it. Such a payment turns a regressive flat tax into a progressive tax. A flat tax also reduces the ability to cheat the system, and is much less expensive to administer and comply with. Many UBI proposals are combined with flat tax proposals.
Example, $1000/month, flat tax of 25% (personal, corporate, plus a VAT). You earn $120,000/year, you live with someone who isn't employed, and have two kids. Your take-home pay is reduced from $10,000 to $7,500/month (reducing your other taxes and lowering your tax bracket), but your UBI received is $3333 (dependent children receiving 1/3 the full amount). You'll also be getting Universal Healthcare (though you can pay for more if you want). Prices for things you buy might go up around 25% from the VAT (which would actually be done by taking 20% of the price you pay as a tax through the seller), but unless you spend more than $3000/month on stuff subject to the VAT, you're still ahead (even before taking into account your other taxes going down).
Above figures are rough, based on current GDP, take-home salaries, retail sales figures, and health care costs, but should be fairly close.
Actually, with a UBI allowing people to move to less expensive areas, the economies of such small towns will boom, leading to more jobs, which will then be available to those new people. Rather than be stuck at 10k or whatever, they'll be able to afford even more, leading to a growth in housing (leading to more jobs), making way for more jobless people to move there, and so on.
Most people WANT to work, to get more, to improve their life. Few dream of retiring to the luxuriant lifestyle of 10k/year.
A more realistic figure is about $2000/month, get there by starting small ($100/month) and increase it by $100 every 4 months or so. Fund with a flat tax (corporate, personal, and VAT), set to recover exactly the amount required. It should be around 1.8% or so for $100/month. UBI and the flat tax amount would not be reported as income, so your taxable income (and tax bracket) would go down, and of course you'd also be getting the UBI back to offset those additional taxes. Reduce the minimum wage by about $0.50/hr for each $100/month of UBI. Dependent children get 1/3 of the payment for an adult.
Reduce budget for other programs as the need (and eligibility) is reduced, which then lowers the remaining taxes. You'd still want a Universal Healthcare program, including assistance for people who are still unable to manage their lives even with a UBI.
Your scholarship, the money to pay for your lab work, even the very existence of that college is due in large part to resources provided by society precisely so people could benefit as you have. If you hadn't been able to come to this country, and you were now living in poverty somewhere with no opportunities, would that have been a reflection on your worth? Sure, congratulations, some of what you have now is very much through your own talents and determination, but you also were lucky enough to be in a position where that even mattered. One illness, one missed opportunity, could have prevented you from succeeding.
Unless you survived on your own after being born "naked and afraid" in the wilderness, you are not a self-made person, you are the beneficiary of millions of people before you.
Many UBI methods are combined with a flat tax. One way of phasing it in (which is almost certainly going to be necessary, as a straight jump to a full UBI would be disruptive) would be to start off small (say, $100/month distributed), funded entirely by a very small flat tax.
The UBI itself would never be taxed itself, nor counted as income for setting tax brackets. The amount that is taken out by the flat tax is also not not reportable as income. The tax rate itself would set to be be exactly what's needed to cover the payments, and would be on corporate profits, personal income, and as an added VAT, all at the same rate.
You could distribute $100/month ($1200/year) for about a 1.8% flat tax/VAT rate while leaving everything else alone, then adjust other spending (and thus the need for other taxes) as the UBI increasingly reduces the need for other services. You can also start to adjust minimum wage rates as the UBI increases (e.g. by around $0.50/hour for each $100/month of UBI being distributed, delayed by a year).
So, at $1,000/month, you'd be at around 18%, $2,000/month ($24,000/year) around 36%. At that rate, if you're making less than $70,000/year, you would be receiving as much in UBI payments as you're paying in salary. You'd also be paying more for purchased items because of the VAT, but that's before taking into account lower additional taxes (that you currently already pay) as the government reduces costs of other programs, reduced prices of good through the reduction in minimum wage, etc. Some of that reduction would be automatic as your reportable income (and tax bracket) go down as the flat tax increases.
I'd like to see the elimination of capital gains tax because the budget of the country shouldn't depend on the whims of the market. You'd also eliminate the primary means of gaming the tax system. Instead, add a very small transaction tax (0.05% - 0.1%, perhaps.
With a flat tax system, you eliminate most deductions. Instead, use direct subsidies for things we want to encourage (e.g. subsidize lower interest rates on home mortgages, but only up to a certain amount for the loan). For charitible contributions, make direct matching funds (e.g. at 20% of total contributions) instead of giving tax deductions, meaning contributions from rich people are no longer being subsidized by everyone else, everyone's contributions are as valuable regardless of how much money you make. The VAT rate could be made lower for food and medicine and other basic necessities. Much more directly subsidizing things would be better than our current indirect subsidy through income tax policy where your subsidy is higher the richer you are.
You'd still need additional mechanisms - Universal Healthcare would still need to exist (and could be the primary solution for almost all circumstances beyond the norm, whether mental or physical needs). You wouldn't eliminate Social Security, you'd phase it out over time (people who have paid into it for their entire lives shouldn't just lose it arbitrarily). Inexpensive education (including online) and communication (computers and internet), affordable housing, public transportation, there are still many things that we'd want to have government doing.
$24,000/year seems to me a reasonable goal. Most people want a significantly higher standard of living than that will provide, so there's still plenty of motivation to do something useful, with no disincentives to making additional money. Rich people don't say "hey, I have plenty, I'm going to stop trying to make more money" - if having $24,000/year was enough to keep people from working, they'd already be doing it, there are plenty of people with a couple million in assets that could just kick back and live the grand dream of surviving on $24,000/year.
You are misunderstanding the fair-use factor 3, the amount copied. That isn't a positive defense, at best it is neutral: Google can say "We copied no more than necessary." But Oracle will try to argue that they did copy more than necessary.
None of them are positive defenses. All are factors that weigh more or less in favor of fair use or against it. They are also not exhaustive, the jury can use other factors as well. Read the jury instructions.
Amount used (in comparison to the infringed work) is an important factor. The amount of copied material compared to the rest of the infringing work is also a factor, it goes to "the purpose and character of use" - if most of your work is just copied material, it weight against fair use. In Sega, the entire ROM was copied many times in it's entirety, even downloaded from the Internet, for an explicitly commercial use, yet they won on fair use with those two factors completely against them. One factor was that none of the protected material actually ended up in the finished product, other than a very small piece of code that was challenged on trademark but not copyright (and Sega lost on that as well). The other factor was the use and purpose of the copying.
The Java API is clearly HIGHLY functional, and Google clearly copied the absolute minimum required to use it. The only copied material is the names and the relationships between the names, and changing a single character of any of those names would cause that portion of the API, and quite possibly the whole system, to completely fail. Hard to get more functional than that.
Indeed, rather than show that the API was "the heart" of Android, Oracle's demonstration served to show how functional it is (especially since ANY section of code removed from Android, whether from the API or anywhere else, would also make it fail).
The "nature of the copyrighted work" is clearly functional. You don't decide you want to replace the API in your project because you're tired of looking at this one and would like something fresh and new. You don't buy a product that uses Java inside for the artfully selected names like java.net.HttpURLConnection.setChunkedStreamingMode(), and if all the names were changed to AAAAA AAAAB AAAAC, etc. it would be just as functional, except it would be hard to write code for (so, again, the names are functional).
It may take creativity to create it, but the work is functional, and the purpose for copying it is for the function.
In brief, when considering merger for copyright protection, you need to consider the options available to Sun when they originally wrote Java: there were plenty of ways they could have written any of those APIs.
The CAFC confused merger with scènes à faire. Merger is independent of point of view, it either is or it isn't.
The API is an abstraction, it is an idea, protection is not supposed to "extend" to it. The expression is indeed copyrighted, but the idea expressed is not protected.
The CAFC said that the "idea" was "an API", but that isn't what is expressed by the source code. The source code expresses a very specific API, the Java API. That is the "idea" that is not protected, whether you call it a process, a system, or a method of operation, 102(b) says the idea is not protected.
Look at Baker v Selden or Bikram, the idea was not "an accounting system" or "a sequence of yoga poses" the way the CAFC would have you believe. In Bikram the Ninth completely rejected that the idea of "the Sequence" could be protected even though there were any number of ways it could have been created. Bikram was just about the idea being used, but once you have the ruling that the idea is not protected, merger can come into play. For example, expressing the Sequence as a simple list of each of the 26 poses by name would not be protected expression, as almost any expres
The size is mostly irrelevant though. In one case (Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises) someone copied 400 words out of a 200,000 word book (the supreme court ruled against them). As one judge said, "you can't escape guilt by showing how much you didn't copy." You have to look at the importance of the copying, and whether they used more than necessary for the purpose.
As a general principle, yes, but all the factors are weighed. It was the same percentage, but it was stand-alone paragraphs and sentences, not scattered individual names that don't stand on their own. They also were a much larger portion of the infringing work, it was not functional, it wasn't yet published, it reduced demand for the original.
That's not really what is meant by transformative. Here Google's approach was to say, "Before we did this, Java couldn't be used on mobile. We created a new work that allowed people to use Java on mobile." Oracle's counter-argument was to show phones that did have J2SE on mobile (SavaJe, Blackberry).
Oracle wouldn't allow Google to license JavaSE for a phone.
It was transformative because they created entirely new implementation code, and used the existing API in new ways. That it wasn't transformative in the same way a parody is transformative is, I submit, entirely due to the highly functional nature of the work.
Oracle's counter to this was to quote Google's own expert witness, Joshua Bloch, who said, "Writing a program is very much a creative process." [...] The appellate court also pointed out that just because cod is functional, that doesn't prevent it from being creative (otherwise basically no code could be copyrighted, since it's all functional).
102(b) doesn't say "unless it's really creative". The actual expression (the source code) doesn't lose protection unless there's merger - which was the case here because any changes to the actual declarations would change the functionality. 97% of the code retained protection, which is why Google had to write their own.
Another way to say it is that, given the API specification, there is no creativity required to turn it into the declaring code. For example, I offer the javap program.
The court is supposed to look at potential income lost here. If your argument were correct, it would mean the GPL is meaningless because anyone could claim the market value was zero. You can't just take code and not follow the license.
No, the GPL has requirements other than money, and no one has ever thought it restricted reimpkementing an API. It works just fine, and many open source projects have reimplemented APIs without license.
OpenJDK was released with the Classpath exception. Oracle had already reduced any potential income with OpenJDK, having two free alternatives with almost identical licensing requirements wouldn't have hurt the market more than having just OpenJDK.
I don't know why you think this. clean room is a technique to ensure that no more was copied than necessary, which would weigh favorably on fair use factor three (or at least prevent it from weighing negatively, since the amount copied is at best a neutral factor).
A clean room requires functional specifications, the Java API itself, to be passed in. That API was ruled to be protected, thus there'd be nothing to pass in that was clean. If they passed it in anyway, they would have produced exactly the same code that was found infringing (except maybe without the rangeCheck oops, which didn't make any difference). It was already the case that no more than was necessary was copied.
True, they did accidentally copy one method, and Oracle agreed to accept $0 in damages.
Clean room is how you avoid infringement entirely, in which case fair use isn't even brought up. In this case, the CAFC made the whole process of clean room implementation impossible anyway.
Google is indeed for profit, however giving away the code (including source code) at no cost isn't particularly indicative of commercial use and exploitation. A company donating money to education can deduct it from their taxes even though it generates commercially valuable good will or even mind share and future customers. Plenty of open source is sold, and even more is used for commercial purposes.
It most certainly was for interoperability, otherwise there was no reason to use it at all. There are plenty of Java libraries that work fine with just those 37 packages, and interoperability with developer's skills is also something a jury might well find relevant - Oracle doesn't own their skills and training.
The reason Google didn't take a license was that Sun would only license JavaME for use on a mobile device (which, by the way, was also not interoperable with JavaSE).
Google's use was also transformative. They selected out a useful subset of the Java API, rewrote all of the actual implementation and documentation (97% of the code), then wrote a whole lot more more new APIs using the old APIs in new ways; together the old APIs and new APIs presented a lot of new capabilities that seem to have done a lot better than JavaME in the smartphone area.
The nature of the copyrighted work was highly functional, a factor strongly in favor of fair use. Oracle even proved it, just change a single name by a single character and the whole thing won't work.
The total amount that was actually used from Oracle's API code was very tiny, less than 0.2%, just the names and relationships between those names, in 37 packages out of 166, so maybe 20% of 3% of 22%. That's 20 (scattered) words out of 10,000.
As for market impact, Oracle had OpenJDK available for free as well, licensed under GPLv2+CE. Anyone who wanted to use JavaSE could already get it for free - and if the additional parts of the API were that important to people in any significant number, OpenJDK would be much more desirable than Google's truncated implementation.
There are several judges involved in the SCO litigation, none of them Judge Alsup. It's not even the same Circuit.
Alsup is Ninth Circuit in California, SCO v IBM and Novell are in Tenth Circuit in Utah.
No, clean room wouldn't have made a difference. Google in fact was found to not infringe on any of the "implementation code", it was the declarations that were found by the appeals court to infringe. There is no way to write those declarations another way without changing the API, so a clean room would not give any different result. It was the API itself that was found to be protected, so no matter how you try to do it, the information needed by the clean room is "dirty". A clean room implementation is impossible given the CAFC decision.
If you're putting $300 billion dollars into the economy every month (or whatever level it would be), you have to take almost that much out or you have uncontrolled inflation.
$50,000/year with flat tax of 50%.
You have no income, net $50,000.
You have income of $100,000, net $100,000, tax rate 0%
You have income of $200,000, net $150,000, tax rate 25%
You have income of $500,000, net $300,000, tax rate 40%
How is that regressive?
Paying a Basic Income close to what it actually costs people to live right now wouldn't increase prices by much, if any.
Paying a Basic Income of $1 million would increase what it actually costs people to live to around $1 million.
That's why you calibrate it to what prices are right now, and you phase it in so that disruption can be controlled.
Why would people demand more money to do construction work? It already pays pretty well, and the people doing it are now going to need less, so they might even accept a lower rate. People aren't going to spend their entire UBI on rent, and at the level where demand will actually increase (cheap housing), rent going above where it is now will simply not be competitive.
Why would rent go up $1000? Do you think competition suddenly disappears?
People aren't going to be spending their entire monthly amount on rent. Rent may go up a little in response to increased demand, but it would only be the really cheap places that currently homeless people could now afford. In response, there would be an increase in construction, leading to increases in construction jobs.
What do you mean by skimming? Everyone gets the same amount. The only fraud would be people who aren't supposed to get it (non-citizens or whatever) or people collecting on non-existent or dead people. Much easier than the current systems.
There's much less incentive to commit crimes. Your basic income is cut off while you're incarcerated.