Take the example a little farther - now not only do I pay them in lindens - they pay other retailers in second life for out of game items - say real clothes - in lindens. Out of game no money changes hands - there is nothing to tax.
This is the point where your argument breaks down.
Income is taxable, whether it's in cash or in objects. If I pay you $10,000, you owe income taxes on $10,000. If I instead give you a car worth $10,000, you *STILL* owe income taxes on $10,000. And if I give you a car in exchange for labor, we owe social security and medicare taxes on that too.
So I agree that when you give people lindens to do something in-game that there's no basis for tax. But if someone gives someone else in-game lindens, and then receives a tangible real-world item for it, like clothing, or an XBox, or whatever, the object received is taxable income at the fair-market value of the object.
So even though no REAL money changed hands, the person in your example did get something of real value (the clothing), and that income is taxable.
Thus making this a scenario at least the US government IS prepared to handle. It's already covered by existing legislation.
Only if you can show that the $15 was spent in a business activity. In general (although the list of things that factor in is more extensive) the IRS considers something to be a business activity if you're doing it for-profit. The easiest way to show that you're doing something for-profit is to actually profit on it.
Absent that, there are some other things you can do to show that an activity is for-profit, but you'd probably have a tough time making 'playing WoW' meet those criteria. The IRS would regard playing WoW as a hobby, for which expenses are not deductible.
...all the 'money' is owned by Blizzard. The only thing that changes is who gets control of it in-game.
Saying that transfers of the in-game items in-game should be taxed is like saying that you should pay taxes every time you pass the dice next time you play D&D.
Obviously she's unaware that something cannot have "real market value" when it's illegal to sell.
Hey, look a slashdot comment about something that is 'obvious' that is entirely wrong!
You're wrong. Your first problem is that sale of WoW items is not illegal - it's merely against the terms of service contract you have with the service provider, which is NOT the same thing. Income earned in violation of a contract is still income, and you still have to report and pay taxes on it. If this were not the case, I could just have a contract with anyone who gives me money that says I must live in Trinidad and Tobago to get paid, and then turn around to the IRS and say that since I earned that money in violation of the contract it's not taxable. Clearly this isn't the case.
But let's say, for the sake of argument, that sale of WoW was actually illegal. Guess what? You're STILL wrong!
Income from any commercial activity is taxable, whether is is legal or not. And that's how the government often gets people involved in illegal activity - they don't prove necessarily that they were doing something illegal, they just prove that they had income that they didn't declare on their taxes and get them for tax evasion.
For example, if you make $1 million selling cocaine, even though the activity is illegal, you're still liable for the taxes on the income, and can still be criminally charged for tax evasion in addition to narcotics distribution.
A more mundane example is illegal immigrants - even if you're working here illegally, you still have to pay taxes, and that's one of the big reasons the IRS started issuing individual tax ID numbers - so people using fake social security numbers could still file their taxes. And believe it or not, a lot of illegal immigrants do pay taxes.
As a more general comment on the topic at hand, it seems logical to me that you'd only be liable for taxes on WoW and other virtual items if you actually sold them for real money. And if you did, you'd at least be able to deduct your subscription fees. But if you only keep your virtual items in the virtual world, I don't see how you have tax liability there any more than you have tax liability if you sew your own clothing. Start selling that clothing to others though....
Regardless, maybe you should go back to arm-chair quarterbacking and leave the arm-chair lawyering to the professionals.
"to all the people that download music, if you think you are only hurting big companies you are wrong. There are two working people with families who no longer have jobs because of music piracy."
Music piracy has nothing to do with it. They don't have jobs anymore because record stores are a crappy way to distribute music when you have the internet. There is simply no reason to go to a physical place to buy a CD when you could download the same song from your house.
And this isn't something that just affects the music industry. I have always built my own computers from components. Back in the early 90's, I did that by going to a computer show and buying the components. Nowadays I order what I want from Newegg.
Why? Because it's BETTER. Does it suck that those computer fair operators have gone out of business? It does for them, but it doesn't suck for the rest of us who don't have to blow a Saturday driving to the fairgrounds to get parts that UPS will get us for the price of admission.
Even if nobody downloaded pirated music, the record companies STILL would have gone out of business, because $0.99 downloads are still better than $18 CDs or $3.99 singles.
Hell, the $13 CD I got on Amazon with free shipping is better than having to drive down to the record store. Record stores are closing because record stores just aren't needed anymore. Piracy has nothing to do with it.
Like the story today about the Ford guy getting 25 million.
Let's say they didn't pay him a thing. Ford has, what, 200,000 employees? So they don't pay the CEO anything and then the workers get another $125/year each.
I'm not saying the CEO's aren't making more money. But that's not where the money is going, and to suggest it is is just ignorance.
The american people have been clear they want wage increases and corporate accountability, the government still has not acted.
The government has certainly acted in terms of corporate accountability. Whether that yielded a net benefit to the economy or just caused lots of money to be spent on compliance is debatable.
As for wanting wage increases, it is not the government's responsibility to set wages. And the government should avoid doing so. See: USSR. See: China. See: Cuba. Hell, see: California. Highest minimum wages in the country. Also, most expensive place to live. Making twice as much money doesn't do you any good when you can't afford a place to live.
And the American people DO get wage increases. The 'buying power' of Americans continues to go up. Everybody has more and better stuff than they would have in the same job 20 years ago.
What we have may not be the best system, but it's already been proven that governments setting wages doesn't work.
If we outsources 100% of the current workforce, other countries would start outsourcing their work to us.
Jobs get outsourced to India because there is an untapped labor market there. As more of that market gets used, there will be less of an incentive to move jobs there and eventually an equilibrium will be reached where moving jobs overseas won't make sense because the people over there are paid just as well as the people here.e
4) is just a special case of 3). If the shareholders want to let their CEOs make off with all their money, that's the shareholders problem.
No matter how you cut it, spending $200 making something that could be made for $100 is stupid. It's stupid when you could spend $100 on a robot to do it, it's stupid when you can spend $100 on an immigrant to do it. If it wasn't stupid, life would have been better in 1780 when everything was done manually, by hand. Everybody had jobs, but nobody could buy much more than clothes and food and they worked 80 hours a week because everything was EXPENSIVE.
Worrying about whether something is made by someone here or someone abroad is just ethnocentrism. Our prosperity does not depend on NOT hiring people in India, or Pakistan, or China to do work.
The fact of the matter is, we have been decimating jobs for 200 years. We've brought in machines to do them, we've brought in immigrants to do them, and we've shipped them overseas. Our unemployment rates have not skyrocketed. Just as many people own homes. People now have more and better stuff than they did in 1800, or 1850, or 1900, or 1950, or 1975. People have better health care than they did in 1800, 1850, 1900, 1975.
Your 'defense' is that the rich have gotten richer. Who cares? What's more important, making sure the rich don't get richer, or making sure the everybody else gets a better standard of living?
So what you're suggesting will happen is Indians will all be gainfully employed and Americans will all be starving?
It can't get that far - long before it did, Indians would start outsourcing to US.
People have been whining about jobs getting lost to immigrants, and jobs being lost to automation, and now jobs being lost to outsourcing, for at least two centuries. And just like it's been a good thing the past 200 years, it's a good thing now. Because what people want isn't really jobs, it's stuff. And immigration, automation, and outsourcing all get us MORE STUFF.
Our prosperity does not depend on the rest of the world being in poverty.
Your first problem is your focusing on the number of dollars spent. The number of dollars spent is only partially relevant. The other part is HOW MUCH CAN YOU BUY WITH A DOLLAR.
If a company reduces the amount of money paid in wages, one of three things (or a combination) happens:
1) The make a larger profit, and the people who earn that profit spend it on other things. 2) They invest that saved money in more production or more production efficiency (buy technology, spend on research, build another factory) 3) They lower the price of the product, so the consumer then spends their money on something else.
The important thing here is that previously idle people in India or China are now no longer idle. They're making things. And when they make things, *WE* in the US get a cut of it.
Outsourcing turns a guy in India who wasn't doing shit into a guy in India who makes, say, $100 worth of stuff, and keeps $80 of it and we get $20 'for free'. That's good for him and good for us.
That does eliminate a job in the US that may have paid $200 for the same stuff. But that's OK, because the stuff costs $100 less, and the person who would have had that job can now work on something else.
Also keep in mind that depressed wages are the only way that the free market can move around workers. Just because we all want high paid jobs in a certain field doesn't mean the economy can support allocating workers that way.
But in the end, we want to export as many jobs as we can and replace as many workers as possible with machines. If we do this to perfection, none of us will have to work anymore, because machines and people in India will be doing all our work for us, and we'll still have the same amount of stuff.
Or at least, we'll have freed up enough of our labor force to provide the universal healthcare everyone seems to want.
Congress wasted time on this bill that could have been spent getting something important done, such as finally hammering out a definate government policy on Stem Cell research, abortions
Yeah, because Congress totally would have accomplished something on THOSE deadlock issues....
The restaurant industry already has a solution to this problem.
Airlines just need a cell-phone section and a no-cell-phone section.
Another way to look at it is the most obnoxious cell phone user can't be any worse than the crying baby. They really shouldn't let those things on planes.
sub service_passengers {
foreach my $passenger (@passengers) {
if (passenger_talking_on_phone($passenger)) {
stewardess_action($passenger,PHONE_USE);
}
} }
sub stewardess_action {
my $passenger = shift;
my $action = shift;
switch ($action) {
case EMPTY_GLASS:
fill_glass();
break;
case CALL_BUTTON:
disable_call_button();
stewardess_action($passenger,query_passenger($pass enger));
break;
case NO_PEANUTS:
provide_peanuts($passenger);
break;
case PHONE_USE:
case SMOKING:
case DRUNKENNESS:
case FAIL_CREW_DIRECTIVE:
case SHOE_BOMB:
stewardess_panic($passenger);
break;
} }
sub stewardess_panic {
my $passenger = shift;
pilot::divert_airplane();
if ($passenger) {
passengers::restrain_passenger($passenger);
fbi::arrest_on_landing($passenger);
} }
So if paper is going to be the final word, why waste the money on voting machines in the first place?
Because not all paper ballots are created equal, and paper ballots filled out by humans are more prone to error than paper ballots printed by a machine.
The current paper ballots involve things like hole-punches (hanging chads anyone?), filling in bubbles (fill in too many or too few or only partially), butterfly ballots, etc.
It's the same reason your college professors wanted you to type your papers. The machine, by default, makes the paper much more legible than it would be if the paper were written by hand.
Same with electronic voting. The machine makes the ballot much less likely to have an error on it than if the ballot is done by a human with a pen (optical ballots) or punch (punch cards).
There are other features you get with electronic voting. For example, you don't need to print the ballots in advance. You can just load the ballot into the machine the morning of the election, and when people votes, the machine prints out the office and the selected candidate. So instead of having to 'lock' the ballot a month in advance to allow for the ballots to be printed, you might be able to reduce that lead time to a few days or a week. Then when a candidate dies three weeks before the election, or somebody wins/loses a lawsuit, you have more time to correct the ballot.
You can also do neat things like randomize the order candidates appear on the ballot. One problem with elections is the candidate listed first tends to get more votes than other candidates. With electronic ballots, candidates can all be listed first an 'equal' number of times.
Electronic voting also gives you the ability to accommodate more people with disabilities.
Slashdot Mirror
Take the example a little farther - now not only do I pay them in lindens - they pay other retailers in second life for out of game items - say real clothes - in lindens. Out of game no money changes hands - there is nothing to tax.
This is the point where your argument breaks down.
Income is taxable, whether it's in cash or in objects. If I pay you $10,000, you owe income taxes on $10,000. If I instead give you a car worth $10,000, you *STILL* owe income taxes on $10,000. And if I give you a car in exchange for labor, we owe social security and medicare taxes on that too.
So I agree that when you give people lindens to do something in-game that there's no basis for tax. But if someone gives someone else in-game lindens, and then receives a tangible real-world item for it, like clothing, or an XBox, or whatever, the object received is taxable income at the fair-market value of the object.
So even though no REAL money changed hands, the person in your example did get something of real value (the clothing), and that income is taxable.
Thus making this a scenario at least the US government IS prepared to handle. It's already covered by existing legislation.
Only if you can show that the $15 was spent in a business activity. In general (although the list of things that factor in is more extensive) the IRS considers something to be a business activity if you're doing it for-profit. The easiest way to show that you're doing something for-profit is to actually profit on it.
Absent that, there are some other things you can do to show that an activity is for-profit, but you'd probably have a tough time making 'playing WoW' meet those criteria. The IRS would regard playing WoW as a hobby, for which expenses are not deductible.
...all the 'money' is owned by Blizzard. The only thing that changes is who gets control of it in-game.
Saying that transfers of the in-game items in-game should be taxed is like saying that you should pay taxes every time you pass the dice next time you play D&D.
Obviously she's unaware that something cannot have "real market value" when it's illegal to sell.
Hey, look a slashdot comment about something that is 'obvious' that is entirely wrong!
You're wrong. Your first problem is that sale of WoW items is not illegal - it's merely against the terms of service contract you have with the service provider, which is NOT the same thing. Income earned in violation of a contract is still income, and you still have to report and pay taxes on it. If this were not the case, I could just have a contract with anyone who gives me money that says I must live in Trinidad and Tobago to get paid, and then turn around to the IRS and say that since I earned that money in violation of the contract it's not taxable. Clearly this isn't the case.
But let's say, for the sake of argument, that sale of WoW was actually illegal. Guess what? You're STILL wrong!
Income from any commercial activity is taxable, whether is is legal or not. And that's how the government often gets people involved in illegal activity - they don't prove necessarily that they were doing something illegal, they just prove that they had income that they didn't declare on their taxes and get them for tax evasion.
For example, if you make $1 million selling cocaine, even though the activity is illegal, you're still liable for the taxes on the income, and can still be criminally charged for tax evasion in addition to narcotics distribution.
A more mundane example is illegal immigrants - even if you're working here illegally, you still have to pay taxes, and that's one of the big reasons the IRS started issuing individual tax ID numbers - so people using fake social security numbers could still file their taxes. And believe it or not, a lot of illegal immigrants do pay taxes.
As a more general comment on the topic at hand, it seems logical to me that you'd only be liable for taxes on WoW and other virtual items if you actually sold them for real money. And if you did, you'd at least be able to deduct your subscription fees. But if you only keep your virtual items in the virtual world, I don't see how you have tax liability there any more than you have tax liability if you sew your own clothing. Start selling that clothing to others though....
Regardless, maybe you should go back to arm-chair quarterbacking and leave the arm-chair lawyering to the professionals.
Are your pet's creations steaming?
"to all the people that download music, if you think you are only hurting big companies you are wrong. There are two working people with families who no longer have jobs because of music piracy."
Music piracy has nothing to do with it. They don't have jobs anymore because record stores are a crappy way to distribute music when you have the internet. There is simply no reason to go to a physical place to buy a CD when you could download the same song from your house.
And this isn't something that just affects the music industry. I have always built my own computers from components. Back in the early 90's, I did that by going to a computer show and buying the components. Nowadays I order what I want from Newegg.
Why? Because it's BETTER. Does it suck that those computer fair operators have gone out of business? It does for them, but it doesn't suck for the rest of us who don't have to blow a Saturday driving to the fairgrounds to get parts that UPS will get us for the price of admission.
Even if nobody downloaded pirated music, the record companies STILL would have gone out of business, because $0.99 downloads are still better than $18 CDs or $3.99 singles.
Hell, the $13 CD I got on Amazon with free shipping is better than having to drive down to the record store. Record stores are closing because record stores just aren't needed anymore. Piracy has nothing to do with it.
I would have said something earlier, but I don't read the comment subject lines until after I've read the article.
That's what you get for not knocking first.
DM: There is a closed door in front of you.
PC: I knock on the door and loudly ask 'Is there a fully armed knight there?'
DM: You hear a deep, loud 'No!' in reply, accompanied by the sound of metal clanking against metal.
PC: I open the door.
Erm, wait, that's not right.
What do you think is justifying the salary demands of US IT people?
Most IT people in Switzerland only have one gun. Most Americans have three.
Like the story today about the Ford guy getting 25 million.
Let's say they didn't pay him a thing. Ford has, what, 200,000 employees? So they don't pay the CEO anything and then the workers get another $125/year each.
I'm not saying the CEO's aren't making more money. But that's not where the money is going, and to suggest it is is just ignorance.
...Thats a downward pressure on living in Northern California.
Don't forget that Toyota cars are now more 'American' than Ford cars are.
The american people have been clear they want wage increases and corporate accountability, the government still has not acted.
The government has certainly acted in terms of corporate accountability. Whether that yielded a net benefit to the economy or just caused lots of money to be spent on compliance is debatable.
As for wanting wage increases, it is not the government's responsibility to set wages. And the government should avoid doing so. See: USSR. See: China. See: Cuba. Hell, see: California. Highest minimum wages in the country. Also, most expensive place to live. Making twice as much money doesn't do you any good when you can't afford a place to live.
And the American people DO get wage increases. The 'buying power' of Americans continues to go up. Everybody has more and better stuff than they would have in the same job 20 years ago.
What we have may not be the best system, but it's already been proven that governments setting wages doesn't work.
If we outsources 100% of the current workforce, other countries would start outsourcing their work to us.
Jobs get outsourced to India because there is an untapped labor market there. As more of that market gets used, there will be less of an incentive to move jobs there and eventually an equilibrium will be reached where moving jobs overseas won't make sense because the people over there are paid just as well as the people here.e
4) is just a special case of 3). If the shareholders want to let their CEOs make off with all their money, that's the shareholders problem.
No matter how you cut it, spending $200 making something that could be made for $100 is stupid. It's stupid when you could spend $100 on a robot to do it, it's stupid when you can spend $100 on an immigrant to do it. If it wasn't stupid, life would have been better in 1780 when everything was done manually, by hand. Everybody had jobs, but nobody could buy much more than clothes and food and they worked 80 hours a week because everything was EXPENSIVE.
Worrying about whether something is made by someone here or someone abroad is just ethnocentrism. Our prosperity does not depend on NOT hiring people in India, or Pakistan, or China to do work.
The fact of the matter is, we have been decimating jobs for 200 years. We've brought in machines to do them, we've brought in immigrants to do them, and we've shipped them overseas. Our unemployment rates have not skyrocketed. Just as many people own homes. People now have more and better stuff than they did in 1800, or 1850, or 1900, or 1950, or 1975. People have better health care than they did in 1800, 1850, 1900, 1975.
Your 'defense' is that the rich have gotten richer. Who cares? What's more important, making sure the rich don't get richer, or making sure the everybody else gets a better standard of living?
So what you're suggesting will happen is Indians will all be gainfully employed and Americans will all be starving?
It can't get that far - long before it did, Indians would start outsourcing to US.
People have been whining about jobs getting lost to immigrants, and jobs being lost to automation, and now jobs being lost to outsourcing, for at least two centuries. And just like it's been a good thing the past 200 years, it's a good thing now. Because what people want isn't really jobs, it's stuff. And immigration, automation, and outsourcing all get us MORE STUFF.
Our prosperity does not depend on the rest of the world being in poverty.
Your first problem is your focusing on the number of dollars spent. The number of dollars spent is only partially relevant. The other part is HOW MUCH CAN YOU BUY WITH A DOLLAR.
If a company reduces the amount of money paid in wages, one of three things (or a combination) happens:
1) The make a larger profit, and the people who earn that profit spend it on other things.
2) They invest that saved money in more production or more production efficiency (buy technology, spend on research, build another factory)
3) They lower the price of the product, so the consumer then spends their money on something else.
The important thing here is that previously idle people in India or China are now no longer idle. They're making things. And when they make things, *WE* in the US get a cut of it.
Outsourcing turns a guy in India who wasn't doing shit into a guy in India who makes, say, $100 worth of stuff, and keeps $80 of it and we get $20 'for free'. That's good for him and good for us.
That does eliminate a job in the US that may have paid $200 for the same stuff. But that's OK, because the stuff costs $100 less, and the person who would have had that job can now work on something else.
Also keep in mind that depressed wages are the only way that the free market can move around workers. Just because we all want high paid jobs in a certain field doesn't mean the economy can support allocating workers that way.
But in the end, we want to export as many jobs as we can and replace as many workers as possible with machines. If we do this to perfection, none of us will have to work anymore, because machines and people in India will be doing all our work for us, and we'll still have the same amount of stuff.
Or at least, we'll have freed up enough of our labor force to provide the universal healthcare everyone seems to want.
If corporations can outsource labor, why can't I outsource purchase?
Republicans?
Congress wasted time on this bill that could have been spent getting something important done, such as finally hammering out a definate government policy on Stem Cell research, abortions
Yeah, because Congress totally would have accomplished something on THOSE deadlock issues....
The restaurant industry already has a solution to this problem.
Airlines just need a cell-phone section and a no-cell-phone section.
Another way to look at it is the most obnoxious cell phone user can't be any worse than the crying baby. They really shouldn't let those things on planes.
sub service_passengers {
s enger));
foreach my $passenger (@passengers) {
if (passenger_talking_on_phone($passenger)) {
stewardess_action($passenger,PHONE_USE);
}
}
}
sub stewardess_action {
my $passenger = shift;
my $action = shift;
switch ($action) {
case EMPTY_GLASS:
fill_glass();
break;
case CALL_BUTTON:
disable_call_button();
stewardess_action($passenger,query_passenger($pas
break;
case NO_PEANUTS:
provide_peanuts($passenger);
break;
case PHONE_USE:
case SMOKING:
case DRUNKENNESS:
case FAIL_CREW_DIRECTIVE:
case SHOE_BOMB:
stewardess_panic($passenger);
break;
}
}
sub stewardess_panic {
my $passenger = shift;
pilot::divert_airplane();
if ($passenger) {
passengers::restrain_passenger($passenger);
fbi::arrest_on_landing($passenger);
}
}
Your average airplane makes about 10 flights in a day
What planet are these planes flying on?
That's 2.4 hours per flight. I've spent 2.4 hours on some flights just sitting on the tarmac.
Short routes you MIGHT get 8 flights per day once you factor in not flying at night. Longer routes you get 4.
Sure would be funny to freak out the passenger next to you by constantly playing cs_747.
Voting machines must be allocated to voting districts in a manner proportional to the districts' populations.
So if paper is going to be the final word, why waste the money on voting machines in the first place?
Because not all paper ballots are created equal, and paper ballots filled out by humans are more prone to error than paper ballots printed by a machine.
The current paper ballots involve things like hole-punches (hanging chads anyone?), filling in bubbles (fill in too many or too few or only partially), butterfly ballots, etc.
It's the same reason your college professors wanted you to type your papers. The machine, by default, makes the paper much more legible than it would be if the paper were written by hand.
Same with electronic voting. The machine makes the ballot much less likely to have an error on it than if the ballot is done by a human with a pen (optical ballots) or punch (punch cards).
There are other features you get with electronic voting. For example, you don't need to print the ballots in advance. You can just load the ballot into the machine the morning of the election, and when people votes, the machine prints out the office and the selected candidate. So instead of having to 'lock' the ballot a month in advance to allow for the ballots to be printed, you might be able to reduce that lead time to a few days or a week. Then when a candidate dies three weeks before the election, or somebody wins/loses a lawsuit, you have more time to correct the ballot.
You can also do neat things like randomize the order candidates appear on the ballot. One problem with elections is the candidate listed first tends to get more votes than other candidates. With electronic ballots, candidates can all be listed first an 'equal' number of times.
Electronic voting also gives you the ability to accommodate more people with disabilities.