For one thing if you think the Air Force envisions F-35 as primarily an aircraft that fights other planes you're sadly mistaken. The F-22 is the Air Superiority fighter of the future. A lot of the problems with the F-35 are directly related to this. It's supposed to be the A-10, F-15, and F-16 all rolled into one. It has to be good enough at all those roles to succeed while being stealthy enough to nigh-invulnerable.
You're also missing the point. If everyone in the world knows the USAF canot be defeated because of it's stealth aircraft then everyone in the world has a damn good reason to design RADARs capable of dealing with stealth. A country like Iran can easily have it's PR dudes fake up a bunch of cool-looking planes while simultaneously buying a really sophisticated RADAR from the Russians and training up their smartest guys o use it. This probably wouldn't actually stop the invasion, but it would kill a bunch of our pilots. It would also be a major blow to US prestige, and would probably make the Chinese and North Koreans a lot more aggressive. After all if Iran can give the US a bloody nose...
Most developed world countries don't have the capability to do much of anything without US help.
The French at least pretend to have a military, but their recent intervention in Mali (which is not that far from France) could not have happened if the USAF hadn't given their guys a free ride.
The troops the other NATO states recruit and train are just as capable as the ones the US does, but their governments are major cheap-skates. Yes Canada could by the $55 million fighter, and save money; but there really isn't much point in doing so because when the F-35 is ready an Air Force with Superhornets will be useless.
If we end up in dogfights we're totally fucked. The USAF has been trying to banish the Dogfight to the history books since it was the Army Air Corps. The F-4 didn't even have a gun.
Syria actually has an air defense network, which is fully capable of blowing up jets designed in the 70s. Both the CF-18 and the Superhornet count. So if NATO decides to give Assad the Gaddafi treatment Canada will have to choose between a) sitting it out, and b) being the little guy who waits for the big tough Americans to blow up the Syrian Air Defense Network before pitching in.
If you're a "defensive military" the F/A-18s you currently use are fine.
If you want to participate in international missions as a full partner neither the Superhornet or the CF-18 are good enough. You'll need a Stealth Fighter that can do ground attack.
Right now that means a) waiting on F-35 and paying through the nose for the privilege of flying one whenever McDonnel-Douglas finally finishes the damn things or b) praying that the Russians/Chinese/etc. have some top-secret plane program further along then F-35 and are willing to sell those planes to Canada.
1) It takes a long-ass time to design a fighter-jet. The F-35 program officially started with the Join Strike Fighter in '93, and it's still not operational.
2) Fighter drones're "next generation" because the technology just isn't there. There's significant latency problems with drones. These are fine for tasks like surveillance and simple ground attack, where the situation generally doesn't change much in the two seconds between the drone seeing something and it's "pilot" in Nevada seeing it. But if there was some other plane shooting at it that's a pretty big deal.
F-35 is necessary because a) sensors are getting better, so our current aircraft are becoming more vulnerable, b) our current airframes are decades old (most of the Thunderbirds are younger then their planes), and c) the Chinese/Russians aren't gonna sit still for 25 years while we develop a really cool drone to kick their asses.
Simple: F-35 might actually be good enough to do the job they need when it's done.
The job they need is to a) not completely suck at air combat, and b) be very very hard to see. If you have both you can kill anything before it sees you, which means you are theoretically invincible.
Granted F-35 is not in service, but do you seriously believe that the US won't spend money until the problems are solved? It may take awhile, but eventually those F-35s will enter US Service.
And if we do, and Canada has just bought a decentish plane with limited stealth capabilities, the Canadians will have to choose between replacing their brand new Superhornets and being a second-rate Air Force.
Landing at the wrong airport isn't good, but it's not that unusual. Our own boys in clue did it less then a year ago: http://www.tampabay.com/news/military/macdill/c-17s-landing-at-wrong-airport-elicits-theories-but-few-facts/1241869 The landing was actually quite impressive in a way. The landing strip the ended up using is not supposed to be long enough to land a C-17. but somehow a) they did not notice this fact until it was too late, and b) they managed to land safely.
You really don;t understand how this works, do you?
Fighter jets are not interchangeable. If you get the cheaper jet you get a less useful jet. Since the Hornet was designed before stealth technology existed it is shitty at stealth. This means that countries using it cannot participate in air combat over enemy-held territory ever. Period. The F-18 is simply a death trap in those circumstances.
Which means that if Assad decides to go full evil on his enemies all Canada could do to stop him would be send a really nasty press release.
Of course when the laws change what people lobby will change. That's kinda the entire point of changing the law. That doesn't mean those lobbyists will necessarily win. If you have 41 Senators who oppose a registry today, and you make sure they oppose a registry tomorrow you're fine. Background checks are simply irrelevant to what happens in the next vote.
In the long-term thinking like this is likely to hurt the gun rights movement. If Mr. Median Voter likes gun rights, AND like background checks, but the Gun Rights activists all tell him he's the tip of the spear of an evil anti-gun conspiracy for supporting background checks; eventually he's gonna choose between the two. And there's a 50-50 shot he chooses to end the Second Amendment.
This debate would be so much easier if people would actually read what the other side says, rather then simply assuming everyone who is not actively agreeing with every word they say is a moron who needs to b slapped down.
To quote myself, with relevant bits bolded:
gun dealers/"private collectors"/etc.
"Private collectors," etc. do not have to do background checks. If the ATF finds out one of them sold a gun to a felon, oh well. Under the current that is supposed to happen.
You can easily require background checks without a registry. Just don't record the background check, or delete the record after a few months. It's still useful to law enforcement. Why?
Most bad-guy guns go through a handfull of routes, when law enforcement notices one of these gun dealers/"private collectors"/etc. all they have to do to shut him down is send an informant who'd fail the check to the suspected dealer, and of said informant gets a gun the dealer gets busted. Hopefully wth records showing who else he's armed...
And shares that are held by the company itself don't count for purposes of "earnings per share," or other business statistics. These stats are based on "shares outstanding," which explicitly excludes held shares. Thus the business press invented statistics like "diluted earnings per share," to reflect the likely value of a share of a company after all options were exercised.
Any company issuing options is by definition increasing the number of shares outstanding, which reduces the value of everyone else's shares. There's a semantic argument to be made this is not literally "printing shares," but I really don't care about that particular bit of semantics. Call it printing shares, printing money, or just spending money it still supports my thesis:
Facebook is spending money when it issues stock options to it's employees. Like all other expenses these costs reduce it's profit which ultimately reduces it's tax burden. This year there were so many options that Facebook's profit was entirely wiped out.
A company has to print shares for every option of a company stock it issues as soon as that option is exercised, by definition. Why?
Because Ford is not allowed to control shares of Ford. That would give Ford management the ability to file paperwork issuing a few billion new shares, and then since the CEO controls Ford he would be un-fireable. Thus when companies engage in share buy-back programs the shares are eliminated from things that are calculated on a per share basis. As far as the market is concerned, the number of shares of Ford is equal to the number of shares of Ford that Ford does not own.
Which is a roundabout way of saying it is impossible to exercise an option on Ford, issued by Ford, without geting a share that is totally new as far as anyone who matters (ie: Dow Jones) is concerned. Ford can reduce the damage with complicated buy-back schemes -- you exercise on Aug. 28, they buy a share on Aug. 29, and issue it to you on Aug. 30 -- but Ford is still issuing a new share on the 30th. It's just replacing one they abolished on the 28th, so the numbers work out pretty.
I honestly have no idea whether Facebook is getting this fancy, they certainly have the cash to do so and a pretty strong incentive not to dilute Zuckerberg's shares (he owns roughly 54%, so he'll be fireable if Facebook's total shares increase by 8%); but that actually makes my main point stronger: Facebook're paying their employees with valuable things that cost them money. These things happen to be options. This is a business expense which gets counted against profit. It is supposed to reduce their taxes because taxes are on profit. This is not something Congress allowed because Congress is stupid, or engaged in some wild conspiracy to enrich Facebook. It's something Congress expected to happen when they forced everyone to expense options in 2006.
Geez, for a guy calling others ignorant and clueless you're pretty ignorant and clueless.
What's going on is simple: we tax companies on profits. Profit is revenue minus costs. Since 2006 stock options have been counted as a cost. Not counting them as a cost allowed companies to print money via stock options, and still look incredibly profitable. This sucked for shareholders because each option printed diluted their shares voting power, which made those shares less valuable.
Expensing options solved that problem, but it created others. One is that a company that companies with operating profits can wipe out those profits by paying their employees with lots of stock options. That's exactly what Facebook is doing. To an extent it's a huge problem because it pisses people off, but OTOH printing as many shares as Facebook does is actually dumb business which costs the shareholders of Facebook money.
The far bigger problem is that small start-ups have bigger problems in the early years because paying people with options makes them look unprofitable, which means they have trouble getting investors and banks to sign on.
The reason they get this tax break is that only profits are taxed.
A few years back companies were literally printing money with their stock options. They could give any employee seven figures in stock without affecting their bottom line. So they did. In 2006 this was changed because it was unfair to all the other shareholders, who lost value in the company for each new share that was printed.
But if options are a business expense you can reduce your taxable profit by giving out lots of options.
It is not deferred! That money is spent and gone forever. Middle income earners can deduct medical, but only if it is a huge portion of their income, I think it was like 30%. For FB this is not a tax break, it's a deduction.
It's technically 10%.
For most people it actually has to be significantly more then 10% because the IRS gives you a deduction of $5,950 for free, therefore unless your medical plus your other deductible expenses are $6,000 greater then your income you shouldn't bother deducting.
As a tax Pro I have only deducted for a couple who had $50k medical expenses and people who owned houses.
Most notably, I found that a DOS emulation tool (DOSBox), when used in combination with a service such as Dropbox, allowed me to have a consistent environment across all of my devices - including my Android tablet and phone - with the same files and applications used everywhere. Handy. Nerdy, and handy.
He doesn't say flat-out he'd use the phone for photoshop, but part of the appeal seems to be that he could do so in theory.
Most likely people have simply given up taking the source code and building it themselves. If a prebuilt binary is not available they will simply give up.
You do realize that for people who are not programmers "taking the source code and building it themselves" is a non-trivial task? That, in fact, it is easier to write simple programs (like "Hello World") then understand which libraries you need to get something as big as GIMP to compile properly.
He's not using it for pro-level editing. You don't do pro-level editing on a cell phone. So 4 GB is probably a couple hundred times bigger then any file he intends to use.
Slashdot Mirror
For one thing if you think the Air Force envisions F-35 as primarily an aircraft that fights other planes you're sadly mistaken. The F-22 is the Air Superiority fighter of the future. A lot of the problems with the F-35 are directly related to this. It's supposed to be the A-10, F-15, and F-16 all rolled into one. It has to be good enough at all those roles to succeed while being stealthy enough to nigh-invulnerable.
You're also missing the point. If everyone in the world knows the USAF canot be defeated because of it's stealth aircraft then everyone in the world has a damn good reason to design RADARs capable of dealing with stealth. A country like Iran can easily have it's PR dudes fake up a bunch of cool-looking planes while simultaneously buying a really sophisticated RADAR from the Russians and training up their smartest guys o use it. This probably wouldn't actually stop the invasion, but it would kill a bunch of our pilots. It would also be a major blow to US prestige, and would probably make the Chinese and North Koreans a lot more aggressive. After all if Iran can give the US a bloody nose...
That's a hell of a down-side. F-35 is much more difficult to kill then a Superhornet, which means it's much more likely to come home after a mission.
How much are your pilots live's worth?
Most developed world countries don't have the capability to do much of anything without US help.
The French at least pretend to have a military, but their recent intervention in Mali (which is not that far from France) could not have happened if the USAF hadn't given their guys a free ride.
The troops the other NATO states recruit and train are just as capable as the ones the US does, but their governments are major cheap-skates. Yes Canada could by the $55 million fighter, and save money; but there really isn't much point in doing so because when the F-35 is ready an Air Force with Superhornets will be useless.
Without stealth it'll just be too vulnerable.
You do realize that the reason we can "blow their radars to shit," is that we have plenty of stealth aircraft?
Which means they are likely to buy/design better air defenses and it would be a really good idea if we kept ahead of them?
If we end up in dogfights we're totally fucked. The USAF has been trying to banish the Dogfight to the history books since it was the Army Air Corps. The F-4 didn't even have a gun.
How about Assad?
Syria actually has an air defense network, which is fully capable of blowing up jets designed in the 70s. Both the CF-18 and the Superhornet count. So if NATO decides to give Assad the Gaddafi treatment Canada will have to choose between a) sitting it out, and b) being the little guy who waits for the big tough Americans to blow up the Syrian Air Defense Network before pitching in.
If you're a "defensive military" the F/A-18s you currently use are fine.
If you want to participate in international missions as a full partner neither the Superhornet or the CF-18 are good enough. You'll need a Stealth Fighter that can do ground attack.
Right now that means a) waiting on F-35 and paying through the nose for the privilege of flying one whenever McDonnel-Douglas finally finishes the damn things or b) praying that the Russians/Chinese/etc. have some top-secret plane program further along then F-35 and are willing to sell those planes to Canada.
The problems with this argument are two-fold.
1) It takes a long-ass time to design a fighter-jet. The F-35 program officially started with the Join Strike Fighter in '93, and it's still not operational.
2) Fighter drones're "next generation" because the technology just isn't there. There's significant latency problems with drones. These are fine for tasks like surveillance and simple ground attack, where the situation generally doesn't change much in the two seconds between the drone seeing something and it's "pilot" in Nevada seeing it. But if there was some other plane shooting at it that's a pretty big deal.
F-35 is necessary because a) sensors are getting better, so our current aircraft are becoming more vulnerable, b) our current airframes are decades old (most of the Thunderbirds are younger then their planes), and c) the Chinese/Russians aren't gonna sit still for 25 years while we develop a really cool drone to kick their asses.
Simple:
F-35 might actually be good enough to do the job they need when it's done.
The job they need is to a) not completely suck at air combat, and b) be very very hard to see. If you have both you can kill anything before it sees you, which means you are theoretically invincible.
Granted F-35 is not in service, but do you seriously believe that the US won't spend money until the problems are solved? It may take awhile, but eventually those F-35s will enter US Service.
And if we do, and Canada has just bought a decentish plane with limited stealth capabilities, the Canadians will have to choose between replacing their brand new Superhornets and being a second-rate Air Force.
Landing at the wrong airport isn't good, but it's not that unusual. Our own boys in clue did it less then a year ago:
http://www.tampabay.com/news/military/macdill/c-17s-landing-at-wrong-airport-elicits-theories-but-few-facts/1241869
The landing was actually quite impressive in a way. The landing strip the ended up using is not supposed to be long enough to land a C-17. but somehow a) they did not notice this fact until it was too late, and b) they managed to land safely.
You really don;t understand how this works, do you?
Fighter jets are not interchangeable. If you get the cheaper jet you get a less useful jet. Since the Hornet was designed before stealth technology existed it is shitty at stealth. This means that countries using it cannot participate in air combat over enemy-held territory ever. Period. The F-18 is simply a death trap in those circumstances.
Which means that if Assad decides to go full evil on his enemies all Canada could do to stop him would be send a really nasty press release.
Of course when the laws change what people lobby will change. That's kinda the entire point of changing the law. That doesn't mean those lobbyists will necessarily win. If you have 41 Senators who oppose a registry today, and you make sure they oppose a registry tomorrow you're fine. Background checks are simply irrelevant to what happens in the next vote.
In the long-term thinking like this is likely to hurt the gun rights movement. If Mr. Median Voter likes gun rights, AND like background checks, but the Gun Rights activists all tell him he's the tip of the spear of an evil anti-gun conspiracy for supporting background checks; eventually he's gonna choose between the two. And there's a 50-50 shot he chooses to end the Second Amendment.
This debate would be so much easier if people would actually read what the other side says, rather then simply assuming everyone who is not actively agreeing with every word they say is a moron who needs to b slapped down.
To quote myself, with relevant bits bolded:
gun dealers/"private collectors"/etc.
"Private collectors," etc. do not have to do background checks. If the ATF finds out one of them sold a gun to a felon, oh well. Under the current that is supposed to happen.
And you would have known to go to her kitchen how, precisely? Presumably it's not visible from your driveway.
I've lived in high-crime areas. The bad guy chooses when to strike, and he's gonna make a point of striking when your gun ain't around.
You can easily require background checks without a registry. Just don't record the background check, or delete the record after a few months. It's still useful to law enforcement. Why?
Most bad-guy guns go through a handfull of routes, when law enforcement notices one of these gun dealers/"private collectors"/etc. all they have to do to shut him down is send an informant who'd fail the check to the suspected dealer, and of said informant gets a gun the dealer gets busted. Hopefully wth records showing who else he's armed...
And shares that are held by the company itself don't count for purposes of "earnings per share," or other business statistics. These stats are based on "shares outstanding," which explicitly excludes held shares. Thus the business press invented statistics like "diluted earnings per share," to reflect the likely value of a share of a company after all options were exercised.
Any company issuing options is by definition increasing the number of shares outstanding, which reduces the value of everyone else's shares. There's a semantic argument to be made this is not literally "printing shares," but I really don't care about that particular bit of semantics. Call it printing shares, printing money, or just spending money it still supports my thesis:
Facebook is spending money when it issues stock options to it's employees. Like all other expenses these costs reduce it's profit which ultimately reduces it's tax burden. This year there were so many options that Facebook's profit was entirely wiped out.
Actually, the Swedes have done that already. The only difference is they picked refugees from war-torn countries like Somalia and Iraq, not Mexico.
Altho the way Mexico has been going...
It seems to be working out pretty well for them.
A company has to print shares for every option of a company stock it issues as soon as that option is exercised, by definition. Why?
Because Ford is not allowed to control shares of Ford. That would give Ford management the ability to file paperwork issuing a few billion new shares, and then since the CEO controls Ford he would be un-fireable. Thus when companies engage in share buy-back programs the shares are eliminated from things that are calculated on a per share basis. As far as the market is concerned, the number of shares of Ford is equal to the number of shares of Ford that Ford does not own.
Which is a roundabout way of saying it is impossible to exercise an option on Ford, issued by Ford, without geting a share that is totally new as far as anyone who matters (ie: Dow Jones) is concerned. Ford can reduce the damage with complicated buy-back schemes -- you exercise on Aug. 28, they buy a share on Aug. 29, and issue it to you on Aug. 30 -- but Ford is still issuing a new share on the 30th. It's just replacing one they abolished on the 28th, so the numbers work out pretty.
I honestly have no idea whether Facebook is getting this fancy, they certainly have the cash to do so and a pretty strong incentive not to dilute Zuckerberg's shares (he owns roughly 54%, so he'll be fireable if Facebook's total shares increase by 8%); but that actually makes my main point stronger:
Facebook're paying their employees with valuable things that cost them money. These things happen to be options. This is a business expense which gets counted against profit. It is supposed to reduce their taxes because taxes are on profit. This is not something Congress allowed because Congress is stupid, or engaged in some wild conspiracy to enrich Facebook. It's something Congress expected to happen when they forced everyone to expense options in 2006.
Geez, for a guy calling others ignorant and clueless you're pretty ignorant and clueless.
What's going on is simple: we tax companies on profits. Profit is revenue minus costs. Since 2006 stock options have been counted as a cost. Not counting them as a cost allowed companies to print money via stock options, and still look incredibly profitable. This sucked for shareholders because each option printed diluted their shares voting power, which made those shares less valuable.
Expensing options solved that problem, but it created others. One is that a company that companies with operating profits can wipe out those profits by paying their employees with lots of stock options. That's exactly what Facebook is doing. To an extent it's a huge problem because it pisses people off, but OTOH printing as many shares as Facebook does is actually dumb business which costs the shareholders of Facebook money.
The far bigger problem is that small start-ups have bigger problems in the early years because paying people with options makes them look unprofitable, which means they have trouble getting investors and banks to sign on.
The reason they get this tax break is that only profits are taxed.
A few years back companies were literally printing money with their stock options. They could give any employee seven figures in stock without affecting their bottom line. So they did. In 2006 this was changed because it was unfair to all the other shareholders, who lost value in the company for each new share that was printed.
But if options are a business expense you can reduce your taxable profit by giving out lots of options.
Goddangit, ignore "greater then your income."
I swear it made sense in one of my drafts, but I meant to delete it.
It is not deferred! That money is spent and gone forever. Middle income earners can deduct medical, but only if it is a huge portion of their income, I think it was like 30%. For FB this is not a tax break, it's a deduction.
It's technically 10%.
For most people it actually has to be significantly more then 10% because the IRS gives you a deduction of $5,950 for free, therefore unless your medical plus your other deductible expenses are $6,000 greater then your income you shouldn't bother deducting.
As a tax Pro I have only deducted for a couple who had $50k medical expenses and people who owned houses.
To quote the article:
Most notably, I found that a DOS emulation tool (DOSBox), when used in combination with a service such as Dropbox, allowed me to have a consistent environment across all of my devices - including my Android tablet and phone - with the same files and applications used everywhere. Handy. Nerdy, and handy.
He doesn't say flat-out he'd use the phone for photoshop, but part of the appeal seems to be that he could do so in theory.
Most likely people have simply given up taking the source code and building it themselves. If a prebuilt binary is not available they will simply give up.
You do realize that for people who are not programmers "taking the source code and building it themselves" is a non-trivial task? That, in fact, it is easier to write simple programs (like "Hello World") then understand which libraries you need to get something as big as GIMP to compile properly.
He's not using it for pro-level editing. You don't do pro-level editing on a cell phone. So 4 GB is probably a couple hundred times bigger then any file he intends to use.