to reward someone who risked a significant investment in time, money, and materials to be able to recoup that investment plus make a profit in exchange for sharing the fruits of that investment with everyone.
Not quite. The point of a patent is to encourage inventors to invent, disclose the workings of, and bring to market, the most useful, novel, nonobvious inventions which otherwise would not have been invented, disclosed, or brought to market, all for the least cost to the public by limiting the scope and duration of a monopoly.
Whether the inventor actually risked anything, or whether the reward is adequate to recoup investment is really irrelevant. We just want the most inventions for the least cost to the public; the fortunes of inventors are irrelevant, save for their effect as an incentive.
And so, software patents are a bad idea. Not because of a lack of risk -- I don't care whether an inventor can come up with something amazing in their sleep, or if it takes years of toiling in a lab -- but because the software industry is so dynamic at the moment that all of this stuff is going to be invented and brought to market anyway, and having been revealed, the information that needs disclosure will usually be pretty obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art. Simply, there's just no need for software patents; they are probably holding the industry back and causing the state of the art to stagnate, which is the exact opposite of what patents should ever do.
(Disclosure can also be handled by imposing a strict deposit requirement on software copyrights; no copyrights unless copies of the binaries and source (if any) are provided, along with any other information that is deemed useful so that others can make lawful use of the software, e.g. source code, notes about compilers, etc.)
Maybe someday the software industry will slow down, and it will then be appropriate to set up software patents so as to provide a little extra incentive for invention. But right now there is a surplus of natural incentive for invention, and there's simply no point in our offering any more, particularly when the cost to the public of doing so is probably greater than the benefit received.
The sole determinant for whether a work should be in copyright is whether it will benefit the original creator for it to remain in copyright.
Not only no, but Hell No!
The issue is whether it will benefit the public for it to remain in copyright. Copyright exists for the sole purpose of serving the public interest, by promoting the progress of science. It does this in two ways: First, by encouraging the creation and publication of the greatest number of works which otherwise would not have been created and published; Second, by limiting the scope and duration of copyright as much as possible.
It doesn't really matter what authors want, except insofar as we're essentially trying to 'bribe' them with the offer of a copyright, and it needs to be the least bribe possible that still gets them to do what we want, viz. create and publish works. Of course, at some point there is an issue of diminishing returns: It might be impossible to get a particularly recalcitrant author to dash off a few lines without promising him the moon. In that case, much as we might like having that work available, the price is too high, and we'll just have to pass. So long as the public gets the most bang for its buck, as it were, who cares whether authors like the deal. It's not as though they have a lot of alternatives.
Copyright would be just fine if the term was limited to something sane.
No, it would take more than that. In fact, I'd say that the number one reform we need is to stop automatically granting copyrights; we need to require registrations and impose some strict formalities. A system of short overall terms comprised of even shorter initial and renewal terms would probably be number two, and a broad exception for non-commercial infringement by natural persons would probably be number three.
We don't have the flexibility to alter our domestic law in this manner any more.
Sure we do. We can withdraw from TRIPS, Berne, etc. at any time. No one is forcing us to remain in these agreements. We just need the political power to get the country doing what is in the best interests of its people, rather than a privileged few.
DC did that once. There was a series called Superman & Batman: Generations, which had Superman & Batman start their careers in the 1930's, and the story runs through to the 30th century. New Batmen come along pretty frequently, but as you expect, Superman (and his various descendants, who mainly also have superpowers) just keeps on keeping on.
Yes, there is an appalling lack of solidarity at times. And it's so short-sighted!
Because it's 1) easier and less risky to kill him, than to kill the entire other half; 2) you'd probably make more splitting it all evenly, since you just know he's going to underpay the hired killers.
you are implying that taxation should be based on need. Implying that the needs of carrying the poor on the backs of the rich is a good thing.
It's based on what's practical, and within those bounds, a mixture of utility and empathy. People with money are better-equipped to assist people who have none; people who have more money more so than people who have less.
Other than abandoning the poor to their fate, or shifting the lion's share of the harm caused by being taxed to people who are less able to bear it (the middle class), what alternatives are there in the short term?
In the long term it would be nice to help poor people all escape poverty and become wholly self supporting so as to reduce the need for tax-funded programs to help them. But there would still be a need for taxes, which would still be most fairly allocated in a progressive manner. And it may not even be possible; I've never heard of any society that managed to do this.
To make everyone poor / everyone suffer, and this should be watched with vigilance.
Well, if that's what you think, then know that I am willing to take a bullet for you: Give me enough money that I'm among the rich, and I will willingly shoulder the burden of higher taxes. Oh, what a terrible briar patch!
The point isn't to punish the rich or to make everyone poor. Hell, poverty sucks; I'd rather make everyone middle class or better, but even that goes beyond what can probably be accomplished via taxation. I'm content with not harming the middle class (they're too important to risk), not helping the rich (they don't need it; they're already advantaged), and helping the poor (they do need it).
Current tax policies, OTOH, are all fucked up: Right now we're helping the rich, harming the middle class, and ignoring, if not harming, the poor.
So long as what we define to be rich is not a "moving target" and isn't approaching what the majority is, I think we can agree on this point.
A rigid definition won't suffice either; if you defined rich as making more than $500 a week back in 1911, when such a person would be very rich, it wouldn't really help now, what with inflation and all. Percentiles might work better, but defining the boundaries of classes is just a quagmire.
It's not thievery when the government does it, eh?
It's not thievery, since the government is where the right to property originates (beyond that which you can personally defend from others, which in practice isn't much), and which defines offenses against property, such as theft.
The country did without a Federal income tax for 137 years and coincidentally survived the rise and fall of two national banks.
Yes, the government got by on regressive taxes for a long time. This was a mistake, but then the framers and founders made lots of mistakes; they weren't perfect, and we shouldn't act as though they were. Slavishly imitating them is a bad idea.
I don't think either of us is suggesting no government (anarchy).
Anarchy could be fine. Anarchists can have government and organization, they just don't suffer having it imposed by external authority. I would have very much liked to see the anarchists win the Spanish Civil War, and to see what sort of state would develop from that. I was talking about outright chaos.
The 10th Amendment clearly defines the intent of limited government. This does not include entitlements, healthcare, or cradle-to-the-grave nannying.
That's not what it says at all. And the government, pursuant to the spending clause, the elastic clause, the commerce clause, and the appropriations clause, can, with few exceptions, spend its money as it damn well pleases; the 10th is, by its own language, no obstacle to that.
You have accepted the art of a junkie who died of a drug overdose as wisdo
(Or maybe not -- I was posting here before we even had user accounts, and I never bothered to get one until they stopped allowing people to just enter in a username at will for each post)
Let's see, your base your premise and conclusion with an ad hominem attack
Just because it is an insult does not make it an ad hom. And I'm not saying that you are stupid and that therefore your argument is wrong (without actually examining whether it is right or wrong). I'm saying that having examined your argument, it is wrong, and that you believe in it anyway, and therefore you are stupid. I think there's a difference.
Certainly, it is easy to discover that in a system of progressive income taxation, tax rates only apply to taxable income within a particular tax bracket; not to all income generally. It's also easy to do arithmetic to determine that one's net income is higher after crossing into a higher tax bracket (so long as the higher tax is no greater than 100%) despite the effect of the higher tax rate on that bracket.
Someone who supported your argument even after all of that would, it seems, either have to be stupid (if they believed it) or a liar (if they merely wanted to make a baseless argument against taxes).
It seemed charitable to go with stupid, but I assume malice on your part if you prefer.
The point that you completely missed is that no one agrees what it means to be "rich" and sooner or later the bar will get lowered enough so that everyone will get punished.
It doesn't matter. The point of taxing the rich isn't to punish them; it's because they are the most able to afford it. A poor person may not be able to afford the bare necessities of life, much less endure taxation. Trying to tax them would be like trying to wring blood from a stone. A rich person, OTOH, has money to spare; we could tax him quite heavily before it put the merest dent in his lifestyle, much less caused him any actual harm.
For a given government budget to be funded by taxation, our tax policy should basically just be to allocate taxes in such a way that it causes the least amount of financial 'pain' possible for as many people as possible. There are fewer people in the rich end of the spectrum than the poor end, and they are better able to bear the burden. There's no cruelty involved.
We're not talking about your trivial examples however, we are talking about going back to flawed ideas of the pre-Reagan rates of %70, and if we go back a bit further to %90.
What's actually flawed about them? America was tremendously prosperous in the 1950's and 1960's when rates were far higher than the 1980's or later. If they were so bad, where were the bad effects? I'm not saying that higher rates would necessarily cause everything to be sweetness and light, but I have no problems with a low level of income inequality.
What you want out of them is a resource to be exploited in the form of institutionalized thievery
Oh, it's not thievery. Taxes -- and a progressive tax structure -- are the cost of government. If you have no government, then you are alone and vulnerable; you have no protection from everyone else, and they have the advantage of numbers and strength and organization.
As the lady said, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. The benefits of a government -- of having your fellow citizens help to protect you -- are usually worth the cost in taxes. Greedy people who refuse to pay that cost will wind up with nothing left.
Like it or lump it, that's how things are.
so that you and your ilk can be layabouts
Do you mean lawyers or liberals? Either way, I work quite a lot, though I suppose it would be idyllic if no one at all had to work for any reason other than pleasure. We don't live in that world, though.
or funding of programs that are in direct opposition to their freedoms.
Such as? Helping the poor isn't in direct opposition to the freedom of a rich person, because large, angry masses of poor people can easily overpower and kill the small number of
How about we stop paying for deadbeats who refuse to get a job instead? Why should the productive shoulder the burden for the lazy fucks? I say let the welfare leeches work or starve.
How about people who are unable to get work, and have just been kicked aside by people like you, engage in a violent orgy of destruction, and kill all the wealthy people that they can find, and take for themselves the remaining assets, property, factories, etc.? After all, there's a lot more poor people than rich. And whatever you may think of the long term effects of such an uprising, it's probably little comfort to the wealthy who face a guillotine or a firing squad.
The haves can surely afford to give something to the have nots, if only to stave off thugs such as this, in their own self interest.
Anyone who is near or at the limit of being thrown into a higher tax bracket because of an idea like yours is going to do the most natural response: Keep themselves just shy of that limit. The reason "tax the rich" doesn't work is because it creates incentives for people becoming underachievers.
No, it only has that effect on very stupid people. Tax rates only apply to the portion of taxable income within the corresponding tax bracket. For example, of we tax 10% of taxable income in the bracket from $0 to $100, and 20% in the bracket from $100.01 up, a person making $100 (and thus paying $10 in tax) would be wise to try to make more; if he managed to make $200 in taxable income, he would only pay $30 in tax: $10 for the first hundred and $20 for the second hundred. This means that instead of having only $90 left, he has $170 -- if he ever cared about money, the higher tax would not have discouraged him. You seem to think that the higher rate would apply to all income, rather than only the income in the higher bracket, but if we refer back to the top of the paragraph, I guess we know where that leaves you.
Should we give tax breaks to people who create jobs (especially 6 figure salaries), tax revenue and wealth?
No, because it usually doesn't cause them to do proportionately more of what we want out of them. We need industrious people, not rich layabouts. Industrious people who get rich have a bad habit of becoming (or engendering) layabouts. Keep them from getting rich, and we get a better result.
Microfiching and read-only digital archiving with regular copying are appropriate for all such cultural artifacts, of course.
Meh. Microfilm isn't nearly as good as it is advertised to be. It's bad at photographs or anything in color, the film isn't as stable as one would hope, and it's usually not verified to be readable when it is made (this also happens with Google books at times). Since the process for making microfilm is usually destructive (they chop up books to stack the pages more neatly) and the goal is rather destructive as well (the heart of the policy isn't mere preservation but also the wholesale disposal of paper books, more or less regardless of condition, so that libraries don't have to buy new buildings for storage), it's not a good deal. Plus, many libraries will throw away copies of works once someone else makes up microfilms, but editions may differ (eg throwing away a complete copy of a newspaper to replace it with only the evening editions), leaving us significantly worse off.
I don't mind if we non destructively make microfilms, but we shouldn't use them as an excuse to not preserve originals, or to not try using numerous different non destructive methods of preserving and disseminating information.
Yes, I remember upgrading the RAM on my first computer by inserting ICs into sockets. But what I continue to find really amazing is how cheap absolutely mind-boggling amounts of memory are now. I recently upgraded a machine to 8GB of RAM for about $100; it seems like only yesterday that I could have spent several times as much money to upgrade a machine to 8MB. Likewise, I've still got some old 160kB 5.25" floppy disks hanging around... now I could easily carry many gigs of storage around on a keychain, and once they come out in a 9.5mm height, I'll have upgraded my laptop to 1TB.
Bullshit. Why should some people profit from copyright and not others?
If public resources -- such as government funding, government-owned equipment or premises -- are being used for the research, surely the output of the research should belong to the public. Otherwise you're allowing someone to not only get public funding but then turn around and charge the public for the product of that funding. That's bullshit.
If the researcher wants to get a patent or copyright or hold trade secrets, let him secure private funding.
Yes, it is problematic. Given a new technology that is unburdened by the physical limitations of the past, why should we shackle it with rules so that it is effectively just as burdened?
If we invented a Star Trek style replicator, we could solve the problem of hunger pretty much overnight. Unless we required that only farmers could have replicators and they could only use them if they paid Monsanto.
While it might significantly change how much of am incentive a copyright is for an author, we really ought to consider changing copyright to better accommodate new technologies and new soctal mores that develop in response to those technologies. It's not a good idea to try to make us all live in the past, with a blindfold on to keep us from looking around or ahead.
realistically we're close to the top of the Laffer curve,
That is not even vaguely true; we've cut taxes on the rich by a tremendous amount over the last almost 50 years and seen none of the benefits the Laffer curve would predict. Frankly, we probably never got to the top of the curve, even when taxes were at their highest.
A very large part of the solution to our budget woes will have to involve raising taxes, particularly on the rich.
If it costs a hundred million dollars to automate the job of Fruit of the Loom Inspector #8, it's probably not worth doing. It would take a long time for a human Inspector #8 to cost that much, and in the meantime the money could probably be spent on more immediately worthwhile projects. And perhaps in the future automating the job might be cheaper anyway.
Sometimes there are limits to how much efficiency we should pursue, at least so long as we have to deal with limited resources.
No. Then we have a bunch of people who contribute nothing useful to society
That depends on the nature of the jobs program, as you seem to agree later.
I'd suggest that instead of giving them checks or letting them starve, society go through a change so that none of these inefficient practices are required anymore.
Good luck with that, but in the meantime, would you accept a jobs program as a stopgap solution?
The same applies to any job that can be automated.
Only if it's reasonable to automate it. We aren't yet at the point where we it's cheaper to use a machine for everything.
Then they should find something useful to do. I don't think we should go around creating useless jobs for their sake. Then we would likely have a bunch of people who contribute nothing useful to society.
It is not always viable to tell people to help themselves. Not everyone is in a position where they can do that. They may need training, which they cannot afford (in terms of cost, opportunity cost, etc.) by themselves, or may need to move to a different part of the country (difficult if one member of a family is employed in the current location, or if there are children, or if any real property is owned, especially in the current market), or they may lack the capital needed to start up a new business, or several other things.
If people are out of alternatives, surely giving them a job as a way to assist them would be better than just giving them a check or allowing them to starve in the streets?
And there's no reason why the job has to be useless. Again, look at the WPA and many of the other other New Deal agencies; they didn't waste time on useless projects. They did a lot of good stuff, and it was a great benefit to society, in fact. You would do well to do some research here.
Currently there are a lot of unemployed and underemployed people. Surely there must be someone capable of coming up with some useful, important projects that they could do to earn a living until they can get a better job. And as a benefit, we get the results of the project. Even if all someone is able to do was dig ditches, we could put them to work laying municipally-owned fiber optics directly to people's houses. (Which parallels rural electrification projects from the 30's, incidentally)
Instead what we have is pricks like you figuring out new an ingenious ways to part the lower classes from their money and homes, while shrinking the working class. I seriously hope I'm alive when the shit hits the fan because I will be one of the headhunters coming for you elites when it does.
My plan is to get in the construction business. Everyone talks about so-and-so should be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes. In order to mollify everyone who wants their victim of choice to go first, we'll have to stage one big execution in parallel. This means we'll need a big wall, and hopefully a big construction contract. (Because who wants to deal with a bunch of bullet holes in an existing wall?);)
A person's right to own property (including money) ultimately comes down to what they can personally defend or what they can convince others to agree to let them have.
Large groups of people have banded together, consensually established and empowered governments to serve their mutual interests, and generally they fund these by empowering the government to levy taxes.
This means that people don't have a right that is recognized by their neighbors to money that lawfully taxed and due to the government. This leaves them with the option of trying to personally defend their money from the tax man through force of arms, but it never seems to work out very well, because the government can bring a lot more force to bear if it wants to. Sometimes you can achieve better results by arguing as to how much, precisely, is owed, but this concedes that at least some taxation is lawful.
Apparently most people think that progressive taxation is the best way to go. I, at least, would say so. In which case a flat tax would be a bad idea, since the poor cannot afford to pay as much as the rich. The fairest thing to do is to shift the burden around to those who can best bear it. And after all, the rich benefit immensely from the government protecting their stuff (b/c they have more stuff), and from the poor not being so desperate that they just rise up and kill the rich, which is the kind of thing that historically happens when taxes are allocated unfairly.
Frankly, I cannot imagine any rich person with two brain cells to rub together who would prefer to not be rich rather than to be rich but with a progressive taxation system. Even if taxes are quite high on the rich, they're still doing pretty damn well. It's better than being poor under any taxation system. And a stable society is better than being dead.
If anyone here sounds greedy, I'm afraid it's you.
Employing people for the sake of employing people is rather idiotic, I think.
Well, it's pretty bad to have a lot of unemployed people around. Even if it's a make-work project (and you could probably design some useful make-work projects -- the WPA built public buildings, roads, bridges, installed utilities, etc.) it's better to have people working for a living than to be on the dole. Better still is if you can manage to have people privately employed, while still maintaining good standards for pay, benefits, etc. Maybe if we someday can provide people with enjoyable, leisurely lives without anyone having to work at a job because they must, we can all just pursue our hobbies full time, but so far such a thing escapes us.
Full employment does tend to cause inflation, as we found out when the US pursued this policy from the 50's to the 70's, but on the whole, it seems to have worked out better than how things have gone since.
A device that rips CDs to a hard drive is very much like a standalone audio CD recorder, except in reverse.
Oh sure, don't get me wrong; it is entirely possible to build an AHRA-compliant device, and there have been any number of them on the market at various times.
Assuming that the manufacturer was careful to dot all the p's and cross all the q's, I can see a standalone CD to HD recorder and playback device being eligible for AHRA protection.
Though that still doesn't mean that format shifting is generally lawful in the US which was the earlier question. There are few AHRA compliant devices and media, and they wouldn't cover everything anyway.
What did I miss?
SCMS relies on flags, and the flags can be set to allow serial copying. Is it possible that a workalike would have to offer a digital audio out and check for flags instead of just not offering such an output at all, in order to match SCMS for AHRA purposes? I admit I've never given the question much thought; there's never been any call for it.
These royalties are what, 2 percent of the wholesale price of a covered device, capped at $8 per device
The caps can go up after 1998. I'd have to check to see if they ever have, and I honestly don't care. Besides, there's no way that a CD drive, a hard drive, and a little board to handle the ripping, playback, controls, etc. is going to cost more than $400 these days.
But then, I can't see who would buy a standalone ripper now anyway. It doesn't seem very useful or better than just using a computer and an iPod.
Derivatives works are fair use, not an exclusive right of the copyright holder.
Not in the US at least:
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:... (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work....
17 USC 106
And anyway, fair use only applies to things which are otherwise infringing but which are fair under the circumstances. So for it to be a fair use to prepare derivatives, it must first be illegal to prepare derivatives; otherwise you wouldn't need it to be a fair use to begin with. (It's like, say, justifiable homicide -- if the victim doesn't actually die, you don't need to make excuses for why you killed him)
If that were the case, there would be no remixes.
If you're talking about recording a song that you don't hold the rights to, that's actually covered specifically elsewhere. Music licensing is a weird sort of thing but no one really relies on fair use to do it.
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to reward someone who risked a significant investment in time, money, and materials to be able to recoup that investment plus make a profit in exchange for sharing the fruits of that investment with everyone.
Not quite. The point of a patent is to encourage inventors to invent, disclose the workings of, and bring to market, the most useful, novel, nonobvious inventions which otherwise would not have been invented, disclosed, or brought to market, all for the least cost to the public by limiting the scope and duration of a monopoly.
Whether the inventor actually risked anything, or whether the reward is adequate to recoup investment is really irrelevant. We just want the most inventions for the least cost to the public; the fortunes of inventors are irrelevant, save for their effect as an incentive.
And so, software patents are a bad idea. Not because of a lack of risk -- I don't care whether an inventor can come up with something amazing in their sleep, or if it takes years of toiling in a lab -- but because the software industry is so dynamic at the moment that all of this stuff is going to be invented and brought to market anyway, and having been revealed, the information that needs disclosure will usually be pretty obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art. Simply, there's just no need for software patents; they are probably holding the industry back and causing the state of the art to stagnate, which is the exact opposite of what patents should ever do.
(Disclosure can also be handled by imposing a strict deposit requirement on software copyrights; no copyrights unless copies of the binaries and source (if any) are provided, along with any other information that is deemed useful so that others can make lawful use of the software, e.g. source code, notes about compilers, etc.)
Maybe someday the software industry will slow down, and it will then be appropriate to set up software patents so as to provide a little extra incentive for invention. But right now there is a surplus of natural incentive for invention, and there's simply no point in our offering any more, particularly when the cost to the public of doing so is probably greater than the benefit received.
The sole determinant for whether a work should be in copyright is whether it will benefit the original creator for it to remain in copyright.
Not only no, but Hell No!
The issue is whether it will benefit the public for it to remain in copyright. Copyright exists for the sole purpose of serving the public interest, by promoting the progress of science. It does this in two ways: First, by encouraging the creation and publication of the greatest number of works which otherwise would not have been created and published; Second, by limiting the scope and duration of copyright as much as possible.
It doesn't really matter what authors want, except insofar as we're essentially trying to 'bribe' them with the offer of a copyright, and it needs to be the least bribe possible that still gets them to do what we want, viz. create and publish works. Of course, at some point there is an issue of diminishing returns: It might be impossible to get a particularly recalcitrant author to dash off a few lines without promising him the moon. In that case, much as we might like having that work available, the price is too high, and we'll just have to pass. So long as the public gets the most bang for its buck, as it were, who cares whether authors like the deal. It's not as though they have a lot of alternatives.
Copyright would be just fine if the term was limited to something sane.
No, it would take more than that. In fact, I'd say that the number one reform we need is to stop automatically granting copyrights; we need to require registrations and impose some strict formalities. A system of short overall terms comprised of even shorter initial and renewal terms would probably be number two, and a broad exception for non-commercial infringement by natural persons would probably be number three.
We don't have the flexibility to alter our domestic law in this manner any more.
Sure we do. We can withdraw from TRIPS, Berne, etc. at any time. No one is forcing us to remain in these agreements. We just need the political power to get the country doing what is in the best interests of its people, rather than a privileged few.
DC did that once. There was a series called Superman & Batman: Generations, which had Superman & Batman start their careers in the 1930's, and the story runs through to the 30th century. New Batmen come along pretty frequently, but as you expect, Superman (and his various descendants, who mainly also have superpowers) just keeps on keeping on.
It's worth a read.
Yes, there is an appalling lack of solidarity at times. And it's so short-sighted!
Because it's 1) easier and less risky to kill him, than to kill the entire other half; 2) you'd probably make more splitting it all evenly, since you just know he's going to underpay the hired killers.
It's just tragic sometimes.
you are implying that taxation should be based on need. Implying that the needs of carrying the poor on the backs of the rich is a good thing.
It's based on what's practical, and within those bounds, a mixture of utility and empathy. People with money are better-equipped to assist people who have none; people who have more money more so than people who have less.
Other than abandoning the poor to their fate, or shifting the lion's share of the harm caused by being taxed to people who are less able to bear it (the middle class), what alternatives are there in the short term?
In the long term it would be nice to help poor people all escape poverty and become wholly self supporting so as to reduce the need for tax-funded programs to help them. But there would still be a need for taxes, which would still be most fairly allocated in a progressive manner. And it may not even be possible; I've never heard of any society that managed to do this.
To make everyone poor / everyone suffer, and this should be watched with vigilance.
Well, if that's what you think, then know that I am willing to take a bullet for you: Give me enough money that I'm among the rich, and I will willingly shoulder the burden of higher taxes. Oh, what a terrible briar patch!
The point isn't to punish the rich or to make everyone poor. Hell, poverty sucks; I'd rather make everyone middle class or better, but even that goes beyond what can probably be accomplished via taxation. I'm content with not harming the middle class (they're too important to risk), not helping the rich (they don't need it; they're already advantaged), and helping the poor (they do need it).
Current tax policies, OTOH, are all fucked up: Right now we're helping the rich, harming the middle class, and ignoring, if not harming, the poor.
So long as what we define to be rich is not a "moving target" and isn't approaching what the majority is, I think we can agree on this point.
A rigid definition won't suffice either; if you defined rich as making more than $500 a week back in 1911, when such a person would be very rich, it wouldn't really help now, what with inflation and all. Percentiles might work better, but defining the boundaries of classes is just a quagmire.
It's not thievery when the government does it, eh?
It's not thievery, since the government is where the right to property originates (beyond that which you can personally defend from others, which in practice isn't much), and which defines offenses against property, such as theft.
The country did without a Federal income tax for 137 years and coincidentally survived the rise and fall of two national banks.
Yes, the government got by on regressive taxes for a long time. This was a mistake, but then the framers and founders made lots of mistakes; they weren't perfect, and we shouldn't act as though they were. Slavishly imitating them is a bad idea.
I don't think either of us is suggesting no government (anarchy).
Anarchy could be fine. Anarchists can have government and organization, they just don't suffer having it imposed by external authority. I would have very much liked to see the anarchists win the Spanish Civil War, and to see what sort of state would develop from that. I was talking about outright chaos.
The 10th Amendment clearly defines the intent of limited government. This does not include entitlements, healthcare, or cradle-to-the-grave nannying.
That's not what it says at all. And the government, pursuant to the spending clause, the elastic clause, the commerce clause, and the appropriations clause, can, with few exceptions, spend its money as it damn well pleases; the 10th is, by its own language, no obstacle to that.
You have accepted the art of a junkie who died of a drug overdose as wisdo
#2852? You look pretty old to me. ;)
(Or maybe not -- I was posting here before we even had user accounts, and I never bothered to get one until they stopped allowing people to just enter in a username at will for each post)
Let's see, your base your premise and conclusion with an ad hominem attack
Just because it is an insult does not make it an ad hom. And I'm not saying that you are stupid and that therefore your argument is wrong (without actually examining whether it is right or wrong). I'm saying that having examined your argument, it is wrong, and that you believe in it anyway, and therefore you are stupid. I think there's a difference.
Certainly, it is easy to discover that in a system of progressive income taxation, tax rates only apply to taxable income within a particular tax bracket; not to all income generally. It's also easy to do arithmetic to determine that one's net income is higher after crossing into a higher tax bracket (so long as the higher tax is no greater than 100%) despite the effect of the higher tax rate on that bracket.
Someone who supported your argument even after all of that would, it seems, either have to be stupid (if they believed it) or a liar (if they merely wanted to make a baseless argument against taxes).
It seemed charitable to go with stupid, but I assume malice on your part if you prefer.
The point that you completely missed is that no one agrees what it means to be "rich" and sooner or later the bar will get lowered enough so that everyone will get punished.
It doesn't matter. The point of taxing the rich isn't to punish them; it's because they are the most able to afford it. A poor person may not be able to afford the bare necessities of life, much less endure taxation. Trying to tax them would be like trying to wring blood from a stone. A rich person, OTOH, has money to spare; we could tax him quite heavily before it put the merest dent in his lifestyle, much less caused him any actual harm.
For a given government budget to be funded by taxation, our tax policy should basically just be to allocate taxes in such a way that it causes the least amount of financial 'pain' possible for as many people as possible. There are fewer people in the rich end of the spectrum than the poor end, and they are better able to bear the burden. There's no cruelty involved.
We're not talking about your trivial examples however, we are talking about going back to flawed ideas of the pre-Reagan rates of %70, and if we go back a bit further to %90.
What's actually flawed about them? America was tremendously prosperous in the 1950's and 1960's when rates were far higher than the 1980's or later. If they were so bad, where were the bad effects? I'm not saying that higher rates would necessarily cause everything to be sweetness and light, but I have no problems with a low level of income inequality.
What you want out of them is a resource to be exploited in the form of institutionalized thievery
Oh, it's not thievery. Taxes -- and a progressive tax structure -- are the cost of government. If you have no government, then you are alone and vulnerable; you have no protection from everyone else, and they have the advantage of numbers and strength and organization.
As the lady said, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. The benefits of a government -- of having your fellow citizens help to protect you -- are usually worth the cost in taxes. Greedy people who refuse to pay that cost will wind up with nothing left.
Like it or lump it, that's how things are.
so that you and your ilk can be layabouts
Do you mean lawyers or liberals? Either way, I work quite a lot, though I suppose it would be idyllic if no one at all had to work for any reason other than pleasure. We don't live in that world, though.
or funding of programs that are in direct opposition to their freedoms.
Such as? Helping the poor isn't in direct opposition to the freedom of a rich person, because large, angry masses of poor people can easily overpower and kill the small number of
How about we stop paying for deadbeats who refuse to get a job instead? Why should the productive shoulder the burden for the lazy fucks? I say let the welfare leeches work or starve.
How about people who are unable to get work, and have just been kicked aside by people like you, engage in a violent orgy of destruction, and kill all the wealthy people that they can find, and take for themselves the remaining assets, property, factories, etc.? After all, there's a lot more poor people than rich. And whatever you may think of the long term effects of such an uprising, it's probably little comfort to the wealthy who face a guillotine or a firing squad.
The haves can surely afford to give something to the have nots, if only to stave off thugs such as this, in their own self interest.
Anyone who is near or at the limit of being thrown into a higher tax bracket because of an idea like yours is going to do the most natural response: Keep themselves just shy of that limit. The reason "tax the rich" doesn't work is because it creates incentives for people becoming underachievers.
No, it only has that effect on very stupid people. Tax rates only apply to the portion of taxable income within the corresponding tax bracket. For example, of we tax 10% of taxable income in the bracket from $0 to $100, and 20% in the bracket from $100.01 up, a person making $100 (and thus paying $10 in tax) would be wise to try to make more; if he managed to make $200 in taxable income, he would only pay $30 in tax: $10 for the first hundred and $20 for the second hundred. This means that instead of having only $90 left, he has $170 -- if he ever cared about money, the higher tax would not have discouraged him. You seem to think that the higher rate would apply to all income, rather than only the income in the higher bracket, but if we refer back to the top of the paragraph, I guess we know where that leaves you.
Should we give tax breaks to people who create jobs (especially 6 figure salaries), tax revenue and wealth?
No, because it usually doesn't cause them to do proportionately more of what we want out of them. We need industrious people, not rich layabouts. Industrious people who get rich have a bad habit of becoming (or engendering) layabouts. Keep them from getting rich, and we get a better result.
Microfiching and read-only digital archiving with regular copying are appropriate for all such cultural artifacts, of course.
Meh. Microfilm isn't nearly as good as it is advertised to be. It's bad at photographs or anything in color, the film isn't as stable as one would hope, and it's usually not verified to be readable when it is made (this also happens with Google books at times). Since the process for making microfilm is usually destructive (they chop up books to stack the pages more neatly) and the goal is rather destructive as well (the heart of the policy isn't mere preservation but also the wholesale disposal of paper books, more or less regardless of condition, so that libraries don't have to buy new buildings for storage), it's not a good deal. Plus, many libraries will throw away copies of works once someone else makes up microfilms, but editions may differ (eg throwing away a complete copy of a newspaper to replace it with only the evening editions), leaving us significantly worse off.
I don't mind if we non destructively make microfilms, but we shouldn't use them as an excuse to not preserve originals, or to not try using numerous different non destructive methods of preserving and disseminating information.
Yes, I remember upgrading the RAM on my first computer by inserting ICs into sockets. But what I continue to find really amazing is how cheap absolutely mind-boggling amounts of memory are now. I recently upgraded a machine to 8GB of RAM for about $100; it seems like only yesterday that I could have spent several times as much money to upgrade a machine to 8MB. Likewise, I've still got some old 160kB 5.25" floppy disks hanging around... now I could easily carry many gigs of storage around on a keychain, and once they come out in a 9.5mm height, I'll have upgraded my laptop to 1TB.
It's crazy, I tell you.
Bullshit. Why should some people profit from copyright and not others?
If public resources -- such as government funding, government-owned equipment or premises -- are being used for the research, surely the output of the research should belong to the public. Otherwise you're allowing someone to not only get public funding but then turn around and charge the public for the product of that funding. That's bullshit.
If the researcher wants to get a patent or copyright or hold trade secrets, let him secure private funding.
Yes, it is problematic. Given a new technology that is unburdened by the physical limitations of the past, why should we shackle it with rules so that it is effectively just as burdened?
If we invented a Star Trek style replicator, we could solve the problem of hunger pretty much overnight. Unless we required that only farmers could have replicators and they could only use them if they paid Monsanto.
While it might significantly change how much of am incentive a copyright is for an author, we really ought to consider changing copyright to better accommodate new technologies and new soctal mores that develop in response to those technologies. It's not a good idea to try to make us all live in the past, with a blindfold on to keep us from looking around or ahead.
Yes WWI flight sims could be very enjoyable.
Well, only for a few minutes, anyway.
realistically we're close to the top of the Laffer curve,
That is not even vaguely true; we've cut taxes on the rich by a tremendous amount over the last almost 50 years and seen none of the benefits the Laffer curve would predict. Frankly, we probably never got to the top of the curve, even when taxes were at their highest.
A very large part of the solution to our budget woes will have to involve raising taxes, particularly on the rich.
If it costs a hundred million dollars to automate the job of Fruit of the Loom Inspector #8, it's probably not worth doing. It would take a long time for a human Inspector #8 to cost that much, and in the meantime the money could probably be spent on more immediately worthwhile projects. And perhaps in the future automating the job might be cheaper anyway.
Sometimes there are limits to how much efficiency we should pursue, at least so long as we have to deal with limited resources.
No. Then we have a bunch of people who contribute nothing useful to society
That depends on the nature of the jobs program, as you seem to agree later.
I'd suggest that instead of giving them checks or letting them starve, society go through a change so that none of these inefficient practices are required anymore.
Good luck with that, but in the meantime, would you accept a jobs program as a stopgap solution?
The same applies to any job that can be automated.
Only if it's reasonable to automate it. We aren't yet at the point where we it's cheaper to use a machine for everything.
Then they should find something useful to do. I don't think we should go around creating useless jobs for their sake. Then we would likely have a bunch of people who contribute nothing useful to society.
It is not always viable to tell people to help themselves. Not everyone is in a position where they can do that. They may need training, which they cannot afford (in terms of cost, opportunity cost, etc.) by themselves, or may need to move to a different part of the country (difficult if one member of a family is employed in the current location, or if there are children, or if any real property is owned, especially in the current market), or they may lack the capital needed to start up a new business, or several other things.
If people are out of alternatives, surely giving them a job as a way to assist them would be better than just giving them a check or allowing them to starve in the streets?
And there's no reason why the job has to be useless. Again, look at the WPA and many of the other other New Deal agencies; they didn't waste time on useless projects. They did a lot of good stuff, and it was a great benefit to society, in fact. You would do well to do some research here.
Currently there are a lot of unemployed and underemployed people. Surely there must be someone capable of coming up with some useful, important projects that they could do to earn a living until they can get a better job. And as a benefit, we get the results of the project. Even if all someone is able to do was dig ditches, we could put them to work laying municipally-owned fiber optics directly to people's houses. (Which parallels rural electrification projects from the 30's, incidentally)
Instead what we have is pricks like you figuring out new an ingenious ways to part the lower classes from their money and homes, while shrinking the working class. I seriously hope I'm alive when the shit hits the fan because I will be one of the headhunters coming for you elites when it does.
My plan is to get in the construction business. Everyone talks about so-and-so should be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes. In order to mollify everyone who wants their victim of choice to go first, we'll have to stage one big execution in parallel. This means we'll need a big wall, and hopefully a big construction contract. (Because who wants to deal with a bunch of bullet holes in an existing wall?) ;)
No one has the right to someone else's money.
Why not?
A person's right to own property (including money) ultimately comes down to what they can personally defend or what they can convince others to agree to let them have.
Large groups of people have banded together, consensually established and empowered governments to serve their mutual interests, and generally they fund these by empowering the government to levy taxes.
This means that people don't have a right that is recognized by their neighbors to money that lawfully taxed and due to the government. This leaves them with the option of trying to personally defend their money from the tax man through force of arms, but it never seems to work out very well, because the government can bring a lot more force to bear if it wants to. Sometimes you can achieve better results by arguing as to how much, precisely, is owed, but this concedes that at least some taxation is lawful.
Apparently most people think that progressive taxation is the best way to go. I, at least, would say so. In which case a flat tax would be a bad idea, since the poor cannot afford to pay as much as the rich. The fairest thing to do is to shift the burden around to those who can best bear it. And after all, the rich benefit immensely from the government protecting their stuff (b/c they have more stuff), and from the poor not being so desperate that they just rise up and kill the rich, which is the kind of thing that historically happens when taxes are allocated unfairly.
Frankly, I cannot imagine any rich person with two brain cells to rub together who would prefer to not be rich rather than to be rich but with a progressive taxation system. Even if taxes are quite high on the rich, they're still doing pretty damn well. It's better than being poor under any taxation system. And a stable society is better than being dead.
If anyone here sounds greedy, I'm afraid it's you.
Employing people for the sake of employing people is rather idiotic, I think.
Well, it's pretty bad to have a lot of unemployed people around. Even if it's a make-work project (and you could probably design some useful make-work projects -- the WPA built public buildings, roads, bridges, installed utilities, etc.) it's better to have people working for a living than to be on the dole. Better still is if you can manage to have people privately employed, while still maintaining good standards for pay, benefits, etc. Maybe if we someday can provide people with enjoyable, leisurely lives without anyone having to work at a job because they must, we can all just pursue our hobbies full time, but so far such a thing escapes us.
Full employment does tend to cause inflation, as we found out when the US pursued this policy from the 50's to the 70's, but on the whole, it seems to have worked out better than how things have gone since.
There's a list of old stations here. Apparently there were quite a few, although most of them seem to have been set up for mechanical tv sets.
A device that rips CDs to a hard drive is very much like a standalone audio CD recorder, except in reverse.
Oh sure, don't get me wrong; it is entirely possible to build an AHRA-compliant device, and there have been any number of them on the market at various times.
Assuming that the manufacturer was careful to dot all the p's and cross all the q's, I can see a standalone CD to HD recorder and playback device being eligible for AHRA protection.
Though that still doesn't mean that format shifting is generally lawful in the US which was the earlier question. There are few AHRA compliant devices and media, and they wouldn't cover everything anyway.
What did I miss?
SCMS relies on flags, and the flags can be set to allow serial copying. Is it possible that a workalike would have to offer a digital audio out and check for flags instead of just not offering such an output at all, in order to match SCMS for AHRA purposes? I admit I've never given the question much thought; there's never been any call for it.
These royalties are what, 2 percent of the wholesale price of a covered device, capped at $8 per device
The caps can go up after 1998. I'd have to check to see if they ever have, and I honestly don't care. Besides, there's no way that a CD drive, a hard drive, and a little board to handle the ripping, playback, controls, etc. is going to cost more than $400 these days.
But then, I can't see who would buy a standalone ripper now anyway. It doesn't seem very useful or better than just using a computer and an iPod.
Derivatives works are fair use, not an exclusive right of the copyright holder.
Not in the US at least:
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: ...
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work....
17 USC 106
And anyway, fair use only applies to things which are otherwise infringing but which are fair under the circumstances. So for it to be a fair use to prepare derivatives, it must first be illegal to prepare derivatives; otherwise you wouldn't need it to be a fair use to begin with. (It's like, say, justifiable homicide -- if the victim doesn't actually die, you don't need to make excuses for why you killed him)
If that were the case, there would be no remixes.
If you're talking about recording a song that you don't hold the rights to, that's actually covered specifically elsewhere. Music licensing is a weird sort of thing but no one really relies on fair use to do it.