My understanding is that it doesn't matter if your facility has anything to do with making the sale or not. If you have a physical presence in the state, you must collect the tax. But then IANAL.
Have you checked the interest rates on Treasury securities lately? The US government is borrowing money at interest rates barely above zero... which means the bond markets think this is the safest possible investment they can make. If the bond markets were demanding huge interest rates, that would be one thing... but they're not. And that means no one thinks the US government is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
Because what Texas is trying to do is pretty clearly NOT against the law. Texas's claim is that Amazon's warehouse operation constitutes a physical presence in the state, which seems pretty uncontroversial. Amazon's claim is that the warehouse doesn't belong to them, it belongs to... their wholly owned subsidiary. It's ludicrous.
Seriously? You can't understand the difference between a student complaining about the teacher, and the teacher complaining about the student? Here's a hint: the teacher is supposed to be the RESPONSIBLE one of this matchup.
I nearly wet myself while reading the comments thread over at TFA. Post after post bitching about how stupid the kids are these days... and these same posts are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. Wasn't there a Bible verse, I don't know, something about motes and beams? Holy crap.
Then there are the posts that on one hand, bitch about the "arbitrary" firing of the teacher, and the evils of teacher's unions... in the same post!
I'm not sure how you guys keep getting away with saying that the Affordable Care Act is, well, unaffordable. It's simply a fact that the act cuts the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars in it's first 10 years, and by even more in the following 10 years as the reforms continue to take hold. People who claim the opposite are either confused or outright lying.
The same bill is going to be reintroduced under different rules that allow it to be passed with a simple majority. Unless something changes, it's almost certain to be extended.
Opposition to this crossed party lines - most Democrats and some Republicans voted against it. In the long run it probably won't matter, as the House leadership is going to re-introduce it under different rules that allow for more debate/amendments, but require a simple majority to pass. The votes for that are there, and the Senate is likely to pass it as well.
We're talking about whether you could put a solar installation on a house. If you have a roof, you have space. Cars parking on the street have nothing whatsoever to do with it. The rest of your post is pretty much gibberish. The fact is that some fairly large percentage of houses in the US could accommodate a solar PV installation.
... dude, we've ALREADY SPENT the 4 trillion and ALREADY HAVE the rockets. What you're proposing is that we just dump all of that and spend another $4 trillion in the (not guaranteed) hope that you'll come up with something better? The GP is exactly right here.
If it requires a "tremendous amount of investment", then it can't be "almost 'free'". That investment would have to be paid off, and all the while, it would be competing with rocket technology that's ALREADY been paid off. Net result: rockets would be cheaper, so no one invests in the launch loop.
He didn't so much as mention what these alternative technologies might be, and the only things I've seen have been pretty much pie-in-the-sky. It's far from a sure thing that there ARE any higher hills to climb, and even if there were, there's a good chance that getting from here to there would be cost-prohibitive.
Yeah, except your numbers are backwards. Rockets are nearly perfected technology - making little tweaks to them is not very expensive, and all the basic R&D is already paid off. However, developing entirely new technologies from scratch is very, very expensive. And you run the risk of them not working at all.
So if your object is to get something into space in the relatively near future, are you going to go with a) the system that's already been extensively tested, has pretty good capability, and a known price? Or b) a system that hasn't even had basic R&D done (meaning you'll need to pay for that), might have either extremely good capability, about the same capability, or worse capability, and you have no idea what it will cost?
It was an interesting article, but there were a couple of parts that I thought were really weak. One problem area:
To recap, the existence of rockets big enough to hurl significant payloads into orbit was contingent on the following radically improbable series of events:
World's most technically advanced nation under absolute control of superweapon-obsessed madman
Astonishing advent of atomic bombs at exactly the same time
...
What? Surely step 2 was more or less a direct result of step 1 - there's nothing improbable about that at all. I omitted the rest of the list, but the sequence didn't seem all that improbable to me. In fact, I really can't even figure out how the concept of probability even applies to historical events. They're all unique.
Another problem:
There is no shortage of proposals for radically innovative space launch schemes that, if they worked, would get us across the valley to other hilltops considerably higher than the one we are standing on now—high enough to bring the cost and risk of space launch down to the point where fundamentally new things could begin happening in outer space.
*crickets*
Ok, Neal, care to explain to us what these radically innovative schemes might be? In addition to the parent's theory that institutional inertia is the reason (which is probably a big part of the answer), there's also the very real possibility that none of these other "radically innovative" schemes have any chance of competing with rockets on the basis of cost-effectiveness - because all the R&D on rockets is essentially done and paid for, whereas to "cross those valleys" would be simply enormously expensive. And there's no guarantee your radical new technology would work. I think the risk factor here is even more important than the problems of inertia.
When the snow melts in the springtime, the meltwater trickles runs through the grass, soaks through the ground, goes through wetlands, etc... all of which removes contaminants from it. When you dump the snow straight into the harbor, none of that happens - all the pollutants go straight into the ocean.
I was trying to get to a buddy's house and he had provided an address... cheerfully typed it into Google Maps on the iPhone and away I go. Get somewhat near the destination, and the application starts telling me to turn right... while I'm on an overpass. I later found out that his address was unknown to Google Maps and you had to use Mapquest to find it!
My buddy used to drive for JB Hunt, and they damn sure told him which way he was going to drive (presumably based on one of these premium nav services). I'm kinda surprised that this guy was freelancing it.
Egypt does not supply any significant quantity of oil, and neither does unrest there affect oil deliveries from elsewhere. Unless the problem spreads to some country that actually produces oil, I doubt there will be a big effect.
You can stop gasoline sales right now and it won't make the slightest difference in oil consumption.
That's ludicrous on it's face. Per Wikipedia, in 2003 the US consumed 476 billion liters of gasoline. And you're going to tell me that if consumption of gas dropped to zero tomorrow, oil consumption wouldn't change at all? The answer's in your own post: oil companies would stop alkylation and reforming, meaning that the components of petroleum that used to be converted to gasoline would now become available for use as diesel, kerosene, etc. Which means that less oil would be required
Check this page for more details. You can see that gasoline accounts for around half of all "finished petroleum products" consumed in the US. If we stopped using gasoline, we could pump much less oil, because we wouldn't have to convert other hydrocarbons into gasoline - we could just use them for heavier fuels, chemical feedstocks, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding is that it doesn't matter if your facility has anything to do with making the sale or not. If you have a physical presence in the state, you must collect the tax. But then IANAL.
Have you checked the interest rates on Treasury securities lately? The US government is borrowing money at interest rates barely above zero... which means the bond markets think this is the safest possible investment they can make. If the bond markets were demanding huge interest rates, that would be one thing... but they're not. And that means no one thinks the US government is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
Minding the federal government's business. Which does not include collecting state taxes.
... you mean "the special tax deal expired, and now Texas wants them to pay what they owe", then you'd be correct.
Because what Texas is trying to do is pretty clearly NOT against the law. Texas's claim is that Amazon's warehouse operation constitutes a physical presence in the state, which seems pretty uncontroversial. Amazon's claim is that the warehouse doesn't belong to them, it belongs to... their wholly owned subsidiary. It's ludicrous.
Seriously? You can't understand the difference between a student complaining about the teacher, and the teacher complaining about the student? Here's a hint: the teacher is supposed to be the RESPONSIBLE one of this matchup.
I nearly wet myself while reading the comments thread over at TFA. Post after post bitching about how stupid the kids are these days... and these same posts are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. Wasn't there a Bible verse, I don't know, something about motes and beams? Holy crap.
Then there are the posts that on one hand, bitch about the "arbitrary" firing of the teacher, and the evils of teacher's unions... in the same post!
People are nuts.
I'm not sure how you guys keep getting away with saying that the Affordable Care Act is, well, unaffordable. It's simply a fact that the act cuts the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars in it's first 10 years, and by even more in the following 10 years as the reforms continue to take hold. People who claim the opposite are either confused or outright lying.
The same bill is going to be reintroduced under different rules that allow it to be passed with a simple majority. Unless something changes, it's almost certain to be extended.
Opposition to this crossed party lines - most Democrats and some Republicans voted against it. In the long run it probably won't matter, as the House leadership is going to re-introduce it under different rules that allow for more debate/amendments, but require a simple majority to pass. The votes for that are there, and the Senate is likely to pass it as well.
We're talking about whether you could put a solar installation on a house. If you have a roof, you have space. Cars parking on the street have nothing whatsoever to do with it. The rest of your post is pretty much gibberish. The fact is that some fairly large percentage of houses in the US could accommodate a solar PV installation.
And amortized development costs for that will OBVIOUSLY be cheaper than our already paid for rocket technology.
Your investment ideas intrigue me and I'd like a copy of your prospectus.
... dude, we've ALREADY SPENT the 4 trillion and ALREADY HAVE the rockets. What you're proposing is that we just dump all of that and spend another $4 trillion in the (not guaranteed) hope that you'll come up with something better? The GP is exactly right here.
If it requires a "tremendous amount of investment", then it can't be "almost 'free'". That investment would have to be paid off, and all the while, it would be competing with rocket technology that's ALREADY been paid off. Net result: rockets would be cheaper, so no one invests in the launch loop.
He didn't so much as mention what these alternative technologies might be, and the only things I've seen have been pretty much pie-in-the-sky. It's far from a sure thing that there ARE any higher hills to climb, and even if there were, there's a good chance that getting from here to there would be cost-prohibitive.
Yeah, except your numbers are backwards. Rockets are nearly perfected technology - making little tweaks to them is not very expensive, and all the basic R&D is already paid off. However, developing entirely new technologies from scratch is very, very expensive. And you run the risk of them not working at all.
So if your object is to get something into space in the relatively near future, are you going to go with a) the system that's already been extensively tested, has pretty good capability, and a known price? Or b) a system that hasn't even had basic R&D done (meaning you'll need to pay for that), might have either extremely good capability, about the same capability, or worse capability, and you have no idea what it will cost?
I think the question answers itself.
It was an interesting article, but there were a couple of parts that I thought were really weak. One problem area:
What? Surely step 2 was more or less a direct result of step 1 - there's nothing improbable about that at all. I omitted the rest of the list, but the sequence didn't seem all that improbable to me. In fact, I really can't even figure out how the concept of probability even applies to historical events. They're all unique.
Another problem:
*crickets*
Ok, Neal, care to explain to us what these radically innovative schemes might be? In addition to the parent's theory that institutional inertia is the reason (which is probably a big part of the answer), there's also the very real possibility that none of these other "radically innovative" schemes have any chance of competing with rockets on the basis of cost-effectiveness - because all the R&D on rockets is essentially done and paid for, whereas to "cross those valleys" would be simply enormously expensive. And there's no guarantee your radical new technology would work. I think the risk factor here is even more important than the problems of inertia.
When the snow melts in the springtime, the meltwater trickles runs through the grass, soaks through the ground, goes through wetlands, etc... all of which removes contaminants from it. When you dump the snow straight into the harbor, none of that happens - all the pollutants go straight into the ocean.
I'm soooo naming my next band "fark nad slashdot".
Surely misreading a map means that you deserve to die, and your family to suffer horribly, right?
I concur with the GP: you're an ass.
I was trying to get to a buddy's house and he had provided an address... cheerfully typed it into Google Maps on the iPhone and away I go. Get somewhat near the destination, and the application starts telling me to turn right... while I'm on an overpass. I later found out that his address was unknown to Google Maps and you had to use Mapquest to find it!
My buddy used to drive for JB Hunt, and they damn sure told him which way he was going to drive (presumably based on one of these premium nav services). I'm kinda surprised that this guy was freelancing it.
Egypt does not supply any significant quantity of oil, and neither does unrest there affect oil deliveries from elsewhere. Unless the problem spreads to some country that actually produces oil, I doubt there will be a big effect.
That's ludicrous on it's face. Per Wikipedia, in 2003 the US consumed 476 billion liters of gasoline. And you're going to tell me that if consumption of gas dropped to zero tomorrow, oil consumption wouldn't change at all? The answer's in your own post: oil companies would stop alkylation and reforming, meaning that the components of petroleum that used to be converted to gasoline would now become available for use as diesel, kerosene, etc. Which means that less oil would be required
Check this page for more details. You can see that gasoline accounts for around half of all "finished petroleum products" consumed in the US. If we stopped using gasoline, we could pump much less oil, because we wouldn't have to convert other hydrocarbons into gasoline - we could just use them for heavier fuels, chemical feedstocks, etc.
Current Prius batteries have a 100,000 mile warranty on their batteries, and many are lasting considerably longer than that.