Where is this alleged "social contract" written down? At least advocating shopping around for a better government does make whatever is going on look more like an actual contract (that is, an agreement between parties for mutual benefit).
Now compare it to three companies I named elsewhere in this thread as actual "political merchants" (by that I mean companies whose primary profit strategy is in obtaining public funding or publicly enforced rent-seeking opportunities):
I imagine there are a number of companies with campaign contributions and lobbying costs that are even larger than these (particularly in health care, investment, entertainment, and legal sectors).
Apple seems to be on the same level as Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle in terms of campaign contributions. I didn't notice them spending much less than these other large companies. But Apple certainly spends much less than certain obvious businesses.
I wish you would be so nonchalant and forgiving of the corporations and lay all the blame on the congress critters
Why? He is correct in where the blame lies. Note here that the actual corporations creating those loopholes aren't being punished, merely outsiders such as Apple who exploit what others have created.
I would favor killing off (in the economic sense) political merchants who game the system. In the US, that would be companies like General Motors, General Electric, or Boeing. It wouldn't be Apple.
if and when some large bank uses legal methods to unfairly foreclose on your home
What does "unfair" mean here? If you can't pay for a home, then it's not unfair to foreclose. You aren't entitled to a home.
Because the world is changing and it's no longer socially acceptable to just pay what's legal
Sure it is. I bet that whatever tax savings Apple gets for these games more than adequately compensates Apple for no longer being "socially acceptable" especially given that no impact to sales occur as a result (which is a solid indication that such activities are still socially acceptable).
Of late there's been a swing the other way and national governments are now putting pressure on organisations to pay their fair share of tax
This is something that should be a great embarrassment to you. It's not a "swing" of morality but a demonstration of weakness.
Companies that don't conform get "outed" in the media.
Imagine if a religion government were to do the same for you. I guess moral conformity is just fine when you think it's your morality that is being conformed to. Second, what is the actual criteria for exposure, for being "outed"? I imagine it is failing to bribe the appropriate officials. A company that pays off the right people no doubt finds in turn that it is paying its "fair" share of taxes, however small that share might be.
No, it isn't. Some of your tax money is so disposed. Other parts are used for spurious purposes and in some cases actually harm society (for example, by establishing onerous regulatory organizations or creating rent-seeking opportunities for the well-connected).
If a major economy like the US did that it would trigger a massive trade war, the EU, Russia, China, India and so forth would be perfectly justified in slapping massive tariffs on money transfers to the US.
In other words, you're saying that a major country defecting from the high tax policies common to the developed world would cripple the power of budding government oligarchies globally? Ok, let's do it then. I don't mind fighting so-called "trade wars" which will end in my favor.
Sentiments such as you echo remind me of why I support tax competition among governments. You are in a situation where due to the bribes that your government pays you, you have to support the growth of their power in order to continue to receive those bribes.
All I can say here is that if your so-called "western lifestyle" can only be funded by a lot of Other Peoples' Money, then it's not worthwhile. You have become merely a parasite and my view on parasites is that purging them is better, even if it comes at great cost to the host. Or maybe co-opting them so that they are somehow symbiotes.
I think a lower tax rate would help in the latter strategy since you'd have to actually provide something of value in order to survive than merely take it.
For me, I think the EPA' decision to shorten US residents useful lifespan by 2, 5, maybe 10 years
Or maybe 0 years. Or given the circumstances, even a negative amount of years since they are weakening the regulation in the advent of an emergency, which is where one would expect other rather urgent issues affecting life expectancy to rear their ugly heads. Is it somehow better to die of thirst or starve to death now than live with a slightly shorter lifespan maybe?
Aside from as the AC noted, a "chickenshit" answer, it's also an admission of surrender. After all, what Apple does is legal and hence, is the going rate. Your argument is self-defeating.
Jobs/Woz grew up in the USA, they were educated there and used the resources/facilities/opportunities of the USA to earn their fortunes. Many of those resources/facilities/opportunities were provided using taxpayer money.
And what makes you think they haven't paid that back by orders of magnitude? This is one of those demonstrations of how stupid social ideas tend to be. We have here the creation of a debt that could be and technically was repaid easily. But you still consider it unpaid because that furthers your interests.
I think it ingratitude. Instead of being thankful that a bunch of hard working people helped a lot of people through Apple and its works, you're still holding over its head ridiculous social responsibility due to the meager efforts that society played in its creation.
It's normal when working in a nuclear plant to be taking potassium iodide on a regular basis, which isn't something that the general populace is likely to be doing.
You would have to have a significantly elevated risk of being exposed to radioactive iodine to justify it. Just working at a nuclear plant doesn't mean you have that risk.
And what does "not assuming" such things do for us? Not much in the absence of evidence.
I find that companies literally sucking money out of the economy, then letting it sit, thereby starving the economy of capital, thereby adding to high unemployment, lower wages, less benefits, less job security, less public services, etc... is pretty bad for society.
What makes you think this is happening here? Instead, I see a bunch of governments acting in bizarre and harmful ways backed by some pretty crazy voters. Who's going to throw money into the economy just to have it destroyed by the next insane idea out of the US or EU?
Define morally acceptable.
It's an arbitrary map from a directly ordered set to a subset of possible human behaviors.
More likely we'd find that most people are all of the above, both sociopathic, and empathetic and trusting - just not necessarily to the same groups of people or at the same time.
You aren't adding much value for me either. But I see a lot of value in a "live and let live" policy where you don't interfere with people who are doing things that aren't valuable to you.
The 11 hour delay to make a trade if you get information right after extended hours trading ends on the NYSE seems like an unconscionable delay if milliseconds actually matter. If this had anything to do with market efficiency, they would be clamoring to extend the market hours.
I believe you can trade after hours on so called "dark pool" markets which don't have the constraints of the NYSE and similar markets. The clamoring was answered.
So what? Why should corporate taxes be greater than 0%? There seems to be this opinion that corporations should pay taxes. But those in turn get passed on to customers, employees, and shareholders. And the resulting tax revenue just gets squandered by governments.
When a company like Apple avoids/evades paying taxes, it hurts the free market by taking for themselves an advantage that other companies can or do not.
No. There is a difference legally between tax avoidance and tax evasion in that the latter is defined to be illegal. What Apple is doing is legal. Hence, anyone or any business in the so-called "free market" can pursue the same strategies.
While the original poster attempted to make a distinction between "legal" and "morally acceptable", it's worth noting that what Apple does is probably considered morally acceptable by Apple. Why should I give the original poster's opinion on moral acceptability any more weight than Apple's?
By not contributing their share of taxes
That's an opinion. Apple doesn't have a defined share of taxes. And I've noticed that no one goes out of their way to pay more taxes.
Stealing is immoral. [...] Lying is immoral.
No evidence in either case that this is occurring.
You cannot make a persuasive argument that you are not represented.
What does "represented" do for me? Sounds like it's nothing more than a pretext for claiming that I have no justification for complaining about taxation. The problem with my "representation" is that it is diluted by a lot of other people.
What I find instead is that I represent my interests far better than any government does or could. Hence, I have a natural desire to see power shifted from that government to me. Second, since government is running so very counter to my beliefs and opinions, particularly on fiscal and future-oriented matters, why should I think I'm being represented here? Instead, I find that those engaging in adventurous tax avoidance seem to further my interests better than the governments which claim to represent my interests.
I wouldn't make the mistake of saying that Apple is representing my interests because they happen to be doing something I approve of. But we seem to have common interests which is more than I can say for the people who are getting worked up over what is supposed to be morally acceptable.
There are other radioactive materials than just these two. Sure, you can separate out every radioactive isotope at least to some rather impressive level. But that hasn't been done.
And even if you did do it, you still have to worry about contamination later. For example, it takes an impressive amount of shielding to block cosmic rays. You basically have to dig a big hole in somewhat radioactive earth to get away from that. That leads to several possible sources of radioactive contamination which have to be blocked at considerable additional cost (or at least setting the radioactivity threshold above that point).
The fact that there is naturally occurring radioactivity does not mean it is safe to add more.
But it is a good indication that one can safely add more. As to the rest of your post, look at the error bars of such studies. I bet you'll see no actual evidence of increased mortality for small doses of radiation. Instead you'll see evidence consistent with a wide range of possibilities.
You observed that I did not mention something and assumed it means that it should be ignored?
No, by not mentioning something, you are in the act of ignoring it.
We don't know anything 100%. I said we should use reasonable expectation.
Sure. But if we're going to do that, then we need a better argument. Such as knowing enough so that we have good confidence that we're improving things by whatever criteria we have decided matters and are applying.
The size of the change is not as important as the rate of change.
Oh, it matters as much. Annually, we see very large changes in climate from summer to winter.
No, I am talking about a potential future state that can no longer be reversed to the present state. [...] it is hard to go back
I don't see the point of the first claim. Being difficult doesn't mean that something is impossible. Given that changing the climate at all is a difficult, globe-spanning task, what is the point of saying something is "hard". It's hard to move the climate unintentionally too.
I' wouldn't say that reversing climate is impossible at least under current solar output, but rather that it isn't worth the cost. And I bet that cessation of human activity, no matter where we go climate-wise will end up back at ice age within a few thousand years.
It is ok if we get to a new state that is irreversible if the new state is not bad. It is a different story when the new state is bad. The more tipping points we cross the more likely it becomes that we cross a really bad tipping point.
It's worth noting here that the only tipping point we've come across so far is the development of industrial society. The rest of the tipping points are hypothetical.
Sure, there are positive feedbacks, particularly, the effects of albedo change from a retreating snowline. But there are also two very strong negative feedbacks, the increase of radiation to space as the fourth power of temperature, and the cooling effect of storms (which efficiently move heat from the low atmosphere to the stratosphere and are alleged to become more common (the extreme weather people claim much more common) as global temperature rises).
Are you really blaming a Federal government for something a State government is doing?
Well, if the NSA wasn't there, apparently doing the very important federal task of snooping on us, there wouldn't be public revenue going to those taxes.
incredibly stupid lie
I've noticed that you seem to confuse disagreement with lying. Maybe you should work on that.
No offense to us in the US, but we do seem like a bunch of chumps. Maybe a few thousand more hamster wheels like this and someone will start thinking about what the point of a federal government should be.
I simply said that whether it's man made is irrelevant to whether we should try to stop it.
And I showed that whether it is man-made is quite relevant.
Why would you assume that I would propose ignoring the negative effects of the mitigation strategies?
Because you don't mention them. And I didn't "propose", but merely observed.
I am saying we should try to take the optimal path, and you are saying that some paths have negative effects. I really don't see your point.
Sure. But agreeing in the abstract with "some paths have negative effects" or that we should take "optimal paths" while simultaneously implying that there are situations where we should act even when we don't know that our actions will have any positive effect ("whether it's man made is irrelevant to whether we should try to stop it") indicates to me that in practice you aren't seeing this. That's an inherently suboptimal approach with unknown perhaps very negative effects,.
You don;t think that drastically changing climate will cause species to go extinct?
It didn't for the climate changes of the past few million years (alternating between glacial and the warmer interglacial periods). I think the big difference is that we didn't have a sprawling human civilization sprawling across escape routes (as well as ruthless invasive species). We can fix that via wilderness corridors and can always assist by helping such organisms to move. Such activities would be useful even in the absence of significant climate change (as far as species preservation is concerned).
It may become too late to reverse the effects. Like how it can become too late for a smoker to quite smoking before he gets lung cancer. I am not sure what part of "too late" is so hard to understand.
Reverse to what state? The 1850 climate? What is so important about the past climate that we should go back to it at the expense of our other priorities? Keep in mind that we already have an industrial society that we don't want reversed and a population we don't want to kill off. The situation is already irreversible.
And if the Government doesn't prosecute, then the law falls off the books as not being prosecutable anymore when they don't prosecute for 10 million violations.
You forgot the excluded middle. There are a variety of ways, legal and illegal, that the IRS can evade this even if your assertion is true. Merely claiming that they're a vital bureaucracy pursuing a vital national task may do the trick.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what we call a social contract.
Where is this alleged "social contract" written down? At least advocating shopping around for a better government does make whatever is going on look more like an actual contract (that is, an agreement between parties for mutual benefit).
If I slept with your wife, would you listen to those who told you to stop moaning about it and begin petitioning for adultery to be made illegal?
Why are you trying to claim that government should be as involved in personal spats as they are in tax collection?
If you want to make a splash, you start at the top.
Like say, General Electric? I think Apple got targeted because they didn't offer enough bribes.
One merely needs to look:
Apple
Now compare it to three companies I named elsewhere in this thread as actual "political merchants" (by that I mean companies whose primary profit strategy is in obtaining public funding or publicly enforced rent-seeking opportunities):
Boeing,
General Electric,
and General Motors.
I imagine there are a number of companies with campaign contributions and lobbying costs that are even larger than these (particularly in health care, investment, entertainment, and legal sectors).
Apple seems to be on the same level as Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle in terms of campaign contributions. I didn't notice them spending much less than these other large companies. But Apple certainly spends much less than certain obvious businesses.
I wish you would be so nonchalant and forgiving of the corporations and lay all the blame on the congress critters
Why? He is correct in where the blame lies. Note here that the actual corporations creating those loopholes aren't being punished, merely outsiders such as Apple who exploit what others have created.
I would favor killing off (in the economic sense) political merchants who game the system. In the US, that would be companies like General Motors, General Electric, or Boeing. It wouldn't be Apple.
if and when some large bank uses legal methods to unfairly foreclose on your home
What does "unfair" mean here? If you can't pay for a home, then it's not unfair to foreclose. You aren't entitled to a home.
Because the world is changing and it's no longer socially acceptable to just pay what's legal
Sure it is. I bet that whatever tax savings Apple gets for these games more than adequately compensates Apple for no longer being "socially acceptable" especially given that no impact to sales occur as a result (which is a solid indication that such activities are still socially acceptable).
Of late there's been a swing the other way and national governments are now putting pressure on organisations to pay their fair share of tax
This is something that should be a great embarrassment to you. It's not a "swing" of morality but a demonstration of weakness.
Companies that don't conform get "outed" in the media.
Imagine if a religion government were to do the same for you. I guess moral conformity is just fine when you think it's your morality that is being conformed to. Second, what is the actual criteria for exposure, for being "outed"? I imagine it is failing to bribe the appropriate officials. A company that pays off the right people no doubt finds in turn that it is paying its "fair" share of taxes, however small that share might be.
your tax money is used to benefit society
No, it isn't. Some of your tax money is so disposed. Other parts are used for spurious purposes and in some cases actually harm society (for example, by establishing onerous regulatory organizations or creating rent-seeking opportunities for the well-connected).
If a major economy like the US did that it would trigger a massive trade war, the EU, Russia, China, India and so forth would be perfectly justified in slapping massive tariffs on money transfers to the US.
In other words, you're saying that a major country defecting from the high tax policies common to the developed world would cripple the power of budding government oligarchies globally? Ok, let's do it then. I don't mind fighting so-called "trade wars" which will end in my favor.
Sentiments such as you echo remind me of why I support tax competition among governments. You are in a situation where due to the bribes that your government pays you, you have to support the growth of their power in order to continue to receive those bribes.
All I can say here is that if your so-called "western lifestyle" can only be funded by a lot of Other Peoples' Money, then it's not worthwhile. You have become merely a parasite and my view on parasites is that purging them is better, even if it comes at great cost to the host. Or maybe co-opting them so that they are somehow symbiotes.
I think a lower tax rate would help in the latter strategy since you'd have to actually provide something of value in order to survive than merely take it.
For me, I think the EPA' decision to shorten US residents useful lifespan by 2, 5, maybe 10 years
Or maybe 0 years. Or given the circumstances, even a negative amount of years since they are weakening the regulation in the advent of an emergency, which is where one would expect other rather urgent issues affecting life expectancy to rear their ugly heads. Is it somehow better to die of thirst or starve to death now than live with a slightly shorter lifespan maybe?
It's whatever the going rate is,
Aside from as the AC noted, a "chickenshit" answer, it's also an admission of surrender. After all, what Apple does is legal and hence, is the going rate. Your argument is self-defeating.
Jobs/Woz grew up in the USA, they were educated there and used the resources/facilities/opportunities of the USA to earn their fortunes. Many of those resources/facilities/opportunities were provided using taxpayer money.
And what makes you think they haven't paid that back by orders of magnitude? This is one of those demonstrations of how stupid social ideas tend to be. We have here the creation of a debt that could be and technically was repaid easily. But you still consider it unpaid because that furthers your interests.
I think it ingratitude. Instead of being thankful that a bunch of hard working people helped a lot of people through Apple and its works, you're still holding over its head ridiculous social responsibility due to the meager efforts that society played in its creation.
It's normal when working in a nuclear plant to be taking potassium iodide on a regular basis, which isn't something that the general populace is likely to be doing.
You would have to have a significantly elevated risk of being exposed to radioactive iodine to justify it. Just working at a nuclear plant doesn't mean you have that risk.
And what does "not assuming" such things do for us? Not much in the absence of evidence.
I find that companies literally sucking money out of the economy, then letting it sit, thereby starving the economy of capital, thereby adding to high unemployment, lower wages, less benefits, less job security, less public services, etc... is pretty bad for society.
What makes you think this is happening here? Instead, I see a bunch of governments acting in bizarre and harmful ways backed by some pretty crazy voters. Who's going to throw money into the economy just to have it destroyed by the next insane idea out of the US or EU?
Define morally acceptable.
It's an arbitrary map from a directly ordered set to a subset of possible human behaviors.
More likely we'd find that most people are all of the above, both sociopathic, and empathetic and trusting - just not necessarily to the same groups of people or at the same time.
but it isn't adding much value either
You aren't adding much value for me either. But I see a lot of value in a "live and let live" policy where you don't interfere with people who are doing things that aren't valuable to you.
The 11 hour delay to make a trade if you get information right after extended hours trading ends on the NYSE seems like an unconscionable delay if milliseconds actually matter. If this had anything to do with market efficiency, they would be clamoring to extend the market hours.
I believe you can trade after hours on so called "dark pool" markets which don't have the constraints of the NYSE and similar markets. The clamoring was answered.
So what? Why should corporate taxes be greater than 0%? There seems to be this opinion that corporations should pay taxes. But those in turn get passed on to customers, employees, and shareholders. And the resulting tax revenue just gets squandered by governments.
When a company like Apple avoids/evades paying taxes, it hurts the free market by taking for themselves an advantage that other companies can or do not.
No. There is a difference legally between tax avoidance and tax evasion in that the latter is defined to be illegal. What Apple is doing is legal. Hence, anyone or any business in the so-called "free market" can pursue the same strategies.
While the original poster attempted to make a distinction between "legal" and "morally acceptable", it's worth noting that what Apple does is probably considered morally acceptable by Apple. Why should I give the original poster's opinion on moral acceptability any more weight than Apple's?
By not contributing their share of taxes
That's an opinion. Apple doesn't have a defined share of taxes. And I've noticed that no one goes out of their way to pay more taxes.
Stealing is immoral. [...] Lying is immoral.
No evidence in either case that this is occurring.
You cannot make a persuasive argument that you are not represented.
What does "represented" do for me? Sounds like it's nothing more than a pretext for claiming that I have no justification for complaining about taxation. The problem with my "representation" is that it is diluted by a lot of other people.
What I find instead is that I represent my interests far better than any government does or could. Hence, I have a natural desire to see power shifted from that government to me. Second, since government is running so very counter to my beliefs and opinions, particularly on fiscal and future-oriented matters, why should I think I'm being represented here? Instead, I find that those engaging in adventurous tax avoidance seem to further my interests better than the governments which claim to represent my interests.
I wouldn't make the mistake of saying that Apple is representing my interests because they happen to be doing something I approve of. But we seem to have common interests which is more than I can say for the people who are getting worked up over what is supposed to be morally acceptable.
You can get non-radioactive biological materials
Where?
but mice have been raised without carbon-14
There are other radioactive materials than just these two. Sure, you can separate out every radioactive isotope at least to some rather impressive level. But that hasn't been done.
And even if you did do it, you still have to worry about contamination later. For example, it takes an impressive amount of shielding to block cosmic rays. You basically have to dig a big hole in somewhat radioactive earth to get away from that. That leads to several possible sources of radioactive contamination which have to be blocked at considerable additional cost (or at least setting the radioactivity threshold above that point).
The fact that there is naturally occurring radioactivity does not mean it is safe to add more.
But it is a good indication that one can safely add more. As to the rest of your post, look at the error bars of such studies. I bet you'll see no actual evidence of increased mortality for small doses of radiation. Instead you'll see evidence consistent with a wide range of possibilities.
Nobody has shown that what Apple has done shouldn't be morally acceptable.
You observed that I did not mention something and assumed it means that it should be ignored?
No, by not mentioning something, you are in the act of ignoring it.
We don't know anything 100%. I said we should use reasonable expectation.
Sure. But if we're going to do that, then we need a better argument. Such as knowing enough so that we have good confidence that we're improving things by whatever criteria we have decided matters and are applying.
The size of the change is not as important as the rate of change.
Oh, it matters as much. Annually, we see very large changes in climate from summer to winter.
No, I am talking about a potential future state that can no longer be reversed to the present state. [...] it is hard to go back
I don't see the point of the first claim. Being difficult doesn't mean that something is impossible. Given that changing the climate at all is a difficult, globe-spanning task, what is the point of saying something is "hard". It's hard to move the climate unintentionally too.
I' wouldn't say that reversing climate is impossible at least under current solar output, but rather that it isn't worth the cost. And I bet that cessation of human activity, no matter where we go climate-wise will end up back at ice age within a few thousand years.
It is ok if we get to a new state that is irreversible if the new state is not bad. It is a different story when the new state is bad. The more tipping points we cross the more likely it becomes that we cross a really bad tipping point.
It's worth noting here that the only tipping point we've come across so far is the development of industrial society. The rest of the tipping points are hypothetical.
Sure, there are positive feedbacks, particularly, the effects of albedo change from a retreating snowline. But there are also two very strong negative feedbacks, the increase of radiation to space as the fourth power of temperature, and the cooling effect of storms (which efficiently move heat from the low atmosphere to the stratosphere and are alleged to become more common (the extreme weather people claim much more common) as global temperature rises).
Are you really blaming a Federal government for something a State government is doing?
Well, if the NSA wasn't there, apparently doing the very important federal task of snooping on us, there wouldn't be public revenue going to those taxes.
incredibly stupid lie
I've noticed that you seem to confuse disagreement with lying. Maybe you should work on that.
You, uh, realize we pay for that anyway?
No offense to us in the US, but we do seem like a bunch of chumps. Maybe a few thousand more hamster wheels like this and someone will start thinking about what the point of a federal government should be.
I simply said that whether it's man made is irrelevant to whether we should try to stop it.
And I showed that whether it is man-made is quite relevant.
Why would you assume that I would propose ignoring the negative effects of the mitigation strategies?
Because you don't mention them. And I didn't "propose", but merely observed.
I am saying we should try to take the optimal path, and you are saying that some paths have negative effects. I really don't see your point.
Sure. But agreeing in the abstract with "some paths have negative effects" or that we should take "optimal paths" while simultaneously implying that there are situations where we should act even when we don't know that our actions will have any positive effect ("whether it's man made is irrelevant to whether we should try to stop it") indicates to me that in practice you aren't seeing this. That's an inherently suboptimal approach with unknown perhaps very negative effects,.
You don;t think that drastically changing climate will cause species to go extinct?
It didn't for the climate changes of the past few million years (alternating between glacial and the warmer interglacial periods). I think the big difference is that we didn't have a sprawling human civilization sprawling across escape routes (as well as ruthless invasive species). We can fix that via wilderness corridors and can always assist by helping such organisms to move. Such activities would be useful even in the absence of significant climate change (as far as species preservation is concerned).
It may become too late to reverse the effects. Like how it can become too late for a smoker to quite smoking before he gets lung cancer. I am not sure what part of "too late" is so hard to understand.
Reverse to what state? The 1850 climate? What is so important about the past climate that we should go back to it at the expense of our other priorities? Keep in mind that we already have an industrial society that we don't want reversed and a population we don't want to kill off. The situation is already irreversible.
And if the Government doesn't prosecute, then the law falls off the books as not being prosecutable anymore when they don't prosecute for 10 million violations.
You forgot the excluded middle. There are a variety of ways, legal and illegal, that the IRS can evade this even if your assertion is true. Merely claiming that they're a vital bureaucracy pursuing a vital national task may do the trick.