You are addressing a non-issue in this case (and you alluded to that, but you may have tried to brush it off). Amazon is dealing with affiliates.
While you try to point the less-than-ideal use of resources in an anti-competitive situation (ie, single owner of multiple competitors), this is not the case with affiliates. Interactions within one owned entity is internal transfer of resources. Interactions between affiliates are still transactions. The only thing that differentiates them from transactions with non-affiliates is that a pre-existing protocol for transacting is in place which speeds up processing. The competition is still in full force among affiliates because transactions are subject to contracts and taxes (whereas interactions among branches of a corporation are not).
What further makes the market MORE competitive is that affiliations are as easily severed as business relationships with non-affiliated players, whereas no simple mechanism for severability exists between branches of a corporation.
As for your attempt to justify putting public interest before shareholders or customer's interest, you slip in a double-edged sword in there to justify it. No private enterprise should be receiving public funds unless they are paid under a contract for a service to be performed or as debt obligation. Anything else is theft of public funds by the government.
The enterprise receiving the funds would be as much a victim of this situation as the general public. It creates a murky level of responsibility which is not agreed-upon at the time the funds are received. A level of responsibility which would almost certainly result in a future demand for performance and for consideration of public interest before the interest of those to whom the enterprise did make concrete commitments (ie, shareholders and customers). Since such arrangement of priorities must be considered theft, these "free public funds" almost guarantees that at some future date the enterprise will be acting and consequently treated as near-criminal.
Lastly, a monopoly situation is not a free market situation because it attempts to substitute centralized planning for competitive behavior. It is in its essence socialist. That's right, I am saying that all monopolies are socialist institutions just as much as all socialist institutions are monopolies.
Rather than giving the government the draconian power to investigate and decide on when monopolies should be broken up, the much simpler solution is to remove the mechanism which allows them to emerge. Simply removing corporate merger as a legally-sanctioned action would do just that. All the arguments for efficiencies of scale are moot because efficiencies of scale can be taken advantage of through.... wait for it.... affiliate programs.
Snap reaction is a common side-effect of using amphetamines (Amphetamine, Adderal, Ritalin). Disagreeing with you on facts is not a personal attack, you know. Both of you happen to be right, technically, so there is no reason to call the guy a troll. Forcing a release and preventing a reuptake are, in fact, different mechanisms. But they do produce the same effect of higher level of dopamine.
I am afraid you are too engrossed in the issues that matter to you to properly analyze the source of the anger in this discussion. Most of it is not over taxes themselves, but rather over extra-territorial taxation.
I don't know. Maybe an election? It could work...in theory
Election happens once every 2-4 years. Purchase happens whenever you need something and you ELECT to purchase it. That sure takes care of the "vote often" part.
As much as I hate the idea of extra-territorial taxation, I dislike logical discrepancies even more. So I feel obliged to point out that interstate commerce is constitutionally within the authority of the federal government. So the states can, technically, task the federal government (through a law suit if need be... although originally this kind of demand was precisely the reason why senators were originally appointed by governors) with creating a taxonomy of categories of products that they would adapt universally for the purposes of local taxation. After that, identifying a product as belonging to any specific category would be independent of locale.
Good! That's precisely what they should do. A business taking care of business is the only ethical thing they can do. Their responsibility is to their shareholders and their customers. Period. Their employees and affiliates are the people they may chose to hire to assist them in fulfilling their responsibilities to their shareholders and their customers. The moment they try to assume any "social responsibility", they'll become hypocrites. They owe their allegiance to those who pay them. If they ever put those who don't pay them in front of those who do, they'll become thieves.
Sending old people to die in the wilderness when they reached a fixed age is "rationing" as well. Those who throw around the words "we", "community", "society", etc as liberally as you do fail to mind their own business. Your attitude is the hallmark of a Communist society. I am not speaking in hypotheticals. I am speaking from experience.
"Many" does not make for statistical indicator. You do realize, btw, that AT&T and Verizon are now one company, do you not? And that other than Lucent, they are in Manhattan? 25% of all pharmaceutical companies in the country are headquartered in the Princeton area. But the numbers tell more than personal accounts (that I suspect you base your observations on). 4-5 million is a very significant portion of the NJ population that works in Manhattan. That number dwarfs the number of employees that work for Lucent, Rutgers, Princeton, Setton Hall, all small colleges based in NJ and all pharmaceutical researchers/executives based in NJ. The people you mentioned are highly educated. But they still represent a minority (ie, less than 50%) of the Ivy League graduates and/or graduate-degree holders residing of NJ.
Right! Public health inspectors have no place coming into PRIVATE restaurants! Just think of how much money the poor restaurateurs could save if they didn't have to put up with those intrusive inspections, citing them for things like 'chefs not washing hands' or 'seafood kept in unrefrigerated piles on a dirt floor next to the catbox.'
To our great shame, we have produced a class of government compliance workers who live off of bribes rather than their salaries (aka "safety inspectors"). Oh, and I am pretty sure I can be sued for giving food poisoning to my house guests. So can the restaurants. As for washing hands, unless you have those inspectors camping in the restaurants, they do not in any way guarantee it. But hey, let's pay the exorbitant price for the illusion of safety while giving up actual freedoms of free association between rational men. Nobody gives a damn, anyway.
Then, the less obvious ones: schools (Amazon needs an educated customer base), various economic assistance programs (Amazon needs a strong economy to have customers), hospitals (Amazon needs live people). There are more.
Umm... wow! No, Amazon does not need to have all of their customers' needs satisfied in order to maintain a customer base. Their customers need to have their own needs satisfied. And their customers should be the ones paying for it. That would put the tax burden on NC residents -- not on Amazon.
Gas taxes and vehicle registration fees don't come close to paying for roads. Many areas use some form of sales tax to pay for part of their transportation infrastructure. So the shipping companies do not in fact pay for all of Amazon's use.
So very much not true. Amazon pays shippers. It is the shippers that need the roads to do their business. Amazon's responsibility ends with their payment to the shippers. If local governments need to tax gasoline more in order to support the roads on which that gasoline is used, no one would object. But to tax an entity that doesn't make direct use of those roads (becase, again, they already paid the shippers) is theft.
Amazon does make use of police services, schools, etc. because Amazon needs civilization to survive.
Aha. Right. They sell stuff. They are not a mission. They are a business providing a product. Their taxes should pay for the government services which they use in operation of their business. The far fetched "needs civilization to survive" argument can just as easily be used by China to tax Amazon because Amazon needs Chinese authors of the future to be educated to be able to write books that might be sold by Amazon in NC. Yes, this is far fetched. But it is the logical extreme of your far fetched argument.
We all depend on it all.
Blah, blah, blah. Talk is cheap. If Amazon isn't purchasing a service from NC, then NC has no business sending Amazon the bill. The "civilization" in NC is purchased by the NC residents. They get to pay for it -- not an out-of-state company. Anything else is theft.
When you walk into a restaurant, you walk into a PRIVATE establishment. Claiming public health concerns to regulate behavior on private property is at the very least disingenuous.
He said proximity to culture. Not presence of culture. There are places in NJ which have a shorter commute to NYC cultural centers than most of the greater NYC. So NJ residents along the Hudson get to enjoy all the benefits of living in America (as opposed to NYC) while having easy access to both NYC job market and NYC cultural attractions.
> Not even close to true.
Umm... It's completely true. There is roughly 10.5 million people living in NJ (+/- 1 million). Roughly 7 million people commute into Manhattan each day (9-10 million work force - 2.5 million residents). About 4 million of those 7 come from NJ (just because the throughput capacity of the east entrances into Manhattan is a bit larger than West+South+North. That already accounts for 4 out 10.5 million on NJ residents. Most people who commuting into NYC are forced to do so because it has a higher concentration of jobs for highly educated people. Philadelphia hasn't been as much a factor in the past 20 years, but when Philadelphia was still a viable city, many people who worked in the downtown didn't want to live in Philadelphia for the same reasons that most middle-class avoids urban setting in the US (high crime, bad public schools, etc). Anyhow, today that account for about another 500k to 1 million NJ residents. That's 4-5 million residents of a state with population of 10.5 million. That 10.5 million includes housewives, school children, retirees, etc. So yeah, the bulk of the work force that creates the wealth in NJ works in NYC or Philadelphia. Everyone else either works in some local service industry or isn't in the work force. That would make the statement "NJ is a state of 2 suburbs" true.
Most NJ residents work in either NYC or Philadelphia. It's a state of 2 suburbs. It has one of the highest education levels per capita. But most of the educated people living in NJ don't work there.
Amazon does not use any resources provided by the local state government. And yet they would be expected to pay for them? That's called "theft". They use no public roads (delivery companies pay for those through gasoline taxes and vehicle registration payments). They use no police services (they have no physical presence in NC so they have nothing to protect there). They can't take advantage of NC education (since they don't live there, their children can't go to school there). And yet NC thinks they have the right to shake down Amazon? Every honest men hopes this withdrawal of Amazon affiliation takes as heavy toll on NC economy as possible. This type of punishment of thieves would only be just.
Sales taxes is not what makes NJ a hostile business environment. NJ corporate income tax structure and (almost deliberately) low-tech regulatory agencies (in one of the most high-tech states in the nation) is what makes it hostile to the business environment.
Finally some business demonstrating some balls. If the tax is being considered, then the locality has an environment hostile to Amazon's business. It doesn't matter if it goes through. The fact that they see nothing wrong with their hostile attitude is enough of a reason for Amazon to declare that they will have nothing to do without them. No business with bullies -- not even with those who associate with bullies by living in their tax base. Good for them!
This probably works for you, but you are gonna have to trust people when they tell you that it doesn't always work for them. Sometimes looking for a solution to a problem is like looking for lost keys. One understands the problem very well (similar to knowing where everything is in the apartment), but still can't see the solution that seems obvious. The best thing to do in that case is to actually take your attention away from the problem. And the keys just pop up when you get back to it. It will often work better than "retracing your steps" advice that so many try to follow. What's missing is usually simple, but the brain traces a network when it tries to look for the obvious. And the more you go over what is already in your field of view, the more you reinforce the connections which you already visited. What's necessary is to have the brain try a random shoot-off connection in the network. That's why the recommendations like "take a walk" are made. As you get random input from the scenery, the brain is more likely to make a random shoot towards the piece of information that you weren't reinforcing, but which is in there somewhere.
is to take a walk. Hopefully, you have a scenic random route you can walk. The random imagery of the walk "primes" the brain. Try not talking the same walk for this purpose, but sort of pick random directions. Ten minutes of this should really help you focus.
You are confusing "nobody can" with "I cannot". Consciousness is not yet defined, but it will be. It's not a philosophical, but rather physical concept. All physical concepts, however complicated, are definable.
Slashdot Mirror
You are addressing a non-issue in this case (and you alluded to that, but you may have tried to brush it off). Amazon is dealing with affiliates.
While you try to point the less-than-ideal use of resources in an anti-competitive situation (ie, single owner of multiple competitors), this is not the case with affiliates. Interactions within one owned entity is internal transfer of resources. Interactions between affiliates are still transactions. The only thing that differentiates them from transactions with non-affiliates is that a pre-existing protocol for transacting is in place which speeds up processing. The competition is still in full force among affiliates because transactions are subject to contracts and taxes (whereas interactions among branches of a corporation are not).
What further makes the market MORE competitive is that affiliations are as easily severed as business relationships with non-affiliated players, whereas no simple mechanism for severability exists between branches of a corporation.
As for your attempt to justify putting public interest before shareholders or customer's interest, you slip in a double-edged sword in there to justify it. No private enterprise should be receiving public funds unless they are paid under a contract for a service to be performed or as debt obligation. Anything else is theft of public funds by the government.
The enterprise receiving the funds would be as much a victim of this situation as the general public. It creates a murky level of responsibility which is not agreed-upon at the time the funds are received. A level of responsibility which would almost certainly result in a future demand for performance and for consideration of public interest before the interest of those to whom the enterprise did make concrete commitments (ie, shareholders and customers). Since such arrangement of priorities must be considered theft, these "free public funds" almost guarantees that at some future date the enterprise will be acting and consequently treated as near-criminal.
Lastly, a monopoly situation is not a free market situation because it attempts to substitute centralized planning for competitive behavior. It is in its essence socialist. That's right, I am saying that all monopolies are socialist institutions just as much as all socialist institutions are monopolies.
Rather than giving the government the draconian power to investigate and decide on when monopolies should be broken up, the much simpler solution is to remove the mechanism which allows them to emerge. Simply removing corporate merger as a legally-sanctioned action would do just that. All the arguments for efficiencies of scale are moot because efficiencies of scale can be taken advantage of through.... wait for it.... affiliate programs.
Seems like the country for geeks is Scotland.
Snap reaction is a common side-effect of using amphetamines (Amphetamine, Adderal, Ritalin). Disagreeing with you on facts is not a personal attack, you know. Both of you happen to be right, technically, so there is no reason to call the guy a troll. Forcing a release and preventing a reuptake are, in fact, different mechanisms. But they do produce the same effect of higher level of dopamine.
I am afraid you are too engrossed in the issues that matter to you to properly analyze the source of the anger in this discussion. Most of it is not over taxes themselves, but rather over extra-territorial taxation.
I don't know. Maybe an election? It could work...in theory
Election happens once every 2-4 years. Purchase happens whenever you need something and you ELECT to purchase it. That sure takes care of the "vote often" part.
As much as I hate the idea of extra-territorial taxation, I dislike logical discrepancies even more. So I feel obliged to point out that interstate commerce is constitutionally within the authority of the federal government. So the states can, technically, task the federal government (through a law suit if need be... although originally this kind of demand was precisely the reason why senators were originally appointed by governors) with creating a taxonomy of categories of products that they would adapt universally for the purposes of local taxation. After that, identifying a product as belonging to any specific category would be independent of locale.
Good! That's precisely what they should do. A business taking care of business is the only ethical thing they can do. Their responsibility is to their shareholders and their customers. Period. Their employees and affiliates are the people they may chose to hire to assist them in fulfilling their responsibilities to their shareholders and their customers. The moment they try to assume any "social responsibility", they'll become hypocrites. They owe their allegiance to those who pay them. If they ever put those who don't pay them in front of those who do, they'll become thieves.
Sending old people to die in the wilderness when they reached a fixed age is "rationing" as well. Those who throw around the words "we", "community", "society", etc as liberally as you do fail to mind their own business. Your attitude is the hallmark of a Communist society. I am not speaking in hypotheticals. I am speaking from experience.
"Many" does not make for statistical indicator. You do realize, btw, that AT&T and Verizon are now one company, do you not? And that other than Lucent, they are in Manhattan? 25% of all pharmaceutical companies in the country are headquartered in the Princeton area. But the numbers tell more than personal accounts (that I suspect you base your observations on). 4-5 million is a very significant portion of the NJ population that works in Manhattan. That number dwarfs the number of employees that work for Lucent, Rutgers, Princeton, Setton Hall, all small colleges based in NJ and all pharmaceutical researchers/executives based in NJ. The people you mentioned are highly educated. But they still represent a minority (ie, less than 50%) of the Ivy League graduates and/or graduate-degree holders residing of NJ.
Right! Public health inspectors have no place coming into PRIVATE restaurants! Just think of how much money the poor restaurateurs could save if they didn't have to put up with those intrusive inspections, citing them for things like 'chefs not washing hands' or 'seafood kept in unrefrigerated piles on a dirt floor next to the catbox.'
To our great shame, we have produced a class of government compliance workers who live off of bribes rather than their salaries (aka "safety inspectors"). Oh, and I am pretty sure I can be sued for giving food poisoning to my house guests. So can the restaurants. As for washing hands, unless you have those inspectors camping in the restaurants, they do not in any way guarantee it. But hey, let's pay the exorbitant price for the illusion of safety while giving up actual freedoms of free association between rational men. Nobody gives a damn, anyway.
Then, the less obvious ones: schools (Amazon needs an educated customer base), various economic assistance programs (Amazon needs a strong economy to have customers), hospitals (Amazon needs live people). There are more.
Umm... wow! No, Amazon does not need to have all of their customers' needs satisfied in order to maintain a customer base. Their customers need to have their own needs satisfied. And their customers should be the ones paying for it. That would put the tax burden on NC residents -- not on Amazon.
Gas taxes and vehicle registration fees don't come close to paying for roads. Many areas use some form of sales tax to pay for part of their transportation infrastructure. So the shipping companies do not in fact pay for all of Amazon's use.
So very much not true. Amazon pays shippers. It is the shippers that need the roads to do their business. Amazon's responsibility ends with their payment to the shippers. If local governments need to tax gasoline more in order to support the roads on which that gasoline is used, no one would object. But to tax an entity that doesn't make direct use of those roads (becase, again, they already paid the shippers) is theft.
Amazon does make use of police services, schools, etc. because Amazon needs civilization to survive.
Aha. Right. They sell stuff. They are not a mission. They are a business providing a product. Their taxes should pay for the government services which they use in operation of their business. The far fetched "needs civilization to survive" argument can just as easily be used by China to tax Amazon because Amazon needs Chinese authors of the future to be educated to be able to write books that might be sold by Amazon in NC. Yes, this is far fetched. But it is the logical extreme of your far fetched argument.
We all depend on it all.
Blah, blah, blah. Talk is cheap. If Amazon isn't purchasing a service from NC, then NC has no business sending Amazon the bill. The "civilization" in NC is purchased by the NC residents. They get to pay for it -- not an out-of-state company. Anything else is theft.
When you walk into a restaurant, you walk into a PRIVATE establishment. Claiming public health concerns to regulate behavior on private property is at the very least disingenuous.
Korean War is the only one I can think of (it prevented Communism from spreading into South Korea).
He said proximity to culture. Not presence of culture. There are places in NJ which have a shorter commute to NYC cultural centers than most of the greater NYC. So NJ residents along the Hudson get to enjoy all the benefits of living in America (as opposed to NYC) while having easy access to both NYC job market and NYC cultural attractions.
> Not even close to true. Umm... It's completely true. There is roughly 10.5 million people living in NJ (+/- 1 million). Roughly 7 million people commute into Manhattan each day (9-10 million work force - 2.5 million residents). About 4 million of those 7 come from NJ (just because the throughput capacity of the east entrances into Manhattan is a bit larger than West+South+North. That already accounts for 4 out 10.5 million on NJ residents. Most people who commuting into NYC are forced to do so because it has a higher concentration of jobs for highly educated people. Philadelphia hasn't been as much a factor in the past 20 years, but when Philadelphia was still a viable city, many people who worked in the downtown didn't want to live in Philadelphia for the same reasons that most middle-class avoids urban setting in the US (high crime, bad public schools, etc). Anyhow, today that account for about another 500k to 1 million NJ residents. That's 4-5 million residents of a state with population of 10.5 million. That 10.5 million includes housewives, school children, retirees, etc. So yeah, the bulk of the work force that creates the wealth in NJ works in NYC or Philadelphia. Everyone else either works in some local service industry or isn't in the work force. That would make the statement "NJ is a state of 2 suburbs" true.
Most NJ residents work in either NYC or Philadelphia. It's a state of 2 suburbs. It has one of the highest education levels per capita. But most of the educated people living in NJ don't work there.
Amazon does not use any resources provided by the local state government. And yet they would be expected to pay for them? That's called "theft". They use no public roads (delivery companies pay for those through gasoline taxes and vehicle registration payments). They use no police services (they have no physical presence in NC so they have nothing to protect there). They can't take advantage of NC education (since they don't live there, their children can't go to school there). And yet NC thinks they have the right to shake down Amazon? Every honest men hopes this withdrawal of Amazon affiliation takes as heavy toll on NC economy as possible. This type of punishment of thieves would only be just.
Sales taxes is not what makes NJ a hostile business environment. NJ corporate income tax structure and (almost deliberately) low-tech regulatory agencies (in one of the most high-tech states in the nation) is what makes it hostile to the business environment.
Finally some business demonstrating some balls. If the tax is being considered, then the locality has an environment hostile to Amazon's business. It doesn't matter if it goes through. The fact that they see nothing wrong with their hostile attitude is enough of a reason for Amazon to declare that they will have nothing to do without them. No business with bullies -- not even with those who associate with bullies by living in their tax base. Good for them!
This probably works for you, but you are gonna have to trust people when they tell you that it doesn't always work for them. Sometimes looking for a solution to a problem is like looking for lost keys. One understands the problem very well (similar to knowing where everything is in the apartment), but still can't see the solution that seems obvious. The best thing to do in that case is to actually take your attention away from the problem. And the keys just pop up when you get back to it. It will often work better than "retracing your steps" advice that so many try to follow. What's missing is usually simple, but the brain traces a network when it tries to look for the obvious. And the more you go over what is already in your field of view, the more you reinforce the connections which you already visited. What's necessary is to have the brain try a random shoot-off connection in the network. That's why the recommendations like "take a walk" are made. As you get random input from the scenery, the brain is more likely to make a random shoot towards the piece of information that you weren't reinforcing, but which is in there somewhere.
is to take a walk. Hopefully, you have a scenic random route you can walk. The random imagery of the walk "primes" the brain. Try not talking the same walk for this purpose, but sort of pick random directions. Ten minutes of this should really help you focus.
You are confusing "nobody can" with "I cannot". Consciousness is not yet defined, but it will be. It's not a philosophical, but rather physical concept. All physical concepts, however complicated, are definable.
Somehow, this seems more reminiscent of a different SW character: Lobot.
You do realize that by saying that biblical account is metaphorical you are (by definition) also saying that it is not factual, do you not?