Current incarnations of IM are, for the most part, more like "write" than "talk". Some are proprietary and some are not. There are many clients that speak multiple protocols, allowing one to reign in the insanity just a little bit and talk to one's friends regardless of their choice of client (within limits, of course). Typically they keep a conversation history, which allows you to keep some idea of what's going on, but isn't the level of interactivity you saw with "talk". More like a scroll-back buffer.
I wouldn't say anything about the functionality of most of the IM clients is revolutionary in any meaningful sense. Some allow you to send pictures and whatnot, giving them a certain IRC-ness. Some allow you to spawn other networked programs (e.g. games) and automatically pass your friend's IP. Of course, since everyone lives behind a firewall these days, that's pretty much useless. I've seen one at least that includes a shared white-board for multiple users, which is pretty cool. Needless to say, that's not one that's in common use, though. So, in summary, what makes these IMs "better" than write or talk were? Sexy GUI interface.
Spoken like a man who fixes his own car. And refrigerator. And microwave oven. And television. And plumbing. And...
The reality is, life is getting more complex. It's reached the point where it's not practical to understand everything a typical individual in a technologically advanced country uses on a daily basis well enough to be able to repair them all. It will someday reach the point where that's not even possible or conceivable. At some point, you have to decide what you're going to devote the time to building your knowledge and where you're going to let it be someone else's job to fix it when it doesn't work right. That means it's perfectly reasonable to expect there to be an applicable somebody for every possible thing that might not work right.
This is how technologically advanced civilizations deal with complexity: specialization. Welcome to the future.
Not at all. Religion and science address completely unrelated spheres. Religion is about the unknowable. It's child's play to create a religious explanation for this event that's consistent with the idea of a soul.
My greatest personal experience is with Roman Catholicism, so I'll speak to that. Guess what? Dogs don't have souls. There is no conflict to address. That was easy, wasn't it?
A sufficient explanation for those religions that allow for the possibility of animal souls is left as an exercise for the reader. Here's a hint, though: it's not possible to verify in any way or to any degree whatever theory you happen to come up with. This is why religious explanations are impossible to challenge with scientific methods.
It's a somewhat technical point, but zombies of legend are not brought back to life. They're animated corpses. Still actually dead. They rot and stuff.
You only need them if the other guy has them. Outfitting a single individual with $200M worth of equipment is simply not cost effective unless there's another individual out there [s]he can personally face who poses a $200M threat all by h(im|er)self. Then there's always the reality factor. You can trust Batman because he's a comic book character. Trustworthiness is part of the definition of the character. You outfit a single individual with more and better hardware than not only the local police but the National Guard... that's going to turn a guy's head. He's going to start thinking about what he could get away with.
There are basically three sources of tax revenue: taxes on income, taxes on property, and taxes on goods and services. In the United States, at least, the burden of each of these forms rests more or less heavily on the three different economic strata: the rich, the middle class, and the poor. The rich pay most of their tax burden in income because property, goods, and services are not what their money is spent on. Most of their income is recycled into investments that generate more income. Take a look at the statistics and you'll see that most of the income tax revenue that is collected comes from a very small percentage of top earners. The middle class pay most of their tax burden in property taxes, because the property they own is their most significant investment. The poor feel the taxes on goods and services most heavily because they don't earn enough or own enough to pay a significant amount of income or property tax. Most of the money they earn is spent on good and services because they can't afford to save or invest.
Essentially what you're proposing is to take the load off the rich and let the poor carry it. It's probably not as good an idea as you might have thought.
If you're actually interested in why bundling is considered a monopolistic practice, it will be informative to look at the difference between your example and the Microsoft situation.
In order for the car stereo example to be closer to what Microsoft has done, let's say that Toyota doesn't make the whole car. They just make the engine. They make an engine that's popular enough that not having their engine in the car you're trying to sell effectively means being able to market a lot fewer cars. Once that situation is established, Toyota decides to start making a car stereo as well. And they tell all the people who make cars, "If you don't install our car stereo standard with the cars you sell, we won't sell you our engines anymore." Then they make their car stereo incredibly difficult to take out once it's installed. That's where the problem is. They use the leverage of their existing monopoly to force themselves into an unfair position in a different market.
I'm surprised not to have seen this brought up already, though I admit to only scanning through the comments so far. But let me get this straight: Companies are concerned about the people they employ who have access to sensitive information leaking that information to outside entities who are not authorized to receive it. So they hire more employees and give them access to this information. And they prevent these new employees from leaking the information how exactly? Do they intend to hire even more employees to keep watch over them?
How to keep a secret, lesson one: don't tell anyone.
So your dad built something to protect certain information from being accessed by a third party even though the third party may physically intercept the media containing the information (or in this case is assumed to be in posession of it). This is exactly what cryptography is and what it does.
The way in which this differs from DRM is that in the case of the widget there is no legitimate access by the third party to this information. This would be more like DRM if the company wanted to allow their clients to dump the control configs, but not to make a copy of the dump once made. So you'd have to give them the login/password in order for them to make the dump. At that point you've lost control of what they do with it. See?
I'm not sure I'm entirely following what you're describing, but it sounds as though it's a method for authenticating access to certain information. But once authenticated the user has access to the information, so they could make a copy of it if they chose, could they not? Or am I missing something?
Or is it that only certain of the information is available to the authorized user? The data on how to interact with the device, but not the actual data on how the device itself acts?
The issue is that DRM seeks to prevent access to the information available to authorized users by the very same people who are the authorized users. I'm unclear on how your example refutes that this is an inherent contradiction. I suspect I'm just not understanding very well.
A) The purpose of cryptography is to allow information to get from a sender to a recipient without allowing a third party to access it.
B) In the case of DRM, the third party is the same entity as the recipient.
Substituting B into A, we derive:
C) The purpose of DRM is to allow information to get from a sender to a recipient without allowing the recipient to access it.
It really doesn't matter how one specifically attempts to implement this, or how many monkeys you get to stand in the middle. The proposition is internally ludicrous.
As it turns out, the example used in the article was a poor choice because it itself constitutes the evidence you're looking for. The designers did market research when they were designing the look of that character, including asking a group of women what they thought of the costume. The women found the costuming arbitrary, so the designers _for that reason_ gave the character a move where she could seduce guards. Once the character had that ability it explained her choice of outfit, and the female focus group happily accepted it.
Furthermore, at any science-fiction convention you can observe any number of real-life females who enjoy dressing like that when they can get away with it. Why would they object to a character in a game dressed in that fashion?
I have to agree that the idea of across-the-board objection to fantasy depictions of feminine beauty is just another sterotype. The idea that women universally object to boobs is just kind of internally ridiculous. It's the sort of thing only a guy would come up with.
It doesn't say in TFA, and IANAL, but if I had to guess I'd say that the bulk of the damages sought in this case are punitive, meaning that they're intended not to cover any actual expense or loss, but rather to punish and discourage Yahoo!'s response (or lack thereof). If I understand correctly, a judgement including punitive damages can often be mitigated by demonstrating improvement. That is to say, if Yahoo! changes their policies and becomes more responsive to cases like this, they will probably avoid paying the bulk of this figure.
He wasn't forced to take down his website or change anything in it, as near as I can tell from the article. He was frightened into doing it. From my experience, lawyers for corporations first draft a scary letter telling you what they're going to do if you don't cease and desist. They send this letter regardless of whether they have any legal right to follow through on those threats for the simple reason that people who don't know their rights as well as a lawyer does will often back down. They assume that a lawyer knows the law and won't make threats they can't back up. But why litigate when you can mug some people through the mail?
Back in the day, I put up a website called "The Saint Peterbilt Steel Erection Church of Christ". For reasons that are lost in obscurity. I received a C&D from lawyers representing Paccar, the company that owns Peterbilt Trucks. They claimed images on the page (which I had made myself) were similar to the Peterbilt logo, and they would take legal action to protect their trademark. Well, I panicked. Then I researched and found out what my rights are. Then I took a look at the images, and decided I could make them look nicer and at the same time a little less like the Peterbilt logo. That served both our purposes, so I went ahead and did it. Then I sent them a letter stating that the site was parody and therefore protected, that I'd made a concession in altering the images to make them less similar to the protected trademark, and that was pretty much all they were going to get. I offered to include a verbal disclaimer on the site if they felt there was a possibility people would get confused and think that Paccar Inc. was a sponsor or somehow affiliated with The Saint Peterbilt Steel Erection Church of Christ. Their response was, "No, that's fine." My site was down for all of... not at all.
The exploration of possible alternatives seems perfectly reasonable to me. Sorry if I went off a little yesterday, I think I was just feeling very opinionated. I even commented somewhere about grammar. Seriously. Well, they mentioned grammar in their post, but really, is that any excuse? Anyway, thanks for retaining a very reasonable tone in response to comments that, as I look over them today, seem a little kurt and possibly even snide.
Anyway, the problem we have, really, is that it's very difficult to compare the details of a real-world solution to the possibilities of an imagined one. Really until you actually implemented a consumption based tax structure, you'd have no idea how complex it would ultimately grow to be. It's entirely possible that it could be made more simple than the system the US currently has in place. It certainly seems possible that the US system itself could be simplified without a radical redesign (Why don't they just send you a bill? Don't they have computers?). But in implementation you always run into factors you didn't take into account in design. It's just impossible to foresee everything.
Justification for taxation is an interesting topic on its own. Many maintain that taxation itself is unfair, regardless of how it's implemented. Me, I like to drive on roads, so I can put up with a little taxation. On the other hand, I'm not a terribly huge fan of the national debt.
The reason one might wish to tax unused income is that spending is healthy for the economy. If you tax everything but money that is not spent, the wealthy will not spend. The middle class will consider their expenditures more carefully. The poor... they can't afford to save, so they'll get the hose again. The economy would tend to stagnate as more and more currency was taken out of circulation. If you tax investment and savings accounts, the rich will probably start looking into foreign investments - an option that is not as open to the middle class. That is also unhealthy for our economy. (Not to say that foreign investments are detrimental, just that if we're investing more in other countries than we are in our own, we're tipping a balance.)
So, that's another reason for taxation, to try and manage the health of the economy. That's one of the primary justifications for import taxes, to encourage investment in the local economy.
There's also the punitive effect of taxation, the attempt to discourage certain kinds of transactions. For example, the taxes on liquor and tobacco.
I would be a bit surprised to see a taxation plan that seemed reasonable and fair in all practical situations and that relied only on one form of taxation. I wouldn't be shocked, but I'd be surprised. But let's face it, the current model isn't entirely reasonable and fair in all situations, either. So the goal isn't really to emulate the current status quo in a different fashion. It's to accomplish all the goals of taxation in a reasonable and fair manner, and ideally as simply as possible. I'm not saying we're there already. Just pointing out that it's easier to see the flaws in the system that's in use.
From the Statistical Abstract of the United States, approximately 130,255,000 individual tax returns were filed in 2001 (the most recent year for which I can find figures), collecting a total of about 888 billion dollars. Of these, the number filed by individuals claiming $100K or more gross income comes to about 11,046,000: about 8.5%. But that 8.5% of the population is responsible for 552 of those 888 billion dollars of income tax revenue, which is 62%. That's just to give you an idea that I'm not making these concepts up based on ideology. The burden of income tax rests pretty squarely on the rich. Look the numbers up.
And, to clarify, the reason a tax on consumption will have little impact on the rich regardless off how it is specifically implemented is that consumption doesn't represent a significant portion of the flow of cash at higher levels of income. They don't buy things. They invest.
And if you think the process of specifying which items fall into what gradient level of necessity is going to be an uncomplicated one... You're essentially proposing that every good which is sold in the United States should be rated against some standards of necessity. That means a body has to be created to formulate those standards, and to apply them. There has to be a process for ammending the standards, and their application. And every company will be lobbying for their products to be classified as necessities, so that their customers won't be dissuaded from purchasing them by inflated consumption taxes. This sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare worse than the IRS has ever been.
The purpose of taxation is not distribution of wealth, but rather to provide for common infrastructure and services that benefit society as a whole. Roads, for example. Someone has to pay for those things. Taxation is one system of providing for them.
To answer your hypothetical question, if you want to arrange things in such a way that nothing has changed, it is much simpler to do so by changing nothing.
A system is usually complex in response to the complexity it needs to manage. Taxation is complicated. If your solution to a complex problem is a simple one, that's a reasonable indicator that it is inadequate.
Thing is, there exists some kind of balance between income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes. The burden of income taxes rests largely on the wealthy, because they make so much more and the largest portion of that income is redirected into investments. Yes loopholes, yes tax shelters, but the fact remains that the majority of income tax revenue in the US comes from the rich. The burden of property tax rests mostly on the middle class, because they make enough to buy a house, but the house they own is the most significant portion of their net worth. The burden of sales tax rests on the poor, because they don't make enough to pay a significant amount of income tax or own any property. Most of what they earn is spent, not invested.
The bottom line is, getting rid of income tax in favour of raising sales (or consumption) taxes would make you the rich man's best friend.
Slashdot Mirror
MS runs Hotmail. The spam hits their servers and their network, so it cost them bandwidth and disk space.
Or discounts on penis-enlargement pills.
Current incarnations of IM are, for the most part, more like "write" than "talk". Some are proprietary and some are not. There are many clients that speak multiple protocols, allowing one to reign in the insanity just a little bit and talk to one's friends regardless of their choice of client (within limits, of course). Typically they keep a conversation history, which allows you to keep some idea of what's going on, but isn't the level of interactivity you saw with "talk". More like a scroll-back buffer.
I wouldn't say anything about the functionality of most of the IM clients is revolutionary in any meaningful sense. Some allow you to send pictures and whatnot, giving them a certain IRC-ness. Some allow you to spawn other networked programs (e.g. games) and automatically pass your friend's IP. Of course, since everyone lives behind a firewall these days, that's pretty much useless. I've seen one at least that includes a shared white-board for multiple users, which is pretty cool. Needless to say, that's not one that's in common use, though. So, in summary, what makes these IMs "better" than write or talk were? Sexy GUI interface.
Some tell you that the other user is typing, I think that's about it.
Raise your hand if you remember when the command for Instant Messaging was 'write'.
Spoken like a man who fixes his own car. And refrigerator. And microwave oven. And television. And plumbing. And...
The reality is, life is getting more complex. It's reached the point where it's not practical to understand everything a typical individual in a technologically advanced country uses on a daily basis well enough to be able to repair them all. It will someday reach the point where that's not even possible or conceivable. At some point, you have to decide what you're going to devote the time to building your knowledge and where you're going to let it be someone else's job to fix it when it doesn't work right. That means it's perfectly reasonable to expect there to be an applicable somebody for every possible thing that might not work right.
This is how technologically advanced civilizations deal with complexity: specialization. Welcome to the future.
Not at all. Religion and science address completely unrelated spheres. Religion is about the unknowable. It's child's play to create a religious explanation for this event that's consistent with the idea of a soul.
My greatest personal experience is with Roman Catholicism, so I'll speak to that. Guess what? Dogs don't have souls. There is no conflict to address. That was easy, wasn't it?
A sufficient explanation for those religions that allow for the possibility of animal souls is left as an exercise for the reader. Here's a hint, though: it's not possible to verify in any way or to any degree whatever theory you happen to come up with. This is why religious explanations are impossible to challenge with scientific methods.
It's a somewhat technical point, but zombies of legend are not brought back to life. They're animated corpses. Still actually dead. They rot and stuff.
You only need them if the other guy has them. Outfitting a single individual with $200M worth of equipment is simply not cost effective unless there's another individual out there [s]he can personally face who poses a $200M threat all by h(im|er)self. Then there's always the reality factor. You can trust Batman because he's a comic book character. Trustworthiness is part of the definition of the character. You outfit a single individual with more and better hardware than not only the local police but the National Guard... that's going to turn a guy's head. He's going to start thinking about what he could get away with.
There are basically three sources of tax revenue: taxes on income, taxes on property, and taxes on goods and services. In the United States, at least, the burden of each of these forms rests more or less heavily on the three different economic strata: the rich, the middle class, and the poor. The rich pay most of their tax burden in income because property, goods, and services are not what their money is spent on. Most of their income is recycled into investments that generate more income. Take a look at the statistics and you'll see that most of the income tax revenue that is collected comes from a very small percentage of top earners. The middle class pay most of their tax burden in property taxes, because the property they own is their most significant investment. The poor feel the taxes on goods and services most heavily because they don't earn enough or own enough to pay a significant amount of income or property tax. Most of the money they earn is spent on good and services because they can't afford to save or invest.
Essentially what you're proposing is to take the load off the rich and let the poor carry it. It's probably not as good an idea as you might have thought.
Or even better, they could pay someone else to do it for them. No, wait, that could never happen.
If you're actually interested in why bundling is considered a monopolistic practice, it will be informative to look at the difference between your example and the Microsoft situation.
In order for the car stereo example to be closer to what Microsoft has done, let's say that Toyota doesn't make the whole car. They just make the engine. They make an engine that's popular enough that not having their engine in the car you're trying to sell effectively means being able to market a lot fewer cars. Once that situation is established, Toyota decides to start making a car stereo as well. And they tell all the people who make cars, "If you don't install our car stereo standard with the cars you sell, we won't sell you our engines anymore." Then they make their car stereo incredibly difficult to take out once it's installed. That's where the problem is. They use the leverage of their existing monopoly to force themselves into an unfair position in a different market.
I'm surprised not to have seen this brought up already, though I admit to only scanning through the comments so far. But let me get this straight: Companies are concerned about the people they employ who have access to sensitive information leaking that information to outside entities who are not authorized to receive it. So they hire more employees and give them access to this information. And they prevent these new employees from leaking the information how exactly? Do they intend to hire even more employees to keep watch over them?
How to keep a secret, lesson one: don't tell anyone.
So your dad built something to protect certain information from being accessed by a third party even though the third party may physically intercept the media containing the information (or in this case is assumed to be in posession of it). This is exactly what cryptography is and what it does.
The way in which this differs from DRM is that in the case of the widget there is no legitimate access by the third party to this information. This would be more like DRM if the company wanted to allow their clients to dump the control configs, but not to make a copy of the dump once made. So you'd have to give them the login/password in order for them to make the dump. At that point you've lost control of what they do with it. See?
I'm not sure I'm entirely following what you're describing, but it sounds as though it's a method for authenticating access to certain information. But once authenticated the user has access to the information, so they could make a copy of it if they chose, could they not? Or am I missing something?
Or is it that only certain of the information is available to the authorized user? The data on how to interact with the device, but not the actual data on how the device itself acts?
The issue is that DRM seeks to prevent access to the information available to authorized users by the very same people who are the authorized users. I'm unclear on how your example refutes that this is an inherent contradiction. I suspect I'm just not understanding very well.
You're missing the point:
A) The purpose of cryptography is to allow information to get from a sender to a recipient without allowing a third party to access it.
B) In the case of DRM, the third party is the same entity as the recipient.
Substituting B into A, we derive:
C) The purpose of DRM is to allow information to get from a sender to a recipient without allowing the recipient to access it.
It really doesn't matter how one specifically attempts to implement this, or how many monkeys you get to stand in the middle. The proposition is internally ludicrous.
As it turns out, the example used in the article was a poor choice because it itself constitutes the evidence you're looking for. The designers did market research when they were designing the look of that character, including asking a group of women what they thought of the costume. The women found the costuming arbitrary, so the designers _for that reason_ gave the character a move where she could seduce guards. Once the character had that ability it explained her choice of outfit, and the female focus group happily accepted it.
Furthermore, at any science-fiction convention you can observe any number of real-life females who enjoy dressing like that when they can get away with it. Why would they object to a character in a game dressed in that fashion?
I have to agree that the idea of across-the-board objection to fantasy depictions of feminine beauty is just another sterotype. The idea that women universally object to boobs is just kind of internally ridiculous. It's the sort of thing only a guy would come up with.
Also, to be accurate, it's $100K. Not $100K/yr.
It doesn't say in TFA, and IANAL, but if I had to guess I'd say that the bulk of the damages sought in this case are punitive, meaning that they're intended not to cover any actual expense or loss, but rather to punish and discourage Yahoo!'s response (or lack thereof). If I understand correctly, a judgement including punitive damages can often be mitigated by demonstrating improvement. That is to say, if Yahoo! changes their policies and becomes more responsive to cases like this, they will probably avoid paying the bulk of this figure.
He wasn't forced to take down his website or change anything in it, as near as I can tell from the article. He was frightened into doing it. From my experience, lawyers for corporations first draft a scary letter telling you what they're going to do if you don't cease and desist. They send this letter regardless of whether they have any legal right to follow through on those threats for the simple reason that people who don't know their rights as well as a lawyer does will often back down. They assume that a lawyer knows the law and won't make threats they can't back up. But why litigate when you can mug some people through the mail?
Back in the day, I put up a website called "The Saint Peterbilt Steel Erection Church of Christ". For reasons that are lost in obscurity. I received a C&D from lawyers representing Paccar, the company that owns Peterbilt Trucks. They claimed images on the page (which I had made myself) were similar to the Peterbilt logo, and they would take legal action to protect their trademark. Well, I panicked. Then I researched and found out what my rights are. Then I took a look at the images, and decided I could make them look nicer and at the same time a little less like the Peterbilt logo. That served both our purposes, so I went ahead and did it. Then I sent them a letter stating that the site was parody and therefore protected, that I'd made a concession in altering the images to make them less similar to the protected trademark, and that was pretty much all they were going to get. I offered to include a verbal disclaimer on the site if they felt there was a possibility people would get confused and think that Paccar Inc. was a sponsor or somehow affiliated with The Saint Peterbilt Steel Erection Church of Christ. Their response was, "No, that's fine." My site was down for all of... not at all.
The exploration of possible alternatives seems perfectly reasonable to me. Sorry if I went off a little yesterday, I think I was just feeling very opinionated. I even commented somewhere about grammar. Seriously. Well, they mentioned grammar in their post, but really, is that any excuse? Anyway, thanks for retaining a very reasonable tone in response to comments that, as I look over them today, seem a little kurt and possibly even snide.
Anyway, the problem we have, really, is that it's very difficult to compare the details of a real-world solution to the possibilities of an imagined one. Really until you actually implemented a consumption based tax structure, you'd have no idea how complex it would ultimately grow to be. It's entirely possible that it could be made more simple than the system the US currently has in place. It certainly seems possible that the US system itself could be simplified without a radical redesign (Why don't they just send you a bill? Don't they have computers?). But in implementation you always run into factors you didn't take into account in design. It's just impossible to foresee everything.
Justification for taxation is an interesting topic on its own. Many maintain that taxation itself is unfair, regardless of how it's implemented. Me, I like to drive on roads, so I can put up with a little taxation. On the other hand, I'm not a terribly huge fan of the national debt.
The reason one might wish to tax unused income is that spending is healthy for the economy. If you tax everything but money that is not spent, the wealthy will not spend. The middle class will consider their expenditures more carefully. The poor... they can't afford to save, so they'll get the hose again. The economy would tend to stagnate as more and more currency was taken out of circulation. If you tax investment and savings accounts, the rich will probably start looking into foreign investments - an option that is not as open to the middle class. That is also unhealthy for our economy. (Not to say that foreign investments are detrimental, just that if we're investing more in other countries than we are in our own, we're tipping a balance.)
So, that's another reason for taxation, to try and manage the health of the economy. That's one of the primary justifications for import taxes, to encourage investment in the local economy.
There's also the punitive effect of taxation, the attempt to discourage certain kinds of transactions. For example, the taxes on liquor and tobacco.
I would be a bit surprised to see a taxation plan that seemed reasonable and fair in all practical situations and that relied only on one form of taxation. I wouldn't be shocked, but I'd be surprised. But let's face it, the current model isn't entirely reasonable and fair in all situations, either. So the goal isn't really to emulate the current status quo in a different fashion. It's to accomplish all the goals of taxation in a reasonable and fair manner, and ideally as simply as possible. I'm not saying we're there already. Just pointing out that it's easier to see the flaws in the system that's in use.
From the Statistical Abstract of the United States, approximately 130,255,000 individual tax returns were filed in 2001 (the most recent year for which I can find figures), collecting a total of about 888 billion dollars. Of these, the number filed by individuals claiming $100K or more gross income comes to about 11,046,000: about 8.5%. But that 8.5% of the population is responsible for 552 of those 888 billion dollars of income tax revenue, which is 62%. That's just to give you an idea that I'm not making these concepts up based on ideology. The burden of income tax rests pretty squarely on the rich. Look the numbers up.
And, to clarify, the reason a tax on consumption will have little impact on the rich regardless off how it is specifically implemented is that consumption doesn't represent a significant portion of the flow of cash at higher levels of income. They don't buy things. They invest.
And if you think the process of specifying which items fall into what gradient level of necessity is going to be an uncomplicated one... You're essentially proposing that every good which is sold in the United States should be rated against some standards of necessity. That means a body has to be created to formulate those standards, and to apply them. There has to be a process for ammending the standards, and their application. And every company will be lobbying for their products to be classified as necessities, so that their customers won't be dissuaded from purchasing them by inflated consumption taxes. This sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare worse than the IRS has ever been.
The purpose of taxation is not distribution of wealth, but rather to provide for common infrastructure and services that benefit society as a whole. Roads, for example. Someone has to pay for those things. Taxation is one system of providing for them.
To answer your hypothetical question, if you want to arrange things in such a way that nothing has changed, it is much simpler to do so by changing nothing.
A system is usually complex in response to the complexity it needs to manage. Taxation is complicated. If your solution to a complex problem is a simple one, that's a reasonable indicator that it is inadequate.
Thing is, there exists some kind of balance between income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes. The burden of income taxes rests largely on the wealthy, because they make so much more and the largest portion of that income is redirected into investments. Yes loopholes, yes tax shelters, but the fact remains that the majority of income tax revenue in the US comes from the rich. The burden of property tax rests mostly on the middle class, because they make enough to buy a house, but the house they own is the most significant portion of their net worth. The burden of sales tax rests on the poor, because they don't make enough to pay a significant amount of income tax or own any property. Most of what they earn is spent, not invested.
The bottom line is, getting rid of income tax in favour of raising sales (or consumption) taxes would make you the rich man's best friend.
You've misspelled the word "Troll". HTH.
You misspelled "Troll". HTH