It's difficult to get away from thinking of taxation in terms of income. The sales tax isn't higher than social security, nor is it three steps up the progressive scale, because the sales tax is not a percentage on income, it's a percentage of spending. The only basis for comparing the sales tax to other taxes is the aggregate total generated.
20% was the actual figure proposed a few years ago in House Resolution 2500 or 2000 or something. Essentially I think they divided the federal budget by the amount of retail sales and got 20%. That's probably an oversimplification. There were other conditions. For example, to get the refund you had to register as a head of household and claim a number of dependents, same as on your 1040 today. Your dollar amount refunded would be similar to the flat dollar exemption given today by the IRS. So there would be some paperwork and bureacracy involved, just a hell of a lot less than what we have now, and infinitely less invasive.
Right now there is a similar measure in the House and Senate (HR 25, S 1493) called the Linder/Peterson Fair Tax Act of 2003. The figure they propose is 23%.
Everybody who gets special treatment now could get special treatment in some way other than through the tax system. Taxation is a way to collect money to run the government. Special benefits for the blind, financial aid for students, grants for preserving historical buildings, etc, etc, should all be considered separately, not as reasons to tinker with the tax system.
Percent-wise they would be paying much less than a person with a 20K income who spends 19.5K a year.
Wrong. Everybody would pay the same percentage, BASED ON THEIR CONSUMPTION, not on their income. When you think of wealth, do you think of a large number on a paycheck, or do you think of big houses, expensive cars, fancy restaurants, flying first class, etc? Most of us think of wealth in terms of spending money, not merely having it. A sales tax is based on that same point of view. The benefits of making the mental switch of defining wealth in terms of consumption rather than income are enormous, because consumption is so much easier to meter.
As business is economically not an enduser of anything (everything a business does is associated with providing a good or service to ultimately an individual consumer) under this system they would pay no tax at all.
Absolutely right. But businesses already don't pay taxes, and they never have. They collect taxes and pass the money on to the government. All taxes levied on businesses are built into the prices of products and paid by customers. Essentially we pay federal sales tax already, we just don't call it that and we don't know how much it is.
Instead of taxing people for achievement (income), tax them for consumption (spending). A national sales tax of 20% on all retail transactions would generate the same revenue collected now, but with a tiny fraction of the overhead.
To counteract the regressive nature of the sales tax, everybody would receive a fixed dollar amount refund. That refund would be equal to the tax rate times the federal definition of poverty level income. The basis for this is that a person whose income is at poverty level must spend all their income to survive. If that person and everybody else receives the same size refund, it would amount to a 100% refund for the poor and a smaller percentage refund for higher income people. People would automatically pay an infinitely graduated tax because people with higher incomes buy more.
All the privacy issues generated by federal income tax would go away.
The overhead involved would be practically zero. The IRS would need only a fraction of its current 100,000+ employees, to deal with state revenue agencies to collect the fed's share. If they still insisted on doing audits, rather than letting the existing state agencies handle it, they would be looking at 12 million businesses collecting sales tax instead of 170 million people currently paying income tax.
All business taxes and corporate income taxes would go away. The national sales tax would be on end user purchases only. All the hidden taxes paid by companies and built into the prices of everything would be gone.
All the costs of calculating personal and business taxes and trying to avoid them would go away, along with all of the associated record keeping. An army of clerks, accountants, lawyers and consultants whose jobs are based entirely on taxation would have to find something productive to do.
Congress would lose its ability to use tax breaks to repay campaign contributions.
About 7 years ago there was a proposal to do the above. It died in committee.
Does anybody really think this is useful? Maybe if they could carry the 3D concept farther, for example represent processes as machines that you plug files and other machines into...
I was expecting some new information, but this article seems to have been written by someone who just became aware of the idea of self driving cars, and assumes the reader likewise knows nothing about it.
My prediction is within 10 years manufacturers will get beyond the toe-in-the-water stage and fully robotic cars will be approved for highway use. At some point someone will realize that a robotic car need not sit in the parking lot at work. It can drive home and chauffeur the rest of the family around, then return when it's quitting time. The saving on double car payments will far outweigh the cost of the additional trips.
The next step will be to ask why the car has to sit in the garage when it's not in use. Leasing companies will offer the use of their entire fleet of cars. Cars will become robot taxis, summoned by cell phone.
The next step after that will be to ban human-driven vehicles from the highways. When that's done, robotic cars will be able to travel at high speeds with less distance between them. Traffic jams will disappear. The annual highway death toll of 50,000 in America (consistent since the 1960's and half because of drunks) will plummet. I'm looking forward to all of this.
Some people don't think any of this will happen because people won't want to give up control of their cars. Driving a car is fun. Sure it, but so is riding a horse, and people gave that up when something better came along. Robotic cars are something better.
Discontinued internet appliance, runs QNX and has been hacked. 7" diag 640x480 touch screen, nice and sharp, cool Jetsons design. $80 on eBay. I bought several to stream mp3 through.
Back in the 80s I had to work at a customer site to do some customization on a business package my company had developed. The customer, a fabric manufacturing company, had no remote access, and no spare terminal for me to work on. The only choice was the operator's console in the bathroom-size, heavily air-conditioned computer room, where there was no desk or chair. The console terminal sat on a piece of plywood between two giant disk drives. So I spent 2 weeks standing in front of it, hacking their crappy DiBOL code, wearing a jacket, hat and headphones. My fingers kept getting cold but I couldn't type while wearing gloves, so I alternated putting one hand in my pocket and typing with the other. I was also simultaneously kicking my own ass for being stupid enough not to resign.
I would love to read an equally well researched analysis, with concrete examples, of how politicians use these same sales techniques -- on the one hand to pimp themselves to the money people, and on the other to convince the rest of us that democracy is still real.
I don't think the big issue here is record sales or copy protection, it's the appalling eagerness of governments to cooperate with the slapdown mentality of the copymaking industry. I'm not talking about artists and creators, I'm talking about businesses that produce nothing original themselves but only make and sell copies of other people work, controlling the rights through well written contracts. The copymaking industry (music, film, paper) has achieved an amazing degree of control over governments throughout the world. They don't have to prove the costs of copyright infringement, or even that there is any cost. All they have to do is whine loudly and blame all their business problems on "piracy," and governments obligingly implement scorched-earth enforcement.
Crying fair use is not enough. The general public doesn't really care about being able to make backups of their CDs. They happily consume whatever is put in front of them. Copy protection doesn't bother them. What might bother them is the realization that the democracy they think most of the world lives in today is really a pretend democracy, sort of like Student Council. Ordinary people don't really have a say in what their governments do anymore. That privilege belongs to people with enough money to outbid each other for the attention of lawmakers.
That's the sad message that should shine through all of this -- that if you aren't wealthy You Don't Matter.
One of the guards at the company I work for showed me how a simple strip of metal with a notch in it can be used to penetrate the security system of almost any motor vehicle. Naturally, my first reaction was to notify the Dept of Homeland Security. Hopefully they will visit this terrorist at his home in the middle of the night, and remove him to an undisclosed location where he belongs.
I got one of those letters, not from PanIP but from some other clowns, who claim to have invented the idea of downloading media files over the web. They cited the presence of a couple mpegs on my web server as proof that I was using their technology without permission, and insisted that I contact them to discuss licensing. I trashed the letter and never heard from them again.
The trio are now on bail and have not been charged with any crime.
That's because they didn't commit any crime, because they were in England, not Las Vegas.
As the article says, He [Packard of Eudaemonic Pie fame] stopped his own attempts partly because new laws in some US states barred computers from casinos. British gambling laws from 1845 are currently in the process of being redrafted to bring them up to date with 21st Century gaming.
Meaning that British laws are being redrafted to ensure that casino customers are not allowed to do what the casinos do: control the odds and play the other party for a sucker.
This doesn't have anything to do with the article, which I didn't even read yet, I just want to enter my vote for "Chainsaw-wielding Robotic Submarine" as the greatest Slashdot headline of all time.
To my mind, the questions are similar. No, Puerto Rico is not a state because it hasn't been admitted to the US. What makes Pluto a planet is that we say it's a planet. Same goes for Sedna. Size does not matter (in this case).
I don't see the issue, other than somebody acting like a 2-year-old ("Mine! Mine!"). But then our economic system is pretty much designed to encourage everybody to act like that.
If United Business Media doesn't want other sites to bring eyeballs to their sites because their content is just too precious and special, then phuckem.
Instead of just stealing your stuff, they should wait in your house and hack you up with your own kitchen knives when you get home. That would put more pressure on the police to catch them.
Wow, I can hear the dominoes falling now. State governments using software they didn't have to pay for multiple times? No recurring license fees in the millions of dollars every year? Depriving software vendors the right to lock in their share of our tax money? Don't these pinkoes know they are chipping away the foundations of capitalism? Next thing you know, it will be illegal to get paid to write code! Slippery slope, slippery slope. The government should be setting an example for the rest of us by making sure someone else owns everything they do!
In an e-voting system the paper absentee ballots would be thrown away after being entered into the system.
"If the problem had occurred with their electronic ballots or with the tabulation software (that sits on the county server) they would have been hard pressed to reconstruct their election," she said. "Or they might not have ever known there was a problem at all. If they were doing the manual count on the electronic ballots there would be no record to look at to determine what the accurate vote count should be."
The problem is that we've lived with airliners for so long without recognizing them as the huge cruise missiles that they are. If our cultural heritage included walking around with belts of live grenades slung across our chests, we would resent a sudden requirement to leave them at the door. It isn't that there is any greater danger now, it's just that now we're aware of it and we have to deal with it. Rod Serling always felt responsible for inspiring airline hijackings with a tv episode he wrote, but sooner or later someone would have thought of it. I'm amazed we went so long before someone decided to use airliners to cause mayhem. The secret is out and it won't go away. Buying a ticket with cash and flying anonymously is an outdated luxury. Other things we take for granted will follow.
God Damn! I read about Stanford R. Ovshinsky and amorphous semiconductors back in the late 1970s. It promised to revolutionize solar energy technology by allowing solar cells to be created by spraying coatings onto ordinary surfaces and attaching contacts. The coatings were supposedly able to convert heat as well as light, so you could theoretically wrap your woodstove pipe with this material and get electricity.
Over the years I have seen Ovshinsky's name pop up here an there. At last he seems to have made it work. As the article says, a whopping 2500 watts per kg! Gotta tip my hat to him for perseverence, even if unabombers don't have cheap, off-grid power in their survival cabins yet.
Face it people, all this surveillance is going to happen. The government is going to have complete information about you and contrl over you in a few short years. The Internet can be a great tool for communication and education, just like television could have been. It can also be a tool for control, just like television is.
America is in the hands of the bad guys, and within our lifetimes we will have a totalitarian government ruling a flock of consumer/workers who generate wealth for the top 2%. Just like in the good old days, only with HDTV. It's pretty much that way now, but in the future it won't be a secret, and people won't really care as long as the can buy cheap gas, eat Big Macs and watch American Idol on a 42-incher.
I've come to the conclusion that it's just the way the human race works. Some people take charge because the rest let them. Unless you are one of those take-charge types, the best thing you can hope to do is take care of yourself, your family and other people you care about, stay under the radar and live as well as possible. Democracy is like every other good thing that survives until They Who Must Own Everything figure out how to hack it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's difficult to get away from thinking of taxation in terms of income. The sales tax isn't higher than social security, nor is it three steps up the progressive scale, because the sales tax is not a percentage on income, it's a percentage of spending. The only basis for comparing the sales tax to other taxes is the aggregate total generated.
20% was the actual figure proposed a few years ago in House Resolution 2500 or 2000 or something. Essentially I think they divided the federal budget by the amount of retail sales and got 20%. That's probably an oversimplification. There were other conditions. For example, to get the refund you had to register as a head of household and claim a number of dependents, same as on your 1040 today. Your dollar amount refunded would be similar to the flat dollar exemption given today by the IRS. So there would be some paperwork and bureacracy involved, just a hell of a lot less than what we have now, and infinitely less invasive.
Right now there is a similar measure in the House and Senate (HR 25, S 1493) called the Linder/Peterson Fair Tax Act of 2003. The figure they propose is 23%.
Everybody who gets special treatment now could get special treatment in some way other than through the tax system. Taxation is a way to collect money to run the government. Special benefits for the blind, financial aid for students, grants for preserving historical buildings, etc, etc, should all be considered separately, not as reasons to tinker with the tax system.
Percent-wise they would be paying much less than a person with a 20K income who spends 19.5K a year.
Wrong. Everybody would pay the same percentage, BASED ON THEIR CONSUMPTION, not on their income. When you think of wealth, do you think of a large number on a paycheck, or do you think of big houses, expensive cars, fancy restaurants, flying first class, etc? Most of us think of wealth in terms of spending money, not merely having it. A sales tax is based on that same point of view. The benefits of making the mental switch of defining wealth in terms of consumption rather than income are enormous, because consumption is so much easier to meter.
As business is economically not an enduser of anything (everything a business does is associated with providing a good or service to ultimately an individual consumer) under this system they would pay no tax at all.
Absolutely right. But businesses already don't pay taxes, and they never have. They collect taxes and pass the money on to the government. All taxes levied on businesses are built into the prices of products and paid by customers. Essentially we pay federal sales tax already, we just don't call it that and we don't know how much it is.
Three words:
National Sales Tax.
Instead of taxing people for achievement (income), tax them for consumption (spending). A national sales tax of 20% on all retail transactions would generate the same revenue collected now, but with a tiny fraction of the overhead.
To counteract the regressive nature of the sales tax, everybody would receive a fixed dollar amount refund. That refund would be equal to the tax rate times the federal definition of poverty level income. The basis for this is that a person whose income is at poverty level must spend all their income to survive. If that person and everybody else receives the same size refund, it would amount to a 100% refund for the poor and a smaller percentage refund for higher income people. People would automatically pay an infinitely graduated tax because people with higher incomes buy more.
All the privacy issues generated by federal income tax would go away.
The overhead involved would be practically zero. The IRS would need only a fraction of its current 100,000+ employees, to deal with state revenue agencies to collect the fed's share. If they still insisted on doing audits, rather than letting the existing state agencies handle it, they would be looking at 12 million businesses collecting sales tax instead of 170 million people currently paying income tax.
All business taxes and corporate income taxes would go away. The national sales tax would be on end user purchases only. All the hidden taxes paid by companies and built into the prices of everything would be gone.
All the costs of calculating personal and business taxes and trying to avoid them would go away, along with all of the associated record keeping. An army of clerks, accountants, lawyers and consultants whose jobs are based entirely on taxation would have to find something productive to do.
Congress would lose its ability to use tax breaks to repay campaign contributions.
About 7 years ago there was a proposal to do the above. It died in committee.
Does anybody really think this is useful? Maybe if they could carry the 3D concept farther, for example represent processes as machines that you plug files and other machines into...
I was expecting some new information, but this article seems to have been written by someone who just became aware of the idea of self driving cars, and assumes the reader likewise knows nothing about it.
My prediction is within 10 years manufacturers will get beyond the toe-in-the-water stage and fully robotic cars will be approved for highway use. At some point someone will realize that a robotic car need not sit in the parking lot at work. It can drive home and chauffeur the rest of the family around, then return when it's quitting time. The saving on double car payments will far outweigh the cost of the additional trips.
The next step will be to ask why the car has to sit in the garage when it's not in use. Leasing companies will offer the use of their entire fleet of cars. Cars will become robot taxis, summoned by cell phone.
The next step after that will be to ban human-driven vehicles from the highways. When that's done, robotic cars will be able to travel at high speeds with less distance between them. Traffic jams will disappear. The annual highway death toll of 50,000 in America (consistent since the 1960's and half because of drunks) will plummet. I'm looking forward to all of this.
Some people don't think any of this will happen because people won't want to give up control of their cars. Driving a car is fun. Sure it, but so is riding a horse, and people gave that up when something better came along. Robotic cars are something better.
Discontinued internet appliance, runs QNX and has been hacked. 7" diag 640x480 touch screen, nice and sharp, cool Jetsons design. $80 on eBay. I bought several to stream mp3 through.
Back in the 80s I had to work at a customer site to do some customization on a business package my company had developed. The customer, a fabric manufacturing company, had no remote access, and no spare terminal for me to work on. The only choice was the operator's console in the bathroom-size, heavily air-conditioned computer room, where there was no desk or chair. The console terminal sat on a piece of plywood between two giant disk drives. So I spent 2 weeks standing in front of it, hacking their crappy DiBOL code, wearing a jacket, hat and headphones. My fingers kept getting cold but I couldn't type while wearing gloves, so I alternated putting one hand in my pocket and typing with the other. I was also simultaneously kicking my own ass for being stupid enough not to resign.
I would love to read an equally well researched analysis, with concrete examples, of how politicians use these same sales techniques -- on the one hand to pimp themselves to the money people, and on the other to convince the rest of us that democracy is still real.
I don't think the big issue here is record sales or copy protection, it's the appalling eagerness of governments to cooperate with the slapdown mentality of the copymaking industry. I'm not talking about artists and creators, I'm talking about businesses that produce nothing original themselves but only make and sell copies of other people work, controlling the rights through well written contracts. The copymaking industry (music, film, paper) has achieved an amazing degree of control over governments throughout the world. They don't have to prove the costs of copyright infringement, or even that there is any cost. All they have to do is whine loudly and blame all their business problems on "piracy," and governments obligingly implement scorched-earth enforcement.
Crying fair use is not enough. The general public doesn't really care about being able to make backups of their CDs. They happily consume whatever is put in front of them. Copy protection doesn't bother them. What might bother them is the realization that the democracy they think most of the world lives in today is really a pretend democracy, sort of like Student Council. Ordinary people don't really have a say in what their governments do anymore. That privilege belongs to people with enough money to outbid each other for the attention of lawmakers.
That's the sad message that should shine through all of this -- that if you aren't wealthy You Don't Matter.
One of the guards at the company I work for showed me how a simple strip of metal with a notch in it can be used to penetrate the security system of almost any motor vehicle. Naturally, my first reaction was to notify the Dept of Homeland Security. Hopefully they will visit this terrorist at his home in the middle of the night, and remove him to an undisclosed location where he belongs.
I got one of those letters, not from PanIP but from some other clowns, who claim to have invented the idea of downloading media files over the web. They cited the presence of a couple mpegs on my web server as proof that I was using their technology without permission, and insisted that I contact them to discuss licensing. I trashed the letter and never heard from them again.
The trio are now on bail and have not been charged with any crime.
That's because they didn't commit any crime, because they were in England, not Las Vegas.
As the article says, He [Packard of Eudaemonic Pie fame] stopped his own attempts partly because new laws in some US states barred computers from casinos. British gambling laws from 1845 are currently in the process of being redrafted to bring them up to date with 21st Century gaming.
Meaning that British laws are being redrafted to ensure that casino customers are not allowed to do what the casinos do: control the odds and play the other party for a sucker.
This doesn't have anything to do with the article, which I didn't even read yet, I just want to enter my vote for "Chainsaw-wielding Robotic Submarine" as the greatest Slashdot headline of all time.
To my mind, the questions are similar. No, Puerto Rico is not a state because it hasn't been admitted to the US. What makes Pluto a planet is that we say it's a planet. Same goes for Sedna. Size does not matter (in this case).
I don't see the issue, other than somebody acting like a 2-year-old ("Mine! Mine!"). But then our economic system is pretty much designed to encourage everybody to act like that.
If United Business Media doesn't want other sites to bring eyeballs to their sites because their content is just too precious and special, then phuckem.
Dude, I sure hope you got laid.
Seriously, I salute your dedication to the sport. But I also hope you got laid.
If somebody pops up uninvited and starts chatting with me, I hope they're not offended when I tell them exactly how they can "help" me.
Instead of just stealing your stuff, they should wait in your house and hack you up with your own kitchen knives when you get home. That would put more pressure on the police to catch them.
Is it stupid in here or is it just me?
Wow, I can hear the dominoes falling now. State governments using software they didn't have to pay for multiple times? No recurring license fees in the millions of dollars every year? Depriving software vendors the right to lock in their share of our tax money? Don't these pinkoes know they are chipping away the foundations of capitalism? Next thing you know, it will be illegal to get paid to write code! Slippery slope, slippery slope. The government should be setting an example for the rest of us by making sure someone else owns everything they do!
In an e-voting system the paper absentee ballots would be thrown away after being entered into the system.
"If the problem had occurred with their electronic ballots or with the tabulation software (that sits on the county server) they would have been hard pressed to reconstruct their election," she said. "Or they might not have ever known there was a problem at all. If they were doing the manual count on the electronic ballots there would be no record to look at to determine what the accurate vote count should be."
The problem is that we've lived with airliners for so long without recognizing them as the huge cruise missiles that they are. If our cultural heritage included walking around with belts of live grenades slung across our chests, we would resent a sudden requirement to leave them at the door. It isn't that there is any greater danger now, it's just that now we're aware of it and we have to deal with it. Rod Serling always felt responsible for inspiring airline hijackings with a tv episode he wrote, but sooner or later someone would have thought of it. I'm amazed we went so long before someone decided to use airliners to cause mayhem. The secret is out and it won't go away. Buying a ticket with cash and flying anonymously is an outdated luxury. Other things we take for granted will follow.
God Damn! I read about Stanford R. Ovshinsky and amorphous semiconductors back in the late 1970s. It promised to revolutionize solar energy technology by allowing solar cells to be created by spraying coatings onto ordinary surfaces and attaching contacts. The coatings were supposedly able to convert heat as well as light, so you could theoretically wrap your woodstove pipe with this material and get electricity.
Over the years I have seen Ovshinsky's name pop up here an there. At last he seems to have made it work. As the article says, a whopping 2500 watts per kg! Gotta tip my hat to him for perseverence, even if unabombers don't have cheap, off-grid power in their survival cabins yet.
Face it people, all this surveillance is going to happen. The government is going to have complete information about you and contrl over you in a few short years. The Internet can be a great tool for communication and education, just like television could have been. It can also be a tool for control, just like television is.
America is in the hands of the bad guys, and within our lifetimes we will have a totalitarian government ruling a flock of consumer/workers who generate wealth for the top 2%. Just like in the good old days, only with HDTV. It's pretty much that way now, but in the future it won't be a secret, and people won't really care as long as the can buy cheap gas, eat Big Macs and watch American Idol on a 42-incher.
I've come to the conclusion that it's just the way the human race works. Some people take charge because the rest let them. Unless you are one of those take-charge types, the best thing you can hope to do is take care of yourself, your family and other people you care about, stay under the radar and live as well as possible. Democracy is like every other good thing that survives until They Who Must Own Everything figure out how to hack it.