You have a funny definition of "liberal politicians."
Pro-gun control, pro-abortion, pro-illegal immigration, pro-nanny state to the power of ten (because liberals believe that people are too stupid to make their own choices since they might make the "wrong" ones and have to face consequences, which would be bad as everyone should be a Winner no matter what).
Funny how "racial profiling" is OK in the minds of liberal politicians for their cities but bad when done in a place like Arizona. I guess it's racism in Arizona and "just stopping the most likely offenders" in NYC.
Eh...there probably was some half baked documentation at some point,
Yes, there was and there is. It's called "source code." One of the reasons that COBOL is such a verbose language is that it was designed so that bean counters with no programming experience could audit the source code and understand it well enough to make sure that nobody was stealing anything. Not only that, it's rare that COBOL code actually needs any comments because the variable names are long enough that you shouldn't ever have to guess what any of them are used for or what's being done with/to them.
If I recall correctly from the CSC351 COBOL class I had as an undergrad in 1982 or 1983...
There's probably only a hundred or so people that are able to successfully edit Wikipedia pages, and they're ok with the code. Everyone else gets their edits rolled back without a glance.
I didn't realize that I was so special. I've made a dozen edits to Wikipedia entries, including one that wasn't trivial...
I've never seen it either, in 50+ years of life in three states. The theater I normally go to has a warning at the beginning that they will throw you out. Given that I have never seen anyone with a phone screen on there, I can only presume they mean it.
2:15 pm June 25 showing of Star Trek Into Darkness at the Peoria, AZ Harkin's Theater. Twice during the show a woman three rows down pulls out her phone for about 30 seconds each time. Full brightness.
While stadium seating gives much better view of the movie it means that you can see every phone in front of you.
Thanks for the excellent clarification, but it seems to me there's still a step missing. For court orders and subpoenas, the FBI would presumably need to have probable cause, and therefore the evidence for the probable cause would presumably have to be available to the defense, to avoid being the fruit of the poisoned tree. It seems to me that the FBI would have to conduct their own investigation to establish probable cause for court action, and then they would of course ask for warrants and subpoenas based on the NSA tip.
To me, it appears that categorization would pose far more of a problem for grocery delivery businesses such as Amazon (which bought WebVan) than for businesses selling non-food goods, as food is far more likely to be exempt from use tax as a measure to mitigate the regressiveness of use tax. Could you give me a problem where accurate categorization of non-food goods has proven difficult?
It doesn't matter that the example was food based. The still valid point is that every jurisdiction has wrinkles in their sales tax systems that makes accurate classification of every item sold in every single jurisdiction sold into difficult. A large business with a tax department or a Mom & Pop bricks & mortar store that sells in only one has a big advantage over a small internet-based business.
The associated argument that it doesn't apply to small business because of some $1,000,000 in sales exemption doesn't cut it either. If a business has a 10% net sales margin (a very high margin) then $1,000,000 in sales is $100,000 is gross profits, from which all operating expenses, loan services, inventory, etc must come.
All this is doing is requiring out-of-state business to work for free as [use] tax collectors for the state. That is just wrong.
Congress and the legislatures of the several states disagree with you that "That is just wrong", and you should express your views to you and/or vote them out of office.
Even though in essence they are collecting taxes in reality these businesses are being taxed by a jurisdiction in which they do not reside and in which they have no representation. Taxation without representation was at one point in our country's history considered a Bad Thing. Now it's OK, I guess, because Look At All Of That Money Available! In all other cases State Laws only apply inside that state's boarders (otherwise your state could arrest you for gambling if you go to a casino in Las Vegas, or for "soliciting" if you visit some places near there) but for some reason people think that this should be an exception.
Hydro: probably going down over the coming decades as we decide that the damage to fish populations outweighs the other positive impacts (at least for smaller dams)
Wind: hardly free of environmental impacts (steel and rare earth mining and refining) and until we get an economically viable storage mechanism it won't supply base load and so is almost worthless. Interestingly with a smart grid and a large fleet of electric vehicles you can get a fairly significant amount of distributed storage but at this point electric cars are too expensive.
Solar: Why 90% of the power in the desert SW doesn't come from stored solar I have no clue, they're already paying some of the highest rates in the country, to the point where unsubsidized pv solar makes sense if you're in the top two tiers of consumption so stored thermal solar has to make sense since it's so much more efficient.
Your post really shows that you have conflicting sets of Greens. Each set believes that Green Power is great as long as it doesn't impact their particular interest.
Hydro: Fish Killer and Destroyer of Riparian Systems
Wind: Eagle Choppers
Solar: Destroyer of Pristine and Fragile Desert Ecosystems (see Desert Tortoise and Biological Soil Crust). You get to chose between building towers with mirrors to melt salt or covering (and destroying the ecosystem of) many thousands of acres with solar panels. There's a salt plant under construction in Gila Bend for APS that will generate 280 MW. Wikipedia says that the Solana Generating Station will cover 1,920 acres. It also notes that "solar thermal plants use substantially more water for cooling than other solar generating technologies" but the Sierra Club supports it because it's being built on private agricultural land (already ruined, I guess) and will use "75 to 85 percent less water than the current agricultural use" (they must have been growing cotton).
That sentence hurt my head, but even with what you mean it's irrelevant. In the USA, for example, 82% of the population lives in cities and suburbs and so could have most of their transportation needs met by mass transit and the gaps filled with taxis or schemes similar to ZipCar for occasional use.
I live in the city/suburb (call it whichever you want) of Glendale, AZ in the metropolitan Phoenix area. There apparently IS, to my surprise, a ZipCar site at ASU West, which is only seven short miles away from my house.
I live nine miles away from my workplace. It takes me 15 minutes (20 with dense traffic but not dense enough to avoid) to drive up the 101 from my house to work.
Over the past 22 years that I've lived at my current address, I've checked a couple of times per year on bus routes to see if things have gotten better. They have. While there would still be a mile plus walk from my house to the nearest applicable bus stop and two bus transfers from there to work, the time has decreased so that it would now take less than an hour each way (excluding the mile-plus walk in each direction) to ride the bus to work.
Add in that my hours are often irregular and that the current (1:50 PM) temperature is 106 degrees (forecast is 5pm=108, 6pm=107) with an 11 (NOT a goes-to-eleven joke) UV exposure factor for that walk and you may see that mass transit is not an optimal fit for me. (It is a "dry heat" and the "feels like" numbers are "only" 99, 101, and 100 respectively, at least until July and August when the humidity goes up a bit.) And I AM part of your 82% cities/suburbs number.
Mass transit works for those who live near an outlying node and need to get to another node or a central hub. Central hubs are usually downtown near government buildings or at universities. When you have highly-dense, older cities with subways it works better. When you look at newer, less-dense cities it works poorly.
Part of the deal in this interstate sales tax bill is that participating states will make TaxCloud.net available to online retailers without charge. Integrating TaxCloud.net into a cart is supposed to be no more painful than integrating a payment processor or a shipping rate service.
And I'm sure that TaxCloud.net will handle properly classifying nice, simple things like this:
Note that this is the real issue. While a Mom & Pop bricks & mortar store needs only get it right once, the Mom & Pop web-based store must get it right for every single item for every single state collecting tax. As the grandparent post states, this will be far more painful to a small operation, which might have a "tax person", than to a multinational with a tax department. This puff piece kind of glosses over that (emphasis mine)...
Q: So, if there is an error in the rate or the treatment of an item will the CSP pay the deficiency?
A: TaxCloud is indemnified by the states, and we only use states-provided data. So long as sellers accurately categorize their item(s), TaxCloud will defend sellers from any assessments, penalties, or interest.
Don't forget that BUSINESSES PAY SALES TAXES, not the buyer. (That's why in Arizona a business has to get a "Transaction Privilege (Sales) Tax License".) These taxes, unlike most, are itemized and passed on to the consumer so most people mistakenly believe that they pay the tax. They do not. A business is not "collecting" the tax for the state. They are instead being taxed and are increasing the price to cover the tax. (This is more apparent with the "includes taxes" type sales that you may see at entertainment venues like ballparks and theaters.) This means that allowing a state to require an out-of-state business to "collect" sales tax really means that they are being allowed to tax that out-of-state business.
It is wrong for a state to be able to tax an entity outside it's jurisdiction. A state cannot prohibit mail-order/internet-order business due to the Interstate Commerce clause. What it can do (and always has) is require its residents to pay the Use Tax in lieu of sales tax that would have been paid. In some cases (buying a car in one state and registering it in another) it's easy for a state to enforce this. In most cases it isn't. It is not the fault of the out-of-state business that the state's residents, due to intent or ignorance, violate that law. All this is doing is requiring out-of-state business to work for free as tax collectors for the state. That is just wrong.
But that is no excuse to get rid of government. The focus should be to rid government of vested interests.
Limit what government can do so that it can't provide lavish benefits to some at the expense of others and that pretty much solves the problem.
The framers of the Constitution would be appalled at what our government does under the excuses of "Interstate Commerce" and "General Welfare". The modern view of those clauses leaves no powers to be "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." A Constitution written to limit the powers of government wouldn't have two catch-all clauses for "and everything else not listed here", as it specifically does for the people in the Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." It's obvious on its face that those clauses are being misinterpreted and abused.
And B&N helped kill all of my local bookstores before Amazon was even a thing. As long as authors get paid to keep writing books I don't even care anymore.
Also, keeping the existing system has a 100% chance of being a nagging pain in the ass; but a pretty minimal chance of failing catastrophically in some novel way that the IT minions aren't already familiar with.
You mean like some of our software, written in the 80s, running only on an old version of VMS, which runs only on certain old DEC hardware (of which there are almost no spares) and can only be supported by a rapidly dwindling generation of staff, none of whom work at our company? Have you ever seen what happens when a piece of hardware fails on one of these machines?!
I must know you. Not only are the VAXes ancient, the Alphas are obsolete now too.
My personal belief is that in a perfect world Communism is the best form of government, in an imperfect world, a combination of governmental philosophies are the best.
By "imperfect world" you mean a world where "individuals who seek to gain for themselves and their families" thwart the Greater Good (as determined by...?).
+5? The only way to keep a website from getting hacked is by not connecting it to the internet in the first place. Effort should certainly be put into making it difficult to hack but also making it difficult to gain anything valuable when you are hacked.
That's not to say Democrats don't have their own problems, but until Republicans agree that the rich should pay the same taxes as people who work, it is silly for me to support Republicans.
And if a bunch of generally wealthy people have to spend a lot more time sitting around airports to get rich people to pay their fair share, I'm good with that.
How about a 10% (or pick your number) flat tax with no deductions and no floor? Then everyone pays the same and nobody gets a tax break.
No Big <insert-boogeyman-here> tax breaks, no "green" tax breaks, no charity tax breaks, no farm tax breaks, no tax breaks for hiring new workers, no tax break for depreciation, no tax breaks for mortgage interest, no tax break for being "rich", no tax break for being "poor", no tax break for being "middle class", no tax breaks at all.
How is this in any way different from the shit that the Kock brothers do?
Right wing nutjobs piss and whinge about the unions and how money grabbing they are. Do they do that for the oil companies? No, yet the sociopathic CEOs and super rich are far worse.
And left-wing nutjobs piss and whine about Corporations and "The Rich" but give the unions a pass.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a funny definition of "liberal politicians."
Pro-gun control, pro-abortion, pro-illegal immigration, pro-nanny state to the power of ten (because liberals believe that people are too stupid to make their own choices since they might make the "wrong" ones and have to face consequences, which would be bad as everyone should be a Winner no matter what).
Political_stands
Funny how "racial profiling" is OK in the minds of liberal politicians for their cities but bad when done in a place like Arizona. I guess it's racism in Arizona and "just stopping the most likely offenders" in NYC.
I think the next Dr. Who should be a woman, deffinately. With the usual hot female sidekick. Deffinately.
Xena?
Probably something like 7.21% of the PCs would pass the Windows Genuine Advantage check...
In the same state:
Damn Big Hole
Martian Canal Spotter
Piss Water Skiing
Red Rock Wackos
Falling Hill Town
London Bridge Site
Standing On Corner
Big Dead Birds
Copper to Artists
Shot Down Dead
Eh...there probably was some half baked documentation at some point,
Yes, there was and there is. It's called "source code." One of the reasons that COBOL is such a verbose language is that it was designed so that bean counters with no programming experience could audit the source code and understand it well enough to make sure that nobody was stealing anything. Not only that, it's rare that COBOL code actually needs any comments because the variable names are long enough that you shouldn't ever have to guess what any of them are used for or what's being done with/to them.
If I recall correctly from the CSC351 COBOL class I had as an undergrad in 1982 or 1983...
COMPUTE t1(i1) = (t2(i2) ** 3) / (t3(i1) * 2 + 1);
Completely made up, of course, but you can make "self-documenting" COBOL look nearly as bad as Perl if you want to.
There's probably only a hundred or so people that are able to successfully edit Wikipedia pages, and they're ok with the code. Everyone else gets their edits rolled back without a glance.
I didn't realize that I was so special. I've made a dozen edits to Wikipedia entries, including one that wasn't trivial...
I've never seen it either, in 50+ years of life in three states. The theater I normally go to has a warning at the beginning that they will throw you out. Given that I have never seen anyone with a phone screen on there, I can only presume they mean it.
2:15 pm June 25 showing of Star Trek Into Darkness at the Peoria, AZ Harkin's Theater. Twice during the show a woman three rows down pulls out her phone for about 30 seconds each time. Full brightness.
While stadium seating gives much better view of the movie it means that you can see every phone in front of you.
Thanks for the excellent clarification, but it seems to me there's still a step missing. For court orders and subpoenas, the FBI would presumably need to have probable cause, and therefore the evidence for the probable cause would presumably have to be available to the defense, to avoid being the fruit of the poisoned tree. It seems to me that the FBI would have to conduct their own investigation to establish probable cause for court action, and then they would of course ask for warrants and subpoenas based on the NSA tip.
"We received an Anonymous Tip."
Er, aren't there 50 states, not 5? Still even 2 billion is a large chunk of change.
Nah. There's only five, as far as matters to the feds:
NY, IL, CA, DC, Other.
To me, it appears that categorization would pose far more of a problem for grocery delivery businesses such as Amazon (which bought WebVan) than for businesses selling non-food goods, as food is far more likely to be exempt from use tax as a measure to mitigate the regressiveness of use tax. Could you give me a problem where accurate categorization of non-food goods has proven difficult?
It doesn't matter that the example was food based. The still valid point is that every jurisdiction has wrinkles in their sales tax systems that makes accurate classification of every item sold in every single jurisdiction sold into difficult. A large business with a tax department or a Mom & Pop bricks & mortar store that sells in only one has a big advantage over a small internet-based business.
The associated argument that it doesn't apply to small business because of some $1,000,000 in sales exemption doesn't cut it either. If a business has a 10% net sales margin (a very high margin) then $1,000,000 in sales is $100,000 is gross profits, from which all operating expenses, loan services, inventory, etc must come.
All this is doing is requiring out-of-state business to work for free as [use] tax collectors for the state. That is just wrong.
Congress and the legislatures of the several states disagree with you that "That is just wrong", and you should express your views to you and/or vote them out of office.
Even though in essence they are collecting taxes in reality these businesses are being taxed by a jurisdiction in which they do not reside and in which they have no representation. Taxation without representation was at one point in our country's history considered a Bad Thing. Now it's OK, I guess, because Look At All Of That Money Available! In all other cases State Laws only apply inside that state's boarders (otherwise your state could arrest you for gambling if you go to a casino in Las Vegas, or for "soliciting" if you visit some places near there) but for some reason people think that this should be an exception.
Hydro: probably going down over the coming decades as we decide that the damage to fish populations outweighs the other positive impacts (at least for smaller dams)
Wind: hardly free of environmental impacts (steel and rare earth mining and refining) and until we get an economically viable storage mechanism it won't supply base load and so is almost worthless. Interestingly with a smart grid and a large fleet of electric vehicles you can get a fairly significant amount of distributed storage but at this point electric cars are too expensive.
Solar: Why 90% of the power in the desert SW doesn't come from stored solar I have no clue, they're already paying some of the highest rates in the country, to the point where unsubsidized pv solar makes sense if you're in the top two tiers of consumption so stored thermal solar has to make sense since it's so much more efficient.
Your post really shows that you have conflicting sets of Greens. Each set believes that Green Power is great as long as it doesn't impact their particular interest.
Hydro: Fish Killer and Destroyer of Riparian Systems
Wind: Eagle Choppers
Solar: Destroyer of Pristine and Fragile Desert Ecosystems (see Desert Tortoise and Biological Soil Crust). You get to chose between building towers with mirrors to melt salt or covering (and destroying the ecosystem of) many thousands of acres with solar panels. There's a salt plant under construction in Gila Bend for APS that will generate 280 MW. Wikipedia says that the Solana Generating Station will cover 1,920 acres. It also notes that "solar thermal plants use substantially more water for cooling than other solar generating technologies" but the Sierra Club supports it because it's being built on private agricultural land (already ruined, I guess) and will use "75 to 85 percent less water than the current agricultural use" (they must have been growing cotton).
That sentence hurt my head, but even with what you mean it's irrelevant. In the USA, for example, 82% of the population lives in cities and suburbs and so could have most of their transportation needs met by mass transit and the gaps filled with taxis or schemes similar to ZipCar for occasional use.
I live in the city/suburb (call it whichever you want) of Glendale, AZ in the metropolitan Phoenix area. There apparently IS, to my surprise, a ZipCar site at ASU West, which is only seven short miles away from my house.
I live nine miles away from my workplace. It takes me 15 minutes (20 with dense traffic but not dense enough to avoid) to drive up the 101 from my house to work.
Over the past 22 years that I've lived at my current address, I've checked a couple of times per year on bus routes to see if things have gotten better. They have. While there would still be a mile plus walk from my house to the nearest applicable bus stop and two bus transfers from there to work, the time has decreased so that it would now take less than an hour each way (excluding the mile-plus walk in each direction) to ride the bus to work.
Add in that my hours are often irregular and that the current (1:50 PM) temperature is 106 degrees (forecast is 5pm=108, 6pm=107) with an 11 (NOT a goes-to-eleven joke) UV exposure factor for that walk and you may see that mass transit is not an optimal fit for me. (It is a "dry heat" and the "feels like" numbers are "only" 99, 101, and 100 respectively, at least until July and August when the humidity goes up a bit.) And I AM part of your 82% cities/suburbs number.
Mass transit works for those who live near an outlying node and need to get to another node or a central hub. Central hubs are usually downtown near government buildings or at universities. When you have highly-dense, older cities with subways it works better. When you look at newer, less-dense cities it works poorly.
Part of the deal in this interstate sales tax bill is that participating states will make TaxCloud.net available to online retailers without charge. Integrating TaxCloud.net into a cart is supposed to be no more painful than integrating a payment processor or a shipping rate service.
And I'm sure that TaxCloud.net will handle properly classifying nice, simple things like this:
Sales of Ice Cream Cakes and Similar Items
Note that this is the real issue. While a Mom & Pop bricks & mortar store needs only get it right once, the Mom & Pop web-based store must get it right for every single item for every single state collecting tax. As the grandparent post states, this will be far more painful to a small operation, which might have a "tax person", than to a multinational with a tax department. This puff piece kind of glosses over that (emphasis mine)...
Why the number of sales tax jurisdictions doesn’t matter
Q: So, if there is an error in the rate or the treatment of an item will the CSP pay the deficiency?
A: TaxCloud is indemnified by the states, and we only use states-provided data. So long as sellers accurately categorize their item(s), TaxCloud will defend sellers from any assessments, penalties, or interest.
Don't forget that BUSINESSES PAY SALES TAXES, not the buyer. (That's why in Arizona a business has to get a "Transaction Privilege (Sales) Tax License".) These taxes, unlike most, are itemized and passed on to the consumer so most people mistakenly believe that they pay the tax. They do not. A business is not "collecting" the tax for the state. They are instead being taxed and are increasing the price to cover the tax. (This is more apparent with the "includes taxes" type sales that you may see at entertainment venues like ballparks and theaters.) This means that allowing a state to require an out-of-state business to "collect" sales tax really means that they are being allowed to tax that out-of-state business.
It is wrong for a state to be able to tax an entity outside it's jurisdiction. A state cannot prohibit mail-order/internet-order business due to the Interstate Commerce clause. What it can do (and always has) is require its residents to pay the Use Tax in lieu of sales tax that would have been paid. In some cases (buying a car in one state and registering it in another) it's easy for a state to enforce this. In most cases it isn't. It is not the fault of the out-of-state business that the state's residents, due to intent or ignorance, violate that law. All this is doing is requiring out-of-state business to work for free as tax collectors for the state. That is just wrong.
But that is no excuse to get rid of government. The focus should be to rid government of vested interests.
Limit what government can do so that it can't provide lavish benefits to some at the expense of others and that pretty much solves the problem.
The framers of the Constitution would be appalled at what our government does under the excuses of "Interstate Commerce" and "General Welfare". The modern view of those clauses leaves no powers to be "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." A Constitution written to limit the powers of government wouldn't have two catch-all clauses for "and everything else not listed here", as it specifically does for the people in the Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." It's obvious on its face that those clauses are being misinterpreted and abused.
And B&N helped kill all of my local bookstores before Amazon was even a thing. As long as authors get paid to keep writing books I don't even care anymore.
I'm confused. I thought that was Fox Books...
Also, keeping the existing system has a 100% chance of being a nagging pain in the ass; but a pretty minimal chance of failing catastrophically in some novel way that the IT minions aren't already familiar with.
You mean like some of our software, written in the 80s, running only on an old version of VMS, which runs only on certain old DEC hardware (of which there are almost no spares) and can only be supported by a rapidly dwindling generation of staff, none of whom work at our company? Have you ever seen what happens when a piece of hardware fails on one of these machines?!
I must know you. Not only are the VAXes ancient, the Alphas are obsolete now too.
My personal belief is that in a perfect world Communism is the best form of government, in an imperfect world, a combination of governmental philosophies are the best.
By "imperfect world" you mean a world where "individuals who seek to gain for themselves and their families" thwart the Greater Good (as determined by...?).
Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. Not to mention that it's already in orbit.
Be careful. It might not be Cosmos at all. It might be IKON and it'll nuke you back.
iPads
How does one create with one of those?
netbooks
Those would have been perfect, and I use one, but they're no longer manufactured, and I wonder what to do once it breaks.
notebooks, ultrabooks, MacBook Airs
Those don't go down to 10".
Why are things so conformist with you that there has to be only one right answer to something?
I don't require only one right answer. I just desire that there exist a right answer.
You sound almost like an employer designing a job description tailored for an H-1B because they can't find an American with the required skill set.
+5? The only way to keep a website from getting hacked is by not connecting it to the internet in the first place. Effort should certainly be put into making it difficult to hack but also making it difficult to gain anything valuable when you are hacked.
The only way to win is not to play?
That's not to say Democrats don't have their own problems, but until Republicans agree that the rich should pay the same taxes as people who work, it is silly for me to support Republicans.
And if a bunch of generally wealthy people have to spend a lot more time sitting around airports to get rich people to pay their fair share, I'm good with that.
How about a 10% (or pick your number) flat tax with no deductions and no floor? Then everyone pays the same and nobody gets a tax break.
No Big <insert-boogeyman-here> tax breaks, no "green" tax breaks, no charity tax breaks, no farm tax breaks, no tax breaks for hiring new workers, no tax break for depreciation, no tax breaks for mortgage interest, no tax break for being "rich", no tax break for being "poor", no tax break for being "middle class", no tax breaks at all.
Also, social programs don't do anybody any long term favors. The give a man a fish and teach him to fish analogy comes to mind.
How about you ask your parents to opt-out of Social Security and Medicare and you cover their retirement expenses......
How about giving them back all of the money (with interest) that they paid into their "account"?
Give me back all of my "contributions" over the last 31 years (both halves) and I'll opt-out, you bet your ass.
And left-wing nutjobs piss and whine about Corporations and "The Rich" but give the unions a pass.
Next.
You get used to it. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, red-head.