Pull whatever numbers out of your ass that you want, the tax is still covering the cost of the educational campaigns. I'd be thrilled if the tax revenues were high enough to be 100x the cost of the campaigns, but I seriously doubt it's that high.
Soo you say the taxes don't discourage smoking.. and then cite those HUGE prices as one of the reasons for the decline in smoking? Makes perfect sense.
This "nanny state" talk is nonsense. They aren't banning the sale of soda; they're taxing it. And it SHOULD be taxed if it helps discourage stupid parents from pouring sugar-water down their kids' throats 24/7. And even if it doesn't lead to a decline, guess what? More tax revenues. It's still a win.
...what? I don't recall any job listings with the description "at least 5 years' experience in gun maintenance." I don't think you can compare something as mind-numbingly simple as that to an educational subject, but then again, the types of people who think homeschooling is good are generally the same types of people who would probably find gun maintenance to be mentally stimulating, too.
And no, a kid's future career possibilities should not be based on his parents' preferences. I hope you read over your own post tomorrow to see just how absurd you sound.
You're probably better off just training the programmers, or hiring people with programming experience. Salespeople (and business majors in general) tend to go into those fields specifically to get the highest pay/work ratio they can find.
For every "useful" thing you think a kid might learn being homeschooled, they're missing out on 10 ACTUALLY useful things they'd learn at school, where they have access to people specifically trained to teach each subject. Sure, different public schools have their own quality issues, but you know what inherently has 100x more? Homeschooling done by dumb people who think they know more about every subject that people educated specifically in those respective subjects.
And just because YOU haven't used chemistry since high school, that means your grandkid wouldn't be interested? I guess you'll never know, since his parents are stealing that choice away from him.
It doesn't sound like you or his parents are suited to school him, then. Send him to school before you ruin his life. You and/or his parents should be ashamed.
Mobile service is irrelevant. Nobody actually WORKS from their phone or tablet.
And bandwidth caps in most countries are still higher than what most people in America could get by downloading movies for most of the month. One of Japan's largest ISP's (NTT), for example, received alot of bad publicity when they started a policy to slow down service to anyone downloading 30GB a day. That's almost 1TB a month. Australia, one of the most notorious countries for bandwidth restrictions, has ISP's that charge anywhere from $60 (unlimited DSL) to $130 (1TB monthly).
And the US has almost no overlap in high-speed internet networks, either. In fact, 98% of Americans have only ONE choice for broadband speeds. Everything you just complained about with the Netherlands applies to the US as well. The funny thing is that, while AT&T and Comcast both call it socialist when anyone says we should take the infrastructure back and let ISP's compete over it, they campaigned FOR that very thing in the UK because THEY were the small ISP's there.
What exactly is our $600+ billion military budget protecting us (or other countries) from? No other governments want to attack us because their countries are too busy selling stuff to us. A few terrorists (which will ALWAYS be around, ESPECIALLY when you spend $600 billion annually on new explosives to destroy their communities and take their resources) don't qualify as a threat to an entire country's national security. Even if they did (and there would need to be A LOT of sporadic attacks to argue that), how exactly do gigantic fleets of warships, nuclear submarines, fighter jets, rocket launchers, tanks, and all other sorts of things (which have together ended a grand total of 0 extremist ideologies) "secure" us?
And anyway, it's fairly obvious that I meant "free" in the same way that a pre-college education is free. And substantially cheaper per capita than private alternatives. It's astounding how much public services can provide when they're actually made to service the public instead of a few rich people.
If the government REALLY "got in the middle", this wouldn't be a problem in the first place since public colleges and universities would be dirt cheap or even free, as they are in most other OECD countries.
In fact if you look at tuition, aside from Australia, the US government is less-involved in college education than any other developed country in the world.
I don't know about that. I know it's only anecdotal, but most of the people I used to play WoW with have quit for the same reasons I did (because it got irredeemably bland, repetitive, and unimaginative). And they're not the only people who feel that way; WoW's usership has gone from 11.5 million (May 2011) to 10 million. The Elder Scrolls games are insanely popular for their RPG gameplay, and while BioWare is too, SW:TOR is sci-fi and and comes from developers who already made single-player games with similar combat styles to WoW; so even though SW:TOR's active combat system (no auto-attack, strategic use of energy/force regeneration, etc.) is a huge step up from BioWare's previous gameplay mechanics, many people assumed it would just be a WoW clone.
The Elder Scrolls don't have that same reputation to disprove. And since it's in the same fantasy genre as WoW (whose developers seem to do remarkably little fantasizing for fantasy game developers), it's probably going to appeal more directly to bored WoW subscribers than SW:TOR did.
And on a side note, the space combat missions in SW:TOR are great. If you've played SWG, you should know how boring open-ended space exploration gets after, oh, about 5 minutes of... empty space. It really could use some more races though, seeing as there are like 100 different spacefaring races in the Star Wars universe.
you're assuming that the average business grad has the mental capacity for critical thinking or planning, seeing as 90% of them go into business school in the first place as a lazy get-rich-quick scheme. You just have to look at most tv commercials to see that the only place the average business marketer is manipulative is in their own head (and the South).
At least some are funny, though. Just look at the allstate commercials.
More people die from starvation, thirst, disease, or violence every day around the world, but Americans only remember the time 11 years ago when a bunch of impoverished extremists launched an attack on unassuming people as a misguided attempt to make their voices heard.
you could chalk it up to "out of sight, out of mind," but that's just an excuse for their ignorance; it isn't an excuse for the 100,000+ innocent people who have died in a "war" that 90% of Americans supported for an attack completely unrelated to the targeted country.
Yes, "collateral damage" and "accidental casualties" caused by a government-sponsored "war" launched for the sake of exerting control over recently-socialized oil pipelines are indeed murder. So is re-electing someone after they've started that "war."
The same type of planet where 40% of a supposedly educated country doesn't accept the concept of evolution, or the greenhouse effect of various gases when the next planet over is Venus.
Or building your roads. Or educating kids. Or paying people to make sure Johnson & Johnson don't leave metal shards in your tylenol. Or making sure that insurance companies pay you when they owe you money. Or employing cops to keep your neighborhood safe. Or keeping companies (such as Apple) from dumping toxic byproducts into your drinking water. Or making sure water-bottling companies sold clean water if a company DID poison your local water. Or maintaining airports and coordinating their traffic.
But every dollar Apple keeps WILL go toward pushing impoverished Chinese people toward suicide from making their products. Or poisoning those people from making their products. Or poisoning other people for dumping their byproducts into THEIR local water sources, or air.
Oh, and of course it'll go toward filling your precious bank account with fractions of the profits.
Also, those operations are going to China because they can pay people $10 a day there. Even so, that's not the cause of most of the missing revenue. A business might be MAKING things in another country (although the 20% of the US' GDP is still manufacturing--remarkably average for advanced economies), they're still SELLING all the same stuff here, and they're still providing all the same services here. Unless we start taxing a company for over 100% of the profits they're making from doing business in the country, they're still going to have an incentive to do business in the country.
That's why pharmaceutical companies can sell medicine in Mexico for $5, while charging you $200 for it here. Mexico doesn't subsidize it; they can just still make a profit from selling the medicine to Mexicans for $5, and they make an additional $195 from selling it to you.
You're proposing that the US becomes a giant tax haven. That only works on a micro scale. City-states like Singapore or Luxembourg can get away with it because they have minimal infrastructure costs and steal taxable revenue from all around the globe--and STILL just support their single cities. Even small countries like Ireland and Iceland--who tried lowering taxes and deregulating businesses exactly as you're talking about--couldn't sustain it.
It's one thing to suggest lowering tax rates to a level similar to Japan's (which still only has an 11:1 CEO/employee pay ratio, compared to our 325:1 ratio) or England's (22:1, the SECOND-HIGHEST after the US) while closing loopholes, but it's another thing entirely to buy into this corporate propaganda.
It's not like Apple's the only corporation guilty of evading criminal amounts of taxes. Google never pays higher than 5%, News Corp never pays more than 2% (the same guys who use Fox News to complain about taxes being too high on the rich), General Electric paid nothing and got $3 billion in tax credits, oil companies receive stupid amounts of subsidies, Amazon still ignores most sales taxes, Microsoft always pays in the single digits as well; the list goes on and on and on. Over 2/3 of major US corporations have NO tax liabilities.
Yet these same corporations still pay MOST of the taxes they owe in other OECD countries. The difference between the US and the rest of the developed world is that we're the only country with a tax system that considers GLOBAL business activities liable to taxation (obviously there are exceptions in other countries, such as INCREASED taxes for foreign employment or pollution). Other OECD countries only tax businesses based on DOMESTIC business activities. But in order to avoid having our global taxing system cause foreign business activities from having negative net profits from piled tax rates, Congress throws in a bunch of loopholes to negate the whole thing. Only it ends up negating almost all taxes on domestic activities too. This isn't an accident.
Video cards provide most of the benefits of console hardware. The X-Box even got its name because it runs games using Microsoft's Direct-X utilities. So even when a game can take advantage of hardware acceleration and run more efficiently on a game console, the game still faces physics and AI limitations (and I'm sure there are others), and the overall performance still gets increasingly better for computers as new video cards come out, whereas game consoles will use the same hardware until you either trade them in for newer versions or wait for the next generation.
Deus Ex: HR can be run at 9600x1080p (5 HD monitors) on a computer. The developers also urged people to get the PC version, since the console versions couldn't show it off in all its glory.
Consoles are nice for playing with friends, but PC's will always be better at running AAA games.
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Pull whatever numbers out of your ass that you want, the tax is still covering the cost of the educational campaigns. I'd be thrilled if the tax revenues were high enough to be 100x the cost of the campaigns, but I seriously doubt it's that high.
It's simple economics. If the price is raised, then people will buy less of it.
And you know what funds those campaigns? taxes on cigarettes.
Soo you say the taxes don't discourage smoking.. and then cite those HUGE prices as one of the reasons for the decline in smoking? Makes perfect sense.
This "nanny state" talk is nonsense. They aren't banning the sale of soda; they're taxing it. And it SHOULD be taxed if it helps discourage stupid parents from pouring sugar-water down their kids' throats 24/7. And even if it doesn't lead to a decline, guess what? More tax revenues. It's still a win.
...what? I don't recall any job listings with the description "at least 5 years' experience in gun maintenance." I don't think you can compare something as mind-numbingly simple as that to an educational subject, but then again, the types of people who think homeschooling is good are generally the same types of people who would probably find gun maintenance to be mentally stimulating, too.
And no, a kid's future career possibilities should not be based on his parents' preferences. I hope you read over your own post tomorrow to see just how absurd you sound.
You're probably better off just training the programmers, or hiring people with programming experience. Salespeople (and business majors in general) tend to go into those fields specifically to get the highest pay/work ratio they can find.
For every "useful" thing you think a kid might learn being homeschooled, they're missing out on 10 ACTUALLY useful things they'd learn at school, where they have access to people specifically trained to teach each subject. Sure, different public schools have their own quality issues, but you know what inherently has 100x more? Homeschooling done by dumb people who think they know more about every subject that people educated specifically in those respective subjects.
And just because YOU haven't used chemistry since high school, that means your grandkid wouldn't be interested? I guess you'll never know, since his parents are stealing that choice away from him.
It doesn't sound like you or his parents are suited to school him, then. Send him to school before you ruin his life. You and/or his parents should be ashamed.
Mobile service is irrelevant. Nobody actually WORKS from their phone or tablet.
And bandwidth caps in most countries are still higher than what most people in America could get by downloading movies for most of the month. One of Japan's largest ISP's (NTT), for example, received alot of bad publicity when they started a policy to slow down service to anyone downloading 30GB a day. That's almost 1TB a month. Australia, one of the most notorious countries for bandwidth restrictions, has ISP's that charge anywhere from $60 (unlimited DSL) to $130 (1TB monthly).
And the US has almost no overlap in high-speed internet networks, either. In fact, 98% of Americans have only ONE choice for broadband speeds. Everything you just complained about with the Netherlands applies to the US as well. The funny thing is that, while AT&T and Comcast both call it socialist when anyone says we should take the infrastructure back and let ISP's compete over it, they campaigned FOR that very thing in the UK because THEY were the small ISP's there.
I don't know, the lighting is usually pretty good on those sets.
What exactly is our $600+ billion military budget protecting us (or other countries) from? No other governments want to attack us because their countries are too busy selling stuff to us. A few terrorists (which will ALWAYS be around, ESPECIALLY when you spend $600 billion annually on new explosives to destroy their communities and take their resources) don't qualify as a threat to an entire country's national security. Even if they did (and there would need to be A LOT of sporadic attacks to argue that), how exactly do gigantic fleets of warships, nuclear submarines, fighter jets, rocket launchers, tanks, and all other sorts of things (which have together ended a grand total of 0 extremist ideologies) "secure" us?
And anyway, it's fairly obvious that I meant "free" in the same way that a pre-college education is free. And substantially cheaper per capita than private alternatives. It's astounding how much public services can provide when they're actually made to service the public instead of a few rich people.
If the government REALLY "got in the middle", this wouldn't be a problem in the first place since public colleges and universities would be dirt cheap or even free, as they are in most other OECD countries.
In fact if you look at tuition, aside from Australia, the US government is less-involved in college education than any other developed country in the world.
I don't know about that. I know it's only anecdotal, but most of the people I used to play WoW with have quit for the same reasons I did (because it got irredeemably bland, repetitive, and unimaginative). And they're not the only people who feel that way; WoW's usership has gone from 11.5 million (May 2011) to 10 million. The Elder Scrolls games are insanely popular for their RPG gameplay, and while BioWare is too, SW:TOR is sci-fi and and comes from developers who already made single-player games with similar combat styles to WoW; so even though SW:TOR's active combat system (no auto-attack, strategic use of energy/force regeneration, etc.) is a huge step up from BioWare's previous gameplay mechanics, many people assumed it would just be a WoW clone.
The Elder Scrolls don't have that same reputation to disprove. And since it's in the same fantasy genre as WoW (whose developers seem to do remarkably little fantasizing for fantasy game developers), it's probably going to appeal more directly to bored WoW subscribers than SW:TOR did.
And on a side note, the space combat missions in SW:TOR are great. If you've played SWG, you should know how boring open-ended space exploration gets after, oh, about 5 minutes of... empty space. It really could use some more races though, seeing as there are like 100 different spacefaring races in the Star Wars universe.
I think only Radeon cards support it.
you're assuming that the average business grad has the mental capacity for critical thinking or planning, seeing as 90% of them go into business school in the first place as a lazy get-rich-quick scheme. You just have to look at most tv commercials to see that the only place the average business marketer is manipulative is in their own head (and the South).
At least some are funny, though. Just look at the allstate commercials.
Average consumers *do not* like stepping into the middle of a fight which they don't even understand.
You must not follow American politics.
More people die from starvation, thirst, disease, or violence every day around the world, but Americans only remember the time 11 years ago when a bunch of impoverished extremists launched an attack on unassuming people as a misguided attempt to make their voices heard.
you could chalk it up to "out of sight, out of mind," but that's just an excuse for their ignorance; it isn't an excuse for the 100,000+ innocent people who have died in a "war" that 90% of Americans supported for an attack completely unrelated to the targeted country.
Yes, "collateral damage" and "accidental casualties" caused by a government-sponsored "war" launched for the sake of exerting control over recently-socialized oil pipelines are indeed murder. So is re-electing someone after they've started that "war."
The same type of planet where 40% of a supposedly educated country doesn't accept the concept of evolution, or the greenhouse effect of various gases when the next planet over is Venus.
Or building your roads. Or educating kids. Or paying people to make sure Johnson & Johnson don't leave metal shards in your tylenol. Or making sure that insurance companies pay you when they owe you money. Or employing cops to keep your neighborhood safe. Or keeping companies (such as Apple) from dumping toxic byproducts into your drinking water. Or making sure water-bottling companies sold clean water if a company DID poison your local water. Or maintaining airports and coordinating their traffic.
But every dollar Apple keeps WILL go toward pushing impoverished Chinese people toward suicide from making their products. Or poisoning those people from making their products. Or poisoning other people for dumping their byproducts into THEIR local water sources, or air.
Oh, and of course it'll go toward filling your precious bank account with fractions of the profits.
Go troll somewhere else.
Also, those operations are going to China because they can pay people $10 a day there. Even so, that's not the cause of most of the missing revenue. A business might be MAKING things in another country (although the 20% of the US' GDP is still manufacturing--remarkably average for advanced economies), they're still SELLING all the same stuff here, and they're still providing all the same services here. Unless we start taxing a company for over 100% of the profits they're making from doing business in the country, they're still going to have an incentive to do business in the country.
That's why pharmaceutical companies can sell medicine in Mexico for $5, while charging you $200 for it here. Mexico doesn't subsidize it; they can just still make a profit from selling the medicine to Mexicans for $5, and they make an additional $195 from selling it to you.
You're proposing that the US becomes a giant tax haven. That only works on a micro scale. City-states like Singapore or Luxembourg can get away with it because they have minimal infrastructure costs and steal taxable revenue from all around the globe--and STILL just support their single cities. Even small countries like Ireland and Iceland--who tried lowering taxes and deregulating businesses exactly as you're talking about--couldn't sustain it.
It's one thing to suggest lowering tax rates to a level similar to Japan's (which still only has an 11:1 CEO/employee pay ratio, compared to our 325:1 ratio) or England's (22:1, the SECOND-HIGHEST after the US) while closing loopholes, but it's another thing entirely to buy into this corporate propaganda.
It's not like Apple's the only corporation guilty of evading criminal amounts of taxes. Google never pays higher than 5%, News Corp never pays more than 2% (the same guys who use Fox News to complain about taxes being too high on the rich), General Electric paid nothing and got $3 billion in tax credits, oil companies receive stupid amounts of subsidies, Amazon still ignores most sales taxes, Microsoft always pays in the single digits as well; the list goes on and on and on. Over 2/3 of major US corporations have NO tax liabilities.
Yet these same corporations still pay MOST of the taxes they owe in other OECD countries. The difference between the US and the rest of the developed world is that we're the only country with a tax system that considers GLOBAL business activities liable to taxation (obviously there are exceptions in other countries, such as INCREASED taxes for foreign employment or pollution). Other OECD countries only tax businesses based on DOMESTIC business activities. But in order to avoid having our global taxing system cause foreign business activities from having negative net profits from piled tax rates, Congress throws in a bunch of loopholes to negate the whole thing. Only it ends up negating almost all taxes on domestic activities too. This isn't an accident.
Apple means 10 internet inches.
Video cards provide most of the benefits of console hardware. The X-Box even got its name because it runs games using Microsoft's Direct-X utilities. So even when a game can take advantage of hardware acceleration and run more efficiently on a game console, the game still faces physics and AI limitations (and I'm sure there are others), and the overall performance still gets increasingly better for computers as new video cards come out, whereas game consoles will use the same hardware until you either trade them in for newer versions or wait for the next generation.
Deus Ex: HR can be run at 9600x1080p (5 HD monitors) on a computer. The developers also urged people to get the PC version, since the console versions couldn't show it off in all its glory.
Consoles are nice for playing with friends, but PC's will always be better at running AAA games.