"For one, Verizon is government subsidized. Yes, I said they are welfare recipients. For, every dollar they weepingly spend on infrastructure, they DEDUCT FROM THEIR TAXES."
Umm, thats the way it works for all businesses, if you were self employed, you could deduct those things. Taxing companies on gross revenue rather than profit would actually favor monopolies and would result in most of the cost being passed on to the customer. In reality, all companies are owned by people, so why should companies pay income taxes in the first place? Why not just tax the income when the investor recieves it? That way all income is treated the same.
"Secondly, if Verizon screws up, they DEDUCT THEIR LOSSES FROM THEIR INCOME TAXES. The "risk" that they take is government insured, because the taxpayers will be further taxed to make up for the money Verizon will not pay if they screw up."
The RISK is not insured, if the investment fails, then never get all the money back. It's lost, gone. This point makes absolutely no sense what so ever.
I suppose i could cover points three and four too, but I think I value my time more than that.
On the one hand you tout adam smith, on the other you call capitalism a "zero sum game", which is not at all the case. Are you going to make any real cogent points here, or am i just feeding a troll spouting nonsense and blather?
Re:Why are we always nitpicking?
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
Yep, they didnt do a thing, and mean old Dubya just walked in and executed them, yep. That Bush personally had them all killed, had nothing to do with Texas's long standing death penalty. Which was there long before W was govenor.
How about we give eveyone the same terms, person or corporate? 30 years maybe? According to the economists' AC brief in Eldred vs. Ashcroft, increasing the length of copyright past 50 years does little to promote further creation, because money earned more than 50 years from now has very little present value, plus most of the value is capured early on. The upside us losing the case is that we can retroactively shorten copyrights too, if congress really wanted to, since the court ruled they had such authority.
"At what point, exactly, do you feel comfortable with making what a woman does with her body your business?"
Why not? We already have decided as a society that you cannot use certain drugs or other thing with "your body." For that matter, you could say that the baby really isn't a part of her body Afterall, from conception the fetus has its own unique genetic makeup.
Further, by having consentual sex, she has to accept the consequences of that behavior. Now if you are talking about incest or rape, it eliminates the "responsiblity for your own choices" argument, but most abortions in the US are just retroactive birth control, and are not "hard cases."
Once again, the situation matters, as there is no perfect solution when you have a case were two fundamental right are in conflict.
"The concentration of wealth into the hands of a few has seen "the masses" being herded like sheep as never seen before."
Do you realize that on balance that income equality became much greater over the last century? Yes, it really sorta peaked during the 50s in the US, but on the whole, the industrial revolution and the end of the Guilded Age created and cemented the concept and notion of the middle class. Before that, you had subsistance farming (everyone was poor) with a very few well to do people in the ruling class and the later robber-barrons of the 19th century. You will never achive perfect income equality, and even if you could, the costs of doing so would be far greater than whatever benefits it would provide. At some point, the redistribution of wealth ceases to be productive to the overall well being of the people.
"Sun has yet to let anyone besides Sun itself have any say over Java."
So, the JCP only consists of Sun?? I was under the mistaken assumption that it included many other industry groups.
"Courts have ruled in several instances that if something is to be considered available, it must be available anonymously. "
That is not entirely true IIRC. It only holds when you already have an expectation of privacy. For example, you don't expect people to know all of the books you have ever checked out, but you dont have a right to anonymous public protest. The very fact that you are doing something obvious to the public means you have no expectation of privacy. Just like the court held that you have no right of privacy OUTSIDE and abortion and family planning clinic. Inside, what you actually do, is protected, especially since it is private property and you are also protected by the confidentiality agreement of the clinic. There is no "right" to be free of "social stigma", only resonable expectation of privacy. The government needs judicial permisson to watch "nonpublic" behavior. In otherwords, you are free to say or do what you want, but that doesn't mean that people have to agree with what you do, or like you for doing it.
I have no problem with the government being able to go to the library and asking to see what I've borrowed, as long as they have a warrant and probable cause, which is differnt than unlimited access to patron records.
Fact, Kyoto does jack to Fix the global warming problem, it buys us 6 years 100 years from now, in terms of CO2 levels. In other words, the net effect of Kyoto is almost nothing, but the costs are very high. Certainly it would be good to do something, but its kinda hard to reduce total emissions if you exclude china and india, thus whatever we do, any progress is canceled out by india and china.
Thus the poster's point is that there is no real environmental gain, so why should we burden ourselves with the cost. It would be far better to invest the money to research or Superfund or some other environmental goal, which gives us a much larger return for what we would be spending to get into compliance with Kyoto.
Yeah, that would be great forest management.
Perhaps we should burn it instead of clearing it, then we can burn up trees that have economic value, so that we can "feel good" cause we are "doing something" by keeping the evil loggers out of the forests. Even if it would be demonstrably better for them to log the forest, cause then you are sticking it to the big, evil corporations.
Its that attitude that upsets me. And it is more common than most well intentioned people want to admit.
And strangely, 80% of Canadians have a higher standard of living than 80% of Americans. The American per-capita-income figure is largely distorted by extremely rich people.
Is this before or after taxes? Just curious.
" But in fact, it worked really well ! a great bunch of good french movies came out of this politic (for example, Amélie), and same for songs (new singers/band, etc.)."
The question is, are these groups so good that they might have made it without the government requiring a certain quota of French songs? The answer is that you will never really know, but people will credit the law for the success of these group, which may (or may not) have happened anyways.
or option 3. in which american workers continue to become more productive, thus justifying our high wages and high standard of living. If it was cheeper to do everything elsewhere, then why would international companies to anything in the US. Fact of the matter is, the more software jobs that move to india, and the greater the trade imbalance, the cheeper it becomes to do work in the US. You completely disregared exchange rates. If the US standard of living dropped and we could suddenly not afford to import as much from overseas, then the value of the dollar, relative to other currencies, would be cheaper, thus making US produced products "cheeper" to foreigners, because even though the cost in dollars is the same, the cost in terms of say, rupees, is much lower. You are extrapolating a trend instead of seeing that it is an equation with an equilibrium.
We are talking about innacuracies "noncriminal" informaiton, not your criminal record. What they are saying is that the police can keep information on people that they think are suspicious, like they have done for years. They have always kept "files" on people that have had legal problems. But these files arent an authoratative source of information, they exist for the convenience of cops, unlike things that the law requires to be kept accurate, like the chain of evidence, and other "official" government records, like titles, licences, and your criminal history. In these things, the governemnt is still obligated to keep accurate records.
"My sympathies to the American people, but take comfort in the fact that GWB was not elected by a majority vote. Who knows, we might even let you rejoin the international community once you have a democratically elected government."
I fail to see how such a statement is less arrogant than what the US has done. Frankly, very little that happens in the world is agreed upon by everyone. You sound like a little kid who's threatening to take his ball and play elsewhere.
I also find it highly amusing that democracy is now required to be a member of the "international community" considering that almost half of the UN is made of countries that are no where near democracy. Like Iraq for ezample, which chairs the UN commission on dissarmament. Are they considered members of the International community?
Yeah, the cops can come in unannounced, if they have a warrant.
Also, anybody cannot just be held without council. People captured on foreign soil, training to fight are not considered civilians by international law. Furthermore, technically only US citizens are protected under the constitution. So if someone decides to join the taliban and fight against the US, then they can hardly be considered US civilians anymore. Civilians have far more rights than combatants. The USSC and other Frederal courts have many times on this matter. Now if we are talking about US citizens on US soil, with out a warranty and right to council, then you would be entirely correct, such behavior would be entirely unconstitutional. And for the record, it think that the PATRIOT ACT (under anything more than a very strict interpretation) should be considered highly unconstitutional. But the government has mostly been using powers that they already had before, just more extensively.
there is a difference between a raise from inflation (which does not raise your standard of living) and one from increased productivity (which does raise your standard of living)
Your other problem is that even the biggest company faces competition for workers, since there is a very large number of business in the world. Now the more specialized your work is, the more bargaining power you have, and the smaller the market for your skills, the less power you have, but these tend to balance out. (nothing that highly specialized and talented people tend to make substantially more than their less educated and specialized counterparts)
but you can't increase pay for onlly "good" teachers
which is the fundamental problem with unionization, it removes the ability of good workers to differentiate themselves from badly performing counterparts, and removes any individual incentive to do better work.
unless of course that the company decides that it can't afford to pay both your wage and insurance costs. In the real world it just comes out of your pay, or they just dont hire you to begin with. To a company, you cost them money, doesn't matter if you get it in cash, their matching FICA money, or insurance premiums, labor costs are labor costs.
The US really does have more advanced medical care than most of the world, generally speaking. The problem the US has is that our healthcare is also much more expensive in general. Of course, like any other brand new technology, only the rich can afford to be early adopters. We have larger legal costs (which don't exist when the doctor is an employee of the gov't which you cannot sue for big $), we also have a generally broken "insurance system", that encourages free riders, which was adopted in WWII to get around wage controls (give employees insurance cause you can't raise their wages). And lastly, we have tons of federal regulations and a difficult drug approval process. Now im not saying all regualtions are bad and that we should pay for everything out of pocket, but the current system has problems that need to be addressed. And federalizing the whole thing doesn't fundamentally fix those problems, it just removes choices.
Slashdot Mirror
"For one, Verizon is government subsidized. Yes, I said they are welfare recipients. For, every dollar they weepingly spend on infrastructure, they DEDUCT FROM THEIR TAXES." Umm, thats the way it works for all businesses, if you were self employed, you could deduct those things. Taxing companies on gross revenue rather than profit would actually favor monopolies and would result in most of the cost being passed on to the customer. In reality, all companies are owned by people, so why should companies pay income taxes in the first place? Why not just tax the income when the investor recieves it? That way all income is treated the same. "Secondly, if Verizon screws up, they DEDUCT THEIR LOSSES FROM THEIR INCOME TAXES. The "risk" that they take is government insured, because the taxpayers will be further taxed to make up for the money Verizon will not pay if they screw up." The RISK is not insured, if the investment fails, then never get all the money back. It's lost, gone. This point makes absolutely no sense what so ever. I suppose i could cover points three and four too, but I think I value my time more than that.
On the one hand you tout adam smith, on the other you call capitalism a "zero sum game", which is not at all the case. Are you going to make any real cogent points here, or am i just feeding a troll spouting nonsense and blather?
Yep, they didnt do a thing, and mean old Dubya just walked in and executed them, yep. That Bush personally had them all killed, had nothing to do with Texas's long standing death penalty. Which was there long before W was govenor.
How about we give eveyone the same terms, person or corporate? 30 years maybe? According to the economists' AC brief in Eldred vs. Ashcroft, increasing the length of copyright past 50 years does little to promote further creation, because money earned more than 50 years from now has very little present value, plus most of the value is capured early on. The upside us losing the case is that we can retroactively shorten copyrights too, if congress really wanted to, since the court ruled they had such authority.
there is this thing called student loans that the rest of us had to take out...
Why not? We already have decided as a society that you cannot use certain drugs or other thing with "your body." For that matter, you could say that the baby really isn't a part of her body Afterall, from conception the fetus has its own unique genetic makeup.
Further, by having consentual sex, she has to accept the consequences of that behavior. Now if you are talking about incest or rape, it eliminates the "responsiblity for your own choices" argument, but most abortions in the US are just retroactive birth control, and are not "hard cases."
Once again, the situation matters, as there is no perfect solution when you have a case were two fundamental right are in conflict.
Do you realize that on balance that income equality became much greater over the last century? Yes, it really sorta peaked during the 50s in the US, but on the whole, the industrial revolution and the end of the Guilded Age created and cemented the concept and notion of the middle class. Before that, you had subsistance farming (everyone was poor) with a very few well to do people in the ruling class and the later robber-barrons of the 19th century. You will never achive perfect income equality, and even if you could, the costs of doing so would be far greater than whatever benefits it would provide. At some point, the redistribution of wealth ceases to be productive to the overall well being of the people.
since bind was completely rewritten for version 9, its been much, much better. BIND 4 and 8 were pretty bad though, and some Unixes still use them.
I think you have your numbers backwards, what country uses "85% of the worlds resources."
"Sun has yet to let anyone besides Sun itself have any say over Java." So, the JCP only consists of Sun?? I was under the mistaken assumption that it included many other industry groups.
That is not entirely true IIRC. It only holds when you already have an expectation of privacy. For example, you don't expect people to know all of the books you have ever checked out, but you dont have a right to anonymous public protest. The very fact that you are doing something obvious to the public means you have no expectation of privacy. Just like the court held that you have no right of privacy OUTSIDE and abortion and family planning clinic. Inside, what you actually do, is protected, especially since it is private property and you are also protected by the confidentiality agreement of the clinic. There is no "right" to be free of "social stigma", only resonable expectation of privacy. The government needs judicial permisson to watch "nonpublic" behavior. In otherwords, you are free to say or do what you want, but that doesn't mean that people have to agree with what you do, or like you for doing it.
I have no problem with the government being able to go to the library and asking to see what I've borrowed, as long as they have a warrant and probable cause, which is differnt than unlimited access to patron records.
Fact, Kyoto does jack to Fix the global warming problem, it buys us 6 years 100 years from now, in terms of CO2 levels. In other words, the net effect of Kyoto is almost nothing, but the costs are very high. Certainly it would be good to do something, but its kinda hard to reduce total emissions if you exclude china and india, thus whatever we do, any progress is canceled out by india and china. Thus the poster's point is that there is no real environmental gain, so why should we burden ourselves with the cost. It would be far better to invest the money to research or Superfund or some other environmental goal, which gives us a much larger return for what we would be spending to get into compliance with Kyoto.
Yeah, that would be great forest management. Perhaps we should burn it instead of clearing it, then we can burn up trees that have economic value, so that we can "feel good" cause we are "doing something" by keeping the evil loggers out of the forests. Even if it would be demonstrably better for them to log the forest, cause then you are sticking it to the big, evil corporations. Its that attitude that upsets me. And it is more common than most well intentioned people want to admit.
And strangely, 80% of Canadians have a higher standard of living than 80% of Americans. The American per-capita-income figure is largely distorted by extremely rich people. Is this before or after taxes? Just curious.
" But in fact, it worked really well ! a great bunch of good french movies came out of this politic (for example, Amélie), and same for songs (new singers/band, etc.)." The question is, are these groups so good that they might have made it without the government requiring a certain quota of French songs? The answer is that you will never really know, but people will credit the law for the success of these group, which may (or may not) have happened anyways.
or option 3. in which american workers continue to become more productive, thus justifying our high wages and high standard of living. If it was cheeper to do everything elsewhere, then why would international companies to anything in the US. Fact of the matter is, the more software jobs that move to india, and the greater the trade imbalance, the cheeper it becomes to do work in the US. You completely disregared exchange rates. If the US standard of living dropped and we could suddenly not afford to import as much from overseas, then the value of the dollar, relative to other currencies, would be cheaper, thus making US produced products "cheeper" to foreigners, because even though the cost in dollars is the same, the cost in terms of say, rupees, is much lower. You are extrapolating a trend instead of seeing that it is an equation with an equilibrium.
We are talking about innacuracies "noncriminal" informaiton, not your criminal record. What they are saying is that the police can keep information on people that they think are suspicious, like they have done for years. They have always kept "files" on people that have had legal problems. But these files arent an authoratative source of information, they exist for the convenience of cops, unlike things that the law requires to be kept accurate, like the chain of evidence, and other "official" government records, like titles, licences, and your criminal history. In these things, the governemnt is still obligated to keep accurate records.
I fail to see how such a statement is less arrogant than what the US has done. Frankly, very little that happens in the world is agreed upon by everyone. You sound like a little kid who's threatening to take his ball and play elsewhere. I also find it highly amusing that democracy is now required to be a member of the "international community" considering that almost half of the UN is made of countries that are no where near democracy. Like Iraq for ezample, which chairs the UN commission on dissarmament. Are they considered members of the International community?
Yeah, the cops can come in unannounced, if they have a warrant. Also, anybody cannot just be held without council. People captured on foreign soil, training to fight are not considered civilians by international law. Furthermore, technically only US citizens are protected under the constitution. So if someone decides to join the taliban and fight against the US, then they can hardly be considered US civilians anymore. Civilians have far more rights than combatants. The USSC and other Frederal courts have many times on this matter. Now if we are talking about US citizens on US soil, with out a warranty and right to council, then you would be entirely correct, such behavior would be entirely unconstitutional. And for the record, it think that the PATRIOT ACT (under anything more than a very strict interpretation) should be considered highly unconstitutional. But the government has mostly been using powers that they already had before, just more extensively.
the president can force unions back to work if their job is one that might effect public safety (like the air traffic controlers, or police etc)
there is a difference between a raise from inflation (which does not raise your standard of living) and one from increased productivity (which does raise your standard of living) Your other problem is that even the biggest company faces competition for workers, since there is a very large number of business in the world. Now the more specialized your work is, the more bargaining power you have, and the smaller the market for your skills, the less power you have, but these tend to balance out. (nothing that highly specialized and talented people tend to make substantially more than their less educated and specialized counterparts)
but you can't increase pay for onlly "good" teachers which is the fundamental problem with unionization, it removes the ability of good workers to differentiate themselves from badly performing counterparts, and removes any individual incentive to do better work.
Obvious benefits, hidden costs.
The US really does have more advanced medical care than most of the world, generally speaking. The problem the US has is that our healthcare is also much more expensive in general. Of course, like any other brand new technology, only the rich can afford to be early adopters. We have larger legal costs (which don't exist when the doctor is an employee of the gov't which you cannot sue for big $), we also have a generally broken "insurance system", that encourages free riders, which was adopted in WWII to get around wage controls (give employees insurance cause you can't raise their wages). And lastly, we have tons of federal regulations and a difficult drug approval process. Now im not saying all regualtions are bad and that we should pay for everything out of pocket, but the current system has problems that need to be addressed. And federalizing the whole thing doesn't fundamentally fix those problems, it just removes choices.