Oh, I'm certainly not claiming that oil is preferred simply due to subsidies.
However, I'll be the first to claim the opposite SHOULD be true.
Thing that damage the environment should cost heavily in additional taxes. This allows that nifty "market forces" thing to help guide people's decisions and businesses to put extra resources into areas with a lower burden of environmental/tax overhead.
It also creates tax revenues from areas without as direct an influence on the poor and may help fund environmental cleanup programs.
Win-Win-Win
Of course, Rick Perry would do away with the EPA entirely, wouldn't he? I seem to have forgotten.... what that third agency is.... heh:-)
1) It's also about the size of California. Excluding the mojave desert area, it's about the same population density.
2) German's strong Euro HURTS exports. WTF are you talking about? Just making shit up? It might be worth noting that the EU contributed more than 3x as much as the US during the recent involvement in Libya.
3) This is due in part to Germany's strict immigration policies. The US is also below "replacement rate" in fertility, but also leans on immigration to pick up the bulk of growth. Are you arguing for looser immigration policies in order to spur growth? Interesting...
4) Are you arguing that a European country is more business friendly than a US company? Germany provides national health care, as well as free University education. I like that model. Let's use it!
5) All Germans can go to University if they pass highschool, and even if they don't, they have a path to get there if they choose. Speaking of a class system (and I quote)
There is little available evidence that the United States has more relative mobility than other advanced nations. If anything, the data seem to suggest the opposite. Using the relationship between parents’ and children’s incomes as an indicator of relative mobility, data show that a number of countries, including Denmark, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany, and France have more relative mobility than does the United States.
6) Keep in mind the EU is one trading area. Do you live in Kentucky? If not, then importing Kentucky Bourbon is exactly as hard as importing Irish Whiskey or French wine or Polish Vodka for someone in Germany.
7) The Bush tax cuts won't be allowed to expire as long as Republicans control at least 33% of the government. They'll scream bloody murder if someone tries. Also, German's public debt is notably lower than the US, though I guess there are other areas that offset that?
8) Most ironically, the "Republican base", on average, are net recipients of the benefits of the programs they rail against, as you pointed out. Germans don't like that idea. Germans are the California or New York of the US.
9) Anything you can get in the US, you can also get in Germany. Name something where that isn't true.
10) Most German cars will kill their American counterparts on almost any track.
I wonder how taxes stack up if you include your very expensive health care costs in your "taxes". Right-wingers all moan about how taxes will go up if we adopt universal health care like the less idiotic countries do, but I'd wager that taxes would rise less than the cost of insurance, because the insurance companies are parasitic middlemen who do nothing for health care except make it more expensive.
+1
I know many people who have moved from the US to Canada and vice-versa. I also know people who have moved their businesses.
It's pretty much widely regarded in Canada that the employer-supported cost of health care is much higher than the tax-supported cost of provincial health coverage. Businesses moving across the border generally have their "net costs" decreased when moving to Canada. The only place where this is not the case is businesses that have to deal with the VAT (GST), which combined with local taxes makes sales tax quite high.
Income taxes in Canada (which support the government health care) aren't much higher than in the US and most businesses are paying almost 10% of worker outflows into benefits.
The argument that government health care is somehow more expensive than what is currently in the US is a big fat red herring, or lies. I'm not quite sure which, probably a bit of both.
gas prices can significantly affect the price of food since a lot of the food economy is set up to ship food across long distances to take advantage of economies of scale
Yes!!!
Yes!!!!!
Shipping basic food items all over is a huge huge (and stupid) problem.
I was completely amazed when I was in a St. Louis food distribution warehouse and saw a box destined for California that contained all California-grown products.
WTF?
Frankly, if you are charging $5/gallon in taxes and using those to offset the cost of basic commodities, this isn't an issue anyway.
Plus, maybe distributors will start locally sourcing food. The whole global agri-business model completely distorts the real cost of things anyway by artificially inflating some items and deflating others. It encourages mono-culture crop growth (like 1,000,000 acres of soy on one farm with no variations) which is terrible for the enviornment and carries huge risks in terms of genetic diversity of crops, loss of tertiary species in large areas and the over "processing" of food items through the use of cheap additives.
Psychology research has got to me more than half total sham. So much is based on questionnaires from hand-picked samples with little deference to the questions being asked and how they are phrased or worded, or even what answers are allowed.
They seem to be a gross representation of the "researchers" simply confirming their own biases under the veil of statistics.
By the way, the DSM is a complete sham too. Science, my ass.
Anyway, agreed and thanks for the opportunity to rant a bit.
1) It's just "faith", get over it and I am scared out of my mind that someone will challenge it. 2) It's just "faith, get over it and I don't understand the common practices of science, nor the scientific method as it is commonly used. 3) It's just "faith", get over it and I think God enjoys fucking with people. 4) It's just "faith", get over it, have a nice evening.
You have a lot to say about whether or not God has something to do with evolution.
Why do you believe in God? Is there any evidence to his/its existence? Or is it simply dogmatic because you were raised that way?
What do you say to someone who is of another faith, perhaps Hindu or Christian or Jane or Sikh or whatever? What of the tens of millions who lived before the founding of Islam?
I'm somewhat baffled by religion in general. I don't intend to pick on a Muslim, your weirdly rational writing struck a profound cognitive dissonance within my head in contrast to the actual content of your writing.
Though I do feel compelled to point (for clarity) out that "appendices" is not the plural of appendix in the context to which you were referring (appendixes).
Your wife maybe be one case, but what the company is doing by tacitly allowing it is accepting your judgement (and the judgement of every other employee) about the trustworthiness of every other user on every computer.
Your wife is probably fine and quite nice.
That accountant down the hall whos 18 year old nephew thinks he's 1337 is a different story and he may have just handed his password over to someone who won't be so judicious with its use.
But the company has no control over your judgement, so the policy is "no other users". Seems pretty sane to me. The fact that they looked the other way isn't terrible, but it would be pretty silly for you to not understand where it came from at all....
He could fix anything, and would do just about anything to make sure stuff worked. Nobody asked questions, nobody audited him.
There was a huge security breach and it was tracked down to his workstation. See, his home computer got hacked and his big list of passwords let the person into the company VPN and allowed them to destroy a lot of data. Fortunately, they were just vandals, not thieves. In the course of the investigation, it was discovered that he had more than a dozen company computers in his garage, tagged for sale on ebay.
Needless to say, he was fired, quietly to avoid the publicity and preserve the management's reputation.
Man.. it would would be nice if the US was second best at anything I care about (other than number of fighter jets, executions, people in prison and money shoveling)... and technically the US is second best at money shoveling, since the EU has a larger economy, combined, than the US... sure it's not a country, ok, you can't lose them all.
The US emits more pollution than the EU and china combined, despite having just over half the economy (PPP GDP) of the two combined. The US uses 7 times as much water per capita and 4 times as much overall as the two combined.
What are you aiming at here? It's all about fighter jets isn't it?
First of all, the argument about "double taxation" only applies to dividend income. I still think it's an absurd argument, but you're even grossly misstating your own questionable argument.
The vast majority of "capital gains" are from stock price appreciation and the cost-basis growth component of capital gains is still taxed at an absurdly low point. This is the issue. I think leaving the taxation of dividends at 15% is not such a big deal, as it represents a small fraction of securities transactions.
So now that we've pointed out how silly the argument is, lets delve into the double taxation argument.
Conservatives a re very fond of pointing out that corporations are individuals. Now, when you get paid a salary, you are taxed (just like a corporation). If you hire a plumber to come work on your house so that you don't have to do it yourself, you pay him out of those after tax dollars and he then also has to pay tax on that income.
In the same way, the corporation is taxed on income and then individuals are taxed on the dividend as income as well. There is a very clear line between what is deductible income for the corporation and what isn't and that line is someone providing a material contribution (time, labor, goods, loans etc). Speculatively providing money (in the way an investor does) is not a material contribution in the same way and does not benefit from this deduction.
This is pretty standard common-law taxation and is fairly basic to our system.
But, like I said, it's really small compared to the cost-basis appreciation components of capital gains, especially over recent years.
The older services like the gnutella protocol in question here are primarily a "whole file" system, rather than fracturing them up into pieces like BitTorrent does.
I don't see any oil companies taking massive amounts of my money and disappearing with it a la Solyndra.
WHAT?!?
The oil industry got BILLIONS in tax subsidies during the Bush administration. WTF planet are you on?
In 2005, Bush, who has received more campaign support from the oil and gas industry than any other politician in US history, signed an energy bill from the Republican-controlled Congress that gave $14.5 billion in tax breaks for oil, gas, nuclear power and coal companies. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, which was based on recommendations by Cheney's energy task force, also rolled back regulations the oil industry considered burdensome, including exemptions from some clean water laws and safety oversight regulations. All of this transpired only one year after Congress passed a bill that included a tax cut for domestic manufacturing that was expected to save energy companies at least $3.6 billion over a decade.
The concept of "big oil" comes from the fact that the oil companies spend almost $100,000,000 per year lobbying the US Congress, and about the same amount for other governments in the world in order to ensure that laws enacted are for their best interest.
"Big Green" publishes thousands of scientific papers with the same goal.
I'm not sure which is more desirable to society, do you? Which should we celebrate and which should we condemn?
If you have to choose one path, which do you pick?
And this is opposed to a megacorp suing you for infringing on one of their 42,000 patents, shutting down your business, taking your home and then buying a yacht based on profits from their competing device.
Problem is certainly not solved by keeping the system as-is.
Perhaps a much shorter term is appropriate for most patents, or extra protection for someone who wishes to actually produce the product, but a shorter term for those who don't, I dunno.
There are lots of proposals, but the current system is ALMOST as bad as having none at all, and may actually be WORSE than having no patents at all, in terms of promoting innovation today.
If all of these inventions that are considered both "ubiquitous" and "commodity" are still patented, this is a sign that these patents have too long a term.
In the mid 1700s, a patent term of 20+ years may have been reasonable. Perhaps today a more reasonable term is around 5 years?
Wouldn't that drastically cut down on many of these issues and still allow inventors to profit from inventions for a period of time?
If you "provoked" an Israeli security officer, you wouldn't get a finger up the vagina, you'd have an assault rifle in your ear.
I don't have a vagina, but I think I'd prefer the former.
TSA goons are average (perhaps below average) people, unfortunately. There are tens of thousands of them and we don't pay enough to have them all be navy seals.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I'm certainly not claiming that oil is preferred simply due to subsidies.
However, I'll be the first to claim the opposite SHOULD be true.
Thing that damage the environment should cost heavily in additional taxes. This allows that nifty "market forces" thing to help guide people's decisions and businesses to put extra resources into areas with a lower burden of environmental/tax overhead.
It also creates tax revenues from areas without as direct an influence on the poor and may help fund environmental cleanup programs.
Win-Win-Win
Of course, Rick Perry would do away with the EPA entirely, wouldn't he? I seem to have forgotten.... what that third agency is.... heh :-)
1) It's also about the size of California. Excluding the mojave desert area, it's about the same population density.
2) German's strong Euro HURTS exports. WTF are you talking about? Just making shit up? It might be worth noting that the EU contributed more than 3x as much as the US during the recent involvement in Libya.
3) This is due in part to Germany's strict immigration policies. The US is also below "replacement rate" in fertility, but also leans on immigration to pick up the bulk of growth. Are you arguing for looser immigration policies in order to spur growth? Interesting...
4) Are you arguing that a European country is more business friendly than a US company? Germany provides national health care, as well as free University education. I like that model. Let's use it!
5) All Germans can go to University if they pass highschool, and even if they don't, they have a path to get there if they choose. Speaking of a class system (and I quote)
There is little available evidence that the United States has more relative mobility than other advanced nations. If anything, the data seem to
suggest the opposite. Using the relationship between parents’ and children’s incomes as an indicator of relative mobility, data show that a number of countries,
including Denmark, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany, and France have more relative mobility than does the United States.
6) Keep in mind the EU is one trading area. Do you live in Kentucky? If not, then importing Kentucky Bourbon is exactly as hard as importing Irish Whiskey or French wine or Polish Vodka for someone in Germany.
7) The Bush tax cuts won't be allowed to expire as long as Republicans control at least 33% of the government. They'll scream bloody murder if someone tries. Also, German's public debt is notably lower than the US, though I guess there are other areas that offset that?
8) Most ironically, the "Republican base", on average, are net recipients of the benefits of the programs they rail against, as you pointed out. Germans don't like that idea. Germans are the California or New York of the US.
9) Anything you can get in the US, you can also get in Germany. Name something where that isn't true.
10) Most German cars will kill their American counterparts on almost any track.
Exxon gets a direct "tax incentive" of $6 billion per year.
I'm sure that looks great on the balance sheet just above the $45 billion in profit they just reported.
What?
Being so short on details makes this hard to believe.
Sounds like a propaganda line to me...
I wonder how taxes stack up if you include your very expensive health care costs in your "taxes". Right-wingers all moan about how taxes will go up if we adopt universal health care like the less idiotic countries do, but I'd wager that taxes would rise less than the cost of insurance, because the insurance companies are parasitic middlemen who do nothing for health care except make it more expensive.
+1
I know many people who have moved from the US to Canada and vice-versa. I also know people who have moved their businesses.
It's pretty much widely regarded in Canada that the employer-supported cost of health care is much higher than the tax-supported cost of provincial health coverage. Businesses moving across the border generally have their "net costs" decreased when moving to Canada. The only place where this is not the case is businesses that have to deal with the VAT (GST), which combined with local taxes makes sales tax quite high.
Income taxes in Canada (which support the government health care) aren't much higher than in the US and most businesses are paying almost 10% of worker outflows into benefits.
The argument that government health care is somehow more expensive than what is currently in the US is a big fat red herring, or lies. I'm not quite sure which, probably a bit of both.
gas prices can significantly affect the price of food since a lot of the food economy is set up to ship food across long distances to take advantage of economies of scale
Yes!!!
Yes!!!!!
Shipping basic food items all over is a huge huge (and stupid) problem.
I was completely amazed when I was in a St. Louis food distribution warehouse and saw a box destined for California that contained all California-grown products.
WTF?
Frankly, if you are charging $5/gallon in taxes and using those to offset the cost of basic commodities, this isn't an issue anyway.
Plus, maybe distributors will start locally sourcing food. The whole global agri-business model completely distorts the real cost of things anyway by artificially inflating some items and deflating others. It encourages mono-culture crop growth (like 1,000,000 acres of soy on one farm with no variations) which is terrible for the enviornment and carries huge risks in terms of genetic diversity of crops, loss of tertiary species in large areas and the over "processing" of food items through the use of cheap additives.
All of it is gross and terrible.
Good!
Fix it.
Psychology research has got to me more than half total sham. So much is based on questionnaires from hand-picked samples with little deference to the questions being asked and how they are phrased or worded, or even what answers are allowed.
They seem to be a gross representation of the "researchers" simply confirming their own biases under the veil of statistics.
By the way, the DSM is a complete sham too. Science, my ass.
Anyway, agreed and thanks for the opportunity to rant a bit.
1) It's just "faith", get over it and I am scared out of my mind that someone will challenge it.
2) It's just "faith, get over it and I don't understand the common practices of science, nor the scientific method as it is commonly used.
3) It's just "faith", get over it and I think God enjoys fucking with people.
4) It's just "faith", get over it, have a nice evening.
I never said I'd never met one.
I only said that this person was one and I felt compelled to ask some questions.
Certainly something I've done before, but don't usually bother, or I would be interrogating a quarter of everyone I meet.
You have a lot to say about whether or not God has something to do with evolution.
Why do you believe in God? Is there any evidence to his/its existence? Or is it simply dogmatic because you were raised that way?
What do you say to someone who is of another faith, perhaps Hindu or Christian or Jane or Sikh or whatever? What of the tens of millions who lived before the founding of Islam?
I'm somewhat baffled by religion in general. I don't intend to pick on a Muslim, your weirdly rational writing struck a profound cognitive dissonance within my head in contrast to the actual content of your writing.
Not to be pedantic, but apparently you can get a degree in religious studies.
Or just about anything other than science, math and engineering, where there are "no right answers".
Try disagreeing with a philosophy or even a literature professor. They often mark you very highly. :-)
loan officers don't remove appendices.
ROFL!
Actually, I suspect they do that occasionally.
Though I do feel compelled to point (for clarity) out that "appendices" is not the plural of appendix in the context to which you were referring (appendixes).
Wait....
The IT Guy (who wouldn't have known) plugged the screen into the wrong ports on the KVM.
You called and made him come down from another building to plug in two cables? Rather than bending over to do it?
And someone is being called a "lazy ass" here?
Whew!
Your wife maybe be one case, but what the company is doing by tacitly allowing it is accepting your judgement (and the judgement of every other employee) about the trustworthiness of every other user on every computer.
Your wife is probably fine and quite nice.
That accountant down the hall whos 18 year old nephew thinks he's 1337 is a different story and he may have just handed his password over to someone who won't be so judicious with its use.
But the company has no control over your judgement, so the policy is "no other users". Seems pretty sane to me. The fact that they looked the other way isn't terrible, but it would be pretty silly for you to not understand where it came from at all....
I knew a guy like that.
He could fix anything, and would do just about anything to make sure stuff worked. Nobody asked questions, nobody audited him.
There was a huge security breach and it was tracked down to his workstation. See, his home computer got hacked and his big list of passwords let the person into the company VPN and allowed them to destroy a lot of data. Fortunately, they were just vandals, not thieves. In the course of the investigation, it was discovered that he had more than a dozen company computers in his garage, tagged for sale on ebay.
Needless to say, he was fired, quietly to avoid the publicity and preserve the management's reputation.
Maybe it was the same guy?
Man.. it would would be nice if the US was second best at anything I care about (other than number of fighter jets, executions, people in prison and money shoveling)... and technically the US is second best at money shoveling, since the EU has a larger economy, combined, than the US... sure it's not a country, ok, you can't lose them all.
The US emits more pollution than the EU and china combined, despite having just over half the economy (PPP GDP) of the two combined. The US uses 7 times as much water per capita and 4 times as much overall as the two combined.
What are you aiming at here? It's all about fighter jets isn't it?
Pew pew pew. BOOM.
First of all, the argument about "double taxation" only applies to dividend income. I still think it's an absurd argument, but you're even grossly misstating your own questionable argument.
The vast majority of "capital gains" are from stock price appreciation and the cost-basis growth component of capital gains is still taxed at an absurdly low point. This is the issue. I think leaving the taxation of dividends at 15% is not such a big deal, as it represents a small fraction of securities transactions.
So now that we've pointed out how silly the argument is, lets delve into the double taxation argument.
Conservatives a re very fond of pointing out that corporations are individuals. Now, when you get paid a salary, you are taxed (just like a corporation). If you hire a plumber to come work on your house so that you don't have to do it yourself, you pay him out of those after tax dollars and he then also has to pay tax on that income.
In the same way, the corporation is taxed on income and then individuals are taxed on the dividend as income as well. There is a very clear line between what is deductible income for the corporation and what isn't and that line is someone providing a material contribution (time, labor, goods, loans etc). Speculatively providing money (in the way an investor does) is not a material contribution in the same way and does not benefit from this deduction.
This is pretty standard common-law taxation and is fairly basic to our system.
But, like I said, it's really small compared to the cost-basis appreciation components of capital gains, especially over recent years.
The older services like the gnutella protocol in question here are primarily a "whole file" system, rather than fracturing them up into pieces like BitTorrent does.
Wait... I just re-read this...
I don't see any oil companies taking massive amounts of my money and disappearing with it a la Solyndra.
WHAT?!?
The oil industry got BILLIONS in tax subsidies during the Bush administration. WTF planet are you on?
In 2005, Bush, who has received more campaign support from the oil and gas industry than any other politician in US history, signed an energy bill from the Republican-controlled Congress that gave $14.5 billion in tax breaks for oil, gas, nuclear power and coal companies. The Energy Policy Act of 2005, which was based on recommendations by Cheney's energy task force, also rolled back regulations the oil industry considered burdensome, including exemptions from some clean water laws and safety oversight regulations. All of this transpired only one year after Congress passed a bill that included a tax cut for domestic manufacturing that was expected to save energy companies at least $3.6 billion over a decade.
I'm sorry, it was actually $146 million last year.
Back in 2006, Bush passed a law giving Exxon a $6 billion annual tax credit. Exxon promptly reported a $30 billion profit.
The total lobbying bills from environmental organizations amount to barely $8 million.
The concept of "big oil" comes from the fact that the oil companies spend almost $100,000,000 per year lobbying the US Congress, and about the same amount for other governments in the world in order to ensure that laws enacted are for their best interest.
"Big Green" publishes thousands of scientific papers with the same goal.
I'm not sure which is more desirable to society, do you? Which should we celebrate and which should we condemn?
If you have to choose one path, which do you pick?
Man.... so difficult.
And this is opposed to a megacorp suing you for infringing on one of their 42,000 patents, shutting down your business, taking your home and then buying a yacht based on profits from their competing device.
Problem is certainly not solved by keeping the system as-is.
Perhaps a much shorter term is appropriate for most patents, or extra protection for someone who wishes to actually produce the product, but a shorter term for those who don't, I dunno.
There are lots of proposals, but the current system is ALMOST as bad as having none at all, and may actually be WORSE than having no patents at all, in terms of promoting innovation today.
If all of these inventions that are considered both "ubiquitous" and "commodity" are still patented, this is a sign that these patents have too long a term.
In the mid 1700s, a patent term of 20+ years may have been reasonable. Perhaps today a more reasonable term is around 5 years?
Wouldn't that drastically cut down on many of these issues and still allow inventors to profit from inventions for a period of time?
I think it would!
If you "provoked" an Israeli security officer, you wouldn't get a finger up the vagina, you'd have an assault rifle in your ear.
I don't have a vagina, but I think I'd prefer the former.
TSA goons are average (perhaps below average) people, unfortunately. There are tens of thousands of them and we don't pay enough to have them all be navy seals.
Many folks I know got the dream job after 40-50 applications and 10+ interviews.
Sure, tiring, but worth it in the end. ;-)