Public school teacher salaries vary wildly from state to state and district to district. In some states, they do quite decently or better, in other states they're paid worse than waiters. There's a lot of recruiting that goes on for schoolteachers, with the poor-paying states ending up not getting any decent teachers because they all leave the state for places like what you describe.
None, just like there's no market forces in favor of spending the money required to build roads in rural areas. That's why we need government, to provide infrastructure that companies only interested in short-term profits would never be interested in. Internet access isn't profitable by itself when you look at the costs that way, however its profitability to society and the greater economy is immeasurable.
No, melange does not allow the Spacing Guild to warp space, at least that's not the way I remember it. They basically had warp drives just like any other sci-fi, the problem was that if you just warp off to some remote planet blindly, you're likely to run into a star or some other object. Melange granted prescience, so that the Guild Navigators could plot courses to avoid any obstacles. In later books, the Ixians (IIRC, it's been a long time) developed computers (previously banned in the Butlerian Jihad) to do the same thing, ruining the Spacing Guild's monopoly on space travel.
Many things in Dune were somewhat plausible, if you accept the whole premise of the Butlerian Jihad handicapping technology in many ways, mainly prohibiting computers and automation. A return to Feudalism isn't impossible by any means; our democratic systems now are showing many signs of strain and breakdown. Heck, if you look at western history, we went from Republic forms of government to Feudalism: the Roman Republic turned into the Roman Emipire, which collapsed (involving a huge loss of technology) and turned into Feudalism. It's entirely reasonable to think the exact same thing could happen now.
The biggest problem in Dune, from a scientific perspective, was the "ghosts possessing their descandants" as ultranova put it, or rather, the whole premise of genetic memories. Back in the 60s when Herbert starting writing Dune, genetic memories was a new idea that was becoming popular, the idea that our memories might be encoded in our genes, and maybe there was some way to gain access to those memories of past ancestors. The whole field of genetics was very new at that time. These days, our knowledge of genetics has advanced greatly, and we know now that memories are not encoded in our genes at all (just like we now know that bumps on your head don't tell us anything about your personality, which disproves Phrenology as a science), so this whole part of Dune is moved into pure fantasy unfortunately. This isn't unprecedented, however: lots of older sci-fi has elements which are disproven by modern scientific knowledge: just look at all the early 20th-century or late 19th-century sci-fi that predicted aliens living on Mars and Venus. It's one of the problems with sci-fi: it can become dated as knowledge of the universe improves, rendering what was formely a plausible story totally implausible. However, it's also a feature, as it can be very interesting looking at older sci-fi and reading what people used to think was possible, or what people back then thought the future might look like.
No, not necessarily. There's a lot of good sci-fi that doesn't focus so much on individual characters, but rather social issues, how a new technology affects society, etc.
Public transit (in the modern sense of buses and trains) is a complete failure in any place less dense than Manhattan, and will always be so because of its technical limitations: it works great if you have lots of people wanting to go from point A to point B, but it completely falls apart if you have 1 million people wanting to move between 1 million different points in a grid. And finally, buses are extremely slow, once you factor in the fact that they only run every so often (usually 15 or 30 minutes, maybe every hour), and don't take you directly to your destination, but rather require that you transfer several times between several buses, with long waits between each one.
The solution isn't to keep pushing 19th-century transportation methods, it's to move to the 20th century and invest in SkyTran personal rapid transit, using autonomous vehicles to transport people directly to their destination. (In case you're thinking, "It's the 21st century now, not the 20th", PRT is completely achievable using 20th-century technology, and should have been deployed in that century, so I say 20th century to show just how far behind we are technologically.)
The best way to figure that hugely complex problem out is with market forces, not arbitrary "well, we're gonna burn $150million and hope that the demand appears".
That's exactly what we did with the internet, in case you don't recall: we spent a bunch of government money building it, and voila, demand appeared. Obviously, we started small: we didn't build the internet out to every home in America, we started by just building a nationwide data network that connected universities and government institutions, plus some companies. Al Gore played a role here as many may recall. It proved useful and popular, and expanded from there.
Past trends do not indicate that people will need or want gigabit internet for many, many, many years now. Try that sort of thinking out with other infrastructure; why not invest in 4 lane roads to each house, and 500 amps of current to each house, and double-capacity storm drainage. I mean, the need isnt there NOW, but in the future, who knows, right?
Wrong. 4-lane roads cost a fortune and use up a lot of space. 500-amp service to buildings requires big, expensive wires. Storm drainage costs a lot of money to build. Gigabit fiber doesn't cost anything at all.
You're probably about to call foul on the last point, but the truth is, people DO want something better than what's commonly available now. DSL sucks: 1Mbit isn't enough for a single Netflix stream, and faster speeds are usually expensive and not available in many places due to technical limitations of DSL. Cable is a lot better, but it has two serious problems: 1) it's shared among all your neighbors on a local loop, so you don't get full capacity all the time, and 2) it's owned by the cable monopoly, which in most places is expensive and has terrible service (Comcast anyone?). So many people in the US only get these two choices: slow-ass DSL, or expensive and crappy cable. Clearly, we need to upgrade to something better. What then? Well, it's pretty simple: fiber. You say we don't need gigabit speeds, but that's irrelevant; it's not like there's a much-cheaper fiber out there with 1/10 the speed. Either you get gigabit speeds or you stick with DSL/cable like we have today. If you're going to do the work to lay some new wire, you're naturally going to choose fiber, which gives you gigabit speeds. It's a lot like computer RAM or flash memory sizes: if you think you only need 256MB of RAM for whatever you're doing, too bad, because they don't sell computers with so little RAM any more. It's so cheap there's no point in selling less, so either you get 1GB+ or you get nothing at all. Or flash cards (like for cameras): maybe you think you only want 128MB, but they don't sell those any more, they only come in 1GB+ sizes.
If beehive hairdos were that great, women would still be wearing them. Obviously, they're not, for a reason.
Where did you ever get the idea that I want common uniformity in culture? That's what we used to have, before the internet.
As for punk mohawks, even back in the days when people did that, that was completely restricted to a small subculture. There's still people dressing like that, they're just really rare, as they're a small subculture, same as before. As for your fasion shoot, so what? If people wanted to dress that way, they would. Obviously, they don't, and probably for good reason.
Your whole assertion seems to be that we need a bunch of unelected, untalented freaks to make up stupid fads for us to follow, and that we should all follow them, just so we can have a supposedly nonstagnant culture. YOU want a common uniformity in culture, rather than allowing people to do whatever they want, yet you accuse me of the same. You obviously have some serious physchological problems, starting with "projection", and also including a complete denial of reality, as if the internet has caused any cultural problems, it's exactly the opposite of your assertions, that, as Zalbik points out, that it has enabled total heterogeneity, allowing people to follow whatever subculture they want, rather than being bound by the local culture in the place where they happen to live, or being bound by the overall national culture defined by some elitists who gave us disposable fads.
This argument is absolutely stupid. It sounds interesting for about 5 seconds, until you realize it's absolutely wrong.
Everyone has this common generic culture now.
You haven't been ever outside the USA, have you?
This kind of culture didn't exist before the internet. Before the internet, you actually had societies develop and advance the arts. But, if you didn't notice already, culture has pretty much frozen since around 1995. People wear the same clothes as they do in 1995. Style hasn't advanced like it did from the 50's to the 70's. Or from the 70's to the 90's. People listen to the same kinds of music. They use the same grammar and language from 20 years ago. And so on.
So, not everyone needs to see the same movies, listen to the same music, and so on
You apparently haven't been noticing what's going on in the world around you for the last 20 years. Back in the 50s-90s, in the USA at least, people (of the same age group) generally DID listen to the same music. With the internet, that's all changed. Now the Top 40 doesn't rule things the way it used to, and there's all kinds of indie music available on the internet. If anything, the internet has fractured "common culture", so that people don't listen to the same stuff like they used to back in the days of Top 40 radio. Things are actually totally backwards from what you say: pre-internet, people (in the USA) were much more homogenous, and listened to the same music, watched the same movies, etc. Now, they've spun off in all directions. I can watch movies from France and Finland on Netflix now with a few button presses. Before the internet, I had no access to such things. Maybe you don't remember the days before 1995, but I do, and we all watched whatever crap Hollywood decided to shovel us. It didn't matter if you were in California or Maine; the movies and music were all the same, from sea to shining sea. That's different now. Now everyone has a different subculture.
The whole idea of information being free and shared by everyone is actually destructive to society, since that means information becomes devalued when culture becomes democratic. It devalues professional tastemakers, causing populist sensibilities to take hold, which is the exact cause of cultural stagnation. Democratic sensibilities are always obvious, and can never advance the state-of-the-art that professional tastemakers can.
What a pile of elitist drivel. "Professional tastemakers" gave us all kinds of bullshit like tailfins on cars, beehive hairdos, Backstreet Boys, the butt-ugly cars of the 70s, Britney Spears, and many more abominations of good taste than I can possibly count. They deserve to be devalued, and they should be doing other jobs, such as cleaning port-a-potties. If you really think the internet has made things more homogeneous, then you're totally blind. If anything, it's allowed people to ignore the more stupid trends, and adopt better ones no matter where they came from.
No, it doesn't. That's not DRM, that's encryption. DRM is where you try to restrict what a user can do with their computer (e.g., they can watch a video, but they can't keep a copy of it; they can play a video game, but only when the game maker's server authorizes it, etc.). SSL provides encrypted connections between a buyer (and their computer) and a seller, so that others can't easily eavesdrop and get the buyer's credit card info.
I don't see why Bittorrent wouldn't work for an office of 10 people; its strength is copying data over distributed networks. For an office with 10 people, assuming they're on wired Ethernet links rather than WiFi, all 10 of those links will be connecting to one or more switches, which are able to handle full 100Mb or 1Gb speeds, duplex, between the computer and the switch, simultaneously. Using BT to copy the data might be a little slower than just using scp if it were only one PC, but the total transfer time for all 10 will be less.
You guys seem to be missing another big reason to bring a lunch to work and eat it there: money. Eating out at a local restaurant is expensive, whereas I can bring a lunch in, and only pay $1-5, depending on the ingredients or it it's a microwave meal. You're not going to get a good meal at a local restaurant for that. And the quality will probably be bad too.
I'm not disagreeing, but I question whether this is something that happens more with really big projects which are very unique (Big Digs aren't exactly a regular occurrence, hence the name), rather than with your mundane, everyday civil engineering projects like a boring commercial building that's not much different from dozens of other commercial buildings in its area.
2-so your idea is to just give the finger to large cities and crash their economy by forcing people out? Brilliant.
Are you really that simple-minded? NYC and Silicon Valley have probably the highest costs of living in the country, and most likely very high taxes as well. Do you see people flocking away from those cities and moving to Montana for the low taxes and cost-of-living? No, they keep going to the big cities because that's where all the high-paying jobs are.
And if some cities/states do have a problem with too many people leaving, then maybe they should lower their taxes (or perhaps try to find a way to bring in more good jobs to attract people despite the taxes). I don't see many people complaining about the taxes in Manhattan, and there aren't miles of empty brownstones there either.
3-yes they do but forcing them to use only that is a huge shift to the tax environment. Better or worse is an argument that's not likely to end
I never said there'd be no sales taxes, just that they'd be collected differently, and probably of a different amount.
4-once again, it shifts the tax burden to specific areas while other's pay less/nothing.
How would anyone pay nothing? My simple proposal in this thread (which is a very different from my proposal in the other thread you replied to) was for the Federal government to have a single sales tax (much like the VAT in EU), and dole that out to states. States with no sales tax currently would obviously benefit. States with very high sales taxes would probably get less. What's the problem with that? Taxes change all the time, and even more, revenues change drastically, as they depend on the economy. It's governments' job to keep up with that and keep their spending in line with the tax revenue. If they can't do that, then too bad. There's no way to guarantee a particular tax revenue in any year (since again, this depends on the economy), so I don't see why changing around the tax scheme is a problem. You're never going to have any progress if you don't shake things up once in a while, and rework things.
If you think state tax i as simple as taking x% of a line from your 1040...please stop reading and leave the discussion. You're in so far over your head I can't even...
State tax IS as simple as that. At least, that's as simple as it is in Arizona; I don't know about your state. If you disagree, then prove it's not that simple, otherwise STFU with your accusations. (Yes, it's slightly more complex than that, with some additional deductions for a tiny minority of residents, but for the vast majority of residents that's as simple as it is; get your AGI, subtract a standard or itemized deduction, subtract your exemptions, calculate your tax, and you're done, and then at the bottom decide if you want to contribute some extra money to one or more special funds, like the wildlife fund, the child abuse prevention fund, the Special Olympics fund, the clean elections fund, and the "I didn't pay enough" fund--yes there's really a fund for that on the tax form.)
If you remove that, you add a major tax burden back on individuals. Basically raising the cost of goods by several percent in a substantial portion of sales. THAT won't do our economy any favors.
First, how does reducing taxes increase the cost of goods? I call BS on that idea. And second, I never said sales taxes should be eliminated altogether, only that the entire scheme should be reworked so that they're collected only by sellers, for use in the seller's jurisdiction, to keep things simple and avoid all these arguments and complexity over wondering if Joe Schmoe lives on one side of some imaginary line or the other because there's some weird law somewhere that only residents on the north side of the street have to pay some extra sales tax. This wouldn't eliminate taxes at all, only simplify their enforcement, and end the whole internet sales tax debate.
Sellers are taxed - they pay income tax.
No, they don't. Corporations (esp. large ones) don't pay income taxes. Go look at how much tax Amazon paid last year.
Beyond that, shifting the burden entirely to the seller based on their location? Impractical. I'll simply pick locale with the least (or no) sales tax or the best tax breaks (for larger companies who can negotiate such) and bypass tax once again.
So what? States are free to raise or lower their taxes if they wish, to compete. They could even give special tax advantages to warehouse shippers if they want.
The tax model is based on the buyer's location currently... a use tax.
You talk of use tax and you call my idea "impractical", when NO ONE pays use taxes because there's no way to enforce them? And you actually think it's somehow practical for small internet sellers to figure out how much tax they need to charge everyone nationwide, and somehow send checks to 9600 different tax jurisdictions?
You can have a federal sales tax, though you'd need a Constitutional Amendment to do so. Anyway, to fund state/city/town governments, there's many options:
1) get the money from the Federal government, perhaps somehow calculated from the Federal sales tax received and allotted by population, or which states it came from, etc. i.e., if the Federal government gets $100B from Montana businesses in sales tax, it sends it all back to Montana to use. Having it collected at the Federal level just simplifies the collection and remittance, and fixes the whole "internet sales tax" debate, and also eliminates the problem of having differing rates.
2) Town/city governments are already mostly funded by property taxes, not sales taxes. Let them increase those if they need to. Cities that have excessive property taxes will have excessive rents and mortgage payments, and people will move to lower-tax locales. People are already fleeing New Jersey because of this. No one can afford to retire there because the property taxes keep going up, and are already #1 in the nation.
3) State governments already have their own income taxes.
4) There's various other taxes that states and cities levy on all kinds of different things: gasoline, cigarettes, alcohol, permits, etc.
They don't. What's SUPPOSED to happen is the buyer pays use tax in his/her home state. Really.
No, they aren't, because they already paid sales tax in the foreign state. You're only supposed to pay use tax when you didn't pay any sales tax for an item. I'm pretty sure there's usually some kind of exemption if you paid sales tax at the seller's location, and there might be some clauses dealing with differences between the tax rates.
What'd be better is if we shifted the burden entirely to the seller, and made it so the seller charged the sales tax rate applicable in their own jurisdiction. Then, the seller's states (and cities) would get all the sales tax from sales by that seller, making it very appealing for cities and states to court sellers to live in their states. Having the consumer be responsible for paying sales and use taxes, and trying to figure things out when they buy stuff in other states (whether by internet/mail-order sales or on a road trip) is a ridiculous burden and practically impossible, so it should be banned entirely. I think we need a federal law banning all collection of sales and use taxes by the States from consumers altogether, and the only taxes allowed are those levied on sellers/merchants, by their own states of residence/operation, to be collected by those merchants and remitted only to their own states and cities of residence. This would make everything far, far simpler and avoid all these arguments.
If states need more money from their residents, they can raise property taxes or income taxes, since those are fairly easy to calculate and deal with (well, income tax at the state level is pretty easy at any rate, since it's usually "enter your AGI from form 1040 on this line, and then multiply by X%, and this is your state tax". Federal income tax is another matter entirely.).
Perhaps you should study some legal history. Using "the law" and "some simple rules" in the same sentence shows a massive misconception regarding how things actually work. There will always be very smart, very clever, and entirely amoral folks that are going to look for loopholes, not to mention that lawyers don't really have any interest in a simple legal system (not good for their business).
Yes, of course I realize all this. I was describing the way I think things should be done. I don't believe in making laws complicated. Just because we stupidly continue to elect people that believe otherwise isn't going to change my opinion on that, or make me propose ridiculously complex laws to "fit in".
In this case, businesses will simply amalgamate in such a way as to have lots of low paid employees in jurisdictions with low taxes...
And what's the problem with that? If the high-tax states don't like it, they're free to lower their taxes to be competitive. Meanwhile, lots of people in the low-tax states will have gainful employment, which in this economy is a good thing.
As I said in some other posts here, I think the law would have to make sure to apply some simple rules to prevent this kind of thing, such as basing it on where the employees are located. If all the employees work in NY, then NY state tax applies. If half work in NY and half in DE, then the tax charged could be half of NY's tax, and remitted to NY. If half the employees are in NY and half in NJ, and NY and NJ taxes are the same (they're not, but let's assume so for this example), then regular NY/NJ tax is charged, and half is remitted to each state for each sale. For small companies, compliance would be easy; they'd just charge the tax at their one physical location, and would only have to remit to a single tax authority. For bigger companies, they'd have to determine where all their employees are working, what the tax rates there are, and what the total proportional tax rate would be, and would have to send out multiple checks, but even so it'd only be a handful of tax authorities (and locations) for most companies, and would be far simpler than figuring tax in tens of thousands of different places and remitting checks to them all.
As I've said before here several times in other postings, since the real furor is not about Amazon having trouble figuring tax properly (since they have the resources to handle this), but about small internet merchants dealing with these taxes. Some mom-n-pop internet site selling fishing lures (for example) with 4 employees (Mom, Pop, and two kids) operating out of their home is not going to have the resources to deal with thousands of different tax locales, figuring out if fishing lures are taxable in some town 1500 miles away where they've made a special tax exemption for fishing lures, etc. Small businesses don't have multiple locations.
Anyway, for the big ones, they'd just have to figure out a way to handle that and make it somewhat fair. My proposal is to base it on where all the company's employees are located within the US. First off, ignore any foreign locations like the Caymans, and only consider their US operations (which will in effect make it not profitable for them to move stuff offshore). Then, just total up their US employee count, then figure the tax based on where those employees work (office, warehouse, etc.), then figure the tax by proportion. So, for a simpler example, suppose a company has 400 employees, with 300 of them in a NYC office in Midtown (where the sales tax is high, let's say it's 10% for this example to make things easy), and 100 of them in a warehouse in Oregon (where there's zero sales tax). So, 75% of their employees are in the 10% tax jurisdiction, and 25% are in the 0% jurisdiction. So, the tax they have to charge all their customers is 7.5%. Obviously, this will make it advantageous to move as many employees as possible to low- or no-tax locales, which is fine with me, but just as tech companies are still largely located in high-tax and high-CoL Silicon Valley, and finance and advertising and web companies are largely located in high-tax and high-CoL NYC, large internet retailers aren't going to be able to easily move all their operations to OR, AK, DE, NH, and MT. OR is the only state in that list with any significant tech presence, and even then it's not that large.
Except your proposal can be construed as an export tax, which is expressly prohibited by the constitution.
Except that we already have this "export tax": if I drive across the state line to a higher-tax state and buy loaf of bread there, and bring it back home with me, I've done the exact same thing as if I ordered it online, except that I just paid a (higher) sales tax to that state instead of my own.
This "loophole" isn't a bug; it's a feature. The founding fathers foresaw that taxes might get too high in one state. These constitutional restrictions enable people to buy goods from a state with lower taxes, which in supposed to force tax competition between states and help keep taxes low.
Yes, which is exactly why many people drive across state lines to buy stuff. Southern Washington residents regularly drive across a bridge to Portland to buy stuff because there's no sales tax in Oregon. It should be the same for internet sales. Of course, those WA residents are supposed to pay a "use tax", but of course none do, and the state doesn't bother enforcing it because it's too much trouble and expense, and plus, they're getting those peoples' income taxes instead, as someone else here pointed out.
If we're going to make some big change for cross-state sales taxes, it needs to apply equally to both internet merchants and to brick-and-mortar merchants. This means that merchants, anywhere, even some small mom-n-pop business in Smalltown MO, need to see proof of all customers' addresses, and charge them sales tax based on their home address, even if it's a total PITA to do so. Otherwise, the B&M retailers are getting an unfair advantage. If we can't do this, then this internet tax scheme needs to be thrown out and we should stick with the way things are now.
Honestly, the taxation is completely backward. There should be a federal sales tax (instead of income tax), and states should tax income (instead of sales). Why? Because you can buy your goods from anywhere (federal), but you have to live somewhere (state). The inherent nature of what is being taxed on what level can resolve all the jurisdiction issues.
Sounds good to me. Of course, it'd require a Constitutional Amendment or two.
I don't know about the USA (since I live here, and am not a foreign tourist), but Canada is much the same. Americans visiting Canada can fill out a form and get some of the taxes back which they paid while on vacation in Canada.
If that's good enough for tourists, maybe it should be good enough for everyone else, including internet shoppers. Charge the tax based on the merchant's locale, and if the shopper thinks it's wrong, they can file a form to reclaim it. If that's too much work for the government, maybe they should eliminate these sales taxes and switch to a national sales tax instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Public school teacher salaries vary wildly from state to state and district to district. In some states, they do quite decently or better, in other states they're paid worse than waiters. There's a lot of recruiting that goes on for schoolteachers, with the poor-paying states ending up not getting any decent teachers because they all leave the state for places like what you describe.
It's so they can make the masses into better worker-bees, instead of having to worry about any critical thinkers popping up and ruining their plans.
None, just like there's no market forces in favor of spending the money required to build roads in rural areas. That's why we need government, to provide infrastructure that companies only interested in short-term profits would never be interested in. Internet access isn't profitable by itself when you look at the costs that way, however its profitability to society and the greater economy is immeasurable.
The MBAs running companies don't want to pay STEM workers more. They see them as mere mechanics who should be happy to have a job.
No, melange does not allow the Spacing Guild to warp space, at least that's not the way I remember it. They basically had warp drives just like any other sci-fi, the problem was that if you just warp off to some remote planet blindly, you're likely to run into a star or some other object. Melange granted prescience, so that the Guild Navigators could plot courses to avoid any obstacles. In later books, the Ixians (IIRC, it's been a long time) developed computers (previously banned in the Butlerian Jihad) to do the same thing, ruining the Spacing Guild's monopoly on space travel.
Many things in Dune were somewhat plausible, if you accept the whole premise of the Butlerian Jihad handicapping technology in many ways, mainly prohibiting computers and automation. A return to Feudalism isn't impossible by any means; our democratic systems now are showing many signs of strain and breakdown. Heck, if you look at western history, we went from Republic forms of government to Feudalism: the Roman Republic turned into the Roman Emipire, which collapsed (involving a huge loss of technology) and turned into Feudalism. It's entirely reasonable to think the exact same thing could happen now.
The biggest problem in Dune, from a scientific perspective, was the "ghosts possessing their descandants" as ultranova put it, or rather, the whole premise of genetic memories. Back in the 60s when Herbert starting writing Dune, genetic memories was a new idea that was becoming popular, the idea that our memories might be encoded in our genes, and maybe there was some way to gain access to those memories of past ancestors. The whole field of genetics was very new at that time. These days, our knowledge of genetics has advanced greatly, and we know now that memories are not encoded in our genes at all (just like we now know that bumps on your head don't tell us anything about your personality, which disproves Phrenology as a science), so this whole part of Dune is moved into pure fantasy unfortunately. This isn't unprecedented, however: lots of older sci-fi has elements which are disproven by modern scientific knowledge: just look at all the early 20th-century or late 19th-century sci-fi that predicted aliens living on Mars and Venus. It's one of the problems with sci-fi: it can become dated as knowledge of the universe improves, rendering what was formely a plausible story totally implausible. However, it's also a feature, as it can be very interesting looking at older sci-fi and reading what people used to think was possible, or what people back then thought the future might look like.
No, not necessarily. There's a lot of good sci-fi that doesn't focus so much on individual characters, but rather social issues, how a new technology affects society, etc.
You have a private company answering your 911 call when your relative has a heart attack? I seriously doubt that.
Public transit (in the modern sense of buses and trains) is a complete failure in any place less dense than Manhattan, and will always be so because of its technical limitations: it works great if you have lots of people wanting to go from point A to point B, but it completely falls apart if you have 1 million people wanting to move between 1 million different points in a grid. And finally, buses are extremely slow, once you factor in the fact that they only run every so often (usually 15 or 30 minutes, maybe every hour), and don't take you directly to your destination, but rather require that you transfer several times between several buses, with long waits between each one.
The solution isn't to keep pushing 19th-century transportation methods, it's to move to the 20th century and invest in SkyTran personal rapid transit, using autonomous vehicles to transport people directly to their destination. (In case you're thinking, "It's the 21st century now, not the 20th", PRT is completely achievable using 20th-century technology, and should have been deployed in that century, so I say 20th century to show just how far behind we are technologically.)
Bad analogies.
The best way to figure that hugely complex problem out is with market forces, not arbitrary "well, we're gonna burn $150million and hope that the demand appears".
That's exactly what we did with the internet, in case you don't recall: we spent a bunch of government money building it, and voila, demand appeared. Obviously, we started small: we didn't build the internet out to every home in America, we started by just building a nationwide data network that connected universities and government institutions, plus some companies. Al Gore played a role here as many may recall. It proved useful and popular, and expanded from there.
Past trends do not indicate that people will need or want gigabit internet for many, many, many years now.
Try that sort of thinking out with other infrastructure; why not invest in 4 lane roads to each house, and 500 amps of current to each house, and double-capacity storm drainage. I mean, the need isnt there NOW, but in the future, who knows, right?
Wrong. 4-lane roads cost a fortune and use up a lot of space. 500-amp service to buildings requires big, expensive wires. Storm drainage costs a lot of money to build. Gigabit fiber doesn't cost anything at all.
You're probably about to call foul on the last point, but the truth is, people DO want something better than what's commonly available now. DSL sucks: 1Mbit isn't enough for a single Netflix stream, and faster speeds are usually expensive and not available in many places due to technical limitations of DSL. Cable is a lot better, but it has two serious problems: 1) it's shared among all your neighbors on a local loop, so you don't get full capacity all the time, and 2) it's owned by the cable monopoly, which in most places is expensive and has terrible service (Comcast anyone?). So many people in the US only get these two choices: slow-ass DSL, or expensive and crappy cable. Clearly, we need to upgrade to something better. What then? Well, it's pretty simple: fiber. You say we don't need gigabit speeds, but that's irrelevant; it's not like there's a much-cheaper fiber out there with 1/10 the speed. Either you get gigabit speeds or you stick with DSL/cable like we have today. If you're going to do the work to lay some new wire, you're naturally going to choose fiber, which gives you gigabit speeds. It's a lot like computer RAM or flash memory sizes: if you think you only need 256MB of RAM for whatever you're doing, too bad, because they don't sell computers with so little RAM any more. It's so cheap there's no point in selling less, so either you get 1GB+ or you get nothing at all. Or flash cards (like for cameras): maybe you think you only want 128MB, but they don't sell those any more, they only come in 1GB+ sizes.
I urge you to seek professional counseling. You obviously have deep-seated psychological issues you need to deal with.
Wow, you really don't get it, do you?
If beehive hairdos were that great, women would still be wearing them. Obviously, they're not, for a reason.
Where did you ever get the idea that I want common uniformity in culture? That's what we used to have, before the internet.
As for punk mohawks, even back in the days when people did that, that was completely restricted to a small subculture. There's still people dressing like that, they're just really rare, as they're a small subculture, same as before. As for your fasion shoot, so what? If people wanted to dress that way, they would. Obviously, they don't, and probably for good reason.
Your whole assertion seems to be that we need a bunch of unelected, untalented freaks to make up stupid fads for us to follow, and that we should all follow them, just so we can have a supposedly nonstagnant culture. YOU want a common uniformity in culture, rather than allowing people to do whatever they want, yet you accuse me of the same. You obviously have some serious physchological problems, starting with "projection", and also including a complete denial of reality, as if the internet has caused any cultural problems, it's exactly the opposite of your assertions, that, as Zalbik points out, that it has enabled total heterogeneity, allowing people to follow whatever subculture they want, rather than being bound by the local culture in the place where they happen to live, or being bound by the overall national culture defined by some elitists who gave us disposable fads.
This argument is absolutely stupid. It sounds interesting for about 5 seconds, until you realize it's absolutely wrong.
Everyone has this common generic culture now.
You haven't been ever outside the USA, have you?
This kind of culture didn't exist before the internet. Before the internet, you actually had societies develop and advance the arts. But, if you didn't notice already, culture has pretty much frozen since around 1995.
People wear the same clothes as they do in 1995. Style hasn't advanced like it did from the 50's to the 70's. Or from the 70's to the 90's.
People listen to the same kinds of music.
They use the same grammar and language from 20 years ago.
And so on.
So, not everyone needs to see the same movies, listen to the same music, and so on
You apparently haven't been noticing what's going on in the world around you for the last 20 years. Back in the 50s-90s, in the USA at least, people (of the same age group) generally DID listen to the same music. With the internet, that's all changed. Now the Top 40 doesn't rule things the way it used to, and there's all kinds of indie music available on the internet. If anything, the internet has fractured "common culture", so that people don't listen to the same stuff like they used to back in the days of Top 40 radio. Things are actually totally backwards from what you say: pre-internet, people (in the USA) were much more homogenous, and listened to the same music, watched the same movies, etc. Now, they've spun off in all directions. I can watch movies from France and Finland on Netflix now with a few button presses. Before the internet, I had no access to such things. Maybe you don't remember the days before 1995, but I do, and we all watched whatever crap Hollywood decided to shovel us. It didn't matter if you were in California or Maine; the movies and music were all the same, from sea to shining sea. That's different now. Now everyone has a different subculture.
The whole idea of information being free and shared by everyone is actually destructive to society, since that means information becomes devalued when culture becomes democratic. It devalues professional tastemakers, causing populist sensibilities to take hold, which is the exact cause of cultural stagnation. Democratic sensibilities are always obvious, and can never advance the state-of-the-art that professional tastemakers can.
What a pile of elitist drivel. "Professional tastemakers" gave us all kinds of bullshit like tailfins on cars, beehive hairdos, Backstreet Boys, the butt-ugly cars of the 70s, Britney Spears, and many more abominations of good taste than I can possibly count. They deserve to be devalued, and they should be doing other jobs, such as cleaning port-a-potties. If you really think the internet has made things more homogeneous, then you're totally blind. If anything, it's allowed people to ignore the more stupid trends, and adopt better ones no matter where they came from.
No, it doesn't. That's not DRM, that's encryption. DRM is where you try to restrict what a user can do with their computer (e.g., they can watch a video, but they can't keep a copy of it; they can play a video game, but only when the game maker's server authorizes it, etc.). SSL provides encrypted connections between a buyer (and their computer) and a seller, so that others can't easily eavesdrop and get the buyer's credit card info.
I don't see why Bittorrent wouldn't work for an office of 10 people; its strength is copying data over distributed networks. For an office with 10 people, assuming they're on wired Ethernet links rather than WiFi, all 10 of those links will be connecting to one or more switches, which are able to handle full 100Mb or 1Gb speeds, duplex, between the computer and the switch, simultaneously. Using BT to copy the data might be a little slower than just using scp if it were only one PC, but the total transfer time for all 10 will be less.
You guys seem to be missing another big reason to bring a lunch to work and eat it there: money. Eating out at a local restaurant is expensive, whereas I can bring a lunch in, and only pay $1-5, depending on the ingredients or it it's a microwave meal. You're not going to get a good meal at a local restaurant for that. And the quality will probably be bad too.
I'm not disagreeing, but I question whether this is something that happens more with really big projects which are very unique (Big Digs aren't exactly a regular occurrence, hence the name), rather than with your mundane, everyday civil engineering projects like a boring commercial building that's not much different from dozens of other commercial buildings in its area.
2-so your idea is to just give the finger to large cities and crash their economy by forcing people out? Brilliant.
Are you really that simple-minded? NYC and Silicon Valley have probably the highest costs of living in the country, and most likely very high taxes as well. Do you see people flocking away from those cities and moving to Montana for the low taxes and cost-of-living? No, they keep going to the big cities because that's where all the high-paying jobs are.
And if some cities/states do have a problem with too many people leaving, then maybe they should lower their taxes (or perhaps try to find a way to bring in more good jobs to attract people despite the taxes). I don't see many people complaining about the taxes in Manhattan, and there aren't miles of empty brownstones there either.
3-yes they do but forcing them to use only that is a huge shift to the tax environment. Better or worse is an argument that's not likely to end
I never said there'd be no sales taxes, just that they'd be collected differently, and probably of a different amount.
4-once again, it shifts the tax burden to specific areas while other's pay less/nothing.
How would anyone pay nothing? My simple proposal in this thread (which is a very different from my proposal in the other thread you replied to) was for the Federal government to have a single sales tax (much like the VAT in EU), and dole that out to states. States with no sales tax currently would obviously benefit. States with very high sales taxes would probably get less. What's the problem with that? Taxes change all the time, and even more, revenues change drastically, as they depend on the economy. It's governments' job to keep up with that and keep their spending in line with the tax revenue. If they can't do that, then too bad. There's no way to guarantee a particular tax revenue in any year (since again, this depends on the economy), so I don't see why changing around the tax scheme is a problem. You're never going to have any progress if you don't shake things up once in a while, and rework things.
If you think state tax i as simple as taking x% of a line from your 1040...please stop reading and leave the discussion. You're in so far over your head I can't even...
State tax IS as simple as that. At least, that's as simple as it is in Arizona; I don't know about your state. If you disagree, then prove it's not that simple, otherwise STFU with your accusations. (Yes, it's slightly more complex than that, with some additional deductions for a tiny minority of residents, but for the vast majority of residents that's as simple as it is; get your AGI, subtract a standard or itemized deduction, subtract your exemptions, calculate your tax, and you're done, and then at the bottom decide if you want to contribute some extra money to one or more special funds, like the wildlife fund, the child abuse prevention fund, the Special Olympics fund, the clean elections fund, and the "I didn't pay enough" fund--yes there's really a fund for that on the tax form.)
If you remove that, you add a major tax burden back on individuals. Basically raising the cost of goods by several percent in a substantial portion of sales. THAT won't do our economy any favors.
First, how does reducing taxes increase the cost of goods? I call BS on that idea.
And second, I never said sales taxes should be eliminated altogether, only that the entire scheme should be reworked so that they're collected only by sellers, for use in the seller's jurisdiction, to keep things simple and avoid all these arguments and complexity over wondering if Joe Schmoe lives on one side of some imaginary line or the other because there's some weird law somewhere that only residents on the north side of the street have to pay some extra sales tax. This wouldn't eliminate taxes at all, only simplify their enforcement, and end the whole internet sales tax debate.
Sellers are taxed - they pay income tax.
No, they don't. Corporations (esp. large ones) don't pay income taxes. Go look at how much tax Amazon paid last year.
Beyond that, shifting the burden entirely to the seller based on their location? Impractical. I'll simply pick locale with the least (or no) sales tax or the best tax breaks (for larger companies who can negotiate such) and bypass tax once again.
So what? States are free to raise or lower their taxes if they wish, to compete. They could even give special tax advantages to warehouse shippers if they want.
The tax model is based on the buyer's location currently ... a use tax.
You talk of use tax and you call my idea "impractical", when NO ONE pays use taxes because there's no way to enforce them? And you actually think it's somehow practical for small internet sellers to figure out how much tax they need to charge everyone nationwide, and somehow send checks to 9600 different tax jurisdictions?
You can have a federal sales tax, though you'd need a Constitutional Amendment to do so. Anyway, to fund state/city/town governments, there's many options:
1) get the money from the Federal government, perhaps somehow calculated from the Federal sales tax received and allotted by population, or which states it came from, etc. i.e., if the Federal government gets $100B from Montana businesses in sales tax, it sends it all back to Montana to use. Having it collected at the Federal level just simplifies the collection and remittance, and fixes the whole "internet sales tax" debate, and also eliminates the problem of having differing rates.
2) Town/city governments are already mostly funded by property taxes, not sales taxes. Let them increase those if they need to. Cities that have excessive property taxes will have excessive rents and mortgage payments, and people will move to lower-tax locales. People are already fleeing New Jersey because of this. No one can afford to retire there because the property taxes keep going up, and are already #1 in the nation.
3) State governments already have their own income taxes.
4) There's various other taxes that states and cities levy on all kinds of different things: gasoline, cigarettes, alcohol, permits, etc.
They don't. What's SUPPOSED to happen is the buyer pays use tax in his/her home state. Really.
No, they aren't, because they already paid sales tax in the foreign state. You're only supposed to pay use tax when you didn't pay any sales tax for an item. I'm pretty sure there's usually some kind of exemption if you paid sales tax at the seller's location, and there might be some clauses dealing with differences between the tax rates.
What'd be better is if we shifted the burden entirely to the seller, and made it so the seller charged the sales tax rate applicable in their own jurisdiction. Then, the seller's states (and cities) would get all the sales tax from sales by that seller, making it very appealing for cities and states to court sellers to live in their states. Having the consumer be responsible for paying sales and use taxes, and trying to figure things out when they buy stuff in other states (whether by internet/mail-order sales or on a road trip) is a ridiculous burden and practically impossible, so it should be banned entirely. I think we need a federal law banning all collection of sales and use taxes by the States from consumers altogether, and the only taxes allowed are those levied on sellers/merchants, by their own states of residence/operation, to be collected by those merchants and remitted only to their own states and cities of residence. This would make everything far, far simpler and avoid all these arguments.
If states need more money from their residents, they can raise property taxes or income taxes, since those are fairly easy to calculate and deal with (well, income tax at the state level is pretty easy at any rate, since it's usually "enter your AGI from form 1040 on this line, and then multiply by X%, and this is your state tax". Federal income tax is another matter entirely.).
Perhaps you should study some legal history. Using "the law" and "some simple rules" in the same sentence shows a massive misconception regarding how things actually work. There will always be very smart, very clever, and entirely amoral folks that are going to look for loopholes, not to mention that lawyers don't really have any interest in a simple legal system (not good for their business).
Yes, of course I realize all this. I was describing the way I think things should be done. I don't believe in making laws complicated. Just because we stupidly continue to elect people that believe otherwise isn't going to change my opinion on that, or make me propose ridiculously complex laws to "fit in".
In this case, businesses will simply amalgamate in such a way as to have lots of low paid employees in jurisdictions with low taxes ...
And what's the problem with that? If the high-tax states don't like it, they're free to lower their taxes to be competitive. Meanwhile, lots of people in the low-tax states will have gainful employment, which in this economy is a good thing.
As I said in some other posts here, I think the law would have to make sure to apply some simple rules to prevent this kind of thing, such as basing it on where the employees are located. If all the employees work in NY, then NY state tax applies. If half work in NY and half in DE, then the tax charged could be half of NY's tax, and remitted to NY. If half the employees are in NY and half in NJ, and NY and NJ taxes are the same (they're not, but let's assume so for this example), then regular NY/NJ tax is charged, and half is remitted to each state for each sale. For small companies, compliance would be easy; they'd just charge the tax at their one physical location, and would only have to remit to a single tax authority. For bigger companies, they'd have to determine where all their employees are working, what the tax rates there are, and what the total proportional tax rate would be, and would have to send out multiple checks, but even so it'd only be a handful of tax authorities (and locations) for most companies, and would be far simpler than figuring tax in tens of thousands of different places and remitting checks to them all.
As I've said before here several times in other postings, since the real furor is not about Amazon having trouble figuring tax properly (since they have the resources to handle this), but about small internet merchants dealing with these taxes. Some mom-n-pop internet site selling fishing lures (for example) with 4 employees (Mom, Pop, and two kids) operating out of their home is not going to have the resources to deal with thousands of different tax locales, figuring out if fishing lures are taxable in some town 1500 miles away where they've made a special tax exemption for fishing lures, etc. Small businesses don't have multiple locations.
Anyway, for the big ones, they'd just have to figure out a way to handle that and make it somewhat fair. My proposal is to base it on where all the company's employees are located within the US. First off, ignore any foreign locations like the Caymans, and only consider their US operations (which will in effect make it not profitable for them to move stuff offshore). Then, just total up their US employee count, then figure the tax based on where those employees work (office, warehouse, etc.), then figure the tax by proportion. So, for a simpler example, suppose a company has 400 employees, with 300 of them in a NYC office in Midtown (where the sales tax is high, let's say it's 10% for this example to make things easy), and 100 of them in a warehouse in Oregon (where there's zero sales tax). So, 75% of their employees are in the 10% tax jurisdiction, and 25% are in the 0% jurisdiction. So, the tax they have to charge all their customers is 7.5%. Obviously, this will make it advantageous to move as many employees as possible to low- or no-tax locales, which is fine with me, but just as tech companies are still largely located in high-tax and high-CoL Silicon Valley, and finance and advertising and web companies are largely located in high-tax and high-CoL NYC, large internet retailers aren't going to be able to easily move all their operations to OR, AK, DE, NH, and MT. OR is the only state in that list with any significant tech presence, and even then it's not that large.
Except your proposal can be construed as an export tax, which is expressly prohibited by the constitution.
Except that we already have this "export tax": if I drive across the state line to a higher-tax state and buy loaf of bread there, and bring it back home with me, I've done the exact same thing as if I ordered it online, except that I just paid a (higher) sales tax to that state instead of my own.
This "loophole" isn't a bug; it's a feature. The founding fathers foresaw that taxes might get too high in one state. These constitutional restrictions enable people to buy goods from a state with lower taxes, which in supposed to force tax competition between states and help keep taxes low.
Yes, which is exactly why many people drive across state lines to buy stuff. Southern Washington residents regularly drive across a bridge to Portland to buy stuff because there's no sales tax in Oregon. It should be the same for internet sales. Of course, those WA residents are supposed to pay a "use tax", but of course none do, and the state doesn't bother enforcing it because it's too much trouble and expense, and plus, they're getting those peoples' income taxes instead, as someone else here pointed out.
If we're going to make some big change for cross-state sales taxes, it needs to apply equally to both internet merchants and to brick-and-mortar merchants. This means that merchants, anywhere, even some small mom-n-pop business in Smalltown MO, need to see proof of all customers' addresses, and charge them sales tax based on their home address, even if it's a total PITA to do so. Otherwise, the B&M retailers are getting an unfair advantage. If we can't do this, then this internet tax scheme needs to be thrown out and we should stick with the way things are now.
Honestly, the taxation is completely backward. There should be a federal sales tax (instead of income tax), and states should tax income (instead of sales). Why? Because you can buy your goods from anywhere (federal), but you have to live somewhere (state). The inherent nature of what is being taxed on what level can resolve all the jurisdiction issues.
Sounds good to me. Of course, it'd require a Constitutional Amendment or two.
I don't know about the USA (since I live here, and am not a foreign tourist), but Canada is much the same. Americans visiting Canada can fill out a form and get some of the taxes back which they paid while on vacation in Canada.
If that's good enough for tourists, maybe it should be good enough for everyone else, including internet shoppers. Charge the tax based on the merchant's locale, and if the shopper thinks it's wrong, they can file a form to reclaim it. If that's too much work for the government, maybe they should eliminate these sales taxes and switch to a national sales tax instead.