Personally I feel that the GPLv3 could be a huge threat to Freesoftware, i think things like anti-DRM should be in a separate license that developers can choose for their own software and not forced onto the end users through the userspace tools
Licenses, especially free licenses, should give permissions, not take rights away. I support a license which allows users to legally circumvent DRM, not one which prohibits users from implementing DRM. Giving users the right to legally circumvent DRM should be enough anyway - it only takes one person to crack the DRM and distribute the cracked version to everyone.
I guess the FSF *will* use the GPL 3 for the new GNU tools version, if they prevent Novell from *distributing* the GNU tools, then I guess things will get difficult for Novell.
At the point where the FSF goes from GPL2 or any later version to GPL3 or any later version, Novell can fork the tools. But either way I don't think the FSF can prevent Novell from *distributing* the GNU tools. Don't they have the right to do that under the doctrine of first sale?
I will point out, though, that gifts are taxable if they exceed some amount - I think it is $12,000 these days.
Gifts are taxed, as gifts, to the person who gave the gift. They are not taxed, as income, to the recipient. I think you're right on the $12,000, but I'd have to look it up to be sure.
Again, I agree with you that the income tax system is not desirable. That said, we have it, and so I would like it to at least be as equitable as possible.
Fair enough. I don't actually agree with this, as I see it similar to saying that "we have pickpocketing, so we should make sure everyone gets pickpocketed equally", but if you're sure you want to take that position with regard to taxes I can accept it. After all, there is a certain belief that taxes go to benefit the public, which is at least somewhat tenable (personally I look at the wars which are fought using tax money, and the people who are put in jail for victimless crimes using tax money, and make the opposite conclusion). Anyway, I'm going to go with your desire to be as equitable as possible, and I still think there's a good argument for exempting contest winnings.
To that end, I feel like government should collect the same amount of revenue whether or not a contest occurs. You make many very good points, but someone still has to fill the government's coffers, and I really don't see why someone who did nothing to win a prize should be worthy of an exemption of the rules that we all play by.
OK, but if you want to be fair, what about when a gift occurs? The way I see it, a contest is more like a gift than a paycheck, and gifts aren't taxed as income.
I have no idea how the government currently calculates the value of a prize. Fair market value is certainly an option - personally I think it should be taxed at whatever the contest promoter writes off on his taxes.
In this particular case, the amount being written off by the contest promoter is probably equal to the fair market value, because the contest promoter probably isn't getting any discount off the market price. The IRS will probably take the position that the value of the prize is equal to the fair market value. There are a couple cases from several decades ago where the courts allowed a lower valuation in similar situations (a prize of a non-transferable cruise), so I'm not going to say one way or another what I think the proper valuation under the law is (unless one of the prize winners feels like paying me a whole lot of money for written advice).
Your ideas about keeping a "flat" tax and then working out separate welfare-type programs makes a lot of sense, especially since the government just ends up running those kinds of programs anyway.
Thank you. And in case you've read me wrong please understand that while my ideas are radical I don't seriously suggest that we adopt all of them overnight. In reality I favor a gradual movement in this direction, which needs to be re-evaluated along the way as problems arise. I know I'm dead wrong a lot of the time, and I know that when things change drastically a lot of unintended consequences arise.
A guy who works really hard for $135,000 will pay about 1/3 of that in taxes. Why should some guy who does absolutely nothing come along and get $135,000 and not have to pay a dime?
Because two wrongs don't make a right?
That's enough reason for me, but maybe you want a more limited exception. What's so utterly egregious about this particular case is that the prize is a non-transferable service. So a more limited exemption would be for prizes of non-transferable services. Or you could go a little bit more broadly, and limit the taxation to the amount that the prize recipient could receive by reselling the prize (which in the case of non-transferable services would be $0).
I agree that a blown up car is a "loophole" in income tax, but I'd argue that it is too small of one to bother filling.
Actually, I don't think it's a loophole at all.
I'm not aware of any example of this having happened, and it certainly doesn't happen on the same scale as give-aways.
Movie productions blow up cars and/or push them over cliffs all the time. And lots of other businesses destroy products during the course of their business.
As for the auto dealer using the car and thus writing it off, they are just an end user like any other business user - there just happens to be a coincidence that they are using a car and also happen to sell cars. If the use of the car helps to provide more taxable revenue, then the government is ultimately a winner.
OK, but isn't that the same situation we have with the trip to space? The rocket ride is being given away to advertise for the company, it is being done to provide more taxable revenue.
Also, the depreciation schedule for a car is something like 5 years, so they won't be able to just claim the entire cost of the car on one tax return as they could by giving it away in a contest.
Sure, but the car is going to last 5 years. The trip to space is closer to 5 hours (random guess, but it's short). The gasoline for the car is used up more quickly, and gets to be written off immediately. But again, the gasoline doesn't go into the final product, it is a general expenditure.
Income tax sucks, but so do property taxes.
It sucks to pay property taxes, but I'd much rather live in a world with property taxes than one without them. I can't say the same for income taxes.
Income tax sucks, but so do property taxes. Property taxes are especially harsh on people with fixed or no incomes. Excise taxes are better, IMHO, but regressive if applied to certain items. For instance, you'd better subsidize public transit if you are going to tax gasoline - you just made it more expensive for the poor to get to work!
I don't think it makes sense to mix social welfare programs with tax breaks like that. If you want to help poor people get to work, give them rebates for free public transit, don't change the gasoline tax. If someone is disabled and can't work, give them housing credits, don't lower everyone's property taxes. If someone neglected saving enough money for retirement, or didn't use birth control and had 8 kids...well, those are tough ones, but whatever we decide to do to help them it doesn't make sense to mess with everybody else's tax rates too.
The fact is that the employer can sue even if he has little or no basis for the suit and the OP will have to pay money to defend himself. If you don't show up to defend yourself in court, even a generally baseless lawsuit can win in court.
Actually a lawsuit which is completely baseless won't even make it to court. But let's say they come up with some ridiculous argument which gets into court. Wow, so he has to pay the bus fare to the courthouse. He'd probably be able to get three times that much back in a countersuit.
Many frivolous lawsuits are filed each year and the consequences for doing so are few and far between.
All the frivolous lawsuits I've ever heard about have had pretty severe penalties attached to them. Then again, they were frivolous lawsuits against the government...
Lots of things are illegal but that doesn't make you safe from them or make them uncommon.
Exactly. In Germany you can shoot anyone for any reason.
Does it really matter if we elect a candidate who got 47% of the vote instead of what that got 48%? If we really want to fix the electoral system we need to figure out why the hell so many people voted for George W. Bush a second time after he screwed up so bad the first time. Everything else pales in comparison to that.
In America, you can ruin/make the life miserable for/generally fsck up a person (or even a company) by suing them repeatedly, even if you lose every time, as long as your budget for legal fees is bigger than theirs.
Maybe in some rare instances this is possible, but not in general.
The lawsuits don't need to be frivolous, they just need to be baseless, but not baseless enough that they're thrown out immediately.
If you repeatedly sue someone for a baseless reason, surely the judge will award legal fees to that person. And if the lawsuit really is baseless, then your legal fees don't need to be very large in the first place.
I think you're confusing baseless lawsuits with lawsuits which are based on quite a bit of reason, but ultimately fail. These types of disputes can be expensive for both parties, to be sure, and US law is complicated enough that they do come up with some frequency.
And that statement makes about as much sense as "In Germany you can shoot anyone for any reason." Sure, in America you can sue anyone for anything, but bringing a frivolous lawsuit against someone is not legal.
They were really upset when I insisted on leaving and one week into my last two weeks the V.P. of Sales told me the company was suing me for leaving, and they were also suing my new employer for hiring me.
What did the new employer have to say about this? Are they willing to offer you free legal representation?
Personally I think I'd just ignore what the VP said until I see a formal notice in writing, assuming the new employer agrees that the threats are baseless. I personally wouldn't spend any money hiring a lawyer over such a thing, at least until I get some sort of notice to appear in court, but maybe that's dumb of me.
Yeah, that's the way income tax works... each "value added" bit gets taxed, and you get credit, within limits, for losses.
That works to the extent that the costs of generating the income go into the final product, the costs of goods sold, but doesn't work so well for general expenses that can't be tied to a product, like in this case advertising.
Now, if the car dealer decides to give the car away as a promotion, he is going to write of the cost of the car and thus not pay any tax on it.
But the whole purpose of giving the car away as a promotion is to sell more cars, thus to increase income and profits (which increases income tax). If the car dealership advertised by blowing up the car or pushing it over a cliff, they'd get to write off the cost of the car and thus not pay any tax on it. Moreover, if the car dealership gave the car to an employee who drove it around the country doing business the car would get written off and no one would pay any additional taxes.
Now maybe it's the time to move away from the car analogy and back to the situation at hand. New Scientist wants to sell magazine subscriptions. They think they can do so by essentially blowing stuff up. That they chose someone to come along for the ride doesn't seem to me to be worthy of taxation. Yes, according to the law, it very well might be, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
All this said I'm not quite sure how to reconcile what seems like a terribly flawed law, without destroying the income tax system entirely by opening up loopholes. I guess the rule should be that a non-employee of a company who receives a prize without doing any work for the prize-giver (or by doing a token amount of work like writing an essay on the best patented invention) shouldn't be taxed on that prize. To avoid subversion of the gift-tax rules, in the case of a related-party transfer it would still be taxed as a gift.
But in the end I think it's time to just get rid of the income tax entirely. The whole idea of taxing free trade makes no sense - free trade should be encouraged, not taxed. If I perform a service for you in return for you performing a service for me that doesn't deserve to be taxed, regardless of whether or not money changes hands in between. How then do we pay for the running of the government? Reducing spending should come first. Excise taxes which can be tied to spending should come second (gasoline taxes to pay for the roads and environmental cleanup efforts). And property taxes should come third, though I haven't really decided exactly what property other than real estate should be included. It'd have to be easy to enforce and hard or impossible to avoid using loopholes. Taxing all property fails on the first criterion, and taxing only business property probably fails on the second.
If I were King, I would try to avoid double taxation. In the current system in the U.S., people generally think that they can not pay taxes on something if it has already been taxed, but that is not the case at all. Multiple taxations are commonplace.
VAT taxes and property taxes seem to avoid "multiple taxations" the best.
My company hypes the fact that my medical and dental benefits are paid (by me) pre-tax, but this is not true. It is pre income tax, but I still have to pay social security and medicare tax on it, and those together add up to about 7%.
Why are you paying social security and medicare tax on medical and dental benefits?
The U.S. is commonly known for having on e of the lowest tax rates among the first world nations, but when you add up ALL of the taxes, not just income tax, then it reveals itself as not such a great rate after all.
My family paid about 10% in taxes in 2006, counting FICA and estimating sales taxes at about 2% of my income (remember, sales tax isn't charged on my rent, my food, or my savings). To be fair I suppose I should factor in the property taxes based on what my landlord pays, so let's add 10% for that. A quick calculation of the gasoline taxes I pay gives me a number well under 1%. Am I missing anything? Now, where but Florida "in the first world" can I pay less than 20% of my income in total taxes?
Using the church-raffle car as an example, the problem is that somewhere upstream, the car was written off as a deduction on someone else's taxes. Using the church-raffle car as an example, the problem is that somewhere upstream, the car was written off as a deduction on someone else's taxes. For instance, a car dealership may have given the $20,000 car to the church, and then gotten a $5,000 tax break.
But that car dealership bought the car from the car manufacturer, who had to pay taxes on the income. Incidentally, that's the amount that the car dealership is allowed to deduct, the amount they paid for the car.
I'd regulate things even less. The last mile is the only place where there's any real monopoly power, so that's where I'd focus. Basically, I'd separate out the OSI Layer 1 (physical layer) connections of the local monopolies (telcos, cable, and cell phone companies) from everything else, and then I'd require those physical layer companies to negotiate with the government to establish reasonable fees to resellers. For example, Verizon would be disbanded and reorganized into at least three separate companies, with two of them being highly regulated and one being essentially unregulated. The first company would own the cell phone frequencies and would resell raw bandwidth to the third. The second company would maintain the copper wires and would resell local loops to the third, and the third company would buy bandwidth and rent copper loops from the first two on the exact same terms as anyone else who wanted to get into the game.
There are few sources of bandwidth outside the existing telco infrastructure, and very few companies that control all that.
But I thought the telcos were already required to allow CLECs to buy local loops. These local loops are just copper wires connecting the CLECs to the homes, so they are already network neutral.
What if it's the local government that gets greedy? What if it's the FCC? Or a "tax" on pornographic websites to help cover "filtering costs"?
I'm not saying those would happen or even could happen, but a non-neutral net is a very dangerous tool in the hands of legislators. I'm happy to see legislators willing to legislate power away from themselves for once.
The problem is, we're not talking about a constitutional amendment here. It's just a plain old law, which can be overturned just as easily as it was passed in the first place. So if the government wants to "tax" pornographic websites to help cover "filtering costs", they include verbage in the bill to exempt themselves from the net neutrality laws. In fact, they only need a few words: "notwithstanding the provisions of section whatever..."
By the way, I mentioned the constitution above. Fortunately the constitution has been interpreted to already guarantee that the local government can't "get greedy", in the form of the Commerce Clause.
Peering points are generally pretty powerless anyway, because the number of them grows exponentially with your number of hops from the endpoints. If network neutrality laws serve only to regulate the monopolies providing the physical lines to individual households (and those companies given monopolies over certain radio frequencies), then I don't have a problem with it. But if it tries to go further and regulate all internet providers, even the ones without any inherent monopoly power, then I have to remain strongly opposed.
If this suceeds, I think we basically win the internet freedom war against the telcoms and cable companies
Call me a cynic, but once Congress gets involved I don't have any hope that this legislation will increase freedom for anyone. The only way to truly win freedom from the telecoms and cable companies is to build a network which doesn't rely on telecoms and cable companies.
I don't know about you, but if I had to rely on, for example, a private sector police force to come help when something's happening, I don't think I'd be in the country for much longer.
Do you actually have any stories of times when a public police officer, while on-duty, has helped you? In my experience I think I've got to conclude that my interactions with on-duty police officers, mostly during traffic stops, has been a net negative.
"Your president demands payment for his services. Please send $5,000 per household to the White House immediately, or we'll call Reality Squad and make it a civil war. You have thirty seconds to comply. We do accept Visa and Master Card. Operators are standing by. Thank you, and may God Bless America."
As was pointed out by another poster, this isn't very far from where we currently are. Fortunately, most income taxes aren't imposed on poor people like me, though.
More importantly, who decided that the trip was worth $138,000?
Presumably that's how much Oracle paid for it. In this case the trip is being given away by a different company than the one who is providing the trip.
As for the cost of the trip, it should be based on what Oracle paid for it. The accountants have that trip marked off on a balance sheet somewhere - that should be the value.
But...The company that Oracle paid for the trip has already declared that as income. Why should the income be taxed twice? Because the income tax system makes absolutely no sense, of course!
But at least it does make a little bit of sense. Looking for a precedent in a case like this, I was able to find one... Turner vs. Commissioner. Someone steamship tickets from a radio station. The tickets were non-transferable. The court agreed to value the tickets at only 2/3 of the fair market value, "because [the taxpayers] would not have purchased them for themselves". This is an even more pronounced case of the same thing. Not only would the guy not be willing to purchase the trip for himself at fair market value, he wouldn't even be willing to purchase the trip for 18% of the fair market value.
You can spin it any way you'd like, but in the US, prizes are taxable income, and that's exactly what this is.
You're wrong about the first part. Some prizes are taxable income. Others aren't.
As for the second part, you do seem to be correct as to this particular case.
The reason it wouldn't work to pay him minimum wage to film the trip, is that it is already public knowledge that the trip was given to him as a prize.
Actually, the trip wasn't given to him at all. He declined it. My point was about what they should have done, not what has actually happened.
If the prize had been "Work as a space documentary film maker" with a requirement of the job actually going to space, then they could pay him, and it would be considered part of the job.
My suggestion wasn't that he work as a space documentary film maker, it was that he *appear*, while in space, in some promotional materials. That's what Oracle is running this prize for, promotion, right?
I dunno, the bottom line is this absolutely shouldn't be taxable income, and there must be some way to structure it so it isn't, because the law couldn't possibly be that screwed up.
Disclaimer under IRS Circular 230: Nothing in this post is intended
or written to be used, and it cannot be used, by any taxpayer for the
purpose of avoiding penalties that may be imposed on the taxpayer.
I've got one in the US. It involves the retirement savings credit. When your AGI crosses the magic thresholds into a lower credit, you pay a lot more in taxes. For a married couple, the biggest threshold is at $30,000. For a single person it's at $15,000. Your credit drops from 50% to 20% at these thresholds, which equates to a maximum of a $1200 tax (for a married couple, or $600 for a single person).
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Licenses, especially free licenses, should give permissions, not take rights away. I support a license which allows users to legally circumvent DRM, not one which prohibits users from implementing DRM. Giving users the right to legally circumvent DRM should be enough anyway - it only takes one person to crack the DRM and distribute the cracked version to everyone.
At the point where the FSF goes from GPL2 or any later version to GPL3 or any later version, Novell can fork the tools. But either way I don't think the FSF can prevent Novell from *distributing* the GNU tools. Don't they have the right to do that under the doctrine of first sale?
Gifts are taxed, as gifts, to the person who gave the gift. They are not taxed, as income, to the recipient. I think you're right on the $12,000, but I'd have to look it up to be sure.
Fair enough. I don't actually agree with this, as I see it similar to saying that "we have pickpocketing, so we should make sure everyone gets pickpocketed equally", but if you're sure you want to take that position with regard to taxes I can accept it. After all, there is a certain belief that taxes go to benefit the public, which is at least somewhat tenable (personally I look at the wars which are fought using tax money, and the people who are put in jail for victimless crimes using tax money, and make the opposite conclusion). Anyway, I'm going to go with your desire to be as equitable as possible, and I still think there's a good argument for exempting contest winnings.
OK, but if you want to be fair, what about when a gift occurs? The way I see it, a contest is more like a gift than a paycheck, and gifts aren't taxed as income.
In this particular case, the amount being written off by the contest promoter is probably equal to the fair market value, because the contest promoter probably isn't getting any discount off the market price. The IRS will probably take the position that the value of the prize is equal to the fair market value. There are a couple cases from several decades ago where the courts allowed a lower valuation in similar situations (a prize of a non-transferable cruise), so I'm not going to say one way or another what I think the proper valuation under the law is (unless one of the prize winners feels like paying me a whole lot of money for written advice).
Thank you. And in case you've read me wrong please understand that while my ideas are radical I don't seriously suggest that we adopt all of them overnight. In reality I favor a gradual movement in this direction, which needs to be re-evaluated along the way as problems arise. I know I'm dead wrong a lot of the time, and I know that when things change drastically a lot of unintended consequences arise.
And if it's on Slashdot, then it's not true, so...
Because two wrongs don't make a right?
That's enough reason for me, but maybe you want a more limited exception. What's so utterly egregious about this particular case is that the prize is a non-transferable service. So a more limited exemption would be for prizes of non-transferable services. Or you could go a little bit more broadly, and limit the taxation to the amount that the prize recipient could receive by reselling the prize (which in the case of non-transferable services would be $0).
Actually, I don't think it's a loophole at all.
Movie productions blow up cars and/or push them over cliffs all the time. And lots of other businesses destroy products during the course of their business.
OK, but isn't that the same situation we have with the trip to space? The rocket ride is being given away to advertise for the company, it is being done to provide more taxable revenue.
Sure, but the car is going to last 5 years. The trip to space is closer to 5 hours (random guess, but it's short). The gasoline for the car is used up more quickly, and gets to be written off immediately. But again, the gasoline doesn't go into the final product, it is a general expenditure.
It sucks to pay property taxes, but I'd much rather live in a world with property taxes than one without them. I can't say the same for income taxes.
I don't think it makes sense to mix social welfare programs with tax breaks like that. If you want to help poor people get to work, give them rebates for free public transit, don't change the gasoline tax. If someone is disabled and can't work, give them housing credits, don't lower everyone's property taxes. If someone neglected saving enough money for retirement, or didn't use birth control and had 8 kids...well, those are tough ones, but whatever we decide to do to help them it doesn't make sense to mess with everybody else's tax rates too.
Actually a lawsuit which is completely baseless won't even make it to court. But let's say they come up with some ridiculous argument which gets into court. Wow, so he has to pay the bus fare to the courthouse. He'd probably be able to get three times that much back in a countersuit.
All the frivolous lawsuits I've ever heard about have had pretty severe penalties attached to them. Then again, they were frivolous lawsuits against the government...
Exactly. In Germany you can shoot anyone for any reason.
Does it really matter if we elect a candidate who got 47% of the vote instead of what that got 48%? If we really want to fix the electoral system we need to figure out why the hell so many people voted for George W. Bush a second time after he screwed up so bad the first time. Everything else pales in comparison to that.
Maybe in some rare instances this is possible, but not in general.
If you repeatedly sue someone for a baseless reason, surely the judge will award legal fees to that person. And if the lawsuit really is baseless, then your legal fees don't need to be very large in the first place.
I think you're confusing baseless lawsuits with lawsuits which are based on quite a bit of reason, but ultimately fail. These types of disputes can be expensive for both parties, to be sure, and US law is complicated enough that they do come up with some frequency.
And that statement makes about as much sense as "In Germany you can shoot anyone for any reason." Sure, in America you can sue anyone for anything, but bringing a frivolous lawsuit against someone is not legal.
What did the new employer have to say about this? Are they willing to offer you free legal representation?
Personally I think I'd just ignore what the VP said until I see a formal notice in writing, assuming the new employer agrees that the threats are baseless. I personally wouldn't spend any money hiring a lawyer over such a thing, at least until I get some sort of notice to appear in court, but maybe that's dumb of me.
That works to the extent that the costs of generating the income go into the final product, the costs of goods sold, but doesn't work so well for general expenses that can't be tied to a product, like in this case advertising.
But the whole purpose of giving the car away as a promotion is to sell more cars, thus to increase income and profits (which increases income tax). If the car dealership advertised by blowing up the car or pushing it over a cliff, they'd get to write off the cost of the car and thus not pay any tax on it. Moreover, if the car dealership gave the car to an employee who drove it around the country doing business the car would get written off and no one would pay any additional taxes.
Now maybe it's the time to move away from the car analogy and back to the situation at hand. New Scientist wants to sell magazine subscriptions. They think they can do so by essentially blowing stuff up. That they chose someone to come along for the ride doesn't seem to me to be worthy of taxation. Yes, according to the law, it very well might be, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
All this said I'm not quite sure how to reconcile what seems like a terribly flawed law, without destroying the income tax system entirely by opening up loopholes. I guess the rule should be that a non-employee of a company who receives a prize without doing any work for the prize-giver (or by doing a token amount of work like writing an essay on the best patented invention) shouldn't be taxed on that prize. To avoid subversion of the gift-tax rules, in the case of a related-party transfer it would still be taxed as a gift.
But in the end I think it's time to just get rid of the income tax entirely. The whole idea of taxing free trade makes no sense - free trade should be encouraged, not taxed. If I perform a service for you in return for you performing a service for me that doesn't deserve to be taxed, regardless of whether or not money changes hands in between. How then do we pay for the running of the government? Reducing spending should come first. Excise taxes which can be tied to spending should come second (gasoline taxes to pay for the roads and environmental cleanup efforts). And property taxes should come third, though I haven't really decided exactly what property other than real estate should be included. It'd have to be easy to enforce and hard or impossible to avoid using loopholes. Taxing all property fails on the first criterion, and taxing only business property probably fails on the second.
VAT taxes and property taxes seem to avoid "multiple taxations" the best.
Why are you paying social security and medicare tax on medical and dental benefits?
My family paid about 10% in taxes in 2006, counting FICA and estimating sales taxes at about 2% of my income (remember, sales tax isn't charged on my rent, my food, or my savings). To be fair I suppose I should factor in the property taxes based on what my landlord pays, so let's add 10% for that. A quick calculation of the gasoline taxes I pay gives me a number well under 1%. Am I missing anything? Now, where but Florida "in the first world" can I pay less than 20% of my income in total taxes?
But that car dealership bought the car from the car manufacturer, who had to pay taxes on the income. Incidentally, that's the amount that the car dealership is allowed to deduct, the amount they paid for the car.
I'd regulate things even less. The last mile is the only place where there's any real monopoly power, so that's where I'd focus. Basically, I'd separate out the OSI Layer 1 (physical layer) connections of the local monopolies (telcos, cable, and cell phone companies) from everything else, and then I'd require those physical layer companies to negotiate with the government to establish reasonable fees to resellers. For example, Verizon would be disbanded and reorganized into at least three separate companies, with two of them being highly regulated and one being essentially unregulated. The first company would own the cell phone frequencies and would resell raw bandwidth to the third. The second company would maintain the copper wires and would resell local loops to the third, and the third company would buy bandwidth and rent copper loops from the first two on the exact same terms as anyone else who wanted to get into the game.
But I thought the telcos were already required to allow CLECs to buy local loops. These local loops are just copper wires connecting the CLECs to the homes, so they are already network neutral.
The problem is, we're not talking about a constitutional amendment here. It's just a plain old law, which can be overturned just as easily as it was passed in the first place. So if the government wants to "tax" pornographic websites to help cover "filtering costs", they include verbage in the bill to exempt themselves from the net neutrality laws. In fact, they only need a few words: "notwithstanding the provisions of section whatever..."
By the way, I mentioned the constitution above. Fortunately the constitution has been interpreted to already guarantee that the local government can't "get greedy", in the form of the Commerce Clause.
Peering points are generally pretty powerless anyway, because the number of them grows exponentially with your number of hops from the endpoints. If network neutrality laws serve only to regulate the monopolies providing the physical lines to individual households (and those companies given monopolies over certain radio frequencies), then I don't have a problem with it. But if it tries to go further and regulate all internet providers, even the ones without any inherent monopoly power, then I have to remain strongly opposed.
Call me a cynic, but once Congress gets involved I don't have any hope that this legislation will increase freedom for anyone. The only way to truly win freedom from the telecoms and cable companies is to build a network which doesn't rely on telecoms and cable companies.
No, he has no need for a good accountant, as he declined the prize.
Do you actually have any stories of times when a public police officer, while on-duty, has helped you? In my experience I think I've got to conclude that my interactions with on-duty police officers, mostly during traffic stops, has been a net negative.
As was pointed out by another poster, this isn't very far from where we currently are. Fortunately, most income taxes aren't imposed on poor people like me, though.
Presumably that's how much Oracle paid for it. In this case the trip is being given away by a different company than the one who is providing the trip.
There's an interesting treatment of pretty much exactly this question in Section III (OBJECTIVE METHODS OF DETERMINING THE FAIR MARKET VALUE OF AN ASSET AND SUBJECTIVE ALTERNATIVES) of The Extreme Home Renovation Giveaway: Constructive Justification for Tax-Free Home Improvements on ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Two rather old cases are presented where the IRS did allow a subjective valuation of prize income rather than the actual fair market value.
But...The company that Oracle paid for the trip has already declared that as income. Why should the income be taxed twice? Because the income tax system makes absolutely no sense, of course!
But at least it does make a little bit of sense. Looking for a precedent in a case like this, I was able to find one... Turner vs. Commissioner. Someone steamship tickets from a radio station. The tickets were non-transferable. The court agreed to value the tickets at only 2/3 of the fair market value, "because [the taxpayers] would not have purchased them for themselves". This is an even more pronounced case of the same thing. Not only would the guy not be willing to purchase the trip for himself at fair market value, he wouldn't even be willing to purchase the trip for 18% of the fair market value.
You're wrong about the first part. Some prizes are taxable income. Others aren't.
As for the second part, you do seem to be correct as to this particular case.
Actually, the trip wasn't given to him at all. He declined it. My point was about what they should have done, not what has actually happened.
My suggestion wasn't that he work as a space documentary film maker, it was that he *appear*, while in space, in some promotional materials. That's what Oracle is running this prize for, promotion, right?
I dunno, the bottom line is this absolutely shouldn't be taxable income, and there must be some way to structure it so it isn't, because the law couldn't possibly be that screwed up.
Disclaimer under IRS Circular 230: Nothing in this post is intended or written to be used, and it cannot be used, by any taxpayer for the purpose of avoiding penalties that may be imposed on the taxpayer.
I've got one in the US. It involves the retirement savings credit. When your AGI crosses the magic thresholds into a lower credit, you pay a lot more in taxes. For a married couple, the biggest threshold is at $30,000. For a single person it's at $15,000. Your credit drops from 50% to 20% at these thresholds, which equates to a maximum of a $1200 tax (for a married couple, or $600 for a single person).