I wish I could be as optimistic as you about the poor. It's actually worse than you say. Once they've received the "free" medical welfare from the hospital, they may need to avoid ever becoming non poor, because if they don't avoid that, they may find their newfound middleclass status suddenly becoming a bit less "judgment proof" than you say. Instances of non poor people breaking free of the bottom buying a home, and finding an unexpected lien are... more common than you'd wish. =(
That's one of the problems with our current "mandated care" form of social welfare. It's a sort of safety net, just cruel and capricious. I should say, it's not very nice for the hospitals either. Virtually anything else would be better. The current system is a complete mess.
The Slashdot community has this amusing mix of copyright haters and copyright lovers. See, we're supposed to be all geeks, so if someone takes (pardon me, "duplicates") our stuff, it's not longer "copyright is not theft!" but rather "get a goddamn rope!"
I think property taxes only make sense for property that is used commercially. If you charge rent, or...
Beware asymmetries. There is a certain percentage of the population, at any given time, that for reasons of convenience and life circumstance, really don't want to own. Truly. I'm not kidding. Imagine a system that was asymmetric. To account for it's lack of coverage for one large half, it has to now overcompensate on the other large half. What if rent was suddenly Very Expensive (tm)? Would that impact be desirable? What if the number of rental units dropped below a certain baseline demand level? Would that put the poor, who tend to rent exclusively due to poor credit, into an even worse position?
I live in a high property tax state. Although as a point of order, I was referring to land value tax, not "property tax" which is a tax on the improvements as well as the land. This is a very important distinction.
Income taxes don't impact the uber wealthy beyond their own personal willingness to be impacted by income taxes. Why? Because the uber wealthy are structurally in control of the flows of the monies. They can elect to leave the money in a corporation. They can arrange to have the income "realized" in another state, or even another country. They control the expensing. They can sell the company for a profit, which is not income, but rather a capital gain. And so on and so forth. When you make these sorts of command decisions, exercising structural control over income and expense, you have great leeway that ordinary citizens do not enjoy. All penalties are toward the upper middle class or the lower upper class at best. Which is a shame, because these classes are what the lesser classis aspire to be.
The same is true of their "death" taxes. One word: trusts.
Both wealthy individuals as well as large corporations tend to own land. They own it in disproportionately high quantities, in comparison to the poor and middle class. Dodge that! Satellites, dontcha know.
The income tax system is just plain broken, will always be just plain broken, and will never be fixed.
There's also the possibility of hybrid systems. A sales (or VAT) tax, on goods only, that excludes certain necessities. A land value tax. Taxes on wages, but only for social security and medicare...
People who fund terrorist groups are frequently named as accomplices and tried as heinous criminals, so why aren't shareholders held accountable for crimes perpetrated with their money ?
The same could be said of governments and their tax payers, yes?
Anyway, there does seem to be some things sort of ill with the current system used world wide for corporations. Problem is, it's relatively easy to see that, and pick on the parts you don't like, but very very hard to define (and implement! practicality is to not be overlooked) something clearly better.
In my opinion, income taxes cause many evils. I hate them. Sales Taxes, Value Added Taxes, or the "Fair Tax" all would be better.
I don't agree with your "rent from the government" objection though. In many ways, all property ownership in a sovereign nation is like that. The very existence of the ability to really-no-kidding "own" property is something that the government enables for you. Taxing that one thing, that one very important thing, perhaps the really-no-kidding most important economic thing, does not seem so objectionable to me personally.
Especially when I consider the other positive aspects of that particular type of tax...
Fair comment. Large corporations of course, are mostly owned by anonymous shareholders who haven't done any bad. It's the execs who are usually doin' the bad. Adam Smith's little invisible hand, not as originally envisioned sirrah. Smaller companies of course, plenty of "players" there, I'm sure. I've even known a few...
Anyway, I've thought about this more fully. Here's what I think. I think that a dechartered company is sold by something analogous to a bankruptcy court. I'm just guessing here, but if you were a shareholder, and a company you had shares in suddenly had its LLC status removed, meaning you as a shareholder could now be legally held liable for all acts of the company, would you not insist? You'd want an unimpeachable court to do it, you wouldn't even want a vote (your vote could get you sued!, you'd want it done quick, legally, and "judicially". I'll guess: this is the law.
Go ahead and reincorporate. All those assets, though, they must be sold off with proceeds to the shareholders and creditors and so forth. You understand, a corporation undergoing this sort of thing is going to be having its executive leadership paralyzed as well... being a defendant does that. Anyway.... are you speculating, or did you have a specific instance in mind?
When a corporation is "convicted" of a felony, it is generally dechartered, whereby it loses its LLC standing. This is the death penalty, as far as a corporation is concerned. Tis why Arthur Anderson is gone. Is very rare. More often they go after the execs instead. Or the scape goat, if you're cynical.
The Fair Tax isn't really 23%. Go read up about it, carefully, as in what is the thing being taxed, and how does it differ from other sales taxes in the way it is collected. The lie will make you really angry.
Anyway, I'm with ya. Sort of. The right kind of sales tax would be better than income taxes. But before we leap off this bridge, let's think it through. Suppose we switched to sales taxes. Are you aware that the "Fair Tax" considers all services to be taxable, except for a service when it is a wage? What's the economic impact of that? How many outsourcing companies will go out of business overnight, because suddenly insourcing is so much cheaper? And before you laugh at all the evil outsourcing companies, let's think this through even further:
For the government, a government employee (wages, no tax) or a contractor (services, 30% tax)?
Not sounding so good now?
So, while the theory of sales taxes sits... moderately okay with me when I think about some of the Evils of the income tax... just take care. Massive changes to the tax system cause massive economic disruptions. Beware the consequences.
Personally, I am more in favor of the LVT (Land Value Tax), where the unimproved value of the land only is taxed. What's not to like? Very very hard to dodge this tax. Satellites, dontcha know. And the improvers are rewarded, but the speculators who hoard vast tracks... they are given incentive to not speculate, but rather improve.
And the correct answer to the question is: yes, but most people won't be able to get to it.
For some definition of the word "most" so sufficiently close to "all" as to not particularly matter. Although, of course there are ways. Like Hamachi and the like.
NAT = FIREWALL.
There's a difference between truth in theory and truth in practice. I understand the truth in theory is that a NAT might even nat N:N, simply doing simple address translation, passing through ports and addresses, any NAT that is translating small N to large N will not be doing this, so indeed will basically be a firewall. While the ISP may elect to pass through a port on the limited N outside subset, this again is a technicality. They won't, or won't if you don't pay.
So what I said was, as a matter of reduction to practice, correct.
Just so you know. While you were correcting me, n' all.
And with that, I'll give you an amusing todbit of philosophy, and it's source:
"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."
What you've said is a fine idea, however you would have to put more meat behind it. There is nothing to prevent, in what you propose above, employment contracts that would require an _exclusive_ license, written in such a fashion as to be "as good as" ownership in most every legal sense.
Having thought about this before, you would need to, at a minimum, require that the original work holder always receive some statutory minimum royalty.
I always pictured a worldwide solar grid connected all around the world.
A fine idea. Pointless without cheap (and likely room temperature) superconductors, however. The loss of energy due to transmission would be... intolerable.
They never seem to "get" that the more they wait, the more expensive switching becomes.
I disagree with this entirely. If imported oil becomes overly expensive, all the alternatives are proportionately cheaper, not more expensive. When that happens (which is a "when," not an "if"), then a vast swath of alternative energy technologies will kick off, their economies of scale will suddenly improve dramatically, and I'd say at that point, that will be the point of no return for Mid East oil as an energy source. It'll be for plastics from then on out.
You don't think that the Google cluster requires specialized talent?
Quite probably, as I know they roll some of their own proprietary stuff, like Google File System.
Be that as it may, a great deal of the modern load balanced web enterprise is "the" commodity data center technology dejure these days. Mind, this is per se a sort of specialized talent pool, but it is one of the most readily available ones for this otherwise special purpose thing.
It could? I doubt it. Have you heard of the expression "opex"? Specialized computers require specialized talent. And then if they're not 100% commodity, they lack economies of scale throughout the entire supply chain.
Anyway, I'll believe it when I see it. Let IBM try to put the GOOG out of business. But you should know something. The GOOG is just, like, unbelievably crazy smart when it comes to cost effectiveness of their data center ops.
Using some white paper dream machine in a what if discussion is one thing, but until and unless they're ready to present a real, no kidding TCO argument, with actual hardware and systems, this is just crazy talk.:-)
Part of the issue is that cable companies are partially regulated as a Utility.
That's a per-State issue. In many States, cable companies are both a defacto monopoly in their service areas, and at the same time not regulated at all.:-(
I always heard that the 80-20 rule was that 20% of the people do 80% of the work. Those 20% are probably not "multitaskers," I would suspect. My job makes me handle constant interruptions and reprioritization. Thankfully I have a staff of folks who don't have to do that. It's a mess when you do.
I don't disagree with you in the sense that we have a terrible mess, and no solution is clear.
But what you may not realize (or perhaps you do?) is that we already have socialized medicine in the U.S.
It's the whole "shall treat" policy that's been placed down on emergency rooms, as an unfunded mandate.
The side effect of this is what I call "capricious socialized medicine". If you are dirt poor, and have no future, you benefit. However, if you do have a future, what happens is that seven years later the hospital catches up with you, about the time you buy your house, dropping a lien down on top of it. This system is *worse* than socialized medicine.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have a good solution, only a firm conviction that this particular system above is even more evil than some alternatives.
The thing is, We the People are not happy with letting people die on the operating table if they don't have insurance. There exists no possibility that any amount of patriotic libertarian drum beating will take people in that direction.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I could be as optimistic as you about the poor. It's actually worse than you say. Once they've received the "free" medical welfare from the hospital, they may need to avoid ever becoming non poor, because if they don't avoid that, they may find their newfound middleclass status suddenly becoming a bit less "judgment proof" than you say. Instances of non poor people breaking free of the bottom buying a home, and finding an unexpected lien are... more common than you'd wish. =(
That's one of the problems with our current "mandated care" form of social welfare. It's a sort of safety net, just cruel and capricious. I should say, it's not very nice for the hospitals either. Virtually anything else would be better. The current system is a complete mess.
C//
...it is actually piracy...
Arrrr. Shiver me timbers, and walk the plank, matey.
The Slashdot community has this amusing mix of copyright haters and copyright lovers. See, we're supposed to be all geeks, so if someone takes (pardon me, "duplicates") our stuff, it's not longer "copyright is not theft!" but rather "get a goddamn rope!"
C//
I think property taxes only make sense for property that is used commercially. If you charge rent, or...
Beware asymmetries. There is a certain percentage of the population, at any given time, that for reasons of convenience and life circumstance, really don't want to own. Truly. I'm not kidding. Imagine a system that was asymmetric. To account for it's lack of coverage for one large half, it has to now overcompensate on the other large half. What if rent was suddenly Very Expensive (tm)? Would that impact be desirable? What if the number of rental units dropped below a certain baseline demand level? Would that put the poor, who tend to rent exclusively due to poor credit, into an even worse position?
C//
I live in a high property tax state. Although as a point of order, I was referring to land value tax, not "property tax" which is a tax on the improvements as well as the land. This is a very important distinction.
Income taxes don't impact the uber wealthy beyond their own personal willingness to be impacted by income taxes. Why? Because the uber wealthy are structurally in control of the flows of the monies. They can elect to leave the money in a corporation. They can arrange to have the income "realized" in another state, or even another country. They control the expensing. They can sell the company for a profit, which is not income, but rather a capital gain. And so on and so forth. When you make these sorts of command decisions, exercising structural control over income and expense, you have great leeway that ordinary citizens do not enjoy. All penalties are toward the upper middle class or the lower upper class at best. Which is a shame, because these classes are what the lesser classis aspire to be.
The same is true of their "death" taxes. One word: trusts.
Both wealthy individuals as well as large corporations tend to own land. They own it in disproportionately high quantities, in comparison to the poor and middle class. Dodge that! Satellites, dontcha know.
The income tax system is just plain broken, will always be just plain broken, and will never be fixed.
There's also the possibility of hybrid systems. A sales (or VAT) tax, on goods only, that excludes certain necessities. A land value tax. Taxes on wages, but only for social security and medicare...
C//
People who fund terrorist groups are frequently named as accomplices and tried as heinous criminals, so why aren't shareholders held accountable for crimes perpetrated with their money ?
The same could be said of governments and their tax payers, yes?
Anyway, there does seem to be some things sort of ill with the current system used world wide for corporations. Problem is, it's relatively easy to see that, and pick on the parts you don't like, but very very hard to define (and implement! practicality is to not be overlooked) something clearly better.
C//
In my opinion, income taxes cause many evils. I hate them. Sales Taxes, Value Added Taxes, or the "Fair Tax" all would be better.
I don't agree with your "rent from the government" objection though. In many ways, all property ownership in a sovereign nation is like that. The very existence of the ability to really-no-kidding "own" property is something that the government enables for you. Taxing that one thing, that one very important thing, perhaps the really-no-kidding most important economic thing, does not seem so objectionable to me personally.
Especially when I consider the other positive aspects of that particular type of tax...
C//
Fair comment. Large corporations of course, are mostly owned by anonymous shareholders who haven't done any bad. It's the execs who are usually doin' the bad. Adam Smith's little invisible hand, not as originally envisioned sirrah. Smaller companies of course, plenty of "players" there, I'm sure. I've even known a few...
:-)
Anyway, I've thought about this more fully. Here's what I think. I think that a dechartered company is sold by something analogous to a bankruptcy court. I'm just guessing here, but if you were a shareholder, and a company you had shares in suddenly had its LLC status removed, meaning you as a shareholder could now be legally held liable for all acts of the company, would you not insist? You'd want an unimpeachable court to do it, you wouldn't even want a vote (your vote could get you sued!, you'd want it done quick, legally, and "judicially". I'll guess: this is the law.
You a gamblin' man?
C//
Go ahead and reincorporate. All those assets, though, they must be sold off with proceeds to the shareholders and creditors and so forth. You understand, a corporation undergoing this sort of thing is going to be having its executive leadership paralyzed as well... being a defendant does that. Anyway.... are you speculating, or did you have a specific instance in mind?
C//
When a corporation is "convicted" of a felony, it is generally dechartered, whereby it loses its LLC standing. This is the death penalty, as far as a corporation is concerned. Tis why Arthur Anderson is gone. Is very rare. More often they go after the execs instead. Or the scape goat, if you're cynical.
C//
The Fair Tax isn't really 23%. Go read up about it, carefully, as in what is the thing being taxed, and how does it differ from other sales taxes in the way it is collected. The lie will make you really angry.
Anyway, I'm with ya. Sort of. The right kind of sales tax would be better than income taxes. But before we leap off this bridge, let's think it through. Suppose we switched to sales taxes. Are you aware that the "Fair Tax" considers all services to be taxable, except for a service when it is a wage? What's the economic impact of that? How many outsourcing companies will go out of business overnight, because suddenly insourcing is so much cheaper? And before you laugh at all the evil outsourcing companies, let's think this through even further:
For the government, a government employee (wages, no tax) or a contractor (services, 30% tax)?
Not sounding so good now?
So, while the theory of sales taxes sits... moderately okay with me when I think about some of the Evils of the income tax... just take care. Massive changes to the tax system cause massive economic disruptions. Beware the consequences.
Personally, I am more in favor of the LVT (Land Value Tax), where the unimproved value of the land only is taxed. What's not to like? Very very hard to dodge this tax. Satellites, dontcha know. And the improvers are rewarded, but the speculators who hoard vast tracks... they are given incentive to not speculate, but rather improve.
Joe.
Jail... well, no. Convicted of a crime? Yes.
C//
And the correct answer to the question is: yes, but most people won't be able to get to it.
For some definition of the word "most" so sufficiently close to "all" as to not particularly matter.
Although, of course there are ways. Like Hamachi and the like.
NAT = FIREWALL.
There's a difference between truth in theory and truth in practice. I understand the truth in theory is that a NAT might even nat N:N, simply doing simple address translation, passing through ports and addresses, any NAT that is translating small N to large N will not be doing this, so indeed will basically be a firewall. While the ISP may elect to pass through a port on the limited N outside subset, this again is a technicality. They won't, or won't if you don't pay.
So what I said was, as a matter of reduction to practice, correct.
Just so you know. While you were correcting me, n' all.
And with that, I'll give you an amusing todbit of philosophy, and it's source:
"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not."
--Winnie the Pooh
C//
The answer to you question is: without your ISP's involvement, no. NAT = FIREWALL.
C//
What you've said is a fine idea, however you would have to put more meat behind it. There is nothing to prevent, in what you propose above, employment contracts that would require an _exclusive_ license, written in such a fashion as to be "as good as" ownership in most every legal sense.
Having thought about this before, you would need to, at a minimum, require that the original work holder always receive some statutory minimum royalty.
C//
I always pictured a worldwide solar grid connected all around the world.
A fine idea. Pointless without cheap (and likely room temperature) superconductors, however. The loss of energy due to transmission would be... intolerable.
C//
They never seem to "get" that the more they wait, the more expensive switching becomes.
I disagree with this entirely. If imported oil becomes overly expensive, all the alternatives are proportionately cheaper, not more expensive. When that happens (which is a "when," not an "if"), then a vast swath of alternative energy technologies will kick off, their economies of scale will suddenly improve dramatically, and I'd say at that point, that will be the point of no return for Mid East oil as an energy source. It'll be for plastics from then on out.
C//
You don't think that the Google cluster requires specialized talent?
Quite probably, as I know they roll some of their own proprietary stuff, like Google File System.
Be that as it may, a great deal of the modern load balanced web enterprise is "the" commodity data center technology dejure these days. Mind, this is per se a sort of specialized talent pool, but it is one of the most readily available ones for this otherwise special purpose thing.
Joe.
It could? I doubt it. Have you heard of the expression "opex"? Specialized computers require specialized talent. And then if they're not 100% commodity, they lack economies of scale throughout the entire supply chain.
:-)
Anyway, I'll believe it when I see it. Let IBM try to put the GOOG out of business. But you should know something. The GOOG is just, like, unbelievably crazy smart when it comes to cost effectiveness of their data center ops.
Using some white paper dream machine in a what if discussion is one thing, but until and unless they're ready to present a real, no kidding TCO argument, with actual hardware and systems, this is just crazy talk.
C//
I doubt that they are planing replacing the Internet with one machine but a Blue Gene might replace Google's cluster.
Not at anywhere near the cost.
C//
Part of the issue is that cable companies are partially regulated as a Utility.
:-(
That's a per-State issue. In many States, cable companies are both a defacto monopoly in their service areas, and at the same time not regulated at all.
C//
I always heard that the 80-20 rule was that 20% of the people do 80% of the work. Those 20% are probably not "multitaskers," I would suspect. My job makes me handle constant interruptions and reprioritization. Thankfully I have a staff of folks who don't have to do that. It's a mess when you do.
C//
Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 45 an attorney can sign and issue subpoenas for third parties, as an officer of the court.
You forgot to add on "IANAL".
C//
That, too, is a copyright violation.
I don't disagree with you in the sense that we have a terrible mess, and no solution is clear.
But what you may not realize (or perhaps you do?) is that we already have socialized medicine in the U.S.
It's the whole "shall treat" policy that's been placed down on emergency rooms, as an unfunded mandate.
The side effect of this is what I call "capricious socialized medicine". If you are dirt poor, and have no future, you benefit. However, if you do have a future, what happens is that seven years later the hospital catches up with you, about the time you buy your house, dropping a lien down on top of it. This system is *worse* than socialized medicine.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have a good solution, only a firm conviction that this particular system above is even more evil than some alternatives.
The thing is, We the People are not happy with letting people die on the operating table if they don't have insurance. There exists no possibility that any amount of patriotic libertarian drum beating will take people in that direction.
See the problem?
C//