The IRS taxes a variety of benefits like that. It's another way to give you valuable things, just not Money. And as long as the IRS sees fit to tax money-based income, I don't see why they shouldn't be expected to tax Miscellaneous Other Benefits like cell phones.
Seriously, no one gets anything done in any job with their manager looking over their shoulder. This is the government. As often as not, no one gets anything done in their job without their manager looking over their shoulder.
If this can actually get workers up off their behind and actually doing the work that my tax dollars paid them to do,
I don't think I'll object too much.
A model which doesn't involve an entity like money?
Money, aside from the numbers and coins and such, in general does three things: a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account (a measuring tool for other things, if you will). Your proposed economic system would need to eliminate, or severely curtail, the need for any sort of exchanges, stores of value, and accounting.
The only way I really see this happening is some sort of central governmental-type robo-agency which automagically gives all the citizens everything they want for free. If the system fails to give people everything they want, then people will resort to bartering the things they don't want as much for things that they want more of, since people have different tastes. And the system will need to be pretty comprehensive, because people want some things (like medical care) that can currently only be provided with highly trained professionals, and being a highly trained professional is a lot of work, and most people wouldn't do it without being provided an adequate amount of... something they value.
People work because they want (and need) Stuff - food, water, medical care, entertainment, furniture, clothes, vacation travel, you name it - and the universe doesn't deliver it to them on a silver platter. Oddly enough, I don't see the universe setting itself up to hand everyone everything they want on a silver platter any time soon, so I think we'll stick with a system like the one we have for a while yet.
Granted, of course, there are far more valuable things to pursue in life than money, but one needn't demonize the stuff either.
I'd note that the boss is probably also the guy who pays for the building / the electricity / the Internet / the game subscriptions; if he's not making at least as much from this venture as he would investing those expenditures elsewhere (a money market account, or CDs, or some good index funds... or whatever they have over there in China that's readily available), then he's effectively losing money by running the business. Since the details of the business's expenditures aren't provided, I don't think anyone here can really make informed commentary on the precise level of exploitation.
I have a friend who went to an all-girls' college; she informed me that there, "co-eds" were males (there were a few, continuing-studies students I think).
Well, a quick search on Google turned up this page, and I guess she's sort of cute, but, well, hardly supremely compelling or anything like that. Perhaps it's enough to give a vague idea? I found a little more with the other search, but it's really more 'terrible, pathetic art' than 'sexy'.
I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but please! I'd hazard a bet that the majority of the leaks, especially the ones the article talks about, are fifty-cent web applications running on a LAMP stack on an ultracheap web host somewhere.
There exist bank accounts which will not charge you monthly fees; there also exist certainonlinebanks which are not only entirely free of fees (save perhaps for certain very large overdrafts, and withdrawals at certain non-affiliated ATMs) but will pay you an astonishing* 4-5% interest on the money you hold therein. If your bank charges you a $3/mo fee, then it is time to find a new bank, not abandon faith in banking altogether.
Consider that, if you could have a 4% APY account, every $900 that you have in Cash or a non-interest Checking account is effectively $3/mo you're missing out on right there. That's the opportunity cost of cash, and it's as real a cost as any other.
My money - just over $1k right now, until I start my job in a week or two - is presently sitting in ING Direct, where it's earning 4% in a checking account. A checking account! (No paper checks, but I have a debit card and can have them send paper checks to people via the mail for free, and they have enough free ATMs to meet my needs.)
Banks should be your friends, not your foes. Admittedly, using paper money can help you self-regulate spending impulses - it seems more real to be handing over a big wad of bills than swiping a little card - but this isn't some sort of travesty that I would fault the banks or credit system for, it's a matter of self control! If you want to criticize Consumerism and reckless wanton hedonism and spending and such, blame the spenders. And consider that even if you have a bank account, there's certainly no reason why you can't restrict yourself to paying with cash anyway if you've got a convenient enough ATM. Hey, the inconvenience of the ATM could convince you not-to-make even more foolish purchases. Such things are tools! They are their for your benefit as well as the banks'! Use them wisely, but use them!
* Given the present state of interest rates in this country. My Wachovia checking account earns what, 0.2%? I forget.
I'll add to this. Starting to fix the problem now is a decent idea. But we need more than just that - we need technology to fix the problem. Some of that technology is presently being developed, some of it is entering the mainstream, and some is still a long ways off.
I've heard it said that changing the climate is like steering an aircraft carrier, only a whole lot slower. The main thing I would have people consider is that panicking about the state of the atmosphere is counterproductive, and that's the biggest thing I'd complain about as a "climate myth". We are not working against some sort of impending carbon countdown doomsday clock to doom and oblivion. We're just making the climate slowly, but measurably and somewhat predictably, worse, over the coming decades.
Certainly we want to do something about this. But what
we don't need are radical, crazy things to change the course of things: it's disruptive, and won't work. We need strong measures, but they need to be flexible, and they need to give people time to adapt. Real change takes time - much longer than anyone with a political stick to shake can hope for to boost their career. You probably can't change your driving habits overnight. You probably can't go out and buy a new super-fuel-efficient Prius at the drop of a hat. (If you can, you have too much money.) Industry needs time too. I have an acquaintance who is a power plant engineer. The new plant coming online in several years' time is basically some sort of gypsum factory, or something like that (probably not actually gypsum, but I've forgotten what it was) that also happens to produce electricity. It puts out very little carbon into the atmosphere. But a power plant takes a long time to build - decades.
Of course, I think many people, and many good environmentalists, realize this. But the current state of affairs isn't a state of Good Environmentalism. It's a state of Moral Panic, of pseudoenvironmentalists chanting the "Bush-Republicans-and-Industry-are-Evil" mantra,
and politicians giving handouts instead of promoting real change
(*cough cough* I'm looking at you, Ethanol -
and also some of the stupider handouts to industry for E85 engines that never actually see a drop of the corn squeezings).
What we need isn't, as Tony Blair put it, "radical international measures" because you can't possibly hope to cut global emissions in
half overnight, short of global thermonuclear war.
What we need a good dose of Truth, and not just what Al Gore thinks of it.
We need reasonable measures.
I'm sick of the hackneyed, black-and-white, us-versus-them approach to The Environment we have today.
The world needs real solutions, not career-boosting buzzwords and political propaganda.
It's lunacy -- I heard the story a few days ago and figured there must be more to it, but having read more about it now, I don't think there is. Apparently if you have any semblance of an adult life outside school, you're unfit to teach Actually, I've been informed by a friend who is going into public school teaching that, for their first year or so, new teachers are advised to find someone else to do their laundry: they probably won't have enough time, otherwise.
Indeed. Whatever downsides layers have, they keep things sane. If you're going to make a mess of things, at least with layers you have an organized mess. There's a reason that Linux is more secure than Windows.
First of all, you broke your link - I fixed it. Secondly: according to that article, the bulk of the gripes against the court seem to be that they're out of step with Supreme Court precedent; in this case, they claim to be following it, and blame the Supreme Court for any resulting silliness. Perhaps this means it's less likely to be overturned?
Flash, I'll grant, begrudgingly (ack), but.... Flash *AND* Shockwave? And both of them on top of CSS? What are you smoking? Aside from the fact that it's not really a Piece of Software (and if it's there, why isn't HTML on your list, btw?)... as long as it's there, it ought to easily outrank both.
Pass the Macromedia^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Adobe kool-aid, wouldya?
PHP is... excessively convenient, but it is not Great. Its soul is an abominable junk-heap filled with the most disgusting assortment of rubbish imaginable, tangled up in mangled-up knots.
And then there are the pages people make using it.
Have we got Mass Media? Check. Have we got the technology for GlobeNet? Sure! Let's check this out, I guess:
"The Corporate Republic utilizes knowledge of the market place and economics to produce the greatest gold of any large empire. This government utilizes orbital communications to communicate its far-flung franchises."
"Facism rules with cruelty and lies, turning patriots into monsters while building a war machine unmatched for any medium empire. Facism is the only government to allow the Facist unit."
A comparison: Facism Corp. Republic Growth: Average Good Production: Good Good Science: Average Good Gold: Bad Good Military: Excellent Average Pollution: Average Awful Max Science Spending: 70% 60%
The money may be in Services, but from what I understand a fair chunk of the profit is in the Software. One of the reasons Services exists is to pipe money to the hardware and software divisions...
It sounds like they're just dumping their Unprofitable parts of Services. If that's the case, they might be able to clean up. The Old Contracts and such are still likely to send money to IBM Software, and many of the people who are getting laid off, if they continue to do things in the industry, may continue to do things the way they learned, the IBM way, and keep sending money there as well. (You get to say "I can work with WebSphere!" It's a selling point for yourself that you're not going to just throw away. So your next client runs on WebSphere.)
On a cosmic timescale, I can agree with you about Strong AI. But, having spent the past semester (exam on Wednesday!) learning about the state of AI, I can indeed assure you that you will need to wait quite a while before you start to see anything really Strong AIish coming to pass. Maybe towards the end of my lifetime you'll start to see something decent, but I'm guessing not. And even if they do have something by then, consider that NIs (natural intelligences) take many years (decades!) to get to the point that they do. Some of that can probably be skipped for the artificial version, but I've got little reason to doubt training the things will be Fast at all.
To be more specific, you can blame Hawaii for the sugar tariffs and the Republican Party for the corn subsidies. See, they're not really in league with the fast-food soda-pop types, they just want to bring home the $$$ to their constituents in the Midwest. (Not that pork is a Republican phenomenon itself, just the midwestern pork.)
The US price of sugar is something like five times what it is on the world market.
Have you taken a look at BP lately? British Petroleum? No, wait! If you've seen their television ads, they've rebranded: they are now beyond petroleum. Not that this actually means anything to what they're doing, in and of itself, and it's not much more than a gesture. But they can see the writing on the wall. They have some idea of what's coming. And the directors at the big companies will indeed act to preserve their future. That's what their investors have hired them to do.
The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stone. The Bronze Age didn't end because we ran out of bronze. And, likewise, the Oil Age is not going to end because we run out of oil. There will be something better, and these companies want in on it.
Sir, I appreciate your concern, but Iraq is not about oil. It's about an attempt to effect regime change in a failed state. It's about the United States trying to make the world a better place. It's about deposing evil dictators and putting up nice huggable parliaments in their place. It's about Freedom and Justice, and telling the world that Oppression is not something that will be tolerated. It's about bringing stability to the Middle East in the midst of a bunch of Islamic nations ever more and more leaning towards really honest-to-goodness Dangerous radicalism that really is a threat to the future of the freedom of the world. And, to a very small extent, about WMDs (they were more of the Excuse than the Reason, really).
It's a mediocre failure on most of those counts, and a massive failure on the others. (Especially Oil. No one in their right mind would set up an oil field that they expect to be repeatedly bombed by the locals.)
One time, I got an idea for a really neat "web mashup" (ugh, hate that name) / Google Maps "hack" - some sort of site where you could put in a WHOIS request and get a marker back on a map. Or maybe multiple sites. I figured you could do a few neat things with that. Maybe move beyond simple maps, set up some animated-time-line-thingy, oh, I don't know. You could do a variety of fun and interesting things with it, anyway.
Then I looked into actually parsing whois results, and not too long after that, gave up. Why isn't this at least marginally standardized? It's sad.
Slashdot Mirror
A POST with a unique ID of some sort generated for each form, however, will.
The IRS taxes a variety of benefits like that. It's another way to give you valuable things, just not Money. And as long as the IRS sees fit to tax money-based income, I don't see why they shouldn't be expected to tax Miscellaneous Other Benefits like cell phones.
Money, aside from the numbers and coins and such, in general does three things: a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account (a measuring tool for other things, if you will). Your proposed economic system would need to eliminate, or severely curtail, the need for any sort of exchanges, stores of value, and accounting.
The only way I really see this happening is some sort of central governmental-type robo-agency which automagically gives all the citizens everything they want for free. If the system fails to give people everything they want, then people will resort to bartering the things they don't want as much for things that they want more of, since people have different tastes. And the system will need to be pretty comprehensive, because people want some things (like medical care) that can currently only be provided with highly trained professionals, and being a highly trained professional is a lot of work, and most people wouldn't do it without being provided an adequate amount of... something they value.
People work because they want (and need) Stuff - food, water, medical care, entertainment, furniture, clothes, vacation travel, you name it - and the universe doesn't deliver it to them on a silver platter. Oddly enough, I don't see the universe setting itself up to hand everyone everything they want on a silver platter any time soon, so I think we'll stick with a system like the one we have for a while yet.
Granted, of course, there are far more valuable things to pursue in life than money, but one needn't demonize the stuff either.
Miami University-- the one in Oxford.
Ohio.
Confused yet? =)
I'd note that the boss is probably also the guy who pays for the building / the electricity / the Internet / the game subscriptions; if he's not making at least as much from this venture as he would investing those expenditures elsewhere (a money market account, or CDs, or some good index funds... or whatever they have over there in China that's readily available), then he's effectively losing money by running the business. Since the details of the business's expenditures aren't provided, I don't think anyone here can really make informed commentary on the precise level of exploitation.
I have a friend who went to an all-girls' college; she informed me that there, "co-eds" were males (there were a few, continuing-studies students I think).
Well, a quick search on Google turned up this page, and I guess she's sort of cute, but, well, hardly supremely compelling or anything like that. Perhaps it's enough to give a vague idea? I found a little more with the other search, but it's really more 'terrible, pathetic art' than 'sexy'.
I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but please! I'd hazard a bet that the majority of the leaks, especially the ones the article talks about, are fifty-cent web applications running on a LAMP stack on an ultracheap web host somewhere.
Yeah, that's it. Yep. Innovation. So.... would anyone else like to join me in tagging this story "dieinafire"? v.v
Consider that, if you could have a 4% APY account, every $900 that you have in Cash or a non-interest Checking account is effectively $3/mo you're missing out on right there. That's the opportunity cost of cash, and it's as real a cost as any other.
My money - just over $1k right now, until I start my job in a week or two - is presently sitting in ING Direct, where it's earning 4% in a checking account. A checking account! (No paper checks, but I have a debit card and can have them send paper checks to people via the mail for free, and they have enough free ATMs to meet my needs.)
Banks should be your friends, not your foes. Admittedly, using paper money can help you self-regulate spending impulses - it seems more real to be handing over a big wad of bills than swiping a little card - but this isn't some sort of travesty that I would fault the banks or credit system for, it's a matter of self control! If you want to criticize Consumerism and reckless wanton hedonism and spending and such, blame the spenders. And consider that even if you have a bank account, there's certainly no reason why you can't restrict yourself to paying with cash anyway if you've got a convenient enough ATM. Hey, the inconvenience of the ATM could convince you not-to-make even more foolish purchases. Such things are tools! They are their for your benefit as well as the banks'! Use them wisely, but use them!
* Given the present state of interest rates in this country. My Wachovia checking account earns what, 0.2%? I forget.
I've heard it said that changing the climate is like steering an aircraft carrier, only a whole lot slower. The main thing I would have people consider is that panicking about the state of the atmosphere is counterproductive, and that's the biggest thing I'd complain about as a "climate myth". We are not working against some sort of impending carbon countdown doomsday clock to doom and oblivion. We're just making the climate slowly, but measurably and somewhat predictably, worse, over the coming decades.
Certainly we want to do something about this. But what we don't need are radical, crazy things to change the course of things: it's disruptive, and won't work. We need strong measures, but they need to be flexible, and they need to give people time to adapt. Real change takes time - much longer than anyone with a political stick to shake can hope for to boost their career. You probably can't change your driving habits overnight. You probably can't go out and buy a new super-fuel-efficient Prius at the drop of a hat. (If you can, you have too much money.) Industry needs time too. I have an acquaintance who is a power plant engineer. The new plant coming online in several years' time is basically some sort of gypsum factory, or something like that (probably not actually gypsum, but I've forgotten what it was) that also happens to produce electricity. It puts out very little carbon into the atmosphere. But a power plant takes a long time to build - decades.
Of course, I think many people, and many good environmentalists, realize this. But the current state of affairs isn't a state of Good Environmentalism. It's a state of Moral Panic, of pseudoenvironmentalists chanting the "Bush-Republicans-and-Industry-are-Evil" mantra, and politicians giving handouts instead of promoting real change (*cough cough* I'm looking at you, Ethanol - and also some of the stupider handouts to industry for E85 engines that never actually see a drop of the corn squeezings). What we need isn't, as Tony Blair put it, "radical international measures" because you can't possibly hope to cut global emissions in half overnight, short of global thermonuclear war. What we need a good dose of Truth, and not just what Al Gore thinks of it. We need reasonable measures. I'm sick of the hackneyed, black-and-white, us-versus-them approach to The Environment we have today. The world needs real solutions, not career-boosting buzzwords and political propaganda.
Go track down someone from Teach for America. Try it out for a while. The money's nothing next to IT, but the Impact is there.
Indeed. Whatever downsides layers have, they keep things sane. If you're going to make a mess of things, at least with layers you have an organized mess. There's a reason that Linux is more secure than Windows.
First of all, you broke your link - I fixed it. Secondly: according to that article, the bulk of the gripes against the court seem to be that they're out of step with Supreme Court precedent; in this case, they claim to be following it, and blame the Supreme Court for any resulting silliness. Perhaps this means it's less likely to be overturned?
Pass the Macromedia^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Adobe kool-aid, wouldya?
And then there are the pages people make using it.
Have we got Mass Media? Check. Have we got the technology for GlobeNet?
Sure! Let's check this out, I guess:
"The Corporate Republic utilizes knowledge of the market place and economics
to produce the greatest gold of any large empire. This government utilizes
orbital communications to communicate its far-flung franchises."
"Facism rules with cruelty and lies, turning patriots into monsters while
building a war machine unmatched for any medium empire. Facism is the only
government to allow the Facist unit."
A comparison:
Facism Corp. Republic
Growth: Average Good
Production: Good Good
Science: Average Good
Gold: Bad Good
Military: Excellent Average
Pollution: Average Awful
Max Science Spending: 70% 60%
It sounds like they're just dumping their Unprofitable parts of Services. If that's the case, they might be able to clean up. The Old Contracts and such are still likely to send money to IBM Software, and many of the people who are getting laid off, if they continue to do things in the industry, may continue to do things the way they learned, the IBM way, and keep sending money there as well. (You get to say "I can work with WebSphere!" It's a selling point for yourself that you're not going to just throw away. So your next client runs on WebSphere.)
On a cosmic timescale, I can agree with you about Strong AI. But, having spent the past semester (exam on Wednesday!) learning about the state of AI, I can indeed assure you that you will need to wait quite a while before you start to see anything really Strong AIish coming to pass. Maybe towards the end of my lifetime you'll start to see something decent, but I'm guessing not. And even if they do have something by then, consider that NIs (natural intelligences) take many years (decades!) to get to the point that they do. Some of that can probably be skipped for the artificial version, but I've got little reason to doubt training the things will be Fast at all.
The US price of sugar is something like five times what it is on the world market.
The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stone. The Bronze Age didn't end because we ran out of bronze. And, likewise, the Oil Age is not going to end because we run out of oil. There will be something better, and these companies want in on it.
It's a mediocre failure on most of those counts, and a massive failure on the others. (Especially Oil. No one in their right mind would set up an oil field that they expect to be repeatedly bombed by the locals.)
Then I looked into actually parsing whois results, and not too long after that, gave up. Why isn't this at least marginally standardized? It's sad.