Here's the problem. If the stock falls to $5 before you sell, you still owe taxes on the $99,000 even though the stock you own is worth
$5000.
That's an interesting scenario, and I'm not sure how likely it is, but in any case wouldn't that person be eligible for the credit for prior year minimum tax? I'd have to input the details to be sure, but I think you would.
I should also note that the AMT on $99,000 is going to be much much less than $25,000.
Nice system, that AMT.
It's no different from the regular tax system, where if you make $100,000 capital gain one year and then lose $100,000 the next year you still pay taxes. Now, if we were going to make AMT the only tax we'd need some sort of net operating loss carryback, but I believe that is adequetely handled by the form 8801 credit (if not, then it should be).
Personally, for taxes, I'd like to see a completely flat tax (no deductions, no minimum earnings) on all income. That way it can't be abused.
It can still be abused. It comes down to how you define income.
Anyway, I wouldn't mind a flat tax if it were a flat 0%:). That wouldn't be abused. But if you try to tax income at all, there will be loopholes. (And of course, loopholes aren't the only type of abuse, there's also outright evasion to worry about).
Presumably that was an S-corp. With an S-corp the IRS tends to focus on underpayment of salaries. With a C-corp, they tend to focus on overpayment. Because with a C-corp, the google founders may not be paying FICA or FUTA, but the Google corporation is paying corporate income tax. In the end, the government probably gets more in income taxes, and they certainly get less in liabilities, as the Google founders won't get as much in social security payments when they retire (like they need it, but bottom line is the government probably collects more).
The tax rate for the options is probably going to roll in at 15% - certainly a lower tax rate than had it been 'earned income' (salary), but much more than zero.
If they cash them all at once, and don't have any capital losses. But if they cash in just enough each year to cover their capital losses, their personal exemption, the standard deduction (or more likely their itemized deductions), and any real estate losses they're taking (up to $25,000 a year). In 2008 they can cash in an additional $10000 or so tax free when the lower capital gains rate goes to zero.
At some point Page and Brin will diversify, but we don't know what their personal situations are like.
Presumably they have at least some wealth already outside of their stock, and even if not they can borrow, using their stock as collateral, to diversify. And as they have capital losses on those other stocks, which they certainly will, they can move out of one and into the other. They can reduce their capital gains up to 50% by donating appreciated stock to charity. The list goes on and on.
If you've thought of the loophole, the feds have figured out how to get a piece of the pie. It's not _that_ easy!
Some loopholes are there intentionally. The biggest one is rental property. Other ones, like incentive stock options (which is what this is all about), is known by the feds, but they haven't figured out how to resolve it yet. See this IRS press release. "Under Notice 2002-47, the IRS will not assess FICA or FUTA taxes, or impose federal income tax withholding, on the exercise of any statutory stock option or the disposition of any stock acquired by exercising a statutory stock option. This moratorium will remain in place until the IRS completes its review of comments on recent proposed regulations and issues future guidance, which would apply only on a prospective basis."
Oh, and look up the "Minimum Alternative Tax" while you're at it.
Capital gains are still subject to AMT at the regular capital gains rate. You can run into situations where having capital gains winds up giving you AMT, but that's because your capital gains take away your AMT exemption and your regular income gets taxed higher.
It may have been a good idea at first, but it's getting to be a real mess these days.
I can't say I understand this comment. AMT is relatively simple. Due to all the recent tax cuts more and more people are running into it, but that's kind of the point. Actually, it'd be nice if we just replaced the regular tax system with AMT. We'd probably have to raise the rate a bit, maybe 35% instead of 28%, but anyone with less than $40,000 of income ($29,000 married filing separately) would pay nothing.
The article poster stated that you don't pay FICA tax (another word for social security tax), medicare tax or income tax on stock appreciations. That is completely true
You don't pay FICA tax on stock appreciations (though, you do pay it on nonqualified stock options and you're supposed to pay it on incentive stock options according to the law, but the IRS has temporarily suspended enforcement of that rule). Medicare tax is part of FICA tax, so that's redundant. And capital gains tax is part of income tax, so, well, that part's just untrue.
I'd say about 10% of the images. Probably less of the text. And I never said I knew how much. I just know that it's a lot. And I know this because I've seen it.
No I am not advocating a police state. All I said was to make it illegal, very illegal, to intentionally not pay sales tax when doing the transaction in order to save money. And by very illegal I mean long jail sentences and harsh fines.
So, wait a second. Do you live in a state which has sales tax? Did you ever buy anything over the internet without paying sales tax? Did you send in the use tax? Do you deserve to go to jail?
Maybe you can plead ignorance, but I just told you so you can't any more. Or maybe you just live somewhere that doesn't have sales tax, in which case I think your comments on sending people to jail for avoiding it are uncalled for.
Concerning property taxes for the levels below the state level, I can't say we should remove them as of now.
I should note that no legally recognized government actually exists below the the state level. Local government is just a part of the state government from a legal standpoint. But, anyway, I know what you mean.
All I can say is that states should remove their portion of property tax and make it up with other sources of revenue, with either an increase in sales tax (additionally make it progressive) or sin taxes.
I'd say they should make it up by cutting services and/or running them in a profitable way (tolls on some state highways, for instance, have traffic ticket revenue cover the highway patrol, have court cost fees cover court costs, etc). I suppose you've still gotta pay for things like the national guard, though, and if sin taxes don't cover it I guess a tiny bit of property tax to pay for it is OK. (And if it were a volunteer militia, you'd only need to pay for the equipment, not the manpower. This would probably work fine if the US government would stop getting involved in everyone else's business, if there were any real threats to our security we'd have plenty of volunteers. If I knew I wasn't going to be sent off to some foreign country and forced to kill innocent people I'd join.)
If we removed property taxes for counties or cities or school districts, we'd have huge issues of how they'd get the revenue they need.
Not if we adopted a school payment system similar to the one we've got for colleges - pay for your own education and let the government back up your loans. No one needs to be turned down for lack of funds, but they do need to pay back their education costs eventually (yes, interest rates will be high to cover a high default rate, but you'll pay much less than you would in income taxes).
In urban areas it might be more difficult to cut down all the costs, so if you want to live in an urban area you'll probably still have property taxes. Even in rural areas maybe you'll need a small property tax to buy the volunteer fire/EMS department some equipment and pay for their operating costs, although maybe those with insurance could avoid this tax and the costs could be passed on to the health/fire insurance companies. You could probably even have a volunteer police department.
Maybe the difference between a property tax and a homeowners fee isn't a big deal, but it's at least a decentralization of control.
I should probably mention that this is just the articles themselves. No talk pages, no administrative pages, etc. So maybe my compression is only about equivalent to yours anyway. But one nice thing is once you're done the search index is already most of the way built.
Anyway, see here and here for my inspiration. I had to adapt things somewhat, though.
The real fun is going to come when I try to compress the history database. My idea is in addition to the dictionary for the entire database, I'll have an additional dictionary per article (and compress the article dictionary itself using the master dictionary). Who knows if this will work or not, but I'm hoping to achieve results on the order of compressing each article separately but with the advantage of random access capability.
But I was trying to point out it's possible for any of the major three (income, property, and sales) to essentially be non-existant.
Anything's possible, but eliminating property taxes would be economically devestating to all but the most remote of places (which have essentially no government services anyway).
As for those not paying sales tax when they are suppose to, made it very illegal. So illegal if caught, it really wouldn't have been worth it.
So basically you're advocating a police state. I can't agree with that.
When someone buys something over the Internet, sales tax should (in my current opinion) be applicable to the physical location of where you bought it from.
Well, it is. Except it's called "use tax". And no one pays it.
I tried "Who is more evil than satan himself?" and it popped up a message saying "Bill Gates is more evil than satan himself" complete with a link to Gates' webpage at Microsoft.
Which is probably the real reason the German Wikipedia was a lot easier to put on CD. Much of the English Wikipedia, especially the images, consists of copyright infringements. I believe the German Wikipedia is much more conservative on this issue.
In order to publish and SELL this information on CD/DVD, does the Wikipedia Foundation have to get the permission of all the article writers, or is there, perhaps, a clause on the website that says something like 'we own all the stuff put on here'.
They must be doing something in the most simplistic way possible, or including all of the media (not just Commons).
I'm sure Wales' comment was talking about including all the media (at least all the images). But it was just a vague comment, not something that is actually being done.
I've got the full text in a semi-browsable format with a search index down to 250 megs. I say semi-browsable because I use compression, but it's dictionary-based compression so it scales on a per-article basis.
If someone avoids paying sales tax, it's illegal. And it's harder to avoid than income tax.
Maybe it's technically illegal, but it isn't enforced, and it's really easy to avoid paying sales tax (on most items, one notable exception being automobiles), you just buy the item over the interenet.
And why would you want to get rid of all taxation?
To improve the economy. To make people more free. To get the government out of our lives.
Cause getting rid of sales tax will essentially do that in some areas.
What areas have no property taxes? I should probably buy some land there.
If I'm free, I can do what I want with my life, my time.
Sure, that includes walk into someone's backyard, pick an apple off an apple tree which happens to be growing there, and eat it.
Likewise if I trade that money for something else of value, like land or a car or whatever. If I don't actually possess property, or get to keep my money in its entirety, my life is no longer mine - I am no longer a free man.
The fact that you are allowed to own land in the first place is a limitation on the freedom of others. Freedom does not require exclusive ownership.
How is private property a hallmark of a non-free society? Communism might sound nice in theory, but it never works in practice.
I'm not suggesting communism though. Unrestricted ownership of real property might sound nice in theory, but it never works in practice. In practice, what works is limited ownership of real property subject to property taxes. If you disagree, feel free to point to me a society which allowed unrestricted ownership of real property and succeeded for all but the select aristocrats who were deemed worthy of that unrestricted ownership.
Nothing could be simpler than this plan: tax all sales except food, clothing, and medicine. There are zero loopholes.
Do you tax services, or only goods? Only new goods, or do you tax a good over and over every time it changes hands? What about intangible goods? Do you tax the sale of gold and other precious metals? Where do you draw the line between what is a service, what is an employee/employer relationship, and what is a B2B contract? What about people who grow or produce their own goods, are they exempt from taxation?
By the way, how can you consider yourself to have absolute ownership of property if you're not allowed to sell that property without paying a tax?
I'd prefer no taxes at all.
Me too.
But I don't see how government (beyond a few thousand people at most) could exist without taxation.
I don't either. That's why I suggest a property tax. But you objected, because that doesn't allow someone to have absolute ownership of property. I responded by asking the question, how can you consider yourself to have absolute ownership of property if you're not allowed to sell that property without paying a tax? I don't feel you've provided an answer, so I'll assume you agree that you can't.
Sales tax makes the cost of government obvious, whereas automatically withheld income tax is not obvious.
I'm in total agreement with you that the cost of the income tax is non-obvious. I think we should certainly eliminate income tax on all but the highest of income producers, and it probably makes sense to just drop it completely. Fortunately, income tax is already easy to avoid if you're a low to lower middle income earner, or if you're rich. That is, except for the FICA tax, which is regressive and nearly impossible to avoid unless you're very rich.
But I don't see how the sales tax is any better. I think the reasons will become obvious if you consider the questions I ask above as to what constitutes a taxable sale. I think the property tax is the most transparent, and a tax on titled property is extremely difficult to evade - if you don't pay, you lose the title, and therefore your rights to exclude others from using the property.
Someone suggested a VAT rather than a sales tax. It's the same thing, just more cumbersome to calculate. If you tax the entire price several times at 10% or just the added value once at 20%, it's going to work out to about the same in the end.
My understanding of VAT is that the only real difference is on who is required to collect the tax. Rather than exempting intermediate B2B sales, which is done with all sales taxes that I know of, the theory of VAT is to charge the tax immediately, and then refund it when the item is resold (or credit it against the tax due on the resale). The idea is
And about sales tax and income tax double taxation, I agree, hence why we should get rid of income tax.
And all sales tax.
Cause the hidden cost of income tax causes even non-sales taxable items to be taxed.
Well, income tax, other than FICA, is pretty easy to avoid nowadays. Even FICA can be avoided for the most part. But the fact that you have to go out of your way to avoid it in the first place is the problem.
Sales tax is harder to avoid unless you're really rich.
The annual taxes on owned property don't factor in if one has an income or not.
They could, and usually the homestead rebates do, but income is a terrible measure of wealth.
Someone could own a cheap home paying like $2-3k per year in property taxes, but if that person happens to lose his or her job, after a few years the government is going to take it away and sell it.
$2-3K per year in property taxes wouldn't be a cheap loan, but if you don't have $2-3K in savings (or the ability to get a loan for that amount if you fall on hard times, possibly using the home itself as collateral), then you probably shouldn't be a home owner in the first place. Moreover, you probably have negative equity in your home for some reason, so you're better off financially without the home and all that debt anyway. Finally, if you can't pay the $2-3K in property taxes, there's no way you can pay the $15-30K in interest, and you're going to lose the home anyway (if you actually owned the home without a mortgage it would be trivial to get a home equity loan before the government takes away your home; it'll cost a bit in closing costs which can be rolled into the loan, but that's the penalty you'll pay for living without any liquid savings or insurance against unemployment).
With sales tax, obviously if you have no income, you have no tax worries.
I had no income for quite a stretch of time, but I still paid a lot of taxes, mainly sales taxes. Maybe you're thinking if you have no money you have no sales tax worries. Well, this is true if you don't tax things bought with welfare checks, of course you could equally well have an exemption for low-income housing.
As for income tax, that's an entirely different subject cause it creates a mess in the system I won't go into.
Income tax and sales tax both suffer from the problem of double taxation.
Re:Ockham's Razor as a criterion for intelligence
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The Baby Bootstrap?
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Prediction is far more more than coming up with language rules.
But that's the problem. You're trying to measure multiple things at once. So when you get a good value, you don't know which factor caused the improvement.
I could argue why I should have to pay annual taxes on property I bought no matter what my income is?
I'm not sure what you mean by this.
At least there's no (state) income tax where I am.
Not where I am either.
Sales tax makes the most sense. You are using government currency in the first place. One way of looking at it is, "It's their money and it's kind of like a fee to use it."
If there were no sales tax due if I bought with Euros, that would be a valid argument, but if that were true everyone would be using Euros (or gold or barter or whatever) to buy stuff. To provide one quote, "Payment need not be received in cash to be subject to sales tax - barter income is also taxable." in South Dakota, but trust me, any state that has sales tax has the exact same rule, otherwise no one would pay sales tax.
Unusued property would best be sold.
Certainly not property which can be held for capital gains, like real estate.
Re:We _are_ talking about information content.
on
The Baby Bootstrap?
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In any case when we're talking about irreducably compressing a natural language corpus as the criterion for AI we _are_ talking about information content.
I just don't think it's a good criterion for AI, not strong AI, anyway. Computers are good at things when humans program them to do those things. One thing you can program a computer to do is recognize the rules of a language. That doesn't mean the computer is intelligent, it's just programmed well.
Yes, AI would be sufficient for good compression of language. But I don't agree that it's necessary. Moreover, there are too many factors other than intelligence which go into good compression, so I just don't think it makes sense to compare humans and computers heads up this way. It's like saying that Deep Blue can beat Kasparov at chess, so Deep Blue is as intelligent as Kasparov.
The point isn't even that at _some_ threshold you have a critter that is indistinguishable from a literate human in its ability to comprehend a large body of literature.
No, compress, not comprehend. I could be given instructions on how to compress Japanese text really well, but that wouldn't mean I'd be able to comprehend it.
The point is that at some point you have a critter that is able to comprehend a body of literature more accurately than anyone.
I agree that comprehension has some relation to ability to compress, at least in that knowledge of the rules of a language improves ability to compress. But that's not the only factor (even beyond the fact that knowing the rules != comprehension).
Think about it more like compressing the entire content of the Library of Congress.
What's that, 10 terabytes? The overhead for the program itself would be insignificant, so we're probably arguing over nothing anyway.
Getting back to my point, we're already pretty close to the 1.3 bpc figure, and I think it would be rather trivial to reach that figure in compressing the LoC, if that were your only goal (of course, Shannon's figure was using only 27 characters, 26 letters and a space, so you'd have to force the LoC content into that form first, there'd also be the problem that the LoC contains more than just english text).
The calgary corpus was compressed down to 1.54 bits per character. Now, this figure doesn't include the size of ha, or rar, or the linux distro, but with proper motivation this could be compressed to a size which would be negligible compared to the LoC, though you'd probably have to ditch the Linux distro and just write a bootloader which runs your compressor directly. However, I think this points out how arbitrary it is to count the exectable itself - this means you're factoring in all the specifics of the intel processor, both positive and negative (mostly negative on intel, since you've got all the overhead for input, output, memory allocation, etc, but in theory the processor/bios could be utilized in some way, especially if you don't restrict yourself to intel architecture).
Anyway, I think the 1.3 bits per character mark would be reached in a matter of weeks, given an input as large as the Library of Congress, stripped down to 27 characters, and assuming the payout was at least a few thousand dollars.
Maybe I'm way off, but I hope someone takes your suggestion, because I'd love to give it a try. I'd almost be willing to do it just to prove you wrong, but it'd take a lot more than a few weeks without any monetary incentive.
Most information theorists these days recognize that algorithmic complexity using Kolmogorov complexity is the ideal way to define information content.
Well, we're not talking about information content, we're talking about artificial intelligence.
Re:That's why I use Kolmogorov compression instead
on
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and all you had to do was produce a major corpus without counting the dictionaries, etc. as part of the compressed corpus, then you simply have a bit, the value of which could be 1 or 0, where, say "1" means "the corpus" and 0 means "not the corpus"
I would assume you aren't allowed to see the corpus beforehand...
Kolmogorov compression ratios have to include all dictionaries, algorithms, etc. that you use to produce the uncompressed corpus. That's why I specified things the way I did for the K-prize and why I called it the "K" prize.
Then I don't see how the 1.3 bits per character is still applicable. After all, Shannon didn't count the bits being used for the dictionaries in people's brains (even besides the fact that he let them use outside dictionaries).
Anyway, as long as you don't have access to the corpus beforehand (and as long as the algorithm scales linerally according to corpus size), it seems reasonable not to count the dictionaries/algorithms/etc. After all, as the size of the corpus increases, the effect of the dictionary becomes negligible, and the compression ratio approaches the same figure anyway.
Think about it, if we reduce the size of the corpus to one paragraph, humans are still going to be able to perform at roughly the same rate. But with such a small corpus it would probably be impossible for a computer program to be written to perform at such a rate given Kolmogorov compression ratios, because Kolmogorov compression ratios penalize the storage taken up by the very intelligence you are trying to measure.
That figure is probably too high, then. And I'm not sure it proves anything. I mean, maybe if the computer came up with the compression algorithm itself. But I can code in the rules of the English language for my computer and that doesn't make my computer smart.
There are already algorithms out there that can get about 1.8 bits per character, and these are fairly elementary algorithms which are designed to run relatively fast on todays machinery. So I don't think 1.3 bits per character would be very hard at all, if that was all you had to do. Obviously from the text you gave subjects were allowed to use dictionaries and character frequency tables, so this would be allowed for the computer too. Include a dictionary, encyclopedia, frequency table, grammar guide, etc., and I just don't think 1.3 bits per character would be that hard.
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Here's the problem. If the stock falls to $5 before you sell, you still owe taxes on the $99,000 even though the stock you own is worth $5000.
That's an interesting scenario, and I'm not sure how likely it is, but in any case wouldn't that person be eligible for the credit for prior year minimum tax? I'd have to input the details to be sure, but I think you would.
I should also note that the AMT on $99,000 is going to be much much less than $25,000.
Nice system, that AMT.
It's no different from the regular tax system, where if you make $100,000 capital gain one year and then lose $100,000 the next year you still pay taxes. Now, if we were going to make AMT the only tax we'd need some sort of net operating loss carryback, but I believe that is adequetely handled by the form 8801 credit (if not, then it should be).
Personally, for taxes, I'd like to see a completely flat tax (no deductions, no minimum earnings) on all income. That way it can't be abused.
It can still be abused. It comes down to how you define income.
Anyway, I wouldn't mind a flat tax if it were a flat 0% :). That wouldn't be abused. But if you try to tax income at all, there will be loopholes. (And of course, loopholes aren't the only type of abuse, there's also outright evasion to worry about).
Presumably that was an S-corp. With an S-corp the IRS tends to focus on underpayment of salaries. With a C-corp, they tend to focus on overpayment. Because with a C-corp, the google founders may not be paying FICA or FUTA, but the Google corporation is paying corporate income tax. In the end, the government probably gets more in income taxes, and they certainly get less in liabilities, as the Google founders won't get as much in social security payments when they retire (like they need it, but bottom line is the government probably collects more).
The tax rate for the options is probably going to roll in at 15% - certainly a lower tax rate than had it been 'earned income' (salary), but much more than zero.
If they cash them all at once, and don't have any capital losses. But if they cash in just enough each year to cover their capital losses, their personal exemption, the standard deduction (or more likely their itemized deductions), and any real estate losses they're taking (up to $25,000 a year). In 2008 they can cash in an additional $10000 or so tax free when the lower capital gains rate goes to zero.
At some point Page and Brin will diversify, but we don't know what their personal situations are like.
Presumably they have at least some wealth already outside of their stock, and even if not they can borrow, using their stock as collateral, to diversify. And as they have capital losses on those other stocks, which they certainly will, they can move out of one and into the other. They can reduce their capital gains up to 50% by donating appreciated stock to charity. The list goes on and on.
If you've thought of the loophole, the feds have figured out how to get a piece of the pie. It's not _that_ easy!
Some loopholes are there intentionally. The biggest one is rental property. Other ones, like incentive stock options (which is what this is all about), is known by the feds, but they haven't figured out how to resolve it yet. See this IRS press release. "Under Notice 2002-47, the IRS will not assess FICA or FUTA taxes, or impose federal income tax withholding, on the exercise of any statutory stock option or the disposition of any stock acquired by exercising a statutory stock option. This moratorium will remain in place until the IRS completes its review of comments on recent proposed regulations and issues future guidance, which would apply only on a prospective basis."
Oh, and look up the "Minimum Alternative Tax" while you're at it.
Capital gains are still subject to AMT at the regular capital gains rate. You can run into situations where having capital gains winds up giving you AMT, but that's because your capital gains take away your AMT exemption and your regular income gets taxed higher.
It may have been a good idea at first, but it's getting to be a real mess these days.
I can't say I understand this comment. AMT is relatively simple. Due to all the recent tax cuts more and more people are running into it, but that's kind of the point. Actually, it'd be nice if we just replaced the regular tax system with AMT. We'd probably have to raise the rate a bit, maybe 35% instead of 28%, but anyone with less than $40,000 of income ($29,000 married filing separately) would pay nothing.
The article poster stated that you don't pay FICA tax (another word for social security tax), medicare tax or income tax on stock appreciations. That is completely true
You don't pay FICA tax on stock appreciations (though, you do pay it on nonqualified stock options and you're supposed to pay it on incentive stock options according to the law, but the IRS has temporarily suspended enforcement of that rule). Medicare tax is part of FICA tax, so that's redundant. And capital gains tax is part of income tax, so, well, that part's just untrue.
I'd say about 10% of the images. Probably less of the text. And I never said I knew how much. I just know that it's a lot. And I know this because I've seen it.
No I am not advocating a police state. All I said was to make it illegal, very illegal, to intentionally not pay sales tax when doing the transaction in order to save money. And by very illegal I mean long jail sentences and harsh fines.
So, wait a second. Do you live in a state which has sales tax? Did you ever buy anything over the internet without paying sales tax? Did you send in the use tax? Do you deserve to go to jail?
Maybe you can plead ignorance, but I just told you so you can't any more. Or maybe you just live somewhere that doesn't have sales tax, in which case I think your comments on sending people to jail for avoiding it are uncalled for.
Concerning property taxes for the levels below the state level, I can't say we should remove them as of now.
I should note that no legally recognized government actually exists below the the state level. Local government is just a part of the state government from a legal standpoint. But, anyway, I know what you mean.
All I can say is that states should remove their portion of property tax and make it up with other sources of revenue, with either an increase in sales tax (additionally make it progressive) or sin taxes.
I'd say they should make it up by cutting services and/or running them in a profitable way (tolls on some state highways, for instance, have traffic ticket revenue cover the highway patrol, have court cost fees cover court costs, etc). I suppose you've still gotta pay for things like the national guard, though, and if sin taxes don't cover it I guess a tiny bit of property tax to pay for it is OK. (And if it were a volunteer militia, you'd only need to pay for the equipment, not the manpower. This would probably work fine if the US government would stop getting involved in everyone else's business, if there were any real threats to our security we'd have plenty of volunteers. If I knew I wasn't going to be sent off to some foreign country and forced to kill innocent people I'd join.)
If we removed property taxes for counties or cities or school districts, we'd have huge issues of how they'd get the revenue they need.
Not if we adopted a school payment system similar to the one we've got for colleges - pay for your own education and let the government back up your loans. No one needs to be turned down for lack of funds, but they do need to pay back their education costs eventually (yes, interest rates will be high to cover a high default rate, but you'll pay much less than you would in income taxes).
In urban areas it might be more difficult to cut down all the costs, so if you want to live in an urban area you'll probably still have property taxes. Even in rural areas maybe you'll need a small property tax to buy the volunteer fire/EMS department some equipment and pay for their operating costs, although maybe those with insurance could avoid this tax and the costs could be passed on to the health/fire insurance companies. You could probably even have a volunteer police department.
Maybe the difference between a property tax and a homeowners fee isn't a big deal, but it's at least a decentralization of control.
I should probably mention that this is just the articles themselves. No talk pages, no administrative pages, etc. So maybe my compression is only about equivalent to yours anyway. But one nice thing is once you're done the search index is already most of the way built.
Anyway, see here and here for my inspiration. I had to adapt things somewhat, though.
The real fun is going to come when I try to compress the history database. My idea is in addition to the dictionary for the entire database, I'll have an additional dictionary per article (and compress the article dictionary itself using the master dictionary). Who knows if this will work or not, but I'm hoping to achieve results on the order of compressing each article separately but with the advantage of random access capability.
But I was trying to point out it's possible for any of the major three (income, property, and sales) to essentially be non-existant.
Anything's possible, but eliminating property taxes would be economically devestating to all but the most remote of places (which have essentially no government services anyway).
As for those not paying sales tax when they are suppose to, made it very illegal. So illegal if caught, it really wouldn't have been worth it.
So basically you're advocating a police state. I can't agree with that.
When someone buys something over the Internet, sales tax should (in my current opinion) be applicable to the physical location of where you bought it from.
Well, it is. Except it's called "use tax". And no one pays it.
I tried "Who is more evil than satan himself?" and it popped up a message saying "Bill Gates is more evil than satan himself" complete with a link to Gates' webpage at Microsoft.
Which is probably the real reason the German Wikipedia was a lot easier to put on CD. Much of the English Wikipedia, especially the images, consists of copyright infringements. I believe the German Wikipedia is much more conservative on this issue.
In order to publish and SELL this information on CD/DVD, does the Wikipedia Foundation have to get the permission of all the article writers, or is there, perhaps, a clause on the website that says something like 'we own all the stuff put on here'.
No, and no.
Wikipedia's servers are often overloaded.
Of course, Yahoo just agreed to host Wikipedia, so this might be changing in the near future.
http://tampabay.bizjournals.com/tampabay/stories/2 005/04/04/daily39.html. Hmm, apparently this support is based on servers in Asia. So maybe not.
They must be doing something in the most simplistic way possible, or including all of the media (not just Commons).
I'm sure Wales' comment was talking about including all the media (at least all the images). But it was just a vague comment, not something that is actually being done.
I've got the full text in a semi-browsable format with a search index down to 250 megs. I say semi-browsable because I use compression, but it's dictionary-based compression so it scales on a per-article basis.
If someone avoids paying sales tax, it's illegal. And it's harder to avoid than income tax.
Maybe it's technically illegal, but it isn't enforced, and it's really easy to avoid paying sales tax (on most items, one notable exception being automobiles), you just buy the item over the interenet.
And why would you want to get rid of all taxation?
To improve the economy. To make people more free. To get the government out of our lives.
Cause getting rid of sales tax will essentially do that in some areas.
What areas have no property taxes? I should probably buy some land there.
If I'm free, I can do what I want with my life, my time.
Sure, that includes walk into someone's backyard, pick an apple off an apple tree which happens to be growing there, and eat it.
Likewise if I trade that money for something else of value, like land or a car or whatever. If I don't actually possess property, or get to keep my money in its entirety, my life is no longer mine - I am no longer a free man.
The fact that you are allowed to own land in the first place is a limitation on the freedom of others. Freedom does not require exclusive ownership.
How is private property a hallmark of a non-free society? Communism might sound nice in theory, but it never works in practice.
I'm not suggesting communism though. Unrestricted ownership of real property might sound nice in theory, but it never works in practice. In practice, what works is limited ownership of real property subject to property taxes. If you disagree, feel free to point to me a society which allowed unrestricted ownership of real property and succeeded for all but the select aristocrats who were deemed worthy of that unrestricted ownership.
Nothing could be simpler than this plan: tax all sales except food, clothing, and medicine. There are zero loopholes.
Do you tax services, or only goods? Only new goods, or do you tax a good over and over every time it changes hands? What about intangible goods? Do you tax the sale of gold and other precious metals? Where do you draw the line between what is a service, what is an employee/employer relationship, and what is a B2B contract? What about people who grow or produce their own goods, are they exempt from taxation?
By the way, how can you consider yourself to have absolute ownership of property if you're not allowed to sell that property without paying a tax?
I'd prefer no taxes at all.
Me too.
But I don't see how government (beyond a few thousand people at most) could exist without taxation.
I don't either. That's why I suggest a property tax. But you objected, because that doesn't allow someone to have absolute ownership of property. I responded by asking the question, how can you consider yourself to have absolute ownership of property if you're not allowed to sell that property without paying a tax? I don't feel you've provided an answer, so I'll assume you agree that you can't.
Sales tax makes the cost of government obvious, whereas automatically withheld income tax is not obvious.
I'm in total agreement with you that the cost of the income tax is non-obvious. I think we should certainly eliminate income tax on all but the highest of income producers, and it probably makes sense to just drop it completely. Fortunately, income tax is already easy to avoid if you're a low to lower middle income earner, or if you're rich. That is, except for the FICA tax, which is regressive and nearly impossible to avoid unless you're very rich.
But I don't see how the sales tax is any better. I think the reasons will become obvious if you consider the questions I ask above as to what constitutes a taxable sale. I think the property tax is the most transparent, and a tax on titled property is extremely difficult to evade - if you don't pay, you lose the title, and therefore your rights to exclude others from using the property.
Someone suggested a VAT rather than a sales tax. It's the same thing, just more cumbersome to calculate. If you tax the entire price several times at 10% or just the added value once at 20%, it's going to work out to about the same in the end.
My understanding of VAT is that the only real difference is on who is required to collect the tax. Rather than exempting intermediate B2B sales, which is done with all sales taxes that I know of, the theory of VAT is to charge the tax immediately, and then refund it when the item is resold (or credit it against the tax due on the resale). The idea is
And about sales tax and income tax double taxation, I agree, hence why we should get rid of income tax.
And all sales tax.
Cause the hidden cost of income tax causes even non-sales taxable items to be taxed.
Well, income tax, other than FICA, is pretty easy to avoid nowadays. Even FICA can be avoided for the most part. But the fact that you have to go out of your way to avoid it in the first place is the problem.
Sales tax is harder to avoid unless you're really rich.
The annual taxes on owned property don't factor in if one has an income or not.
They could, and usually the homestead rebates do, but income is a terrible measure of wealth.
Someone could own a cheap home paying like $2-3k per year in property taxes, but if that person happens to lose his or her job, after a few years the government is going to take it away and sell it.
$2-3K per year in property taxes wouldn't be a cheap loan, but if you don't have $2-3K in savings (or the ability to get a loan for that amount if you fall on hard times, possibly using the home itself as collateral), then you probably shouldn't be a home owner in the first place. Moreover, you probably have negative equity in your home for some reason, so you're better off financially without the home and all that debt anyway. Finally, if you can't pay the $2-3K in property taxes, there's no way you can pay the $15-30K in interest, and you're going to lose the home anyway (if you actually owned the home without a mortgage it would be trivial to get a home equity loan before the government takes away your home; it'll cost a bit in closing costs which can be rolled into the loan, but that's the penalty you'll pay for living without any liquid savings or insurance against unemployment).
With sales tax, obviously if you have no income, you have no tax worries.
I had no income for quite a stretch of time, but I still paid a lot of taxes, mainly sales taxes. Maybe you're thinking if you have no money you have no sales tax worries. Well, this is true if you don't tax things bought with welfare checks, of course you could equally well have an exemption for low-income housing.
As for income tax, that's an entirely different subject cause it creates a mess in the system I won't go into.
Income tax and sales tax both suffer from the problem of double taxation.
Prediction is far more more than coming up with language rules.
But that's the problem. You're trying to measure multiple things at once. So when you get a good value, you don't know which factor caused the improvement.
I could argue why I should have to pay annual taxes on property I bought no matter what my income is?
I'm not sure what you mean by this.
At least there's no (state) income tax where I am.
Not where I am either.
Sales tax makes the most sense. You are using government currency in the first place. One way of looking at it is, "It's their money and it's kind of like a fee to use it."
If there were no sales tax due if I bought with Euros, that would be a valid argument, but if that were true everyone would be using Euros (or gold or barter or whatever) to buy stuff. To provide one quote, "Payment need not be received in cash to be subject to sales tax - barter income is also taxable." in South Dakota, but trust me, any state that has sales tax has the exact same rule, otherwise no one would pay sales tax.
Unusued property would best be sold.
Certainly not property which can be held for capital gains, like real estate.
In any case when we're talking about irreducably compressing a natural language corpus as the criterion for AI we _are_ talking about information content.
I just don't think it's a good criterion for AI, not strong AI, anyway. Computers are good at things when humans program them to do those things. One thing you can program a computer to do is recognize the rules of a language. That doesn't mean the computer is intelligent, it's just programmed well.
Yes, AI would be sufficient for good compression of language. But I don't agree that it's necessary. Moreover, there are too many factors other than intelligence which go into good compression, so I just don't think it makes sense to compare humans and computers heads up this way. It's like saying that Deep Blue can beat Kasparov at chess, so Deep Blue is as intelligent as Kasparov.
The point isn't even that at _some_ threshold you have a critter that is indistinguishable from a literate human in its ability to comprehend a large body of literature.
No, compress, not comprehend. I could be given instructions on how to compress Japanese text really well, but that wouldn't mean I'd be able to comprehend it.
The point is that at some point you have a critter that is able to comprehend a body of literature more accurately than anyone.
I agree that comprehension has some relation to ability to compress, at least in that knowledge of the rules of a language improves ability to compress. But that's not the only factor (even beyond the fact that knowing the rules != comprehension).
Think about it more like compressing the entire content of the Library of Congress.
What's that, 10 terabytes? The overhead for the program itself would be insignificant, so we're probably arguing over nothing anyway.
Getting back to my point, we're already pretty close to the 1.3 bpc figure, and I think it would be rather trivial to reach that figure in compressing the LoC, if that were your only goal (of course, Shannon's figure was using only 27 characters, 26 letters and a space, so you'd have to force the LoC content into that form first, there'd also be the problem that the LoC contains more than just english text).
The calgary corpus was compressed down to 1.54 bits per character. Now, this figure doesn't include the size of ha, or rar, or the linux distro, but with proper motivation this could be compressed to a size which would be negligible compared to the LoC, though you'd probably have to ditch the Linux distro and just write a bootloader which runs your compressor directly. However, I think this points out how arbitrary it is to count the exectable itself - this means you're factoring in all the specifics of the intel processor, both positive and negative (mostly negative on intel, since you've got all the overhead for input, output, memory allocation, etc, but in theory the processor/bios could be utilized in some way, especially if you don't restrict yourself to intel architecture).
Anyway, I think the 1.3 bits per character mark would be reached in a matter of weeks, given an input as large as the Library of Congress, stripped down to 27 characters, and assuming the payout was at least a few thousand dollars.
Maybe I'm way off, but I hope someone takes your suggestion, because I'd love to give it a try. I'd almost be willing to do it just to prove you wrong, but it'd take a lot more than a few weeks without any monetary incentive.
Most information theorists these days recognize that algorithmic complexity using Kolmogorov complexity is the ideal way to define information content.
Well, we're not talking about information content, we're talking about artificial intelligence.
and all you had to do was produce a major corpus without counting the dictionaries, etc. as part of the compressed corpus, then you simply have a bit, the value of which could be 1 or 0, where, say "1" means "the corpus" and 0 means "not the corpus"
I would assume you aren't allowed to see the corpus beforehand...
Kolmogorov compression ratios have to include all dictionaries, algorithms, etc. that you use to produce the uncompressed corpus. That's why I specified things the way I did for the K-prize and why I called it the "K" prize.
Then I don't see how the 1.3 bits per character is still applicable. After all, Shannon didn't count the bits being used for the dictionaries in people's brains (even besides the fact that he let them use outside dictionaries).
Anyway, as long as you don't have access to the corpus beforehand (and as long as the algorithm scales linerally according to corpus size), it seems reasonable not to count the dictionaries/algorithms/etc. After all, as the size of the corpus increases, the effect of the dictionary becomes negligible, and the compression ratio approaches the same figure anyway.
Think about it, if we reduce the size of the corpus to one paragraph, humans are still going to be able to perform at roughly the same rate. But with such a small corpus it would probably be impossible for a computer program to be written to perform at such a rate given Kolmogorov compression ratios, because Kolmogorov compression ratios penalize the storage taken up by the very intelligence you are trying to measure.
That figure is probably too high, then. And I'm not sure it proves anything. I mean, maybe if the computer came up with the compression algorithm itself. But I can code in the rules of the English language for my computer and that doesn't make my computer smart.
There are already algorithms out there that can get about 1.8 bits per character, and these are fairly elementary algorithms which are designed to run relatively fast on todays machinery. So I don't think 1.3 bits per character would be very hard at all, if that was all you had to do. Obviously from the text you gave subjects were allowed to use dictionaries and character frequency tables, so this would be allowed for the computer too. Include a dictionary, encyclopedia, frequency table, grammar guide, etc., and I just don't think 1.3 bits per character would be that hard.