Please explain how it is possible to "misappropriate" BSD licensed code.
Again it depends on one's definitions. If I believe that my work is for taking as long as the taker contributes back to the common cause then "misappropriation" would be defined as a closed source for-profit product using my code. If on the other hand I believe that my code is to be used by anyone as long as they sing my praises in the bootup messages of their package, then "misappropriation" would be by those who try to protect their contributions from being used in such way by sticking GPL license on the code.
Let's not abuse the word freedom... Well, freedom is being free.
There is no such thing. What you mean is absolute freedom which is an abstract, unattainable, philosophical concept. In practical terms there are only limited freedoms to do some specific things. They can combine to form larger freedoms but they will never be "simply" a universal freedom.
What you have done, is to list your freedoms (or your definitions someone's else's) and claimed that my definitions are the ignorant and uninformed ones as being less "free" in some arbitrary way you measured by your own yardstick.
In case you missed it, I posted my original post in an effort to highlight that very problem that is at the heart of GPL/BSD/your-license-here discussions: various people's definition of "free" differ wildly, just like yours and mine do. That is because they focus on "freedom" from different specific restrictions and choose to ignore other restrictions they are not bothered by. So while one's person ultimate "free" license is public-domain (restricts sharing to people not bothered by the one way, coder->business path of their work), other's definition of "free" is GPL (restricts profiteering but enables sharing for those who do not find the first way acceptable).
Well that depends what you mean by "free". Freedom of the code to move around wherever? Freedom of businesses to use it with no compensation in any form? Freedom to not worry that someone will misapropriate your and the community's hard work for his/her profit while giving nothing back? Define which "freedom" do you mean, because there are certainly more then one.
Obviously you don't understand Dell's strategy in outsourcing.
I am glad that the CEO and the Board had you for coffee to explain those things to you and assure you that your continued employment is of such great importance to them. I hope it was before Mike Dell left, I hear Mrs. Dell makes great cookies.
Perheaps it will come as a bit of a shock to you then, that the word "cannot" is a flexible term closely linked to "what we can get away with" and also complimented with "pushing the envelope". The way I understand, the only permanent positions that are indeed secure are the CEO, the Board and (possibly) their favourite "assistants". Everything else is negotiable.
Yes and I will invite hordes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Cutler followers to mail bomb or better yet visit my company. You cannot seriously think that ruse is going work. The reason I post here on slashdot under pseudonym is because I do not wish to be dealing with bald-shaven, tatooed, shotgun waving adherent of some of the policies that somehow always accompany the call to unfeathered corporate power and removal of elected government (because its a monopoly, you know).
You're the one who has "wage-slave" written on your forehead.
Since I am unwilling to confront you in some parking lot, I will just have to take comfort in the simple pleasure of knowing that you are, oh so uterly, uterrly wrong on that.
So start a charity to support whatever boneheaded notions of a "good society" you have.
My vision of a good society is the one where people like you dont get their way. With all the problems western capitalist societies have as it is, we must be doing something right since you do appear to be utterly frustrated. I draw great comfort from that.
Yes it was. Your problem simply comes from a common (very very common these days) mis-understanding of what capitalism is. I dont blame you since the powers at the helm of the western societies are doing their darnest to pervert the ideal beyond recognition. Someone familiar with Adam Smith's work once said that one could contrast his idea of capitalism as "writings of a gentle, compassionate phillosopher who laboured to harness miserable human failings for the progerss of mankind" to "chimpanzee screams" that seem to have become the current definition emanating (primarilly) from the USA. Capitalism is a great thing. We cannot change the way people are, so instead we created conditions whereby their vices can be turned to do good. This is a masterpiece of thinking and it should be admired for its cleverness.
German people that he could create more wealth, provide better medical care, raise the standard of living,
He indeed promised all of those things and what he meant is that he would achieve them all via granting the wealthiests of Germany's capitalists urparallelled priviledges, including slave labour. Hitler was a fascist and if you look that name in a dictionary you will find that it is defined as "collusion of big business and government". While I can think of great evils being commited in the name of Communism and also religions of all sorts, giving Hitler's Germany as axample of non-capitalist excesses is a bit amusing.
When you think things through, you will eventually understand that root of all sorts of evils in our societies can traced to concentration of wealth and power. Nothing is more prominent as an example of most outrageous of these excesses as a modern pan-national corporation.
I understand your outrage at some corrupt large corporations, but I think you should realize that not all corporations become like this, and there are many honest people running businesses.
While there are many honest people in even large businesses, the problem is systematic. That is a system has to be in place that promotes and rewards responsible behaviour and penalizes anti-social one. The establishment of present day corporations is simply a bad move, made with good intentions but as many often do turn out, with insufficient foresight. The rules of the game are such that they work in the opposite direction to what should be happenning, i.e. they reward bad behaviour while penalizing responsible one.
The fact that some people still manage to make the right choices despite the conditions, is not an argument for keeping the current situation unchanged.
The point is that this situation is temporary. Natural progress of outsourcing (that is moving the capital about while preventing workers from following) is the overall reduction of wages of all workers. That is in addition to the constantly shrinking number of such well paid jobs which the oustourcing company is retaining at a minimum possible level in the victim country that still enables it to function. Optimal situation for an outsourcer is to retain the US based board of directors and ship all of its employment out to the country whos workers are willing to get paid the least and whose government is willing to make sure that the workers do not ever ask for more.
Not the kind of people that own these companies. Business rules (corporate rules more so) are so biased at this point towards the richest people that it is not even funny anymore. Very few of them pay any taxes themselves and yet are able to hijack the government's agenda and taxpayer's funds with ease.
I inherited some shares of Tyco.... I am a criminal due to actions
You are being silly. Tycho's CEO is in trouble because he fleeced you and more importantly people who have far, far more shares then you. You are his victim. So in this case, you bear no responsibility even if this was some other sort of business arrangement. On the other hand if Tyco started selling chemical weapons to Usamas of the world and you participated by making oodles of money via your dividends, you would be guilty, because you did nothing to stop it (as for example voting the CEO out or refusing to accept the dividends).
That would be also true if you worked for Papa's Joe Flipping Burger Stand on a corner down the street.
The money my coworkers pay in taxes
See above.
The money Dell stockholders pay in capital gains taxes.
Which is next to nil since capital gains are most aggressively exempt from taxes in various ways, even more so in the Bush tax cutting plan. Besides many of those shareholders are large corporations who in turn do their damnest to avoid any by offshore operations.
The sales tax from the computers Dell sells.
See the burger stand again.
The cost Dell pays DHL to ship the systems
Oh you got me there. No wait, if Papa does catering he might pay that neighbour's kid to deliver his burgers.
All of those virtues of Dell are satisfied by ANY business, and far more so one that does not offshore because unlike Dell, all of its workers contribute to their society's infrastructure. Offshoring would pass the social responsibility test if the country which you offshoring to had similiar living standards and conditions as the one you are offshoring from and their companies were in turn offshoring to here. Otherwise you are playing two groups of workers against each other to see who gives up more, while you yourself laugh all the way to the bank. That is not something sane societies should allow.
Find the loop holes in the law, they are not just for certain people, they are for anyone that finds them.
You sadly missed the whole point of my rants. It became clear to me belatedly, that running a business is about social responsibility. Yes, I want to make money, but I cannot have clear conscience if I make money in a way which destroys the very fabric of our society. Capitalism is supposed to be this clever ploy to take whats evil and destructive (greed) and turn it into something good (wealth, medical care, standard of living, progress of science etc). If you "circumvent" the system for your own greater, faster profit (even if that ruse is available to anyone) it destroys the whole purpose of the excercise.
Re:There are fewer corps! why does this surprise?
on
Dell CEO Tells All
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Of course corporations contribute less, there are fewer of them.
That would be a valid argument if corporations had the same sort of income ranges as regular people. Unfortunately some few corporations exceed in income all of the wage earners in the country combined. Some have incomes exceeding that of GDP of many a small country. Clearly comparing corporation count to that of regular income earners is pointless.
Well, we out in the working world could care less if you're "against" corporations.
I have news for you. I do not presume to guess your age but odds are that I have been in the "working" world probably longer then you. On top of that I do own a buisness and to make things funnier I used to be a shareholder of a corporation. Like most people with any sort of integrity I learned as I went and my present views are a culmination of my experiences in my rather longish career in IT industry. I say this so that you can cease your rather amusing barking. "Liberal!", "Student!", "Ninny!", "Government", "Arghhh!". Do stop or you are likely to start biting people on their legs soon.
Corporations provide a wealth of jobs and products and services - more so than any other business types
Most businesses are corporations because they would be silly not to take advantage of such a great deal but this deal is far sweeter if you are large enough. Should the corporation be returned to its rightful place as a special social charter, most would happilly be partnersbips and sole propriatorships and provide just as many jobs and products. Besides it would help your cause if you were to provide any proof to your claim, since you do not seem to realize that products of major corporations are mere assemblies of components from bewildering numbers of sources many of which are not corporations but in fact partnerships etc.
As for businesses being bigger than governments, so what? You anti-corporate ninnies never realize that governments are the worst type of monopolies
It is patently obvious that discussion with you is pointless. Let me solve your problem for you. No you cannot be Bill Gates. No you will not con everyone out of millions for your one-of-the-kind 20-fold patented software. The super-duper-pan-national-mega-corporation you are dreaming of starting up in your basement will not be larger then CocaCola. Thus you do not need to defend every stupidity and excess large pan-nationals engage in, so that when yours finally makes it grand entrance, you get to play by those generous rules. Give it up. You have "Wage slave" written on your forehead. How do I know? Because only someone destined to be one could be so eager to defend his master.
As to government being a monopoly? On what? Lawmaking? Regulation? Law enforcement? You bloody bet! And that is how it should be. Sure, democratic process can have major flaws but most people will take it over hereditary-feudal-lordship, corporate edition, anytime.
why single out corporations? Why not rail against LLC's, partnerships, and other business types?
Because unlike corporations, these are not easilly capable of the same sort of abuses. All forms of partnerships and sole propriatorships are much harder to manouver in order to avoid taxes and personal responsibility.
In general I am against two things: corporations (too much potential for abuse in the name of protection from "frivolous" lawsuits) and pan-national business in general (because no business should rival elected government in power and reach). These are simple things really. I am not anti-capitalist at all, I am simply anti-highway-robberry-in-broad-daylight, which is what those accusing me here of being "brainwashed" seem to find desirable.
boycott them - starting with your computer
I see, so by this logic, if a citizen of Soviet USSR were to revolt against it, he should boycott his food, shoes and the flat he was living in since he was deprived of choices by the system he was living in?
I have nothing against purposeful capitalism. That is whereby, as Adam Smith wisely designed, the animalistic instincts of greed, agression and possessiveness that humans are unable to grow out of are harnessed for the collective good of the society. Not the kind where these instincts are used to create even more greed, aggression and possesivenes. You know the kind of thing various far right-wing nuts propose to make things more "efficient" while they mumble "and I will really fuck everyone in the ass then!" in anticipation to themselves.
sue you for all you're worth
That is a failing of a legal system not of the business model. Institionalized avoidance of responsibility because someone "might" bring "frivolous" suit forward is the same kind of idea as locking people up because they "look like" terrorists or invading countries "pre-emptively" based on ones "reliable hunches". Curiously enough proponents of corporate freedom from responsibility often subscribe to these notions. Funny coincidence, that.
If the United States abolished corporate income tax
So let me get this straight.. you propose that abusive ficticious legal entities which in order to protect the business elites are considered "persons" and thus are "responsible" for damages they cause instead of their owners, be exempt from any taxes on top of that? So those who benefit the least from the way our crazed version of capitalist society operates are to pay the most in order for these corporations to quarduple their income? And than to force this system upon the rest of the world in a classic "race to the bottom" fashion? All in name of "efficiency"? I mean "efficiency" and not the conditions of living of citizens are the goal of this entire excercise called "society", no? Am I reading this right? So lets see, real citizens create conditions for the ficticious citizens to prosper, pay for the infrastructure of the society, education, medical care, roads and security and then the ficticious citizens are to make vast profits free of taxes and invest them in foreign locations and/or dispesne them in tax free ways to those strange beings known as CEOs or Directors. Right? Thats the plan?
Get a grip man. Corporations are your enemy. Small "inefficient" businesses employ vast majority of workers worldwide and their output constitutes vast majority of world's products. Great majority of those businesses operate within a single country. Most have deep roots in their communities and are active in them. And they very rarely move. Large corporations are the leeches that suck the planet dry and play goverments across the globe against each other, states in those countries against each other, cities against each other and individual workers against each other to achieve their only goal: to enrich the CEO and in some rare instances their large institutional investors. Boosting the said CEO's ego by acquiring rival corporations also plays a large part. They are an abberration of captialism that is probably making Adam Smith spin in his grave.
Remember this: the most "efficient" corporation is one that collects revenue for nothing, employs noone and all of its other expenses are picked up by individual taxpayers while the corporation itself pays no taxes. I dont want to live in a world where your "efficient" corporations rule.
government is on the take...as long as you submit to double taxation
Now you are starting to see the light. Government is not really on the take financially, however it wishes that corporations appear to contribute heavilly to justify their vast priviledges.
In reality, corporations have really no right to exist in a civilised society. They are instruments created by the priviledged to make themselves immune from responsibility and at the same time to avoid any tax burden. The double taxation is a red herring since as others pointed out here, the corporation already has a vast range of ways to avoid any taxes at its disposal (offshore havens are just one of many) and its managers have yet another set of ways to avoid their personal income taxes. This of course applies only to corporations that count, i.e. those who are large enough to have the needed power. Anything small in our current, perverted version of capitalism is by definition powerless.
In short, the corporation is (for those who have a clue how to play the game) the best of both worlds whereby no tax and next to no personal responsibility for one's actions can be achieved at the same time.
And of course one has to admire the results of propaganda by the corporatists in corporate owned media that results in someone being so overhwelmingly naive that he proposes to make the underhanded tax crookery practiced by the corporation and its beneficiaries totally official and above board.
You, Sir, are like a chicken that finds itself staring at its doom in a pot and so it helpfuly offers to pluck its own feathers so that those who are about to eat it need not to be bothered needlessly. Because plucking and cooking would constitute "double effort" and thus would be "unfair" to the cook.
Any why should a corporation pay any taxes.A corporation is a fictitious entity...
If that was indeed a case, you would be right. However in order to exempt themselves from all responsibility for their actions, people who hide behind this ficticious entity insisted that laws be drawn to make corporation a "person" in all respects of the law. That way that ficticious person is responsible for any damages caused by its actions and not those who actually make the decisions that lead to those actions. You cannot have it both ways. What you described is called in legal terms a "partnership" and is wholly distinct from a concept of a corporation which is in most respects a living person. (yes its stupid but thats how billionaires like to make sure that some grandma whose toaster exploded killing her grandchildren wont get hold of the CEO's yacht).
So in a partnership, each individual is responsible for paying their share of taxes based on their slice of the revenue. In a corporation, the corporation itself is responsible for its own taxes and the CEO only pays tax on his "salary" which usually is $1 and he collects "dividends" and what not in convoluted transactions that result in his tax burden being nil.
Take all that goddam money that flows back into the US
Could you enlighten me how exactly is that money flowing back into the US from the off-shore banks and tax havens that exempt the corporation from taxes, or perheaps from the workers making all the products Dell resells who collect their paycheques in China, Thailand etc and spend all their money in... wait for it... China and Thailand (big surprise here).
Oh for Christ's sake, it's a reboot, it doesn't take hours. It takes about two minutes.
What he means is that on a production server you cant just pull the plug to reboot (even if it took 1 second flat) until the last workaholic leaves his beancounting or whatnot at 7pm. IT is an internal service within a company and you dance around others who do earn the actual revenue which you are blowing from the company's gazoo in general direction of Billy Gates.
That is still the part Microsoft doesnt get, insisting that IT is a princeling of corporate departaments which can at its whim bring the company up and down and spend all of its money on bullshit. Apparently you are also under this impression.
fucking rate at which MASS GRAVES are being filled with enemies of Saddam and those that were raped and killed by his sadistic gits Ussay and Quasay for their personal amusement?
Those things you do compare with mass graves being filled with bodies of the residends of places like Falluja killed by the marines and children being
tortured in front of their mothers in Abu Ghraib.
You are clearly a victim of a brainwashing of you believe that Iraq war was an improvement for the iraqis over their previous situation. Saddam was a brutal tyrant in need of removal, but ends do not justify the means. Or actually they do if you are a muslim fundamentalist or a born-again christian nutjob.
Slashdot Mirror
Again it depends on one's definitions. If I believe that my work is for taking as long as the taker contributes back to the common cause then "misappropriation" would be defined as a closed source for-profit product using my code. If on the other hand I believe that my code is to be used by anyone as long as they sing my praises in the bootup messages of their package, then "misappropriation" would be by those who try to protect their contributions from being used in such way by sticking GPL license on the code.
There is no such thing. What you mean is absolute freedom which is an abstract, unattainable, philosophical concept. In practical terms there are only limited freedoms to do some specific things. They can combine to form larger freedoms but they will never be "simply" a universal freedom.
What you have done, is to list your freedoms (or your definitions someone's else's) and claimed that my definitions are the ignorant and uninformed ones as being less "free" in some arbitrary way you measured by your own yardstick.
In case you missed it, I posted my original post in an effort to highlight that very problem that is at the heart of GPL/BSD/your-license-here discussions: various people's definition of "free" differ wildly, just like yours and mine do. That is because they focus on "freedom" from different specific restrictions and choose to ignore other restrictions they are not bothered by. So while one's person ultimate "free" license is public-domain (restricts sharing to people not bothered by the one way, coder->business path of their work), other's definition of "free" is GPL (restricts profiteering but enables sharing for those who do not find the first way acceptable).
Well that depends what you mean by "free". Freedom of the code to move around wherever? Freedom of businesses to use it with no compensation in any form? Freedom to not worry that someone will misapropriate your and the community's hard work for his/her profit while giving nothing back? Define which "freedom" do you mean, because there are certainly more then one.
I am glad that the CEO and the Board had you for coffee to explain those things to you and assure you that your continued employment is of such great importance to them. I hope it was before Mike Dell left, I hear Mrs. Dell makes great cookies.
Perheaps it will come as a bit of a shock to you then, that the word "cannot" is a flexible term closely linked to "what we can get away with" and also complimented with "pushing the envelope". The way I understand, the only permanent positions that are indeed secure are the CEO, the Board and (possibly) their favourite "assistants". Everything else is negotiable.
Yes and I will invite hordes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Cutler followers to mail bomb or better yet visit my company. You cannot seriously think that ruse is going work. The reason I post here on slashdot under pseudonym is because I do not wish to be dealing with bald-shaven, tatooed, shotgun waving adherent of some of the policies that somehow always accompany the call to unfeathered corporate power and removal of elected government (because its a monopoly, you know).
You're the one who has "wage-slave" written on your forehead.
Since I am unwilling to confront you in some parking lot, I will just have to take comfort in the simple pleasure of knowing that you are, oh so uterly, uterrly wrong on that.
My vision of a good society is the one where people like you dont get their way. With all the problems western capitalist societies have as it is, we must be doing something right since you do appear to be utterly frustrated. I draw great comfort from that.
Yes it was. Your problem simply comes from a common (very very common these days) mis-understanding of what capitalism is. I dont blame you since the powers at the helm of the western societies are doing their darnest to pervert the ideal beyond recognition. Someone familiar with Adam Smith's work once said that one could contrast his idea of capitalism as "writings of a gentle, compassionate phillosopher who laboured to harness miserable human failings for the progerss of mankind" to "chimpanzee screams" that seem to have become the current definition emanating (primarilly) from the USA. Capitalism is a great thing. We cannot change the way people are, so instead we created conditions whereby their vices can be turned to do good. This is a masterpiece of thinking and it should be admired for its cleverness.
German people that he could create more wealth, provide better medical care, raise the standard of living,
He indeed promised all of those things and what he meant is that he would achieve them all via granting the wealthiests of Germany's capitalists urparallelled priviledges, including slave labour. Hitler was a fascist and if you look that name in a dictionary you will find that it is defined as "collusion of big business and government". While I can think of great evils being commited in the name of Communism and also religions of all sorts, giving Hitler's Germany as axample of non-capitalist excesses is a bit amusing.
When you think things through, you will eventually understand that root of all sorts of evils in our societies can traced to concentration of wealth and power. Nothing is more prominent as an example of most outrageous of these excesses as a modern pan-national corporation.
While there are many honest people in even large businesses, the problem is systematic. That is a system has to be in place that promotes and rewards responsible behaviour and penalizes anti-social one. The establishment of present day corporations is simply a bad move, made with good intentions but as many often do turn out, with insufficient foresight. The rules of the game are such that they work in the opposite direction to what should be happenning, i.e. they reward bad behaviour while penalizing responsible one.
The fact that some people still manage to make the right choices despite the conditions, is not an argument for keeping the current situation unchanged.
The point is that this situation is temporary. Natural progress of outsourcing (that is moving the capital about while preventing workers from following) is the overall reduction of wages of all workers. That is in addition to the constantly shrinking number of such well paid jobs which the oustourcing company is retaining at a minimum possible level in the victim country that still enables it to function. Optimal situation for an outsourcer is to retain the US based board of directors and ship all of its employment out to the country whos workers are willing to get paid the least and whose government is willing to make sure that the workers do not ever ask for more.
Not the kind of people that own these companies. Business rules (corporate rules more so) are so biased at this point towards the richest people that it is not even funny anymore. Very few of them pay any taxes themselves and yet are able to hijack the government's agenda and taxpayer's funds with ease.
You are being silly. Tycho's CEO is in trouble because he fleeced you and more importantly people who have far, far more shares then you. You are his victim. So in this case, you bear no responsibility even if this was some other sort of business arrangement. On the other hand if Tyco started selling chemical weapons to Usamas of the world and you participated by making oodles of money via your dividends, you would be guilty, because you did nothing to stop it (as for example voting the CEO out or refusing to accept the dividends).
That would be also true if you worked for Papa's Joe Flipping Burger Stand on a corner down the street.
The money my coworkers pay in taxes
See above.
The money Dell stockholders pay in capital gains taxes.
Which is next to nil since capital gains are most aggressively exempt from taxes in various ways, even more so in the Bush tax cutting plan. Besides many of those shareholders are large corporations who in turn do their damnest to avoid any by offshore operations.
The sales tax from the computers Dell sells.
See the burger stand again.
The cost Dell pays DHL to ship the systems
Oh you got me there. No wait, if Papa does catering he might pay that neighbour's kid to deliver his burgers.
All of those virtues of Dell are satisfied by ANY business, and far more so one that does not offshore because unlike Dell, all of its workers contribute to their society's infrastructure. Offshoring would pass the social responsibility test if the country which you offshoring to had similiar living standards and conditions as the one you are offshoring from and their companies were in turn offshoring to here. Otherwise you are playing two groups of workers against each other to see who gives up more, while you yourself laugh all the way to the bank. That is not something sane societies should allow.
You sadly missed the whole point of my rants. It became clear to me belatedly, that running a business is about social responsibility. Yes, I want to make money, but I cannot have clear conscience if I make money in a way which destroys the very fabric of our society. Capitalism is supposed to be this clever ploy to take whats evil and destructive (greed) and turn it into something good (wealth, medical care, standard of living, progress of science etc). If you "circumvent" the system for your own greater, faster profit (even if that ruse is available to anyone) it destroys the whole purpose of the excercise.
That would be a valid argument if corporations had the same sort of income ranges as regular people. Unfortunately some few corporations exceed in income all of the wage earners in the country combined. Some have incomes exceeding that of GDP of many a small country. Clearly comparing corporation count to that of regular income earners is pointless.
I have news for you. I do not presume to guess your age but odds are that I have been in the "working" world probably longer then you. On top of that I do own a buisness and to make things funnier I used to be a shareholder of a corporation. Like most people with any sort of integrity I learned as I went and my present views are a culmination of my experiences in my rather longish career in IT industry. I say this so that you can cease your rather amusing barking. "Liberal!", "Student!", "Ninny!", "Government", "Arghhh!". Do stop or you are likely to start biting people on their legs soon.
Corporations provide a wealth of jobs and products and services - more so than any other business types
Most businesses are corporations because they would be silly not to take advantage of such a great deal but this deal is far sweeter if you are large enough. Should the corporation be returned to its rightful place as a special social charter, most would happilly be partnersbips and sole propriatorships and provide just as many jobs and products. Besides it would help your cause if you were to provide any proof to your claim, since you do not seem to realize that products of major corporations are mere assemblies of components from bewildering numbers of sources many of which are not corporations but in fact partnerships etc.As for businesses being bigger than governments, so what? You anti-corporate ninnies never realize that governments are the worst type of monopolies
It is patently obvious that discussion with you is pointless. Let me solve your problem for you. No you cannot be Bill Gates. No you will not con everyone out of millions for your one-of-the-kind 20-fold patented software. The super-duper-pan-national-mega-corporation you are dreaming of starting up in your basement will not be larger then CocaCola. Thus you do not need to defend every stupidity and excess large pan-nationals engage in, so that when yours finally makes it grand entrance, you get to play by those generous rules. Give it up. You have "Wage slave" written on your forehead. How do I know? Because only someone destined to be one could be so eager to defend his master.
As to government being a monopoly? On what? Lawmaking? Regulation? Law enforcement? You bloody bet! And that is how it should be. Sure, democratic process can have major flaws but most people will take it over hereditary-feudal-lordship, corporate edition, anytime.
Because unlike corporations, these are not easilly capable of the same sort of abuses. All forms of partnerships and sole propriatorships are much harder to manouver in order to avoid taxes and personal responsibility.
In general I am against two things: corporations (too much potential for abuse in the name of protection from "frivolous" lawsuits) and pan-national business in general (because no business should rival elected government in power and reach). These are simple things really. I am not anti-capitalist at all, I am simply anti-highway-robberry-in-broad-daylight, which is what those accusing me here of being "brainwashed" seem to find desirable.
boycott them - starting with your computer
I see, so by this logic, if a citizen of Soviet USSR were to revolt against it, he should boycott his food, shoes and the flat he was living in since he was deprived of choices by the system he was living in?
I have nothing against purposeful capitalism. That is whereby, as Adam Smith wisely designed, the animalistic instincts of greed, agression and possessiveness that humans are unable to grow out of are harnessed for the collective good of the society. Not the kind where these instincts are used to create even more greed, aggression and possesivenes. You know the kind of thing various far right-wing nuts propose to make things more "efficient" while they mumble "and I will really fuck everyone in the ass then!" in anticipation to themselves.
sue you for all you're worth
That is a failing of a legal system not of the business model. Institionalized avoidance of responsibility because someone "might" bring "frivolous" suit forward is the same kind of idea as locking people up because they "look like" terrorists or invading countries "pre-emptively" based on ones "reliable hunches". Curiously enough proponents of corporate freedom from responsibility often subscribe to these notions. Funny coincidence, that.
So let me get this straight.. you propose that abusive ficticious legal entities which in order to protect the business elites are considered "persons" and thus are "responsible" for damages they cause instead of their owners, be exempt from any taxes on top of that? So those who benefit the least from the way our crazed version of capitalist society operates are to pay the most in order for these corporations to quarduple their income? And than to force this system upon the rest of the world in a classic "race to the bottom" fashion? All in name of "efficiency"? I mean "efficiency" and not the conditions of living of citizens are the goal of this entire excercise called "society", no? Am I reading this right? So lets see, real citizens create conditions for the ficticious citizens to prosper, pay for the infrastructure of the society, education, medical care, roads and security and then the ficticious citizens are to make vast profits free of taxes and invest them in foreign locations and/or dispesne them in tax free ways to those strange beings known as CEOs or Directors. Right? Thats the plan?
Get a grip man. Corporations are your enemy. Small "inefficient" businesses employ vast majority of workers worldwide and their output constitutes vast majority of world's products. Great majority of those businesses operate within a single country. Most have deep roots in their communities and are active in them. And they very rarely move. Large corporations are the leeches that suck the planet dry and play goverments across the globe against each other, states in those countries against each other, cities against each other and individual workers against each other to achieve their only goal: to enrich the CEO and in some rare instances their large institutional investors. Boosting the said CEO's ego by acquiring rival corporations also plays a large part. They are an abberration of captialism that is probably making Adam Smith spin in his grave.
Remember this: the most "efficient" corporation is one that collects revenue for nothing, employs noone and all of its other expenses are picked up by individual taxpayers while the corporation itself pays no taxes. I dont want to live in a world where your "efficient" corporations rule.
Now you are starting to see the light. Government is not really on the take financially, however it wishes that corporations appear to contribute heavilly to justify their vast priviledges.
In reality, corporations have really no right to exist in a civilised society. They are instruments created by the priviledged to make themselves immune from responsibility and at the same time to avoid any tax burden. The double taxation is a red herring since as others pointed out here, the corporation already has a vast range of ways to avoid any taxes at its disposal (offshore havens are just one of many) and its managers have yet another set of ways to avoid their personal income taxes. This of course applies only to corporations that count, i.e. those who are large enough to have the needed power. Anything small in our current, perverted version of capitalism is by definition powerless.
In short, the corporation is (for those who have a clue how to play the game) the best of both worlds whereby no tax and next to no personal responsibility for one's actions can be achieved at the same time.
And of course one has to admire the results of propaganda by the corporatists in corporate owned media that results in someone being so overhwelmingly naive that he proposes to make the underhanded tax crookery practiced by the corporation and its beneficiaries totally official and above board.
You, Sir, are like a chicken that finds itself staring at its doom in a pot and so it helpfuly offers to pluck its own feathers so that those who are about to eat it need not to be bothered needlessly. Because plucking and cooking would constitute "double effort" and thus would be "unfair" to the cook.
If that was indeed a case, you would be right. However in order to exempt themselves from all responsibility for their actions, people who hide behind this ficticious entity insisted that laws be drawn to make corporation a "person" in all respects of the law. That way that ficticious person is responsible for any damages caused by its actions and not those who actually make the decisions that lead to those actions. You cannot have it both ways. What you described is called in legal terms a "partnership" and is wholly distinct from a concept of a corporation which is in most respects a living person. (yes its stupid but thats how billionaires like to make sure that some grandma whose toaster exploded killing her grandchildren wont get hold of the CEO's yacht).
So in a partnership, each individual is responsible for paying their share of taxes based on their slice of the revenue. In a corporation, the corporation itself is responsible for its own taxes and the CEO only pays tax on his "salary" which usually is $1 and he collects "dividends" and what not in convoluted transactions that result in his tax burden being nil.
Could you enlighten me how exactly is that money flowing back into the US from the off-shore banks and tax havens that exempt the corporation from taxes, or perheaps from the workers making all the products Dell resells who collect their paycheques in China, Thailand etc and spend all their money in ... wait for it... China and Thailand (big surprise here).
Sorry for my fuzzy math here, the percentages are more like 84% individuals and 16% corporations.
From IRS
Sorry to burst your patriotic bubble, but:
- Plains - France (Ader flew first powered plane)
- Trains - Britain (Stephenson locomotive)
- Automobiles - Germany (Karl Benz - yea the one and the same Benz of "Mercedes Benz")
- Computers - Britain (the WWII cypher cracking Colossus)
- Networks - Britain (Donald Davies is the dude who put the "P" in the TCP/IP as he invented the term "packet switching network")
Jolly good jingoistic try though. Keep up the good trolling.What he means is that on a production server you cant just pull the plug to reboot (even if it took 1 second flat) until the last workaholic leaves his beancounting or whatnot at 7pm. IT is an internal service within a company and you dance around others who do earn the actual revenue which you are blowing from the company's gazoo in general direction of Billy Gates.
That is still the part Microsoft doesnt get, insisting that IT is a princeling of corporate departaments which can at its whim bring the company up and down and spend all of its money on bullshit. Apparently you are also under this impression.
Those things you do compare with mass graves being filled with bodies of the residends of places like Falluja killed by the marines and children being tortured in front of their mothers in Abu Ghraib.
You are clearly a victim of a brainwashing of you believe that Iraq war was an improvement for the iraqis over their previous situation. Saddam was a brutal tyrant in need of removal, but ends do not justify the means. Or actually they do if you are a muslim fundamentalist or a born-again christian nutjob.