There is no "right" to form a limited liability corporation, and I know the one I work for certainly doesn't speak for me - it speaks for the owners who are shielded from most liability. We can make corporations take any form that we wish - they are a complete fiction of law. They weren't implemented with a constitutional amendment, and we don't need one to change the way that they work.
That is certainly a good idea. I'll have to read more about it. Does it work well in practice?
In the US, it would require revisiting the "limited liability" concept that usually applies to corporations. I'm personally not opposed to that, but it would be a very difficult fight - and it's not something the Supreme Court could have implemented without overstepping their bounds IMHO.
So what is your argument exactly? We shouldn't have free newspapers? Or the NY Times, as a corporation, should not have the right to publish a free newspaper?
Point is, I want the NY Times product - the newspaper - to have very broad speech protections, probably almost the same protection afforded to the individual employees. Maybe the answer is that the NY Times shouldn't be a corporation if it wants freedom of speech. I don't know, I don't pretend to be that smart. But I can certainly see the difficult position SCOTUS was in.
It's simple - people will pay more for a scarce commodity. With "real" property, the commodity generally has some shelf life or cost associated with holding on to it. With IP and a near-infinite monopoly, it pays to restrict supply to keep the price high.
I want the New York Times, the media corporation, to have free speech. Granting the Times free speech and not more politically-motivated corporations free speech is a very difficult problem to solve. I can't really fault the Supreme Court.
I think we need to re-examine what we want corporations to be, in a more general sense. There should be a huge amount of support for reform, but for some reason there is not. On the left, people love to hate corporations. On the right, the more libertarian-leaning folks should hate corporations since they represent a huge example of government interference in the free market, and they mask individual liability.
AC is being kind of mean, but he has a point... piracy still offers the best service, even without getting into cost. Google + Torrent or Usenet is still the best offering for content variety, timeliness, and quality in the online arena.
This has a long term distorting effect on the market.
That's an unavoidable consequence of IP law as it is currently implemented. We could go with much shorter copyrights (so you only have to wait 5 years or so for the content) or use a stronger compulsory system, but as long as the law grants exclusive rights you will get exclusive deals.
Obviously there are other factors complicating the situation
Like it coincided with recovery from the dot-com bust?
Federal revenue has bounced between 15-20% of GDP since the 50s, so I don't really get my panties in a bunch so long as it stays in that range. The states are where most of the fight over should be these days, as state share has gone up, up, up. My state is still pretty decent (PA), but I lived in New York for a few years, and the taxes are totally out of control. But that is the luxury of state taxes - you can move.
We aren't up against the Laffer curve right now, so I don't think that is really germane. If Mitt Romney were paying 60% instead of 15% of his income, then we could talk about the Laffer curve. Lowering taxes does stimulate economic growth, but so does spending. The point is that it's not sustainable if spending and revenue aren't at parity. I advocate a freeze because it is hard to justify INCREASED spending, but cutting spending will hurt the economy in the short term. I advocate increased revenue because we dug ourselves into a huge hole. It's a compromise.
Much better would be to just establish a national tax rate for cross-border sales. Distribute the tax as you see fit. Requiring out of state sellers to know the tax laws of all 50 states is not fair, IMHO.
I don't really understand this argument. Spending does not match revenue, that is the only problem we have. "We the People" can raise and lower taxes and spending at will. There is no "right" answer, so I'm not sure where you are going with this argument.
There are very good arguments to reduce the size of government, but there are also good arguments to boost revenue. I propose a compromise:
1. Raise taxes (rates, loopholes, whatever - it really only matters to partisans) to cover our debt service. 2. Freeze spending.
With spending frozen and revenue increasing, it will only be a matter of time before we start paying off debt. As debt service becomes cheaper, lower taxes accordingly until they are back where we are today. Spending can be unfrozen when our debt is down to a reasonable level (10% of GDP?).
So you don't actually believe what you wrote? Were you karma whoring or just bloviating?
No - probably just not communicating well. I was just astounded that he was claiming that capitalism would jack up the price... usually you hear people bitching about how it doesn't price in the true cost of things.
Right, the problem is that sometimes I'm keeping an app open for reference, like a PDF or a web site with the command reference. Then, it auto quits and no longer shows up in Alt-Tab, so I have to go back to the start menu again to get it to fire back up.
It is a colossal PITA - enough so that I decided to stop trying to use Metro for things that need to stay open. I reverted to a Desktop-based PDF reader. The built-in email app does the same thing, only it doesn't suspend properly so if you were drafting an email it brings you back to your inbox when you resume. Gah.
I'm very pro-capitalism in general, I was just repeating the usual criticisms levied against it around here.
Also, your logic is faulty. There are choices besides just communism and capitalism. In fact, the examples of the soviet union are probably a better example of socialism than communism, which IMHO is a theoretical system only.
On the other hand, TFA also says, in comparison to CFLs:
"it is not really accommodating to the human eye; people complain of headaches and the reason is the spectral content of that light doesn't match the Sun - our device can match the solar spectrum perfectly.
Which sounds like BS. Sunlight (at the surface of the Earth) has a nice smooth output of light in the visible spectrum. It drops off quickly as you approach UV, but is otherwise fairly flat. It's pretty close to a black body at 5500 K. I'm very skeptical that they can match the spectral content of the Sun without a black body.
I've heard a lot of concerns lobbed at capitalism from fellow nerds on here, but never that it didn't make things cheap. At the cost of human rights, the environment, natural resource depletion, sure... but cheap.
But Windows can also terminate a suspended app at any time to free up memory for other apps or to save power. When your app is terminated, it stops running and is unloaded from memory.
No, I'm talking about how the Metro apps don't show up in the taskbar and the desktop apps don't show up in the super-secret Metro taskbar.
You can't pin them to the taskbar? Or create a desktop shortcut like just about every application asks for when it is installed?
I am a big fan of pinning to the taskbar. I even got on the jump menu bandwagon recently. Desktop shortcuts are just clutter to me and do not fit in to my workflow. Hitting the show desktop button is just as complicated as going to a separate Start Screen. Tapping the Windows button and typing a name still works, but not as responsively as in Windows 7 and it no longer lists recent documents without additional keystrokes.
Seldom-used stuff, I still have to browse for in the Start menu/screen.
The problem is that the same body of government that can make the funding mandatory can, 10 years down the line, undo the law. This has happened repeatedly in NJ, for instance. Now they are in the hole something like $50 billion. So, yeah, technically I agree that the pension itself isn't immoral - but I think you have to be either lying or stupid to expect future politicians to keep it funded.
There are problems with this proposal. IIRC, the accurate rippers need direct access to the hardware, or at least drives that do not buffer reads. I don't think there are USB bridges that will let this happen. Things could certainly have changed - I finished converting my CDs years ago.
I think we should honor existing contracts, but public pensions should be abolished going forward. They are immoral: 1. You are putting future generations on the hook for current spending. Not fair to the taxpayers. 2. History shows that, if they can get away with it, politicians will underfund the pensions. Not fair to the employees.
Regarding #1, I can actually buy the justification that future generations benefit from the spending as well... but mostly for things like infrastructure. Most government employees are involved with the here and now, so I don't think this logic applies to most public pensions. Education seems like an obvious gray area, though I presume that future generations are also going to be educating their kids so I'm not sure that we should be asking them to pay for their own as well. I am very strongly against taking on debt to meet payroll, and that is what we are doing.
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There is no "right" to form a limited liability corporation, and I know the one I work for certainly doesn't speak for me - it speaks for the owners who are shielded from most liability. We can make corporations take any form that we wish - they are a complete fiction of law. They weren't implemented with a constitutional amendment, and we don't need one to change the way that they work.
That is certainly a good idea. I'll have to read more about it. Does it work well in practice?
In the US, it would require revisiting the "limited liability" concept that usually applies to corporations. I'm personally not opposed to that, but it would be a very difficult fight - and it's not something the Supreme Court could have implemented without overstepping their bounds IMHO.
So what is your argument exactly? We shouldn't have free newspapers? Or the NY Times, as a corporation, should not have the right to publish a free newspaper?
Point is, I want the NY Times product - the newspaper - to have very broad speech protections, probably almost the same protection afforded to the individual employees. Maybe the answer is that the NY Times shouldn't be a corporation if it wants freedom of speech. I don't know, I don't pretend to be that smart. But I can certainly see the difficult position SCOTUS was in.
It's simple - people will pay more for a scarce commodity. With "real" property, the commodity generally has some shelf life or cost associated with holding on to it. With IP and a near-infinite monopoly, it pays to restrict supply to keep the price high.
I want the New York Times, the media corporation, to have free speech. Granting the Times free speech and not more politically-motivated corporations free speech is a very difficult problem to solve. I can't really fault the Supreme Court.
I think we need to re-examine what we want corporations to be, in a more general sense. There should be a huge amount of support for reform, but for some reason there is not. On the left, people love to hate corporations. On the right, the more libertarian-leaning folks should hate corporations since they represent a huge example of government interference in the free market, and they mask individual liability.
AC is being kind of mean, but he has a point... piracy still offers the best service, even without getting into cost. Google + Torrent or Usenet is still the best offering for content variety, timeliness, and quality in the online arena.
This has a long term distorting effect on the market.
That's an unavoidable consequence of IP law as it is currently implemented. We could go with much shorter copyrights (so you only have to wait 5 years or so for the content) or use a stronger compulsory system, but as long as the law grants exclusive rights you will get exclusive deals.
Obviously there are other factors complicating the situation
Like it coincided with recovery from the dot-com bust?
Federal revenue has bounced between 15-20% of GDP since the 50s, so I don't really get my panties in a bunch so long as it stays in that range. The states are where most of the fight over should be these days, as state share has gone up, up, up. My state is still pretty decent (PA), but I lived in New York for a few years, and the taxes are totally out of control. But that is the luxury of state taxes - you can move.
We aren't up against the Laffer curve right now, so I don't think that is really germane. If Mitt Romney were paying 60% instead of 15% of his income, then we could talk about the Laffer curve. Lowering taxes does stimulate economic growth, but so does spending. The point is that it's not sustainable if spending and revenue aren't at parity. I advocate a freeze because it is hard to justify INCREASED spending, but cutting spending will hurt the economy in the short term. I advocate increased revenue because we dug ourselves into a huge hole. It's a compromise.
Much better would be to just establish a national tax rate for cross-border sales. Distribute the tax as you see fit. Requiring out of state sellers to know the tax laws of all 50 states is not fair, IMHO.
I don't really understand this argument. Spending does not match revenue, that is the only problem we have. "We the People" can raise and lower taxes and spending at will. There is no "right" answer, so I'm not sure where you are going with this argument.
There are very good arguments to reduce the size of government, but there are also good arguments to boost revenue. I propose a compromise:
1. Raise taxes (rates, loopholes, whatever - it really only matters to partisans) to cover our debt service.
2. Freeze spending.
With spending frozen and revenue increasing, it will only be a matter of time before we start paying off debt. As debt service becomes cheaper, lower taxes accordingly until they are back where we are today. Spending can be unfrozen when our debt is down to a reasonable level (10% of GDP?).
So you don't actually believe what you wrote? Were you karma whoring or just bloviating?
No - probably just not communicating well. I was just astounded that he was claiming that capitalism would jack up the price... usually you hear people bitching about how it doesn't price in the true cost of things.
Right, the problem is that sometimes I'm keeping an app open for reference, like a PDF or a web site with the command reference. Then, it auto quits and no longer shows up in Alt-Tab, so I have to go back to the start menu again to get it to fire back up.
It is a colossal PITA - enough so that I decided to stop trying to use Metro for things that need to stay open. I reverted to a Desktop-based PDF reader. The built-in email app does the same thing, only it doesn't suspend properly so if you were drafting an email it brings you back to your inbox when you resume. Gah.
I'm very pro-capitalism in general, I was just repeating the usual criticisms levied against it around here.
Also, your logic is faulty. There are choices besides just communism and capitalism. In fact, the examples of the soviet union are probably a better example of socialism than communism, which IMHO is a theoretical system only.
TFA says the life is good.
On the other hand, TFA also says, in comparison to CFLs:
Which sounds like BS. Sunlight (at the surface of the Earth) has a nice smooth output of light in the visible spectrum. It drops off quickly as you approach UV, but is otherwise fairly flat. It's pretty close to a black body at 5500 K. I'm very skeptical that they can match the spectral content of the Sun without a black body.
I've heard a lot of concerns lobbed at capitalism from fellow nerds on here, but never that it didn't make things cheap. At the cost of human rights, the environment, natural resource depletion, sure... but cheap.
I found the documentation here:
So I'm not crazy :)
Well, then when they are "suspending" they are disappearing from Alt-Tab.
It is a replacement for the start menu
No, I'm talking about how the Metro apps don't show up in the taskbar and the desktop apps don't show up in the super-secret Metro taskbar.
You can't pin them to the taskbar? Or create a desktop shortcut like just about every application asks for when it is installed?
I am a big fan of pinning to the taskbar. I even got on the jump menu bandwagon recently. Desktop shortcuts are just clutter to me and do not fit in to my workflow. Hitting the show desktop button is just as complicated as going to a separate Start Screen. Tapping the Windows button and typing a name still works, but not as responsively as in Windows 7 and it no longer lists recent documents without additional keystrokes.
Seldom-used stuff, I still have to browse for in the Start menu/screen.
Oddly, it looks like PCIe (in the form of "Thunderbolt" and USB 3.0) will replace both of them.
The problem is that the same body of government that can make the funding mandatory can, 10 years down the line, undo the law. This has happened repeatedly in NJ, for instance. Now they are in the hole something like $50 billion. So, yeah, technically I agree that the pension itself isn't immoral - but I think you have to be either lying or stupid to expect future politicians to keep it funded.
There are problems with this proposal. IIRC, the accurate rippers need direct access to the hardware, or at least drives that do not buffer reads. I don't think there are USB bridges that will let this happen. Things could certainly have changed - I finished converting my CDs years ago.
I think we should honor existing contracts, but public pensions should be abolished going forward. They are immoral:
1. You are putting future generations on the hook for current spending. Not fair to the taxpayers.
2. History shows that, if they can get away with it, politicians will underfund the pensions. Not fair to the employees.
Regarding #1, I can actually buy the justification that future generations benefit from the spending as well... but mostly for things like infrastructure. Most government employees are involved with the here and now, so I don't think this logic applies to most public pensions. Education seems like an obvious gray area, though I presume that future generations are also going to be educating their kids so I'm not sure that we should be asking them to pay for their own as well. I am very strongly against taking on debt to meet payroll, and that is what we are doing.
Not if it was done intentionally.