It's required by law that there be an option to receive a W2 by mail, not that it actually be sent out. I personally have not been offered a physical copy of a 2 from an employer in years because I made a point of checking the e-everything box. I sincerely hope nobody's tried to physically mail me one, because my address from Feb '11 to Aug of '14 was a Boarding House where some incredibly sketchy people had access to the mail.
You can add all the security features you want, the core problem is that they will get worked around by the massive demand for extremely quick tax refunds until the identity-theft problem gets serious enough that people actually care. This little thread was actually started because one security feature (the employer id number that's on every W2) can now be easily compromised by anyone who has access to enough personal info to get into an H and R Block account.
BTW: The Feds won't screw you if the mistake is tiny. If you put something on the wrong line, but the answer you end up with is correct, they may make you back-up your claims, but they literally can't screw you. You paid your taxes, on-time, so there's no back-taxes for them to collect, which means the penalty and interest are applied to $0.
If your mistake is small, and it's in the IRS favor, they may fix it and send you a check. Several tax pros I know have neglected to report certain small tax credits (like the Saver's Credit, where the government sends people money to reward them putting money into IRAs) because the money the client got from the IRS would be less then the cost of filling out the forms necessary to claim the credit (most tax places charge buy the form). It's not unusual for their clients to get a check for the unclaimed credit.
If it's small and it's in your favor you're paying the mistake, plus penalties and interest. But they're capped, and directly proportional to the magnitude of the mistake.
I'm 34 and I don't even know what color paper my paystub is. Direct Deposit to a checking account attached to a debit card means I literally haven't seen a pay stub in four years. And I have two jobs. I vaguely recall Home Depots are blue, but I honestly have no fucking clue what color the ones from H and R Block are.
Which means that if you're using that as a security measure you've pissed off a massive section of your customer base.
I agree that if customers valued their security more highly it would be fairly simple to make tax-based identity theft harder. For example, if you simply said "all refunds will be sent out on the First of May" then a lot of it would disappear because there'd be time for IRS bureaucrats to go over cases where two people filed the same name/SSN/etc., and it would generally be easy to tell the real return. But if you did that voters would howl to Congressman.
If you've done the data entry for the Federal form on Turbotax, not doing it again is a reason to not bother with Utah's site. Especially since Turbotax does not charge for the state if you've got an EZ.
Of course the number of people who actually have an EZ is much lower then the number of people who think they have an EZ (I actually met a woman with an annuity who thought she had the cheap tax form, sorry lady), and their business model is to lure people into answering a bunch of questions that disqualify them from the 1040EZ and then surprising them with a larger fee, but if you're a filer who actually file an EZ through Turbotax, it's fairly silly to go to Utah's site.
Strictly speaking this is the way the vast majority of Americans want it.
They want their refunds within days of filing, and since everybody files within the same few months (i.e.: late Jan to Mid-April), and most actually file within the same few weeks (late Jan and easy Feb), that means checking tens of millions identities a day. It would be possible to make a system that could do this, but it would be cost-prohibitive. So they do obvious bullshit error-checking (i.e.: are your W2s as reported the ones they have on record? do all SSNs, names, and birthdays match? does the bank account you're having direct deposit go to belong to someone on the return?), and deal with fraud after the fact.
The Feds do more cross-checking then the states, so it's harder to just tell Utah "I am totally former Governor John Hunstman, I really really made enough money to owe you $500 in taxes but had $15,000 witheld, and please send all the money to a bank account for Michaleen Czirpinski in Pittsburgh." The example is slightly exaggerated (the state would usually know how much Hunstman paid into the system), but not much.
The decision to employ public funds to this end was made by the people [...] ISPs should be dismantled as they're a threat to democracy.
If the majority can decide to force me at gunpoint to pay for something I did not want, then the "democracy" must be dismantled as not a mere threat, but actual impediment to freedom.
As a white person I have to say only another white boy would say something this ridiculous.
Every government ever has forced people to pay for things they didn't want. Pacifists funded the revolution at the exact same rate as Patriots. You couldn't get out of paying for the war that conquered the Indians of Ohio by claiming you had a principled disagreement with the policy of Indian Removal to West of the Mississippi.
BTW, the policy of Indian Removal probably would not have worked if the Native Americans had real governments that could do things like insist that the Oglala Lakota of what is now South Dakota send 1,500 number of warriors to a rally point in Green Bay to join the Unified Native Resistance Army. Since they didn't we got to fight each nation thirteen-on-one, with some very rare exceptions (i.e.: Tecumseh), and even those exceptions typically didn't have the political power to enforce taxation or military service. Which meant that when they lost a battle they lost the war.
And this only works if you have a lot of other data in your data set. If you don't know who Scot is, then you can't figure out he's the only person who could go to the bakery on that one exact day and that particular restaurant the next.
I don't think anyone is particularly sanguine about the future of privacy if big companies manage to figure out a way to profit from combining their multiple massive databases. This is particularly true in the US, where it would be virtually impossible to stop the police from using said databases with our warrants. Or worse, using info that the big companies forwarded them as the basis for warrants.
If Apple or Google can silence one of it's critics by figuring out he was paying a hooker with his supposedly anonymous Mastercard gift card, that is a really fucking bad thing.
The number of women buying unique items (i.e.: that one purse that's so cute) is 4-5 points higher then the number of men doing the same thing, which would mean a given data point is 4-5% more effective if the shopper is female.
You can't compare anything but murder because the categories are different. I personally have been the victim of two crimes which would be reported as violent crime in England, which I reported to the local cops, but were not included in these statistics. In addition to these two crimes I mentioned, my sister has been mugged three times in DC and NYC.
Where there's no way to get important data on how the object is put together without destroying it. Which is somewhat believable if you're talking about living material, which would actually have to be reproduced at the molecule-level, including velocity of all molecules, electric forces, etc.to create a living copy. It's becoming more believable about electronics. It's hard to see how you could copy something with a 14 nanometre resolution that with a non-destructive external scan.
But even this process wouldn't be moving the damn thing. After all there's no reason you couldn't create two copies of the destroyed object.
You have a surprising amount of faith in investor's ability to tell stupid shit from a "high-risk/high-reward acquisition strategy." Particularly when "high-risk/high-reward" is followed by sophisticated business-speak for "it's all that guy's fault," especially in this case, which includes a large subtext of "and it'll be at least three more years before the police decide to call my bluff on this particular line of ridiculous BS."
By the time all the cops have confirmed that it's BS all the relevant people at HP will have moved to other companies (probably mostly at higher-level positions), and this particular disaster will be the rationalization the next CEO uses to cover his ass when he totally fucks up. Hell this has already happened. Whitman wasn't CEO until a month after the acquisition was completed.
The IRS's is one of the last government departments that a rational person would cut because IRS Agents earn their keep by nailing tax cheats.
Or you'd simplify the tax code, which would make it easier to spot them, and which would lead to less mistakes which means less fraud and less errors. Then you wouldn't need so many tax collectors.
That's virtually impossible to do under our system. It's incredibly complex, with a whole panoply of veto points, and it's specifically designed so that the same individual can never have control of all of those veto points.
Which means if you're taking a tax break away from somebody who uses it, they have a dozen or so places to stop you.
OTOH, why is the Canadian prime Minister Prime Minister? Because he has the Confidence of Parliament. What does that mean we he tells the Chair of some damn finance subcommittee to pass a bill? It means the Chair of the subcommittee has three options: resigning from the subcommittee, new elections, and passing the damn bill.
If your sole objective is freedom-protection you don't create a Federal government.
Wait, what? If your goal is to give states freedom to oppress people, that's true. Otherwise, false.
Don't be silly.
If your sole objective is freedom protection you're an anarchist, and instead of creating a new level of potential oppressors you abolish all levels of potential oppressors.
Even if you weren't full anarchist, the states of the 1790s were a lot easier to dodge then the Feds because you could always move. Moreover state-level elections back then tended to be annual, so they tended to be much closer to the Electorate then the Feds.
Founders were actually trying to do something very, very complex: create a government that restricted freedom enough
The founders were trying to maintain a status quo in which they and their ilk would control society. They suceeded. They were wealthy, racially privileged land owners, just like in Athens. And guess what? Wealthy, racially privileged land owners still run the country, so mission accomplished.
Don't be ridiculous.
Buffet, Soros, and the Koch brothers don't own land. They own stock. What we have today's completely different, and much more Democratic, then a landed aristocracy; because it just is.
You do realize you are literally not comparing Apples to Apples here?
My repairs were out of warranty. They happened because I could physically go talk to someone with the power to fix my machine, and it was easier for him to fix my machine right there on the fucking spot then argue with me. They had no legal, fiduciary, or ethical obligation to do anything nice for me. In fact they could easily have told me to fuck off (in those very terms) and the got the police to show up and escort me from the building. Instead they gave me a free motherboard, and charged me $15 for a repair Dell would need hundreds for out of warranty.
Your repairs are within warranty. Even assuming you aren't painting an overly rosy picture (in particular I'd be stunned if the wait time time to get on the phone with a real Dell Tech was less then 45 minutes, and I've never waited anywhere near that long for a Genius). If you tried my tactic with those guys you'd get nowhere because their computerized system probably won't send a tech support dude to a guy whose warranty with Dell is not current.
The problem with science spending in the current environment is that a) a lot of it has become politicized ( certain strain of budget-cutting Republican is very skeptical of anything that pro-AGW-scientist do), and b) we've been in fire government employees mode since Bush got termed out. Look at it this way: The IRS's is one of the last government departments that a rational person would cut because IRS Agents earn their keep by nailing tax cheats. Even if each agent is only finding $0.50 on the dollar, you have to cut $2 in IRS spending to equal a $1 cut anywhere else. And we're cutting the IRS. Congress is not in a invest-in-the-future mode, it is in a cut-government-spending-so-private-companies-can-magically-appear-and-invest-in-the-future-their-own-damn-selves mode.
A scientist, who is probably so naive that they honestly think the founders sole objective in creating the Federal government was to protect freedom*, asking for money that could a) result in nothing more interesting then proving his line of research is a dead end, or b) revolutionize some obscure field Congressmen cannot spell properly, does not stand a fucking chance.
*If your sole objective is freedom-protection you don't create a Federal government. The Founders were actually trying to do something very, very complex: create a government that restricted freedom enough it could effectively a) resist future British attempts to retake the colonies and b) destroy those goddamn Indians in Ohio once and for all, without c) granting it sufficient anti-freedom powers that it could seriously oppress the people.
Note that their definition of freedom was wonky. If there'd been any chance the Federal government could end slavery, most of them would have considered that "serious oppression," so they specifically designed there Feds so that could only happen under the most dire of circumstances.
Apparently you don't live near a big American City. There's nothing wrong with that, but one of the trade-offs for doing that is you there are no Apple stores.
I've gotten free repairs on them for parts I admitted I broke simply by going to the Apple Store in-person and being polite. For example, there was one time I spilled Dr. Pepper on the keyboard. Another time the MagSafe board (a daughterboard attached to the motherboard that allows the laptop to connect to the AC Adapter) died. It was out of warranty/ Any company but Apple would have charged me $500, forced me to do the two-week shipping thing you hated so much, and probably fucked it up because the guy reading the work order did the wrong thing. They charged me some ridiculously tiny fee for the part ($10-15) and that was it.
Why run a mac at all if your goal is to use Linux? PCs are a ton cheaper and in most cases just as good.
"most cases" != all the time.
My best guess is you want the advantages of Steve Jobs Walled Garden for hardware, but none of the disadvantages it has for software.
If you want cheap hardware, you wouldn't use a Mac. But let's say you want a high-end laptop, it's 50-50 whether you can beat Apple's prices without going into no-name companies with questionable build quality, and significantly harder to beat their customer service if something goes wrong.
This is particularly true if you're interested in some tech spec that a generic geek building a server/gaming rig/commodity PC for grandma doesn't care about much because it costs a lot of money and doesn't help the machine much. Nobody but Apple has retina-level monitors. There are probably competitors to the MacBook Air (high-end laptop that weighs virtually nothing), but I can't name them. The cost-benefit analysis on features like these says "don't bother," but they're still cool. If your LINUX laptop budget is $1,000-$1,500 and you want a laptop that ways nothing and has a retina display, why the fuck not? It's your money.
Let's look at this logically. You are either right or you are wrong.
Assume you are right: Blaming the US is incredibly dumb tactics because the only people who will care about this are Spaniards who can't vote in US elections. The person you should be blaming is the Prime Minister of Spain, who could fix it tomorrow. You could conceivably blame both, and get increased leverage from associating him with American meddling, but your original post did not even mention the PM's name or party. As is posts like this one are a very good justification for not voting, which allows the Spanish elite to continue to arrest people partly because they use secured electronic devices.
Assume you are wrong: complaining about the US is a waste of time. The government that tolerates this shit can survive any attempt you level that it's doing Obama's bidding because it isn't doing Obama's bidding. The Spanish political elite will continue to oppress you.
Either way, instead of advancing your cause and providing an interesting point-of-view for debate, what you've actually done is allow yourself to be marginalized.
This is why Europe is in permanent decline, and is basically turning into Latin America of the 80s.
The US didn't make this Judge say anything. It didn't lobby the Spanish government to actually do anything. It has absolutely nothing to do with the decision. Yet, instead of blaming the people you should blame (i.e.: the politicians the Spanish people chose to elect) you're blaming the US.
You aren't going to fix the problem by blaming it on a country thousands of miles away. That country is actually a) specifically designed to not care what you think (Swedes don't have votes in the Electoral College), and b) couldn't order Spanish Courts to play nice even if it wanted to (in cases where the US really wants the local Judiciary to play nice -- Syria and North Korea spring immediately to mind -- it does not work).
So congratulations, rather then fix the problem you're going to waste your time.
As a low man on the totem pole, I don't really deal with the kind of issues you'd need an IRS Letter to talk about. I mostly do EIC, sometimes a Schedule A or an Education Credit. This year I finally got far enough in my tax classes to deal with the actual Tax Code instead of the Pub 17.
But a quick google showed that at least a couple of the Letter Rulings had been ignored.
Reread those statements. "Bend the cost curve" is jargon for reducing the double-digit increases we'd been experiencing every year. "Spend less on health care than if this bill doesn't pass" is also clearly a claim that costs would grow less under Obamacare.
You don't sound very stunned to me. Obama said "We agree on reforms that will finally reduce the costs of health care". And what evidence do we have of the modern reinterpretation you give that the "cost curve" has been bent by Obamacare rather than by the worst recession and worst recession recovery since the end of the Second World War?
So you're arguing that the reality of reduced cost growth is irrelevant as long as you can come up with some other rationalization?
Congratulations. Which Social Science do you want a PhD in?
Have you heard of the Federal Republic of Germany? Are you aware that the biggest difference between their system and Obamacare is that their insurers are non-profit?
No, and you aren't aware of this either. I think one of the more naive tendencies is the assumption that the US can just halfheartedly adopt minor commonalities with some other country's health care system and get a health care system that magically halves itself in cost or so.
Who said anything about halving costs? You're the only one in this conversation who thinks that's a goal of ObamaCare.
If a subsidized private insurance market that shields consumers from most costs, and includes a risk-mitigation system, can survive in Germany why not here?
For how long? There's a reason I wrote:
You do realize that health care costs are climbing much faster than inflation in every developed world country?
Over the past 20 years Germany's health costs have risen from 9.9% of GDP to 11.3%. This has happened despite the fact the country aged quite a bit during that time. Their population is so old that it's shrinking, we're still growing. OTOH we've gone from 12.2% to 16%. Their costs have increased by a total of 14%, whereas ours have gone up 31%.
So it's pretty clear that you haven't found the magical words that will prove once and for Obamacare will bankrupt the nation.
It's harder to use that strategy as a tax preparer. The Feds will say "Moron, we clarified that in a letter* last year," your boss will mention "that was on page 2.6 of the book for your depreciation class," and you get yelled at.
As an individual that works. As long as you're ready to pay up promptly when they send you a letter telling you you were wrong the late payment penalty is your biggest problem.
*Seriously. If you want to get a ruling on a tax issue from the IRS you send the appropriate guy a letter, he writes back, and then you put it on your web page and tax preparers nation-wide will use the precedent in preparing taxes. It's called a "Letter Ruling."
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It's required by law that there be an option to receive a W2 by mail, not that it actually be sent out. I personally have not been offered a physical copy of a 2 from an employer in years because I made a point of checking the e-everything box. I sincerely hope nobody's tried to physically mail me one, because my address from Feb '11 to Aug of '14 was a Boarding House where some incredibly sketchy people had access to the mail.
You can add all the security features you want, the core problem is that they will get worked around by the massive demand for extremely quick tax refunds until the identity-theft problem gets serious enough that people actually care. This little thread was actually started because one security feature (the employer id number that's on every W2) can now be easily compromised by anyone who has access to enough personal info to get into an H and R Block account.
BTW: The Feds won't screw you if the mistake is tiny. If you put something on the wrong line, but the answer you end up with is correct, they may make you back-up your claims, but they literally can't screw you. You paid your taxes, on-time, so there's no back-taxes for them to collect, which means the penalty and interest are applied to $0.
If your mistake is small, and it's in the IRS favor, they may fix it and send you a check. Several tax pros I know have neglected to report certain small tax credits (like the Saver's Credit, where the government sends people money to reward them putting money into IRAs) because the money the client got from the IRS would be less then the cost of filling out the forms necessary to claim the credit (most tax places charge buy the form). It's not unusual for their clients to get a check for the unclaimed credit.
If it's small and it's in your favor you're paying the mistake, plus penalties and interest. But they're capped, and directly proportional to the magnitude of the mistake.
Question: How old are you?
I'm 34 and I don't even know what color paper my paystub is. Direct Deposit to a checking account attached to a debit card means I literally haven't seen a pay stub in four years. And I have two jobs. I vaguely recall Home Depots are blue, but I honestly have no fucking clue what color the ones from H and R Block are.
Which means that if you're using that as a security measure you've pissed off a massive section of your customer base.
I agree that if customers valued their security more highly it would be fairly simple to make tax-based identity theft harder. For example, if you simply said "all refunds will be sent out on the First of May" then a lot of it would disappear because there'd be time for IRS bureaucrats to go over cases where two people filed the same name/SSN/etc., and it would generally be easy to tell the real return. But if you did that voters would howl to Congressman.
If you've done the data entry for the Federal form on Turbotax, not doing it again is a reason to not bother with Utah's site. Especially since Turbotax does not charge for the state if you've got an EZ.
Of course the number of people who actually have an EZ is much lower then the number of people who think they have an EZ (I actually met a woman with an annuity who thought she had the cheap tax form, sorry lady), and their business model is to lure people into answering a bunch of questions that disqualify them from the 1040EZ and then surprising them with a larger fee, but if you're a filer who actually file an EZ through Turbotax, it's fairly silly to go to Utah's site.
Strictly speaking this is the way the vast majority of Americans want it.
They want their refunds within days of filing, and since everybody files within the same few months (i.e.: late Jan to Mid-April), and most actually file within the same few weeks (late Jan and easy Feb), that means checking tens of millions identities a day. It would be possible to make a system that could do this, but it would be cost-prohibitive. So they do obvious bullshit error-checking (i.e.: are your W2s as reported the ones they have on record? do all SSNs, names, and birthdays match? does the bank account you're having direct deposit go to belong to someone on the return?), and deal with fraud after the fact.
The Feds do more cross-checking then the states, so it's harder to just tell Utah "I am totally former Governor John Hunstman, I really really made enough money to owe you $500 in taxes but had $15,000 witheld, and please send all the money to a bank account for Michaleen Czirpinski in Pittsburgh." The example is slightly exaggerated (the state would usually know how much Hunstman paid into the system), but not much.
If the majority can decide to force me at gunpoint to pay for something I did not want, then the "democracy" must be dismantled as not a mere threat, but actual impediment to freedom.
As a white person I have to say only another white boy would say something this ridiculous.
Every government ever has forced people to pay for things they didn't want. Pacifists funded the revolution at the exact same rate as Patriots. You couldn't get out of paying for the war that conquered the Indians of Ohio by claiming you had a principled disagreement with the policy of Indian Removal to West of the Mississippi.
BTW, the policy of Indian Removal probably would not have worked if the Native Americans had real governments that could do things like insist that the Oglala Lakota of what is now South Dakota send 1,500 number of warriors to a rally point in Green Bay to join the Unified Native Resistance Army. Since they didn't we got to fight each nation thirteen-on-one, with some very rare exceptions (i.e.: Tecumseh), and even those exceptions typically didn't have the political power to enforce taxation or military service. Which meant that when they lost a battle they lost the war.
And this only works if you have a lot of other data in your data set. If you don't know who Scot is, then you can't figure out he's the only person who could go to the bakery on that one exact day and that particular restaurant the next.
I don't think anyone is particularly sanguine about the future of privacy if big companies manage to figure out a way to profit from combining their multiple massive databases. This is particularly true in the US, where it would be virtually impossible to stop the police from using said databases with our warrants. Or worse, using info that the big companies forwarded them as the basis for warrants.
If Apple or Google can silence one of it's critics by figuring out he was paying a hooker with his supposedly anonymous Mastercard gift card, that is a really fucking bad thing.
Best guess?
The number of women buying unique items (i.e.: that one purse that's so cute) is 4-5 points higher then the number of men doing the same thing, which would mean a given data point is 4-5% more effective if the shopper is female.
You can't compare anything but murder because the categories are different. I personally have been the victim of two crimes which would be reported as violent crime in England, which I reported to the local cops, but were not included in these statistics. In addition to these two crimes I mentioned, my sister has been mugged three times in DC and NYC.
If you want a anti-gun-control person's takedown of this particular statistic I refer you to:
http://blog.skepticallibertari...
Dude, all of England (aka: 56 million people) had 560 murders last year in 2013. NYC (8-9 million range) was crowing about 333.
I don't know where you got that number from, but I suspect it was from somebody who was skilled at the art of BS.
IOW you don't read?
About internal Chinese politics?
Nope.
I'm actually better able to explain the internal politics of several obscure, non-anglophone, African states then China.
Where there's no way to get important data on how the object is put together without destroying it. Which is somewhat believable if you're talking about living material, which would actually have to be reproduced at the molecule-level, including velocity of all molecules, electric forces, etc.to create a living copy. It's becoming more believable about electronics. It's hard to see how you could copy something with a 14 nanometre resolution that with a non-destructive external scan.
But even this process wouldn't be moving the damn thing. After all there's no reason you couldn't create two copies of the destroyed object.
You have a surprising amount of faith in investor's ability to tell stupid shit from a "high-risk/high-reward acquisition strategy." Particularly when "high-risk/high-reward" is followed by sophisticated business-speak for "it's all that guy's fault," especially in this case, which includes a large subtext of "and it'll be at least three more years before the police decide to call my bluff on this particular line of ridiculous BS."
By the time all the cops have confirmed that it's BS all the relevant people at HP will have moved to other companies (probably mostly at higher-level positions), and this particular disaster will be the rationalization the next CEO uses to cover his ass when he totally fucks up. Hell this has already happened. Whitman wasn't CEO until a month after the acquisition was completed.
I doubt it.
These shareholders are the exact same people who fired Walter Hewlett for opposing the Compaq merger.
The IRS's is one of the last government departments that a rational person would cut because IRS Agents earn their keep by nailing tax cheats.
Or you'd simplify the tax code, which would make it easier to spot them, and which would lead to less mistakes which means less fraud and less errors. Then you wouldn't need so many tax collectors.
That's virtually impossible to do under our system. It's incredibly complex, with a whole panoply of veto points, and it's specifically designed so that the same individual can never have control of all of those veto points.
Which means if you're taking a tax break away from somebody who uses it, they have a dozen or so places to stop you.
OTOH, why is the Canadian prime Minister Prime Minister? Because he has the Confidence of Parliament. What does that mean we he tells the Chair of some damn finance subcommittee to pass a bill? It means the Chair of the subcommittee has three options: resigning from the subcommittee, new elections, and passing the damn bill.
If your sole objective is freedom-protection you don't create a Federal government.
Wait, what? If your goal is to give states freedom to oppress people, that's true. Otherwise, false.
Don't be silly.
If your sole objective is freedom protection you're an anarchist, and instead of creating a new level of potential oppressors you abolish all levels of potential oppressors.
Even if you weren't full anarchist, the states of the 1790s were a lot easier to dodge then the Feds because you could always move. Moreover state-level elections back then tended to be annual, so they tended to be much closer to the Electorate then the Feds.
Founders were actually trying to do something very, very complex: create a government that restricted freedom enough
The founders were trying to maintain a status quo in which they and their ilk would control society. They suceeded. They were wealthy, racially privileged land owners, just like in Athens. And guess what? Wealthy, racially privileged land owners still run the country, so mission accomplished.
Don't be ridiculous.
Buffet, Soros, and the Koch brothers don't own land. They own stock. What we have today's completely different, and much more Democratic, then a landed aristocracy; because it just is.
You do realize you are literally not comparing Apples to Apples here?
My repairs were out of warranty. They happened because I could physically go talk to someone with the power to fix my machine, and it was easier for him to fix my machine right there on the fucking spot then argue with me. They had no legal, fiduciary, or ethical obligation to do anything nice for me. In fact they could easily have told me to fuck off (in those very terms) and the got the police to show up and escort me from the building. Instead they gave me a free motherboard, and charged me $15 for a repair Dell would need hundreds for out of warranty.
Your repairs are within warranty. Even assuming you aren't painting an overly rosy picture (in particular I'd be stunned if the wait time time to get on the phone with a real Dell Tech was less then 45 minutes, and I've never waited anywhere near that long for a Genius). If you tried my tactic with those guys you'd get nowhere because their computerized system probably won't send a tech support dude to a guy whose warranty with Dell is not current.
The problem with science spending in the current environment is that a) a lot of it has become politicized ( certain strain of budget-cutting Republican is very skeptical of anything that pro-AGW-scientist do), and b) we've been in fire government employees mode since Bush got termed out. Look at it this way: The IRS's is one of the last government departments that a rational person would cut because IRS Agents earn their keep by nailing tax cheats. Even if each agent is only finding $0.50 on the dollar, you have to cut $2 in IRS spending to equal a $1 cut anywhere else. And we're cutting the IRS. Congress is not in a invest-in-the-future mode, it is in a cut-government-spending-so-private-companies-can-magically-appear-and-invest-in-the-future-their-own-damn-selves mode.
A scientist, who is probably so naive that they honestly think the founders sole objective in creating the Federal government was to protect freedom*, asking for money that could a) result in nothing more interesting then proving his line of research is a dead end, or b) revolutionize some obscure field Congressmen cannot spell properly, does not stand a fucking chance.
*If your sole objective is freedom-protection you don't create a Federal government. The Founders were actually trying to do something very, very complex: create a government that restricted freedom enough it could effectively a) resist future British attempts to retake the colonies and b) destroy those goddamn Indians in Ohio once and for all, without c) granting it sufficient anti-freedom powers that it could seriously oppress the people.
Note that their definition of freedom was wonky. If there'd been any chance the Federal government could end slavery, most of them would have considered that "serious oppression," so they specifically designed there Feds so that could only happen under the most dire of circumstances.
Apparently you don't live near a big American City. There's nothing wrong with that, but one of the trade-offs for doing that is you there are no Apple stores.
I've gotten free repairs on them for parts I admitted I broke simply by going to the Apple Store in-person and being polite. For example, there was one time I spilled Dr. Pepper on the keyboard. Another time the MagSafe board (a daughterboard attached to the motherboard that allows the laptop to connect to the AC Adapter) died. It was out of warranty/ Any company but Apple would have charged me $500, forced me to do the two-week shipping thing you hated so much, and probably fucked it up because the guy reading the work order did the wrong thing. They charged me some ridiculously tiny fee for the part ($10-15) and that was it.
Why run a mac at all if your goal is to use Linux? PCs are a ton cheaper and in most cases just as good.
"most cases" != all the time.
My best guess is you want the advantages of Steve Jobs Walled Garden for hardware, but none of the disadvantages it has for software.
If you want cheap hardware, you wouldn't use a Mac. But let's say you want a high-end laptop, it's 50-50 whether you can beat Apple's prices without going into no-name companies with questionable build quality, and significantly harder to beat their customer service if something goes wrong.
This is particularly true if you're interested in some tech spec that a generic geek building a server/gaming rig/commodity PC for grandma doesn't care about much because it costs a lot of money and doesn't help the machine much. Nobody but Apple has retina-level monitors. There are probably competitors to the MacBook Air (high-end laptop that weighs virtually nothing), but I can't name them. The cost-benefit analysis on features like these says "don't bother," but they're still cool. If your LINUX laptop budget is $1,000-$1,500 and you want a laptop that ways nothing and has a retina display, why the fuck not? It's your money.
Let's look at this logically. You are either right or you are wrong.
Assume you are right: Blaming the US is incredibly dumb tactics because the only people who will care about this are Spaniards who can't vote in US elections. The person you should be blaming is the Prime Minister of Spain, who could fix it tomorrow. You could conceivably blame both, and get increased leverage from associating him with American meddling, but your original post did not even mention the PM's name or party. As is posts like this one are a very good justification for not voting, which allows the Spanish elite to continue to arrest people partly because they use secured electronic devices.
Assume you are wrong: complaining about the US is a waste of time. The government that tolerates this shit can survive any attempt you level that it's doing Obama's bidding because it isn't doing Obama's bidding. The Spanish political elite will continue to oppress you.
Either way, instead of advancing your cause and providing an interesting point-of-view for debate, what you've actually done is allow yourself to be marginalized.
This is why Europe is in permanent decline, and is basically turning into Latin America of the 80s.
The US didn't make this Judge say anything. It didn't lobby the Spanish government to actually do anything. It has absolutely nothing to do with the decision. Yet, instead of blaming the people you should blame (i.e.: the politicians the Spanish people chose to elect) you're blaming the US.
You aren't going to fix the problem by blaming it on a country thousands of miles away. That country is actually a) specifically designed to not care what you think (Swedes don't have votes in the Electoral College), and b) couldn't order Spanish Courts to play nice even if it wanted to (in cases where the US really wants the local Judiciary to play nice -- Syria and North Korea spring immediately to mind -- it does not work).
So congratulations, rather then fix the problem you're going to waste your time.
As a low man on the totem pole, I don't really deal with the kind of issues you'd need an IRS Letter to talk about. I mostly do EIC, sometimes a Schedule A or an Education Credit. This year I finally got far enough in my tax classes to deal with the actual Tax Code instead of the Pub 17.
But a quick google showed that at least a couple of the Letter Rulings had been ignored.
Reread those statements. "Bend the cost curve" is jargon for reducing the double-digit increases we'd been experiencing every year. "Spend less on health care than if this bill doesn't pass" is also clearly a claim that costs would grow less under Obamacare.
You don't sound very stunned to me. Obama said "We agree on reforms that will finally reduce the costs of health care". And what evidence do we have of the modern reinterpretation you give that the "cost curve" has been bent by Obamacare rather than by the worst recession and worst recession recovery since the end of the Second World War?
So you're arguing that the reality of reduced cost growth is irrelevant as long as you can come up with some other rationalization?
Congratulations. Which Social Science do you want a PhD in?
Have you heard of the Federal Republic of Germany? Are you aware that the biggest difference between their system and Obamacare is that their insurers are non-profit?
No, and you aren't aware of this either. I think one of the more naive tendencies is the assumption that the US can just halfheartedly adopt minor commonalities with some other country's health care system and get a health care system that magically halves itself in cost or so.
Who said anything about halving costs? You're the only one in this conversation who thinks that's a goal of ObamaCare.
If a subsidized private insurance market that shields consumers from most costs, and includes a risk-mitigation system, can survive in Germany why not here?
For how long? There's a reason I wrote:
You do realize that health care costs are climbing much faster than inflation in every developed world country?
Over the past 20 years Germany's health costs have risen from 9.9% of GDP to 11.3%. This has happened despite the fact the country aged quite a bit during that time. Their population is so old that it's shrinking, we're still growing. OTOH we've gone from 12.2% to 16%. Their costs have increased by a total of 14%, whereas ours have gone up 31%.
So it's pretty clear that you haven't found the magical words that will prove once and for Obamacare will bankrupt the nation.
It's harder to use that strategy as a tax preparer. The Feds will say "Moron, we clarified that in a letter* last year," your boss will mention "that was on page 2.6 of the book for your depreciation class," and you get yelled at.
As an individual that works. As long as you're ready to pay up promptly when they send you a letter telling you you were wrong the late payment penalty is your biggest problem.
*Seriously. If you want to get a ruling on a tax issue from the IRS you send the appropriate guy a letter, he writes back, and then you put it on your web page and tax preparers nation-wide will use the precedent in preparing taxes. It's called a "Letter Ruling."