And all of those expenses are deductible on their own. There is no additional expense associated with the fact that there is oil in the ground, and there should be no deduction for moving that oil.
The thing you linked to is about an exemption for the STATE SALES TAX, *NOT* the federal tax on diesel of $0.244 per gallon. All diesel sold for road use in the US is assessed a $0.244 per gallon federal tax, no exemptions, period.
Actually, charging by the mile would be extremely easy to do. You just buy a sticker that's good for, say, 10,000 miles. Punch out the numbers for the start mileage and stick it to your wind shield. When your 10,000 miles is almost up, buy another one. Could buy them at your local gas station.
Get pulled over with an invalid sticker and pay nasty fines.
It seems, however, if the concern is wear and tear from electric vehicles, the first thing the government should do us stop subsidizing the purchase of electric vehicles through tax credits.
The federal tax on diesel fuel is 24.4 cents per gallon. Every truck in the country pays that tax.
States also tax diesel fuel. Some states allow exemptions to this tax, or to sales tax on diesel fuel, under certain circumstances. So if you see "Tax Exempt" at a truck stop, it's an exemption from some state tax, NOT the federal tax.
Note that you can get diesel fuel for non-trucking use (like farming, generators, etc) without paying the federal tax. This is known as "Ag Diesel" or "Dye Diesel", as any diesel sold without paying the federal tax is actually died to a different color. If you're driving a truck and get pulled over and are caught running dye diesel, you will face some major, major fines.
Also, remember that the Government already gets more in taxes then the oil companies make in profit per gallon of gas.
Also, remember that the oil companies already get more in revenue than the government earns providing roads to drive on.
You compared REVENUE to PROFIT. Not the same thing. Oil companies profit on the sale of gas. The government spends more money building roads than it gets in gas taxes, so it's operating at a LOSS.
Since the oil companies can't make any money on gas unless the government builds and maintains roads, the government should increase gas taxes until road spending is paid for. Alternatively, the government could also put a special tax on oil company profits so that the government is no longer subsidizing the oil company's business.
What oil subsidies and tax loopholes do you refer too? Oh, maybe its the accelerated depreciation and manufacturers tax credits....something just about all corporations who produce something can get.
The problem is that the oil companies are getting those credits WITHOUT PRODUCING ANYTHING!
The biggest culprit is allowing oil companies to take a capital depreciation expense on the value of the oil that they remove from the ground. That makes no sense at all. The way a capital expense is supposed to work is a business spends $1 million on capital and then gets to write off that $1 million over the lifetime of the equipment. If you allow that deduction to be accelerated, then the manufacturer might write off that $1 million in the first year. Either way, the manufacturer still actually paid $1 million for the asset.
What oil companies do is they find some oil, then declare that oil to be worth $1 million dollars, and then as they pump the oil out of the ground, deduct the value of the oil taken from the ground from their taxes. Problem: They never had an expense with acquiring the oil! It's an expense deduction with no expense, i.e. a handout.
It's like finding a winning lottery ticket on the ground worth $1 million/year for 30 years, and each year you're paid $1 million, claiming a $1 million capital expense deduction on your taxes.
They don't HAVE to go to arbitration. The contract allows them to go to small claims court instead. It just doesn't allow them to seek class-action status.
One would hope they could expect a fair shake in small-claims court.
In a class action lawsuit, if I'm the lucky first guy to file, I might get a couple G's to serve as lead plaintiff, the lawyers make tens of millions of dollars, and everyone else gets a coupon for $10 off their next phone.
If by "go to the business" you mean the customer was charged $30.22 extra, and the business offered $30.22 credit, and the customer wanted arbitration, and the arbitrator decided on $30.22, then yes, I stand by his statement.
Well, actually, no, he didn't trust SOMEONE. He trusted ANYONE. SOMEONE is an identifiable person. Text on your computer screen is not SOMEONE.
What's next? Blaming rape victims for not bringing pepper spray on a blind date?
No, because forcing someone to have sex is not comparable to convincing someone to send you money. This guy is about as much of a victim as the girl who decides to sleep with a convenience store clerk because he convinced her he's a talent scout.
Actually, the most effective tool is solid intelligence that finds the terrorist before they get to the airport. Once they're at the airport, it's pretty much too late. Even if you have somehow invented a 100% effective means of screening passengers (and baggage) to prevent contraband from getting on flights, if the terrorist has made it to the airport, they'll just bomb the line of people waiting to get through security.
Another aspect is opportunity cost. Even IF someone managed to put together an explosive device or other attack originating on US soil, there are far more scary targets available than an airport. Like a major sporting or concert event.
TSA needs to be just good enough to keep someone from a mental disorder from bringing a weapon onto the plane and airport security in general needs to be good enough to prevent someone else from taking control of a plane and turning it into a weapon. Both those problems are pretty much already solved with metal detectors and secure cockpit doors. Airport security will never be effective at preventing explosives from getting on planes, and anyone in the US who had such an explosive wouldn't waste it on a plane anyway.
But, this is really Congress's fault. They gave the TSA a budget. You can't expect the TSA to say "Well, we don't think this extra couple hundred billion you gave us could be effectively spent, so we won't use it." Congress needs to cut TSA budget back to just what is needed for the job they can actually do.
Maybe I don't want to pay higher phone bills to cover the costs of lawsuits from other customers.
Arbitration is less expensive, and more predictable as you're not throwing things in front of juries all the time. That's not to say it hasn't been abused, but how about tweaking the process a bit instead of tossing it completely?
Maybe you can have forced arbitration, but the customer gets to choose the arbiter, the company pays for the arbitrator, and the customer can still bring a lawyer if they want to?
Also make forced arbitration not applicable to class action suits and allow for judicial review, by a judge, but with some deference to the arbitration decision.
That's an artifact of the top 1% of income earners paying over 40% of all federal income tax.
The top 1% of income earners earn 23.5% of income. Note, however, that the top 1% of income earners ALSO pay very, very low tax rates on social security and investments, which is where their income comes from.
A middle-class person might pay a 28% marginal tax rate on money they earn by working. A rich person pays a 15% tax rate on money they make by already having money.
If anyone in the top 1% of earners thinks that's a bad deal, I would be happy to trade places with them.
Microsoft's primary goal is to make money. Their primary goal is not to make Google make less money.
Microsoft and Google make more money is better for Microsoft than Microsoft and Google make less money, even if the less disproportionately affects Google.
This is easily solved when, facing the loss of the contract, your subcontractor just lets agents from the Indian intelligence service use the VPN from their end.
It's pretty obvious that cellular data networks have limited capacity. Just look at AT&T's problems with delivering enough bandwidth to the iPhones on their network. And as a long-time cellular broadband user and early adopter, I can personally attest that the broadband speeds have gone down in general as more people have gotten on 3G and also go down even more when lots of people are present in the same area. (I work in areas where I get phenomenally great bandwidth at 6 AM when no one else is there and get crap bandwidth when 3,000 people show up later in the day.)
Anyway, bandwidth isn't unlimited. The more of it people use, the more network capacity you need to handle it, and even then you still have limits on the amount of data that can move through the air to one tower at one time.
I don't see why anyone expects a company to provide something that has a marginal cost and no natural consumption limit in an unlimited quantity for a fixed rate. That would be like having an agreement with the grocery store to get all the groceries you want for $400/month.
Frankly, I don't see why the idea of paying per meg or gig is such a big deal when most people already pay for an allowance of minutes. God forbid carriers adopt pricing policies that make sense!
It's silly NOT to expect a business to care about anything other than profit. Profit is pretty much the sole determination as to whether a business survives.
And there's nothing wrong with that. Once you ACCEPT that a business should only care about maximizing profit, then you understand how to get a business to operate in an ethical manner: Make it profitable.
You can do that with consumer pressure, laws, taxes, penalties, subsidies, handouts....
So don't get upset that businesses are only interested in profits. Embrace it and make it work for you!
Let's also say that there are 1000 people that might be infected,....
OTOH, let's say that 1 million people might be infected. Test all of them and there ends up being 10,000 false positives. Now the costs of the more accurate test start rising.
Uhm, doing ANYTHING with 1 million people is going to cost more than doing the same thing with 1,000 people (except maybe sending them Viagra spam.) The per-person costs are the same, and if 1% accuracy is good enough for 1,000 people, it's good enough for 1,000,000 people.
What might change is that wit 1,000,000 people, it might make sense to invest some money to come up with a better test.
So your accuracy rates need to be in line with how many people are going to be screened.
This is rubbish. Number of people screened has no bearing on what the accuracy rate needs to be at all. What you want is a test where the cost of administering the test + the cost of dealing with false positives is less than the costs of not administering the test and dealing with the uncaught positives.
In the subject matter of hiring for the NSA, it makes sense to the NSA to use the polygraph tests if the costs of losing out on a few hires who get false positives is less than the costs of not catching nefarious parties only administration of the polygraph test would have caught (or dissuaded from applying entirely). That may not be the best outcome for each person getting hired, but it's the best outcome for the NSA, and the NSA's goal isn't to employ people.
In the medical context, you generally want the cost of the test plus the cost/impact of administering the test plus the cost of treating false positives to be less than the cost of not catching whatever you are testing for.
If it costs $100 to administer the test, and the test has a 1% false positive rate and the cost of a false positive is $1,000, that's a good test to take if even 2% of people have what you are testing for but the cost of not catching it is $10,000. It makes no difference whatsoever how many people you want to test.
The choice for an Hybrid or a fuel efficient car should not only take in to account the cost of the fuel, but also the cost to the environment. If you add the cost of a "carbon fee" for the extra fuel you burn, for the energy required to bring that fuel to you, the damage to the environment to extract that fuel, you get quite a good deal...
No, you get a CRAPPY deal, and the rest of the inhabitants of the planet get a tiny, tiny, tiny better deal.
And that's being very, very, very optimistic.
The reason hybrids cost more to buy than standard engines is that they COST MORE TO MAKE. And cost is a very good indicator of environmental impact. Sure, over the course of the lifetime of the car, a lot of money is spent moving the fuel to the car, extracting the fuel, a very large portion of that is already reflected in the cost of the fuel. Just like building a hybrid engine itself has an environmental impact - building a hybrid engine causes MORE damage to the environment than building a simple conventional engine. All that lithium in the battery pack in the Prius has to be mined from somewhere.
In the vast majority of cases, the CHEAPEST option is also the most environmentally sound option, because use of resources has a cost. About the only place this doesn't hold true is emissions, but even then things like gas have taxes much higher than things like food, so in most cases the gas tax more than covers the extra environmental impact consuming gas has over consuming, say, corn.
Long story short: If the gas engine car is cheaper, buy that one.
The conclusion isn't that people are addicted to the internet.
The conclusion is that technologically-aided communication has replaced more traditional forms of communication for many young people, and if you remove their preferred method of communication, they are not able to fall back on other methods of communication, at least not in the short term.
Other things that might make me sad and annoyed:
- Having to watch TV without a DVR - Having to walk to places I would normally drive to - Having to answer the phone before knowing whether it's my mother calling or not.
This doesn't make me addicted to DVRs, cars, or caller ID.
While one may not agree with the particulars, this seems like a pretty standard case of prosecutorial discretion. The reality of the law is that the maximum penalty prescribed by law - and sometimes even the minimum penalty prescribed by law - is not appropriate for the crime committed. And prosecutors plead out criminals for sentences less than those allowed by law all the time.
And in this case, some sales agents in the army of sales agents misrepresented one product out of an arsenal of products. Ok? Of course not. Deserving of a big fine, and probably one larger than the company got? Sure.
But cutting off access to Medicare/Medicaid for the entire company, even if it is an available legal penalty, is not the appropriate legal penalty in this case.
The real problems here are that:
1) The law is not appropriate. A better penalty would be loss of patent protection on a lucrative drug, or 10x profits made on the drug that was mis-marketed. 2) Those selling drugs in a manner that can harm patients are not personally liable for their actions. If your doctor prescribes you a drug that they should know might harm or kill you, they are liable. And if a pharma rep orchestrates or participates in a sales campaign designed to hide the hazards of a drug, they should also be personally liable. If all the pharma reps knew that off-label marketing got 30 days in jail the practice would be curbed considerably. 3) Corporations are designed to separate business assets and actions from personal assets and actions. There is value to this. But using shell corporations to protect parent corporations seems to have gotten a bit crazy.
One and two could be fixed by competent legislation. Three is probably a ship that has sailed.
Except possibly for the fact that the intersection of "People who purchase women's sporting gear" and "Slashdot readers" is going to be pretty close to a null set.
Slashdot Mirror
And all of those expenses are deductible on their own. There is no additional expense associated with the fact that there is oil in the ground, and there should be no deduction for moving that oil.
The thing you linked to is about an exemption for the STATE SALES TAX, *NOT* the federal tax on diesel of $0.244 per gallon. All diesel sold for road use in the US is assessed a $0.244 per gallon federal tax, no exemptions, period.
Actually, charging by the mile would be extremely easy to do. You just buy a sticker that's good for, say, 10,000 miles. Punch out the numbers for the start mileage and stick it to your wind shield. When your 10,000 miles is almost up, buy another one. Could buy them at your local gas station.
Get pulled over with an invalid sticker and pay nasty fines.
It seems, however, if the concern is wear and tear from electric vehicles, the first thing the government should do us stop subsidizing the purchase of electric vehicles through tax credits.
Trucks are not tax exempt AT ALL.
The federal tax on diesel fuel is 24.4 cents per gallon. Every truck in the country pays that tax.
States also tax diesel fuel. Some states allow exemptions to this tax, or to sales tax on diesel fuel, under certain circumstances. So if you see "Tax Exempt" at a truck stop, it's an exemption from some state tax, NOT the federal tax.
Note that you can get diesel fuel for non-trucking use (like farming, generators, etc) without paying the federal tax. This is known as "Ag Diesel" or "Dye Diesel", as any diesel sold without paying the federal tax is actually died to a different color. If you're driving a truck and get pulled over and are caught running dye diesel, you will face some major, major fines.
Easy one first:
Also, remember that the Government already gets more in taxes then the oil companies make in profit per gallon of gas.
Also, remember that the oil companies already get more in revenue than the government earns providing roads to drive on.
You compared REVENUE to PROFIT. Not the same thing. Oil companies profit on the sale of gas. The government spends more money building roads than it gets in gas taxes, so it's operating at a LOSS.
Since the oil companies can't make any money on gas unless the government builds and maintains roads, the government should increase gas taxes until road spending is paid for. Alternatively, the government could also put a special tax on oil company profits so that the government is no longer subsidizing the oil company's business.
What oil subsidies and tax loopholes do you refer too? Oh, maybe its the accelerated depreciation and manufacturers tax credits....something just about all corporations who produce something can get.
The problem is that the oil companies are getting those credits WITHOUT PRODUCING ANYTHING!
The biggest culprit is allowing oil companies to take a capital depreciation expense on the value of the oil that they remove from the ground. That makes no sense at all. The way a capital expense is supposed to work is a business spends $1 million on capital and then gets to write off that $1 million over the lifetime of the equipment. If you allow that deduction to be accelerated, then the manufacturer might write off that $1 million in the first year. Either way, the manufacturer still actually paid $1 million for the asset.
What oil companies do is they find some oil, then declare that oil to be worth $1 million dollars, and then as they pump the oil out of the ground, deduct the value of the oil taken from the ground from their taxes. Problem: They never had an expense with acquiring the oil! It's an expense deduction with no expense, i.e. a handout.
It's like finding a winning lottery ticket on the ground worth $1 million/year for 30 years, and each year you're paid $1 million, claiming a $1 million capital expense deduction on your taxes.
It's a handout, period.
They don't HAVE to go to arbitration. The contract allows them to go to small claims court instead. It just doesn't allow them to seek class-action status.
One would hope they could expect a fair shake in small-claims court.
OK, so in arbitration, I get my sales tax back.
In a class action lawsuit, if I'm the lucky first guy to file, I might get a couple G's to serve as lead plaintiff, the lawyers make tens of millions of dollars, and everyone else gets a coupon for $10 off their next phone.
How much did I really lose here?
PSN is free. The multi-player game that doesn't work at all if PSN is down isn't.
If by "go to the business" you mean the customer was charged $30.22 extra, and the business offered $30.22 credit, and the customer wanted arbitration, and the arbitrator decided on $30.22, then yes, I stand by his statement.
What did he do wrong? He trusted someone.
Well, actually, no, he didn't trust SOMEONE. He trusted ANYONE. SOMEONE is an identifiable person. Text on your computer screen is not SOMEONE.
What's next? Blaming rape victims for not bringing pepper spray on a blind date?
No, because forcing someone to have sex is not comparable to convincing someone to send you money. This guy is about as much of a victim as the girl who decides to sleep with a convenience store clerk because he convinced her he's a talent scout.
Actually, the most effective tool is solid intelligence that finds the terrorist before they get to the airport. Once they're at the airport, it's pretty much too late. Even if you have somehow invented a 100% effective means of screening passengers (and baggage) to prevent contraband from getting on flights, if the terrorist has made it to the airport, they'll just bomb the line of people waiting to get through security.
Another aspect is opportunity cost. Even IF someone managed to put together an explosive device or other attack originating on US soil, there are far more scary targets available than an airport. Like a major sporting or concert event.
TSA needs to be just good enough to keep someone from a mental disorder from bringing a weapon onto the plane and airport security in general needs to be good enough to prevent someone else from taking control of a plane and turning it into a weapon. Both those problems are pretty much already solved with metal detectors and secure cockpit doors. Airport security will never be effective at preventing explosives from getting on planes, and anyone in the US who had such an explosive wouldn't waste it on a plane anyway.
But, this is really Congress's fault. They gave the TSA a budget. You can't expect the TSA to say "Well, we don't think this extra couple hundred billion you gave us could be effectively spent, so we won't use it." Congress needs to cut TSA budget back to just what is needed for the job they can actually do.
Maybe I don't want to pay higher phone bills to cover the costs of lawsuits from other customers.
Arbitration is less expensive, and more predictable as you're not throwing things in front of juries all the time. That's not to say it hasn't been abused, but how about tweaking the process a bit instead of tossing it completely?
Maybe you can have forced arbitration, but the customer gets to choose the arbiter, the company pays for the arbitrator, and the customer can still bring a lawyer if they want to?
Also make forced arbitration not applicable to class action suits and allow for judicial review, by a judge, but with some deference to the arbitration decision.
You can assume that each 5 mph you drive over 60 mph is like paying an additional $0.24 per gallon for gas.
Geezus, I've been paying $4.98/gallon!
When the options are:
Video Drivers
Anything Else
That's an artifact of the top 1% of income earners paying over 40% of all federal income tax.
The top 1% of income earners earn 23.5% of income. Note, however, that the top 1% of income earners ALSO pay very, very low tax rates on social security and investments, which is where their income comes from.
A middle-class person might pay a 28% marginal tax rate on money they earn by working. A rich person pays a 15% tax rate on money they make by already having money.
If anyone in the top 1% of earners thinks that's a bad deal, I would be happy to trade places with them.
Microsoft's primary goal is to make money. Their primary goal is not to make Google make less money.
Microsoft and Google make more money is better for Microsoft than Microsoft and Google make less money, even if the less disproportionately affects Google.
This is easily solved when, facing the loss of the contract, your subcontractor just lets agents from the Indian intelligence service use the VPN from their end.
It's pretty obvious that cellular data networks have limited capacity. Just look at AT&T's problems with delivering enough bandwidth to the iPhones on their network. And as a long-time cellular broadband user and early adopter, I can personally attest that the broadband speeds have gone down in general as more people have gotten on 3G and also go down even more when lots of people are present in the same area. (I work in areas where I get phenomenally great bandwidth at 6 AM when no one else is there and get crap bandwidth when 3,000 people show up later in the day.)
Anyway, bandwidth isn't unlimited. The more of it people use, the more network capacity you need to handle it, and even then you still have limits on the amount of data that can move through the air to one tower at one time.
I don't see why anyone expects a company to provide something that has a marginal cost and no natural consumption limit in an unlimited quantity for a fixed rate. That would be like having an agreement with the grocery store to get all the groceries you want for $400/month.
Frankly, I don't see why the idea of paying per meg or gig is such a big deal when most people already pay for an allowance of minutes. God forbid carriers adopt pricing policies that make sense!
It's silly NOT to expect a business to care about anything other than profit. Profit is pretty much the sole determination as to whether a business survives.
And there's nothing wrong with that. Once you ACCEPT that a business should only care about maximizing profit, then you understand how to get a business to operate in an ethical manner: Make it profitable.
You can do that with consumer pressure, laws, taxes, penalties, subsidies, handouts....
So don't get upset that businesses are only interested in profits. Embrace it and make it work for you!
Let's also say that there are 1000 people that might be infected, ....
OTOH, let's say that 1 million people might be infected. Test all of them and there ends up being 10,000 false positives. Now the costs of the more accurate test start rising.
Uhm, doing ANYTHING with 1 million people is going to cost more than doing the same thing with 1,000 people (except maybe sending them Viagra spam.) The per-person costs are the same, and if 1% accuracy is good enough for 1,000 people, it's good enough for 1,000,000 people.
What might change is that wit 1,000,000 people, it might make sense to invest some money to come up with a better test.
So your accuracy rates need to be in line with how many people are going to be screened.
This is rubbish. Number of people screened has no bearing on what the accuracy rate needs to be at all. What you want is a test where the cost of administering the test + the cost of dealing with false positives is less than the costs of not administering the test and dealing with the uncaught positives.
In the subject matter of hiring for the NSA, it makes sense to the NSA to use the polygraph tests if the costs of losing out on a few hires who get false positives is less than the costs of not catching nefarious parties only administration of the polygraph test would have caught (or dissuaded from applying entirely). That may not be the best outcome for each person getting hired, but it's the best outcome for the NSA, and the NSA's goal isn't to employ people.
In the medical context, you generally want the cost of the test plus the cost/impact of administering the test plus the cost of treating false positives to be less than the cost of not catching whatever you are testing for.
If it costs $100 to administer the test, and the test has a 1% false positive rate and the cost of a false positive is $1,000, that's a good test to take if even 2% of people have what you are testing for but the cost of not catching it is $10,000. It makes no difference whatsoever how many people you want to test.
The choice for an Hybrid or a fuel efficient car should not only take in to account the cost of the fuel, but also the cost to the environment. If you add the cost of a "carbon fee" for the extra fuel you burn, for the energy required to bring that fuel to you, the damage to the environment to extract that fuel, you get quite a good deal...
No, you get a CRAPPY deal, and the rest of the inhabitants of the planet get a tiny, tiny, tiny better deal.
And that's being very, very, very optimistic.
The reason hybrids cost more to buy than standard engines is that they COST MORE TO MAKE. And cost is a very good indicator of environmental impact. Sure, over the course of the lifetime of the car, a lot of money is spent moving the fuel to the car, extracting the fuel, a very large portion of that is already reflected in the cost of the fuel. Just like building a hybrid engine itself has an environmental impact - building a hybrid engine causes MORE damage to the environment than building a simple conventional engine. All that lithium in the battery pack in the Prius has to be mined from somewhere.
In the vast majority of cases, the CHEAPEST option is also the most environmentally sound option, because use of resources has a cost. About the only place this doesn't hold true is emissions, but even then things like gas have taxes much higher than things like food, so in most cases the gas tax more than covers the extra environmental impact consuming gas has over consuming, say, corn.
Long story short: If the gas engine car is cheaper, buy that one.
The conclusion isn't that people are addicted to the internet.
The conclusion is that technologically-aided communication has replaced more traditional forms of communication for many young people, and if you remove their preferred method of communication, they are not able to fall back on other methods of communication, at least not in the short term.
Other things that might make me sad and annoyed:
- Having to watch TV without a DVR
- Having to walk to places I would normally drive to
- Having to answer the phone before knowing whether it's my mother calling or not.
This doesn't make me addicted to DVRs, cars, or caller ID.
While one may not agree with the particulars, this seems like a pretty standard case of prosecutorial discretion. The reality of the law is that the maximum penalty prescribed by law - and sometimes even the minimum penalty prescribed by law - is not appropriate for the crime committed. And prosecutors plead out criminals for sentences less than those allowed by law all the time.
And in this case, some sales agents in the army of sales agents misrepresented one product out of an arsenal of products. Ok? Of course not. Deserving of a big fine, and probably one larger than the company got? Sure.
But cutting off access to Medicare/Medicaid for the entire company, even if it is an available legal penalty, is not the appropriate legal penalty in this case.
The real problems here are that:
1) The law is not appropriate. A better penalty would be loss of patent protection on a lucrative drug, or 10x profits made on the drug that was mis-marketed.
2) Those selling drugs in a manner that can harm patients are not personally liable for their actions. If your doctor prescribes you a drug that they should know might harm or kill you, they are liable. And if a pharma rep orchestrates or participates in a sales campaign designed to hide the hazards of a drug, they should also be personally liable. If all the pharma reps knew that off-label marketing got 30 days in jail the practice would be curbed considerably.
3) Corporations are designed to separate business assets and actions from personal assets and actions. There is value to this. But using shell corporations to protect parent corporations seems to have gotten a bit crazy.
One and two could be fixed by competent legislation. Three is probably a ship that has sailed.
So, 198% of game developers are morons?
Spoken like a game developer. Anyone with a clue knows that -37% of game developers are morons.
Except possibly for the fact that the intersection of "People who purchase women's sporting gear" and "Slashdot readers" is going to be pretty close to a null set.
It just fits better, I swear!