Bubbles happen when the marginal top tax rate is below 50%. When people have too much easy money, they don't know what to do with it. Instead of investing hard earned money on well researched ideas and companies, they throw it at anything that seems somewhat reasonable. We go from bubble to bubble, with the middle class and the small investor being caught up in the aftermath. After the dot-com bubble, it was not too long before the housing bubble, and then the oil bubble. I hear rumblings that the green bubble is next... About every four years, a bubble forms and then bursts. If you want to fix the problem, make money cost more. Raise taxes on millionaires, and close corporate loopholes. We will stop seeing bubbles, and start seeing real growth.
I heard on the radio today that within 5 years we will see Chinese companies build factories in NK because the Chinese factory workers are starting to ask for too much money. Why pay a Chinese worker $1 an hour when you can pay $.05 an hour to a NK factory worker? China will continue to make products for the US, and products made for the Chinese market will be made in NK.
We don't need to make threats of violence, we have Article 3 Section 1:
"The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services a Compensation which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office."
This is not good Behavior, and thus is grounds for impeachment.
I just upgraded my wireless network to allow for a shared hard drive. I have several laptops at home, but I was running out of space quickly with all the photos and music that I own. I had some portable hard drives that I would move photos to, but keeping that plugged in at all times was a pain. Now with a wireless external storage, I just keep what need right now on the local drive, and the rest is shared. When I am at home, I have access to everything. Right now it's 500GB, but that will expand to a few TB soon. I will also be looking for online backup once I am a bit more organized.
No, we should not limit what people can do with a stock. We could however make it expensive to trade this way. Change capital gains to (Less then 1 day, 50% capital gains.) (1 day to 1 month, 40% capital gains.) (1 month to 2 years, current short term capital gains.) (2 year - 20 years, current long term capital gains.) (20+ years, no capital gains.) This would allow people to trade less then a day, and others trade real long term. I like the idea of making it expensive to do rapid short term trades, but let people who invest real long term, 20+ years, get a strong benefit for it. The stock market should not be run like a casino.
You can't make millions of dollars of profit from security dogs and extra staff trained to interview people. No one will get rich by having an Air Marshal on every fight.
We have a system that would rather purchase 1000s of scanners that cost $150,000 each, and justify their use by forcing people to use them or be physically molested. This is not real security. This is justification for some people to get rich.
PPS at 60K your blood begins to boil if you lose cabin pressure. The SR71 and U2 pilots wear full pressure suits, combat pilots that could go to this altitude don't go for long. Might do it to try and outrun a jet that can't climb to this height. If they were to lose cabin pressure, it would not matter too much that they are wearing O2 masks.
You forget, part of the contract for building that swimming pool, is that after a set amount of time, the pool becomes community property and is opened free to everyone. You on the other hand put in a lock that by law, can never be removed. The pool is free to the public, but no one can get in. After several years, you forget about the pool, and no longer care about the ownership of the pool, but the lock is still on the gate.
I read that this event was used to test out the ability of the new data center that Apple built. I assume that the new Apple TV content will be served from this site, and they wanted a good test to see how well it worked out.
My wife and I are in pretty good shape. We run for miles on trails around Portland, Or. We bike for 20-50 miles at a time. When we hiked the Grand Canyon, we went down 3 miles, and about 2000 feet. This hike took place in late April. It was killer. We had several liters of water and a lot of food.
A ranger summed it up like this, "A lot of people who would not think about walking a mile or two around the neighborhood, think that it is okay to hike to the bottom of the canyon."
I don't listen to the radio that much, but when I do, I use an app on my iPhone. I have access to hundreds of radio stations, not just local ones. I live near Portland OR, but I listen to a station out of San Francisco. I hook my iPhone in to my car, and don't really notice a difference. Granted, I only do this when I have a good cell connection, but that is most of the time driving around the city.
I would rather money be spent on improving the wireless/cell connections around the US, so devices like iPhones, and Android phones work everywhere.
Another problem is turning. Right now sitting close to the center of gravity, when a plane turns you travel a few feet up or down. If you were sitting 20 or 30 feet from the center of gravity, you would travel much further. Most people would feel very uncomfortable doing this. Pilots would have to perform only flat turns, using the rudders. I don't know how practical this would be.
What we really need to do is end all sales taxes and increase income tax. If we are going to have an economy that is based on 70% consumer spending, then we need to make sure that it is easy for people who are willing to spend money to do so.
A person who makes $30,000 a year, and is taxed at 10% will spend the remaining $27,000. A person who makes $10,000,000 a year and is taxed at 40%, I bet will not spend the remaining $6,000,000 a year. Sure, money will, and should be saved, but again, if we base our economy on consumer spending, then having 222 people with $27,000 take home is better then 1 person taking home $6,000.000. I would like to see people making under $250,000 have income taxes lowered and people making more then $5,000,000 pay as much as 70-90%.
Look at what this country accomplished in the 50-70s. We taxed the very rich at 90%. With that money we build the interstate highway system. We build schools, hospitals, police stations, bridges, fire stations, power girds and flew to the Moon. We fought wars in Korea and Vietnam, on the books. (Yes we did borrow money to help, but at least it was debt to ourselves.)
We had an economy based on building things, not pushing around money on paper. A person could find a job that could feed the family, and put the kids through college with only one parent working. Now teens are fighting with college grads for jobs at Burger King.
Before Regan, we used to be the largest importer of raw materials, and the largest exporter of finished goods. We used to be the largest creditor in the world. Now the reverse is true. We ship our raw materials to China and ship back finished goods. We are the largest debtor.
The solution is to not sunset the Bush tax cuts, but to end the Regan tax cuts.
Um, no. If you live a few miles outside of town, I don't mind paying with my taxes for you to get water/power/mail/phone/internet. If you movie to the middle of nowhere and can only access your place by ice road or airplane, well, some people can't be helped.
I don't have a problem paying for others health care. I do it anyway. People go to the ER when the problem is at it's worse, and it costs us all a lot more. I would rather have a doctor telling that person who eats McDs too often they need to stop it, then wait for them to have a heart attack and pay for the treatment. In fact because my brother did not have insurance (he was switching jobs) he did not get a chest x-ray when he should have. He was working as a chef, was 34 and in good health. Too bad he had lung cancer, and by the time he had enough pain to go to the ER it was too late to treat. He died 6 months later.
So as citizen of the United States of America, I am willing to pay for your health care and the health care of your family. I don't want you to go through the pain of losing a family member like I did.
Now, because it is private land, they would have to spend the money themselves to run cable/pipe and build a road, but the easement would allow them to do so on someone's land.
The next question would be, why would you buy a house that you can't get to from a public road, that has no power, or phone, unless you know that going in?
In the 80s people had to be hooked up to cable for the first time, by digging trenches in the streets, and yards to hook up the new technology. Now all homes have all the connections built in.
Where is all the cable located? I bet that almost all of it is located under (in?) public roads or land. How much did the cable company pay us to put that cable in the ground? How much per month are they paying in rent? I can bet that they got to put it in the ground for free, because it served the public good. I even bet that a lot of the costs were paid for by tax payers. If they want to pay monthly rent, by the yard for all the cable in the ground on public land and roads, they can do whatever they want. As long as we the people help pay for the infrastructure (even if it use of our roads to lay cable) we should have some control over it.
Why didn't you build your house next to the road? If you place your house 1 mile from the public road, then yes, I would agree that you should cover the cost of running the cables/pipes to your house from the street. If you choose to live out there, you should still have access to at least the edge of your land.
Today, April 6th 2009, we can live without the internet. The world will not end if we don't have access. However, in 10/20/30 years, the internet will replace phones, TV, and most mail. I want to make it a utility, with all the rules and responsibilities, now. The earlier we do this, the better we will be in the future. So yes, I agree, it is not as important as access to clean water, but it is getting up there with phone and power.
Finding a good job required access to online job ads. Making appointments is happening more and more online. Accessing information about the government is more and more online.
Okay, if that is your argument, shut off your power, water, don't drive on the roads, don't send your kids to public school, don't fly, don't go to the hospital, don't use medicine, move to the middle of nowhere and build a house out of mud. All of those things are wants. We don't have the right to any of them.
We the people funded the internet. We the people subsidized the cables in the ground. We the people own the airways. We the people should have access to what we paid for. If companies want to make profit of of the infrastructure, they need to follow the rules we put in place.
The second we take away the roads, power, water, garbage collection, phone, net access, schools, other fundamental services of a first world nation, we become a third world nation. You can say "free market" all you want, but history shows that companies will not deliver these fundamental services if they don't forced to do so. If you lived in small town America, away from high density populations, you did not get power for years after the rest of the country. The same goes for phones.
I want to live in a first world nation, where I have cheep, reliable access to these services.
Why not micromanage? How is the internet not necessary to function in daily life. The government is moving more and more services to the net. Without high speed access, people will be left out. If we don't make the net a public utility now, we will lose our access to government in the future.
For example, if you live in Mass. you can't have your natural gas cut off, no matter how much you owe in winter. If companies were allowed to do whatever they want, it would cut off gas in winter and let people freeze to death. We have similar rules all over the US for phone, water, power, and others.
Net access needs to be treated the same. It should be a right to have cheep, high speed, unfiltered, unshaped, internet access.
In which case, it is time to have a public utility internet access, run by the local/state/federal government. Like Finland, we need to get a law passed that says people have the right to 1/10/100 mb access to the net. In the past, the US government had to step in to get companies to provide phone and power to rural locations in the US. The same needs to be done for high speed internet access, but not just limited to rural locations. Everyone in the US should be able to access the net at a high speed. As we move more and more functions of the government and business to the net, people need equal access.
Like the roads, power, phone, water, garbage collection, natural gas, and others, the Internet has to become a public utility, and companies that want to provide access need to be regulated as such.
Step 1. Send a letter to your ISP asking them to filter your access by a defined criteria. Step 2. Wait to get content that you requested filtered. Step 3. ?????? Step 4. Profit.
If they can filter content, based on whatever they want to do, they lose their common carrier status, and are now responsible for all content passed over their networks. If you get a spam message that you did not want, you can sue, at least in a perfect world. I am sure they will get out of it somehow.
I say, instead of cutting corporate taxes, raise them, and use the money to teach people new skills. Free college for every American paid for by the corporations that will higher you after you get out.
Slashdot Mirror
Bubbles happen when the marginal top tax rate is below 50%. When people have too much easy money, they don't know what to do with it. Instead of investing hard earned money on well researched ideas and companies, they throw it at anything that seems somewhat reasonable. We go from bubble to bubble, with the middle class and the small investor being caught up in the aftermath. After the dot-com bubble, it was not too long before the housing bubble, and then the oil bubble. I hear rumblings that the green bubble is next... About every four years, a bubble forms and then bursts. If you want to fix the problem, make money cost more. Raise taxes on millionaires, and close corporate loopholes. We will stop seeing bubbles, and start seeing real growth.
I heard on the radio today that within 5 years we will see Chinese companies build factories in NK because the Chinese factory workers are starting to ask for too much money. Why pay a Chinese worker $1 an hour when you can pay $.05 an hour to a NK factory worker? China will continue to make products for the US, and products made for the Chinese market will be made in NK.
We don't need to make threats of violence, we have Article 3 Section 1:
"The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services a Compensation which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office."
This is not good Behavior, and thus is grounds for impeachment.
I just upgraded my wireless network to allow for a shared hard drive. I have several laptops at home, but I was running out of space quickly with all the photos and music that I own. I had some portable hard drives that I would move photos to, but keeping that plugged in at all times was a pain. Now with a wireless external storage, I just keep what need right now on the local drive, and the rest is shared. When I am at home, I have access to everything. Right now it's 500GB, but that will expand to a few TB soon. I will also be looking for online backup once I am a bit more organized.
No, we should not limit what people can do with a stock. We could however make it expensive to trade this way. Change capital gains to (Less then 1 day, 50% capital gains.) (1 day to 1 month, 40% capital gains.) (1 month to 2 years, current short term capital gains.) (2 year - 20 years, current long term capital gains.) (20+ years, no capital gains.) This would allow people to trade less then a day, and others trade real long term. I like the idea of making it expensive to do rapid short term trades, but let people who invest real long term, 20+ years, get a strong benefit for it. The stock market should not be run like a casino.
Same thing we do every night Pinky, try to take over the world!
You can't make millions of dollars of profit from security dogs and extra staff trained to interview people. No one will get rich by having an Air Marshal on every fight.
We have a system that would rather purchase 1000s of scanners that cost $150,000 each, and justify their use by forcing people to use them or be physically molested. This is not real security. This is justification for some people to get rich.
PPS at 60K your blood begins to boil if you lose cabin pressure. The SR71 and U2 pilots wear full pressure suits, combat pilots that could go to this altitude don't go for long. Might do it to try and outrun a jet that can't climb to this height. If they were to lose cabin pressure, it would not matter too much that they are wearing O2 masks.
You forget, part of the contract for building that swimming pool, is that after a set amount of time, the pool becomes community property and is opened free to everyone. You on the other hand put in a lock that by law, can never be removed. The pool is free to the public, but no one can get in. After several years, you forget about the pool, and no longer care about the ownership of the pool, but the lock is still on the gate.
A test of the new Apple data center.
I read that this event was used to test out the ability of the new data center that Apple built. I assume that the new Apple TV content will be served from this site, and they wanted a good test to see how well it worked out.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/20/apple-data-center/
My wife and I are in pretty good shape. We run for miles on trails around Portland, Or. We bike for 20-50 miles at a time. When we hiked the Grand Canyon, we went down 3 miles, and about 2000 feet. This hike took place in late April. It was killer. We had several liters of water and a lot of food.
A ranger summed it up like this, "A lot of people who would not think about walking a mile or two around the neighborhood, think that it is okay to hike to the bottom of the canyon."
I don't listen to the radio that much, but when I do, I use an app on my iPhone. I have access to hundreds of radio stations, not just local ones. I live near Portland OR, but I listen to a station out of San Francisco. I hook my iPhone in to my car, and don't really notice a difference. Granted, I only do this when I have a good cell connection, but that is most of the time driving around the city.
I would rather money be spent on improving the wireless/cell connections around the US, so devices like iPhones, and Android phones work everywhere.
-The Wizard Tim
Another problem is turning. Right now sitting close to the center of gravity, when a plane turns you travel a few feet up or down. If you were sitting 20 or 30 feet from the center of gravity, you would travel much further. Most people would feel very uncomfortable doing this. Pilots would have to perform only flat turns, using the rudders. I don't know how practical this would be.
What we really need to do is end all sales taxes and increase income tax. If we are going to have an economy that is based on 70% consumer spending, then we need to make sure that it is easy for people who are willing to spend money to do so.
A person who makes $30,000 a year, and is taxed at 10% will spend the remaining $27,000.
A person who makes $10,000,000 a year and is taxed at 40%, I bet will not spend the remaining $6,000,000 a year. Sure, money will, and should be saved, but again, if we base our economy on consumer spending, then having 222 people with $27,000 take home is better then 1 person taking home $6,000.000. I would like to see people making under $250,000 have income taxes lowered and people making more then $5,000,000 pay as much as 70-90%.
Look at what this country accomplished in the 50-70s. We taxed the very rich at 90%. With that money we build the interstate highway system. We build schools, hospitals, police stations, bridges, fire stations, power girds and flew to the Moon. We fought wars in Korea and Vietnam, on the books. (Yes we did borrow money to help, but at least it was debt to ourselves.)
We had an economy based on building things, not pushing around money on paper. A person could find a job that could feed the family, and put the kids through college with only one parent working. Now teens are fighting with college grads for jobs at Burger King.
Before Regan, we used to be the largest importer of raw materials, and the largest exporter of finished goods. We used to be the largest creditor in the world. Now the reverse is true. We ship our raw materials to China and ship back finished goods. We are the largest debtor.
The solution is to not sunset the Bush tax cuts, but to end the Regan tax cuts.
Flame on!
Um, no. If you live a few miles outside of town, I don't mind paying with my taxes for you to get water/power/mail/phone/internet. If you movie to the middle of nowhere and can only access your place by ice road or airplane, well, some people can't be helped.
I don't have a problem paying for others health care. I do it anyway. People go to the ER when the problem is at it's worse, and it costs us all a lot more. I would rather have a doctor telling that person who eats McDs too often they need to stop it, then wait for them to have a heart attack and pay for the treatment. In fact because my brother did not have insurance (he was switching jobs) he did not get a chest x-ray when he should have. He was working as a chef, was 34 and in good health. Too bad he had lung cancer, and by the time he had enough pain to go to the ER it was too late to treat. He died 6 months later.
So as citizen of the United States of America, I am willing to pay for your health care and the health care of your family. I don't want you to go through the pain of losing a family member like I did.
I bet that the purchaser would get an easement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement
Now, because it is private land, they would have to spend the money themselves to run cable/pipe and build a road, but the easement would allow them to do so on someone's land.
The next question would be, why would you buy a house that you can't get to from a public road, that has no power, or phone, unless you know that going in?
In the 80s people had to be hooked up to cable for the first time, by digging trenches in the streets, and yards to hook up the new technology. Now all homes have all the connections built in.
Where is all the cable located? I bet that almost all of it is located under (in?) public roads or land. How much did the cable company pay us to put that cable in the ground? How much per month are they paying in rent? I can bet that they got to put it in the ground for free, because it served the public good. I even bet that a lot of the costs were paid for by tax payers. If they want to pay monthly rent, by the yard for all the cable in the ground on public land and roads, they can do whatever they want. As long as we the people help pay for the infrastructure (even if it use of our roads to lay cable) we should have some control over it.
Why didn't you build your house next to the road? If you place your house 1 mile from the public road, then yes, I would agree that you should cover the cost of running the cables/pipes to your house from the street. If you choose to live out there, you should still have access to at least the edge of your land.
Today, April 6th 2009, we can live without the internet. The world will not end if we don't have access. However, in 10/20/30 years, the internet will replace phones, TV, and most mail. I want to make it a utility, with all the rules and responsibilities, now. The earlier we do this, the better we will be in the future. So yes, I agree, it is not as important as access to clean water, but it is getting up there with phone and power.
Finding a good job required access to online job ads.
Making appointments is happening more and more online.
Accessing information about the government is more and more online.
Okay, if that is your argument, shut off your power, water, don't drive on the roads, don't send your kids to public school, don't fly, don't go to the hospital, don't use medicine, move to the middle of nowhere and build a house out of mud. All of those things are wants. We don't have the right to any of them.
We the people funded the internet. We the people subsidized the cables in the ground. We the people own the airways. We the people should have access to what we paid for. If companies want to make profit of of the infrastructure, they need to follow the rules we put in place.
The second we take away the roads, power, water, garbage collection, phone, net access, schools, other fundamental services of a first world nation, we become a third world nation. You can say "free market" all you want, but history shows that companies will not deliver these fundamental services if they don't forced to do so. If you lived in small town America, away from high density populations, you did not get power for years after the rest of the country. The same goes for phones.
I want to live in a first world nation, where I have cheep, reliable access to these services.
Why not micromanage? How is the internet not necessary to function in daily life. The government is moving more and more services to the net. Without high speed access, people will be left out. If we don't make the net a public utility now, we will lose our access to government in the future.
For example, if you live in Mass. you can't have your natural gas cut off, no matter how much you owe in winter. If companies were allowed to do whatever they want, it would cut off gas in winter and let people freeze to death. We have similar rules all over the US for phone, water, power, and others.
Net access needs to be treated the same. It should be a right to have cheep, high speed, unfiltered, unshaped, internet access.
In which case, it is time to have a public utility internet access, run by the local/state/federal government. Like Finland, we need to get a law passed that says people have the right to 1/10/100 mb access to the net. In the past, the US government had to step in to get companies to provide phone and power to rural locations in the US. The same needs to be done for high speed internet access, but not just limited to rural locations. Everyone in the US should be able to access the net at a high speed. As we move more and more functions of the government and business to the net, people need equal access.
Like the roads, power, phone, water, garbage collection, natural gas, and others, the Internet has to become a public utility, and companies that want to provide access need to be regulated as such.
Step 1. Send a letter to your ISP asking them to filter your access by a defined criteria.
Step 2. Wait to get content that you requested filtered.
Step 3. ??????
Step 4. Profit.
If they can filter content, based on whatever they want to do, they lose their common carrier status, and are now responsible for all content passed over their networks. If you get a spam message that you did not want, you can sue, at least in a perfect world. I am sure they will get out of it somehow.
What amount do the corporations actually PAY? Did you know that it's close to 0? http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/study-tallies-corporations-not-paying-income-tax/ Yes, we have one of the highest rates, but that amount is not actually paid.
I say, instead of cutting corporate taxes, raise them, and use the money to teach people new skills. Free college for every American paid for by the corporations that will higher you after you get out.