Actually, it does, to an extent. No one's answered my question yet of why exactly you need to go talk to your local government and tell them what kind of work you do and that you're working at home. That's the part that doesn't make sense. Sure, local governments may enact crazy laws, but there's nothing forcing you to go tell them that you work at home.
Huh? The IRS doesn't have any "standards". I've taken deductions for working at home for several years now, and it's easy. You just fill out the appropriate form with the square footage of your office room divided by the square footage of the house, add in expenses, and you're done. There's no requirement to go tell your local government what you're doing.
Why are you going to your city government and telling them you work at home? I don't go to my city government and tell them anything about my lifestyle.
Yes, I always worked on my projects totally alone. You don't need an open-plan office to ask questions to other people; I did that just fine in other jobs with cubicles or with Skype for remote work. And no, I'm not able to tune out loud full-volume group conversations taking place an arm's length from me; I never had any reason to do that in school. What kind of shitty school did you go to where they had groups of people yakking about stupid bullshit all around you while you tried to take exams?
That's not the experience I had at all in an open-plan office: people had no qualms about having loud conversations right in the middle of the area. And I had zero reason to know what my teammates were doing, as I never worked on the same project as any of them, ever. At previous jobs (esp. at Intel), people were much more respectful of people trying to get work done, and were much quieter in general. We even had "do not disturb" signs to hang across cubicle entrances so that visitors wouldn't interrupt. We had no such thing in the open-plan office job.
I don't see the problem. Realize that I'm speaking as a software engineer here, but in my career, there's no such thing as a "promotion"; the only kind of promotion in this line of work is being turned into a manager. If your goal is to become a manager, then yes, you should probably avoid telecommuting jobs. However, if you have no intention of moving into management (like me), then you're not missing out on anything.
Now if you're talking about raises, again, you're not missing anything. The only way to get a substantial raise in this line of work is to change jobs.
I believe you're wrong. As I recall, the guy DID work from home. The reason he was caught was because the Chinese contractor had to use the guy's company's VPN. The company's IT department saw that someone from a Chinese IP was (successfully) accessing their network through the VPN, and investigated.
Huh? Why would your city care about what kind of building you run an internet-based company from? There's no requirement that you run a company out of a commercial building; there's tons of people who work out of their homes: telecommuters, people with home businesses such as woodworkers, etc.
Sorry, I think you're full of shit. I've worked in an "open-plan" office before, and it drove me mad. I had NO need to collaborate with my coworkers, as we all worked on different projects. Instead, having people constantly interrupt me with conversations about sports and other bullshit did nothing to help my work at all. I started coming in later, and leaving later, so that I could get work done after 5PM when everyone else left and the stupid A/C unit over my desk shut off. My boss didn't like this, pulled me into a 1-on-1 meeting and complained about this, so I threw a resignation letter at him and walked out.
At one of my previous jobs, I got stuck in an "open plan" office, aka bullpen. The management always told us how great it was because it fostered "collaboration" (even though I never had any need to collaborate with my coworkers, as we all worked on different projects). Strangely, these same managers had walled offices with windows and doors.
Cube farms aren't that bad. For you to say such a thing, you obviously have never worked in an "open-plan office environment", a.k.a. "bullpen". Just in case you haven't seen these in person, basically there's no walls at all, or at best there's cubicle walls separating your "team" from other "teams", but no walls between you and 6-10 cow-orkers. So any time one of them starts talking about some stupid sports game, or someone comes to visit one of them, or they use the phone, you get to be interrupted by their conversation. What's really obnoxious is when some boss person or someone from marketing comes over and wants to have a chit-chat with some of the people in your group about something not related to work, and parks his ugly butt on your desk right next to you while you're trying to work.
Think headphones will help? Try it, and find out what a heart attack feels like when some asshole comes up behind you and taps you on the shoulder to get your attention.
Add in a horribly noisy A/C unit in the ceiling above that stays on continuously all day long, and you'll go surely insane.
I worked at a company that had almost their entire workforce working from home, we were low on office space so using remote workers saved us a lot of money since we didn't have to rent new office space to accommodate them and we didn't have to have enough desks to handle the holiday rush that would sit empty for the rest of the year
There's another reason to hire remote workers: it's much easier to convince someone to take the job when they don't need to relocate. With some professions, like software development (and especially certain specialities within software engineering), it's not that easy to find a qualified candidate for the position, and the longer that position sits unfilled, the more money you're losing because you're not able to get the work done, and are missing your opportunity. Now, what if your company isn't located in a hot spot like the Bay Area, but rather some place that doesn't have lots of software engineers available, like Detroit or Nashville or Oklahoma City? In short, having lots of remote workers is a viable alternative to having no workers at all.
Regulation is not hard in the USA. The problem is that you want regulation which benefits regular citizens, rather than "regulation" which benefits huge corporations who pay generous "campaign contributions". The USA isn't very good at the former, but it's great at the latter.
This doesn't really make sense. If Bill is so poor he's resorting to stealing an iPhone (or buying a stolen iPhone, more likely), then his legal phone is going to be some dirt-cheap POS, not a smartphone at all. When he supports the stolen iPhone industry, he's helping sell brand-new iPhones (to replace the stolen ones), which cost hundreds of dollars each. This means lots of profit for Apple.
Sure, but is your local AAA going to call up the police and report you for it? Not likely. That'd be really great for business....
Now if a cop happened to be at the AAA, getting some stuff for himself, and happened to overhear your conversation, that might get you in trouble, if the cop even cared about it or even knew about "structuring" (probably somewhat unlikely). Cops suck and all, but I kinda doubt they're on the lookout for financial crimes like that.
Not necessarily; it'll only get "bitchslapped" if the courts do their jobs properly. Lots of stuff is unconstitutional (whether by a state constitution or the US Constitution) and is still enforced; the 4th Amendment in particular has been null and void for a long time (if you don't believe me, try carrying $100K in cash around and get yourself searched by the cops, or even just go through airport security with it).
There's no reason for New Hampshire Republicans [freestateproject.org] and Mississippi Republicans [theroot.com] to be the same party on an ideological level, but both need an alliance with the much more powerful Federal-level GOP in order to be viable.
True. I also wonder if our crappy election system that forces a two-party state is partly to blame.
There's no perfect solution to this, but moving power to more local levels would help. The powers of the Federal government should logically be limited to only the things that sub-national entities cannot possibly do, which is exactly how this nation was originally structured.
Can't be done. We tried that, remember? We tried it first with the Articles of Confederation, and the states couldn't agree on anything and the whole union was going to fall apart. Then they tried the Constitution, and as soon as it was set up, the federal government grabbed more and more power. That's the natural way of things: power tends to be consolidated. Your idea of a central government that's limited to things that only it can or should do is just like Communism: it sounds nice in theory, but it doesn't work out in practice. I guess you could try setting up a system where there's an automatic revolution every 50 years to "reset" things... They're trying this same thing in Europe, BTW, and it isn't working there either. Without a strong central government, the whole thing falls apart. So the best thing to do is limit your country's size so that only regions you can get along well with are part of your country, and leave other regions to be in separate countries. Otherwise, you're going to have people living thousands of miles away, maybe even speaking different languages, deciding on what's legal and illegal for you and what your monetary policy will be.
The long-term ideal is that all power is held by individuals and voluntarily-established institutions, but, until we get there, competitive local government is better than one homogeneous empire "from sea to shining sea" (and beyond).
Power can't be held by individuals; that's called "anarchy" and only teenagers thing that would work. You have to have some larger organization to create rules for people to live under (e.g., you can't murder each other, you can't steal from each other, etc.), and the maintain an enforcement mechanism for people who break those rules. But this can be done with a voluntarily-established institution, and usually is. It's called "government". The voluntarily-established ones have something called "voting", so if you want to change something about your government, it's your job to vote about it. Don't like the way the voting goes? Blame your fellow citizens.
I get what you're saying, but I don't think any U.S. state would ever actually ban abortion, even if it had the political power to do so. It'd be like King Cnut [wikipedia.org] trying to command the tide!
You really think that's going to stop the bible-thumpers from making such a law? Have you forgotten they've already banned a naturally-growing plant for decades now? It's pretty easy to grow this plant, it's easy to mail the seeds to people, it's easy and cheap to buy the grown and prepared plant so you can smoke it, yet it's still illegal and billions are spent on enforcing this law. The stupidity and futility are irrelevant. Having "abortion checkpoints" and keeping track of women and their pregnancies would create a whole new industry that would get generous government funding.
All this would obviously decimate the prohibitionist states' economy until they give up and get rid of such stupid laws!
Perhaps. And if so, that's not going to stop them from making the laws in the first place, and then forcing the people in those states to live under them for many decades. Soviet communism was a big failure too, but that didn't stop the USSR from forcing it on many millions of people for ~80 years.
I'm not so sure about this. If you were running a corporation and only cared about the bottom line, the last thing you'd do is choose a high-risk action like getting into a trademark fight that you're not likely to win because you're trying to steal a trademark from an organization that's been using that same name for a long time and is in wide global usage by an extremely large number of people (developers), and which name is extremely well-known in the It industry. A true smart sociopath would not do such a thing. Only a clueless moron (possibly still a sociopath, but not a smart one), probably one who got his job solely because of his frat-buddy connections, would do something this dumb.
That's because you're trying to boil everything down to only 2 "sides", as if there's only two kinds of people in this country, "liberals" and "conservatives", which is total bullshit. These two "sides" are really just shaky alliances based on a bunch of different issues that frequently don't have that much to do with each other. For instance, Democrat voters in the Northeast are nothing like Democrat voters in San Francisco. The SF voters probably care about issues like gay marriage, gay rights, maybe environmentalism, etc. The voters in the Northeast care about issues relating to unions. The Democrats usually carry the northeast and other rust belt states because they're aligned with unions. There are no unions in California, and voters there don't care about that. Similarly, Republican voters in Alabama are not the same as Republican voters in Arizona or Montana. The voters in the Bible belt states care about religion, and the Republican party panders to that vote. The voters in Western states don't care that much about religion (at least not from their legislators or government), they tend to be of a libertarian bent and want smaller government, and the Republicans pander to that as well. If, for instance, we were to break the country up into 10 new, smaller countries, you'd quickly find the political landscape changing, as different issues become important in different regions (and other issues become totally settled). A country that encompassed only the Bible Belt states wouldn't have abortion as an issue any more, because they'd probably just ban it and be done with it, so they'd move on to other issues for political parties to distinguish themselves on.
The number of states that's optimal is highly debateable. Obviously, 1 is too few, and 1,000,000 is too many. I disagree that we need more states; more states equals more administrative overhead. Of course, you don't want too few states, because, as you point out, the larger your administrative region becomes, the more internal division there is, and that means more infighting (like people in Illinois fighting over whether there should be strict gun-control laws or not--the city dwellers typically want guns banned or otherwise strict measures, while rural dwellers usually want the opposite, so a state that groups together two disparate groups of people will have infighting over issues like this). But if you make states too small, then you end up with more government overall (more spending on government necessary per capita), plus you get lower efficiency because now you have to deal with all kinds of cross-state issues for all kinds of things like roadbuilding and trade and other issues. Look at all the problems we have now with metro areas that span state lines: you get people living on one side because income taxes are lower there, and then buying stuff on the other side because sales taxes are lower or nonexistent there. Can you imagine the mess if everyone lived near 3 other states? All the states would be fighting each other about how "unfair" it is that people can take advantage of different tax rates in different states. While it's certainly valid to pack up and move to a different state because you don't like the taxation in your own state, just having people drive to a neighboring state to take advantage of lower taxes there doesn't actually solve any problems (actually, it screws over the people who can't afford cars and are stuck staying there and paying the higher taxes at local stores, and because of their lower socioeconomic status don't have a way of getting legislators to fix things for them).
Huh? Addresses are not that complicated. What you may be thinking about is how you write out addresses for different countries if you're addressing postal mail. The data itself is pretty well standardized: these are the fields you usually have to fill: 1. addressee name, 2. addressee business name (optional), 3. street address, 4. city name, 5. region name (only for certain countries, such as the US and Australia where you need the state name or Canada where you need the province name), 6. postal code ("ZIP code" in the US), 7. country name. If you're designing a database schema to store addresses, this is all you need.
Now, there's two other related problems: 1) how to format that information if you're addressing an envelope, and 2) verifying the address for correctness (i.e., making sure it's a valid address and all the parts of it are correct, such as the postal code is correct for the street address, the city name matches the postal code, etc.).
Formatting the information isn't that hard, but different countries have different preferences. I recommend "Frank's Compulsive Guide to Postal Addresses" (google it), a web site that documents most countries' preferred formats. But even if you mis-format an address, these things are sorted by humans at some point if the machines can't figure it out (esp. for international postal pieces), so they'll figure it out if you write the city name before the postal code rather than vice versa. Of course, it's perfectly possible (and not that hard) to write a program module to format addresses correctly for every country using the information in the website I mentioned above. Most countries are simple: the name goes on the top line, the street address on the second line, and then the city and postal code go on the third line (some countries want the postal code first). Then the country name goes on the last line, in all caps. Larger countries need region names, namely the USA, Australia, and Canada, where the city, region abbreviation ("CA", "TX", "BC", "QC", "QLD", "NSW", etc.), and postal code are placed together on the line before the country name. There are a few countries that are real odd-balls, though. Ireland, for instance, doesn't have postal codes, though they do have postal zone numbers in Dublin, and you have to put the County name (which equates to a region name), so that it looks like "Cork, Co. Cork". The UK is weird because if you're sending your mail from the USA, you need to write the country as "UK" (not England, Scotland, etc., even though those are separate countries); but if you're sending it from Canada, you need to write it as "GREAT BRITAIN", even though Great Britain is not a country at all, it's the name of an island (which Northern Island, part of the UK, is not part of, nor are the Isle of Man and Channel Islands). Also, UK addresses frequently have odd multi-line "street addresses" which have no street number at all, and instead point to some hamlet (a group of houses in the country), then to some nearby town name, and then some larger city that that town is close to.
The real hard problem I see is address verification, as that isn't something you can write yourself a program to do. Some countries do have web-based APIs to do address verification, such as the USPS in the US and i believe Royal Mail in the UK, so you could link to those for those countries. For the rest, you can try to use Google Maps or other map services to verify addresses. But this isn't perfect; I've seen differences many times between Google Maps and what the USPS says is correct (usually they disagree on the city name for a zipcode).
Anyway, as I was saying at the beginning, a storage schema for addresses is extremely easy: name, street address, city, region (optional), postal code (exc. in Ireland and a few others), country. That's it.
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Actually, it does, to an extent. No one's answered my question yet of why exactly you need to go talk to your local government and tell them what kind of work you do and that you're working at home. That's the part that doesn't make sense. Sure, local governments may enact crazy laws, but there's nothing forcing you to go tell them that you work at home.
Huh? The IRS doesn't have any "standards". I've taken deductions for working at home for several years now, and it's easy. You just fill out the appropriate form with the square footage of your office room divided by the square footage of the house, add in expenses, and you're done. There's no requirement to go tell your local government what you're doing.
OK, I'm still at a loss:
Why are you going to your city government and telling them you work at home? I don't go to my city government and tell them anything about my lifestyle.
Yes, I always worked on my projects totally alone. You don't need an open-plan office to ask questions to other people; I did that just fine in other jobs with cubicles or with Skype for remote work. And no, I'm not able to tune out loud full-volume group conversations taking place an arm's length from me; I never had any reason to do that in school. What kind of shitty school did you go to where they had groups of people yakking about stupid bullshit all around you while you tried to take exams?
That's not the experience I had at all in an open-plan office: people had no qualms about having loud conversations right in the middle of the area. And I had zero reason to know what my teammates were doing, as I never worked on the same project as any of them, ever. At previous jobs (esp. at Intel), people were much more respectful of people trying to get work done, and were much quieter in general. We even had "do not disturb" signs to hang across cubicle entrances so that visitors wouldn't interrupt. We had no such thing in the open-plan office job.
I don't see the problem. Realize that I'm speaking as a software engineer here, but in my career, there's no such thing as a "promotion"; the only kind of promotion in this line of work is being turned into a manager. If your goal is to become a manager, then yes, you should probably avoid telecommuting jobs. However, if you have no intention of moving into management (like me), then you're not missing out on anything.
Now if you're talking about raises, again, you're not missing anything. The only way to get a substantial raise in this line of work is to change jobs.
I believe you're wrong. As I recall, the guy DID work from home. The reason he was caught was because the Chinese contractor had to use the guy's company's VPN. The company's IT department saw that someone from a Chinese IP was (successfully) accessing their network through the VPN, and investigated.
Huh? Why would your city care about what kind of building you run an internet-based company from? There's no requirement that you run a company out of a commercial building; there's tons of people who work out of their homes: telecommuters, people with home businesses such as woodworkers, etc.
So I'm not allowed to have a computer at my desk? That's a "personal electrical device"; it plugs into the wall outlet.
Actually, I did.
Sorry, I think you're full of shit. I've worked in an "open-plan" office before, and it drove me mad. I had NO need to collaborate with my coworkers, as we all worked on different projects. Instead, having people constantly interrupt me with conversations about sports and other bullshit did nothing to help my work at all. I started coming in later, and leaving later, so that I could get work done after 5PM when everyone else left and the stupid A/C unit over my desk shut off. My boss didn't like this, pulled me into a 1-on-1 meeting and complained about this, so I threw a resignation letter at him and walked out.
At one of my previous jobs, I got stuck in an "open plan" office, aka bullpen. The management always told us how great it was because it fostered "collaboration" (even though I never had any need to collaborate with my coworkers, as we all worked on different projects). Strangely, these same managers had walled offices with windows and doors.
Cube farms aren't that bad. For you to say such a thing, you obviously have never worked in an "open-plan office environment", a.k.a. "bullpen". Just in case you haven't seen these in person, basically there's no walls at all, or at best there's cubicle walls separating your "team" from other "teams", but no walls between you and 6-10 cow-orkers. So any time one of them starts talking about some stupid sports game, or someone comes to visit one of them, or they use the phone, you get to be interrupted by their conversation. What's really obnoxious is when some boss person or someone from marketing comes over and wants to have a chit-chat with some of the people in your group about something not related to work, and parks his ugly butt on your desk right next to you while you're trying to work.
Think headphones will help? Try it, and find out what a heart attack feels like when some asshole comes up behind you and taps you on the shoulder to get your attention.
Add in a horribly noisy A/C unit in the ceiling above that stays on continuously all day long, and you'll go surely insane.
I worked at a company that had almost their entire workforce working from home, we were low on office space so using remote workers saved us a lot of money since we didn't have to rent new office space to accommodate them and we didn't have to have enough desks to handle the holiday rush that would sit empty for the rest of the year
There's another reason to hire remote workers: it's much easier to convince someone to take the job when they don't need to relocate. With some professions, like software development (and especially certain specialities within software engineering), it's not that easy to find a qualified candidate for the position, and the longer that position sits unfilled, the more money you're losing because you're not able to get the work done, and are missing your opportunity. Now, what if your company isn't located in a hot spot like the Bay Area, but rather some place that doesn't have lots of software engineers available, like Detroit or Nashville or Oklahoma City? In short, having lots of remote workers is a viable alternative to having no workers at all.
Regulation is not hard in the USA. The problem is that you want regulation which benefits regular citizens, rather than "regulation" which benefits huge corporations who pay generous "campaign contributions". The USA isn't very good at the former, but it's great at the latter.
This doesn't really make sense. If Bill is so poor he's resorting to stealing an iPhone (or buying a stolen iPhone, more likely), then his legal phone is going to be some dirt-cheap POS, not a smartphone at all. When he supports the stolen iPhone industry, he's helping sell brand-new iPhones (to replace the stolen ones), which cost hundreds of dollars each. This means lots of profit for Apple.
Why not? Its not like I'm running Winblows. Pretty strange comment of yours considering the /. crowd mostly run Linux/BSD
2000 called, and wants you back. This place is full of Apple zealots and Microsoft shills now. The Linux/BSD crowd has moved on.
It was a campaign worker for Rand Paul, the Senator from Kentucky.
Sure, but is your local AAA going to call up the police and report you for it? Not likely. That'd be really great for business....
Now if a cop happened to be at the AAA, getting some stuff for himself, and happened to overhear your conversation, that might get you in trouble, if the cop even cared about it or even knew about "structuring" (probably somewhat unlikely). Cops suck and all, but I kinda doubt they're on the lookout for financial crimes like that.
Maybe not, but it should be. Proposing any law which is obviously unconstitutional should be considered treason, and prosecuted as such.
Not necessarily; it'll only get "bitchslapped" if the courts do their jobs properly. Lots of stuff is unconstitutional (whether by a state constitution or the US Constitution) and is still enforced; the 4th Amendment in particular has been null and void for a long time (if you don't believe me, try carrying $100K in cash around and get yourself searched by the cops, or even just go through airport security with it).
There's no reason for New Hampshire Republicans [freestateproject.org] and Mississippi Republicans [theroot.com] to be the same party on an ideological level, but both need an alliance with the much more powerful Federal-level GOP in order to be viable.
True. I also wonder if our crappy election system that forces a two-party state is partly to blame.
There's no perfect solution to this, but moving power to more local levels would help. The powers of the Federal government should logically be limited to only the things that sub-national entities cannot possibly do, which is exactly how this nation was originally structured.
Can't be done. We tried that, remember? We tried it first with the Articles of Confederation, and the states couldn't agree on anything and the whole union was going to fall apart. Then they tried the Constitution, and as soon as it was set up, the federal government grabbed more and more power. That's the natural way of things: power tends to be consolidated. Your idea of a central government that's limited to things that only it can or should do is just like Communism: it sounds nice in theory, but it doesn't work out in practice. I guess you could try setting up a system where there's an automatic revolution every 50 years to "reset" things... They're trying this same thing in Europe, BTW, and it isn't working there either. Without a strong central government, the whole thing falls apart. So the best thing to do is limit your country's size so that only regions you can get along well with are part of your country, and leave other regions to be in separate countries. Otherwise, you're going to have people living thousands of miles away, maybe even speaking different languages, deciding on what's legal and illegal for you and what your monetary policy will be.
The long-term ideal is that all power is held by individuals and voluntarily-established institutions, but, until we get there, competitive local government is better than one homogeneous empire "from sea to shining sea" (and beyond).
Power can't be held by individuals; that's called "anarchy" and only teenagers thing that would work. You have to have some larger organization to create rules for people to live under (e.g., you can't murder each other, you can't steal from each other, etc.), and the maintain an enforcement mechanism for people who break those rules. But this can be done with a voluntarily-established institution, and usually is. It's called "government". The voluntarily-established ones have something called "voting", so if you want to change something about your government, it's your job to vote about it. Don't like the way the voting goes? Blame your fellow citizens.
I get what you're saying, but I don't think any U.S. state would ever actually ban abortion, even if it had the political power to do so. It'd be like King Cnut [wikipedia.org] trying to command the tide!
You really think that's going to stop the bible-thumpers from making such a law? Have you forgotten they've already banned a naturally-growing plant for decades now? It's pretty easy to grow this plant, it's easy to mail the seeds to people, it's easy and cheap to buy the grown and prepared plant so you can smoke it, yet it's still illegal and billions are spent on enforcing this law. The stupidity and futility are irrelevant. Having "abortion checkpoints" and keeping track of women and their pregnancies would create a whole new industry that would get generous government funding.
All this would obviously decimate the prohibitionist states' economy until they give up and get rid of such stupid laws!
Perhaps. And if so, that's not going to stop them from making the laws in the first place, and then forcing the people in those states to live under them for many decades. Soviet communism was a big failure too, but that didn't stop the USSR from forcing it on many millions of people for ~80 years.
Laws come from reality, and are understood thro
I'm not so sure about this. If you were running a corporation and only cared about the bottom line, the last thing you'd do is choose a high-risk action like getting into a trademark fight that you're not likely to win because you're trying to steal a trademark from an organization that's been using that same name for a long time and is in wide global usage by an extremely large number of people (developers), and which name is extremely well-known in the It industry. A true smart sociopath would not do such a thing. Only a clueless moron (possibly still a sociopath, but not a smart one), probably one who got his job solely because of his frat-buddy connections, would do something this dumb.
That's because you're trying to boil everything down to only 2 "sides", as if there's only two kinds of people in this country, "liberals" and "conservatives", which is total bullshit. These two "sides" are really just shaky alliances based on a bunch of different issues that frequently don't have that much to do with each other. For instance, Democrat voters in the Northeast are nothing like Democrat voters in San Francisco. The SF voters probably care about issues like gay marriage, gay rights, maybe environmentalism, etc. The voters in the Northeast care about issues relating to unions. The Democrats usually carry the northeast and other rust belt states because they're aligned with unions. There are no unions in California, and voters there don't care about that. Similarly, Republican voters in Alabama are not the same as Republican voters in Arizona or Montana. The voters in the Bible belt states care about religion, and the Republican party panders to that vote. The voters in Western states don't care that much about religion (at least not from their legislators or government), they tend to be of a libertarian bent and want smaller government, and the Republicans pander to that as well. If, for instance, we were to break the country up into 10 new, smaller countries, you'd quickly find the political landscape changing, as different issues become important in different regions (and other issues become totally settled). A country that encompassed only the Bible Belt states wouldn't have abortion as an issue any more, because they'd probably just ban it and be done with it, so they'd move on to other issues for political parties to distinguish themselves on.
The number of states that's optimal is highly debateable. Obviously, 1 is too few, and 1,000,000 is too many. I disagree that we need more states; more states equals more administrative overhead. Of course, you don't want too few states, because, as you point out, the larger your administrative region becomes, the more internal division there is, and that means more infighting (like people in Illinois fighting over whether there should be strict gun-control laws or not--the city dwellers typically want guns banned or otherwise strict measures, while rural dwellers usually want the opposite, so a state that groups together two disparate groups of people will have infighting over issues like this). But if you make states too small, then you end up with more government overall (more spending on government necessary per capita), plus you get lower efficiency because now you have to deal with all kinds of cross-state issues for all kinds of things like roadbuilding and trade and other issues. Look at all the problems we have now with metro areas that span state lines: you get people living on one side because income taxes are lower there, and then buying stuff on the other side because sales taxes are lower or nonexistent there. Can you imagine the mess if everyone lived near 3 other states? All the states would be fighting each other about how "unfair" it is that people can take advantage of different tax rates in different states. While it's certainly valid to pack up and move to a different state because you don't like the taxation in your own state, just having people drive to a neighboring state to take advantage of lower taxes there doesn't actually solve any problems (actually, it screws over the people who can't afford cars and are stuck staying there and paying the higher taxes at local stores, and because of their lower socioeconomic status don't have a way of getting legislators to fix things for them).
Huh? Addresses are not that complicated. What you may be thinking about is how you write out addresses for different countries if you're addressing postal mail. The data itself is pretty well standardized: these are the fields you usually have to fill: 1. addressee name, 2. addressee business name (optional), 3. street address, 4. city name, 5. region name (only for certain countries, such as the US and Australia where you need the state name or Canada where you need the province name), 6. postal code ("ZIP code" in the US), 7. country name. If you're designing a database schema to store addresses, this is all you need.
Now, there's two other related problems: 1) how to format that information if you're addressing an envelope, and 2) verifying the address for correctness (i.e., making sure it's a valid address and all the parts of it are correct, such as the postal code is correct for the street address, the city name matches the postal code, etc.).
Formatting the information isn't that hard, but different countries have different preferences. I recommend "Frank's Compulsive Guide to Postal Addresses" (google it), a web site that documents most countries' preferred formats. But even if you mis-format an address, these things are sorted by humans at some point if the machines can't figure it out (esp. for international postal pieces), so they'll figure it out if you write the city name before the postal code rather than vice versa. Of course, it's perfectly possible (and not that hard) to write a program module to format addresses correctly for every country using the information in the website I mentioned above. Most countries are simple: the name goes on the top line, the street address on the second line, and then the city and postal code go on the third line (some countries want the postal code first). Then the country name goes on the last line, in all caps. Larger countries need region names, namely the USA, Australia, and Canada, where the city, region abbreviation ("CA", "TX", "BC", "QC", "QLD", "NSW", etc.), and postal code are placed together on the line before the country name. There are a few countries that are real odd-balls, though. Ireland, for instance, doesn't have postal codes, though they do have postal zone numbers in Dublin, and you have to put the County name (which equates to a region name), so that it looks like "Cork, Co. Cork". The UK is weird because if you're sending your mail from the USA, you need to write the country as "UK" (not England, Scotland, etc., even though those are separate countries); but if you're sending it from Canada, you need to write it as "GREAT BRITAIN", even though Great Britain is not a country at all, it's the name of an island (which Northern Island, part of the UK, is not part of, nor are the Isle of Man and Channel Islands). Also, UK addresses frequently have odd multi-line "street addresses" which have no street number at all, and instead point to some hamlet (a group of houses in the country), then to some nearby town name, and then some larger city that that town is close to.
The real hard problem I see is address verification, as that isn't something you can write yourself a program to do. Some countries do have web-based APIs to do address verification, such as the USPS in the US and i believe Royal Mail in the UK, so you could link to those for those countries. For the rest, you can try to use Google Maps or other map services to verify addresses. But this isn't perfect; I've seen differences many times between Google Maps and what the USPS says is correct (usually they disagree on the city name for a zipcode).
Anyway, as I was saying at the beginning, a storage schema for addresses is extremely easy: name, street address, city, region (optional), postal code (exc. in Ireland and a few others), country. That's it.