Kind of depends how the targeted release date was arrived at, doesn't it?
If it was arrived at with, say, a dartboard, a roulette wheel, or an arbitrary time when the runway runs out, and the requirements/feature points/complexity was not trimmed to suit at the get go, then I don't think it's the team that needs to be let go. It's whoever set up the untenable situation in the first place.
This is often enough contingency to handle the curve ball requirements changes that management and customers will inevitably throw at you throughout the development period.
It may not be enough to cover the gratuitous mid-stream demos that need a week of diverted-from-productive effort to prepare each time.
And if you have the kind of management that wants to interrupt you for a crisis meeting or a re-installation of software/OS on their virus infested laptop, or the latest FAD scrummish trendy management thing at least 3 times per day, fuggedaboutit. You're completely screwed with any estimate you come up with.
The USA is squandering some of its technological lead and economic opportunities with dumb-ass laws.
I've already had to stop hosting several online businesses in the US due to the patriot act and international customers' unwillingness to have there data stored in the US.
Stem cell research was set back a decade by Christian fundamentalist opposition making its way into federal law.
Laws restricting export of US software just result in software being innovated faster elsewhere.
As Freeman Dyson once said: The best way to defeat soviet communism would be to ship Apple computers to their population en masse. He was basically right, though who knew it would be cloned PCs that would do the trick.
When more data is in and denial becomes once again the last refuge of the congenitally moronic.
The world will be a little warmer. The attempts at corrective action will be even more clearly seen to be pathetically inadequate, shackled as they were by the successful lobbying by multi-national corporate super-villains and their flocks of FOX TV-hypnotized sheep supporters riding in their steroidal puffy GM pimpmobiles which are the only ones that will fit their grain-and-corn-syrup-fed @sses.
There is something to this, in that when individual citizens of different countries communicate directly with each other, and can read a broad range of perspective, their political views will inevitably slide toward global norms.
The non-hierarchical, international nature of the Internet is a threat to the sovereignty of state governments. The state government now just becomes one of many voices communicating with its people.
The challenge to peace-loving people will be resisting the tendency of threatened state governments to erect more and more opaque and monitored firewalls (or latency walls) between the nets in different countries.
The invention of GeoIP services (restricting my ability to view and purchase things, depending on my country) has already made the Internet tragically more bordered than it was even 10 years ago. We have to resist this trend. We have to allow simple global e-commerce, and open global sharing of cultural "products".
Oil industry (Exxon,Shell,BP,Chevron,...) $2,000,000,000,000
Fossil-Fuel-based Major Retail (Wal-Mart,Carrefour,...) $1,000,000,000,000
Automotive Industry (Toyota,Ford,Volkswagen,GM,Daimler,...) $2,000,000,000,000
Yes folks, that's 5 trillion (= 5,000 billion) dollars per year revenue, for industries directly dependent on continuation of our massive fossil fuel burn.
--- IPCC-related scientists Assume 4,000 scientists. Assume average one gets $1,000,000 grant money per year. (Overestimate). That's $4,000,000,000 at stake, (assuming, falsely, that the money is all or mostly dependent on their finding that human GHG emissions cause global warming.)
So let's see. -Scientists have 4 billion dollars at stake. (Not really at stake, but we'll imagine it was) -Directly dependent industries have 5,000 billion dollars at stake.
That's a factor of over a 1000x more money at stake for those whose agenda is to promote the status quo and to discredit the science.
Just putting things in perspective. Which side do YOU think is going to have the massive public relations campaign, and massive release of spun dis-information going on? Hmmmmm.
Our fossil fuel emissions are unbalancing the system by a small percentage and causing it.
We are too stupid/greedy to change our ways. (Our emissions growth is still accelerating.)
The United States of America leads the world in this greed, and in the stupidity of its mainstream population on this issue. But that should not surprise us. A large majority of its population believes in God and Jesus, and a majority probably don't believe in evolution.
In 200 years, those people who denied the problem, denied our responsibility, and prevented necessary changes will be seen as criminals.
I already see you that way.
Well I hope Jesus saves you, because you are incapable of saving yourselves or the other peoples of the world whose world you are wrecking, or the ecosystems of the world you are the leaders at destroying.
Yeah. This one gets under my collar. If there was a rational species around here I would join them.
This seems like one of those laws whose name is the opposite of what it actually ensures. These laws are often the result of powerful and successful industry lobbying. They mollify the detail-averse masses, while allowing the exploitation to continue.
We have a tree-protection bylaw in my town. It says, you cannot cut down a 12" or greater diameter tree when demolishing a house for development (and its fine print goes on to say: "unless either you give 3 months notice to the city, or the tree would be in the way of or too close to the new building")
Any regulation that allows blocking or throttling of traffic based on measurement of or assumptions about the specific semantics of the traffic is the OPPOSITE of Net Neutrality, and should never be allowed to be called a Net Neutrality law. This is positively Orwellian language redefinition.
And if you're a Green who realizes that political power oscillating back and forth between the conservatives and the liberals is a control system with feedback seeking balanced policy over time, then what can we make of you?
First, take all the alternative molecules that can be formed by a given RNA-like molecule (call that molecular structure b, for reasons that may shortly become obvious) with only one or very few point mutations or section permutations. If we make the (rather strong) analogy of the RNA-like molecule to a particular construction-program-representing bitstring value, then we are considering the set of alternative bitstring values which have low relative Kolmogorov complexity compared to the original bitstring value. Consider the set of molecules(bitstrings) which can be produced by only a few simple and probable/feasible-by-chance-or-thermodynamics physical process steps, (i.e. by a few local program steps), given the original molecule(bitstring) as a starting point. Call that set of molecules/bitstrings Sb.
Now consider the subset of Sb, S'b which codes for structures/processes which, in the context of the surrounding structures/processes that Sb codes for, and additionally in the context of the prevailing set of probable environmental states C, will do no harm to the continuation of the whole homeostatic and replicating structure/process.
Now consider the subset of S'b, S''b, which codes for structures/processes that have an adaptive (survival probability) advantage in the prevailing environment C.
Evolution of any currently extant (ergo successful) structure-construction program-encoding molecule b will tend to proceed at each step from b to a b'' which is found in S''b.
A more complex picture would see a mix of moves from b to b' (in S'b) (harmless,useless mutations) as well as moves straight from b, or through any b', to b'' or to b''', but roughly, the end-effect is moves from b to a b'', repeat ad nauseum.
There are two constraints operating here. The first is that the program code evolution must be probable and feasible. The second is that the work-product variation caused by the program code variation must be at least non-destructive (so it can hang around as fodder for usefulness should the environment C change), or must be adaptive i.e. MTBF(b'',C) > MTBF(b,C), where F, failure, is defined as loss of any existence/embodiment of the molecular structure/bitstring b in that (causally connected) spacetime region.
That is, pseudo-mathematically speaking, the direction that evolution will tend to take.
But it leaves the question of how simple the simplest reliably surviving b + b-replicating context/machine (i.e. the simplest self-creating Turing machine) was, and what it would have been like, chemically, and how that worked, exactly.
The notion that life probably started by weak, stochastic replication of families of similar molecules.
By weak, is meant that the replication of the molecule/structure is more imperfect from generation to generation than in present day life, and so a class of similar molecules (life codes) is being continued through time rather than a singular particular molecule (same genome).
If this origin theory were true, we would expect the replication capability (continued recreation of imperfect but still somewhat replication-capable molecules) to be robust to change of DNA/RNA even today.
By stochastic, is meant that such imperfect replication is likely to only be stochastically successful in a huge population of the initially highly approximate (i.e. weak) replicator molecules.
In other words, we would not expect this proto-life to be as reliable at being able to continue (or to always reliably grow by recruiting surrounding matter into high-fidelity copies.)
So we might expect these proto-life molecule soups to initially just contain in some regions higher than expected probabilities, stochastically, from time to time, of weak-replicator molecule classes.
Perhaps there is a binary threshold of replication probability and fidelity at which the process self-sustains reliably in the generality of environment it finds itself in. Life catches fire, and cannot easily be stopped at its matter and energy recruitment game from that point on.
Oh damn, you mean I didn't shake your political identity to its core?
It's not so much a political manifesto as an explanation of some specific, even if not yet widely known or accepted implications of the thermodynamics of complex systems.
Also known perhaps as "realpolitik" (with a dash of neo-(non-racist) sociobiology).
"I think the only constraint that there should be on an individual is the constraint from constraining others."
I'm going to give you credit and assume that you realize that is self-contradictory.
No. You are only free in your society/state as long as you conform to its laws and do not work effectively against that state. If you disobey its laws (or even its important social norms), or if you are working effectively to subvert or replace its authority, you will be done like dinner. What you have in a liberal democracy is a slightly freer state than in a less sophisticated, totalitarian state, but make no mistake, you are constrained.
The central authority and tax-collecting tendency of a state doesn't depend on how people individually want to organize things. It is an nergetically stable arrangement in a complex system, and similar complex systems will gravitate toward and fluctuate around roughly the same amount of authority/autonomy and taxation level, with some experimental variation to either side.
The tax rate (energy flow toward central authority) will be there, because co-operation automatically turns into at least slightly hierarchical co-operation, because it is more efficient to co-ordinate. (cost of communications and agreement enforcement closer to nlogn instead of n squared).
You can choose your form of hierarchical governance (if you are lucky), but you cannot choose not to be hierarchically governed to some extent. Hierarchies are latent in human society, and one will always emerge to fill a vacuum of coordination or authority. It is just a question of how big, how fair/law-based, how totalitarian etc. the emerged governance/coordination will be.
The left wing of the political spectrum tends to think tax rates/central organization should be higher. The right wing thinks it should be lower and autonomy of individuals (and of lower-level hierarchies "corporations") should be higher.
But this disagreement about tax rate is just a control system (feedback loop) that is finding a semi-acceptable middle-ground tax rate somewhere between 5% and 80%, and most probably somewhere between 15% and 45%).
Only the unwise or inexperienced think it should be zero percent. All you are doing if you say that is agreeing to be subject to whatever alternate forms of taxation will spring up in a "Mad Max" warlord-run / mafia run / corporate monopoly run / religious messiah run hodge-podge of warring hierarchies. But make no mistake. Either you will be the taxer, or you will be taxed. And if you are the taxer, you are constrained to act so as to maintain the consent of the populace, so you also are not free.
That is life. Just as life formed multi-cellular organisms, it also formed stable hierarchically organized societies of communicating, cooperating higher organisms. Yes there is Darwinian competition in there at all levels too of course, but co-operation (competition of partners at the next level of aggregation, if you will) is Darwinian too, and it is here because it survives as a stable pattern. You can try to fight it, but you will just end up in charge, or dead, and either way, you have lost your freedom.
Legitimacy is not a terribly useful or operational concept, being so subjective.
Tax is a compelled flow of work or work product from a semi-autonomous part (person/corporation) to a whole (government organization). It says to the part "You will direct to me in a usable form a fractional part of the result of your use of energy." The social contract trades this energy tribute for security and norms-enforcement services, and other globally organized services provided back to parts to tame their environment and lower their energy requirements for surviving in it. The social contract is enforced with the grudging assent of the majority of the parts, because it enables prevention of energy-wasting social friction, and assists in the regulation of trust-and-convention-based economic co-operation among the parts. That regulated economic cooperation generates more wealth, which, through the tax portion, empowers the whole in a (virtuous) circle. The state is an organism, and you are a cell in it. You have some freedom to move in it, but it constrains you somewhat and demands that some of your work work for its purposes too. It is all for your own good (on average, measured as energy requirements per unit of survival/reproduction probability for the parts.)
It is a software money exchange system which treats financial transactions as if they were like particle collisions in a particle accelerator.
The tokens or particles mentioned below are encrypted web-service requests, except for "receiving particles" which are web service destinations for requests.
When someone wants to purchase something, a token representing a sum of money hits the vendor's receiving particle, which sends a confirmation of the payment to the payer's online identity. The vendor's particle has been pre-configured to split the payment particle into smaller particles (that add up to the payment total). One sub-particle goes to each royalty participant or supplier/distributor etc., with amount a proportion agreed on in advance. Another sub-particle goes immediately to the relevant Federal government(s) as prescribed VAT/sales tax payment. Another sub-particle goes to another government (say state government) as its tax payment, and the remaining sub-particle goes as a deposit request to the vendor's bank account.
The same thing could apply for taxable salary payments etc.
General point is that all due tax payments, and all supplier/royalty sharing, is handled automatically and instantly at the moment of the original payment.
Therefore, assuming that each stakeholder has the right and technical means (identity key and web-service queries) to query the history and semantics of each and only the transactions they are party to, there is no non-automated accounting to do after the fact.
Standard accounting reports (from the POV of any stakeholder) can be produced automatically by the system on demand, for purposes such as tax returns (which are then just a summary for information purposes, there is no tax to ay or return after the fact generally, because the overall state is maintained in its proper legal balance at all times.
A complicated addition could somehow adjust balances when tax credits are applied for and approved. Most of these credits would be automatically calculable by the government tax departments because they would have had real-time access to the relevant parts of the financial situation of the parties.
Parties (payers and vendors, employers and employees) could perhaps opt into this system (and its inherent privacy losses) for the benefit of not having to do any after-the-fact accounting or payments/receiving.
Now as we move to encrypted fragmented cloud storage and computing, that assumption will presumeably have to change, as it will become routine to encrypt both your stored content and its transmission. And I can see anonymization being offered as part of cloud services of the future, to prevent corporate espionage (shady forms of "business intelligence") etc.
When encryption and anonymization of net communications becomes the norm, then who do you watch, and how?
Slashdot Mirror
Kind of depends how the targeted release date was arrived at, doesn't it?
If it was arrived at with, say, a dartboard, a roulette wheel, or an arbitrary
time when the runway runs out, and the requirements/feature points/complexity
was not trimmed to suit at the get go, then I don't think it's the team that needs
to be let go. It's whoever set up the untenable situation in the first place.
(Or more precisely multiply by 9/5 and add 32).
This is often enough contingency to handle the curve ball requirements changes that
management and customers will inevitably throw at you throughout the development period.
It may not be enough to cover the gratuitous mid-stream demos that need a week of
diverted-from-productive effort to prepare each time.
And if you have the kind of management that wants to interrupt you for a crisis meeting
or a re-installation of software/OS on their virus infested laptop, or the latest
FAD scrummish trendy management thing at least 3 times per day,
fuggedaboutit. You're completely screwed with any estimate you come up with.
Lie lie lie
Lye lie lye
Li li Lie li li lie lye lye la la Lie
(variations in spelling to defeat postercomment compression filter.)
The USA is squandering some of its technological lead and economic opportunities with dumb-ass laws.
I've already had to stop hosting several online businesses in the US due to the patriot act and international customers' unwillingness to have there data stored in the US.
Stem cell research was set back a decade by Christian fundamentalist opposition making its way into
federal law.
Laws restricting export of US software just result in software being innovated faster elsewhere.
As Freeman Dyson once said: The best way to defeat soviet communism would be to ship Apple computers to their population en masse. He was basically right, though who knew it would be cloned PCs that would do the trick.
When more data is in and denial becomes once again the last refuge of the congenitally moronic.
The world will be a little warmer. The attempts at corrective action will be
even more clearly seen to be pathetically inadequate, shackled as they were by the successful lobbying by multi-national corporate super-villains and their flocks of FOX TV-hypnotized sheep supporters riding in their steroidal puffy GM pimpmobiles which are the only ones that will fit their grain-and-corn-syrup-fed @sses.
There is something to this, in that when individual citizens of different countries
communicate directly with each other, and can read a broad range of perspective,
their political views will inevitably slide toward global norms.
The non-hierarchical, international nature of the Internet is a threat to
the sovereignty of state governments. The state government now just becomes
one of many voices communicating with its people.
The challenge to peace-loving people will be resisting the tendency of threatened state governments
to erect more and more opaque and monitored firewalls (or latency walls)
between the nets in different countries.
The invention of GeoIP services (restricting my ability to view and purchase things, depending
on my country) has already made the Internet tragically more bordered
than it was even 10 years ago. We have to resist this trend. We have to allow simple global
e-commerce, and open global sharing of cultural "products".
Annual Revenues
Oil industry (Exxon,Shell,BP,Chevron,...) $2,000,000,000,000
Fossil-Fuel-based Major Retail (Wal-Mart,Carrefour,...) $1,000,000,000,000
Automotive Industry (Toyota,Ford,Volkswagen,GM,Daimler,...) $2,000,000,000,000
Yes folks, that's 5 trillion (= 5,000 billion) dollars per year revenue, for industries
directly dependent on continuation of our massive fossil fuel burn.
---
IPCC-related scientists
Assume 4,000 scientists.
Assume average one gets $1,000,000 grant money per year. (Overestimate).
That's $4,000,000,000 at stake, (assuming, falsely, that the money is all or
mostly dependent on their finding that human GHG emissions cause global
warming.)
So let's see.
-Scientists have 4 billion dollars at stake. (Not really at stake,
but we'll imagine it was)
-Directly dependent industries have 5,000 billion dollars at stake.
That's a factor of over a 1000x more money at stake for those whose agenda
is to promote the status quo and to discredit the science.
Just putting things in perspective. Which side do YOU think is going to
have the massive public relations campaign, and massive release
of spun dis-information going on? Hmmmmm.
Global warming is happening.
Our fossil fuel emissions are unbalancing the system by a small percentage and causing it.
We are too stupid/greedy to change our ways. (Our emissions growth is still accelerating.)
The United States of America leads the world in this greed, and in the stupidity of
its mainstream population on this issue. But that should not surprise us. A large majority
of its population believes in God and Jesus, and a majority probably don't believe in
evolution.
In 200 years, those people who denied the problem, denied our responsibility, and
prevented necessary changes will be seen as criminals.
I already see you that way.
Well I hope Jesus saves you, because you are incapable of saving yourselves
or the other peoples of the world whose world you are wrecking, or the ecosystems
of the world you are the leaders at destroying.
Yeah. This one gets under my collar. If there was a rational species around here
I would join them.
required to safely operate MS-Windows?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/B747-cockpit.jpg
Yes well, I found a feather from a Great Snowy Owl
in my Canadian back yard, so invited some friends
over to look at it.
email subject:
"Superb owl part, eh!"
This seems like one of those laws whose name is the opposite of what it
actually ensures. These laws are often the result of powerful and successful
industry lobbying. They mollify the detail-averse masses, while allowing
the exploitation to continue.
We have a tree-protection bylaw in my town. It says, you cannot cut down
a 12" or greater diameter tree when demolishing a house for development
(and its fine print goes on to say: "unless either you give 3 months notice
to the city, or the tree would be in the way of or too close to the new building")
Any regulation that allows blocking or throttling of traffic based on measurement
of or assumptions about the specific semantics of the traffic is the OPPOSITE
of Net Neutrality, and should never be allowed to be called a Net Neutrality
law. This is positively Orwellian language redefinition.
But you're missing the point.
A "Birkin" handbag costs 1000x as much as another one you could get at Zellers,
and holds the same amount of stuff.
Apparently, people would rather be seen carrying the "Birkin".
And if you're a Green who realizes that political power oscillating back and forth between the conservatives and the liberals is a control system with feedback seeking balanced policy over time, then what can we make of you?
First, take all the alternative molecules that can be formed by a given RNA-like molecule (call that molecular structure b, for reasons
that may shortly become obvious) with only one or very few
point mutations or section permutations. If we make the (rather strong) analogy of the RNA-like molecule
to a particular construction-program-representing bitstring value, then we are considering the set of alternative bitstring values
which have low relative Kolmogorov complexity compared to the original bitstring value.
Consider the set of molecules(bitstrings) which can be produced by only a few simple and probable/feasible-by-chance-or-thermodynamics
physical process steps, (i.e. by a few local program steps), given the original molecule(bitstring) as a starting point.
Call that set of molecules/bitstrings Sb.
Now consider the subset of Sb, S'b which codes for structures/processes which, in the context of the surrounding structures/processes
that Sb codes for, and additionally in the context of the prevailing set of probable environmental states C, will do no harm to the continuation
of the whole homeostatic and replicating structure/process.
Now consider the subset of S'b, S''b, which codes for structures/processes that have an adaptive (survival probability) advantage in
the prevailing environment C.
Evolution of any currently extant (ergo successful) structure-construction program-encoding molecule b will tend to
proceed at each step from b to a b'' which is found in S''b.
A more complex picture would see a mix of moves from b to b' (in S'b) (harmless,useless mutations) as well as moves straight
from b, or through any b', to b'' or to b''', but roughly, the end-effect is moves from b to a b'', repeat ad nauseum.
There are two constraints operating here. The first is that the program code evolution must be probable and feasible.
The second is that the work-product variation caused by the program code variation must be at least
non-destructive (so it can hang around as fodder for usefulness should the environment C change), or must be
adaptive i.e. MTBF(b'',C) > MTBF(b,C), where F, failure, is defined as loss of any existence/embodiment of the molecular
structure/bitstring b in that (causally connected) spacetime region.
That is, pseudo-mathematically speaking, the direction that evolution will tend to take.
But it leaves the question of how simple the simplest reliably surviving b + b-replicating context/machine
(i.e. the simplest self-creating Turing machine) was, and what it would have been like, chemically, and how that
worked, exactly.
The notion that life probably started by weak, stochastic replication of families of similar molecules.
By weak, is meant that the replication of the molecule/structure is more imperfect from generation to generation
than in present day life, and so a class of similar molecules (life codes) is being continued through time
rather than a singular particular molecule (same genome).
If this origin theory were true, we would expect the replication capability (continued recreation of imperfect but still somewhat replication-capable molecules)
to be robust to change of DNA/RNA even today.
By stochastic, is meant that such imperfect replication is likely to only be stochastically successful in a huge population of the
initially highly approximate (i.e. weak) replicator molecules.
In other words, we would not expect this proto-life to be as reliable at being able to continue (or to always reliably grow by recruiting
surrounding matter into high-fidelity copies.)
So we might expect these proto-life molecule soups to initially just contain in some regions higher than expected probabilities,
stochastically, from time to time, of weak-replicator molecule classes.
Perhaps there is a binary threshold of replication probability and fidelity at which the process self-sustains reliably in the
generality of environment it finds itself in. Life catches fire, and cannot easily be stopped at its matter and energy recruitment
game from that point on.
the point of it?
Oh damn, you mean I didn't shake your political identity to its core?
It's not so much a political manifesto as an explanation of some specific, even if not yet widely known or accepted implications of the thermodynamics of complex systems.
Also known perhaps as "realpolitik"
(with a dash of neo-(non-racist) sociobiology).
"I think the only constraint that there should be on an individual is the constraint from constraining others."
I'm going to give you credit and assume that you realize that is self-contradictory.
No. You are only free in your society/state as long as you conform to its laws and do not work effectively against that state. If you disobey its laws (or even its important social norms), or if you are working effectively to subvert or replace its authority, you will be done like dinner. What you have in a liberal democracy is a slightly freer state than in a less sophisticated, totalitarian state, but make no mistake, you are constrained.
The central authority and tax-collecting tendency of a state doesn't depend on how people individually want to organize things. It is an nergetically stable arrangement in a complex system, and similar complex systems will gravitate toward and fluctuate around roughly the same amount of authority/autonomy and taxation level, with some experimental variation to either side.
The tax rate (energy flow toward central authority) will be there, because co-operation automatically turns into at least slightly hierarchical co-operation, because it is more efficient to co-ordinate. (cost of communications and agreement enforcement closer to nlogn instead of n squared).
You can choose your form of hierarchical governance (if you are lucky), but you cannot choose not to be hierarchically governed to some extent. Hierarchies are latent in human society, and one will always emerge to fill a vacuum of coordination or authority. It is just a question of how big, how fair/law-based, how totalitarian etc. the emerged governance/coordination will be.
The left wing of the political spectrum tends to think tax rates/central organization should be higher. The right wing thinks it should be lower and autonomy of individuals (and of lower-level hierarchies "corporations") should be higher.
But this disagreement about tax rate is just a control system (feedback loop) that is finding a semi-acceptable middle-ground tax rate somewhere between 5% and 80%, and most probably somewhere between 15% and 45%).
Only the unwise or inexperienced think it should be zero percent. All you are doing if you say that is agreeing to be subject to whatever alternate forms of taxation will spring up in a "Mad Max" warlord-run / mafia run / corporate monopoly run / religious messiah run hodge-podge of warring hierarchies. But make no mistake. Either you will be the taxer, or you will be taxed. And if you are the taxer, you are constrained to act so as to maintain the consent of the populace, so you also are not free.
That is life. Just as life formed multi-cellular organisms, it also formed stable hierarchically organized societies of communicating, cooperating higher organisms. Yes there is Darwinian competition in there at all levels too of course, but co-operation (competition of partners at the next level of aggregation, if you will) is Darwinian too, and it is here because it survives as a stable pattern. You can try to fight it, but you will just end up in charge, or dead, and either way, you have lost your freedom.
Legitimacy is not a terribly useful or operational concept, being so subjective.
Tax is a compelled flow of work or work product from a semi-autonomous part (person/corporation) to a whole (government organization). It says to the part "You will direct to me in a usable form a fractional part of the result of your use of energy." The social contract trades this energy tribute for security and norms-enforcement services, and other globally organized services provided back to parts to tame their environment and lower their energy requirements for surviving in it.
The social contract is enforced with the grudging assent of the majority of the parts, because it enables prevention of energy-wasting social friction, and assists in the regulation of trust-and-convention-based economic co-operation among the parts. That regulated economic cooperation generates more wealth, which, through the tax portion, empowers the whole in a (virtuous) circle. The state is an organism, and you are a cell in it. You have some freedom to move in it, but it constrains you somewhat and demands that some of your work work for its purposes too. It is all for your own good (on average, measured as energy requirements per unit of survival/reproduction probability for the parts.)
It is a software money exchange system which treats financial transactions as if they were like particle collisions in a particle accelerator.
The tokens or particles mentioned below are encrypted web-service requests, except for "receiving particles" which are web service destinations for requests.
When someone wants to purchase something, a token representing a sum of money hits the vendor's receiving particle, which sends a confirmation of the payment to the payer's online identity. The vendor's particle has been pre-configured to split the payment particle into smaller particles (that add up to the payment total). One sub-particle goes to each royalty participant or supplier/distributor etc., with amount a proportion agreed on in advance.
Another sub-particle goes immediately to the relevant Federal government(s) as prescribed VAT/sales tax payment. Another sub-particle goes to another government (say state government) as its tax payment,
and the remaining sub-particle goes as a deposit request to the vendor's bank account.
The same thing could apply for taxable salary payments etc.
General point is that all due tax payments, and all supplier/royalty sharing, is handled automatically and instantly at the moment of the original payment.
Therefore, assuming that each stakeholder has the right and technical means (identity key and web-service queries) to query the history and semantics of each and only the transactions they are party to, there is no non-automated accounting to do after the fact.
Standard accounting reports (from the POV of any stakeholder) can be produced automatically by the system on demand, for purposes such as tax returns (which are then just a summary for information purposes, there is no tax to ay or return after the fact generally, because the overall state is maintained in its proper legal balance at all times.
A complicated addition could somehow adjust balances when tax credits are applied for and approved. Most of these credits would be automatically calculable by the government tax
departments because they would have had real-time
access to the relevant parts of the financial situation of the parties.
Parties (payers and vendors, employers and employees) could perhaps opt into this system
(and its inherent privacy losses) for the benefit
of not having to do any after-the-fact accounting
or payments/receiving.
Of course that was only possible because there were no friendly, polite, unobtrusive, and culturally aware and respectful American tourists there.
Countries don't usually bring libel cases when insulted. They just make war not love.
Good point. Bang on.
Now as we move to encrypted fragmented cloud storage and computing, that assumption will presumeably have to change, as it will become routine to encrypt both your stored content and its transmission. And I can see anonymization being offered as part of cloud services of the future, to prevent corporate espionage (shady forms of "business intelligence") etc.
When encryption and anonymization of net communications becomes the norm, then who do you watch, and how?
I mean. That's where I'd go fishing for people trying to communicate secrets,
if I was them.
Now I don't want to spread paranoia, but
did you know that the patent on Onion Routing was filed by the US Department of the Navy?
Look it up.
Remember kiddies. Always use your own encryption layer.
if NOT understand logic then
loop
talkTo (self, "Don't program!")
Look (@ Pretty pictures)
endloop
endif
But were you factoring in the amazing new underwater space cannon launching system?
http://gizmodo.com/5449133/jules-verne-was-almost-right