Seems to me like ads might be a smart play - the IP is worth nothing to them, and getting US citizens to pay will be hard since the US will no doubt make it hard to pay them. However, ads are ads as long as they can get advertisers.
Or they could just sell to the international market - being able to legally sell US music and movies in the EU/Asia/etc at zero license cost has to be worth something.
So how in the hell is there such a thing as "a WTO approved 'warez' site" and how on Earth does Antigua think the WIPO is going to view this?
Simple - the WTO gave them permission in advance to do this. The US violated its treaty obligations and the WTO ruled that as a result Antigua could extract sanctions by not respecting US IP.
This sort of thing happens all the time under the WTO. I know the US and Japan have gotten into spats and I forget over what, but imagine that the US wants to sell grain in Japan and Japan refuses to let them sell it under the same conditions as local farmers (maybe tariffs, or extra rules, or a ban, or whatever). The US complains to the WTO that it is costing them $x billion per year in sales. The WTO agrees. Now it isn't like the US can just put a ban on Japanese grain imports, because Japan doesn't sell grain - that's the whole point of trade - rarely is it symmetric. So, instead the US asks to put a tariff on Japanese cars since those sell like hotcakes, and the WTO agrees so that Japan loses $x billion in car sales to the likes of Korea/Germany/etc.
In this case the US did not allow equal access to online gambling in Antigua, costing Antigua money. The WTO agreed with their complaint and said to go ahead and damage the US economy by a similar amount. If the US complied and reimbursed them or otherwise was cooperative chances are the WTO would reverse this.
sure, but any such payment-system denial would be grounds for either a further WTO ruling against the US, and/or civil lawsuit (read:big$$$) against the payment processor companies.
The former, yes, the latter, good luck. That is, unless those companies hold assets in Antigua. Do you think a US court is going to punish a US company for doing what the US government told them to do? And if they did, do you think the US executive branch that told them to do it will do anything to enforce the order?
That's like saying that your neighbor smashed your windows and refuse to pay, so you'll go file a formal petition with your neighbor and ask him to force himself to pay for it.
Actually it does as the agreement which created the WTO is a treaty and the U.S. is required to treat their treaty obligations as equal to the U.S. Constitution.
Under Article II section 2
2. The agreements and associated legal instruments included in Annexes 1, 2 and 3 (hereinafter referred to as "Multilateral Trade Agreements") are integral parts of this Agreement, binding on all Members.
We are in violation.
Yup, and that constitution, the treaty, and a nice log will get you a warm fire for an hour, and that's about it. That is, unless somebody in a position of power cares to enforce any of that stuff.
I wouldn't say that treaties are equal in weight any more than laws are equal in weight (also mentioned in that clause). However, treaties clearly have the force of law which is the whole point.
In any case, the whole point of treaties is mutual agreement - it is bad policy to make a treaty and then violate it, because then nobody wants to make treaties with you. If you sign a bad treaty then announce your intent to back out and do so in some kind of reasonable way (giving up the benefits as well as the responsibilities) and it will probably be taken better than simply ignoring the bits you don't like.
And customer service? I've never had to deal with a phone's customer service, ever. If it's a factor at all, it's a very small one.
I wouldn't lump OS updates into that. That is Android's biggest weakness - it doesn't centralize OS updates. Imagine if you could only get Windows 7/8/etc from whoever sold you your PC, and they were free to not support any particular model.
The whole thing that makes x86/amd64 so different is that the BIOS has been stable for decades. Sure, the odd WiFi chipset might be troublesome, but the windows driver interface has also been fairly stable so getting those drivers ported is reasonably straightforward at least.
Every version of Android uses new driver APIs, and every device uses nearly unique hardware. That means that every 3rd party mod has to be tailored to a specific device, and it needs to reverse engineer both the driver and OS side of the APIs.
Yeah, maybe CM works fine on a Galaxy S2, but try it on devices that are much less popular. Many phones NEVER get a Cyanogenmod release. And it isn't always bulletproof - often stable releases lag way behind Google's OS releases (the S2 has no stable release), and the unstable ones usually have little issues especially with less-commonly-used features (odd bluetooth configurations, camera/gps glitches, etc). Maybe the S2 release right now happens to be better than most (haven't tried it), but I know that on my previous phone it was anything but stable unless you stuck with Gingerbread, which at least was better than the Froyo that it came with. CM doesn't really have a testing/quality cycle either - they have nightlies and then one day a new one is built and gets declared stable - that really isn't how just about anybody does it in the real world (hint - a build should never be considered stable 5 seconds after the compile is done).
And good luck with anything but CM. The fact that it is so painful to actually make old phones work on new OS versions is why there is only one mainstream distro. Imagine if the gnu/linux world consisted of one distro that worked on 60% of PCs, 300 distros that worked on one PC each, and one mainstream window manager implementation.
These are all legitimate complaints, even if the CM devs have worked miracles to make things reasonably bearable on older devices. They're working in awful conditions thanks to the fact that every device is completely unique and the drivers are all closed with unstable APIs.
When CyanogenMod was considering Cornerstone, they were effectively told that if some sort of "opt-in" mechanism weren't present, Google would be forced to blacklist CM.
Uh, how exactly would they do that? The only way to get the Play Store on a CM device is to download it from somebody who is illegally distributing it. It isn't like Google is supporting them in any way. If they build some kind of black-list into the store it could just be patched out, or the OS could just lie to the store app about its identity.
While I prefer that CM stay reasonably close to vanilla Android one of the things that bothers me about it is that it really isn't all that independent. They won't even let you block app permissions except in a way that is virtually guaranteed to break apps (which I think was mainly a way to get people to stop asking for the feature).
If they really only have 17 pieces of artillery that can reach that far then I agree that the damage to Seoul will be moderated. As you say modern counter-artillery fire is quite effective and I'm sure that is deployed and on a hair-trigger.
That said, even 17 guns can do quite a bit in a surprise attack. Unless all units are on full alert and have orders to return fire without further authorization they're going to get off a few rounds at least. If the counter-fire isn't completely automated (ie it involves a bunch of people relaying coordinates over the radio followed by corrections) then they're going to get off a few rounds even under high alert. If you take a random modern city and set off one bus bomb it practically shuts the city down. Now imagine having bombs several times larger than that going off in dozens of locations - perhaps 100. Thousands dying does not seem impossible.
The same applies to missiles - it all depends on how many launchers they have. Bottom line is that if the number is low enough then they will get hit fairly quickly and they won't really have any strategic effect beyond making a mess on day one.
After that it will be one big mess. The US will no doubt bomb the dozen or two buildings that have electricity into the stone age, and anything resembling command/control. There would potentially be millions of people marching through the minefields and who knows how long they keep that up in the face of heavy losses with no commands from above to spur them on. As soon as things bog down (likely a few days) I don't think the NK army will make any further advances. They'll have trouble with supplies, poor command/control, and being in open conventional warfare without an air force in this day and age is suicide. If the army is fanatical they might continue to make trouble in a disorganized fashion, if not they'll likely surrender.
I suspect that if the US attacked NK it would be as a joint operation with China. Obviously we're not quite at the point where anybody actually wants to do that.
The whole shelling of Seoul thing is the real problem. That, and NK so far has been a threat that was far enough out that everybody just hopes that somebody else will have to deal with it.
Don't really see the point in that. Everybody already knows the US can do this. The only thing a demonstration might show is that our targeting isn't as good as everybody thinks.
They voted for the resolution, and a few years ago when NK was rattling sabers they actually cut off their oil supply.
China is all for NK being a general pain to the US. They're not really all that eager to have a nuclear war break out on their border. I think both the US and China have given up on the whole expansion-of-communism vs containment thing - neither country really wants to have tens of thousands of people dying and billions of dollars spent because some kid wants to be a big shot in his third world nation. They'll fight over oil, but not pride.
Perhaps the amendment should be amended in that case, but I don't think a world in which anybody can stockpile nuclear weapons in their garage is really a place we want to live.
I get the principle behind what you're saying. The problem is that progress has tended to further skew the balance between offense and defense and the asymmetry of warfare. It is bad enough that you can't prosecute suicide attacks after they've happened, let alone suicide attacks with arbitrarily powerful weapons.
Agreed on all points. The purpose of most physical security is to detect intrusion and limit the scope of any intrusion. Teenagers can break into the mall, but they probably couldn't carry out all the TVs. Safes aren't rated on being uncrackable, they're rated on how long they typically take to crack. Putting intruders under time constraints won't stop them from stealing one high-value item, but they will stop them from carrying out a truckload.
The physical security analogy doesn't really apply cleanly to computer security. If I want to break into a mall I need to go there, and to escape I need to drive away. Being there means having my face and car on security camera footage. Escaping means there is an opportunity to pursue me. Being there also limits my opportunity - unless I'm able to steal so much stuff that I can finance a huge planning operation I can't case out every mall in the country. If I'm stealing some top secret document and have a $50M bankroll that isn't an issue, but if I'm just stealing TVs then I'm only going to be stealing them from local stores, and chances are after one or two hits I'll find the police on high alert.
For an electronic intrusion I can physically reside anywhere. For state-sponsored intrusion I can even reside in a completely friendly jurisdiction (unless the enemy wants to start dropping bombs). There is no need to escape, though there is potentially more opportunity to detect intrusion (attacks must pass through may physical locations). The risk can be very low if you're in a friendly jurisdiction, so that means I can mount attacks against even low-value targets with a positive ROI. If I live in some country that does not prosecute computer crime I can find a random mom-and-pop e-commerce site, break in, steal data, and hold it for ransom. All they can do is call the cops after the fact, and the cops can't really do anything about it. A mom-and-pop store normally has to deal only with local burglary, and now they have to worry about sophisticated hackers a world away. In fact, local attacks are much less of a risk online, because the US is very aggressive against computer crime so most attacks would be unlikely to be mounted domestically.
$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.
Try explaining that to the 91% of Americans who make less than that per year...
Oh, and if you make $100k you're only paying takes on $10k of that.
The rich guy gets to live in Mozambique or wherever to make his fortunes, and if local politics get rough he can always walk over to the nearest embassy and wave his US passport for an airlift out. That has to be worth something. For those who truly feel that US citizenship carries no benefits, they can always renounce their citizenship.
What exactly does it mean to pledge allegiance to a nation if you only pay taxes if you get an equivalent in benefits? Are we proposing that all government services be done on a charge-back system?
Low interest rate loans to students are the single best return on investment a government can make.
Yes and no. Suppose I want to attend a college that charges $1M/yr in tuition to become an artist. Is making a low-interest loan to cover 100% of my tuition a good "return on investment?" Now suppose I want to attend a school that charges $5k/yr in tuition to become a doctor - how does that change the equation?
Both of those are obviously unrealistic extremes, but the point is that ROI depends both on costs and benefits.
A big problem with our student loans is that they drive up tuition costs - WAY faster than inflation. Wages haven't risen that much in the last 20 years, and undergraduate course content hasn't really changed much either (aside from accessing resources electronically, but it isn't like stocking the library with books was free). Tuition has gone WAY up, and it is largely because students can afford it.
Kids are rarely prepared to make wise decisions regarding college, and their employment prospects are becoming increasingly dismal. Saddling the kids with a mountain of debt doesn't help things, especially when they get degrees that offer them little benefit in the real world.
It would make more sense to just offer kids scholarships on the basis of merit, and let them graduate debt-free. However, give the scholarships to those who are likely to benefit it because of demonstrated aptitude/interest. For the rest have internship programs or something to let kids figure out what they want to do in a much less expensive way, and THEN let them use that as demonstrated aptitude/interest and have them go to school debt-free. If somebody can't figure out what they want to do with their life in 4 years of general high school classes they aren't going to get much further with 4 years of college classes. Have them DO something with their life instead. Offer apprenticeships, whatever.
This isn't about closing doors to college, it is about bringing costs under control (colleges would be forbidden to charge tuition to those on government scholarships, and the scholarships would be fixed in cost by degree). Oh, and make the same opportunities available to the poor sod who gets let go at age 40.
If you taxed both at 10%, the poor person would need to pay $2,100 in taxes (resulting in not having enough money for necessities) and the rich person would pay $100,000 (thus reducing their yearly savings to a "mere" 80% of their salary).
That's true for an income tax of 10% flat. For a 10% consumption tax the poor person would pay $2000 in taxes (woo hoo, a 5% savings), and the rich person would pay $10k in taxes (a 90% savings). Now you can see why the rich just LOVE the idea of a consumption tax.
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Seems to me like ads might be a smart play - the IP is worth nothing to them, and getting US citizens to pay will be hard since the US will no doubt make it hard to pay them. However, ads are ads as long as they can get advertisers.
Or they could just sell to the international market - being able to legally sell US music and movies in the EU/Asia/etc at zero license cost has to be worth something.
So how in the hell is there such a thing as "a WTO approved 'warez' site" and how on Earth does Antigua think the WIPO is going to view this?
Simple - the WTO gave them permission in advance to do this. The US violated its treaty obligations and the WTO ruled that as a result Antigua could extract sanctions by not respecting US IP.
This sort of thing happens all the time under the WTO. I know the US and Japan have gotten into spats and I forget over what, but imagine that the US wants to sell grain in Japan and Japan refuses to let them sell it under the same conditions as local farmers (maybe tariffs, or extra rules, or a ban, or whatever). The US complains to the WTO that it is costing them $x billion per year in sales. The WTO agrees. Now it isn't like the US can just put a ban on Japanese grain imports, because Japan doesn't sell grain - that's the whole point of trade - rarely is it symmetric. So, instead the US asks to put a tariff on Japanese cars since those sell like hotcakes, and the WTO agrees so that Japan loses $x billion in car sales to the likes of Korea/Germany/etc.
In this case the US did not allow equal access to online gambling in Antigua, costing Antigua money. The WTO agreed with their complaint and said to go ahead and damage the US economy by a similar amount. If the US complied and reimbursed them or otherwise was cooperative chances are the WTO would reverse this.
sure, but any such payment-system denial would be grounds for either a further WTO ruling against the US, and/or civil lawsuit (read:big$$$) against the payment processor companies.
The former, yes, the latter, good luck. That is, unless those companies hold assets in Antigua. Do you think a US court is going to punish a US company for doing what the US government told them to do? And if they did, do you think the US executive branch that told them to do it will do anything to enforce the order?
That's like saying that your neighbor smashed your windows and refuse to pay, so you'll go file a formal petition with your neighbor and ask him to force himself to pay for it.
Actually it does as the agreement which created the WTO is a treaty and the U.S. is required to treat their treaty obligations as equal to the U.S. Constitution.
Under Article II section 2
We are in violation.
Yup, and that constitution, the treaty, and a nice log will get you a warm fire for an hour, and that's about it. That is, unless somebody in a position of power cares to enforce any of that stuff.
I wouldn't say that treaties are equal in weight any more than laws are equal in weight (also mentioned in that clause). However, treaties clearly have the force of law which is the whole point.
In any case, the whole point of treaties is mutual agreement - it is bad policy to make a treaty and then violate it, because then nobody wants to make treaties with you. If you sign a bad treaty then announce your intent to back out and do so in some kind of reasonable way (giving up the benefits as well as the responsibilities) and it will probably be taken better than simply ignoring the bits you don't like.
See desktop Windows computers as a prime example for this market phenomenon.
You mean companies like Dell that make $2B/yr? Yeah, no way you can make money selling commodity IT.
Yeah, Bluetooth has always been painful on Android, especially with 3rd party mods. Somebody needs to buy those college kids a BMW or something. :)
And customer service? I've never had to deal with a phone's customer service, ever. If it's a factor at all, it's a very small one.
I wouldn't lump OS updates into that. That is Android's biggest weakness - it doesn't centralize OS updates. Imagine if you could only get Windows 7/8/etc from whoever sold you your PC, and they were free to not support any particular model.
The whole thing that makes x86/amd64 so different is that the BIOS has been stable for decades. Sure, the odd WiFi chipset might be troublesome, but the windows driver interface has also been fairly stable so getting those drivers ported is reasonably straightforward at least.
Every version of Android uses new driver APIs, and every device uses nearly unique hardware. That means that every 3rd party mod has to be tailored to a specific device, and it needs to reverse engineer both the driver and OS side of the APIs.
Yeah, maybe CM works fine on a Galaxy S2, but try it on devices that are much less popular. Many phones NEVER get a Cyanogenmod release. And it isn't always bulletproof - often stable releases lag way behind Google's OS releases (the S2 has no stable release), and the unstable ones usually have little issues especially with less-commonly-used features (odd bluetooth configurations, camera/gps glitches, etc). Maybe the S2 release right now happens to be better than most (haven't tried it), but I know that on my previous phone it was anything but stable unless you stuck with Gingerbread, which at least was better than the Froyo that it came with. CM doesn't really have a testing/quality cycle either - they have nightlies and then one day a new one is built and gets declared stable - that really isn't how just about anybody does it in the real world (hint - a build should never be considered stable 5 seconds after the compile is done).
And good luck with anything but CM. The fact that it is so painful to actually make old phones work on new OS versions is why there is only one mainstream distro. Imagine if the gnu/linux world consisted of one distro that worked on 60% of PCs, 300 distros that worked on one PC each, and one mainstream window manager implementation.
These are all legitimate complaints, even if the CM devs have worked miracles to make things reasonably bearable on older devices. They're working in awful conditions thanks to the fact that every device is completely unique and the drivers are all closed with unstable APIs.
When CyanogenMod was considering Cornerstone, they were effectively told that if some sort of "opt-in" mechanism weren't present, Google would be forced to blacklist CM.
Uh, how exactly would they do that? The only way to get the Play Store on a CM device is to download it from somebody who is illegally distributing it. It isn't like Google is supporting them in any way. If they build some kind of black-list into the store it could just be patched out, or the OS could just lie to the store app about its identity.
While I prefer that CM stay reasonably close to vanilla Android one of the things that bothers me about it is that it really isn't all that independent. They won't even let you block app permissions except in a way that is virtually guaranteed to break apps (which I think was mainly a way to get people to stop asking for the feature).
What, the US isn't America? Next thing you'll be telling me is that there are unamericans who have a brain!
If they really only have 17 pieces of artillery that can reach that far then I agree that the damage to Seoul will be moderated. As you say modern counter-artillery fire is quite effective and I'm sure that is deployed and on a hair-trigger.
That said, even 17 guns can do quite a bit in a surprise attack. Unless all units are on full alert and have orders to return fire without further authorization they're going to get off a few rounds at least. If the counter-fire isn't completely automated (ie it involves a bunch of people relaying coordinates over the radio followed by corrections) then they're going to get off a few rounds even under high alert. If you take a random modern city and set off one bus bomb it practically shuts the city down. Now imagine having bombs several times larger than that going off in dozens of locations - perhaps 100. Thousands dying does not seem impossible.
The same applies to missiles - it all depends on how many launchers they have. Bottom line is that if the number is low enough then they will get hit fairly quickly and they won't really have any strategic effect beyond making a mess on day one.
After that it will be one big mess. The US will no doubt bomb the dozen or two buildings that have electricity into the stone age, and anything resembling command/control. There would potentially be millions of people marching through the minefields and who knows how long they keep that up in the face of heavy losses with no commands from above to spur them on. As soon as things bog down (likely a few days) I don't think the NK army will make any further advances. They'll have trouble with supplies, poor command/control, and being in open conventional warfare without an air force in this day and age is suicide. If the army is fanatical they might continue to make trouble in a disorganized fashion, if not they'll likely surrender.
Their nukes are the still huge. Think old 40s nuclear test stands. You aren't walking that anywhere. It would never fit in a sub.
Sure it would. Well, if you're talking about a suicide sub. :)
I suspect that if the US attacked NK it would be as a joint operation with China. Obviously we're not quite at the point where anybody actually wants to do that.
The whole shelling of Seoul thing is the real problem. That, and NK so far has been a threat that was far enough out that everybody just hopes that somebody else will have to deal with it.
Don't really see the point in that. Everybody already knows the US can do this. The only thing a demonstration might show is that our targeting isn't as good as everybody thinks.
They voted for the resolution, and a few years ago when NK was rattling sabers they actually cut off their oil supply.
China is all for NK being a general pain to the US. They're not really all that eager to have a nuclear war break out on their border. I think both the US and China have given up on the whole expansion-of-communism vs containment thing - neither country really wants to have tens of thousands of people dying and billions of dollars spent because some kid wants to be a big shot in his third world nation. They'll fight over oil, but not pride.
Perhaps the amendment should be amended in that case, but I don't think a world in which anybody can stockpile nuclear weapons in their garage is really a place we want to live.
I get the principle behind what you're saying. The problem is that progress has tended to further skew the balance between offense and defense and the asymmetry of warfare. It is bad enough that you can't prosecute suicide attacks after they've happened, let alone suicide attacks with arbitrarily powerful weapons.
Yeah, I'd never tout the windows installer in general. The only reason MS gets away with it is that nobody actually runs it.
If you want Ubuntu you run their installer. If you want Windows you just buy the computer with it pre-installed.
Agreed on all points. The purpose of most physical security is to detect intrusion and limit the scope of any intrusion. Teenagers can break into the mall, but they probably couldn't carry out all the TVs. Safes aren't rated on being uncrackable, they're rated on how long they typically take to crack. Putting intruders under time constraints won't stop them from stealing one high-value item, but they will stop them from carrying out a truckload.
The physical security analogy doesn't really apply cleanly to computer security. If I want to break into a mall I need to go there, and to escape I need to drive away. Being there means having my face and car on security camera footage. Escaping means there is an opportunity to pursue me. Being there also limits my opportunity - unless I'm able to steal so much stuff that I can finance a huge planning operation I can't case out every mall in the country. If I'm stealing some top secret document and have a $50M bankroll that isn't an issue, but if I'm just stealing TVs then I'm only going to be stealing them from local stores, and chances are after one or two hits I'll find the police on high alert.
For an electronic intrusion I can physically reside anywhere. For state-sponsored intrusion I can even reside in a completely friendly jurisdiction (unless the enemy wants to start dropping bombs). There is no need to escape, though there is potentially more opportunity to detect intrusion (attacks must pass through may physical locations). The risk can be very low if you're in a friendly jurisdiction, so that means I can mount attacks against even low-value targets with a positive ROI. If I live in some country that does not prosecute computer crime I can find a random mom-and-pop e-commerce site, break in, steal data, and hold it for ransom. All they can do is call the cops after the fact, and the cops can't really do anything about it. A mom-and-pop store normally has to deal only with local burglary, and now they have to worry about sophisticated hackers a world away. In fact, local attacks are much less of a risk online, because the US is very aggressive against computer crime so most attacks would be unlikely to be mounted domestically.
Yeah, read my replies to the other 14 people who said the same thing... It was an example - Republicans are hardly the only problem.
Or the biggest entitlement of all - being born to rich parents...
$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.
Try explaining that to the 91% of Americans who make less than that per year...
Oh, and if you make $100k you're only paying takes on $10k of that.
The rich guy gets to live in Mozambique or wherever to make his fortunes, and if local politics get rough he can always walk over to the nearest embassy and wave his US passport for an airlift out. That has to be worth something. For those who truly feel that US citizenship carries no benefits, they can always renounce their citizenship.
What exactly does it mean to pledge allegiance to a nation if you only pay taxes if you get an equivalent in benefits? Are we proposing that all government services be done on a charge-back system?
Low interest rate loans to students are the single best return on investment a government can make.
Yes and no. Suppose I want to attend a college that charges $1M/yr in tuition to become an artist. Is making a low-interest loan to cover 100% of my tuition a good "return on investment?" Now suppose I want to attend a school that charges $5k/yr in tuition to become a doctor - how does that change the equation?
Both of those are obviously unrealistic extremes, but the point is that ROI depends both on costs and benefits.
A big problem with our student loans is that they drive up tuition costs - WAY faster than inflation. Wages haven't risen that much in the last 20 years, and undergraduate course content hasn't really changed much either (aside from accessing resources electronically, but it isn't like stocking the library with books was free). Tuition has gone WAY up, and it is largely because students can afford it.
Kids are rarely prepared to make wise decisions regarding college, and their employment prospects are becoming increasingly dismal. Saddling the kids with a mountain of debt doesn't help things, especially when they get degrees that offer them little benefit in the real world.
It would make more sense to just offer kids scholarships on the basis of merit, and let them graduate debt-free. However, give the scholarships to those who are likely to benefit it because of demonstrated aptitude/interest. For the rest have internship programs or something to let kids figure out what they want to do in a much less expensive way, and THEN let them use that as demonstrated aptitude/interest and have them go to school debt-free. If somebody can't figure out what they want to do with their life in 4 years of general high school classes they aren't going to get much further with 4 years of college classes. Have them DO something with their life instead. Offer apprenticeships, whatever.
This isn't about closing doors to college, it is about bringing costs under control (colleges would be forbidden to charge tuition to those on government scholarships, and the scholarships would be fixed in cost by degree). Oh, and make the same opportunities available to the poor sod who gets let go at age 40.
If you taxed both at 10%, the poor person would need to pay $2,100 in taxes (resulting in not having enough money for necessities) and the rich person would pay $100,000 (thus reducing their yearly savings to a "mere" 80% of their salary).
That's true for an income tax of 10% flat. For a 10% consumption tax the poor person would pay $2000 in taxes (woo hoo, a 5% savings), and the rich person would pay $10k in taxes (a 90% savings). Now you can see why the rich just LOVE the idea of a consumption tax.