Dive into Quickbooks then and see if you can get it to work. What you need to do is apply a 4.2% rate to wages under $18,350 in January and February, and a 6.2% rate that applies to wages over $18,350 but below $110,100 in January and February, and a 0% rate to wages above $110,100 in January and February. Then For March thru December, you need to specify a third rate, TBD, for wages under $110,100, 0% above that limit. The three paired amounts (wages paid and tax withheld for each category) then need to be reportable to fill out quarterly tax forms that have yet to be designed.
No you can't do that, because then tax filers would need to be able to document what their income was during the first two months of the year. They couldn't file taxes until after February, the employer would have to issue a new form, the IRS would have to design the form, they'd have to redesign the 1040, et al. You realize all of this requires lead time, right?
"Payroll tax" is often used to refer to the Social Security tax, when one wishes to obscure the nature of the tax (ie that it funds the Social Security program). "Withholding tax" is more normally used to refer to federal income tax based on the income tax tables.
What the Senate bill did on the Social Security tax was set a limit of $18,350 (1/6 of 110,100, the limit for the entire year) for the first two months of the year that the 4.2% rate applies to. 6.2% applies above that limit. After the first two months of the year, rates are yet to be determined.
So instead of a simple calculation involving a single rate and a single wage limit for the employee portion for the entire year, we have three rates, two for the first two months and one for the last 10 months, and two limits that apply. For reporting the quarter totals (Form 941) employers would need to report the total wages for the first two months below $18,350, and the total wages above $18,350 along with the total wages for the third month in the quarter.
I would be very surprised if any payroll software were capable of handling this calculation for the Social Security tax right now. Up until now, there was no reason to build such a ridiculous calculation into your payroll software.
It seems like to me that it used to be that politicians, or at least their staff, had some inkling of the real world effect of changing tax policy, and the need for lead time for the IRS and SSA not to mention software vendors to adjust to these changes. At the worst, changing tax rates, calculations or reporting requirements should be done at the end of quarter if not the year.
News reports suggest to me that the only sticking point between the Senate and the House is how to fund the bill. The two month time frame apparently came about because that the Senate and House only agreed to funding sources that totaled enough to continue the tax break for that period of time.
That was my initial thought, the alleged theft occurred on the moon, so I think the US Government should bring action against the astronaut in a lunar court.
Oddly enough, I read on Wikipedia (so it must be true!) that some Democrats wanted President Polk ("The Napolean of the Stump") to annex all of Mexico instead of signing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago. I think that would make a very interesting alt-history scenario!
3. After watching the 2005+ series, if you don't have enough time to watching everything in order starting with Tom Baker, watch at least his first season, which includes stories with three recurring villain races. Then if you are interested in the classic episodes but don't want to slog through them in order, skip around based on a theme, say all of the Dalek episodes in order, or regeneration stories (last and first episodes when the actor portraying the Doctor changes). Some of the episodes and seasons are tied together with a theme (Season 16: Key to Time, Season 23: Trial of a Timelord, Keeper of Traken/Logopolis/Castrovalva form a sort of trilogy). Others are notable for certain reasons (e.g. City of Death was filmed in Paris and written by Douglas Adams and will seem familiar if you've read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency). There are a few multiple doctor episodes (The Five Doctors, The Two Doctors, The Three Doctors) that are worth watching. Watch at least one episode from each of doctors 4-7. Check out the only Eighth Doctor (Fox TV movie) because like or not, that's all there is for the eighth doctor (and they did get Sylvester McCoy back for the first 20 minutes to include the regeneration sequence).
Before the energy crisis in California, energy prices were cheaper under the so-called "deregulation" scheme that brought on the crisis. Deregulation is over. Now with the regulation that is in place, the absurd tiered rates and equally absurd baseline usage levels, we pay up to around.44/kwh when we get into the higher tiers. So I feel that we are being ass raped right now.
The problem is too much of the wrong type of regulation. You quite simply can't build nuclear in California. There's actually a law in California against it until the feds figure out the disposal issue. Yucca Mountain is going nowhere, so there we are. There's actually a group trying to get a nuke plant going in central California that thinks it's found a way around the letter of the law prohibiting nuclear power plants: they want to build a nuclear powered desalination plant to clean up the water on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. If they have some leftover electricity to sell then they will. Even if they win on the technicality that nuclear powered desalination plants are not prohibited, it will be at least ten years before they get through all of the red tape and maybe start building something.
Maybe nuclear possible in some other states. California does buy "green" hydro energy from British Columbia who in turns buys coal and gas generated electricity for their own power needs. So I guess if Washington or Oregon built some nukes, they could stop using their own hydro power, ship it down to California, and use the nuclear power.
We recently got xfinity with ComCast (20Mb/s) and NetFlix starts playback almost instantly, and we have never had playback stop to rebuffer. In comparison, we had problems with AT&T's DSL service all the time with NetFlix though. On DSL, playback would stop to buffer the video repeatedly and sometime would stop playback entirely.
In some places I'm sure it is true that Comcast is essentially a monopoly. Though I'd think that anywhere you can get cable, you can also set up a dish for DirectTV and Dish Network, so they do kind of compete against the satellite companies for TV service. Here locally, they do compete against AT&T's uVerse (or something like that) for TV/telephone/Internet service. And of course their Internet service competes against AT&T's DSL. And various local broadband wireless providers. And of course they have to compete against alternative options for getting TV programming (over the air and Internet download/streaming).
I'm not sure that you can definitively say they have no incentive to upgrade. They have just rolled fiber out to our neighborhood, and we did sign up for the xfinity triple play package. We are now getting phone/internet/cable for less than we were paying to Dish/DirectTV and AT&T combined. The speed (20Mb/s) is faster (verifiably and consistently) than anything else that's available. The equipment for xfinity is a step up in several respects from what we had with either Dish Network or DirectTV. There are a couple features we miss from Dish Network's equipment but they are more than made up for with the new features that were lacking in the satellite systems (for instance HD at every TV, DVR playback (in HD) at every TV). They are enhancing their OnDemand service which is a way of differentiating their service from satellite, so it appears that they are trying to compete against the satellite companies.
Knowing ComCast's reputation I am prepared to start hating them at any moment, but so far the xfinity package has been the best deal we have ever had.
Based on reading Comcast's letter, it sounds like what they want to be paid for is the setup for the 27-30 extra ports ($50k per) and associated recurring costs ($25K per port per year) that are going to be required to provide enough bandwidth between Level 3's network and Comcast to handle the new additional traffic Level 3 is sending to them.
They were supposed to include code in their rounding routines to skim all the half cents of all the transactions off and funnel them to a Swiss bank account!
These directions used to tell you to turn right at 7th street, then left at G street. The street view left hand turn into the chain link fence and non-existent road was particularly hilarious but probably not dangerous.
I reported this back in March and checked on it a couple of times, but only just now when I checked was it fixed. So it probably took three months or so for it to be corrected. Probably not too bad considering how big Los Banos is. In this case looking at the satellite view would have saved me a few minutes, as the sat view would have conflicted with the old map that had G St running from 4th through to 7th.
I would also add that farmers can participate in the futures market, at least one way I understand it is used is to hedge against price declines. They even have access to these newfangled things called computers and spreadsheets that help them keep track of their breakeven points and develop trading strategies. Some farmers have even been known to store their harvests when market prices are low (ie, below their profitability targets) and sell them when the market prices have recovered. Go figure. It almost sounds like they expect to be able to make a living farming.
Attaching strings to federal money is a time honored tradition and how the feds make many things "mandatory". For instance the national drinking age has been set at 21 as a condition of states receiving federal highway money.
The article is correct. Abiogenesis has not been observed (in the lab) or when it is assumed to have happened billions of years ago (no observers, at least that we know of).
There are other possibilities:
1. Life on earth was created by an alien entity (which some refer to as "God")
2. Primitive life (single celled organisms) arrived here from somewhere else (on a meteor, spaceship, asteroid, take your pick)
3. We are actually the descendants of a bunch of hairdressers, middle management executives, and telephone sanitizers that crash landed here from another planet.
And I'm sure there are other possibilities.
I don't think assuming that because we exist, abiogenesis must have happened qualifies as a scientific theory. Can it be falsified? How is it any different than saying that because we exist, a God must have created us?
I think the great hope of finding life on other planets, first Mars and possibly other bodies in the solar system, is partly because some feel it would lend some credence to the idea of abiogenesis. The article recognizes how improbable it is for life to arisen from nonlife ("a stroke of astronomical luck") and that this indeed could be the "Great Filter". If, however, life is found elsewhere in the solar system where non-earthlike conditions prevail then maybe it changes the game.
Of course it still may be difficult, if not impossible, to rule out scenario #2 happening somewhere else, but if abiogenesis is assumed to have happened somewhere else, especially in non-earthlike environments, then scientists may be more inclined to think that there exist physical laws and properties of matter at the atomic and molecular level that inevitably lead to the emergence of life (solving the improbability problem).
If that were the case, then we have the problem that if life is inevitable, where is all of the life that should have developed over billions of years and reached such advanced levels of technology and colonized the galaxy that we should be able to detect them?
That I think is the point of the article, to suppose that there are "Great Filters" that may limit the number of civilizations that could have arisen, and that may limit the ability of our civilization to progress to the point we imagine the human race could someday progress.
I think the company that maintained this is no longer in business, and archives of the pages are kept alive by various fans of the site. But you are correct, there is nothing from 2000 on, which means nothing pertaining to XP or Vista. The content for the Hall of Shame was largely reader generated. If someone were to pick up the banner and start a new Hall of Shame it might be more a labor of love than anything.
No doubt the hybrid cars have lasted 200K or more, but a key question may be do the batteries have to be replaced at some point? The article focuses mostly on the environmental impact of the globalized battery manufacturing process. If a new set of batteries are required at some point, it would seem that the Prius goes into negative environmental friendliness territory again...
As indicated here, Toyota offers a 100K warranty for the batteries. So perhaps that is the "expected" life of the batteries, and why the article compares 100K miles on a Prius to 300K miles on Hummer. Of course, the batteries may last longer, so this cannot be an absolute rule.
When you ask someone,"How bad is it?" and they just give you that look and shake their head while keeping their lips closed, do you need to be told any more? Part of growing up is learning that "as bad as it can possibly be" has no limit.
I don't even know what to make of that answer, other than you also have no idea what was leaked and why, or you actually know and for some reason are unable to say what it is.
I can see a few scenarios.
Keyworth was leaking information in effort to win an internal power play with the BoD or senior management. Dunn was fighting back, sloppily, and got caught.
Keyworth was leaking information detrimental to HP. Dunn was trying to prevent these leaks (thereby protecting shareholder value)
Keyworth was leaking information that should have legitimately been shared with stockholders, i.e. something the BoD or senior management was or was not doing that would be detrimental to the company (and therefore shareholder value). Dunn was trying to prevent these leaks because they made her/management/BoD look bad.
I'm just guessing here. "As bad as it could possibly be" can't be the basis of an indictment, much less a conviction. If Dunn really was defrauding shareholders, specific information should be available to support that assertion.
The snooping was conducted in the course of defrauding investors.
This is what I don't get. One of the cited articles at CNN Money says the crime was pretexting. The reason for the crime was to find who on the BoD was leaking information to the media. I've never seen details on what the leaks were or whether they were good or bad for the company and whether they were good or bad for the shareholders. Without that information, it's hard to understand how the defrauding took place and how extensive it was.
Perhaps the pharmaceutical companies don't want us to know what they spend on marketing. Perhaps they don't want their competitors to know what they spend on marketing. Perhaps they don't think Congress should be making accounting rules that apply to a single industry. Perhaps most companies in general wouldn't want Congress mandating accounting rules like this.
The question I have is if marketing was limited on the theory that it would reduce drug costs, how would you find out what drugs are available for a specific condition? How would your doctor find out? I'm not saying that it wouldn't be possible to do away with marketing in general (and I think TV ads that don't say much about the drugs because they often can't say much about the drugs, aside from the side effects, may not be the most effective marketing tool), but I think if you're going to start with the proposition that marketing expenses are excessive and should be reduced, there should be some idea of what would take its place so that the people who need to know about the drug do know about the drug.
In other words, there may be more effective marketing techniques that the drug companies are not currently using. If you know what these techniques are and how to put them into practice, then perhaps you should become a marketing consultant for a drug company and help reduce the cost of drugs by implementing these techniques.
Actually I saved closer to $4500 a year. I separated out the taxes with and without the child tax credit to emphasize a point which maybe I should have explained a bit better. The bulk of reductions in taxes for families stem from two things: reductions in the tax rates themselves and the increase in the child tax credit. Which one of these changes contributes more of course depends on how many kids you have. Even if you don't have kids, there is a reduction in tax rates all the way up. If you do have kids and your income is below the point where the credit starts phasing out, then you may see a much bigger effect from the $1000 per kid credit. Above a certain point, the credit starts phasing out, so the "rich" don't get the benefit of this particular tax cut.
This is the problem in the rhetoric I see. The Democrats say "all the benefits" go to the rich, therefore they want to get rid of all of the tax cuts. If I see a benefit in the form of a lower tax bill, and a not insignificant benefit at that, does that mean I'm rich by the definition of the Democrats? Does that mean they want to increase the taxes I'm currently paying?
At the lower end of the income scale, Democrats were complaining when the tax cuts were being worked out in the Congress because the child tax credit was "denied" to low income families. The reason those low income families couldn't take the credit was because they were not paying income tax to begin with; so there's nothing to credit. Put these two positions together and I have to wonder if the Democrats want to repeal the tax cuts, making me pay more in income taxes, so that they can give money to people who make less than I do and aren't paying any taxes to begin with?
First, I know how the tax brackets work. I generated those numbers by entering payroll checks using both the 1998 tax tables the 2006 tax tables. They are not calculated as flat percentages of my income.
Second, I think you may have looked at the wrong table when estimating my income. It may boggle the mind, but some Slashdot posters are actually married. For 1998, the 28% tax bracket starts at $46,750 and goes up to $96,450. For 2006, the 15% tax bracket starts at $22,900 and goes up to $68,040. So if I'm (barely) in the 15% bracket right now my taxable income has an upper limit of $68k. My gross income is obviously higher.
I didn't say anything about Reps doing me a favor. I just pointed out, with actual real life numbers, that my federal income taxes are significantly lower now than they would be using the tax rates that were in effect eight years ago.
The real point I'm trying to make is it seems to me that we keep hearing the same rhetoric over and over from the side that is opposed to tax cuts. The problem I see with these types of arguments (Bush tax cuts go to the rich, therefore repeal them) is that they have no appeal to people who know what they have been paying in income taxes over the years and know that they are paying lower taxes now. Because people keep making these arguments, I have to wonder if they realize what the actual numbers are.
Slashdot Mirror
Dive into Quickbooks then and see if you can get it to work. What you need to do is apply a 4.2% rate to wages under $18,350 in January and February, and a 6.2% rate that applies to wages over $18,350 but below $110,100 in January and February, and a 0% rate to wages above $110,100 in January and February. Then For March thru December, you need to specify a third rate, TBD, for wages under $110,100, 0% above that limit. The three paired amounts (wages paid and tax withheld for each category) then need to be reportable to fill out quarterly tax forms that have yet to be designed.
No you can't do that, because then tax filers would need to be able to document what their income was during the first two months of the year. They couldn't file taxes until after February, the employer would have to issue a new form, the IRS would have to design the form, they'd have to redesign the 1040, et al. You realize all of this requires lead time, right?
"Payroll tax" is often used to refer to the Social Security tax, when one wishes to obscure the nature of the tax (ie that it funds the Social Security program). "Withholding tax" is more normally used to refer to federal income tax based on the income tax tables.
What the Senate bill did on the Social Security tax was set a limit of $18,350 (1/6 of 110,100, the limit for the entire year) for the first two months of the year that the 4.2% rate applies to. 6.2% applies above that limit. After the first two months of the year, rates are yet to be determined.
So instead of a simple calculation involving a single rate and a single wage limit for the employee portion for the entire year, we have three rates, two for the first two months and one for the last 10 months, and two limits that apply. For reporting the quarter totals (Form 941) employers would need to report the total wages for the first two months below $18,350, and the total wages above $18,350 along with the total wages for the third month in the quarter.
I would be very surprised if any payroll software were capable of handling this calculation for the Social Security tax right now. Up until now, there was no reason to build such a ridiculous calculation into your payroll software.
It seems like to me that it used to be that politicians, or at least their staff, had some inkling of the real world effect of changing tax policy, and the need for lead time for the IRS and SSA not to mention software vendors to adjust to these changes. At the worst, changing tax rates, calculations or reporting requirements should be done at the end of quarter if not the year.
News reports suggest to me that the only sticking point between the Senate and the House is how to fund the bill. The two month time frame apparently came about because that the Senate and House only agreed to funding sources that totaled enough to continue the tax break for that period of time.
Actually, wouldn't half of the people be dumber than the "median" person?
That was my initial thought, the alleged theft occurred on the moon, so I think the US Government should bring action against the astronaut in a lunar court.
Oddly enough, I read on Wikipedia (so it must be true!) that some Democrats wanted President Polk ("The Napolean of the Stump") to annex all of Mexico instead of signing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago. I think that would make a very interesting alt-history scenario!
I'll second this, but add a third option:
3. After watching the 2005+ series, if you don't have enough time to watching everything in order starting with Tom Baker, watch at least his first season, which includes stories with three recurring villain races. Then if you are interested in the classic episodes but don't want to slog through them in order, skip around based on a theme, say all of the Dalek episodes in order, or regeneration stories (last and first episodes when the actor portraying the Doctor changes). Some of the episodes and seasons are tied together with a theme (Season 16: Key to Time, Season 23: Trial of a Timelord, Keeper of Traken/Logopolis/Castrovalva form a sort of trilogy). Others are notable for certain reasons (e.g. City of Death was filmed in Paris and written by Douglas Adams and will seem familiar if you've read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency). There are a few multiple doctor episodes (The Five Doctors, The Two Doctors, The Three Doctors) that are worth watching. Watch at least one episode from each of doctors 4-7. Check out the only Eighth Doctor (Fox TV movie) because like or not, that's all there is for the eighth doctor (and they did get Sylvester McCoy back for the first 20 minutes to include the regeneration sequence).
Before the energy crisis in California, energy prices were cheaper under the so-called "deregulation" scheme that brought on the crisis. Deregulation is over. Now with the regulation that is in place, the absurd tiered rates and equally absurd baseline usage levels, we pay up to around .44/kwh when we get into the higher tiers. So I feel that we are being ass raped right now.
The problem is too much of the wrong type of regulation. You quite simply can't build nuclear in California. There's actually a law in California against it until the feds figure out the disposal issue. Yucca Mountain is going nowhere, so there we are. There's actually a group trying to get a nuke plant going in central California that thinks it's found a way around the letter of the law prohibiting nuclear power plants: they want to build a nuclear powered desalination plant to clean up the water on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. If they have some leftover electricity to sell then they will. Even if they win on the technicality that nuclear powered desalination plants are not prohibited, it will be at least ten years before they get through all of the red tape and maybe start building something.
Maybe nuclear possible in some other states. California does buy "green" hydro energy from British Columbia who in turns buys coal and gas generated electricity for their own power needs. So I guess if Washington or Oregon built some nukes, they could stop using their own hydro power, ship it down to California, and use the nuclear power.
Apparently California is still doing crazy shit, buying laundered electrons from British Columbia.
We recently got xfinity with ComCast (20Mb/s) and NetFlix starts playback almost instantly, and we have never had playback stop to rebuffer. In comparison, we had problems with AT&T's DSL service all the time with NetFlix though. On DSL, playback would stop to buffer the video repeatedly and sometime would stop playback entirely.
In some places I'm sure it is true that Comcast is essentially a monopoly. Though I'd think that anywhere you can get cable, you can also set up a dish for DirectTV and Dish Network, so they do kind of compete against the satellite companies for TV service. Here locally, they do compete against AT&T's uVerse (or something like that) for TV/telephone/Internet service. And of course their Internet service competes against AT&T's DSL. And various local broadband wireless providers. And of course they have to compete against alternative options for getting TV programming (over the air and Internet download/streaming).
I'm not sure that you can definitively say they have no incentive to upgrade. They have just rolled fiber out to our neighborhood, and we did sign up for the xfinity triple play package. We are now getting phone/internet/cable for less than we were paying to Dish/DirectTV and AT&T combined. The speed (20Mb/s) is faster (verifiably and consistently) than anything else that's available. The equipment for xfinity is a step up in several respects from what we had with either Dish Network or DirectTV. There are a couple features we miss from Dish Network's equipment but they are more than made up for with the new features that were lacking in the satellite systems (for instance HD at every TV, DVR playback (in HD) at every TV). They are enhancing their OnDemand service which is a way of differentiating their service from satellite, so it appears that they are trying to compete against the satellite companies.
Knowing ComCast's reputation I am prepared to start hating them at any moment, but so far the xfinity package has been the best deal we have ever had.
Based on reading Comcast's letter, it sounds like what they want to be paid for is the setup for the 27-30 extra ports ($50k per) and associated recurring costs ($25K per port per year) that are going to be required to provide enough bandwidth between Level 3's network and Comcast to handle the new additional traffic Level 3 is sending to them.
They were supposed to include code in their rounding routines to skim all the half cents of all the transactions off and funnel them to a Swiss bank account!
These directions used to tell you to turn right at 7th street, then left at G street. The street view left hand turn into the chain link fence and non-existent road was particularly hilarious but probably not dangerous.
I reported this back in March and checked on it a couple of times, but only just now when I checked was it fixed. So it probably took three months or so for it to be corrected. Probably not too bad considering how big Los Banos is. In this case looking at the satellite view would have saved me a few minutes, as the sat view would have conflicted with the old map that had G St running from 4th through to 7th.
I would also add that farmers can participate in the futures market, at least one way I understand it is used is to hedge against price declines. They even have access to these newfangled things called computers and spreadsheets that help them keep track of their breakeven points and develop trading strategies. Some farmers have even been known to store their harvests when market prices are low (ie, below their profitability targets) and sell them when the market prices have recovered. Go figure. It almost sounds like they expect to be able to make a living farming.
Their licenses will get extended the 116 days the switchover is delayed:
US Senate passes bill to delay digital TV switch
There is an interesting politics as usual angle to this too:
Chicago politics lands in DC
Attaching strings to federal money is a time honored tradition and how the feds make many things "mandatory". For instance the national drinking age has been set at 21 as a condition of states receiving federal highway money.
The article is correct. Abiogenesis has not been observed (in the lab) or when it is assumed to have happened billions of years ago (no observers, at least that we know of).
There are other possibilities:
1. Life on earth was created by an alien entity (which some refer to as "God")
2. Primitive life (single celled organisms) arrived here from somewhere else (on a meteor, spaceship, asteroid, take your pick)
3. We are actually the descendants of a bunch of hairdressers, middle management executives, and telephone sanitizers that crash landed here from another planet.
And I'm sure there are other possibilities.
I don't think assuming that because we exist, abiogenesis must have happened qualifies as a scientific theory. Can it be falsified? How is it any different than saying that because we exist, a God must have created us?
I think the great hope of finding life on other planets, first Mars and possibly other bodies in the solar system, is partly because some feel it would lend some credence to the idea of abiogenesis. The article recognizes how improbable it is for life to arisen from nonlife ("a stroke of astronomical luck") and that this indeed could be the "Great Filter". If, however, life is found elsewhere in the solar system where non-earthlike conditions prevail then maybe it changes the game.
Of course it still may be difficult, if not impossible, to rule out scenario #2 happening somewhere else, but if abiogenesis is assumed to have happened somewhere else, especially in non-earthlike environments, then scientists may be more inclined to think that there exist physical laws and properties of matter at the atomic and molecular level that inevitably lead to the emergence of life (solving the improbability problem).
If that were the case, then we have the problem that if life is inevitable, where is all of the life that should have developed over billions of years and reached such advanced levels of technology and colonized the galaxy that we should be able to detect them?
That I think is the point of the article, to suppose that there are "Great Filters" that may limit the number of civilizations that could have arisen, and that may limit the ability of our civilization to progress to the point we imagine the human race could someday progress.
I think the company that maintained this is no longer in business, and archives of the pages are kept alive by various fans of the site. But you are correct, there is nothing from 2000 on, which means nothing pertaining to XP or Vista. The content for the Hall of Shame was largely reader generated. If someone were to pick up the banner and start a new Hall of Shame it might be more a labor of love than anything.
No doubt the hybrid cars have lasted 200K or more, but a key question may be do the batteries have to be replaced at some point? The article focuses mostly on the environmental impact of the globalized battery manufacturing process. If a new set of batteries are required at some point, it would seem that the Prius goes into negative environmental friendliness territory again...
As indicated here, Toyota offers a 100K warranty for the batteries. So perhaps that is the "expected" life of the batteries, and why the article compares 100K miles on a Prius to 300K miles on Hummer. Of course, the batteries may last longer, so this cannot be an absolute rule.
I don't even know what to make of that answer, other than you also have no idea what was leaked and why, or you actually know and for some reason are unable to say what it is.
I can see a few scenarios.
Keyworth was leaking information in effort to win an internal power play with the BoD or senior management. Dunn was fighting back, sloppily, and got caught.
Keyworth was leaking information detrimental to HP. Dunn was trying to prevent these leaks (thereby protecting shareholder value)
Keyworth was leaking information that should have legitimately been shared with stockholders, i.e. something the BoD or senior management was or was not doing that would be detrimental to the company (and therefore shareholder value). Dunn was trying to prevent these leaks because they made her/management/BoD look bad.
I'm just guessing here. "As bad as it could possibly be" can't be the basis of an indictment, much less a conviction. If Dunn really was defrauding shareholders, specific information should be available to support that assertion.
This is what I don't get. One of the cited articles at CNN Money says the crime was pretexting. The reason for the crime was to find who on the BoD was leaking information to the media. I've never seen details on what the leaks were or whether they were good or bad for the company and whether they were good or bad for the shareholders. Without that information, it's hard to understand how the defrauding took place and how extensive it was.
Perhaps the pharmaceutical companies don't want us to know what they spend on marketing. Perhaps they don't want their competitors to know what they spend on marketing. Perhaps they don't think Congress should be making accounting rules that apply to a single industry. Perhaps most companies in general wouldn't want Congress mandating accounting rules like this.
The question I have is if marketing was limited on the theory that it would reduce drug costs, how would you find out what drugs are available for a specific condition? How would your doctor find out? I'm not saying that it wouldn't be possible to do away with marketing in general (and I think TV ads that don't say much about the drugs because they often can't say much about the drugs, aside from the side effects, may not be the most effective marketing tool), but I think if you're going to start with the proposition that marketing expenses are excessive and should be reduced, there should be some idea of what would take its place so that the people who need to know about the drug do know about the drug.
In other words, there may be more effective marketing techniques that the drug companies are not currently using. If you know what these techniques are and how to put them into practice, then perhaps you should become a marketing consultant for a drug company and help reduce the cost of drugs by implementing these techniques.
Actually I saved closer to $4500 a year. I separated out the taxes with and without the child tax credit to emphasize a point which maybe I should have explained a bit better. The bulk of reductions in taxes for families stem from two things: reductions in the tax rates themselves and the increase in the child tax credit. Which one of these changes contributes more of course depends on how many kids you have. Even if you don't have kids, there is a reduction in tax rates all the way up. If you do have kids and your income is below the point where the credit starts phasing out, then you may see a much bigger effect from the $1000 per kid credit. Above a certain point, the credit starts phasing out, so the "rich" don't get the benefit of this particular tax cut.
This is the problem in the rhetoric I see. The Democrats say "all the benefits" go to the rich, therefore they want to get rid of all of the tax cuts. If I see a benefit in the form of a lower tax bill, and a not insignificant benefit at that, does that mean I'm rich by the definition of the Democrats? Does that mean they want to increase the taxes I'm currently paying?
At the lower end of the income scale, Democrats were complaining when the tax cuts were being worked out in the Congress because the child tax credit was "denied" to low income families. The reason those low income families couldn't take the credit was because they were not paying income tax to begin with; so there's nothing to credit. Put these two positions together and I have to wonder if the Democrats want to repeal the tax cuts, making me pay more in income taxes, so that they can give money to people who make less than I do and aren't paying any taxes to begin with?
First, I know how the tax brackets work. I generated those numbers by entering payroll checks using both the 1998 tax tables the 2006 tax tables. They are not calculated as flat percentages of my income.
Second, I think you may have looked at the wrong table when estimating my income. It may boggle the mind, but some Slashdot posters are actually married. For 1998, the 28% tax bracket starts at $46,750 and goes up to $96,450. For 2006, the 15% tax bracket starts at $22,900 and goes up to $68,040. So if I'm (barely) in the 15% bracket right now my taxable income has an upper limit of $68k. My gross income is obviously higher.
I didn't say anything about Reps doing me a favor. I just pointed out, with actual real life numbers, that my federal income taxes are significantly lower now than they would be using the tax rates that were in effect eight years ago.
The real point I'm trying to make is it seems to me that we keep hearing the same rhetoric over and over from the side that is opposed to tax cuts. The problem I see with these types of arguments (Bush tax cuts go to the rich, therefore repeal them) is that they have no appeal to people who know what they have been paying in income taxes over the years and know that they are paying lower taxes now. Because people keep making these arguments, I have to wonder if they realize what the actual numbers are.