If they think the job market is bad on the coast, wait till they get to OK.
In 2009, Oklahoma City was named the most recession-proof city by Forbes magazine. The current unemployment rate is 6.0% and falling. National average is 9.2%. Los Angelos is 11.8%, San Fransisco is 10.5%, San Diego is 10.6%, New York is 8.5%, Boston is 7.3%. Your Seattle is 8.7%. I was shocked to find out that the unemployment here is even 6%. I can't believe there are large cities in the U.S. where 1 person in 10 does not have a job. And that is the government's numbers which are notoriously underinflated.
You're right that people around here are expected to have a good work ethic. However, in two of the last three places I have worked, we got free sodas in the break room.
Sure salaries are 10% lower around here then in the big cities, but you're right about the low cost of living. My 5,000 square foot house on an acre is 7 miles from downtown Oklahoma City and cost me about $250,000. It takes me 20 minutes to get to the other side of town. I can't justify getting 10% higher salary on the coast for a house that will cost 3-4 times as much.
I have not found myself lacking for anything here in Oklahoma. As was previously mentioned, we have this thing called the internet here, so if you need something that is not sold locally, you can buy it and have it delivered. However, we are not hurting for retail and food establishments. I have never seen so many retail and food outlets per capita. I lived in the Chicago area for 15 years, and it was okay, but I much prefer life here in Oklahoma City.
Verizon is killing off their unlimited data plans and actively working to switch over all their existing customers.
Well, that is odd, the article says that limited data plans are an outdated business model, and yet most of the cell phone providers have gone from unlimited to limited data plans. Could it be the journalist is wrong?
I suspect that the cell phone providers have done market research and what they most likely discovered was that most customers would begrudgingly pay more for less data because they believe that they cannot survive without data on their phones.
I am on one of Verizon's unlimited data plans. I don't relish the idea of moving to a tiered plan. I am on a family plan as well, so I don't know how that will affect my plan. I do know that the proposed price of $15 for 200 MB and $25 a month for 2GB makes the second tier of this tiered system already higher than my current rate of $20 for unlimited. Now, perhaps I will find that my usage is below 200 MB and I will be surprised by a lower bill. At any rate, this change is welcome news because this means I can cancel my service. I am paying nearly $60 per line and I only have two lines that have the data plan. This is just way, way too expensive. I have 5 lines. The main line is $75 for, and the others are $10 a month. Unlimited data is an extra $20 on two lines, so I figure my bill ought to be $155, but it is nearly double that after all the taxes and fees.
And not just 64, AVG crashed my 32 bit Windows, too. I know of 3 people at work (small company. About 30 people) who had problems getting their computers to work after it downloaded the latest AVG. My company laptop (Windows 7 64 bit) started doing spontaneous shutdowns which my research indicated were caused by overheating, but somehow after uninstalling AVG 2011, the problem went away. Two other guys at work had their Windows 7 64 Bit machines stop working after AVG updated. My home computer running XP started getting blue screens after AVG asked me to reboot. I uninstalled AVG, and have been fighting for over a week to get the computer back to life. I have been less and less comfortable with AVG over the last several years, but now it is definitely out the door.
I would think you would only be able to mark the account as a dead persons account.
Another interesting question is how you determine who the owner of an account is and how many accounts were opened by that person. They could have used a fake identity to register the account (which in this day and age, is the only sane thing to do). On the flip side, they could say in their will that "thus and such is my facebook account", but what if it really isn't? The only way to know with reasonable surety is if they also left the password in which case the whole law is moot as they could just log in.
Of course there are people here. This is where all the people from the coasts go when they realize that the job market where they are sucks, the people are all jerks, and it costs too much to live there.
I agree. McCain looked like a johnny-come-lately choosing a female VP. He was just trying to do the same thing that the democrats did, choosing someone that they knew the politically correct idiots in the country couldn't stand to vote against for fear of being perceived as racist. Unfortunately, as the second one to try to take advantage of the idiocy of the american public, he looked like a heel.
How is providing healtcare to those that can't afford it wealth redistribution?
He is not providing healthcare to those that can't afford it, he is forcing insurance on those who can't afford it. So he is robbing from the poor and giving it to the insurance companies.
Give me a console that can do what my current rig can do and I'll be set.
Five years from now they will have a console that can do what your current rig can do. Of course, then it will be five years down the road, and your new rig will again be 10 times as powerful as the currently leading console.
My kids like the Wii, but I find that most of the titles on the Wii are pretty much aimed at kids, and those that aren't are unplayable with the Wiimote. I am completely uninterested in Sony's or Microsoft's motion based controllers as well. The traditional controllers offer much more, oh what's the word...control.
Kinect is not the controller, you are the controller....
Normally one has to pay for a controller. How much is Microsoft willing to pay me to be the controller?
It is their store, they can refuse to sell whatever product they want, for whatever reason or for no reason.
What they CANNOT do, and apparently what they have DONE is to limit people from installing applications on their iphone unless those applications come from the Apple store. I don't know if what they are doing is illegal, but it very well could be. At any rate, i can certainly see why such a policy would put a serious hamper on their sales. I mean sales are doing well already, and their stock is doing well, but just imagine how much more money they would be making if they had a reasonable policy about third party sellers. If I was one of their investors, I would be pissed.
If Best Buy were to rig up their DVD players so that they would only play DVDs you bought at Best Buy, that would be similar to what we are seeing here.
How about a related industry analogy instead of a car analogy?
Like for instance, what if Dell decided that on your Dell computer, you could only install applications that they approved? Trying to install an HP printer driver? No, not approved. Trying to install Microsoft Media Player? No, only Dell's MusicMatch is approved.
In modern construction, when you build a house, you need to make the electric company aware before they will hook you up. That way they can be sure that there is ample infrastructure to handle the new house. Perhaps if they made a similar rule that electric car owners have to notify the electric company a couple of weeks before they buy one, or charge one at work or at a friends house?
It appears that their biggest capacitor can provide 3 watt hours of power. So you would need 8,000 of them for a single charge. They cost $110 each, but you could probably get a volume discount, so call it $60,000. Oh, also, 8,000 of them would weigh a little under 9,000 pounds.
Not saying they should give up, but they have a lot of work to do to make it feasible.
Which just proves that 16kW is a crapload of energy, as it takes a crapload of energy to heat up water, especially a swimming pool full of it. Most swimming pool heaters here in the U.S. are gas or propane powered as electric powered ones would be beyond the capacity of most household circuits. Also, that unit only draws 1800 Watts. It is the output that it says is 16kw.
Real Estate is paid annually instead of as sales tax, but that doesn't make it disappear. Frankly, I would rather pay 8% up front then 7% annually forever. When you buy a company, you do in fact have to pay sales tax on the assets. Of course hookers don't charge sales tax, but if you look at the demographic that buys hookers, I think you will find that it is not the rich who spend the most on hookers. When you buy a Porsche, you of course pay sales tax, or if you buy it abroad, you pay even more to import it.
I would be in favor of not charging sales tax on non-prepared foods and basic clothing. Rent is not taxed, in most places. If they could get rid of the tax on groceries and basic clothing, then I think this would relieve some of the burden on poor people. However, most of the people I know who make less than I do spend much more on sales tax because they generally buy a lot fancier stuff than I do; iphones, new cars, flat screens, surround sound.
I for one didn't buy a darned thing this Black Friday, 15% off or not. Feeding and housing my family is more important than buying bling.
Once could, but saddling them with the responsibility of collecting sales tax across hundreds of thousands of jurisdictions instead of going after the tax evader would be similar to suing craftsman because someone used one of their hammers to open a hole in someone's skull instead of going after the murderer.
The sales tax is just a stupid trick to shift the burden of collecting sales tax to the retailer. That is money owed the stae by the CONSUMER, not the retailer. The state is making the retailer do their dirty work for them.
Second, Amazon is NOT exploiting the fact that there is different legislation per state. They are operating 100% according to the laws that the federal government put there ON PURPOSE to encourage interstate commerce.
And to the regular Joe it is just a cheaper offering from Amazon, most won't realize they still need to pay taxes, so by default commit the crime of not paying. It's a broken system.
It's not broken, the states are just too lazy to go collect their own tax.
I don't want a tax code that allows state A to tell me over in state B what I have to collect for their benefit from their citizens and remit entirely to state A.
Collecting sales tax for a foreign entity is entirely voluntary, and so is remitting it. Technically, Amazon could go ahead and voluntarily collect the sales tax but NOT voluntarily remit it to the state in question.
1) Should I be bothering to pay Use Tax at all?
Yes 2) It is legal or enforceable by the state of Virginia?
Yes 3) Since it's interstate is it really a federal issue?
No 4) What if I don't "use" the purchases or I give them as gifts?
You Used the purchase as a gift, or you Used it to have or to throw away or was stolen from you. You still have to pay Use tax, just as you would pay sales tax if you gave a gift to someone from a retail store, or you bought something but didn't use it, or bought something that was then stolen from you.
Technically, retail stores are supposed to pay Use tax if something is removed from inventory without being sold (and sales tax collected). Even if it was stolen.
Who said "Pay" taxes. It says that they don't "Collect" taxes from you.
Aside from that, yes, definitely ~yawn~. "Big corporation operates in complete compliance with federal interstate commerce laws"
poor people pay a much higher portion of their salary in sales tax than rich people
So your definition of a rich person must be someone who has a lot of money and doesn't spend it. There isn't any point in having money just to have it. It is a tool. You can use it to buy the things you want, or you can use it to invest and hopefully make more money so that you can buy the things you want. Either way, rich or poor, every dollar is eventually used to buy something.
A small mom and pop has to worry about exactly one taxing district. An internet company has to worry about possibly millions. As a retailer, I have access to a file that contains my states taxing districts, there are over 100,000 in my state. You have to know every combination of city, local, county and state tax. It would be impossible for anyone other than a huge company like Amazon to keep track of.
Foreign states have no authority to tell Amazon to send them sales tax for purchasers from within their state. The only reason they can get retailers in their own state to do this is by telling them they can't operate if they don't collect sales tax. They can't do this to Amazon because that would violate federal interstate commerce law. Frankly, no retailer should have to collect sales tax on behalf of the state. If you want the money, then YOU go collect it.
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If they think the job market is bad on the coast, wait till they get to OK.
In 2009, Oklahoma City was named the most recession-proof city by Forbes magazine. The current unemployment rate is 6.0% and falling. National average is 9.2%. Los Angelos is 11.8%, San Fransisco is 10.5%, San Diego is 10.6%, New York is 8.5%, Boston is 7.3%. Your Seattle is 8.7%. I was shocked to find out that the unemployment here is even 6%. I can't believe there are large cities in the U.S. where 1 person in 10 does not have a job. And that is the government's numbers which are notoriously underinflated.
You're right that people around here are expected to have a good work ethic. However, in two of the last three places I have worked, we got free sodas in the break room.
Sure salaries are 10% lower around here then in the big cities, but you're right about the low cost of living. My 5,000 square foot house on an acre is 7 miles from downtown Oklahoma City and cost me about $250,000. It takes me 20 minutes to get to the other side of town. I can't justify getting 10% higher salary on the coast for a house that will cost 3-4 times as much.
I have not found myself lacking for anything here in Oklahoma. As was previously mentioned, we have this thing called the internet here, so if you need something that is not sold locally, you can buy it and have it delivered. However, we are not hurting for retail and food establishments. I have never seen so many retail and food outlets per capita. I lived in the Chicago area for 15 years, and it was okay, but I much prefer life here in Oklahoma City.
Verizon is killing off their unlimited data plans and actively working to switch over all their existing customers.
Well, that is odd, the article says that limited data plans are an outdated business model, and yet most of the cell phone providers have gone from unlimited to limited data plans. Could it be the journalist is wrong?
I suspect that the cell phone providers have done market research and what they most likely discovered was that most customers would begrudgingly pay more for less data because they believe that they cannot survive without data on their phones.
I am on one of Verizon's unlimited data plans. I don't relish the idea of moving to a tiered plan. I am on a family plan as well, so I don't know how that will affect my plan. I do know that the proposed price of $15 for 200 MB and $25 a month for 2GB makes the second tier of this tiered system already higher than my current rate of $20 for unlimited. Now, perhaps I will find that my usage is below 200 MB and I will be surprised by a lower bill. At any rate, this change is welcome news because this means I can cancel my service. I am paying nearly $60 per line and I only have two lines that have the data plan. This is just way, way too expensive. I have 5 lines. The main line is $75 for, and the others are $10 a month. Unlimited data is an extra $20 on two lines, so I figure my bill ought to be $155, but it is nearly double that after all the taxes and fees.
And not just 64, AVG crashed my 32 bit Windows, too. I know of 3 people at work (small company. About 30 people) who had problems getting their computers to work after it downloaded the latest AVG. My company laptop (Windows 7 64 bit) started doing spontaneous shutdowns which my research indicated were caused by overheating, but somehow after uninstalling AVG 2011, the problem went away. Two other guys at work had their Windows 7 64 Bit machines stop working after AVG updated. My home computer running XP started getting blue screens after AVG asked me to reboot. I uninstalled AVG, and have been fighting for over a week to get the computer back to life. I have been less and less comfortable with AVG over the last several years, but now it is definitely out the door.
I would think you would only be able to mark the account as a dead persons account.
Another interesting question is how you determine who the owner of an account is and how many accounts were opened by that person. They could have used a fake identity to register the account (which in this day and age, is the only sane thing to do). On the flip side, they could say in their will that "thus and such is my facebook account", but what if it really isn't? The only way to know with reasonable surety is if they also left the password in which case the whole law is moot as they could just log in.
Of course there are people here. This is where all the people from the coasts go when they realize that the job market where they are sucks, the people are all jerks, and it costs too much to live there.
I'm doing my part by not having a facebook account.
I agree. McCain looked like a johnny-come-lately choosing a female VP. He was just trying to do the same thing that the democrats did, choosing someone that they knew the politically correct idiots in the country couldn't stand to vote against for fear of being perceived as racist. Unfortunately, as the second one to try to take advantage of the idiocy of the american public, he looked like a heel.
How is providing healtcare to those that can't afford it wealth redistribution?
He is not providing healthcare to those that can't afford it, he is forcing insurance on those who can't afford it. So he is robbing from the poor and giving it to the insurance companies.
Give me a console that can do what my current rig can do and I'll be set.
Five years from now they will have a console that can do what your current rig can do. Of course, then it will be five years down the road, and your new rig will again be 10 times as powerful as the currently leading console.
My kids like the Wii, but I find that most of the titles on the Wii are pretty much aimed at kids, and those that aren't are unplayable with the Wiimote. I am completely uninterested in Sony's or Microsoft's motion based controllers as well. The traditional controllers offer much more, oh what's the word...control.
Kinect is not the controller, you are the controller....
Normally one has to pay for a controller. How much is Microsoft willing to pay me to be the controller?
It is their store, they can refuse to sell whatever product they want, for whatever reason or for no reason.
What they CANNOT do, and apparently what they have DONE is to limit people from installing applications on their iphone unless those applications come from the Apple store. I don't know if what they are doing is illegal, but it very well could be. At any rate, i can certainly see why such a policy would put a serious hamper on their sales. I mean sales are doing well already, and their stock is doing well, but just imagine how much more money they would be making if they had a reasonable policy about third party sellers. If I was one of their investors, I would be pissed.
If Best Buy were to rig up their DVD players so that they would only play DVDs you bought at Best Buy, that would be similar to what we are seeing here.
How about a related industry analogy instead of a car analogy?
Like for instance, what if Dell decided that on your Dell computer, you could only install applications that they approved? Trying to install an HP printer driver? No, not approved. Trying to install Microsoft Media Player? No, only Dell's MusicMatch is approved.
In modern construction, when you build a house, you need to make the electric company aware before they will hook you up. That way they can be sure that there is ample infrastructure to handle the new house. Perhaps if they made a similar rule that electric car owners have to notify the electric company a couple of weeks before they buy one, or charge one at work or at a friends house?
It appears that their biggest capacitor can provide 3 watt hours of power. So you would need 8,000 of them for a single charge. They cost $110 each, but you could probably get a volume discount, so call it $60,000. Oh, also, 8,000 of them would weigh a little under 9,000 pounds.
Not saying they should give up, but they have a lot of work to do to make it feasible.
Which just proves that 16kW is a crapload of energy, as it takes a crapload of energy to heat up water, especially a swimming pool full of it. Most swimming pool heaters here in the U.S. are gas or propane powered as electric powered ones would be beyond the capacity of most household circuits. Also, that unit only draws 1800 Watts. It is the output that it says is 16kw.
Real Estate is paid annually instead of as sales tax, but that doesn't make it disappear. Frankly, I would rather pay 8% up front then 7% annually forever. When you buy a company, you do in fact have to pay sales tax on the assets. Of course hookers don't charge sales tax, but if you look at the demographic that buys hookers, I think you will find that it is not the rich who spend the most on hookers. When you buy a Porsche, you of course pay sales tax, or if you buy it abroad, you pay even more to import it.
I would be in favor of not charging sales tax on non-prepared foods and basic clothing. Rent is not taxed, in most places. If they could get rid of the tax on groceries and basic clothing, then I think this would relieve some of the burden on poor people. However, most of the people I know who make less than I do spend much more on sales tax because they generally buy a lot fancier stuff than I do; iphones, new cars, flat screens, surround sound.
I for one didn't buy a darned thing this Black Friday, 15% off or not. Feeding and housing my family is more important than buying bling.
Once could, but saddling them with the responsibility of collecting sales tax across hundreds of thousands of jurisdictions instead of going after the tax evader would be similar to suing craftsman because someone used one of their hammers to open a hole in someone's skull instead of going after the murderer.
The sales tax is just a stupid trick to shift the burden of collecting sales tax to the retailer. That is money owed the stae by the CONSUMER, not the retailer. The state is making the retailer do their dirty work for them.
Second, Amazon is NOT exploiting the fact that there is different legislation per state. They are operating 100% according to the laws that the federal government put there ON PURPOSE to encourage interstate commerce.
And to the regular Joe it is just a cheaper offering from Amazon, most won't realize they still need to pay taxes, so by default commit the crime of not paying. It's a broken system. It's not broken, the states are just too lazy to go collect their own tax.
I don't want a tax code that allows state A to tell me over in state B what I have to collect for their benefit from their citizens and remit entirely to state A.
Collecting sales tax for a foreign entity is entirely voluntary, and so is remitting it. Technically, Amazon could go ahead and voluntarily collect the sales tax but NOT voluntarily remit it to the state in question.
1) Should I be bothering to pay Use Tax at all?
Yes
2) It is legal or enforceable by the state of Virginia?
Yes
3) Since it's interstate is it really a federal issue?
No
4) What if I don't "use" the purchases or I give them as gifts?
You Used the purchase as a gift, or you Used it to have or to throw away or was stolen from you. You still have to pay Use tax, just as you would pay sales tax if you gave a gift to someone from a retail store, or you bought something but didn't use it, or bought something that was then stolen from you.
Technically, retail stores are supposed to pay Use tax if something is removed from inventory without being sold (and sales tax collected). Even if it was stolen.
Who said "Pay" taxes. It says that they don't "Collect" taxes from you.
Aside from that, yes, definitely ~yawn~. "Big corporation operates in complete compliance with federal interstate commerce laws"
poor people pay a much higher portion of their salary in sales tax than rich people
So your definition of a rich person must be someone who has a lot of money and doesn't spend it. There isn't any point in having money just to have it. It is a tool. You can use it to buy the things you want, or you can use it to invest and hopefully make more money so that you can buy the things you want. Either way, rich or poor, every dollar is eventually used to buy something.
A small mom and pop has to worry about exactly one taxing district. An internet company has to worry about possibly millions. As a retailer, I have access to a file that contains my states taxing districts, there are over 100,000 in my state. You have to know every combination of city, local, county and state tax. It would be impossible for anyone other than a huge company like Amazon to keep track of.
Foreign states have no authority to tell Amazon to send them sales tax for purchasers from within their state. The only reason they can get retailers in their own state to do this is by telling them they can't operate if they don't collect sales tax. They can't do this to Amazon because that would violate federal interstate commerce law. Frankly, no retailer should have to collect sales tax on behalf of the state. If you want the money, then YOU go collect it.