Special tax deals for individual companies is a recipe for corruption.
Deals like this happen literally all day every day. Any sufficiently sized company considering moving to an area will be courted by various towns with deals like these. In fact, my local WalMart Supercenter is located in my city because the city was willing to make a deal with them and the neighboring city was not. Walmart ended up building the outlet on a street which is the border between my city and the other city. So they effectively get money from both cities, but the sales tax revenue goes to my city.
So what we have here isn't a situation where everyone's a winner. These deals make your locality a winner at the expense of others. When looked at it from the perspective of society as a whole, these deals are zero sum or worse. They should not be allowed.
And without the sweetheart deal, your locality would be the loser and some other city would be the winner. In fact, they would be even more of a winner if they didn't offer a sweetheart deal and somehow still got the business.
..dodging the tax was originally how amazon managed to do their market takeover in the first place. don't pretend it had no effect on pricing.
Amazon did not dodge any taxes. If anyone dodged taxes, it was some of the consumers that used Amazon.
Why does any car-motion reference need to point out distances in multiples of football fields, as though that means anything? On a highway, you can see many times that distance around you, and unless something drastically changes, 120 yards really doesn't mean much.
Well, that is all well and good if you are following 4.6 seconds (actually, should be more like 7 seconds because of reaction time) behind the guy in front of you. But in my experience, most people follow about a half a second or less behind the person in front of them. So if that person suddenly stops, then you won't be able to stop until 3 seconds after you have crashed through them. Unfortunately, a lot of accidents these days have no braking action prior to hitting the person in front.
With regard to people blowing a tire or swerving into your lane, obviously those can happen fast. I can't imagine why you would not want to know about those things 4.6 seconds earlier. In fact, I catch people about to swerve into my lane about twice a day. If I was texting, I wouldn't be able to hit the brakes or avoid them. I'd just have to count on them to catch themselves before hitting my car.
Turn signal neglect
Grrr, yesterday, I was burned twice by somebody who didn't use their turn signals. Twice within the space of a mile I need to change lanes, the first time because of an accident in the left lane, and the second time because I really needed to be in the left lane all along because I was turning left at the next intersection. In both instances, the guy behind me dived into a spot that was too narrow without using his turn signal, and then cut me off from getting over while I was actually using my turn signal.
Oh, and by the way, the accident in the left lane was a three car accident. I have noticed since the advent of texting, that the number of multi-car accidents seems to have gone up astronomically.
I only know a handful of people who don't use e-mail. In most cases, it is not because of facebook, but because they are computer illiterate. About half the people I know use facebook, the other half rabidly don't use it.
Besides lowering working capital, there is another really good reason to NOT pay dividends, namely TAXES. By holding onto the wealth generated, and not paying the wealth out to shareholders, you reduce the tax liability for your shareholders, often for years and years. Now you may want to pay taxes on your dividends, but me, I'd much rather not pay taxes as my wealth accumulates until such time as I need the income and the wealth is taxed at the lower "capital gains" rate and not at the higher "Marginal Tax" rates.
I don't need the company to make that decision for me. If I need to defer taxes, I put the investment in a 401k.
I'm inclined to agree with you, and am equally concerned that google itself will hit the skids when everybody eventually finds out how negative the ROI is on advertising. Remember, the people who are telling you that marketing works great are all in marketing.
I just returned from a conference where pretty much everybody there said that they would be willing to sacrifice extra time and power for a more accurate answer. Sounds like these guys have come up with pretty much the opposite of that. Where do I avoid signing up?
I work for a company that blocks social media, as well as "blogs" and "newsgroups" broadly categorised. Effectively the top 2-3 google results I get when searching for things like puppet recipes, or common faults are blocked.
Same problem where I work. Approximately 1/3 of the google search results for solutions to issues I run into in Java are blocked by our software. One of them claimed the site was banned due to religious:wiccan content.
Maybe there really are people who can multitask so that checking FB or whatever every 10 minutes doesn't interfere with their work, but I'm skeptical.
Our workplace dynamic is not people checking facebook every ten minutes. It is people getting a text or update every minute or so and then instantly stopping what they are doing to reply. Since they are are using texting, which is extremely inefficient, it often takes another minute to type out 10 or 15 words. So they are effectively wasting at least 1/3 to half the day.
Many places are banning cell phones and I am not surprised. Our company hasn't gone to that length yet, but if the problem worsens, I suppose they might. I still contend that they should just pay based on performance ( which is measurable for the level of people where we have the problem). If they can realize that they could either answer a text or earn another 50 cents, perhaps they will choose to earn the money.
The core problem, of course, is that many workplaces (particularly offices) have no adequate way to measure employee productivity and thus use "time spent staring at your desk at a VDU" or similar as a surrogate indicator of performance.
That is certainly true in professional environment. Where I work, the developers are often slammed for missing deadlines on projects, which is the only indicator of performance. What is missed is how much time the developers spend assisting the production side of the house. This is often missed because the production side of the house just e-mails, IMs or comes and drags the developers into the problem, so there is no tracking of the issue and no proof of what is going on. We have tried putting out foot down and saying "no work without a bug ticket", but they said "we don't have time to write up bug tickets" and management was sympathetic to them. So either we have to also enter the bug tickets, wasting additional of our time, or just waste as little of our time as possible by assisting them without a bug ticket.
Now, the production side of the house has plenty of measurement tools in place. They are able to tell that in, generally speaking, people who don't participate in social networking are able to get much more work done than people who do participate in social networking. They actually shut down facebook because the discrepancy was so bad. People who smoke also get less work done over the course of a day. People who smoke and do social networking get the least work done of all. I have long argued that we should do away with the stick approach and go with the carrot approach. In other words, instead of taking away facebook and giving people a hard time for not meeting their quota, instead monetize their performance. Pay them more when they get more done. Make sure they get minimum wage (or fire them if they don't meet the minimum), but pay them per item completed. In our production area, we have the tools to do that. Management does not like that approach. I find this odd because they are all pretty right leaning republicans, so I would think that they would prefer this over the socialist everyone-paid-the-same-and must-do-the-same-work principal.
I can see states like Mississippi, Alabama doing poorly because they are run by Republicans and republicans hate spending money on kids. (Yes I just heard a guy on MSNBC say that last night.)
Oh, well if it was on MSNBC then it must be true./sarcasm
And cue an entire slashdot discussion about base(60)less conspiracy theories.
Thinking that the Mayans predicted the end of the world on 12/21/2012 is like thinking that Cobol programmers predicted the end of the world on 12/31/1999.
Your point agrees with my thinking entirely. The people in the land from which they immigrated are not innately more entrepreneurial. It is the individuals who put forth the effort to come here that have the right stuff to be entrepreneurs, and had they not come here would likely have started a business at home. I would hazard a guess that it is mostly those who come legally who are entrepreneurial as well. Not least of which because in some states you cannot actually be the founding member of an organization unless you are a citizen or naturalized.
My fear is that the same thing that happened in the 1970s will happen now. In the 1970s, the best and the brightest came from foreign countries and amazed the PHBs. The PHBs then assumed that everyone from those countries was equally brilliant and started lobbying to bring them over in droves. Of course, each successive round of people we imported was less brilliant than the round before, but the PHBs looked past that because the new workers were willing to (illegally) work for less than prevailing wage.
I worry that the same thing will happen and we will open the floodgates to all and sundry, fewer and fewer of which will be entrepreneurial or have good business ideas.
The engines actually spooled up quicker than the numbers in the book said they should.
They may have developed thrust faster than book, but they also did not respond to throttle input immediately. A delay in developing thrust is to be expected, but when combined with the engines not even responding to the throttle input, the delay is compounded. The problem is basically the crew didn't add power until the tail was already dragging through the tree tops
That doesn't make any sense at all. Why would the pilots delay adding power when they were already past the end of the runway they were buzzing? And to wait another quarter of a mile until they were in the trees? Unthinkable.
If this was pilot error, then why was the pilot so enthusiastic to assist in the investigation?
There are plenty of pilot error crashes. In fact, the majority of crashes are pilot error. In this case, the pilot made some mistakes, but they would not have been fatal if the plane had cooperated.
Coincidentally, Pandora just served up "No Quarter" off of Led Zeppelins "Houses of the Holy" album, complete with album cover art. Guess I'm off to jail. Hopefully, they don't serve up some Blind Faith next, or I'm really in for it.
Catch the exploiters, and while harder to do, will have a far more fruitful outcome than simply throwing everyone in jail who happened to see it.
But the actual criminals might be dangerous. Just like it is easier to go after the drug users than the suppliers, and it is easier to go after people who killed a criminal in self defense than it is to go after the criminal, it is easier to go after the guy in his mom's basement that browses CP. Of course, it has backfired with drugs, because now the users are becoming criminals just to obtain the drugs or obtain the money to get the drugs, so now they have become dangerous. Perhaps the same thing might happen to people who browse CP or people who killed a criminal in self defense might now start shooting at the cops when they come to throw them in jail.
Some of these stupid laws would arrest you for looking at a merely nude image of a teenager,
Not to mention that it doesn't matter how old someone looks, if they are only 17 and 364/365ths, then you go to jail. Also, in some jurisdictions, even if a girl is of legal age, but is dressed up like a schoolgirl or has pigtails, then you go to jail. Or if the image is a cartoon of a someone that at least someone might say is under 18, then you go to jail.
There were actually only three fatalities, but the pilot and copilot were charged with involuntary manslaughter. While it was true that the maneuver they performed was dangerous, it was certainly very recoverable. Unfortunately, they were unable to recover because the fly-by-wire system overrode the pilot's input and took too long to apply power by which time it was too late.The company never admitted fault in the fly-by-wire system (even though they did apply changes to it), and in order to prevent loss of contracts on the airplane and potentially bankrupting the company, they chose to ruin the lives of a few individuals who were acting at the direction of the company.
I'm confused. How do you "preserve low student loan rates" when the student loan rate is higher than it has been since the 1970s? With the government giving money to the banks at practically zero percent interest rates, student loan rates are at 8% or higher, same as they were when the government lending rate was 5-6%. Plus, my wife's rate is adjustable, so it goes up when the rates go up.
Unfortunately, we didn't do our research and went with a fly-by-night company by the name of SallieMae, which pretends to be a government backed and legitimate lending agency, but is really nothing but a bunch of crooks pretending to be sponsored by the government. They are no more sponsored by the government then the Franklin Mint. Do not do business with Sallie Mae.
If it was more than 4 ounces, than she should have thrown her $10k machine in the trash like a responsible citizen and then bought another one inside security (where it would probably cost $50k) or even on the plane (where it would cost $100k).
God help us if the TSA ever gets enough education to find out that human beings are 75% water and figure out how many ounces that works out to.
The fact that Pirates: Band of Misfits isn't doing better than yet another unoriginal sequel pulled out someone's anus.
At first reading, I also thought they were surprised that band of misfits didn't hold Avengers back. Now, I actually saw Pirates, and it was not bad for yet another Wallace and Grommet movie. I won't be seeing the Avengers. I haven't watched a comic book Movie since the Hulk, and I haven't enjoyed one since about Superman 3.
Slashdot Mirror
Special tax deals for individual companies is a recipe for corruption.
Deals like this happen literally all day every day. Any sufficiently sized company considering moving to an area will be courted by various towns with deals like these. In fact, my local WalMart Supercenter is located in my city because the city was willing to make a deal with them and the neighboring city was not. Walmart ended up building the outlet on a street which is the border between my city and the other city. So they effectively get money from both cities, but the sales tax revenue goes to my city.
So what we have here isn't a situation where everyone's a winner. These deals make your locality a winner at the expense of others. When looked at it from the perspective of society as a whole, these deals are zero sum or worse. They should not be allowed.
And without the sweetheart deal, your locality would be the loser and some other city would be the winner. In fact, they would be even more of a winner if they didn't offer a sweetheart deal and somehow still got the business.
..dodging the tax was originally how amazon managed to do their market takeover in the first place. don't pretend it had no effect on pricing.
Amazon did not dodge any taxes. If anyone dodged taxes, it was some of the consumers that used Amazon.
Why does any car-motion reference need to point out distances in multiples of football fields, as though that means anything? On a highway, you can see many times that distance around you, and unless something drastically changes, 120 yards really doesn't mean much.
Well, that is all well and good if you are following 4.6 seconds (actually, should be more like 7 seconds because of reaction time) behind the guy in front of you. But in my experience, most people follow about a half a second or less behind the person in front of them. So if that person suddenly stops, then you won't be able to stop until 3 seconds after you have crashed through them. Unfortunately, a lot of accidents these days have no braking action prior to hitting the person in front.
With regard to people blowing a tire or swerving into your lane, obviously those can happen fast. I can't imagine why you would not want to know about those things 4.6 seconds earlier. In fact, I catch people about to swerve into my lane about twice a day. If I was texting, I wouldn't be able to hit the brakes or avoid them. I'd just have to count on them to catch themselves before hitting my car.
Turn signal neglect
Grrr, yesterday, I was burned twice by somebody who didn't use their turn signals. Twice within the space of a mile I need to change lanes, the first time because of an accident in the left lane, and the second time because I really needed to be in the left lane all along because I was turning left at the next intersection. In both instances, the guy behind me dived into a spot that was too narrow without using his turn signal, and then cut me off from getting over while I was actually using my turn signal.
Oh, and by the way, the accident in the left lane was a three car accident. I have noticed since the advent of texting, that the number of multi-car accidents seems to have gone up astronomically.
I only know a handful of people who don't use e-mail. In most cases, it is not because of facebook, but because they are computer illiterate. About half the people I know use facebook, the other half rabidly don't use it.
Besides lowering working capital, there is another really good reason to NOT pay dividends, namely TAXES. By holding onto the wealth generated, and not paying the wealth out to shareholders, you reduce the tax liability for your shareholders, often for years and years. Now you may want to pay taxes on your dividends, but me, I'd much rather not pay taxes as my wealth accumulates until such time as I need the income and the wealth is taxed at the lower "capital gains" rate and not at the higher "Marginal Tax" rates.
I don't need the company to make that decision for me. If I need to defer taxes, I put the investment in a 401k.
I'm inclined to agree with you, and am equally concerned that google itself will hit the skids when everybody eventually finds out how negative the ROI is on advertising. Remember, the people who are telling you that marketing works great are all in marketing.
Of course, we can't trust that number if it was run on the chips in question. What is the margin of error? Plus or minus two to the fourth power?
I just returned from a conference where pretty much everybody there said that they would be willing to sacrifice extra time and power for a more accurate answer. Sounds like these guys have come up with pretty much the opposite of that. Where do I avoid signing up?
I work for a company that blocks social media, as well as "blogs" and "newsgroups" broadly categorised. Effectively the top 2-3 google results I get when searching for things like puppet recipes, or common faults are blocked.
Same problem where I work. Approximately 1/3 of the google search results for solutions to issues I run into in Java are blocked by our software. One of them claimed the site was banned due to religious:wiccan content.
Maybe there really are people who can multitask so that checking FB or whatever every 10 minutes doesn't interfere with their work, but I'm skeptical.
Our workplace dynamic is not people checking facebook every ten minutes. It is people getting a text or update every minute or so and then instantly stopping what they are doing to reply. Since they are are using texting, which is extremely inefficient, it often takes another minute to type out 10 or 15 words. So they are effectively wasting at least 1/3 to half the day.
Many places are banning cell phones and I am not surprised. Our company hasn't gone to that length yet, but if the problem worsens, I suppose they might. I still contend that they should just pay based on performance ( which is measurable for the level of people where we have the problem). If they can realize that they could either answer a text or earn another 50 cents, perhaps they will choose to earn the money.
The core problem, of course, is that many workplaces (particularly offices) have no adequate way to measure employee productivity and thus use "time spent staring at your desk at a VDU" or similar as a surrogate indicator of performance.
That is certainly true in professional environment. Where I work, the developers are often slammed for missing deadlines on projects, which is the only indicator of performance. What is missed is how much time the developers spend assisting the production side of the house. This is often missed because the production side of the house just e-mails, IMs or comes and drags the developers into the problem, so there is no tracking of the issue and no proof of what is going on. We have tried putting out foot down and saying "no work without a bug ticket", but they said "we don't have time to write up bug tickets" and management was sympathetic to them. So either we have to also enter the bug tickets, wasting additional of our time, or just waste as little of our time as possible by assisting them without a bug ticket.
Now, the production side of the house has plenty of measurement tools in place. They are able to tell that in, generally speaking, people who don't participate in social networking are able to get much more work done than people who do participate in social networking. They actually shut down facebook because the discrepancy was so bad. People who smoke also get less work done over the course of a day. People who smoke and do social networking get the least work done of all. I have long argued that we should do away with the stick approach and go with the carrot approach. In other words, instead of taking away facebook and giving people a hard time for not meeting their quota, instead monetize their performance. Pay them more when they get more done. Make sure they get minimum wage (or fire them if they don't meet the minimum), but pay them per item completed. In our production area, we have the tools to do that. Management does not like that approach. I find this odd because they are all pretty right leaning republicans, so I would think that they would prefer this over the socialist everyone-paid-the-same-and must-do-the-same-work principal.
I can see states like Mississippi, Alabama doing poorly because they are run by Republicans and republicans hate spending money on kids. (Yes I just heard a guy on MSNBC say that last night.) /sarcasm
Oh, well if it was on MSNBC then it must be true.
And cue an entire slashdot discussion about base(60)less conspiracy theories.
Thinking that the Mayans predicted the end of the world on 12/21/2012 is like thinking that Cobol programmers predicted the end of the world on 12/31/1999.
Your point agrees with my thinking entirely. The people in the land from which they immigrated are not innately more entrepreneurial. It is the individuals who put forth the effort to come here that have the right stuff to be entrepreneurs, and had they not come here would likely have started a business at home. I would hazard a guess that it is mostly those who come legally who are entrepreneurial as well. Not least of which because in some states you cannot actually be the founding member of an organization unless you are a citizen or naturalized.
My fear is that the same thing that happened in the 1970s will happen now. In the 1970s, the best and the brightest came from foreign countries and amazed the PHBs. The PHBs then assumed that everyone from those countries was equally brilliant and started lobbying to bring them over in droves. Of course, each successive round of people we imported was less brilliant than the round before, but the PHBs looked past that because the new workers were willing to (illegally) work for less than prevailing wage.
I worry that the same thing will happen and we will open the floodgates to all and sundry, fewer and fewer of which will be entrepreneurial or have good business ideas.
The engines actually spooled up quicker than the numbers in the book said they should.
They may have developed thrust faster than book, but they also did not respond to throttle input immediately. A delay in developing thrust is to be expected, but when combined with the engines not even responding to the throttle input, the delay is compounded.
The problem is basically the crew didn't add power until the tail was already dragging through the tree tops
That doesn't make any sense at all. Why would the pilots delay adding power when they were already past the end of the runway they were buzzing? And to wait another quarter of a mile until they were in the trees? Unthinkable.
If this was pilot error, then why was the pilot so enthusiastic to assist in the investigation?
There are plenty of pilot error crashes. In fact, the majority of crashes are pilot error. In this case, the pilot made some mistakes, but they would not have been fatal if the plane had cooperated.
Coincidentally, Pandora just served up "No Quarter" off of Led Zeppelins "Houses of the Holy" album, complete with album cover art. Guess I'm off to jail. Hopefully, they don't serve up some Blind Faith next, or I'm really in for it.
Catch the exploiters, and while harder to do, will have a far more fruitful outcome than simply throwing everyone in jail who happened to see it.
But the actual criminals might be dangerous. Just like it is easier to go after the drug users than the suppliers, and it is easier to go after people who killed a criminal in self defense than it is to go after the criminal, it is easier to go after the guy in his mom's basement that browses CP. Of course, it has backfired with drugs, because now the users are becoming criminals just to obtain the drugs or obtain the money to get the drugs, so now they have become dangerous. Perhaps the same thing might happen to people who browse CP or people who killed a criminal in self defense might now start shooting at the cops when they come to throw them in jail.
Some of these stupid laws would arrest you for looking at a merely nude image of a teenager,
Not to mention that it doesn't matter how old someone looks, if they are only 17 and 364/365ths, then you go to jail. Also, in some jurisdictions, even if a girl is of legal age, but is dressed up like a schoolgirl or has pigtails, then you go to jail. Or if the image is a cartoon of a someone that at least someone might say is under 18, then you go to jail.
There were actually only three fatalities, but the pilot and copilot were charged with involuntary manslaughter. While it was true that the maneuver they performed was dangerous, it was certainly very recoverable. Unfortunately, they were unable to recover because the fly-by-wire system overrode the pilot's input and took too long to apply power by which time it was too late.The company never admitted fault in the fly-by-wire system (even though they did apply changes to it), and in order to prevent loss of contracts on the airplane and potentially bankrupting the company, they chose to ruin the lives of a few individuals who were acting at the direction of the company.
I'm not sure where you've been, but America has not been concerned about Russia for about 20 years.
I'm confused. How do you "preserve low student loan rates" when the student loan rate is higher than it has been since the 1970s? With the government giving money to the banks at practically zero percent interest rates, student loan rates are at 8% or higher, same as they were when the government lending rate was 5-6%. Plus, my wife's rate is adjustable, so it goes up when the rates go up.
Unfortunately, we didn't do our research and went with a fly-by-night company by the name of SallieMae, which pretends to be a government backed and legitimate lending agency, but is really nothing but a bunch of crooks pretending to be sponsored by the government. They are no more sponsored by the government then the Franklin Mint. Do not do business with Sallie Mae.
If it was more than 4 ounces, than she should have thrown her $10k machine in the trash like a responsible citizen and then bought another one inside security (where it would probably cost $50k) or even on the plane (where it would cost $100k).
God help us if the TSA ever gets enough education to find out that human beings are 75% water and figure out how many ounces that works out to.
The fact that Pirates: Band of Misfits isn't doing better than yet another unoriginal sequel pulled out someone's anus.
At first reading, I also thought they were surprised that band of misfits didn't hold Avengers back. Now, I actually saw Pirates, and it was not bad for yet another Wallace and Grommet movie. I won't be seeing the Avengers. I haven't watched a comic book Movie since the Hulk, and I haven't enjoyed one since about Superman 3.