No income tax in WA. Secondly, the tax MS is avoiding is not a sales tax. It is a Business and Occupation tax. The B&O tax in WA is based on the business' revenue. MS may have sold the software elsewhere, but that revenue still comes to it here. So for example, if a company sold things such as books to out of state customers, WA would collect no sales tax on that transaction. It would however, collect a B&O tax on the revenue for the business which sold the books (not "profit" BTW, the B&O tax is based on gross revenue). If that same book seller sold a book to a WA resident, the state would collect sales tax in addition to the same B&O tax on that object.
In this case, MS is selling a different kind of media (software instead of books). Aside from being rich enough to buy itself enough of the legislature to get its way -- why exactly should it be exempted from the taxes everyone else has to pay?
WA already does a property tax on businesses -- including PERSONAL property. Every year I have to pay a "property tax" to the city for the value of all the desks, pens, paperclips, reams of paper, and so forth. Thankfully, we are allowed to estimate the value of the smaller things, like pens and paper.
Personally, I don't really like how paper feels because when I'm handling a lot of it, it tends to dry out my hands -- particularly if it is still hot from the printer or copier.
In my office, we use a mix of digitized images, summaries stored in a database, and physical paper because each has qualities that make it good for specific tasks. As the GP mentioned, spreading out documents can be very efficient for certain tasks. For example, in my office we deal with a lot of medical records, many of which are hand written. Although we may receive them as PDFs, organizing those on a computer screen would be ridiculously slow -- it is much faster to print out the lot and sort them according to our needs. By the same token, if I want to know if I received a particular document some unknown number of years ago, searching the DB for the summary is way faster than digging a file out archives and thumbing through it, and being able to quickly access an image of that document is icing on the cake.
Anyway, I love technology, but it is appropriate to use it judiciously. If something is more easily done on a computer, by all means do it that way, but if it is more easily done on paper, it makes no business sense to do it on a computer. The reason the paperless office doesn't have 100% reign is the same reason the microwave oven has not replaced the old style gas or electric stove/oven -- microwave ovens do some things well, but they don't do ALL things well (or they do nothing well, depending on your preference for taste over speed).
They would "owe" us if we charged, but idiotically, we don't. I met a Belgian woman who about freaked out when I said I thought we should let Europe totally defend itself and remove our bases. I suppose if enough people felt like her, and were willing to pay, fine leave them there. But otherwise, it's just stupid:
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Indeed, how do conservatives justify borrowing hundreds of billions yearly from Europe, Japan and the Gulf states — to defend Europe, Japan and the Arab Gulf states? Is it not absurd to borrow hundreds of billion annually from China — to defend Asia from China? Is it not a symptom of senility to borrow from all over the world in order to defend that world?
And who is this quote from? Right-wing freak Pat Buchanan. The stupidity is so freaking obvious, its only the Democratic and Republican PARTY loyalists who can't see it. Unfortunately, they make up 99.99% of government.
Man, the first few pages of Snow Crash are prophecy already half true, though with the exception of pizza delivery, all the other jobs can be outsourced as well, or P2P'd into non-existence. America is in trouble.
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When it gets down to it, talking trade balances here, once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here, once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel, once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity, y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
Yup. This guy is an idiot. How does he know government can always be trusted with the information, among other things.
He doesn't. He's just angling for some staffer job to get experience before being appointed(*) to legislative, executive, or in his case, judicial, office.
(*) nobody actually is elected anymore -- candidates' entrance fess are paid by either major party and their associated independent PACs in exchange for showing undying loyalty to the party machine, which is not in any way the same as being loyal to America. All you have to do is rise up high enough in the hierarchy, and a seat will be found for you. Our friend at Yale has a great future as a Democrat or Republican.
If a person really wanted to move sensitive information across a border, carrying it would be totally silly in 99% or more of all situations. SSH does not show up on any xray machine, metal detector, or other scanner designed to electronically search a person and their stuff. The only time carrying the data over a border would be reasonable, would be if it is being retrieved from a country that has no internet access or where SSHing would arouse suspicion.
It would be awfully nice if submitters would include links to sites with pictures where you don't have enable 50 scripts just to see a jpeg. For example, linking to wikipedia is a no brainer that would save a million keystrokes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen-Scott_South_Pole_Station
You miss the point, he owns an iPhone 3GS owner -- that does not mean he forces someone to own a 3GS. Indeed, he doesn't mention what he forces his 3GS owner to do for him.
It should be said that so far the only Apps to be pulled are those that actively scan for WiFi hotspots and not those that employ a database paired with the iPhone's GPS capabilities
If everyone moves out into the county, then you just have sprawl, a long commute, and the commensurate environmental degradation. The solution is not to make things worse -- the solution is to face reality and recognize that certain practices aren't reasonable or sustainable from both environmental and economic perspectives. The fact is, the southwest is coming out of a century long wet period, a period during which all the water rights were divvied up based on water level presumptions that are not likely to hold out. There was an interesting National Geographic article examining tree rings and water in the southwest, the text is here sans photos: http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/~tswetnam/tws-pdf/NewsArticles/NGM2008Kunzig.pdf
What do you think property values are going to look like when there is no water, and all those lawns turn to dirt lots? Are you really that interested in importing water from Canada at incredible expense merely so you can mow grass? On the other hand, if climate appropriate landscaping was introduced and perfected over the next few decades, perhaps property values can hold out through time periods when you'll be lucky to have drinking water, let alone lawn water. As someone else pointed out above -- arid landscaping can be very attractive. Best get some practice in.
No. Your English comprehension skills are good. Presently, the first half of the comments are comprised of people who can't understand sentences with a length greater than eight words.
Not a conspiracy theory. The rule was that if you cut X$ in one place, you have to raise X$ in another. So for IBM to get its legislative tax cut, congress had to raise taxes elsewhere. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19tax.html
The law was sponsored by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, as a favor to I.B.M., which wanted a $60 million tax break on its overseas business.
Under budget rules in effect at the time, any tax breaks had to be paid for with new revenues. By requiring software engineers to be employees, a Congressional report estimated, income and payroll taxes would rise by $60 million a year because employees had few opportunities to cheat on their taxes.
Re:Was it a cause of his legal trouble?
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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· Score: 5, Informative
The other half of the equation is the $60m tax cut that was pushed by Senator Moynihan as a favor to IBM. You were clever and figured out a way to navigate the hurdle caused when congress had to find $60m to offset its favor to IBM (nice work BTW). The problem is, when there are a very few who can simply buy the laws they want via the legalized corruption of campaign donations, cleverness will not always be sufficient to overcome those hurdles.
Was he a "fundamentalist libertarian"? His manifesto laments the state of health care in this country. He bashes organized religion, though I think that may be residue from his attempt at one time to start a religion as means of not paying taxes. Lastly, he may have had libertarian leanings, but if so, I'd doubt he was a fundamentalist -- fundamentalists become republicans because of their desire to control people while Libertarians would rather leave people alone. Somehow, I think you are having a knee jerk reaction and stringing together every term you find derogatory.
Re:I'm sure it was a HUGE difference.
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The law was in the main part, a $60m tax break favor to IBM. The effect on ind. contractors was the manner in which IBM's tax cut was funded. Nobody was thinking about consequences. Moynihan was simply doing a $60m favor for IBM.
The more interesting part of the tax provision was that it was introduced by Patrick Moynihan as a favor to IBM. A $60m tax cut type of favor. I'm not saying Joe was right in what he did, but it is rather apparent that to be noticed by government, you must either be insanely rich or insanely violent.
You need glasses or a new prescription to help with that short-sightedness. For example:
Thanks to the Moon missions, Black & Decker was able to pair cordless electricity with elbow grease and make the job of building America easier than ever. While on the Moon, astronauts were tasked with gathering soil and rock samples for analysis back on Earth. To help them, NASA asked Black & Decker to build a special drill for boring into lunar rock. The drill had to be small, lightweight and, most importantly, battery powered. Black & Decker's new drill proved to be a fantastic success and spawned the development of cordless tools for the medical, manufacturing, building and home consumer industries.
People like going to Europe, Asia, N. America, wherever to see the sights and taste the foods and yet, commercial airlines seem to often be in financial trouble.
I'm skeptical. Itunes, eMusic, the CD burner, or other self-publishing routes haven't killed the music majors. As for books, people can have professionally printed books made on demand in runs as short as a single book for cheap, e.g., http://lulu.com/ . A 200 page paperback with a print run of ONE book costs $5.50 according their book cost calculator -- that's a pretty low barrier to entry for a self-publisher. Still, companies like Lulu aren't a real threat to the big publishers because people like that someone out there is filtering their options just as is true with music.
Note -- it is true that there will be some small percentage of people who will be dedicated to the small publisher but if you are about to say how much you love small bands (I personally do too) or self-publishers, realize that you and I are outliers in the market. We're not bringing down the majors.
Slashdot Mirror
No income tax in WA. Secondly, the tax MS is avoiding is not a sales tax. It is a Business and Occupation tax. The B&O tax in WA is based on the business' revenue. MS may have sold the software elsewhere, but that revenue still comes to it here. So for example, if a company sold things such as books to out of state customers, WA would collect no sales tax on that transaction. It would however, collect a B&O tax on the revenue for the business which sold the books (not "profit" BTW, the B&O tax is based on gross revenue). If that same book seller sold a book to a WA resident, the state would collect sales tax in addition to the same B&O tax on that object.
In this case, MS is selling a different kind of media (software instead of books). Aside from being rich enough to buy itself enough of the legislature to get its way -- why exactly should it be exempted from the taxes everyone else has to pay?
WA already does a property tax on businesses -- including PERSONAL property. Every year I have to pay a "property tax" to the city for the value of all the desks, pens, paperclips, reams of paper, and so forth. Thankfully, we are allowed to estimate the value of the smaller things, like pens and paper.
I highly doubt taxes in Canada would be lower than here even if the state legislature had the balls it takes to be fair about tax policy.
Personally, I don't really like how paper feels because when I'm handling a lot of it, it tends to dry out my hands -- particularly if it is still hot from the printer or copier.
In my office, we use a mix of digitized images, summaries stored in a database, and physical paper because each has qualities that make it good for specific tasks. As the GP mentioned, spreading out documents can be very efficient for certain tasks. For example, in my office we deal with a lot of medical records, many of which are hand written. Although we may receive them as PDFs, organizing those on a computer screen would be ridiculously slow -- it is much faster to print out the lot and sort them according to our needs. By the same token, if I want to know if I received a particular document some unknown number of years ago, searching the DB for the summary is way faster than digging a file out archives and thumbing through it, and being able to quickly access an image of that document is icing on the cake.
Anyway, I love technology, but it is appropriate to use it judiciously. If something is more easily done on a computer, by all means do it that way, but if it is more easily done on paper, it makes no business sense to do it on a computer. The reason the paperless office doesn't have 100% reign is the same reason the microwave oven has not replaced the old style gas or electric stove/oven -- microwave ovens do some things well, but they don't do ALL things well (or they do nothing well, depending on your preference for taste over speed).
.
And who is this quote from? Right-wing freak Pat Buchanan. The stupidity is so freaking obvious, its only the Democratic and Republican PARTY loyalists who can't see it. Unfortunately, they make up 99.99% of government.
citation: http://buchanan.org/blog/liquidating-the-empire-3646
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He doesn't. He's just angling for some staffer job to get experience before being appointed(*) to legislative, executive, or in his case, judicial, office.
(*) nobody actually is elected anymore -- candidates' entrance fess are paid by either major party and their associated independent PACs in exchange for showing undying loyalty to the party machine, which is not in any way the same as being loyal to America. All you have to do is rise up high enough in the hierarchy, and a seat will be found for you. Our friend at Yale has a great future as a Democrat or Republican.
If a person really wanted to move sensitive information across a border, carrying it would be totally silly in 99% or more of all situations. SSH does not show up on any xray machine, metal detector, or other scanner designed to electronically search a person and their stuff. The only time carrying the data over a border would be reasonable, would be if it is being retrieved from a country that has no internet access or where SSHing would arouse suspicion.
I think this "washed up old fart" has a song written specifically for you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdBlZzuadLQ
It would be awfully nice if submitters would include links to sites with pictures where you don't have enable 50 scripts just to see a jpeg. For example, linking to wikipedia is a no brainer that would save a million keystrokes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen-Scott_South_Pole_Station
You miss the point, he owns an iPhone 3GS owner -- that does not mean he forces someone to own a 3GS. Indeed, he doesn't mention what he forces his 3GS owner to do for him.
Didn't you get the memo? Even though I'm sure Iphone 3GS owners are not a protected class, slavery is definitely NOT legal anymore.
So the ones left are totally lame.
If everyone moves out into the county, then you just have sprawl, a long commute, and the commensurate environmental degradation. The solution is not to make things worse -- the solution is to face reality and recognize that certain practices aren't reasonable or sustainable from both environmental and economic perspectives. The fact is, the southwest is coming out of a century long wet period, a period during which all the water rights were divvied up based on water level presumptions that are not likely to hold out. There was an interesting National Geographic article examining tree rings and water in the southwest, the text is here sans photos: http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/~tswetnam/tws-pdf/NewsArticles/NGM2008Kunzig.pdf
What do you think property values are going to look like when there is no water, and all those lawns turn to dirt lots? Are you really that interested in importing water from Canada at incredible expense merely so you can mow grass? On the other hand, if climate appropriate landscaping was introduced and perfected over the next few decades, perhaps property values can hold out through time periods when you'll be lucky to have drinking water, let alone lawn water. As someone else pointed out above -- arid landscaping can be very attractive. Best get some practice in.
No. Your English comprehension skills are good. Presently, the first half of the comments are comprised of people who can't understand sentences with a length greater than eight words.
You got it wrong after "and". It is the software that is prohibited from blocking other software installs, not the user.
Inept sharing is different from unauthorized access. Inept sharing means that other do have authorization to access the documents.
The other half of the equation is the $60m tax cut that was pushed by Senator Moynihan as a favor to IBM. You were clever and figured out a way to navigate the hurdle caused when congress had to find $60m to offset its favor to IBM (nice work BTW). The problem is, when there are a very few who can simply buy the laws they want via the legalized corruption of campaign donations, cleverness will not always be sufficient to overcome those hurdles.
Was he a "fundamentalist libertarian"? His manifesto laments the state of health care in this country. He bashes organized religion, though I think that may be residue from his attempt at one time to start a religion as means of not paying taxes. Lastly, he may have had libertarian leanings, but if so, I'd doubt he was a fundamentalist -- fundamentalists become republicans because of their desire to control people while Libertarians would rather leave people alone. Somehow, I think you are having a knee jerk reaction and stringing together every term you find derogatory.
The law was in the main part, a $60m tax break favor to IBM. The effect on ind. contractors was the manner in which IBM's tax cut was funded. Nobody was thinking about consequences. Moynihan was simply doing a $60m favor for IBM.
The more interesting part of the tax provision was that it was introduced by Patrick Moynihan as a favor to IBM. A $60m tax cut type of favor. I'm not saying Joe was right in what he did, but it is rather apparent that to be noticed by government, you must either be insanely rich or insanely violent.
from: http://www.nasa.gov/missions/science/f_apollo_11_spinoff.html
People like going to Europe, Asia, N. America, wherever to see the sights and taste the foods and yet, commercial airlines seem to often be in financial trouble.
I'm skeptical. Itunes, eMusic, the CD burner, or other self-publishing routes haven't killed the music majors. As for books, people can have professionally printed books made on demand in runs as short as a single book for cheap, e.g., http://lulu.com/ . A 200 page paperback with a print run of ONE book costs $5.50 according their book cost calculator -- that's a pretty low barrier to entry for a self-publisher. Still, companies like Lulu aren't a real threat to the big publishers because people like that someone out there is filtering their options just as is true with music.
Note -- it is true that there will be some small percentage of people who will be dedicated to the small publisher but if you are about to say how much you love small bands (I personally do too) or self-publishers, realize that you and I are outliers in the market. We're not bringing down the majors.