Remember those CAFE(Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards that there was all the fuss over? Mercedes and BMW don't meet them. So they pay the fine. And have for a decade. There are other industries that plot the same course.
In the medical profession this attitude would be a serious liablility methinks though - patients would probably quickly defect to a company that would offer them data security.
"There is no point in threats when people have no idea what to do."
One of the most effective ways to get people to learn is for them to play the game at stakes they can't afford to lose. To often companies try to enforce compliance by strident language alone - to obtain true compliance some amount of threats are necessary (but pay docking & negative performance reviews work better than outright firing)
"What frusterates me is that the *most* amount of groundwork for drug research is done by universities. Pharmaceutical companies fund the commercialization and last mile research."
And Universities are now cashing in on their research - to note the University of Rochester http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/Cox-2/pr. html Whose patent on Cox-2 inhibitors may entitile them to royalties in the *Billions* of dollars. They are by no means alone in profiting from their research.
"I have to admit, it's alot of shots these days, and there's clear economic motives for the makers."
Never mind the horrors of death by Polio(you think an autistic childs a problem - try a full body polio cripple), or Tuberculosis, or Measles - the list of truly horrible diseases that killed MILLIONS and were all but eradicated by public vaccination goes on, as do the children saved with vaccinations.
"1) You would pay short term capital gains, not AMT, if you sold shares immediately. You only owe AMT on shares you exercise, but *do not sell before the end of the year*."
Yes - thats why you sell a portion of the shares, to cover a) the short term capital gains tax on the shares sold and b) the AMT due at years end on the shares left unsold. And to diversify your portfolio from the concentrated illiquid risk that a large block of restricted stock is.
"2) After an IPO, there is a minimum of a six month lockout on sales of stock by insiders, to allow the VC's to get their money out. It's in the contract. 3) The SEC enforces what are called "trading windows"; if the window is not open, you can't sell."
Yes - as a company employee your position has limited liquidity. Your investment actions should reflect such - and this should be planned for (see earlier point).
"4) The AMT in question only occurs if the exercise price exceeds the strike price; to relate this discussion back to the article (like it should be), avoiding this was just made illegal in July."
It would be a truly unjust tax if it applied to options that are under water......
"We should therefore expect more people to be put in the same position: pay the money out of pocket, if you are already rich; go to jail as a hostage so that your family can be made to pay it; or kill yourself to avoid the burden on your family, since you can't bankrupt out of taxes.
Face it: AMT is a tax on paper profits that may or may not turn into real profits."
I'm not going to disagree with you that the AMT as applied to stock options is a punitive tax - thats liability outweighs its benefit. I simply disagree with the heartache stories that people bring up in regards to it(the San Jose Mercury News being particularly disgusting) The tax laws were there beforehand - and there were people available who knew & understood the problem. Because people abdigated their responsibilities and allowed themselves to be victimized by the AMT does not make it a tax that should be repealed (as much as the liberal press would have us cast out anything that allows for victimisation)
"That's easy: the tax he owed that he killed himself over was AMT."
Yes - I got that. My point is this:
The problem he had was he either
A) Received bad advice, or B) Thought he wouldn't get caught. C) Didn't wholely consider the implications of his actions
There were widely apparent methods(less than a majority of options holders have been bankrupted after all) which would have protected him from the trap of the AMT. He chose not to exercise his options in this manner, for whatever reason choosing a manner which would give hime potentially higher returns, by holding his position. If he had instead sold some of his shares immediately (as most financial advisors would recommend for portfolio diversification reasons) and paid the AMT with the proceeds from this, he would have had no problem.
In this case the trap was the AMT from stock options. For others it's their 401k, in other cases it's Commodities, for others it's Short (or Long) positions. All of these have acknowledged risks, and benefits. If you plunge in not knowing the risks - you take your life in your own hands, as your subject did.
One can argue the need for the AMT, or other taxes - but people are only victimized by these if they allow themselve sto be victimized. After all, there are plenty of sources to ask questions of if you don't know - particularly if your looking at a windfall in the millions of dollars. If you choose not to ask, you take your life in your own hands.
That said I don't see how it's directly related to the AMT. It's very much analagous to the 401k debacle many people have experience - by listening to the bad advice of parties closely related to them they lost money. BooHoo. That happens when you don't spend the time to get good advice(which you certainly have the money too if your looking at $4-5 million in taxes) and listen to the morons in HR.
Accept resonsibility for your actions - namely by not immediately diversifying your portfolio you set yourself up for signifigant, concentrated, downside risk.
Aside from the usual government inherent bloat - the moneys going to substantially raise the salaries of the SEC's workers, most of whom could make substantially more than their current salary elsewhere on Wall Street.
What a cop out! What the hell ever happened to someone just being a "crook"?
Chemical Triggers don't particularly preclude someone being a crook - "crooks" are probably much more likely to be susceptible to these triggers.
Conceiving of things in other than moral terms allows one to look for other solutions, such as pharmacological solutions to these "triggers" that will work better than historical crime prevention.
Re:Blame college tuitions, not the dot-coms....
on
Generation Wrecked
·
· Score: 1
In Canada, almost all the universities (and all the prestigeous ones, like UBC, SFU, McGill, UofT) are government-subsidised (like the USian state-colleges), and still provide excellent education. ______________________________________ ________
In the US a good bit of the research of all colleges & universities is state subsidized too(this is irrespective of the public/private line) it's particularly true for the technical programs.
The real rising costs for colleges have been, increased financial aid (most private schools give out tremendous "need" based aid), salaries(star professors wages went up with everyone else - esp. in business, EE, Optics & CS), insurance (drinking deaths are bad!) and IT spending (someone had to pay for Napster!) - added with an aging inefficent physical plant, increased recruitment costs(thank you US News) and you have the recipe for the stratospheric rise in US higher education costs.
As for the cheapness of Canadian education - there's an interesting bit in the Economist this week theoreticizing that if Canadian Med Schools charged more, Canada might have less of a problem with Doctors fleeing.
find out what employers are looking for and broaden your skill set.
The problem I've run into off is not that employers are looking for a broader skill set - they're looking for broader work experience to back up that skill set. A bit hard to work on when your out of work.....
If you have a good renter, and the rent they pay covers the mortgage payment.
The problem of course is finding a good renter, and making sure they stay a good renter - easy enough if your within 100 miles or so, but forget it if your beyond that. With the costs associated with property management companies it's only worth holding on to the house if it's a bubble real estate market(California & the Megapolises) or your planning to move back in 5 years.
What's different about American culture that you guys don't? __________________________________________ ______
Are fingers are too Fing fat to use the textpad!
Seriously though - I think the interface has alot to do with lack of use. No one I've ever met (aside from some 12 year olds) is willing to punch in a message on a 9 key keypad. It just isn't worth it.
If you couple this with our cultural propensity for rudeness - if our phones on, we're going to talk on it. It doesn't matter where - school, restauraunts, church! It doesn't give much of a reason for us to text.
How hard can it be to create, say, a simulated "survivor" or "big brother" like situation (meaning a controlled environment with willing volunteers) and study sociological behaviour of the parties involved? How hard can it be to tape people in day to day situations and see how they interact? _______________________________________ ______
It's not necessarily the difficulty of these experiments that's behind the fields aversion to them - it's the ethical implications of the sometimes frightening changes in the persons participating ( to wit - the stanford prison experiment http://www.prisonexp.org/)
I think a fairer statement about the social sciences is not that they are useless, but that they progress only very slowly due to the difficulty of experimentation and the massive complexity of the phenomena being studied. ________________________________________ ____
Your above points are ecellently stated - but they neglect the insitutional aversion to "hard" science in many of the social science fields (or even in some branches of biology) to numerical methods of analysis.
Having worked for a government contractor - they are really, truly the bottom of the pork barrel - and neither party has any desire to do anything about it.
I worked as a government contractor, I was employed by a company that outsources Scientists/Engineers to various research labs(mostly defense), has a headquarters staff of about 15(fulltime, all) for about 150 employees. Mind you - none, not a one, of the other 135 employees work on site. Nor do they have any contact, or management from the office(I met my boss 3 times - once at my interview, once my first day, once when he retired!). When I showed up at the office at 3pm on a Thursday(nothing special, no meetings, no holidays) THERE WAS NO ONE THERE!
Here's the real kicker though - I cost the government just as much as a full time employee! But best of all was it being illegal for my actuall supervisor (the guy who I saw on a daily basis, not the guy who ran the contracting company) to have any say in my performance evaluation!
"One caveat to this is that if you want to work on your own project after hours, you may be better off with a public sector job that allows you to work eight-hour days and a steady paycheck. The public sector is also less likely to require contract stipulations that surrenders intellectual property you develop on your own time."
Correct on both accounts! In my experience the federal government gives you gobs of time to start your own business, project, whatever. And at most federal facilities (at least in the DC area), unless you're a manager, if you work 8 hours a day your an overacheiver. I new Federal Reserve employees who took advantage of the downtown daytime parking(9am-3:30pm). And lets not get started about the secretaries!
"Which will be useful, because there are many places that don't have fibre running to them, and running it is expensive. Like £200,000 per mile expensive"
Plastic Optical Fiber won't particularly change the high cost of laying cabling - most of the cost lies in the act of acquiring right of way, digging the hole, even the act of cabling the fiber the fiber is a very small part of the cost(Corning SMF-28 Optical Fiber runs about $.15/m - and you can get a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper if your doing a big install - i.e. 100,000kms at a time).
Where Plastic Optical Fiber will make a substantial difference is in wiring of Offices (replacing Twisted pair), or possibly as a last mile solution - all of the places where the skill(as in intelligence to follow directions) required to install glass fiber makes the installation cost too much.
"The risk that a corporation takes if it breaks a law is much smaller than the risk an actual flesh and blood person takes for doing the very same thing. It's gotten to the point where corporations typically view legal problems as just another operating expense, like paying the electric bill."
Whats really sick is they can claim the fines they paid as penance for their sins as tax breaks(see Tuesdays Wall Street Journal) if they structure them as "payments to victims" or other such chicanery.
Yet another knowitall Slashdotter! http://www.aircraftbuyer.com/feature d/peds.htm
Yes the FAA head is an imbecile - but "asking you if you had unknown crap in your bag was an effective security measure" - Asking the questions is actually good security - what's more important than the actual answer is the persons manner while answering. It's the same technique customs employees utilize - if the persons stressed, hesitates, etc - they're probably not telling the truth(this is a gross simplification) The problem with the questions was the airlines were never willing to train their staff.
A degree of false sorting yes - but having lived in multiple tract housing homes of the 1920's, and multiple tract housing homes of the 1990's - there was a substantial difference in quality.
Plaster & Lathe is much more durable for walls than wallboard.
Solid Hardwood Floors last much longer than composite hardwoods.
Solid boards for your roof last much longer than plywood.
Of course these techniques are all but impossible to replicate in this day and age at a reasonable cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Is actually rather common among corporations.
Remember those CAFE(Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards that there was all the fuss over? Mercedes and BMW don't meet them. So they pay the fine. And have for a decade. There are other industries that plot the same course.
In the medical profession this attitude would be a serious liablility methinks though - patients would probably quickly defect to a company that would offer them data security.
"There is no point in threats when people have no idea what to do."
One of the most effective ways to get people to learn is for them to play the game at stakes they can't afford to lose. To often companies try to enforce compliance by strident language alone - to obtain true compliance some amount of threats are necessary (but pay docking & negative performance reviews work better than outright firing)
"What frusterates me is that the *most* amount of groundwork for drug research is done by universities. Pharmaceutical companies fund the commercialization and last mile research."
. html Whose patent on Cox-2 inhibitors may entitile them to royalties in the *Billions* of dollars. They are by no means alone in profiting from their research.
And Universities are now cashing in on their research - to note the University of Rochester
http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/Cox-2/pr
"I have to admit, it's alot of shots these days, and there's clear economic motives for the makers."
Never mind the horrors of death by Polio(you think an autistic childs a problem - try a full body polio cripple), or Tuberculosis, or Measles - the list of truly horrible diseases that killed MILLIONS and were all but eradicated by public vaccination goes on, as do the children saved with vaccinations.
The Twinkie Defense!
"1) You would pay short term capital gains, not AMT, if you sold shares immediately. You only owe AMT on shares you exercise, but *do not sell before the end of the year*."
Yes - thats why you sell a portion of the shares, to cover a) the short term capital gains tax on the shares sold and b) the AMT due at years end on the shares left unsold. And to diversify your portfolio from the concentrated illiquid risk that a large block of restricted stock is.
"2) After an IPO, there is a minimum of a six month lockout on sales of stock by insiders, to allow the VC's to get their money out. It's in the contract.
3) The SEC enforces what are called "trading windows"; if the window is not open, you can't sell."
Yes - as a company employee your position has limited liquidity. Your investment actions should reflect such - and this should be planned for (see earlier point).
"4) The AMT in question only occurs if the exercise price exceeds the strike price; to relate this discussion back to the article (like it should be), avoiding this was just made illegal in July."
It would be a truly unjust tax if it applied to options that are under water......
"We should therefore expect more people to be put in the same position: pay the money out of pocket, if you are already rich; go to jail as a hostage so that your family can be made to pay it; or kill yourself to avoid the burden on your family, since you can't bankrupt out of taxes.
Face it: AMT is a tax on paper profits that may or may not turn into real profits."
I'm not going to disagree with you that the AMT as applied to stock options is a punitive tax - thats liability outweighs its benefit. I simply disagree with the heartache stories that people bring up in regards to it(the San Jose Mercury News being particularly disgusting) The tax laws were there beforehand - and there were people available who knew & understood the problem. Because people abdigated their responsibilities and allowed themselves to be victimized by the AMT does not make it a tax that should be repealed (as much as the liberal press would have us cast out anything that allows for victimisation)
"That's easy: the tax he owed that he killed himself over was AMT."
Yes - I got that. My point is this:
The problem he had was he either
A) Received bad advice, or
B) Thought he wouldn't get caught.
C) Didn't wholely consider the implications of his actions
There were widely apparent methods(less than a majority of options holders have been bankrupted after all) which would have protected him from the trap of the AMT. He chose not to exercise his options in this manner, for whatever reason choosing a manner which would give hime potentially higher returns, by holding his position. If he had instead sold some of his shares immediately (as most financial advisors would recommend for portfolio diversification reasons) and paid the AMT with the proceeds from this, he would have had no problem.
In this case the trap was the AMT from stock options. For others it's their 401k, in other cases it's Commodities, for others it's Short (or Long) positions. All of these have acknowledged risks, and benefits. If you plunge in not knowing the risks - you take your life in your own hands, as your subject did.
One can argue the need for the AMT, or other taxes - but people are only victimized by these if they allow themselve sto be victimized. After all, there are plenty of sources to ask questions of if you don't know - particularly if your looking at a windfall in the millions of dollars. If you choose not to ask, you take your life in your own hands.
That people committed suicide is terrible.
That said I don't see how it's directly related to the AMT. It's very much analagous to the 401k debacle many people have experience - by listening to the bad advice of parties closely related to them they lost money. BooHoo. That happens when you don't spend the time to get good advice(which you certainly have the money too if your looking at $4-5 million in taxes) and listen to the morons in HR.
Accept resonsibility for your actions - namely by not immediately diversifying your portfolio you set yourself up for signifigant, concentrated, downside risk.
Aside from the usual government inherent bloat - the moneys going to substantially raise the salaries of the SEC's workers, most of whom could make substantially more than their current salary elsewhere on Wall Street.
2 07 46.html
http://www.thestreet.com/funds/mercerbullard/14
Try about 5 years (the first time I saw their website!)
What a cop out! What the hell ever happened to someone just being a "crook"?
Chemical Triggers don't particularly preclude someone being a crook - "crooks" are probably much more likely to be susceptible to these triggers.
Conceiving of things in other than moral terms allows one to look for other solutions, such as pharmacological solutions to these "triggers" that will work better than historical crime prevention.
In Canada, almost all the universities (and all the prestigeous ones, like UBC, SFU, McGill, UofT) are government-subsidised (like the USian state-colleges), and still provide excellent education._ ________
_____________________________________
In the US a good bit of the research of all colleges & universities is state subsidized too(this is irrespective of the public/private line) it's particularly true for the technical programs.
The real rising costs for colleges have been, increased financial aid (most private schools give out tremendous "need" based aid), salaries(star professors wages went up with everyone else - esp. in business, EE, Optics & CS), insurance (drinking deaths are bad!) and IT spending (someone had to pay for Napster!) - added with an aging inefficent physical plant, increased recruitment costs(thank you US News) and you have the recipe for the stratospheric rise in US higher education costs.
As for the cheapness of Canadian education - there's an interesting bit in the Economist this week theoreticizing that if Canadian Med Schools charged more, Canada might have less of a problem with Doctors fleeing.
find out what employers are looking for and broaden your skill set.
The problem I've run into off is not that employers are looking for a broader skill set - they're looking for broader work experience to back up that skill set. A bit hard to work on when your out of work.....
If you have a good renter, and the rent they pay covers the mortgage payment.
The problem of course is finding a good renter, and making sure they stay a good renter - easy enough if your within 100 miles or so, but forget it if your beyond that. With the costs associated with property management companies it's only worth holding on to the house if it's a bubble real estate market(California & the Megapolises) or your planning to move back in 5 years.
What's different about American culture that you guys don't?_ ______
_________________________________________
Are fingers are too Fing fat to use the textpad!
Seriously though - I think the interface has alot to do with lack of use. No one I've ever met (aside from some 12 year olds) is willing to punch in a message on a 9 key keypad. It just isn't worth it.
If you couple this with our cultural propensity for rudeness - if our phones on, we're going to talk on it. It doesn't matter where - school, restauraunts, church! It doesn't give much of a reason for us to text.
That one's easy - taxes! As in 76% of the gasoline price is a tax! http://www.truthinmedia.org/Bulletins2000/tim2000- 9-4.html
How hard can it be to create, say, a simulated "survivor" or "big brother" like situation (meaning a controlled environment with willing volunteers) and study sociological behaviour of the parties involved? How hard can it be to tape people in day to day situations and see how they interact?_ ______
______________________________________
It's not necessarily the difficulty of these experiments that's behind the fields aversion to them - it's the ethical implications of the sometimes frightening changes in the persons participating ( to wit - the stanford prison experiment http://www.prisonexp.org/)
I think a fairer statement about the social sciences is not that they are useless, but that they progress only very slowly due to the difficulty of experimentation and the massive complexity of the phenomena being studied._ ____
_______________________________________
Your above points are ecellently stated - but they neglect the insitutional aversion to "hard" science in many of the social science fields (or even in some branches of biology) to numerical methods of analysis.
They live in states like South Dakota, Mississippi, South Carolina and Alaska!
Having worked for a government contractor - they are really, truly the bottom of the pork barrel - and neither party has any desire to do anything about it.
I worked as a government contractor, I was employed by a company that outsources Scientists/Engineers to various research labs(mostly defense), has a headquarters staff of about 15(fulltime, all) for about 150 employees. Mind you - none, not a one, of the other 135 employees work on site. Nor do they have any contact, or management from the office(I met my boss 3 times - once at my interview, once my first day, once when he retired!). When I showed up at the office at 3pm on a Thursday(nothing special, no meetings, no holidays) THERE WAS NO ONE THERE!
Here's the real kicker though - I cost the government just as much as a full time employee! But best of all was it being illegal for my actuall supervisor (the guy who I saw on a daily basis, not the guy who ran the contracting company) to have any say in my performance evaluation!
"One caveat to this is that if you want to work on your own project after hours, you may be better off with a public sector job that allows you to work eight-hour days and a steady paycheck. The public sector is also less likely to require contract stipulations that surrenders intellectual property you develop on your own time."
Correct on both accounts! In my experience the federal government gives you gobs of time to start your own business, project, whatever. And at most federal facilities (at least in the DC area), unless you're a manager, if you work 8 hours a day your an overacheiver. I new Federal Reserve employees who took advantage of the downtown daytime parking(9am-3:30pm). And lets not get started about the secretaries!
"Which will be useful, because there are many places that don't have fibre running to them, and running it is expensive. Like £200,000 per mile expensive"
Plastic Optical Fiber won't particularly change the high cost of laying cabling - most of the cost lies in the act of acquiring right of way, digging the hole, even the act of cabling the fiber the fiber is a very small part of the cost(Corning SMF-28 Optical Fiber runs about $.15/m - and you can get a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper if your doing a big install - i.e. 100,000kms at a time).
Where Plastic Optical Fiber will make a substantial difference is in wiring of Offices (replacing Twisted pair), or possibly as a last mile solution - all of the places where the skill(as in intelligence to follow directions) required to install glass fiber makes the installation cost too much.
"The risk that a corporation takes if it breaks a law is much smaller than the risk an actual flesh and blood person takes for doing the very same thing. It's gotten to the point where corporations typically view legal problems as just another operating expense, like paying the electric bill."
Whats really sick is they can claim the fines they paid as penance for their sins as tax breaks(see Tuesdays Wall Street Journal) if they structure them as "payments to victims" or other such chicanery.
Yet another knowitall Slashdotter!e d/peds.htm
http://www.aircraftbuyer.com/featur
Yes the FAA head is an imbecile - but "asking you if you had unknown crap in your bag was an effective security measure" - Asking the questions is actually good security - what's more important than the actual answer is the persons manner while answering. It's the same technique customs employees utilize - if the persons stressed, hesitates, etc - they're probably not telling the truth(this is a gross simplification) The problem with the questions was the airlines were never willing to train their staff.
A degree of false sorting yes - but having lived in multiple tract housing homes of the 1920's, and multiple tract housing homes of the 1990's - there was a substantial difference in quality.
Plaster & Lathe is much more durable for walls than wallboard.
Solid Hardwood Floors last much longer than composite hardwoods.
Solid boards for your roof last much longer than plywood.
Of course these techniques are all but impossible to replicate in this day and age at a reasonable cost.