If I sell you something (I am located in Virginia) via mail - the state of Washington cannot compel me to pay any taxes, either on my work or on your behalf. If I came to your state, I would no longer be out-of-state.
If you have good content, SEO shouldn't be necessary. People have found that you can enhance your ranking by inserting fake or misleading content in the form of keywords, links, and activity which does not increase the actual value of the page. This causes the accuracy of the Google search bot to go down - though it increases the hits on optimized pages. The net result is poorer searching, and good searching keeps eyeballs in front of advertising, which pays the bills to provide better searching.
I'm surprised they're telling everyone about it and not just coding around it, but it could be a social engineering attempt to reduce SEO, making the highly optimized sites easier to spot and flag as less valuable in searching.
Flat taxes are an excellent idea, but only if implemented on gross receipts and not on a "net" or "adjusted" income. If every entity in the US paid 5% on their gross income, we could probably run the country. Poor people would get off with a nominal tax bill (a hike from the current negative rate they "pay"). People with several shell corporations to hide assets and limit liability would pay double, triple, or more. Supply chains with short distribution would pay the least tax (think local farmers, who would have almost no markup to account for the tax), those with highly complex business operations would pay more (think of shell corporations that pass through money to low-tax states) causing their end products to be more expensive.
If your real estate agent gets 6% the gross of your house, and your wall street fund manager gets 3.5% of the total funds you have invested - neither of which are affected by how much your net proceeds are, why should the government - who protects your country and keeps the law of the land - only get paid when you happen to turn a profit?
Net income is easy to fudge and modify. Gross receipts is whatever you receive. Without deductions, it becomes a "flat fee" for any transaction, paid by the recipient.
Except that you can't apply a state tax to an out of state entity. Hey, the money's gotta come from somewhere, and the only thing they can get to is the end user.
Taxes, in an ideal world, are levied in response to a need for services.
Examples:
Most property taxes go to fund local schools, police, fire, and local public services. While your consumption may not be proportional to the value of your real estate, it becomes a relatively fair basis for taxation.
Motor fuel taxes fund road projects. That one is fairly proportional, since heavier vehicles cause more wear and tear on roads, and generally get worse mileage.
Sales taxes - which are local - pay for local infrastructure related to commerce. In all likelihood, internet sales have little demand on your local services. Digital downloads have nearly zero. There is, generally, no local funding of internet services and - in fact - due to monopoly agreements with some providers the localities are already taxing the infrastructure they don't support (or actively discourage). It's a simple panic attempt to fill waning coffers in a down economy, when proper management would have had them either dropping rates in the mid-2000s or (preferrably) saving the "extra" for the inevitable downturn.
See, but that's okay because to get to those vulnerabilities you need physical access to my device. If you can't root my iPad with an app that's available in the app store (i.e. a hidden root), or via an email or link I get to from Safari, then the system is secure enough.
In reality, I could give up my tablet, probably give up my laptop, and maybe give up my desktop - but you can have my smartphone when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Despite the horrendously expensive plans they require, even with minimal data or phone usage (I use about 200 minutes and 50-60MB of cell data in a typical month), it is indepensable and the most efficient use of space I own.
It is my media player, holding most of my 8000 audio files and a couple of audio (and print) books. It's my emergency communication line - my iMessage account is only shared between me, my daughter, and my wife. It is my business office - I have my business line as a Google Voice number, giving me access to call from my work number and get transcribed emails anywhere. It's my general notebook, with Evernote keeping all the stupid slips of paper I used to keep in my wallet. It's my personal phone, with a separate number from my work one. It's my contact book. It's my GPS. It's my general answer machine (Google, not Siri). It's my calendar - no, it's my planner for the entire family. See, we each have a Google calendar - and with Pocket Informant I can bring in all three, plus the calendars for the three boards I sit on - all in their own color. When I find out I might have to have a meeting in the evening or on a weekend, I know instantly if there's a conflict. Just as great, when I put that oddball meeting in, my wife knows I'm going to be late for dinner, or that I won't be around Saturday afternoon.
There are so many things, and so much efficiency, wrapped up in that little device which - since I don't jabber on the phone much - will last a solid three days between charging if needed.
Could I live without my smartphone? Yes, but I would have to replace it with 3-4x the devices or items, and I would be far less efficient. It's not something I would do voluntarily.
I have to admit it, I got caught up in the hype and I bought a smartphone. The novelty wore off after a couple of days. Since then, it has sat in it's charger, almost completely unused. In fact, it's one of the worst purchases I've ever made.
Smartphones in general are rather pointless devices. They're far bulkier than my flip phone, so they're not very good on the go. They're much less comfortable to use than my netbook or my laptop, especially when I have to do a lot of typing. They're so vastly underpowered relative to even a netbook that they're not usable for anything computationally intensive. My Kindle is a much better e-book reader.
I learned the hard way that the usefulness of smartphones is purely a marketing creation. They look like they have potential, but in practice they're just the combination of the worst of every other type of computer or computing device.
I have one, but I rarely use it. I spend most of my time out of the office, and it's just not practical to carry a desktop around. It doesn't have built-in wifi or cell data, so even it I were to pack it up and take it with me, I often can't get online to access my network resources. Of course, having all that computational power is good, but for the work I do I never even notice that my netbook can't process as fast - It works as fast as I can type things in.
I have one, but I rarely use it. It's screen is much smaller than my desktop (which is 3 monitors, actually) and there is no way to get all of the data on the screen I use. Even the models of laptop which have "full size" keyboards and weigh close to 10 lbs don't have the extra function keys I use or a comfortable layout. And don't get me started on the touch pad vs mouse, esp for programs that need a third or scroll button combination move. Mine mostly just sits on a shelf, collecting dust.
Could be worse - you could get injured and have to go to a hospital emergency room where they work residents 80+* hours a week, with allowable shifts of 30 hours straight, and 4 days off - total - in a month. Should you really trust someone with your life when they're so impaired that they would likely fail most sobriety tests?
And the worst part is - those are the "new" lowered hours that were put in place to improve safety. It was much worse prior to the previous decade.
*80 is the "recommended" maximum, but is a voluntary standard.
Paypal is the refuge of last resort for processing things because they capture your money. Google and Square both sweep money into your account directly. And 1% back on debit card purchases from your Paypal account? Why not just use a real CC and get 1%-5% cash back, plus have your money in a real bank, and not have your account balance exposed to fraud.
It's more like "many" banks in Iran are being temporarily blocked from processing transactions with the EU. It's not all the banks in Iraq, and it doesn't appear to apply to transactions anywhere outside of the EU. It probably will hurt the people the most, but that's true of practically every sanction available. And it's cheaper, takes less time, and is easier to recover from sanctions than bombing raids that wipe out a country's infrastructure, which is the alternative.
I can guarantee you that the screening to get you on the list costs the government more than $100. The people writing the laws aren't getting rich off of this.
One of the issues I have with the TSA procedure is the additional time wasted when travelling by air. To make sure you don't miss your boarding call, you have to arrive an extra hour to ninety minutes earlier than you used to. Now, that may be an annoyance, but to a consultant, that's 2-3 hours per trip that is either unbillable or less-billable. Sure you can work in an airport, but you aren't even close to fully efficient. Multiply those hours times the number of business travelers and you have a staggering loss of efficiency / opportunity cost.
While this is nice, it's not a guarantee. You can still arrive and find out you're in the regular line on occasion. It's nice that most of the time you don't have to stand in line, but it sucks because you still have to get there early just in case you get the traditional line.
The caste system has always been in place. Coach/steerage gets the general line. First class gets a special, shorter line (since it's just FC passengers). Private jet passengers have no line, no check.
This is more of a nod to the frequent fliers who are constantly going through this. I'm of two minds about this: folks who are putting up 200k miles are unlikely to be terrorist bombers, and this addresses part of the "bad for business / lost hours" problem that the TSA creates which I like to harp on. That said, it just makes those of us who fly infrequently madder to see folks breezing through the lines and TSA agents standing around doing nothing while the regular line snakes around the corner.
As for the smiles - that's just human nature, not some kind of special Disney treatment you get with your pass. Those agents don't have to deal with constantly grousing passengers, people who have lost patience with the lines and required security striptease, and the inevitable idiot who has no idea what their doing (or is intentionally belligerent) and fouls up the works. I'd smile too if everyone who passed through my line was happy about NOT being in that OTHER line.
The resale may be what they plan on using to make up the difference. A well refurbed Apple item will fetch 70% or more of the retail value after a year as the new ones come out. They might be able to flip a lot of these tablets for $300 (for the $500 model, next year's $400 model) around launch time, which means that if they cost $420 wholesale (probably higher at launch, who knows) and they can sell them for $300, less about a 5% return rate and shipping costs of $10, for $275 net. To them, 12 months only costs $145. That's still not great, as there would be no profit after shipping this thing out 11-12 times in a year - $25/mox12mo = $300, less $120 in shipping/packaging/processing (it's free both ways, and $5 for box and shipping is pretty cheap), $5 in typical refurb to check and wipe with a tech at $20/hr burdered x 12 round trips = $60. It's already gone.
I'm sure there are lower cost items. Maybe they're hoping you'll just not use the service for most of the year.
I'm a bit baffled - $25, less packaging and shipping, on a $500 item (even at wholesale, say $400) means a payback period of no less than 24 months. That's probably longer than the expected lifecycle of a device like this. How many people would be interested in trialing a original iPad?
On the flip side, do you really buy enough stuff to justify $300/year? Especially when you can't get 2-3 similar items to play with side by side (Transformer, iPad, and Note; or three digital cameras like the Lumix TZ20, Sony HX30v, and the Canon SX 260HS).
And then there's the whole - pay retail for a returned and worn product part. I'm sure there's a marketing case for this, but clearly I'm not the demographic!
You can put anything you want into terms and conditions. If it violates their service agreement with the CC processing service (which it is practically guaranteed to), it will be null and void. Credit card companies value your revenue stream more than they value the vendors. It's very hard to run a service without being able to accept MC/Visa/Amex - and if they really use this tactic, and the CC companies get an earful from several customers, it's likely to put them out of business.
Yes, you might have to fight with UPS or Fedex or USPS about the delivery - but often (again) you can cry foul to the CC company, and they'll refund your money and take it up with the carriers insurance. For the big carriers, it's cheaper to pay the occasional claim and save the 1-1.5 minutes of downtime getting a signature. You'll notice that tomorrow, none of the carriers will leave the iPads without a signature in any place that's even remotely dicey. Dell boxes tend to get the same careful treatment. These guys track cost/benefit very carefully.
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If I sell you something (I am located in Virginia) via mail - the state of Washington cannot compel me to pay any taxes, either on my work or on your behalf. If I came to your state, I would no longer be out-of-state.
If you have good content, SEO shouldn't be necessary. People have found that you can enhance your ranking by inserting fake or misleading content in the form of keywords, links, and activity which does not increase the actual value of the page. This causes the accuracy of the Google search bot to go down - though it increases the hits on optimized pages. The net result is poorer searching, and good searching keeps eyeballs in front of advertising, which pays the bills to provide better searching.
I'm surprised they're telling everyone about it and not just coding around it, but it could be a social engineering attempt to reduce SEO, making the highly optimized sites easier to spot and flag as less valuable in searching.
Flat taxes are an excellent idea, but only if implemented on gross receipts and not on a "net" or "adjusted" income. If every entity in the US paid 5% on their gross income, we could probably run the country. Poor people would get off with a nominal tax bill (a hike from the current negative rate they "pay"). People with several shell corporations to hide assets and limit liability would pay double, triple, or more. Supply chains with short distribution would pay the least tax (think local farmers, who would have almost no markup to account for the tax), those with highly complex business operations would pay more (think of shell corporations that pass through money to low-tax states) causing their end products to be more expensive.
If your real estate agent gets 6% the gross of your house, and your wall street fund manager gets 3.5% of the total funds you have invested - neither of which are affected by how much your net proceeds are, why should the government - who protects your country and keeps the law of the land - only get paid when you happen to turn a profit?
Net income is easy to fudge and modify. Gross receipts is whatever you receive. Without deductions, it becomes a "flat fee" for any transaction, paid by the recipient.
Except that you can't apply a state tax to an out of state entity. Hey, the money's gotta come from somewhere, and the only thing they can get to is the end user.
Taxes, in an ideal world, are levied in response to a need for services.
Examples:
Most property taxes go to fund local schools, police, fire, and local public services. While your consumption may not be proportional to the value of your real estate, it becomes a relatively fair basis for taxation.
Motor fuel taxes fund road projects. That one is fairly proportional, since heavier vehicles cause more wear and tear on roads, and generally get worse mileage.
Sales taxes - which are local - pay for local infrastructure related to commerce. In all likelihood, internet sales have little demand on your local services. Digital downloads have nearly zero. There is, generally, no local funding of internet services and - in fact - due to monopoly agreements with some providers the localities are already taxing the infrastructure they don't support (or actively discourage). It's a simple panic attempt to fill waning coffers in a down economy, when proper management would have had them either dropping rates in the mid-2000s or (preferrably) saving the "extra" for the inevitable downturn.
Nice...I'm going to remember this one.
See, but that's okay because to get to those vulnerabilities you need physical access to my device. If you can't root my iPad with an app that's available in the app store (i.e. a hidden root), or via an email or link I get to from Safari, then the system is secure enough.
In reality, I could give up my tablet, probably give up my laptop, and maybe give up my desktop - but you can have my smartphone when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Despite the horrendously expensive plans they require, even with minimal data or phone usage (I use about 200 minutes and 50-60MB of cell data in a typical month), it is indepensable and the most efficient use of space I own.
It is my media player, holding most of my 8000 audio files and a couple of audio (and print) books. It's my emergency communication line - my iMessage account is only shared between me, my daughter, and my wife. It is my business office - I have my business line as a Google Voice number, giving me access to call from my work number and get transcribed emails anywhere. It's my general notebook, with Evernote keeping all the stupid slips of paper I used to keep in my wallet. It's my personal phone, with a separate number from my work one. It's my contact book. It's my GPS. It's my general answer machine (Google, not Siri). It's my calendar - no, it's my planner for the entire family. See, we each have a Google calendar - and with Pocket Informant I can bring in all three, plus the calendars for the three boards I sit on - all in their own color. When I find out I might have to have a meeting in the evening or on a weekend, I know instantly if there's a conflict. Just as great, when I put that oddball meeting in, my wife knows I'm going to be late for dinner, or that I won't be around Saturday afternoon.
There are so many things, and so much efficiency, wrapped up in that little device which - since I don't jabber on the phone much - will last a solid three days between charging if needed.
Could I live without my smartphone? Yes, but I would have to replace it with 3-4x the devices or items, and I would be far less efficient. It's not something I would do voluntarily.
I have to admit it, I got caught up in the hype and I bought a smartphone. The novelty wore off after a couple of days. Since then, it has sat in it's charger, almost completely unused. In fact, it's one of the worst purchases I've ever made.
Smartphones in general are rather pointless devices. They're far bulkier than my flip phone, so they're not very good on the go. They're much less comfortable to use than my netbook or my laptop, especially when I have to do a lot of typing. They're so vastly underpowered relative to even a netbook that they're not usable for anything computationally intensive. My Kindle is a much better e-book reader.
I learned the hard way that the usefulness of smartphones is purely a marketing creation. They look like they have potential, but in practice they're just the combination of the worst of every other type of computer or computing device.
I have one, but I rarely use it. I spend most of my time out of the office, and it's just not practical to carry a desktop around. It doesn't have built-in wifi or cell data, so even it I were to pack it up and take it with me, I often can't get online to access my network resources. Of course, having all that computational power is good, but for the work I do I never even notice that my netbook can't process as fast - It works as fast as I can type things in.
I have one, but I rarely use it. It's screen is much smaller than my desktop (which is 3 monitors, actually) and there is no way to get all of the data on the screen I use. Even the models of laptop which have "full size" keyboards and weigh close to 10 lbs don't have the extra function keys I use or a comfortable layout. And don't get me started on the touch pad vs mouse, esp for programs that need a third or scroll button combination move. Mine mostly just sits on a shelf, collecting dust.
Programmers belong in cubicles, criminals belong in jail.
You say that like there's a functional difference.
Could be worse - you could get injured and have to go to a hospital emergency room where they work residents 80+* hours a week, with allowable shifts of 30 hours straight, and 4 days off - total - in a month. Should you really trust someone with your life when they're so impaired that they would likely fail most sobriety tests?
And the worst part is - those are the "new" lowered hours that were put in place to improve safety. It was much worse prior to the previous decade.
*80 is the "recommended" maximum, but is a voluntary standard.
Paypal is the refuge of last resort for processing things because they capture your money. Google and Square both sweep money into your account directly. And 1% back on debit card purchases from your Paypal account? Why not just use a real CC and get 1%-5% cash back, plus have your money in a real bank, and not have your account balance exposed to fraud.
So you won't let the waitress swipe your card, but you'll let her take it into another room for several minutes?
It's more like "many" banks in Iran are being temporarily blocked from processing transactions with the EU. It's not all the banks in Iraq, and it doesn't appear to apply to transactions anywhere outside of the EU. It probably will hurt the people the most, but that's true of practically every sanction available. And it's cheaper, takes less time, and is easier to recover from sanctions than bombing raids that wipe out a country's infrastructure, which is the alternative.
I can guarantee you that the screening to get you on the list costs the government more than $100. The people writing the laws aren't getting rich off of this.
One of the issues I have with the TSA procedure is the additional time wasted when travelling by air. To make sure you don't miss your boarding call, you have to arrive an extra hour to ninety minutes earlier than you used to. Now, that may be an annoyance, but to a consultant, that's 2-3 hours per trip that is either unbillable or less-billable. Sure you can work in an airport, but you aren't even close to fully efficient. Multiply those hours times the number of business travelers and you have a staggering loss of efficiency / opportunity cost.
While this is nice, it's not a guarantee. You can still arrive and find out you're in the regular line on occasion. It's nice that most of the time you don't have to stand in line, but it sucks because you still have to get there early just in case you get the traditional line.
The caste system has always been in place. Coach/steerage gets the general line. First class gets a special, shorter line (since it's just FC passengers). Private jet passengers have no line, no check.
This is more of a nod to the frequent fliers who are constantly going through this. I'm of two minds about this: folks who are putting up 200k miles are unlikely to be terrorist bombers, and this addresses part of the "bad for business / lost hours" problem that the TSA creates which I like to harp on. That said, it just makes those of us who fly infrequently madder to see folks breezing through the lines and TSA agents standing around doing nothing while the regular line snakes around the corner.
As for the smiles - that's just human nature, not some kind of special Disney treatment you get with your pass. Those agents don't have to deal with constantly grousing passengers, people who have lost patience with the lines and required security striptease, and the inevitable idiot who has no idea what their doing (or is intentionally belligerent) and fouls up the works. I'd smile too if everyone who passed through my line was happy about NOT being in that OTHER line.
and always been at war with Iran. The ministry of truth keeps all the old newspapers updated so that I can verify that fact.
Did you hear that the chocolate rations are going up again?
The resale may be what they plan on using to make up the difference. A well refurbed Apple item will fetch 70% or more of the retail value after a year as the new ones come out. They might be able to flip a lot of these tablets for $300 (for the $500 model, next year's $400 model) around launch time, which means that if they cost $420 wholesale (probably higher at launch, who knows) and they can sell them for $300, less about a 5% return rate and shipping costs of $10, for $275 net. To them, 12 months only costs $145. That's still not great, as there would be no profit after shipping this thing out 11-12 times in a year - $25/mox12mo = $300, less $120 in shipping/packaging/processing (it's free both ways, and $5 for box and shipping is pretty cheap), $5 in typical refurb to check and wipe with a tech at $20/hr burdered x 12 round trips = $60. It's already gone.
I'm sure there are lower cost items. Maybe they're hoping you'll just not use the service for most of the year.
Fair point.
I'm a bit baffled - $25, less packaging and shipping, on a $500 item (even at wholesale, say $400) means a payback period of no less than 24 months. That's probably longer than the expected lifecycle of a device like this. How many people would be interested in trialing a original iPad?
On the flip side, do you really buy enough stuff to justify $300/year? Especially when you can't get 2-3 similar items to play with side by side (Transformer, iPad, and Note; or three digital cameras like the Lumix TZ20, Sony HX30v, and the Canon SX 260HS).
And then there's the whole - pay retail for a returned and worn product part. I'm sure there's a marketing case for this, but clearly I'm not the demographic!
You can put anything you want into terms and conditions. If it violates their service agreement with the CC processing service (which it is practically guaranteed to), it will be null and void. Credit card companies value your revenue stream more than they value the vendors. It's very hard to run a service without being able to accept MC/Visa/Amex - and if they really use this tactic, and the CC companies get an earful from several customers, it's likely to put them out of business.
Yes, you might have to fight with UPS or Fedex or USPS about the delivery - but often (again) you can cry foul to the CC company, and they'll refund your money and take it up with the carriers insurance. For the big carriers, it's cheaper to pay the occasional claim and save the 1-1.5 minutes of downtime getting a signature. You'll notice that tomorrow, none of the carriers will leave the iPads without a signature in any place that's even remotely dicey. Dell boxes tend to get the same careful treatment. These guys track cost/benefit very carefully.