I, too, have been thru the H1-b and green card process, and I agree with your experiences.
Fortunately I never had to do consular processing (I got my H1b, and had my green card application underway, before 9/11/01), but I got caught in a nasty backlog for my EAD (Work Authorisation document for folks waiting on a green card application, for those of you who are following along).
What happened is this: EADs are good for 1 year. Up until 2 years ago, you used to apply for a new EAD 6 weeks prior to the old one expiring, and could get it renewed at your local INS Office. The entire process took about two weeks, so a six week window was considered appropriate and prudent. Two months before my EAD expired INS changed how they handled things ; you now had to apply to the local Regional center, and wait times shot up (in the space of 1 day) from about two weeks to *over three months*. I think at one point the backlog hit six months - on a document that's only valid for a year!
So by INS fiat I was immediately barred from working for at least a month because there was no way I could get my EAD renewed in the time before it expired. INS moved the goalposts on me, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Simple math suggests this process change affected at least 5% of all EAD holders - INS effectively removed the ability to legally work to tens of thousands of legal immigrants and applicants, for a period of weeks or months.
In my case I appealed through my local Congressman and got my EAD after (only!) going a month without working (or being paid, naturally). I was reasonably fortunate.
Ironically, my Green Card was granted about two weeks after my EAD was renewed. I suspect it was because the Congressional inquiry got INS to look at the entire file, and just decided to approve it instead of deal with the hassle of putting the file back in queue.
That makes sense. It could also be the crappy antennas in the last two phones I've had.
It doesn't happen at work because I'm sat right underneath a Cingular tower. But at home, when the signal can randomly plummet from 5 bars to 1, it could well be trying to sync up again.
it happens to me with my ATT/Cingular GSM phones and affects both of my car stereo systems and my desktop speakers, but not my hifi/amp setup. It's not as annoying as the submitter describes, but it's a very audible, very noticeable series of clicks and burps. Lasts about three seconds, every ten, fifteen minutes. I assume it's interference from some kind of GSM syncrohnisation signal, but I'm not an EE.:)
Back in '99, when I got my first Handspring Visor (with 8MB of RAM!) I tried reading books from Gutenberg on the device. I gave up and went back to paper. Here's why:
- Books don't need batteries. - Books are instant on. - Books show more of the surrounding text than any ebook reader I've seen. For some reason that's important to me. Just seeing a couple of sentences on the screen bugs me. - Paper is easier to read than a (small) lcd screen. - Paper doesn't come with insane DRM. - If I leave a book on the train, I'm only out $5-$10. - scrolling thru text on a reader / palm device is hard on my thumbs. Especially when you remember that you only see a couple of sentences at a time - I'm scrolling pretty much constantly.
There are a couple of very specific circumstances where a palm device is better. At night, for example, they're great with backlit screens for reading in low ambient light; or on a plane during cruise. But not during taxi/takeoff/last 20 mins of flight. Searching for specific quotes can be useful, too - but both these are pretty rare occurences.
Just report it anonymously to the DPA. They do follow up on these things, you know. Even for things like keeping names and addresses in Excel spreadsheets, let alone cctv cameras.
We ended up using T`NT - they did OK, for a decent price. The car arrived on time with only some damage. We lost the front license plate to windshear and I think debris damaged our rear differential, causing it to leak - which led to an expensive repair 6 months later.
So, if you have an expensive car (like, worth more than $10K), make sure they'll pay for shipping, and have it shipped in a closed carrier, and put plastic wrap on it.
The 'radial' content model and large world is good. The corpse runs and XP debt are bad. The player housing and horse/saddlebags/flying mounts are good. The lack of point-to-point transportation is bad. The spell/counterspell/aspect-based attacks is good. The level-based paradigm is bad (well, not bad, but yet another MMORG that's unable to break free from the old Chainmaelle wargaming system, circa 1977). The player-owned properties, including inns and stores, is good.
It's like there's a set of sliders for current MMORGs, and in order to advance one set of features you need to pull back on another.
Listerine is a cheap high for chronic alcoholics. It's 21% denatured alcohol. Very bad for you, but if you're that addicted to alcohol you don't care. You'd be surprised at the number of people who show up at EDs reeking of listerine.
I'm not an Emergency physician, but I am married to one.:)
A public hospital is required to treat anyone, regardless of insurance/etc details. A private hospital is not, although they are required to transport you directly to a public hospital after a basic triage.
False by omission - any hospital in the US, public or private, is required to follow EMTALA laws (treatment without requiring payment) if they have an Emergency Deparment.
Many private hospitals get around this requirement by only having 'Urgent Care' departments. Then they must triage and re-direct. This allows them to deal with (paying) urgent care requests like 'Kid's been sick all night' by insured patients but not have to deal with 'unresponsive male found in gutter next to empty bottle of listerine' brought in by ambulance - because the ambulances don't go there.
1. Massive false positive rates. Just ask anyone (and I do mean *anyone*) called 'John Nelson'. Thousands of John Nelsons have been denied boarding because one criminal, at one point in the past, used the alias 'John Nelson'. And that's just one name of the tens of thousands on the no-fly list.
2. The 9/11 hijackers, and, historically, many other aerial ne'erdo-wells, had valid ID and were not under suspicion prior to doing something nasty to a plane. Checking IDs does is, at best, a weak coerelation to aerial security. Far better to actually search people properly for weapons and bombs.
Joking aside, have you read Freakonomics? The author basically says, "Crime dropped off a cliff in the mid-90s because all the kids who *would have* been hitting late teens then were aborted, thanks to Roe vs. Wade 20 years earlier".
I'm a registered Republican, and small government conservative (small 'c', please).
But I digress.
This is the principle of Progressive Taxation; people who have more money pay a penalty so those who don't have much money get tax cuts, on the theory that the rich people need to be taxed more than the poor. Doesn't sound very "fair" to me.
You are in a tiny, tiny minority then, as (as I said) it's the underlying principle of every single Income Tax system in the developed world. It makes economic sense as it's the only proven way to raise enough money to fund modern government activities.
The question is not, however, "is progressive taxation fair", but rather, "shouldn't all forms of income be subject to it, not just wage income?".
Now, I believe in small government and low taxes, especially for me, as I'm quite well off and my tax bill has been lowered by BushCo. But I think all income-related taxes should be progressive in nature.
Progressive taxation happen to other people, right?;)
OK, Econ 101 time.
Suppose you earn $10,000 a year, and you're taxed at 10%. $1,000 in taxes, leaving you $9,000 to live off.
Now suppose you earn $100,000 a year, taxed at $10%. $10,000 in taxes, leaving you with $90,000 to live off.
Who will have the better quality of life? Is it easier to live off $9,000 a year or $90,000?
Now suppose that the person earning $10,000 a year isn't taxed at all, but we raise taxes on the $100K/yr guy to cover the tax receipts.
The $100K person pays an extra $1,000 in taxes - 1% of their total gross, and they still have $89,000 to live off. One person has lost 1% of their gross in additional taxes, the other person has *gained* 10% of their gross back from taxes. And $1,000 means more to you if you only earn $10K a year than it does to someone who earns $100K.
This is the principle of Progressive Taxation; people who have more money pay a bit more so those who don't have much money pay a lot less, on the theory that the poor people need the money to survive more than the rich. It's also the basis of every Income Tax system in the developed world. It's why we have different Income Tax bands and personal exemptions and standard deductions.
So why shouldn't the same idea apply to stock income? Especially when people who earn the greatest percentage of their yearly income from stock sales just happen to be in the richest 10% of the nation? Especially when this was how things used to be done, prior to the tax cuts of 2002?
This is clearly wrong, as stock sales and dividends are two totally separate things. The sale of stock generates either ordinary or capital gains income (depending on how long you hold the stock). Dividends reflect the stockholders share of the profit in ongoing operations, and you don't surrender your stock to get them.
You're right - dividend income is different from stock sales (capital gains). But the underlying thesis is correct - you're taxed less on these forms of income than you are on Ordinary Income. Another poster gave the figures - for 'long term' capital gains, the rate is now 15% (down from 20%).
So you still get income that's taxed at 15% instead of at the Ordinary Income rate. Different method, same outcome.;-p
If Google had tanked they would have made far less
This is true, but it's completely unrelated to this:
What they've effectively done is told their employees: We care about the company because if it makes no money nor will we.
If that were true, then they'd only have sold enough stock to live on since August '04, and maybe repay any debt they might have. I find it hard to believe they spent $1.4Bn on living expenses and clearing personal debt since the IPO.;)
And now they're billionaires. Good for them! But I find it hard to believe that you would care as much about the future of your company if you knew that even if it imploded tomorrow, you'd still never have to work another day of your life, as opposed to needing the company to survive to make your mortgage payment and feed your family.
You're right. Technically, the term is tax avoidance : Tax evasion is illegal. Tax avoidance is making money while paying the smallest legal amount of tax on that money.
Stock (dividend income) sales are taxed at a much lower rate than Regular Income. They were one of the tax cuts passed by Bush back in '02 (?). Prior to that, your tax rate on stock sales was whatever your Ordinary Income rate was (seems fair, right? The more you earn, the more you're taxed). What Bush did was scrap that, and said that so long as the stock was from a US company or certain multinationals, your tax rate was capped at 15%.
When people talk about 'tax cuts for the rich', the dividend income tax change was the biggie.
In the case of The Google Boys, it's the difference between paying a base 35% on $1.4Bn in Income, or paying a base 15% on $1.4Bn. That's over $200 million dollars less in tax.
...which, as stock, is taxed at a much lower rate than Regular Income. I *think* divident income is currently taxed at a flat 15%....it might be as low as 10%, though.
Quite! It's all about risk assessments. The 'average' office worker knows nothing of liveCDs, or even anything about the typical Windows boot process; therefore, the largest risk comes from regular users plugging their iPods into Windows boxes, and copying stuff across. The easiest fix for that is to switch off the USB ports (either in BIOS or using System Policies). It's a small action with the largest potential gain.
Smarter users might try to gain local disk access with a bootCD of some description. There's ways to prevent that, too - removing the CD drive and floppy from the machine, for example, disabling IDE channels and USB ports in the BIOS, and physically securing the case. It's possible, but is a lot more effort to guard against a much smaller risk.
Security is hardly ever absolute. All you can do is decide how much time and effort you want to spend on it. The first step is a risk assessment by knowledgeable professionals. From the article, it seems that most companies haven't even done that. It's hard to address a problem you don't know about!
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I, too, have been thru the H1-b and green card process, and I agree with your experiences.
Fortunately I never had to do consular processing (I got my H1b, and had my green card application underway, before 9/11/01), but I got caught in a nasty backlog for my EAD (Work Authorisation document for folks waiting on a green card application, for those of you who are following along).
What happened is this: EADs are good for 1 year. Up until 2 years ago, you used to apply for a new EAD 6 weeks prior to the old one expiring, and could get it renewed at your local INS Office. The entire process took about two weeks, so a six week window was considered appropriate and prudent. Two months before my EAD expired INS changed how they handled things ; you now had to apply to the local Regional center, and wait times shot up (in the space of 1 day) from about two weeks to *over three months*. I think at one point the backlog hit six months - on a document that's only valid for a year!
So by INS fiat I was immediately barred from working for at least a month because there was no way I could get my EAD renewed in the time before it expired. INS moved the goalposts on me, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Simple math suggests this process change affected at least 5% of all EAD holders - INS effectively removed the ability to legally work to tens of thousands of legal immigrants and applicants, for a period of weeks or months.
In my case I appealed through my local Congressman and got my EAD after (only!) going a month without working (or being paid, naturally). I was reasonably fortunate.
Ironically, my Green Card was granted about two weeks after my EAD was renewed. I suspect it was because the Congressional inquiry got INS to look at the entire file, and just decided to approve it instead of deal with the hassle of putting the file back in queue.
That makes sense. It could also be the crappy antennas in the last two phones I've had.
It doesn't happen at work because I'm sat right underneath a Cingular tower. But at home, when the signal can randomly plummet from 5 bars to 1, it could well be trying to sync up again.
it happens to me with my ATT/Cingular GSM phones and affects both of my car stereo systems and my desktop speakers, but not my hifi/amp setup. It's not as annoying as the submitter describes, but it's a very audible, very noticeable series of clicks and burps. Lasts about three seconds, every ten, fifteen minutes. I assume it's interference from some kind of GSM syncrohnisation signal, but I'm not an EE. :)
One CEO, one President.
Done.
Honestly, I'm surprised non of your investors suggested that.
Back in '99, when I got my first Handspring Visor (with 8MB of RAM!) I tried reading books from Gutenberg on the device. I gave up and went back to paper. Here's why:
- Books don't need batteries.
- Books are instant on.
- Books show more of the surrounding text than any ebook reader I've seen. For some reason that's important to me. Just seeing a couple of sentences on the screen bugs me.
- Paper is easier to read than a (small) lcd screen.
- Paper doesn't come with insane DRM.
- If I leave a book on the train, I'm only out $5-$10.
- scrolling thru text on a reader / palm device is hard on my thumbs. Especially when you remember that you only see a couple of sentences at a time - I'm scrolling pretty much constantly.
There are a couple of very specific circumstances where a palm device is better. At night, for example, they're great with backlit screens for reading in low ambient light; or on a plane during cruise. But not during taxi/takeoff/last 20 mins of flight. Searching for specific quotes can be useful, too - but both these are pretty rare occurences.
Just report it anonymously to the DPA. They do follow up on these things, you know. Even for things like keeping names and addresses in Excel spreadsheets, let alone cctv cameras.
Auto shippers are the very Devil!
We ended up using T`NT - they did OK, for a decent price. The car arrived on time with only some damage. We lost the front license plate to windshear and I think debris damaged our rear differential, causing it to leak - which led to an expensive repair 6 months later.
So, if you have an expensive car (like, worth more than $10K), make sure they'll pay for shipping, and have it shipped in a closed carrier, and put plastic wrap on it.
Dude, painful way to learn.
Our auto-transporter specifically told us to ship empty, or they wouldn't take it. I guess this kind of thing happens all the time.
My Garmin Etrex Vista works fine on the plane. I find it useful in terms of things like: "Oh, that's where Iceland is!"
Remember: It doesn't exist until you've geocached it!
A few steps forward, a few steps back.
The 'radial' content model and large world is good.
The corpse runs and XP debt are bad.
The player housing and horse/saddlebags/flying mounts are good.
The lack of point-to-point transportation is bad.
The spell/counterspell/aspect-based attacks is good.
The level-based paradigm is bad (well, not bad, but yet another MMORG that's unable to break free from the old Chainmaelle wargaming system, circa 1977).
The player-owned properties, including inns and stores, is good.
It's like there's a set of sliders for current MMORGs, and in order to advance one set of features you need to pull back on another.
Listerine is a cheap high for chronic alcoholics. It's 21% denatured alcohol. Very bad for you, but if you're that addicted to alcohol you don't care. You'd be surprised at the number of people who show up at EDs reeking of listerine.
:)
I'm not an Emergency physician, but I am married to one.
A public hospital is required to treat anyone, regardless of insurance/etc details.
A private hospital is not, although they are required to transport you directly to a public hospital after a basic triage.
False by omission - any hospital in the US, public or private, is required to follow EMTALA laws (treatment without requiring payment) if they have an Emergency Deparment.
Many private hospitals get around this requirement by only having 'Urgent Care' departments. Then they must triage and re-direct. This allows them to deal with (paying) urgent care requests like 'Kid's been sick all night' by insured patients but not have to deal with 'unresponsive male found in gutter next to empty bottle of listerine' brought in by ambulance - because the ambulances don't go there.
Not only does he get a political appointment, but why the fuck is a PR post for NASA a Political Appointment?!
The system of appointments-as-payoffs is broken beyond belief.
Two problems with your position:
1. Massive false positive rates. Just ask anyone (and I do mean *anyone*) called 'John Nelson'. Thousands of John Nelsons have been denied boarding because one criminal, at one point in the past, used the alias 'John Nelson'. And that's just one name of the tens of thousands on the no-fly list.
2. The 9/11 hijackers, and, historically, many other aerial ne'erdo-wells, had valid ID and were not under suspicion prior to doing something nasty to a plane. Checking IDs does is, at best, a weak coerelation to aerial security. Far better to actually search people properly for weapons and bombs.
...with the Beagle II?
( tongue firmly in cheek )
Joking aside, have you read Freakonomics? The author basically says, "Crime dropped off a cliff in the mid-90s because all the kids who *would have* been hitting late teens then were aborted, thanks to Roe vs. Wade 20 years earlier".
More like Liberal 101, but I digress.
I'm a registered Republican, and small government conservative (small 'c', please).
But I digress.
This is the principle of Progressive Taxation; people who have more money pay a penalty so those who don't have much money get tax cuts, on the theory that the rich people need to be taxed more than the poor. Doesn't sound very "fair" to me.
You are in a tiny, tiny minority then, as (as I said) it's the underlying principle of every single Income Tax system in the developed world. It makes economic sense as it's the only proven way to raise enough money to fund modern government activities.
The question is not, however, "is progressive taxation fair", but rather, "shouldn't all forms of income be subject to it, not just wage income?".
Now, I believe in small government and low taxes, especially for me, as I'm quite well off and my tax bill has been lowered by BushCo. But I think all income-related taxes should be progressive in nature.
We must ban parent's mercedes!
Progressive taxation happen to other people, right? ;)
OK, Econ 101 time.
Suppose you earn $10,000 a year, and you're taxed at 10%. $1,000 in taxes, leaving you $9,000 to live off.
Now suppose you earn $100,000 a year, taxed at $10%. $10,000 in taxes, leaving you with $90,000 to live off.
Who will have the better quality of life? Is it easier to live off $9,000 a year or $90,000?
Now suppose that the person earning $10,000 a year isn't taxed at all, but we raise taxes on the $100K/yr guy to cover the tax receipts.
The $100K person pays an extra $1,000 in taxes - 1% of their total gross, and they still have $89,000 to live off. One person has lost 1% of their gross in additional taxes, the other person has *gained* 10% of their gross back from taxes. And $1,000 means more to you if you only earn $10K a year than it does to someone who earns $100K.
This is the principle of Progressive Taxation; people who have more money pay a bit more so those who don't have much money pay a lot less, on the theory that the poor people need the money to survive more than the rich. It's also the basis of every Income Tax system in the developed world. It's why we have different Income Tax bands and personal exemptions and standard deductions.
So why shouldn't the same idea apply to stock income? Especially when people who earn the greatest percentage of their yearly income from stock sales just happen to be in the richest 10% of the nation? Especially when this was how things used to be done, prior to the tax cuts of 2002?
This is clearly wrong, as stock sales and dividends are two totally separate things. The sale of stock generates either ordinary or capital gains income (depending on how long you hold the stock). Dividends reflect the stockholders share of the profit in ongoing operations, and you don't surrender your stock to get them.
;-p
You're right - dividend income is different from stock sales (capital gains). But the underlying thesis is correct - you're taxed less on these forms of income than you are on Ordinary Income. Another poster gave the figures - for 'long term' capital gains, the rate is now 15% (down from 20%).
So you still get income that's taxed at 15% instead of at the Ordinary Income rate. Different method, same outcome.
If Google had tanked they would have made far less
;)
This is true, but it's completely unrelated to this:
What they've effectively done is told their employees: We care about the company because if it makes no money nor will we.
If that were true, then they'd only have sold enough stock to live on since August '04, and maybe repay any debt they might have. I find it hard to believe they spent $1.4Bn on living expenses and clearing personal debt since the IPO.
And now they're billionaires. Good for them! But I find it hard to believe that you would care as much about the future of your company if you knew that even if it imploded tomorrow, you'd still never have to work another day of your life, as opposed to needing the company to survive to make your mortgage payment and feed your family.
It isn't about tax evasion or good faith
You're right. Technically, the term is tax avoidance : Tax evasion is illegal. Tax avoidance is making money while paying the smallest legal amount of tax on that money.
Stock (dividend income) sales are taxed at a much lower rate than Regular Income. They were one of the tax cuts passed by Bush back in '02 (?). Prior to that, your tax rate on stock sales was whatever your Ordinary Income rate was (seems fair, right? The more you earn, the more you're taxed). What Bush did was scrap that, and said that so long as the stock was from a US company or certain multinationals, your tax rate was capped at 15%.
When people talk about 'tax cuts for the rich', the dividend income tax change was the biggie.
In the case of The Google Boys, it's the difference between paying a base 35% on $1.4Bn in Income, or paying a base 15% on $1.4Bn. That's over $200 million dollars less in tax.
...which, as stock, is taxed at a much lower rate than Regular Income. I *think* divident income is currently taxed at a flat 15%....it might be as low as 10%, though.
Quite!
It's all about risk assessments. The 'average' office worker knows nothing of liveCDs, or even anything about the typical Windows boot process; therefore, the largest risk comes from regular users plugging their iPods into Windows boxes, and copying stuff across. The easiest fix for that is to switch off the USB ports (either in BIOS or using System Policies). It's a small action with the largest potential gain.
Smarter users might try to gain local disk access with a bootCD of some description. There's ways to prevent that, too - removing the CD drive and floppy from the machine, for example, disabling IDE channels and USB ports in the BIOS, and physically securing the case. It's possible, but is a lot more effort to guard against a much smaller risk.
Security is hardly ever absolute. All you can do is decide how much time and effort you want to spend on it. The first step is a risk assessment by knowledgeable professionals. From the article, it seems that most companies haven't even done that. It's hard to address a problem you don't know about!
So, uh, I was actually mostly right; there are Statutory Damages, and they typically run to thousands of dollars.
:)
I was only wrong about when they were introduced, and I didn't provide detail on how exactly they worked.
Look, I know you've been here just a bit longer than me. I'd have hoped you'd have lost a bit of that Agressive Slashdot Rebuttal trait by now.