Yeah, that's the joke of these systems. They are completely insecure and utter failures at actually being CAPTCHAs. Common sense should be enough to determine this, but apparently it's not. Ad-based CAPTCHAs are one of the most ridiculous scams I've seen for a long time.
Bitcoin cannot support secure offline payments. That makes it all the more difficult to hide the fact that you are using Bitcoin, unlike using paper money.
It can actually. You just need to obtain confidence that your counterparty is not double spending in some manner other than online broadcast to a timestamping network. For example, your counterparty may have some secure hardware that is capable of remote attestation. Once the transaction is signed and given to you, your confidence in the money is determined by how difficult you think it is to attack the secure chip.
In practice, these sorts of chips can be made very secure indeed. EMV (chip-n-pin) cards have used them for many years. The attacks on EMV are never on the chips themselves but always on the vastly overcomplex protocol, or the terminals, or socially engineering the cards owners. But breaking the hardware? Doesn't happen. So unless your counterparty happens to be called Chris Tarnovsky, it'd probably work well enough for everyday use.
It appears the ScatterBytes creator actually replied to your comment and asked for advice/help on implementing Bitcoin payments, so I'm not sure you should say his "level of unthinking oversight is absolutely embarassing". Perhaps if you'd helped randallman, they'd be accepting Bitcoin already.
What he quoted doesn't "ruin his argument". Bitcoins are no more an investment scheme than domain names are. Sure, you can camp on domain names and hope they go up in value. That does not make the DNS a ponzi scheme.
There are multiple ways to allow humans to modify the code safely, but yes, it's one of the parts of the idea that needs more fleshing out. In the wiki page I proposed the use of TPMs and trusted computing technology to help resolve some of these issues - you can have a small immutable core that handles the money which can't be changed, and then human upgrades can be limited to things like optimizing the web UI, the install scripts, etc... things which can't steal the money. You can also run human-provided code inside sandboxes all the time (not simulated), for instance using Java/.NET code access security, or using a JavaScript interpreter, that way the unknown/untrusted code can be prevented from doing things it's not supposed to do, like network access. In short, I think there are ways to make limited adaptation and improvement possible.
The idea that deflation leads to depression was proven to be false back in 2004. The "Bitcoin has a flawed economic design" argument is wrong and I will keep posting this study on Slashdot until it gets modded up and people read it.
Er, do you really think PayPal will allow accounts that are not owned by a human? Can you even do everything on PayPal via an API? PayPal sucks even for people due to rampant account freezes and buyer fraud, I can't even imagine how unfriendly an environment it'd be for programs. Especially given that file hosting costs are likely to be micropayment sized.
Some time ago Gregory Maxwell proposed the idea of autonomous programs that maintain their own Bitcoin wallet. He gave the concrete example of StorJ, a program that provides encrypted file hosting capacity a la MEGA. By buying server time from VPS providers and re-selling services, purchasing advertising via ad networks that offer APIs, hiring humans to improve their code and spawning children that grow up and compete with the parents in the market, StorJ would be the first artificial life form truly worthy of the name. I enclose a copy of his proposal below for your perusal. I also wrote a wiki page on the concept where I explore the relevance of trusted computing and TPM chips to this use.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
StorJ (pronounced Storage)
Consider a simple drop-box style file service with pay per use via bitcoin. (perhaps with naming provided via namecoin and/or tor hidden services)
Want to share a file? send at least enough coin to pay for 24 hours of hosting and one download then send the file. Every day of storage and every byte transferred counts against the balance and when the balance becomes negative no downloads are allowed. If it stays negative too long the file is deleted. Anyone can pay to keep a file online.
(additional services like escrow can also easily be offered, but thats not the point of this document)
Well engineered, a simple site like this provides a service which requires no maintenance and is always in demand.
Many hosting services are coming online that accept bitcoin, they all have electronic interfaces to provision and pay for services. Some even have nice APIs.
An instance of the site could be programmed to automatically spawn another instance of itself on another hosting service, automatically paid for out of its revenue. If the new site is successful it could use its earnings to propagate further. Because instances adapt their pricing models based on their operating costs, some would be more competitive than others.
By reproducing it improves availability and expands capacity.
StorJ instances can purchase other resources that it needs: it can use APIs to talk to namecoin exchanges in order to buy namecoin for conversion into DNS names, or purchase graphic design via bitcoin gateways to mechanical turk. (Through A/B testing it can measure the effectiveness of a design without actually understanding it itself).
StorJ instances could also purchase advertising for itself. (though the limited number of bitcoin friendly ad networks makes this hard right now)
StorJ is not able to find new hosting environments on its own, due to a lack of sufficiently powerful AI— but it can purchase the knowledge from humans: When an instance of StorJ is ready to reproduce it can announce a request for proposal: Who will make the best offer for a script that tells it how to load itself onto a new hosting environment and tells it all the things it needs to know how to survive on its own there? Each offer is a proposed investment: The offerer puts up the complete cost of spawning a new instance and then some: StorJ isn't smart enough to judge bad proposals on its own— instead it forms agreements that make it unprofitable to cheat.
When a new instance is spawned on an untested service StorJ pays only the minimum required to get it started and then runs a battery of tests to make sure that its child is correctly operating.
Assuming that it passes it starts directing customers to the new instance and the child pays a share of its profits: First it proxies them, so it can observe the behavior, later it directs it outright. If the child fails to pay, or the customers complain, StorJ-parent uses its access to terminate the child and it keeps the funds for itself. When the child had operated enough to prove itself, storj p
How has custom hardware helped out the XBox? just solder a mod-chip on the motherboard and now you can run unsigned code.
Actually, mod chips like that were impossible to create for the bulk of the 360s existence, and measurements of piracy rates of the same game on 360 vs PC showed that piracy was dramatically less of a problem on the console platforms. So presumably it paid off for them.
Oddly enough I was just talking with my brother about this problem yesterday. He sells high end music sample libraries. He worked hard on the last release and the sales more or less pay his rent, which takes the pressure off for his main job (contract music production). Unfortunately for the sampler that he targets the copy protection was not very good and recently got cracked. It's very likely that his sales will now fall to the point where his rent is no longer reliably covered. He was asking me what it'd take to make a competitor to that sampler tool and the main competitive advantage would be stronger DRM. Sample libraries at that level require fairly complex programs to make them work so a form of always-online authorization could feasibly work (I have a fair bit of experience in software obfuscation). Now whether anyone will actually do it, hard to say, but the frustration the people in his industry feel about this is very real. Everyone knows no DRM will last forever, but whilst it does, it sure does help put the mind at ease.
Here's the explanation given, and apparently some Harvard professor finds it credible:
“I say this with certainty that the monkey is in good health and the space flight didn’t have any physical effect on Pishgam,” Ebrahimi said. “Some of the photos released by one of news agencies were not related to the time of flight. They were archive photos of the monkeys being prepared for the launch.”
Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks rocket launchings and space activity, also said this week’s monkey space flight was real, but he had a slightly different explanation for the photo mix-up. He claimed the light gray monkey with the mole died during a failed space mission in 2011.
“The monkey with the mole was the one launched in 2011 that died. The rocket failed. It did not get into space,” McDowell said. “They just mixed that footage with the footage of the 2013 successful launch.”
This sounds plausible to me. My experience of working with news agencies in the west is that they're extremely flaky and news stories are always published in a rush with absolutely minimal fact checking. I'd be surprised if things were much better in Iran. This is hardly
In an ironic meta-fail the article also says, Iran has never confirmed that a monkey died in 2011, or that there was a failed mission that yearbut that does not appear to be correct.
In short, this entire article can be summed up as, "news organization publishes story with some details incorrect, follows up with corrections" - is it really newsworthy?
Hmm. What that article actually says is that a western news organization ran an image that they claimed they found on an Iranian news website, but when that Iranian site was checked later the same day no such image was found - the unaltered original was found there though.
In fact, nobody has been able to find the altered image being served by Iranian media anywhere, it seems. So it ends up being "he said she said". That's why the article says
So far, though, it can’t be said with any certainty whether there is any official Iranian involvement in this instance. Sepah apparently published the three-missile version of the image today without further explanation.
There could be any number of explanations for that, including a patriotic but rogue photographer on the Iranian side, or even some kind of Western propaganda. I'm very doubtful that AFP has been compromised, it's more likely it was done by the Iranians, but unfortunately there is a history of absurdly flaky forgeries that support the case for war against middle eastern countries surfacing through the press. At any rate, it's impossible to conclude from this that there's some kind of systematic Iranian policy of photoshopping news images.
because the warmongering is only on one side, and the iranian regime are peace loving hippies
Given that Iran hasn't invaded any country within living memory and the US/Israel are constantly banging the war drums, I'd say that's a pretty fair summary, yes.
no way are they chanting death to america in iran. no way are they helping the assad regime and other organizations in the middle east intent on killing civilians
You realize that a whole lot of people all around the world don't like the US government very much, right? Including in places like Canada and Europe. The Iraq war triggered the largest mass protests in history. It's hardly unique to Iran, especially given the history of US oppression they have. And "helping other organizations in the middle east intent on killing civilians" could easily describe the USA too couldn't it.
Wake up. Iran isn't going to do jack shit to anyone if left alone. The belief that it's some kind of existential threat that has to be contained at all costs is a fiction created by two war-like states that need to justify their paranoid and bloated military spending.
Now, what are we going to do for a living after everything's been automated?
Not everything will be automated. There are many types of jobs, anything creative for instance, that automation has had absolutely no impact on at all so far and it's difficult to see how it might change. I don't see many robot artists, do you?
What can happen is that low prices push up demand for things that would once have been a luxury. I commissioned an artist to draw a cartoon of my brother for his birthday. It's remarkably cheap for something hand made by a professional, just a few hundred dollars. Go back 50 years and the whole idea would have been preposterous but technology means I was able to find the right guy, contact him, pay him and receive the finished product (as a vector file no less) only days later. Win!
Now what can and should happen, maybe, is that over time people do less and less work for the same quality of living. Our current economic system has real problems with this state of affairs. Partly because some things like the 9-5 work week are culturally ingrained in us from birth, and partly because many people don't have the right skills to get ANY work, let alone "less than what they may have done 10 years ago". I blame the university system, there is little or no attempt to connect the things people are taught as young adults with the skills actually being demanded by the market, but everyone is told they need a degree. So you end up with lots of people who study worthless topics.
The article states that computer programmers are one of the industries where high paying jobs are being added fast - OK then, so why the fuck were there only 60 people on my computer science class 7 years ago, of which exactly zero were women? Oh right, because the vast majority of people at that university were studying subjects with little or no market demand outside of teaching. And then people wonder why unemployment amongst the young is so high. Maybe the majority of all students at that university should have been studying a strong vocational software engineering course?
France has a 10%+ and growing unemployment rate. The idea behind a shorter working week is not "the entire country works less", the idea is that the work which does exist is distributed more evenly over the population. So people work less, but more people work, and because everything is so damn efficient and cheap the quality of life can still be pretty good.
That isn't likely to happen in a place like France because laws make hiring and especially firing people very difficult. So if you have some work that really needs 1.2 man weeks per week, the incentives are all wrong - instead of hiring two people to work part time and ensuring neither is overloaded, it makes far more sense to push the existing employee harder (and pay overtime if need be) because that way you hugely reduce your management risk. If you hire a second employee with the intention of having both work part time and it turns out the second employee can't handle the work, or is lazy or doesn't get on with the team or the amount of work to do unexpectedly drops it's hard to let go of them again. So it's best to not grow unless you really have to. And if you can use a machine, even better, even if that machine is perhaps not quite as good or flexible as a human might have been. You can switch the machine off when the order book is thin. No such equivalent for a person.
I love the idea of a 4-day working week, but when I think through the implications, I can't escape the feeling that labor markets would have to be radically deregulated for it to work. Employing lots more people to work less just increases the risk of personell problems so dramatically.
The article says: In the U.S., the economic recovery that started in June 2009 has been called the third straight "jobless recovery."
But that's a misnomer. The jobs came back after the first two.
Most recessions since World War II were followed by a surge in new jobs as consumers started spending again and companies hired to meet the new demand. In the months after recessions ended in 1991 and 2001, there was no familiar snap-back, but all the jobs had returned in less than three years.
That is not the case. The ratio of working age men who actually work has steadily fallen since the 50s (in the USA). After each recession it plunged and then recovered.... but not to the original levels. Data.
Anyway, whilst I'm sympathetic to the general topic and find the idea fascinating, the article has a lot of other questionable statements in it. Like this one: Even the most commonplace technologies — take, say, email — are making it tough for workers to get jobs. That's obviously wrong. Email and the net allow people to find employers around the world whereas before they might have been limited to their local area. Heck, I hired a commission artist just two days ago, I initiated contact via email.
But you still have to fill them out. The US tax code is one of the worlds most complicated. And if you failed to do it in previous years, when the rules weren't enforced and many people didn't even know about these policies, you can be fined so much your entire life savings evaporate. I've read multiple stories of this happening.
Regardless, my other points still stand. The US dollar has been in long term decline. I am not a rich businessman by any means, I am a software engineer in my 20s and in my local currency I earn over the equivalent of $170k. So if I were unlucky enough to be born American I'd have to give up taxes to Uncle Sam in return for absolutely nothing. Assuming, of course, that I could actually find a bank who would take me.
If a rich person spends as much as a poor person does, and the rest sits as cash never to be used, then are they really rich? Bear in mind the government will progressively take away more and more of the rich mans savings every year through inflation anyway.
$90,000 sounded like a lot when Congress set that amount back in the 70s, but the dollar has been steadily in decline for decades. Here is a graph relative to the Swiss Franc. People who would have been considered incredibly rich by meeting this standard back when it was set are now merely normal people earning in a currency stronger than the dollar.
The real problem with trying to tax people who don't actually live in your country is the logistics of it. How can you do that? America's approach is to try and force every financial institution in the world to become unpaid agents of the IRS by using economic sanctions (recursively applied). This is causing a gigantic mess - many countries have privacy laws that conflict with the USAs demands, and the complexity of US paperwork is legendary. So many banks and so on choose the simplest option afforded to them - identify and terminate the accounts of any "US persons". This is easier said than done, the US tries to tax dual citizens as well, so just because a customer presented a British passport (for example) does not mean it's safe to give them an account. Nightmarish.
US citizens working abroad can enjoy the comfort of an embassy and US Marines protecting them in times of war and/or crisis. Hell, they'll even evacuate you back to the US if the shit really hits the fan. I'd pay my taxes for that, especially if I was working somewhere that's dangerous.
Are you shitting me? The US military spends its time blowing up goat herders in Afghanistan. If you live in Germany, that is really the least helpful thing they could be doing. And if you live abroad then it's going to be the local army defending you, not a foreign one.
Also FYI the US will not evacuate you for free "if the shit hits the fan" (which for the vast majority of expats it won't) - you get landed with the bill.
Departure assistance is expensive. U.S. law 22 U.S.C. 2671(b) (2) (A) requires that any departure assistance be provided “on a reimbursable basis to the maximum extent practicable.” This means that evacuation costs are ultimately your responsibility; you will be asked to sign a form promising to repay the U.S. government. We charge you the equivalent of a full coach fare on commercial air at the time that commercial options cease to be a viable option. You will be taken to a nearby safe location, where the traveler will need to make his or her own onward travel arrangements. If you are destitute, and private resources are not available to cover the cost of onward travel, you may be eligible for emergency financial assistance.
The loopholes exist because of the economic benefits. RTFA, the USA is the only economy in the developed world to try to tax foreign earned income the same as domestically earned income. This is true for citizens and green card holders too, by the way, which places US citizens into the unique and perverse situation of moving abroad and still paying Uncle Sam taxes, despite getting no services for that tax.
For US persons, this is merely an unfair affront to basic common sense. For US companies it's the difference between being competitive or being double taxed into total lack of competitive-ness. So these "loopholes" as you call them have been around for a long time and don't get closed because they're the thing that's keeping US business on a level playing field with the rest of the world.
You're right that the US tax system should be simplified and loopholes removed. If the US gave up on trying to tax income regardless of where it was earned, it'd be the same as every other tax system and there'd be no need to maintain these "loopholes", they'd just go away naturally. Also, US companies would be more likely to spend foreign earned money in the USA because there'd be no double taxation. And US citizens would not be trapped by the financial "Berlin Wall" that is resulting in them being systematically evicted from the worlds financial institutions. It'd be a win all round, but of course, nobody in Congress is talking about doing that because it'd be revenue neutral.
A 99% exit tax would be considered capital controls, and those are illegal in the EU. They're illegal exactly because in the past they were used by abusive governments to stop people leaving. Incidentally, the US charges an exit tax for people who try to give up citizenship, did you know that? And they also try to tax citizens wherever they live in the world!
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's the joke of these systems. They are completely insecure and utter failures at actually being CAPTCHAs. Common sense should be enough to determine this, but apparently it's not. Ad-based CAPTCHAs are one of the most ridiculous scams I've seen for a long time.
It can actually. You just need to obtain confidence that your counterparty is not double spending in some manner other than online broadcast to a timestamping network. For example, your counterparty may have some secure hardware that is capable of remote attestation. Once the transaction is signed and given to you, your confidence in the money is determined by how difficult you think it is to attack the secure chip.
In practice, these sorts of chips can be made very secure indeed. EMV (chip-n-pin) cards have used them for many years. The attacks on EMV are never on the chips themselves but always on the vastly overcomplex protocol, or the terminals, or socially engineering the cards owners. But breaking the hardware? Doesn't happen. So unless your counterparty happens to be called Chris Tarnovsky, it'd probably work well enough for everyday use.
It appears the ScatterBytes creator actually replied to your comment and asked for advice/help on implementing Bitcoin payments, so I'm not sure you should say his "level of unthinking oversight is absolutely embarassing". Perhaps if you'd helped randallman, they'd be accepting Bitcoin already.
What he quoted doesn't "ruin his argument". Bitcoins are no more an investment scheme than domain names are. Sure, you can camp on domain names and hope they go up in value. That does not make the DNS a ponzi scheme.
There are multiple ways to allow humans to modify the code safely, but yes, it's one of the parts of the idea that needs more fleshing out. In the wiki page I proposed the use of TPMs and trusted computing technology to help resolve some of these issues - you can have a small immutable core that handles the money which can't be changed, and then human upgrades can be limited to things like optimizing the web UI, the install scripts, etc ... things which can't steal the money. You can also run human-provided code inside sandboxes all the time (not simulated), for instance using Java/.NET code access security, or using a JavaScript interpreter, that way the unknown/untrusted code can be prevented from doing things it's not supposed to do, like network access. In short, I think there are ways to make limited adaptation and improvement possible.
The idea that deflation leads to depression was proven to be false back in 2004. The "Bitcoin has a flawed economic design" argument is wrong and I will keep posting this study on Slashdot until it gets modded up and people read it.
Er, do you really think PayPal will allow accounts that are not owned by a human? Can you even do everything on PayPal via an API? PayPal sucks even for people due to rampant account freezes and buyer fraud, I can't even imagine how unfriendly an environment it'd be for programs. Especially given that file hosting costs are likely to be micropayment sized.
Some time ago Gregory Maxwell proposed the idea of autonomous programs that maintain their own Bitcoin wallet. He gave the concrete example of StorJ, a program that provides encrypted file hosting capacity a la MEGA. By buying server time from VPS providers and re-selling services, purchasing advertising via ad networks that offer APIs, hiring humans to improve their code and spawning children that grow up and compete with the parents in the market, StorJ would be the first artificial life form truly worthy of the name. I enclose a copy of his proposal below for your perusal. I also wrote a wiki page on the concept where I explore the relevance of trusted computing and TPM chips to this use.
Yes, you are. The samples were recorded by the people who made the sample library. So your point is invalid.
Actually, mod chips like that were impossible to create for the bulk of the 360s existence, and measurements of piracy rates of the same game on 360 vs PC showed that piracy was dramatically less of a problem on the console platforms. So presumably it paid off for them.
Oddly enough I was just talking with my brother about this problem yesterday. He sells high end music sample libraries. He worked hard on the last release and the sales more or less pay his rent, which takes the pressure off for his main job (contract music production). Unfortunately for the sampler that he targets the copy protection was not very good and recently got cracked. It's very likely that his sales will now fall to the point where his rent is no longer reliably covered. He was asking me what it'd take to make a competitor to that sampler tool and the main competitive advantage would be stronger DRM. Sample libraries at that level require fairly complex programs to make them work so a form of always-online authorization could feasibly work (I have a fair bit of experience in software obfuscation). Now whether anyone will actually do it, hard to say, but the frustration the people in his industry feel about this is very real. Everyone knows no DRM will last forever, but whilst it does, it sure does help put the mind at ease.
Iran isn't "always threatening them". When was the last time Iran threatened to invade the USA?
Here's the explanation given, and apparently some Harvard professor finds it credible:
This sounds plausible to me. My experience of working with news agencies in the west is that they're extremely flaky and news stories are always published in a rush with absolutely minimal fact checking. I'd be surprised if things were much better in Iran. This is hardly
In an ironic meta-fail the article also says, Iran has never confirmed that a monkey died in 2011, or that there was a failed mission that year but that does not appear to be correct.
In short, this entire article can be summed up as, "news organization publishes story with some details incorrect, follows up with corrections" - is it really newsworthy?
Hmm. What that article actually says is that a western news organization ran an image that they claimed they found on an Iranian news website, but when that Iranian site was checked later the same day no such image was found - the unaltered original was found there though.
In fact, nobody has been able to find the altered image being served by Iranian media anywhere, it seems. So it ends up being "he said she said". That's why the article says
There could be any number of explanations for that, including a patriotic but rogue photographer on the Iranian side, or even some kind of Western propaganda. I'm very doubtful that AFP has been compromised, it's more likely it was done by the Iranians, but unfortunately there is a history of absurdly flaky forgeries that support the case for war against middle eastern countries surfacing through the press. At any rate, it's impossible to conclude from this that there's some kind of systematic Iranian policy of photoshopping news images.
Given that Iran hasn't invaded any country within living memory and the US/Israel are constantly banging the war drums, I'd say that's a pretty fair summary, yes.
You realize that a whole lot of people all around the world don't like the US government very much, right? Including in places like Canada and Europe. The Iraq war triggered the largest mass protests in history. It's hardly unique to Iran, especially given the history of US oppression they have. And "helping other organizations in the middle east intent on killing civilians" could easily describe the USA too couldn't it.
Wake up. Iran isn't going to do jack shit to anyone if left alone. The belief that it's some kind of existential threat that has to be contained at all costs is a fiction created by two war-like states that need to justify their paranoid and bloated military spending.
They already did, look at UIGEA.
Delivering mail is by no means a middle-class job. Sorry. That's working class. It doesn't get less skilled than that.
Not everything will be automated. There are many types of jobs, anything creative for instance, that automation has had absolutely no impact on at all so far and it's difficult to see how it might change. I don't see many robot artists, do you?
What can happen is that low prices push up demand for things that would once have been a luxury. I commissioned an artist to draw a cartoon of my brother for his birthday. It's remarkably cheap for something hand made by a professional, just a few hundred dollars. Go back 50 years and the whole idea would have been preposterous but technology means I was able to find the right guy, contact him, pay him and receive the finished product (as a vector file no less) only days later. Win!
Now what can and should happen, maybe, is that over time people do less and less work for the same quality of living. Our current economic system has real problems with this state of affairs. Partly because some things like the 9-5 work week are culturally ingrained in us from birth, and partly because many people don't have the right skills to get ANY work, let alone "less than what they may have done 10 years ago". I blame the university system, there is little or no attempt to connect the things people are taught as young adults with the skills actually being demanded by the market, but everyone is told they need a degree. So you end up with lots of people who study worthless topics.
The article states that computer programmers are one of the industries where high paying jobs are being added fast - OK then, so why the fuck were there only 60 people on my computer science class 7 years ago, of which exactly zero were women? Oh right, because the vast majority of people at that university were studying subjects with little or no market demand outside of teaching. And then people wonder why unemployment amongst the young is so high. Maybe the majority of all students at that university should have been studying a strong vocational software engineering course?
France has a 10%+ and growing unemployment rate. The idea behind a shorter working week is not "the entire country works less", the idea is that the work which does exist is distributed more evenly over the population. So people work less, but more people work, and because everything is so damn efficient and cheap the quality of life can still be pretty good.
That isn't likely to happen in a place like France because laws make hiring and especially firing people very difficult. So if you have some work that really needs 1.2 man weeks per week, the incentives are all wrong - instead of hiring two people to work part time and ensuring neither is overloaded, it makes far more sense to push the existing employee harder (and pay overtime if need be) because that way you hugely reduce your management risk. If you hire a second employee with the intention of having both work part time and it turns out the second employee can't handle the work, or is lazy or doesn't get on with the team or the amount of work to do unexpectedly drops it's hard to let go of them again. So it's best to not grow unless you really have to. And if you can use a machine, even better, even if that machine is perhaps not quite as good or flexible as a human might have been. You can switch the machine off when the order book is thin. No such equivalent for a person.
I love the idea of a 4-day working week, but when I think through the implications, I can't escape the feeling that labor markets would have to be radically deregulated for it to work. Employing lots more people to work less just increases the risk of personell problems so dramatically.
The article says: In the U.S., the economic recovery that started in June 2009 has been called the third straight "jobless recovery." But that's a misnomer. The jobs came back after the first two. Most recessions since World War II were followed by a surge in new jobs as consumers started spending again and companies hired to meet the new demand. In the months after recessions ended in 1991 and 2001, there was no familiar snap-back, but all the jobs had returned in less than three years.
That is not the case. The ratio of working age men who actually work has steadily fallen since the 50s (in the USA). After each recession it plunged and then recovered .... but not to the original levels. Data.
Anyway, whilst I'm sympathetic to the general topic and find the idea fascinating, the article has a lot of other questionable statements in it. Like this one: Even the most commonplace technologies — take, say, email — are making it tough for workers to get jobs. That's obviously wrong. Email and the net allow people to find employers around the world whereas before they might have been limited to their local area. Heck, I hired a commission artist just two days ago, I initiated contact via email.
But you still have to fill them out. The US tax code is one of the worlds most complicated. And if you failed to do it in previous years, when the rules weren't enforced and many people didn't even know about these policies, you can be fined so much your entire life savings evaporate. I've read multiple stories of this happening.
Regardless, my other points still stand. The US dollar has been in long term decline. I am not a rich businessman by any means, I am a software engineer in my 20s and in my local currency I earn over the equivalent of $170k. So if I were unlucky enough to be born American I'd have to give up taxes to Uncle Sam in return for absolutely nothing. Assuming, of course, that I could actually find a bank who would take me.
If a rich person spends as much as a poor person does, and the rest sits as cash never to be used, then are they really rich? Bear in mind the government will progressively take away more and more of the rich mans savings every year through inflation anyway.
$90,000 sounded like a lot when Congress set that amount back in the 70s, but the dollar has been steadily in decline for decades. Here is a graph relative to the Swiss Franc. People who would have been considered incredibly rich by meeting this standard back when it was set are now merely normal people earning in a currency stronger than the dollar.
The real problem with trying to tax people who don't actually live in your country is the logistics of it. How can you do that? America's approach is to try and force every financial institution in the world to become unpaid agents of the IRS by using economic sanctions (recursively applied). This is causing a gigantic mess - many countries have privacy laws that conflict with the USAs demands, and the complexity of US paperwork is legendary. So many banks and so on choose the simplest option afforded to them - identify and terminate the accounts of any "US persons". This is easier said than done, the US tries to tax dual citizens as well, so just because a customer presented a British passport (for example) does not mean it's safe to give them an account. Nightmarish.
Are you shitting me? The US military spends its time blowing up goat herders in Afghanistan. If you live in Germany, that is really the least helpful thing they could be doing. And if you live abroad then it's going to be the local army defending you, not a foreign one.
Also FYI the US will not evacuate you for free "if the shit hits the fan" (which for the vast majority of expats it won't) - you get landed with the bill.
The loopholes exist because of the economic benefits. RTFA, the USA is the only economy in the developed world to try to tax foreign earned income the same as domestically earned income. This is true for citizens and green card holders too, by the way, which places US citizens into the unique and perverse situation of moving abroad and still paying Uncle Sam taxes, despite getting no services for that tax.
For US persons, this is merely an unfair affront to basic common sense. For US companies it's the difference between being competitive or being double taxed into total lack of competitive-ness. So these "loopholes" as you call them have been around for a long time and don't get closed because they're the thing that's keeping US business on a level playing field with the rest of the world.
You're right that the US tax system should be simplified and loopholes removed. If the US gave up on trying to tax income regardless of where it was earned, it'd be the same as every other tax system and there'd be no need to maintain these "loopholes", they'd just go away naturally. Also, US companies would be more likely to spend foreign earned money in the USA because there'd be no double taxation. And US citizens would not be trapped by the financial "Berlin Wall" that is resulting in them being systematically evicted from the worlds financial institutions. It'd be a win all round, but of course, nobody in Congress is talking about doing that because it'd be revenue neutral.
A 99% exit tax would be considered capital controls, and those are illegal in the EU. They're illegal exactly because in the past they were used by abusive governments to stop people leaving. Incidentally, the US charges an exit tax for people who try to give up citizenship, did you know that? And they also try to tax citizens wherever they live in the world!