For example, the City of Phoenix (Arizona) borrowed a billion dollars over the past 5 years to build out the water system. Now the water department wants to raise an extra $24million a year by raising water fees... 'Cause the usury always gets paid first.
I calculate that the interest charge on a billion dollars a year (at 5%) is $50million. If Arizona owned a bank like North Dakota, the Bank of Arizona would have financed the Phoenix water expansion (at, say, 3%). Most of the $50million the city is now bleeding out to Wall Street would instead be flowing into the state's treasury.
Speaking as an Arizona resident (Tucson), I would just like to point out that if Arizona owned a bank like North Dakota, the idiots in our legislature would fuck it up beyond belief, and it would require a federal bailout. This is inarguable.
The simple answer is to cancel all sales tax and just have income tax. That way people can directly see what taxes they pay, none of this hidden tax crap. Or make one sales tax for everything.
I think high property taxes are extremely punitive to the retired and anyone who loses their job.
High sales and income taxes at least only hit people spending money (and sales taxes are tuned to avoid basic needs).
However, along the same logic... any increase in income tax will apparently lead to massive flight of the wealthy from Texas to Belize or Mississipi or France.
The wealthy won for a while with the "I'm going to take my ball" argument, but now that EVERYWHERE is running into money problems, I think taxes may flow the other way for a while.
I agree completely. An income tax is the most progressive option, even if it's a fixed rate (say, 5% for all income) instead of graduated like the Federal income tax.
Property taxes are inherently regressive -- one has essentially no control over the value of a property. As we've seen in the bubble, home values were doubling and in some cases tripling over a very short time frame, clearly exceeding the change in the owners' incomes. So you might be "house rich" but that's not reflected in your income. In fact, like any object of value, a home's only value to the owner is realized when it's sold. So if your property tax on a $150,000 home is $1,500 a year (which is the case with my house), the homeowner needs to come up with that $1,500 each year. You can't magically pull it out of the home value!
Sales taxes are regressive, too, simply because everyone, regardless of income level, pays the same percentage on products but if you are on the lower end of the income scale, the amount paid in tax is significant compared with rent and utilities.
also with a sales tax, people aren't exactly clear on how much they pay in that tax every year. Your income tax is prominently shown on your pay stub and on your 1040 each year.
Once joesobscuremerchandise.com has calculated the taxes, and billed appropriately, Joe owes various entities the taxes he has collected. The paperwork on that alone could be prohibitive for a small site.
But Amazon is not a small site! The small retailers who use Amazon's systems do it so that they do not have to deal with the billing and hosting and credit-card details. So the point is that Amazon is one of the few retailers in a position to "do it right" because so much is aggregated through them.
An API that just serves the tax rates when you request them once every month or so is not a big honey pot. What do you anticipate a hacker would do? Raise/Lower tax rates for their jurisdiction and risk going to jail for an extra 6.25% off of online purchases? That's ridiculous. The IRS already has a big online presence anyway, this would be trivially easy to do.
Am I being pedantic when I point out that the IRS has nothing to do with state, county and municipal income, sales and use taxes?
The 8051 is an ancient piece of crap and it needs to die. Do yourself a favor and get an ARM instead.
and all of the good stuff one gets with an 8051
LOL
For a lot of applications, an ARM is overkill. And nobody uses the original 12-clocker Intel 8051s. The SiLabs single-clocker devices are pretty great.
I love the Arduino, it's one of the best uC's I've ever used.
Then you should know that Arduino isn't a microcontroller. It's a board with a micro installed on it. And you obviously haven't used many if it's "one of the best you've ever used."
Not trying to be a hater here, but seriously: you can get a Silicon Labs 8051-based kit, with a micro that has onboard DACs, ADCs, comparators, full-speed
USB, and all of the good stuff one gets with an 8051, PLUS the JTAG debug/programming dongle (which Arduino kits DO NOT HAVE) for a hundred bucks.
OK, so the free SiLabs IDE is for Windows only. But they publish the programming interface protocol (C2 for the example '340 device), they fully support SDCC (as well as Keil, IAR and others) in their debugger and SiLabs support is excellent.
And you can buy the JTAG dongle for $35, which is a steal, especially if you remember the cost of the old Nohau emulators.
Arduino is popular among people who don't do this for a living. Which is fine, but it didn't win anything.
I have a coil of wire that I would like to donate to the project. I call it an "inductor" because I wrapped it on the INside of a roll of DUCT tape OR similar.
I also have a pencil broken in half with a wire glued on one end and another wire that you can "wipe" up and down the black graphite center... I call it a "variable resistor" for some reason...but in any case... I hereby release it to be OPEN HARDWARE!
yay!
The quality of your work has earned you the title "Maker".
Like open source software it's not just being able to change the design, it's having access to the full internal details of the product. Companies are encouraged to produce open-designed hardware or variants of it because it's cheaper than designing new hardware and marketing it from scratch, and when you buy it you get the full details of how it was made, so you can easily use, repair, reprogram and extend it without having to beg implementation details from a vendor who is uncooperative because they're trying to shield their proprietary designs from competitors.
If the documentation for any particular piece of open-source hardware is as bad as the same for most open-source software, I say: no thanks. The whole point of this is to save time, and if I have to waste time figuring out interfaces and verifying that the open-source design does as advertised on the tin, well, I will just do it myself.
Look at what Seeedstudio are doing with Arduino boards for example; they have taken the open-source Arduino design and extended it in interesting ways (Seeeduino Film for example) and they publish the full circuit diagrams, board layouts and firmware so if you want to mod or fix their boards you can.
What people keep forgetting is that Arduino is a trivial microcontroller eval board. It's really no different from a Silicon Labs kit, except that SiLabs markets their kits to actual engineers (people who do it for a living) and they're not trying to surf this absurd wave of "open source hardware."
Basically, here's what happens. You choose a celebrity which you want to be associated with. They perform a useless job, with some official sounding title. This then allows the company to say person X is with us. We then *might* get them to be apart of some ad campaigns, some marketing, and similar. Basically, anything that they couldn't fuck up too much, and that we could discard at a moments notice.
We have had "Director of Brand Engineering", "VP of Creative Development" and many other titles for these positions.
It doesn't mean shit, besides "Intel thinks Sam.I.Am is someone they want to associate their brand with".
EoS (End of Story)
Sort of like when Linus Torvalds was hired by Transmeta
Double edged razors are hard to find in stores - I finally found one in a flea market. Blades are cheap and plentiful, though, and they are as good as Mach 3.
But... but... but the Gillette Fusion ProGlide Power razor has FIVE FUCKING BLADES!
I'm surprised that most people in that situation don't just stop paying the bill. They'll cut off your account eventually, right? And if you're not planning on buying a house in the next few years, it's not like the hit to your credit will matter.
The easiest way to cancel an AOL account is to call the issuer of the credit card that AOL bills, tell them, "My card was stolen," and they'll reissue a new card with a new number. AOL will keep trying to bill the canceled card, and eventually they'll close the account.
I have been in this industry for a while...machines get slower over time. Not relatively slower, but measurably, due to flex in the motherboard, wearing down of moving parts, static buildup...it happens,
Obviously you know nothing about electronics. Now shut the fuck up about "computers slowing down." The only moving parts in a PC are the hard drive and cooling fans. The hard drive doesn't "slow down" because of the wear on the mechanism. Now run along while the adults discuss the topic.
So then explain why all of the other smart phone touch-screen interfaces are essentially clones of the iPhone interface?
You obviously haven't used Android or BlackberryOS or WP7 then because they are absolutely not clones of the iphone interface, they are not just 'buttons on the homescreen' like the iphone is. I'd be interested to know how you come to the conclusion that the competitors have cloned the iOS interface.
OK, perhaps "clone" is too strong a word. How about, "Wow, this really looks highly similar to the iPhone interface? Couldn't they think of anything different?"
Slashdot Mirror
Utah runs with no deficit as well.
And I'm sure that this has nothing to do with the 10% wealth tax imposed on all of the citizens who are members of a certain church.
For example, the City of Phoenix (Arizona) borrowed a billion dollars over the past 5 years to build out the water system. Now the water department wants to raise an extra $24million a year by raising water fees... 'Cause the usury always gets paid first.
I calculate that the interest charge on a billion dollars a year (at 5%) is $50million. If Arizona owned a bank like North Dakota, the Bank of Arizona would have financed the Phoenix water expansion (at, say, 3%). Most of the $50million the city is now bleeding out to Wall Street would instead be flowing into the state's treasury.
Speaking as an Arizona resident (Tucson), I would just like to point out that if Arizona owned a bank like North Dakota, the idiots in our legislature would fuck it up beyond belief, and it would require a federal bailout. This is inarguable.
The thing I want to know is if Amazon settled and paid the taxes how could they recover this money from the customers who were supposed to pay it?
This is why they should have been collecting the taxes all along.
The simple answer is to cancel all sales tax and just have income tax. That way people can directly see what taxes they pay, none of this hidden tax crap. Or make one sales tax for everything.
This is the correct, and obviously so, solution.
Well, personally, I'm for an income tax.
I think high property taxes are extremely punitive to the retired and anyone who loses their job.
High sales and income taxes at least only hit people spending money (and sales taxes are tuned to avoid basic needs).
However, along the same logic... any increase in income tax will apparently lead to massive flight of the wealthy from Texas to Belize or Mississipi or France.
The wealthy won for a while with the "I'm going to take my ball" argument, but now that EVERYWHERE is running into money problems, I think taxes may flow the other way for a while.
I agree completely. An income tax is the most progressive option, even if it's a fixed rate (say, 5% for all income) instead of graduated like the Federal income tax.
Property taxes are inherently regressive -- one has essentially no control over the value of a property. As we've seen in the bubble, home values were doubling and in some cases tripling over a very short time frame, clearly exceeding the change in the owners' incomes. So you might be "house rich" but that's not reflected in your income. In fact, like any object of value, a home's only value to the owner is realized when it's sold. So if your property tax on a $150,000 home is $1,500 a year (which is the case with my house), the homeowner needs to come up with that $1,500 each year. You can't magically pull it out of the home value!
Sales taxes are regressive, too, simply because everyone, regardless of income level, pays the same percentage on products but if you are on the lower end of the income scale, the amount paid in tax is significant compared with rent and utilities.
also with a sales tax, people aren't exactly clear on how much they pay in that tax every year. Your income tax is prominently shown on your pay stub and on your 1040 each year.
Once joesobscuremerchandise.com has calculated the taxes, and billed appropriately, Joe owes various entities the taxes he has collected. The paperwork on that alone could be prohibitive for a small site.
But Amazon is not a small site! The small retailers who use Amazon's systems do it so that they do not have to deal with the billing and hosting and credit-card details. So the point is that Amazon is one of the few retailers in a position to "do it right" because so much is aggregated through them.
An API that just serves the tax rates when you request them once every month or so is not a big honey pot. What do you anticipate a hacker would do? Raise/Lower tax rates for their jurisdiction and risk going to jail for an extra 6.25% off of online purchases? That's ridiculous. The IRS already has a big online presence anyway, this would be trivially easy to do.
Am I being pedantic when I point out that the IRS has nothing to do with state, county and municipal income, sales and use taxes?
The 8051 is an ancient piece of crap and it needs to die. Do yourself a favor and get an ARM instead.
and all of the good stuff one gets with an 8051
LOL
For a lot of applications, an ARM is overkill. And nobody uses the original 12-clocker Intel 8051s. The SiLabs single-clocker devices are pretty great.
I love the Arduino, it's one of the best uC's I've ever used.
Then you should know that Arduino isn't a microcontroller. It's a board with a micro installed on it. And you obviously haven't used many if it's "one of the best you've ever used."
Not trying to be a hater here, but seriously: you can get a Silicon Labs 8051-based kit, with a micro that has onboard DACs, ADCs, comparators, full-speed USB, and all of the good stuff one gets with an 8051, PLUS the JTAG debug/programming dongle (which Arduino kits DO NOT HAVE) for a hundred bucks.
OK, so the free SiLabs IDE is for Windows only. But they publish the programming interface protocol (C2 for the example '340 device), they fully support SDCC (as well as Keil, IAR and others) in their debugger and SiLabs support is excellent.
And you can buy the JTAG dongle for $35, which is a steal, especially if you remember the cost of the old Nohau emulators.
Arduino is popular among people who don't do this for a living. Which is fine, but it didn't win anything.
It would also be nice with a similar system based around an FPGA.
I know that there are some people working on these sorts of ideas, so hopefully something will take off.
Uh, perhaps this board from Digilent? Or this kit from Xilinx? Or similar offerings from Altera and Actel?
What am I missing?
I have a coil of wire that I would like to donate to the project. I call it an "inductor" because I wrapped it on the INside of a roll of DUCT tape OR similar. I also have a pencil broken in half with a wire glued on one end and another wire that you can "wipe" up and down the black graphite center... I call it a "variable resistor" for some reason...but in any case... I hereby release it to be OPEN HARDWARE! yay!
The quality of your work has earned you the title "Maker".
Where are my mod points when I need them!
Like open source software it's not just being able to change the design, it's having access to the full internal details of the product. Companies are encouraged to produce open-designed hardware or variants of it because it's cheaper than designing new hardware and marketing it from scratch, and when you buy it you get the full details of how it was made, so you can easily use, repair, reprogram and extend it without having to beg implementation details from a vendor who is uncooperative because they're trying to shield their proprietary designs from competitors.
If the documentation for any particular piece of open-source hardware is as bad as the same for most open-source software, I say: no thanks. The whole point of this is to save time, and if I have to waste time figuring out interfaces and verifying that the open-source design does as advertised on the tin, well, I will just do it myself.
Look at what Seeedstudio are doing with Arduino boards for example; they have taken the open-source Arduino design and extended it in interesting ways (Seeeduino Film for example) and they publish the full circuit diagrams, board layouts and firmware so if you want to mod or fix their boards you can.
What people keep forgetting is that Arduino is a trivial microcontroller eval board. It's really no different from a Silicon Labs kit, except that SiLabs markets their kits to actual engineers (people who do it for a living) and they're not trying to surf this absurd wave of "open source hardware."
Basically, here's what happens. You choose a celebrity which you want to be associated with. They perform a useless job, with some official sounding title. This then allows the company to say person X is with us. We then *might* get them to be apart of some ad campaigns, some marketing, and similar. Basically, anything that they couldn't fuck up too much, and that we could discard at a moments notice.
We have had "Director of Brand Engineering", "VP of Creative Development" and many other titles for these positions.
It doesn't mean shit, besides "Intel thinks Sam.I.Am is someone they want to associate their brand with".
EoS (End of Story)
Sort of like when Linus Torvalds was hired by Transmeta
Wish I had mod points ...
whoosh.
Double edged razors are hard to find in stores - I finally found one in a flea market. Blades are cheap and plentiful, though, and they are as good as Mach 3.
But ... but ... but the Gillette Fusion ProGlide Power razor has FIVE FUCKING BLADES!
(Really, it does ...)
I'm surprised that most people in that situation don't just stop paying the bill. They'll cut off your account eventually, right? And if you're not planning on buying a house in the next few years, it's not like the hit to your credit will matter.
The easiest way to cancel an AOL account is to call the issuer of the credit card that AOL bills, tell them, "My card was stolen," and they'll reissue a new card with a new number. AOL will keep trying to bill the canceled card, and eventually they'll close the account.
I have been in this industry for a while...machines get slower over time. Not relatively slower, but measurably, due to flex in the motherboard, wearing down of moving parts, static buildup...it happens,
Obviously you know nothing about electronics. Now shut the fuck up about "computers slowing down." The only moving parts in a PC are the hard drive and cooling fans. The hard drive doesn't "slow down" because of the wear on the mechanism. Now run along while the adults discuss the topic.
More specifically, Virus doesn't make a lot of sense to pluralize as Latin since it's not a noun representing a single discreet thing.
Surely you mean "discrete."
Ford was far from a hero, he was a virulent anti-semite nazi sympathizer.
MOD UP.
You're denying the presence of a gun control lobby on what grounds, exactly?
The gun-control lobby exists. Its impact is dwarfed by that of the NRA.
So who exactly is more powerful?
That's just because you seem to be a reasonable person. Powerful interests are working hard to disarm this country.
That must be some yummmmmmmmmmy Kool-Aid you're drinking there, Bob.
Thanks Captain Assumption, but that doesn't work for me either.
I sell directly, or through app stores with a more reasonable take with regard to retail sales. More often I write specific apps for customers though.
So your particular niche doesn't involve the standard consumer. Bully for you. The point still stands.
So then explain why all of the other smart phone touch-screen interfaces are essentially clones of the iPhone interface?
You obviously haven't used Android or BlackberryOS or WP7 then because they are absolutely not clones of the iphone interface, they are not just 'buttons on the homescreen' like the iphone is. I'd be interested to know how you come to the conclusion that the competitors have cloned the iOS interface.
OK, perhaps "clone" is too strong a word. How about, "Wow, this really looks highly similar to the iPhone interface? Couldn't they think of anything different?"
Now do that math with Photoshop.
As a developer I can say with certainty that I'd never promote any of my apps through a store that takes 30%.
No, you'd just wholesale them to a retail outlet that will sell the product at 100% markup.