NTSB will "start digging" when an Audi or a Toyota is crashed by its driver, and "AI" is blamed. As long as it is a symbolic American company, no, no sir, they have nothing to worry about.
Well, hello back, yet another French corporation, subject to the same laws that other French corporations are subject to and not hiding revenue in Ireland.
But from a profit perspective, it is usually preferable for the company to pass the tax on rather than simply eating it.
Their problem is they cannot do it, for reasons the explainer made clear, which shows that you have not read it.
The obvious example is if the seller currently only has a 2% profit margin, and you impose a 3% revenue tax on them. Obviously they're not going to eat the tax since that would mean they'll be losing money with each sale. The only way they can continue to sell and stay in business is by passing part or all of that tax on to consumers.
Yes, a part of the tax may be passed on, but it will definitely not be the full amount, and how much the company will "eat" will depend on demand elasticity. If the company attempts to raise the price, and the demand is elastic (which it always is), the demand facing that company (and that market) will fall to a point where only the customers that are prepared to pay the new full amount will participate in the market. The consumers that will not be buying the service will not be paying the tax. Typically for elastic (flat) demand curve, that will mean a large loss of market share, which to most companies is unacceptable.
You're assuming the goal of a business is to maintain their pre-tax revenue and sales. It's not. It's to maximize their profit (profit = revenue - costs).
If you seriously think a company only looks at the profits, and not at market share it commands and its growth potential, you simply don't know how companies work. Sales, share and growth are numbers that any company cares about a lot, and it will routinely sacrifice profits to achieve a sales, market share or growth target. That is why a company which risks to lose a significant share will think hard before passing taxes on.
Therefore a tax is practically never passed on in full, especially in the long run.
You fail to consider the market for FB services. It is not what the users are *paying*, it is what advertisers are. It is business oriented, so the elasticity of demand and the power to negotiate is significantly better than what a consumer has. So, believe me, nothing close to full passing of the tax is even close to happening. And since the amount is not even all that big, it ain't getting passed on the consumer at all.
Not to mention that if a service is a monopoly, then regulation should not be optional, but mandatory. Monopolies are always bad.
So fundamentally, this isn't a problem with companies or profit or a corrupt political process.
So, "fundamentally", how to you explain the hard facts in TFA about Facebook trying to bribe politicians into supporting anti-data harvesting legislation then? Since this is/., I will not ask if you've read TFA, but instead quote TFS for you:
FB has been promising investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them into lobbying on Facebook's behalf against data privacy legislation.
And it has not been a small thing either. It is a well-orchestrated worldwide operation: documents... reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU
You think this isn't a problem? You think it is easy for the average voter to confront corporate subterfuge on this scale? You must be quite ignorant of how politics works, then, because it is happening everywhere and you, the average guy, have been sidelined from the political process by corporate long before you were born.
This process is trivial to stop.
You don't say. How easy is it to stop an operation like the one described above? Please elaborate, I'm very interested to hear about it. How do you learn about it, how do you get access to the likes of the UK prime minister or MPs on equal footing with Zuckerberg. How do you get your ass to Davos, mister, where Zuckerberg flies on his private jet with his army of manipulators? Show me how you've done it.
Please show me how "trivial" it is to stop a large international corporation, which business model is abusing the lack of global oversight, from shopping for politicians willing to sell out their constituency. Show me also how "trivial" it is to block Facebook from completely spying on you while you're using the Internet on all your devices if you're not a somewhat competent sysadmin.
Equating it to corporate behavior or corrupt politics is tantamount to admitting that people are too dumb
"Equating" what, my friend? The described facts about FB trying to influence the "race to the bottom" in privacy with various forms of bribery so that they can use their other manipulative technologies to spy on users does not show that users aren't "dumb" at all. It shows how insidious and ruthless the said corporation is.
Do you think that you are as clever as the whole technical and marketing machine that is FB? You have delusions of competence, my dear. You saying you can stand your ground alone against FB is tantamount to you admitting you have no idea how easy a target you are.
Whenever it is more profitable for a company to invest in corrupting the political process instead of improving its services, it will invest in corrupting the political process.
This process is unstoppable when the added benefit of unequal cost/benefit distribution makes it expensive for the other players in the market to oppose such political "investment", and multiplies the profits of the corrupting entity many times over.
Actually, it would be even better if such babies are found out early and the pregnant women are then mandated to abort them. The family should then be made to adopt a healthy baby of a different race that has been orphaned or given up by the parents. This will not only create more happy families, but significantly lower the risk of inbreeding even when the foster parents later decide to have unprotected sex with the adopted children.
Why should I read an article about chemistry (or economics) in the Economist? It is an outfit about as useful as a source of information as Fox News in the US.
What does UKIP have to do with Brexit? Brexit was and is the responsibility of the UK Conservative Party and a certain David Cameron, who chose the referendum to be a key issue of the 2015 election campaign because they otherwise got nothing and would have lost.
Well, thanks for repeating the famous Isaac Newton quote, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." Mendeleev saw further than the people who worked before him, and that is why the periodic table is named after him.
What you misunderstood about it from reading Wikipedia just to post a comment here is your own problem.
This is totally irrelevant to the point of the OP. The PERIODIC LAW, which is the reason why the periodic table is called periodic in the first place was discovered by Mendeleev, and not by Lavoisier. Celebrating the latter as the creator of the periodic table just because he made a table of sorts is beyond ridiculous.
But then, it is the Economist, which is hardly famous for the scientific education of its authors.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not getting any disagreement from me on this, sorry.
NTSB will "start digging" when an Audi or a Toyota is crashed by its driver, and "AI" is blamed. As long as it is a symbolic American company, no, no sir, they have nothing to worry about.
People end up in prison all the time based on nothing more than eye-witness testimony
It is apparently even worse, people end up in prison all the time based on nothing more than a threat of longer sentence and a plea bargain offer.
Hardly.
low cost markets tend to be cheaper than those in the generally more expensive places.
Film at 11.
Well, hello back, yet another French corporation, subject to the same laws that other French corporations are subject to and not hiding revenue in Ireland.
Well, start counting. Wake me up when it is stopped. I won't be holding my breath.
But from a profit perspective, it is usually preferable for the company to pass the tax on rather than simply eating it.
Their problem is they cannot do it, for reasons the explainer made clear, which shows that you have not read it.
The obvious example is if the seller currently only has a 2% profit margin, and you impose a 3% revenue tax on them. Obviously they're not going to eat the tax since that would mean they'll be losing money with each sale. The only way they can continue to sell and stay in business is by passing part or all of that tax on to consumers.
Yes, a part of the tax may be passed on, but it will definitely not be the full amount, and how much the company will "eat" will depend on demand elasticity. If the company attempts to raise the price, and the demand is elastic (which it always is), the demand facing that company (and that market) will fall to a point where only the customers that are prepared to pay the new full amount will participate in the market. The consumers that will not be buying the service will not be paying the tax. Typically for elastic (flat) demand curve, that will mean a large loss of market share, which to most companies is unacceptable.
You're assuming the goal of a business is to maintain their pre-tax revenue and sales. It's not. It's to maximize their profit (profit = revenue - costs).
If you seriously think a company only looks at the profits, and not at market share it commands and its growth potential, you simply don't know how companies work. Sales, share and growth are numbers that any company cares about a lot, and it will routinely sacrifice profits to achieve a sales, market share or growth target. That is why a company which risks to lose a significant share will think hard before passing taxes on.
Therefore a tax is practically never passed on in full, especially in the long run.
You fail to consider the market for FB services. It is not what the users are *paying*, it is what advertisers are. It is business oriented, so the elasticity of demand and the power to negotiate is significantly better than what a consumer has. So, believe me, nothing close to full passing of the tax is even close to happening. And since the amount is not even all that big, it ain't getting passed on the consumer at all.
Not to mention that if a service is a monopoly, then regulation should not be optional, but mandatory. Monopolies are always bad.
They won't because they can't. Here's an explainer, with TL;DR section.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ref/ec...
These would be the perfectly competitive markets. There is no "free market" in economic theory, the phrase is just a political gimmick.
So fundamentally, this isn't a problem with companies or profit or a corrupt political process.
So, "fundamentally", how to you explain the hard facts in TFA about Facebook trying to bribe politicians into supporting anti-data harvesting legislation then? Since this is /., I will not ask if you've read TFA, but instead quote TFS for you:
FB has been promising investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them into lobbying on Facebook's behalf against data privacy legislation.
And it has not been a small thing either. It is a well-orchestrated worldwide operation: documents ... reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU
You think this isn't a problem? You think it is easy for the average voter to confront corporate subterfuge on this scale? You must be quite ignorant of how politics works, then, because it is happening everywhere and you, the average guy, have been sidelined from the political process by corporate long before you were born.
This process is trivial to stop.
You don't say. How easy is it to stop an operation like the one described above? Please elaborate, I'm very interested to hear about it. How do you learn about it, how do you get access to the likes of the UK prime minister or MPs on equal footing with Zuckerberg. How do you get your ass to Davos, mister, where Zuckerberg flies on his private jet with his army of manipulators? Show me how you've done it.
Please show me how "trivial" it is to stop a large international corporation, which business model is abusing the lack of global oversight, from shopping for politicians willing to sell out their constituency. Show me also how "trivial" it is to block Facebook from completely spying on you while you're using the Internet on all your devices if you're not a somewhat competent sysadmin.
Equating it to corporate behavior or corrupt politics is tantamount to admitting that people are too dumb
"Equating" what, my friend? The described facts about FB trying to influence the "race to the bottom" in privacy with various forms of bribery so that they can use their other manipulative technologies to spy on users does not show that users aren't "dumb" at all. It shows how insidious and ruthless the said corporation is.
Do you think that you are as clever as the whole technical and marketing machine that is FB? You have delusions of competence, my dear. You saying you can stand your ground alone against FB is tantamount to you admitting you have no idea how easy a target you are.
Japanese: Square KK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
American: Square Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
WOOSH
Whenever it is more profitable for a company to invest in corrupting the political process instead of improving its services, it will invest in corrupting the political process.
This process is unstoppable when the added benefit of unequal cost/benefit distribution makes it expensive for the other players in the market to oppose such political "investment", and multiplies the profits of the corrupting entity many times over.
I saw it, and I don't think it says anything at all. Corporations should not be begged to behave, they should be forced to behave by law.
This is what a "free market" is - a market regulated so that all players have equal power. Economics 101, Adam Smith, etc.
No, I know I am, because I have made sure it is so. But you obviously prefer hand-wringing.
You are too squirmish. Be brave, be strong, there's plenty of other people's children to go around.
I heartily agree.
Actually, it would be even better if such babies are found out early and the pregnant women are then mandated to abort them. The family should then be made to adopt a healthy baby of a different race that has been orphaned or given up by the parents. This will not only create more happy families, but significantly lower the risk of inbreeding even when the foster parents later decide to have unprotected sex with the adopted children.
A win-win situation for everyone.
Thanks for the stats, it is good to know that some people on slashdot have such awesome counting skills.
Oh, fuck off already.
Yeah it would if anyone did that.
Read the fucking summary and get back to me.
You could read it
Why should I read an article about chemistry (or economics) in the Economist? It is an outfit about as useful as a source of information as Fox News in the US.
What does UKIP have to do with Brexit? Brexit was and is the responsibility of the UK Conservative Party and a certain David Cameron, who chose the referendum to be a key issue of the 2015 election campaign because they otherwise got nothing and would have lost.
Well, thanks for repeating the famous Isaac Newton quote, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." Mendeleev saw further than the people who worked before him, and that is why the periodic table is named after him.
What you misunderstood about it from reading Wikipedia just to post a comment here is your own problem.
This is totally irrelevant to the point of the OP. The PERIODIC LAW, which is the reason why the periodic table is called periodic in the first place was discovered by Mendeleev, and not by Lavoisier. Celebrating the latter as the creator of the periodic table just because he made a table of sorts is beyond ridiculous.
But then, it is the Economist, which is hardly famous for the scientific education of its authors.