I wonder if - 20 years of technology later - we had found out that they couldn't sing well, but were using digital pitch and tone correction (autotune/melodyne style) to make them sound awesome there would be any fallout at all. It's basically what every cute boy/girl pop star is doing, to varying degrees, but now it's mainstream so it must be okay.
Actually, there is a societal-level case that recycling an old fridge is worth the value of scrap plus the differential cost of the power required to run it. With a 20 year old unit, that's about $100/yr. The savings is both in energy usage (1000 kWh/yr) as well as financial planning angle. Someone who buys an old fridge (we'll say 10 years old) for $100 and runs it for another ten years will have spent at least $650 on the fridge and "extra" energy over a 10 year life, presuming nothing goes wrong with it. A new fridge (on sale) will cost between $500 an $600. I've excluded cost of money here, as the increase in electricity is expected to outstrip inflation over the near term, but without a crystal ball you can massage the numbers in either direction. The point is, while it may be expedient to grab a fridge from the curb, it probably doesn't make financial sense,
Is there a market for this? Well, there are over to 100,000,000 households in the US, and a fridge only lasts for 20 years or so. 100M/20 years=5 million refrigerators per year that might need disposal. You'd need more than 30 of these around the US to handle that load.
And, again, that's why a gross receipts tax would be great. 3% on all receipts means that day traders would lose their shirts on all by the craziest of moves, but the long term investor with a 10-30 year time horizon would pay only 3% on the gains and dividends - practically tax free by today's standards. We could just eliminate the "tax advantaged" savings accounts for retirement - the new tax would be so low as to make it trivial.
I've got bad news for you: Despite the current unemployment rate being "high," there are too many people working. Those people are getting paid, in part, by the trillion dollars a year the federal government is borrowing with no plan to ever pay it back.
Here's the funny thing about money the government spends: nearly every dollar ends up employing someone. Go ahead, let that sink in.
Every dollar the government "pays" is in salary for a federal worker (employment) or benefits (which employs people who provide services to that worker), or goes to a contractor for goods (which keeps people employed making said goods) or services (which employs people to do things for the government).
Obama and the Democrats know this, and so do the Republicans. The TEA Party representatives may not know this, but their handlers do. A correction will have to occur, and it's going to result in a spike in unemployment. If you're not in the White House, you'd really like that spike to happen now so that when the current occupant is gone, the worst part is over.
This is not a political post. It wouldn't matter who was in the White House. the stimulus would have happened under McCain, because it's the only way that the economy wouldn't have tumbled into an abyss. The challenge for each representative is to protect as much of their constituency from the effects. If unemployment goes to 12-13%, but your constituents don't feel the pinch much, you get re-elected. The game not to save or hurt the country, but to strategically choose how to make sure the other side takes the hit. And, if you're out of power, to make sure that hit comes before the next election cycle so you can capitolize on it.
It's all part of the game.
to answer your questions:
A minimum impact on the US (and the world be damned) would be to cut foreign programs, shut down all foreign military bases, and make an orderly but rapid pull out of the middle east. Halve most of the defense programs that involve research and development of new weapons. Shut down NASA manned space flight completely, keep the science. Shut down most of the Education grants to states, along with police, fire. Shut down DHS, scale back all TSA functions to pre 9/11/01 levels. Maintain Interior resources for existing installations (maintenance) but do not expand operations. Raise the Soc/Med age to the average age of mortality for people who live to 18, 6 months per year is too aggressive, 3 months is better. The social contract should be that if you plan your money to last a statistical lifetime, society will make sure you don't starve if you live too long. Might as well extend the payroll tax to all income with no cap.
Taxes should eliminate EIC, child tax deductions - hell - I think they should eliminate all deductions and go with a gross receipts tax. Corporate, individual, everyone. No deductions or exclusions means no loopholes and no under-the-table benefits.
The next ten years is not going to be pretty, but unless congress royally screws up (and even if they do) we'll get through.
I admit, I would allow a 2087xFed Min Wage to be deducted, so if you worked for min wage you wouldn't have to pay, and if yuo owned a small business that only brought in fed min wage, you wouldn't have to pay. (Though I wouldn't allow you to combine people in families to get a bigger exemption - every individual would be required to file separately)
I've never figured out how much we would actually need, though. At 14T GDP, it would be near 20%. If, as I suspect, most things change hands at least three times, it would drop to less than 7%. If you add in intangibles like real estate sales, which I would guess at between 8-10T/yr, and securities, which is about $12T/yr on the NYSE alone, I think you might stabilize around 3-4% once all the phantom corporations are eliminated to reduce the number of entities paying taxes. Don't really know for sure, though.
How do you think those companies operating in the red pay for electricity, rent, salaries, paper, and the like? The electric company doesn't base the bill on the company's profit, and yet they get paid*. We need to stop talking about corporate taxes as some kind of penalty for making a profit, and start calling it what it is - a cost of doing business.
Federal tax is Federal tax - they can do it any way they like. State tax is state tax - they can do it any way they like.
It's not required that everybody do it the same all at once. (Though the states which base their personal income tax on federal AGI would have to do a little work or convert. Corporate is totally different anyway so it wouldn't matter)
*Those that operate in the red do so on borrowed money. Those that don't dig themselves out of their self-created hole go bankrupt. Investors decide whether the company is likely to do so or not with the full information of the costs and profits associated with the business. Gross receipts taxes do not change anything except to increase the upside profits and shift the risk-reward equation slightly.
The law will likely make no distinction in the kind of information - once they have your name, they will have to comply. And, hell, if they have to comply they may as well get as much as possible so they can sell it.
Put the corporate officers in jail - make the minimum sentence mandatory. It needn't be long. Hold people in power responsible and you'll see action.
Business will make a value judgment based on the cost - $5,000,000 potential fine or $300,000 in IT changes means it happens. $5,000,000 fine or $3,000,000 in IT changes and all of a sudden it's not so clear cut. CEO and CIO guaranteed to get 6 months to 5 years in a federal pen for non-compliance and that IT change could cost $30,000,000 and it would be item number one on every single board meeting agenda until the transition is complete.
Yeah, for long term investors it's like being the house when the guy sitting at the table playing black jack and knows what the dealers down card is and what the next 10 cards in the shoe are. Usually, the house takes those guys out back and breaks their knees, but it this case, the guy at the table happens to already own the knee-breaking-guys.
This is one reason we should go to a gross receipts tax. If you had to pay 3% on every dollar you received from any source, it would make HFT impossible, along with most day-trading. Someone who actually invests in a company, and receives dividends (taxed at 3%) then sells 10 years or more later to either choose a new investment strategy or to become liquid, would only pay 3% of the receipts, and probably far, far less than normal taxes today.
Your broker chain - who you presume is actively working to get you profits - is getting 4% of the gross for "investing" in that mutual fund, rather than taking a percentage of the profits. Ever wonder why there seems to be more profit to be had on Wall Street than in Washington DC these days? Yeah, me neither.
If it's a gross receipts tax, it won't matter. Where do you live? How much did you receive from all sources? Multiply tax rate in state (or locality) A x total receipts = tax.
My town has a gross receipts tax for business. If you have a presence in town, you pay the tax on all receipts for that entity. If you sne dhtat money back to a corporate HQ, it doesn't matter - whatever you receive in the town gets put on your taxes. It's something like 0.1 or 0.2%, but it makes everything work out easy. (yes, it sucks to not be able to hide money from the tax man, but I also know that the $B corporation across town also pays the tax; I've seen the numbers).
Wrong -losing your job is like a business losing all of it's customers and hence all of it's income. Businesses get to deduct the equivalent of "living expenses" for individuals. The money I have left in the bank after I've bought everything I want is my "net profit."
There is always profit margin - it gets factored into the price. Show me a good reason to buy something and then immediately sell it back for nearly the same price. Now show me how that adds value to the economy. See, there isn't - it's used by leeches to skim money from the system.
Gross receipts tax is the absolute easiest system - how much did you receive? send us a fraction of that. There's no accounting required, just recordation of income.
If you lose money, does the military not need to defend your country? Do the regulators no longer need to audit your bank's books? Does the space shuttle fly for free? Do the teachers and companies who build your roads and schools do that for free? Do prisons, police departments, fire departments, and the like no longer need to exist?
Does your real estate or stock broker give you transaction commission free if you're under water? Fuck no.
Every transaction should taxed - no deductions, no exclusions, no loopholes. You want fair? Get rid of all the ways around taxes. If you think somebody deserves money for being special, send them a government check - but don't hide it in the tax code. Corporate loopholes and "incentives," and negative personal tax brackets, are hiding much of the "spending" we do in Federal Government.
In part, via the tax code. You can call it regulation, but it's really a place where you can change the financial advantage in your favor by 20% or so with the proper group of accountants and lawyers (and off shore tax havens and shell corps). That's not the "regulation" you think of, though, when business rails against the government.
Sorry, a technology company near D.C. just screams federal funding.
It may make money. Hell, the bridge to nowhere they built near Virginia Tech has been so profitable for auto research that they've canned the idea of actually extending it to connect the town to I-81 and using it for traffic. I'm skeptical, though, that a town without people will provide actual data on how systems interact with, well, people.
I was amazed at the central/central eastern side of B'more when I went through on the train a couple weeks ago. Street upon street of abandoned/vacant(?) and just horribly run down row houses. Sad, indeed.
Prescriptive: If you build it with Douglas Fir you can span 32 feet maximum. (Well, there are actually whole tables)
Standard (aka performance based): Your residence must be able to support a 90mph wind, a 0.167g lateral seismic force, 40 pounds per square foot for live load, and under this load it cannot deflect more than the span length divided by 360.
I you use the Prescriptive method, you grab an $80-100 code book (or download it from the state for free), use their tables and methods, and you're done. By using those methods and materials you effectively comply with the performance standards. If you use the standard building code, you need to prove it - generally by hiring an professional engineer or registered architect to do the calculations and show you how to build it. Heck, you technically don't even need to comply with some of the provisions if you can prove they are not applicable. For example, if you're in a 90MPH wind zone but you have a special sheltered area that never gets that kind of wind, you can set up a monitoring station and have a professional take data for 5-10 years, compile it using standard formulas and statistical estimates to create a custom wind zone which you can then ask to have adopted by the local official or the national body. Same for new materials - you create the materials, run then through standard testing (and by standard, I mean custom, but with the national code body supervising or an engineer creating the test) and submit the new data for approval.
Now, the key here is that if you want to build a house for $10000 in spare parts, it's going to cost you $100,000 or more to engineer such a beast. If you're building 10,000 of them, then it's no big deal - but if each one is different. Well, the cost to prove that you meet the standard can be high. I once had a guy who wanted to build a garage out of surplus server racks. He had some old, undocumented lumber trusses he's bought/found, too. I told him it would probably cost more for me do properly design his garage (back then at $100/hr) than it would cost to go buy one, but that I would be happy to help him if he really wanted to do it.
Yeah, but this is on the internet which is what makes it novel. Sure, we may have used video conferencing to connect people for business and video lectures at school to have students in multiple locations all share the same class and professor, but that was mostly CCTV. This is the goddamned interner we're talking about. Of course it's a novel, patentable concept.
Besides, if some goofball can patent "dividing the number of golf strokes outside 50 yards by # of greens in regulation" on an 18 hole round to get your "long game" handicap, certainly something like this deserves a patent.
Okay, genius: You've got a $100 budget for all the hardware and software in the office and anything connected to the computers must be HIPAA compliant.
Ebay and farmville are built around getting people to do something specific, and are very orderly.
Most people STILL don't understand pixel count and how it affects the raw size of a document, and the compression techniques that are available. Greek to them; no - it's worse - it's Greek and math combined, which makes it beyond the comprehension of 80% of all adults.
I know lots of people who can function on a day to day basis, but couldn't tell you if a $2.95, 12 oz jar of peanut butter is more expensive per ounce than a $4.95, 1lb 4oz jar of the same peanut butter. They'll pick up the larger jar figuring it must be cheaper in bulk. Can you really expect those people to understand the concept of file size as proportional to the square of the pixels on one side of the image? Or understand that a gif or tiff file is fine for 1 bit or line art images, but jpg will do a better job on a photo - and that the greater the compression (what, you can change that?) on jpeg means a higher number of artifacts from the FFT used to encode the information which, if overdone, will lead to a poor quality image? Not likely.
Hell, I'm still waiting for a simple program that will take a scan and intelligently run a color, B&W, or high-res 1 bit image through a processor to increase the contrast and gamma to get a 300dpi fax-like scan of an image. Everything I've seen has been part of a (usually several hundred dollar) image management software application. All I want is to make scans small and storable as PDFs (really TIFFs embedded in PDFs), but I have yet to find it.
Slashdot Mirror
And, technically, that 40 is made up of at least 8 hours of break, iirc.
I wonder if - 20 years of technology later - we had found out that they couldn't sing well, but were using digital pitch and tone correction (autotune/melodyne style) to make them sound awesome there would be any fallout at all. It's basically what every cute boy/girl pop star is doing, to varying degrees, but now it's mainstream so it must be okay.
Because nobody can ever have enough different options for creating fart noises.
Actually, there is a societal-level case that recycling an old fridge is worth the value of scrap plus the differential cost of the power required to run it. With a 20 year old unit, that's about $100/yr. The savings is both in energy usage (1000 kWh/yr) as well as financial planning angle. Someone who buys an old fridge (we'll say 10 years old) for $100 and runs it for another ten years will have spent at least $650 on the fridge and "extra" energy over a 10 year life, presuming nothing goes wrong with it. A new fridge (on sale) will cost between $500 an $600. I've excluded cost of money here, as the increase in electricity is expected to outstrip inflation over the near term, but without a crystal ball you can massage the numbers in either direction. The point is, while it may be expedient to grab a fridge from the curb, it probably doesn't make financial sense,
Is there a market for this? Well, there are over to 100,000,000 households in the US, and a fridge only lasts for 20 years or so. 100M/20 years=5 million refrigerators per year that might need disposal. You'd need more than 30 of these around the US to handle that load.
These is a follow on patent to
Rapid acceleration of rocket propelled device
1) As a single unit
2) In multiple directions simultaneously
and
Novel method for core sampling of desert soils utilizing ballistic trajectory of rocket propelled craft
And, again, that's why a gross receipts tax would be great. 3% on all receipts means that day traders would lose their shirts on all by the craziest of moves, but the long term investor with a 10-30 year time horizon would pay only 3% on the gains and dividends - practically tax free by today's standards. We could just eliminate the "tax advantaged" savings accounts for retirement - the new tax would be so low as to make it trivial.
I've got bad news for you: Despite the current unemployment rate being "high," there are too many people working. Those people are getting paid, in part, by the trillion dollars a year the federal government is borrowing with no plan to ever pay it back.
Here's the funny thing about money the government spends: nearly every dollar ends up employing someone. Go ahead, let that sink in.
Every dollar the government "pays" is in salary for a federal worker (employment) or benefits (which employs people who provide services to that worker), or goes to a contractor for goods (which keeps people employed making said goods) or services (which employs people to do things for the government).
Obama and the Democrats know this, and so do the Republicans. The TEA Party representatives may not know this, but their handlers do. A correction will have to occur, and it's going to result in a spike in unemployment. If you're not in the White House, you'd really like that spike to happen now so that when the current occupant is gone, the worst part is over.
This is not a political post. It wouldn't matter who was in the White House. the stimulus would have happened under McCain, because it's the only way that the economy wouldn't have tumbled into an abyss. The challenge for each representative is to protect as much of their constituency from the effects. If unemployment goes to 12-13%, but your constituents don't feel the pinch much, you get re-elected. The game not to save or hurt the country, but to strategically choose how to make sure the other side takes the hit. And, if you're out of power, to make sure that hit comes before the next election cycle so you can capitolize on it.
It's all part of the game.
to answer your questions:
A minimum impact on the US (and the world be damned) would be to cut foreign programs, shut down all foreign military bases, and make an orderly but rapid pull out of the middle east. Halve most of the defense programs that involve research and development of new weapons. Shut down NASA manned space flight completely, keep the science. Shut down most of the Education grants to states, along with police, fire. Shut down DHS, scale back all TSA functions to pre 9/11/01 levels. Maintain Interior resources for existing installations (maintenance) but do not expand operations. Raise the Soc/Med age to the average age of mortality for people who live to 18, 6 months per year is too aggressive, 3 months is better. The social contract should be that if you plan your money to last a statistical lifetime, society will make sure you don't starve if you live too long. Might as well extend the payroll tax to all income with no cap.
Taxes should eliminate EIC, child tax deductions - hell - I think they should eliminate all deductions and go with a gross receipts tax. Corporate, individual, everyone. No deductions or exclusions means no loopholes and no under-the-table benefits.
The next ten years is not going to be pretty, but unless congress royally screws up (and even if they do) we'll get through.
I admit, I would allow a 2087xFed Min Wage to be deducted, so if you worked for min wage you wouldn't have to pay, and if yuo owned a small business that only brought in fed min wage, you wouldn't have to pay. (Though I wouldn't allow you to combine people in families to get a bigger exemption - every individual would be required to file separately)
I've never figured out how much we would actually need, though. At 14T GDP, it would be near 20%. If, as I suspect, most things change hands at least three times, it would drop to less than 7%. If you add in intangibles like real estate sales, which I would guess at between 8-10T/yr, and securities, which is about $12T/yr on the NYSE alone, I think you might stabilize around 3-4% once all the phantom corporations are eliminated to reduce the number of entities paying taxes. Don't really know for sure, though.
How do you think those companies operating in the red pay for electricity, rent, salaries, paper, and the like? The electric company doesn't base the bill on the company's profit, and yet they get paid*. We need to stop talking about corporate taxes as some kind of penalty for making a profit, and start calling it what it is - a cost of doing business.
Federal tax is Federal tax - they can do it any way they like.
State tax is state tax - they can do it any way they like.
It's not required that everybody do it the same all at once. (Though the states which base their personal income tax on federal AGI would have to do a little work or convert. Corporate is totally different anyway so it wouldn't matter)
*Those that operate in the red do so on borrowed money. Those that don't dig themselves out of their self-created hole go bankrupt. Investors decide whether the company is likely to do so or not with the full information of the costs and profits associated with the business. Gross receipts taxes do not change anything except to increase the upside profits and shift the risk-reward equation slightly.
The law will likely make no distinction in the kind of information - once they have your name, they will have to comply. And, hell, if they have to comply they may as well get as much as possible so they can sell it.
Put the corporate officers in jail - make the minimum sentence mandatory. It needn't be long. Hold people in power responsible and you'll see action.
Business will make a value judgment based on the cost - $5,000,000 potential fine or $300,000 in IT changes means it happens. $5,000,000 fine or $3,000,000 in IT changes and all of a sudden it's not so clear cut. CEO and CIO guaranteed to get 6 months to 5 years in a federal pen for non-compliance and that IT change could cost $30,000,000 and it would be item number one on every single board meeting agenda until the transition is complete.
Yeah, for long term investors it's like being the house when the guy sitting at the table playing black jack and knows what the dealers down card is and what the next 10 cards in the shoe are. Usually, the house takes those guys out back and breaks their knees, but it this case, the guy at the table happens to already own the knee-breaking-guys.
This is one reason we should go to a gross receipts tax. If you had to pay 3% on every dollar you received from any source, it would make HFT impossible, along with most day-trading. Someone who actually invests in a company, and receives dividends (taxed at 3%) then sells 10 years or more later to either choose a new investment strategy or to become liquid, would only pay 3% of the receipts, and probably far, far less than normal taxes today.
Your broker chain - who you presume is actively working to get you profits - is getting 4% of the gross for "investing" in that mutual fund, rather than taking a percentage of the profits. Ever wonder why there seems to be more profit to be had on Wall Street than in Washington DC these days? Yeah, me neither.
If it's a gross receipts tax, it won't matter. Where do you live? How much did you receive from all sources? Multiply tax rate in state (or locality) A x total receipts = tax.
My town has a gross receipts tax for business. If you have a presence in town, you pay the tax on all receipts for that entity. If you sne dhtat money back to a corporate HQ, it doesn't matter - whatever you receive in the town gets put on your taxes. It's something like 0.1 or 0.2%, but it makes everything work out easy. (yes, it sucks to not be able to hide money from the tax man, but I also know that the $B corporation across town also pays the tax; I've seen the numbers).
Wrong -losing your job is like a business losing all of it's customers and hence all of it's income. Businesses get to deduct the equivalent of "living expenses" for individuals. The money I have left in the bank after I've bought everything I want is my "net profit."
There is always profit margin - it gets factored into the price. Show me a good reason to buy something and then immediately sell it back for nearly the same price. Now show me how that adds value to the economy. See, there isn't - it's used by leeches to skim money from the system.
Gross receipts tax is the absolute easiest system - how much did you receive? send us a fraction of that. There's no accounting required, just recordation of income.
I'm impressed that Amazon figures they can get a law passed to get them out of this problem in less than a year. Now that's balls.
If you lose money, does the military not need to defend your country? Do the regulators no longer need to audit your bank's books? Does the space shuttle fly for free? Do the teachers and companies who build your roads and schools do that for free? Do prisons, police departments, fire departments, and the like no longer need to exist?
Does your real estate or stock broker give you transaction commission free if you're under water? Fuck no.
Every transaction should taxed - no deductions, no exclusions, no loopholes. You want fair? Get rid of all the ways around taxes. If you think somebody deserves money for being special, send them a government check - but don't hide it in the tax code. Corporate loopholes and "incentives," and negative personal tax brackets, are hiding much of the "spending" we do in Federal Government.
In part, via the tax code. You can call it regulation, but it's really a place where you can change the financial advantage in your favor by 20% or so with the proper group of accountants and lawyers (and off shore tax havens and shell corps). That's not the "regulation" you think of, though, when business rails against the government.
Sorry, a technology company near D.C. just screams federal funding.
It may make money. Hell, the bridge to nowhere they built near Virginia Tech has been so profitable for auto research that they've canned the idea of actually extending it to connect the town to I-81 and using it for traffic. I'm skeptical, though, that a town without people will provide actual data on how systems interact with, well, people.
I was amazed at the central/central eastern side of B'more when I went through on the train a couple weeks ago. Street upon street of abandoned/vacant(?) and just horribly run down row houses. Sad, indeed.
They have both kinds.
Prescriptive: If you build it with Douglas Fir you can span 32 feet maximum. (Well, there are actually whole tables)
Standard (aka performance based): Your residence must be able to support a 90mph wind, a 0.167g lateral seismic force, 40 pounds per square foot for live load, and under this load it cannot deflect more than the span length divided by 360.
I you use the Prescriptive method, you grab an $80-100 code book (or download it from the state for free), use their tables and methods, and you're done. By using those methods and materials you effectively comply with the performance standards. If you use the standard building code, you need to prove it - generally by hiring an professional engineer or registered architect to do the calculations and show you how to build it. Heck, you technically don't even need to comply with some of the provisions if you can prove they are not applicable. For example, if you're in a 90MPH wind zone but you have a special sheltered area that never gets that kind of wind, you can set up a monitoring station and have a professional take data for 5-10 years, compile it using standard formulas and statistical estimates to create a custom wind zone which you can then ask to have adopted by the local official or the national body. Same for new materials - you create the materials, run then through standard testing (and by standard, I mean custom, but with the national code body supervising or an engineer creating the test) and submit the new data for approval.
Now, the key here is that if you want to build a house for $10000 in spare parts, it's going to cost you $100,000 or more to engineer such a beast. If you're building 10,000 of them, then it's no big deal - but if each one is different. Well, the cost to prove that you meet the standard can be high. I once had a guy who wanted to build a garage out of surplus server racks. He had some old, undocumented lumber trusses he's bought/found, too. I told him it would probably cost more for me do properly design his garage (back then at $100/hr) than it would cost to go buy one, but that I would be happy to help him if he really wanted to do it.
Yeah, but this is on the internet which is what makes it novel. Sure, we may have used video conferencing to connect people for business and video lectures at school to have students in multiple locations all share the same class and professor, but that was mostly CCTV. This is the goddamned interner we're talking about. Of course it's a novel, patentable concept.
Besides, if some goofball can patent "dividing the number of golf strokes outside 50 yards by # of greens in regulation" on an 18 hole round to get your "long game" handicap, certainly something like this deserves a patent.
Okay, genius: You've got a $100 budget for all the hardware and software in the office and anything connected to the computers must be HIPAA compliant.
Go!
Ebay and farmville are built around getting people to do something specific, and are very orderly.
Most people STILL don't understand pixel count and how it affects the raw size of a document, and the compression techniques that are available. Greek to them; no - it's worse - it's Greek and math combined, which makes it beyond the comprehension of 80% of all adults.
I know lots of people who can function on a day to day basis, but couldn't tell you if a $2.95, 12 oz jar of peanut butter is more expensive per ounce than a $4.95, 1lb 4oz jar of the same peanut butter. They'll pick up the larger jar figuring it must be cheaper in bulk. Can you really expect those people to understand the concept of file size as proportional to the square of the pixels on one side of the image? Or understand that a gif or tiff file is fine for 1 bit or line art images, but jpg will do a better job on a photo - and that the greater the compression (what, you can change that?) on jpeg means a higher number of artifacts from the FFT used to encode the information which, if overdone, will lead to a poor quality image? Not likely.
Hell, I'm still waiting for a simple program that will take a scan and intelligently run a color, B&W, or high-res 1 bit image through a processor to increase the contrast and gamma to get a 300dpi fax-like scan of an image. Everything I've seen has been part of a (usually several hundred dollar) image management software application. All I want is to make scans small and storable as PDFs (really TIFFs embedded in PDFs), but I have yet to find it.
This better not get federal funding.