Many modern applications look fine - Chrome for instance, which I'm typing in right now. Everything scales well according to the settings in both the control panel and the settings (another WTF in Windows... why two control panels???). But many of the built-in Windows things, and almost every "standard installer" is fuzzy, scaled up from a low resolution.
Actually, your comment made me go check - and it looks like MS updated a lot of the formerly fuzzy-looking applications in the April update. My complaint is actually not nearly as applicable anymore. My last struggle was with a somewhat janky cross-platform application, not one of the internal programs.
You are claiming that a human being cannot detect a doubling or quadrupling in computation speed? Interesting argument.
Personally I just moved from a Core2Duo to an i7. I already had an SSD and plenty of RAM. I can certainly feel a difference in the two computers, though I suppose you'll say it is in my head.
Your inputs are changing. Let's use a simple example of someone dealing with videos or photos. Resolutions and color depths have increased to where they overwhelm the memory and storage available in older equipment. The processing of these files also takes longer.
Hard drives fill up, log files get longer, patches accumulate, caches grow larger, temp directories fill up. Software is installed but rarely cleaned back out, so total number of processes climb. Drives fragment, software gets more complicated.
I'm a big Mac fan - I've been using them as my main computer since 1993.
With that said, the stagnation got to be too much. I picked up an HP Envy recently that costs about half of what an i7 does on the Mac side, and it has one of the new 15 watt TDP chips in it so it is cool and has decent (but not spectacular) battery life. Sure, I die a little every time I need to use Windows 10 - but at the end of the day I just couldn't spend too much money on hardware that seems to be somewhat flaky.
Tangentially, why the hell can't Microsoft figure out high-res displays? Are my choices really teeny-tiny or big-n-fuzzy? Sheesh. And if it were just legacy support, fine - but it's the situation with MS's own bundled apps!
Critters and shit were around long before sidewalks and lawns had been invented
I don't understand this argument at all. Lots of things were around before sidewalks - take dysentery, for instance. We know a lot more about disease now than we did when we were hucking spears around the forest. One important finding is transmission of disease in fecal matter. Pooping right in the middle of where you are going to walk, then tracking that poop into our living spaces. You would probably call the cops if a guy dropped trou and took a shit in the middle of the sidewalk, even if he picked it back up when he was done. The same guy brings his pet to that location and does exactly the same thing, it's all cool. And of course you can't pick up piss.
Sure, if you live out in farm country, a little animal shit (or human shit, for that matter) won't hurt anyone. But cram 27,000 people into a square mile and shit of any form is harmful.
Take a step back and think about whether it should even be culturally acceptable to walk around a neighborhood and shit on sidewalks and lawns. Maybe plastic bags are an answer to an absurd question?
no Free OS that is based first and foremost around the concept of security.
This sounds nice, but in practice it would wind up pretty much the same as the other flavors of OS. The most secure computer is one that it off - do anything useful with it, and you start to make security compromises. The compromises add up to a balance of security and usefulness that exist in every modern OS, and that same dynamic would be true in a "secure OS" even if it started from the other extreme. As the other commenters mentioned, OpenBSD and Qubes exist. Yeah, they modified other OSes (BSD and Xen, respectively), but in the end they resemble what you are asking for.
You left out AGW deniers. Don't worry, we still have our organic, anti-GMO cousins keeping up the good fight on the other side of the pond. It brings a tear to my eye to see us unite against science as a species.
As long as the sun remains approximately the same mass, it should have no significant effect on the gravity felt by Earth at this distance.
Of course the sun IS losing mass, both by converting mass to energy in nuclear reactions and through boiling off particles into the solar wind.
And the Earth also experiences an influence on spin from the sun. If the sun survived long enough, Earth would become tidally locked to the sun - with a single rotation lasting an Earth year and the same side of the planet always facing the sun... the same way the same side of the moon always faces Earth. Earth is far enough away from the sun that the sun will die before this occurs. Mercury is close to the sun and is tidally locked. Venus is closer but has a bizarre backwards slow spin, the cause of I don't think is well understood.
Yeah, now you are getting it, though confusing possessives and plurals more generally would indicate an even shallower grasp of written English. But you are right, it would not change the meaning of my post, is likely to be the result of autocorrect, and isn't generally worth commenting on.
Really, you're going to claim that the use of "it's" made the text hard to understand? Interesting tactic.
Well, I don't concede that point. The text was no harder to understand because "it's" made no sense in the context. You could probably come up with an example of where using its vs it's causes confusion, but this is not one of those cases.
The effective tax rate on money used to pay dividends--on that specific pile of money--is always the corporate income tax rate, no more and no less.
Right, but you are trying to segregate the money paid as dividends from all of the other income. I get your point, but depending on the company it can be a very small amount of the income that actually gets paid as dividends. Apple might be extraordinary, but they reported $2.73/share in revenue and they only paid $0.73 in dividends. If you are correct, then you are only correct for around a quarter of their income. But again, none of this really matters because tax rates would be adjusted to make up for the lost corporate income. I am suggesting something that is revenue-neutral as a prerequisite. Any argument that the revenue will go down is easily rectified by adjusting rates and filling loopholes and deductions.
yet you get to spend millions of dollars.
Sure, you get to spend it by investing it. Same thing you can do now. Amazon has hardly paid any income taxes at all, because they have incentive to reinvest any profits. I have a buddy who very rarely shows a profit for his small business - it's something of a mistake when he does. Yes, a company will have less tax incentive to invest rather than hoard cash - but there are already some pretty strong disincentives to hoard cash. If hoarding of cash becomes a problem, I'll be the first to propose rule changes to address that. I think I could make an argument that the current tax regime already encourages companies to hoard cash overseas.
because the marginal cost of an individual's use of the yacht club's resources is a fraction of the cost of the yacht itself, the individual incurs only a marginal amount of income.
And so in today's regime, what happens? The Yacht is a business expense and is not taxed. How does this change for the worse then, if everything is the same?
would be taxed at the corporate income tax rate under the current system.
Oh, please. They'll sell the yacht club in a year where they show a loss. Or they'll play games with leases and paying with carried interest. They have whole departments just for this.
Joe Millionaire's accountant is having an easier time covering Joe Millionaire's assets from taxation.
Simplification of the tax code would be a necessary part of eliminating the corporate tax, I can't claim otherwise.
Of your examples, only "his" is singular, and even then there is no word "hi" => "his" as there is "it" => "its". It's a unique word and it is confusing as it seemingly breaks standard rules for singular possessives. It's also pronounced exactly the same with or without the apostrophe, so arguing about it is pedantic as hell. It's a frigging message board, not the NY Times.
Probably as baffling as feeling the need to correct it. Hint: phones automatically insert the apostrophe about 50% of the time. Move on, it's just the universe exerting its will against your sanity. Don't let the universe win.
The effective tax rate was not 35%. And in any case, the tax rate is no longer 35%. I'm well-aware of the double tax on dividends - that's the justification for the lower special rate, and is removal of the double tax is why I feel justified in raising it. I've already said that tax rates should be adjusted to make sure that the loss of corporate taxes is revenue neutral, so I'm not sure where you are going with this line of protest.
You wouldn't get them on capital gains until the shareholders sold stock.
And? I don't see the problem. Is it the deferred tax that bothers you? What about IRAs, 401(k)s and the like? And of course as you point out, they are deferring taxes right now by holding money outside of the country.
The individuals wouldn't be exposed to higher tax liability
Why do you say that? Their tax rates would necessarily go up.
Then you own a yacht club, a bunch of yachts, and can go boating.
Yes, this is obviously a part of the tax code that would need revision. Things like access to yachts, company cars, first class air travel, etc. would need to considered benefits like salary. I agree that this is not workable within the current tax code, and significant changes would be necessary. But your yacht club example can happen today, with costs written off as entertainment expenses and whatnot. It's not a new type of tax avoidance or abuse, but it does become critical to attack it more aggressively. Which, again, I contend will be easier when the government doesn't need to fight GE's accounting and lobbying departments and instead is just fighting Joe Millionaire's accountant.
By the way, thanks for the discussion. Despite vigorously disagreeing with me and probably thinking that I'm a bit of a naive moron, you are keeping it very civil and forcing me to defend my admittedly radical position.
I don't know what you are talking about. Most of the games on tablets/phones are either "free" or a few bucks. Most console games are in $25-$50. Only the absolute premium, high-end blockbuster games go for $70 - and in an era where it costs me around $60-100 to take my family of 4 out to the movies, this seems reasonable for something I'll play for many, many hours.
As I said, it becomes a GAAP thing and not a tax thing.
Currently, dividends are taxed as profit (was 35% in 2016), then taxed again when paid to shareholders as capital gains (15%), bringing the total to a 44.75% tax rate.
This is misleading on four counts. The effective tax rate was not 35%, and dividends are often paid independently of profit. For instance, GE only recently reduced their dividend despite many consecutive losses. And even now, they still pay a dividend. You also leave capital gains out of the argument, and you are using last year's significantly higher tax rate.
if they put that cash in a box like Apple does--they pay 0% taxes
Good on them - their stock price will likely reflect their cash hoard and you get them on capital gains.
Apple's effective tax rate under your system would be vanishingly-small.
It would be zero.
That's how the law has worked for the past century or so.
Again this is misleading. It has only worked that way for short-term capital gains. Long term capital gains are taxed at a lower rate.
Nothing you describe would reduce tax avoidance
That's an absurd statement - it would go to zero... there would be no taxes for corporations to avoid. Individuals would need to do all of the avoiding, and they do not have a giant accounting department at their disposal - nor do they have the same number of lobbyists to carve out tax exemptions.
would provide a much better tax shelter
What shelter? Presumably rich people want to do things with their money? Tax it when it comes out of the corporation.
A pass-through payment for a corporate entity isn't simply the corporation granting you income under contract
OK, my mistake - I used jargon incorrectly. The audience here is more sophisticated than that, and I should know better. I don't mean literally convert C-corps to LLC or some other pass-through entity. I just mean treat the income made from a C-corp or similar (be it dividends or capital gains) as regular income.
that's potentially billions of untaxed incomes, and a large cost to collect
That's OK, we're giving up trillions in uncollected taxes now, held overseas. Let's not let perfection be the enemy of progress. The people who owe $40 are small potatoes anyway, and over time collection can be made more efficient.
Well, you're wrong.
I'm sure I have many things wrong, but tax avoidance is real. You even described several excellent bizarre maneuvers that would go away if there was no corporate tax. Depreciation would be become a GAAP quirk and would have no tax consequences at all, with no games to play. Corporations can pay people money to work or provide goods and services for them, which you tax as income. They can pay dividends, which you tax as income. They can pay interest, which you tax as income. People can sell their shares in a corporation, which you tax the profit on.
Slashdot Mirror
Many modern applications look fine - Chrome for instance, which I'm typing in right now. Everything scales well according to the settings in both the control panel and the settings (another WTF in Windows... why two control panels???). But many of the built-in Windows things, and almost every "standard installer" is fuzzy, scaled up from a low resolution.
Actually, your comment made me go check - and it looks like MS updated a lot of the formerly fuzzy-looking applications in the April update. My complaint is actually not nearly as applicable anymore. My last struggle was with a somewhat janky cross-platform application, not one of the internal programs.
You are claiming that a human being cannot detect a doubling or quadrupling in computation speed? Interesting argument.
Personally I just moved from a Core2Duo to an i7. I already had an SSD and plenty of RAM. I can certainly feel a difference in the two computers, though I suppose you'll say it is in my head.
With computers it isn't quite so simple.
Your inputs are changing. Let's use a simple example of someone dealing with videos or photos. Resolutions and color depths have increased to where they overwhelm the memory and storage available in older equipment. The processing of these files also takes longer.
Hard drives fill up, log files get longer, patches accumulate, caches grow larger, temp directories fill up. Software is installed but rarely cleaned back out, so total number of processes climb. Drives fragment, software gets more complicated.
I'm a big Mac fan - I've been using them as my main computer since 1993.
With that said, the stagnation got to be too much. I picked up an HP Envy recently that costs about half of what an i7 does on the Mac side, and it has one of the new 15 watt TDP chips in it so it is cool and has decent (but not spectacular) battery life. Sure, I die a little every time I need to use Windows 10 - but at the end of the day I just couldn't spend too much money on hardware that seems to be somewhat flaky.
Tangentially, why the hell can't Microsoft figure out high-res displays? Are my choices really teeny-tiny or big-n-fuzzy? Sheesh. And if it were just legacy support, fine - but it's the situation with MS's own bundled apps!
Critters and shit were around long before sidewalks and lawns had been invented
I don't understand this argument at all. Lots of things were around before sidewalks - take dysentery, for instance. We know a lot more about disease now than we did when we were hucking spears around the forest. One important finding is transmission of disease in fecal matter. Pooping right in the middle of where you are going to walk, then tracking that poop into our living spaces. You would probably call the cops if a guy dropped trou and took a shit in the middle of the sidewalk, even if he picked it back up when he was done. The same guy brings his pet to that location and does exactly the same thing, it's all cool. And of course you can't pick up piss.
Sure, if you live out in farm country, a little animal shit (or human shit, for that matter) won't hurt anyone. But cram 27,000 people into a square mile and shit of any form is harmful.
Take a step back and think about whether it should even be culturally acceptable to walk around a neighborhood and shit on sidewalks and lawns. Maybe plastic bags are an answer to an absurd question?
no Free OS that is based first and foremost around the concept of security.
This sounds nice, but in practice it would wind up pretty much the same as the other flavors of OS. The most secure computer is one that it off - do anything useful with it, and you start to make security compromises. The compromises add up to a balance of security and usefulness that exist in every modern OS, and that same dynamic would be true in a "secure OS" even if it started from the other extreme. As the other commenters mentioned, OpenBSD and Qubes exist. Yeah, they modified other OSes (BSD and Xen, respectively), but in the end they resemble what you are asking for.
You left out AGW deniers. Don't worry, we still have our organic, anti-GMO cousins keeping up the good fight on the other side of the pond. It brings a tear to my eye to see us unite against science as a species.
Correct. Unless we yank it out of the way. :)
Honestly the textbook that I learned from in the 80s was probably written in the early 60s, so yeah :)
Point is, Earth won't be tidally locked with the sun.
As long as the sun remains approximately the same mass, it should have no significant effect on the gravity felt by Earth at this distance.
Of course the sun IS losing mass, both by converting mass to energy in nuclear reactions and through boiling off particles into the solar wind.
And the Earth also experiences an influence on spin from the sun. If the sun survived long enough, Earth would become tidally locked to the sun - with a single rotation lasting an Earth year and the same side of the planet always facing the sun... the same way the same side of the moon always faces Earth. Earth is far enough away from the sun that the sun will die before this occurs. Mercury is close to the sun and is tidally locked. Venus is closer but has a bizarre backwards slow spin, the cause of I don't think is well understood.
Alright, I need help here. Sarcasm or not?
Yeah, now you are getting it, though confusing possessives and plurals more generally would indicate an even shallower grasp of written English. But you are right, it would not change the meaning of my post, is likely to be the result of autocorrect, and isn't generally worth commenting on.
Yup, used the wrong term. Sorry - sacrifice me to the indefinite genitive gods.
Sorry, I used the wrong terminology. Apparently I was looking for "indefinite genitive".
Anyway, the point I was trying to make is:
That is its towel.
That is her towel.
That is his towel.
That is their towel.
People don't say:
That towel is its.
But they do say:
That towel is hers.
That towel is his.
That towel is theirs.
Really, you're going to claim that the use of "it's" made the text hard to understand? Interesting tactic.
Well, I don't concede that point. The text was no harder to understand because "it's" made no sense in the context. You could probably come up with an example of where using its vs it's causes confusion, but this is not one of those cases.
The effective tax rate on money used to pay dividends--on that specific pile of money--is always the corporate income tax rate, no more and no less.
Right, but you are trying to segregate the money paid as dividends from all of the other income. I get your point, but depending on the company it can be a very small amount of the income that actually gets paid as dividends. Apple might be extraordinary, but they reported $2.73/share in revenue and they only paid $0.73 in dividends. If you are correct, then you are only correct for around a quarter of their income. But again, none of this really matters because tax rates would be adjusted to make up for the lost corporate income. I am suggesting something that is revenue-neutral as a prerequisite. Any argument that the revenue will go down is easily rectified by adjusting rates and filling loopholes and deductions.
yet you get to spend millions of dollars.
Sure, you get to spend it by investing it. Same thing you can do now. Amazon has hardly paid any income taxes at all, because they have incentive to reinvest any profits. I have a buddy who very rarely shows a profit for his small business - it's something of a mistake when he does. Yes, a company will have less tax incentive to invest rather than hoard cash - but there are already some pretty strong disincentives to hoard cash. If hoarding of cash becomes a problem, I'll be the first to propose rule changes to address that. I think I could make an argument that the current tax regime already encourages companies to hoard cash overseas.
because the marginal cost of an individual's use of the yacht club's resources is a fraction of the cost of the yacht itself, the individual incurs only a marginal amount of income.
And so in today's regime, what happens? The Yacht is a business expense and is not taxed. How does this change for the worse then, if everything is the same?
would be taxed at the corporate income tax rate under the current system.
Oh, please. They'll sell the yacht club in a year where they show a loss. Or they'll play games with leases and paying with carried interest. They have whole departments just for this.
Joe Millionaire's accountant is having an easier time covering Joe Millionaire's assets from taxation.
Simplification of the tax code would be a necessary part of eliminating the corporate tax, I can't claim otherwise.
Of your examples, only "his" is singular, and even then there is no word "hi" => "his" as there is "it" => "its". It's a unique word and it is confusing as it seemingly breaks standard rules for singular possessives. It's also pronounced exactly the same with or without the apostrophe, so arguing about it is pedantic as hell. It's a frigging message board, not the NY Times.
Probably as baffling as feeling the need to correct it. Hint: phones automatically insert the apostrophe about 50% of the time. Move on, it's just the universe exerting its will against your sanity. Don't let the universe win.
As a matter of fact, they currently do.
The tax rate was 35%
The effective tax rate was not 35%. And in any case, the tax rate is no longer 35%. I'm well-aware of the double tax on dividends - that's the justification for the lower special rate, and is removal of the double tax is why I feel justified in raising it. I've already said that tax rates should be adjusted to make sure that the loss of corporate taxes is revenue neutral, so I'm not sure where you are going with this line of protest.
You wouldn't get them on capital gains until the shareholders sold stock.
And? I don't see the problem. Is it the deferred tax that bothers you? What about IRAs, 401(k)s and the like? And of course as you point out, they are deferring taxes right now by holding money outside of the country.
The individuals wouldn't be exposed to higher tax liability
Why do you say that? Their tax rates would necessarily go up.
Then you own a yacht club, a bunch of yachts, and can go boating.
Yes, this is obviously a part of the tax code that would need revision. Things like access to yachts, company cars, first class air travel, etc. would need to considered benefits like salary. I agree that this is not workable within the current tax code, and significant changes would be necessary. But your yacht club example can happen today, with costs written off as entertainment expenses and whatnot. It's not a new type of tax avoidance or abuse, but it does become critical to attack it more aggressively. Which, again, I contend will be easier when the government doesn't need to fight GE's accounting and lobbying departments and instead is just fighting Joe Millionaire's accountant.
By the way, thanks for the discussion. Despite vigorously disagreeing with me and probably thinking that I'm a bit of a naive moron, you are keeping it very civil and forcing me to defend my admittedly radical position.
I don't know what you are talking about. Most of the games on tablets/phones are either "free" or a few bucks. Most console games are in $25-$50. Only the absolute premium, high-end blockbuster games go for $70 - and in an era where it costs me around $60-100 to take my family of 4 out to the movies, this seems reasonable for something I'll play for many, many hours.
Yeah, I ilke how the keyboard sort of slides in there magically when they show it on its side. Magic!
The SEC then penalizes you for securities fraud.
As I said, it becomes a GAAP thing and not a tax thing.
Currently, dividends are taxed as profit (was 35% in 2016), then taxed again when paid to shareholders as capital gains (15%), bringing the total to a 44.75% tax rate.
This is misleading on four counts. The effective tax rate was not 35%, and dividends are often paid independently of profit. For instance, GE only recently reduced their dividend despite many consecutive losses. And even now, they still pay a dividend. You also leave capital gains out of the argument, and you are using last year's significantly higher tax rate.
if they put that cash in a box like Apple does--they pay 0% taxes
Good on them - their stock price will likely reflect their cash hoard and you get them on capital gains.
Apple's effective tax rate under your system would be vanishingly-small.
It would be zero.
That's how the law has worked for the past century or so.
Again this is misleading. It has only worked that way for short-term capital gains. Long term capital gains are taxed at a lower rate.
Nothing you describe would reduce tax avoidance
That's an absurd statement - it would go to zero... there would be no taxes for corporations to avoid. Individuals would need to do all of the avoiding, and they do not have a giant accounting department at their disposal - nor do they have the same number of lobbyists to carve out tax exemptions.
would provide a much better tax shelter
What shelter? Presumably rich people want to do things with their money? Tax it when it comes out of the corporation.
A pass-through payment for a corporate entity isn't simply the corporation granting you income under contract
OK, my mistake - I used jargon incorrectly. The audience here is more sophisticated than that, and I should know better. I don't mean literally convert C-corps to LLC or some other pass-through entity. I just mean treat the income made from a C-corp or similar (be it dividends or capital gains) as regular income.
that's potentially billions of untaxed incomes, and a large cost to collect
That's OK, we're giving up trillions in uncollected taxes now, held overseas. Let's not let perfection be the enemy of progress. The people who owe $40 are small potatoes anyway, and over time collection can be made more efficient.
Well, you're wrong.
I'm sure I have many things wrong, but tax avoidance is real. You even described several excellent bizarre maneuvers that would go away if there was no corporate tax. Depreciation would be become a GAAP quirk and would have no tax consequences at all, with no games to play. Corporations can pay people money to work or provide goods and services for them, which you tax as income. They can pay dividends, which you tax as income. They can pay interest, which you tax as income. People can sell their shares in a corporation, which you tax the profit on.