The Wired article doesn't provide it, and makes it sound like the proposition passed with an 81% Yes vote because people want to track registered sex offenders' Internet activity.
The proposition was billed as the human trafficking and penalties initiative. Its main focus was on increasing penalties for those convicted of human trafficking (mostly kids and women into prostitution). That's why it passed with such a high percentage of Yes votes. The part about sex offenders' Internet activity was a single sentence buried in the middle of the voter pamphlet's summary description, so probably was glazed over by most voters.
I was baffled why something whose main provision seemed like such a no-brainer was even a proposition. It sounded like something the legislature should've been able to pass in 5 minutes. So I did a bit more research and dug up this article explaining why it may not be very helpful, counter-intuitive as that seems. That's something you have to be careful of with these ballot propositions - if it sounds like a simple Yes vote, you need to ask yourself, "What's the catch? Why hasn't the legislature passed this already?"
People always die, selecting who lives based on who has the most money is immoral.
Canada provides a basic level of universal health care. If you wish to supplement that with private insurance or personal funds, you can. So even there they do in fact select who lives based on who has the most money.
So perhaps it's more accurate to say "refusing to provide basic medical care (up to $x in cost) due to inability to pay is immoral." In that respect the U.S. is already there - it is illegal for hospital emergency rooms to turn away patients due to inability to pay.
The U.S. health care system is screwed up in a different way. Even before Obamacare, government spending on health care per capita exceeded what Canada was spending. That is, the U.S. government was already spending enough on health care to provide each of its citizens with Canadian-style coverage, and we still had a worse health care system. Canadians spending an extended time in the U.S. have to deal with this with supplemental insurance. The Canadian government will only pay for treatment in the U.S. up to what equivalent treatment would cost in Canada. Anything above that has to be paid out of pocket or by supplemental insurance.
There is no perfect election system. The bottom line is any representative system is going to have shortcomings. Some will be better than others in certain situations, which means for a given range of situations some will on average be better. I'd argue the U.S. system could be improved substantially with instant run-off voting. But the bottom line is any system will always have areas where "it can be improved." The problem is those improvements cause deficiencies elsewhere.
The balanced budget under Clinton was largely attributable to the bubble. The spending cuts in particular are mostly attributable to Newt and the Republicans who swept into power in 1994. Still, spending under Clinton never actually fell below the historical average for tax revenue - it was the spike in revenue due to the tech bubble which turned it into a balanced budget. In fact, if you look at the numbers behind the red line, you'll find Bush's budgets over 8 years actually spent slightly less on average (as percent of GDP) than Clinton's budgets for 8 years.
Bush did plenty of stupid things himself (the stupid tax cuts and the Iraq war). But the narrative that everything bad was his fault simply isn't true.
tl;dr version is that the H1B program short-circuits the natural market dynamic: Shortage of engineers -> salaries for engineers increases -> more kids study to become engineers -> more engineers -> salaries for engineers decreases.
The much larger pool of foreign engineers acts like an electrical ground at a lower potential (lower salary expectation). The H1B program shorts the above system by connecting it to that ground. Perpetually low engineer salaries -> lack of incentive for native students to enter engineering fields -> lack of native engineers -> (perverse) rationale for expanding the H1B program.
People make verbal arguments which try to explain why the above doesn't happen. But if you model it as a control system it's pretty obvious what the steady state response is. Unfortunately almost none of our lawmakers have engineering backgrounds so have no clue what my previous sentence means. They get swayed by the verbal argument instead.
The one benefit the H1B program does bring is that it encourages skilled foreign workers to immigrate to the U.S. It's just that while that's a laudable goal with all other things remaining constant, it mostly defeats its own purpose if it reduces the number of native-born students entering engineering fields.
Bush wasn't afraid of a quagmire. He respected the UN. The UN mandate only authorized us to eject Iraq from Kuwait, nothing more. So that's all he felt we could do. That was the reason he did not come to the defense of Iraqis rebelling against Saddam after the war. He didn't protect them until the UN authorized the no-fly zones over Northern and Southern Iraq.
Bush Jr. OTOH decided the UN was unimportant and invaded Iraq on his own.
I originally found them at Office Max. Later Home Depot started carrying them. Other stores may carry them now. They're $5-$6 for fifty 8" long strips. That's 10-12 cents apiece, and being velcro they're much more versatile than traditional plastic cable ties. You just tear one off, wrap it around the cable bundle, and the velcro sticks to itself - takes just a couple seconds. If you mess up, it's velcro so you just lift it up and try again. No need to cut them or fiddle with a knife to release them like you do with plastic cable ties. They come with a little hole at one end if you want to affix it around a single cable for a more permanent (but reusable) installation.
I use em for network cables, video cables, audio cables, wrapping cables around ducting, hanging a picture frame on a fence, everything. I've used one to hold down a broken switch on a kitchen faucet. Heck, I've used them to create a hanging cradle to isolate HDD vibrations and noise from a computer case. They're very handy.
Can someone tell me why voter registration can't happen at the polls?
So someone doesn't go to one poll, registers, votes, goes to another poll, registers, votes, repeat.
Remember, your ballot is not linked to your voter registration. Once your ballot drops into the box, it is anonymous and decoupled from any means to identify whose ballot it is. There's no way to separate out the multiple fraudulent ballots dropped in by someone perpetrating the above scam, so any fraud needs to be stopped before the actual vote. Hence the delay between registration and when you can actually vote. During the delay, they're verifying that yes indeed you are eligible to vote, and are switching your registration from your old voting precinct to your new one.
Sorry, screwed up the html and lost the link to the LTE royalty rates. Here it is (PDF). And to address the anonymous comment claiming it's a percentage of the cost of the LTE radio, the PDF makes it pretty clear that it's a "percent of the sale price of the handset."
I agree with the reasons you list, and think this whole fiasco is Apple's fault. But there's another possible reason here, one that I think is much more likely:
Google wants Apple to stew in the mess it created by dropping Google Maps. They want to delay the (re)introduction of Google Maps for iOS for as long as they can without letting Apple's Maps app gain traction. But they don't want people blaming them for the delay. They want people blaming Apple. So they make a lot of noise about how it'll take them a long time to prepare the app, how it's likely Apple will reject it, etc.
The reason I think it's the more likely reason is because Google doesn't need to create a Google Maps app for iOS. They already have one - the one Apple yanked with iOS 6. Unless their contract with Apple stipulates they can't release it as a regular App Store app, they could've submitted it to the App Store the day after Apple announced iOS 6. If the contract had stipulated that, I think we would've heard of it by now. The anti-Apple PR from saying "We cannot release Google Maps for iOS yet because our contract with Apple prohibits it, and there's still a year left in the contract." would have been priceless.
They don't even need to delay their app to add turn-by-turn navigation. They can introduce it as-is (as it was in iOS 5). Then roll out an update once they have turn-by-turn navigation ready. So I'm pretty sure the delay in getting Google Maps in the App Store is entirely to make Apple lie in the bed it made for itself.
Yes, but a dollar figure sets a minimum bar for the cost of the device. If 100 companies when after Apple, all claiming 2.5% of the cost of the device, the device would have to cost at least 2.5 times what it costs. Percentages are an impossible and unfounded way to demand royalties from another group.
This study puts the average royalty rate for a patent in the electronics industry at about 4.5%. The $1/device Apple is requesting would be about 0.2%. As way of comparison, Here are royalty rates other companies are asking for essential LTE patents. They range from 0.8% to 3%. Motorola's 2.25% is a bit on the high end but within the norm. Apple's requested 0.2% OTOH is off the scale at the low end.
Based on what 5 minutes of googling turned up, Apple is going to lose this, and lose it badly.
That's the reason I'd take these statistical forecasts with a grain of salt. I love Nate Silver's methodology, but election poll data has two sources of uncertainty. Regular sampling error, which is mathematically easy to account for. And uncertainty over how likely a respondent is to actually vote, which is difficult to account for. If you look at the 2008 and 2010 elections, their divergent results were only slightly due to people deciding to support Democrats (2008) or Republicans (2010). It was more due to differences in turnout. In 2008, Republicans stayed home while Democrats came out in force to vote. In 2010 it was reversed.
So if Nate calculates an 86.3% chance of an Obama victory, then I'm inclined to believe Obama's chances are somewhere between 80%-90%. But there's no way he's got 3 significant figures of accuracy even though that's what the math says. A single incident or news story breaking today or early Tuesday, while not actually changing people's minds on who to vote for, could dramatically shift voter turnout in favor of one side or the other.
How about just keeping an old-fashioned telephone (the kind that doesn't need to be plugged into a power outlet) in your closet? If the pay phones are working, that phone will work too when plugged into your house's phone jack. If you don't have landline phone service but still have a landline phone jack, you can usually still make 911 and toll free calls.
Traditional manufacturing had huge barriers to entry. You needed to buy millions of dollars worth of equipment before your factory could actually produce anything. That meant the labor market was captive, creating a pressure for labor to unionize.
Software development has almost no barriers to entry. You need a computer, some development tools, and network access. These are easily within reach of any developer (and in fact any developer who loves what they do will already own these for "recreational coding" at home). If you're in software development and are unhappy with the level of autonomy and self-management your employer gives you, simply quit and start your own company.
This isn't going to be enforced the way you think. It's likely not going to stop playing just because somebody walked in. Where this is going to be used is for things like pay-per-view sporting events and premium content services. This is primarily here to prevent a bar (or similar venue) from buying the consumer-priced-for-home-viewing $90 wrestling fight.
What's to stop a bar from having an HDMI splitter, with the monitoring device hooked up to a TV in a back room where employees on break can watch, while the non-monitored outputs go to the TVs in the bar? (For that matter why would a bar even have an XBox able to see people at the bar when it works best with a static background?)
It's a lot easier to just randomly send inspectors posing as customers to various bars and slap them with fines if they're showing broadcast events without a public exhibition site license.
I disagree - if more corporations were playing the game honestly, and actually shouldering their share of the tax burden, the overall tax rates could be lower, and regular citizens who can't escape tax as easily, could pay less.
No they wouldn't pay less. Money is just a representation of productivity. The only source of productivity is people. Consequently, if the government wishes to take 30% of the country's productivity (GDP) via taxes, that means the income which goes into people's pockets represents only 70% of the productivity they generated regardless of where you extract the taxes. Unless there's an increase in productivity, if the government is taking 30%, then the amount the people have to spend for themselves is 70%. Where there 30% comes from is irrelevant.
Say there are just two types of taxes - corporate taxes and personal income taxes. First consider a case where there are no corporate taxes and the government gets all its revenue from personal income taxes. The guy who makes $50k/yr pays $15k/yr in taxes, and has $35k/yr to spend by himself.
Now say the people get upset that corporations "aren't paying their fair share," and government reallocates taxes so that its 30% of GDP comes entirely from corporate taxes. That is, there are no personal income taxes. Do you think the guy who used to make $50k and paid $15k in taxes now suddenly has $50k to spend? Nope. To pay for the corporate taxes, the guy's employer has to drop his salary to $35k/yr. Or they have to raise their prices, meaning that the $50k the guy takes home can now only buy as much as $35k used to buy when he was paying $15k in personal income taxes. Or some combination of the two. (A third alternative - fix wages and prices while increasing corporate taxes - would result in widespread bankruptcies and a dead economy.)
There's no free lunch. If the government takes 30%, that leaves 70% for the people regardless of whether the government takes the 30% directly from the people, or indirectly via the corporations the people work at and buy from.
"But what about the rich guys who own the corporations!?!?" you ask? Having wealth in the corporation gets them nothing (unless they're breaking laws and secretly embezzling, or using corporate assets as if they were personal property). For the corporate wealth to benefit them personally, they have to take an income from the company. And that income will be taxed via the personal income tax. If you think rich corporate executives and owners are making too much money, simply raise the tax rate on higher incomes and eliminate the many tax breaks (e.g. capital gains tax rate), deductions, and loopholes they enjoy.
Shifting taxes to corporations doesn't increase the purchasing power of the people. You can justify corporate taxes as a means to discourage certain behaviors (e.g. middlemen are discouraged by a 10% VAT because instead of a 1% arbitrage being sufficient justification for a flip, suddenly you now need an 11% arbitrage to justify it). Or because the paperwork for a corporate tax is easier and it allows you to collect the tax revenue at less cost. But you can't justify them as a way of giving people more spending power - it just doesn't work that way.
Having so many taxes (income, corporate, sales, property, excise, etc) is a really inefficient way to collect government revenue. It just creates excess bureaucracy and paperwork. Except for a few cases where taxes are used to discourage certain behaviors (e.g. fuel and property taxes), we'd really be better served by having just one tax. I think making it just one big personal income tax would make the most sense since that's the only way to implement a progressive tax system. And it would let everyone see exactly how big government is relative to the economy instead of hiding it in taxes they never see. But if you want to count corporations as "legal persons" and foist a personal income tax on them, I d
This really needs to be run by the government. Rather than make it the responsibility for every company out there to collect sales tax info from every jurisdiction in the country, the Federal government needs to set up a web site. The jurisdictions update the site with their current sales tax info every day (or week). Businesses then just download the tax tables from the site at the start of the business day (or week).
Yes there are companies that collect all the sales tax rates throughout the country, and you can pay them to subscribe to their tables. The problem is they don't indemnify you from their mistakes. If they screw up and you fail to collect $5000 in sales tax before they notice the mistake, you owe the extra $5000, not them.
By having the government run it, the party making the error bears the consequences.
- If a jurisdiction fails to update their tax rate correctly causing a shortfall in tax revenue, then the government website has a record of their error and the jurisdiction simply loses out on the tax revenue.
- If a business fails to update their tax tables and fails to collect the right sales tax, then it's their mistake and they're liable for paying the shortfall.
- If the federal government screws up and the website goes down, then either they can compensate the jurisdictions for lost revenue, or say the federal government is immune to liability and tell the jurisdictions tough luck.
United and Lufthansa are codeshare partners. One trip a few years ago, I was on a Lufthansa flight to Germany, and a United flight back to the U.S.
On the Lufthansa flight, the stewardesses were constantly roaming around the cabin. In addition to the two meal and drink services plus one hot towel service, they were passing out snacks, drink refills, drinking water and orange juice, magazines, toys, shuffling around pillows and blankets. It actually got annoying (I had an aisle seat), and people couldn't get to the lavatory without having to squeeze around one of them. But I really appreciated the work they were putting in.
On the United flight, we got two meal services, two drink services, and one hot towel service. That's it. Most of the 8 hour flight, the stewardesses were sitting in empty seats chatting with each other.
The manufacturers don't control the seats - the airlines do. Both Boeing and Airbus try to choose cabin widths which maximize the width of each seat, while not quite providing enough room for the airlines to squeeze in an extra seat. But they can't do anything if an airline chooses to forgo 2-4-2 seating (8 across), shrinks the aisles and seat widths, and makes it 3-3-3 seating (9 across).
Since you work for the company that makes the windows, a question: Is there a failsafe to turn the windows to clear in an emergency? In an accident, there's typically a fire on just one side, or only forward or only aft. With physical shades, there are usually enough shades open to quickly determine from inside if/where there's a fire outside. Are there safeguards in place to make sure there's never a situation where there's an accident, a fire outside, and nobody inside can see where the fire is because all the windows are stuck on full dark?
The EPA mileage ratings aren't meant to predict the mileage you'll get with a car. There's too much variance between drivers to try to predict that. The EPA ratings are meant to allow car buyers to compare the mileage of different cars. Run every car in an identical fashion through identical courses which approximate typical real-world driving, and record their mileage.
So if the EPA rates one car at 30 MPG and another at 33 MPG, you're unlikely to get exactly 30 and 33 MPG when you drive them. But whatever mileage you do get, chances are pretty good you'll get about 10% better MPG with the second car than you would the first.
For Apple to post a statement that purports to be from Apple stating that Samsung did not copy would be ridiculous, because it's already won judgments in other jurisdictions that say Samsung did copy.
What jurisdictions are these? The UK ruling covers the entire EU and overrides the local Germany ruling. The U.S. jury award was for copying the iPhone (likely due to the judge disallowing Samsung from introducing internal documents showing that the design of the F700 Apple claimed was a copy was actually established in-house before the iPhone was ever released), which was not at issue in the UK ruling. On the tablet front the U.S. jury actually cleared Samsung, finding that they did not copy the iPad.
but I think the problem is that most people in the U.S. do not actually live in their homes for a long enough time. I've been here 13 years, but I've been looking to move for the past five or so
This shouldn't really matter, as any unrealized value of the PV panels would presumably be recouped by increased resale price of the house.
The hang-up is up-front costs. The average home in the U.S. uses 11,500 kWh in a year. So at a constant power draw that's 1311 Watts. Factor in PV solar's average capacity factor o 0.145 and that means you need 9050 Watts of nameplate capacity installed to (on average) zero out your electricity bill (in reality it's a bit less because peak electric prices are during the middle of the day when nobody's home but the panels are generating the most).
If panels are $1/Watt, that's a $9k up-front cost the homeowner has to pay, plus several thousand more for installation, mounting, inverters and regulation, etc. That's simply out of the reach of most homeowners unless they can somehow roll it in with their mortgage.
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The Wired article doesn't provide it, and makes it sound like the proposition passed with an 81% Yes vote because people want to track registered sex offenders' Internet activity.
The proposition was billed as the human trafficking and penalties initiative. Its main focus was on increasing penalties for those convicted of human trafficking (mostly kids and women into prostitution). That's why it passed with such a high percentage of Yes votes. The part about sex offenders' Internet activity was a single sentence buried in the middle of the voter pamphlet's summary description, so probably was glazed over by most voters.
I was baffled why something whose main provision seemed like such a no-brainer was even a proposition. It sounded like something the legislature should've been able to pass in 5 minutes. So I did a bit more research and dug up this article explaining why it may not be very helpful, counter-intuitive as that seems. That's something you have to be careful of with these ballot propositions - if it sounds like a simple Yes vote, you need to ask yourself, "What's the catch? Why hasn't the legislature passed this already?"
Canada provides a basic level of universal health care. If you wish to supplement that with private insurance or personal funds, you can. So even there they do in fact select who lives based on who has the most money.
So perhaps it's more accurate to say "refusing to provide basic medical care (up to $x in cost) due to inability to pay is immoral." In that respect the U.S. is already there - it is illegal for hospital emergency rooms to turn away patients due to inability to pay.
The U.S. health care system is screwed up in a different way. Even before Obamacare, government spending on health care per capita exceeded what Canada was spending. That is, the U.S. government was already spending enough on health care to provide each of its citizens with Canadian-style coverage, and we still had a worse health care system. Canadians spending an extended time in the U.S. have to deal with this with supplemental insurance. The Canadian government will only pay for treatment in the U.S. up to what equivalent treatment would cost in Canada. Anything above that has to be paid out of pocket or by supplemental insurance.
There is no perfect election system. The bottom line is any representative system is going to have shortcomings. Some will be better than others in certain situations, which means for a given range of situations some will on average be better. I'd argue the U.S. system could be improved substantially with instant run-off voting. But the bottom line is any system will always have areas where "it can be improved." The problem is those improvements cause deficiencies elsewhere.
The tech bubble actually burst 8 months before Bush won the election. So the economy was already set to crash before he ever got into office.
The balanced budget under Clinton was largely attributable to the bubble. The spending cuts in particular are mostly attributable to Newt and the Republicans who swept into power in 1994. Still, spending under Clinton never actually fell below the historical average for tax revenue - it was the spike in revenue due to the tech bubble which turned it into a balanced budget. In fact, if you look at the numbers behind the red line, you'll find Bush's budgets over 8 years actually spent slightly less on average (as percent of GDP) than Clinton's budgets for 8 years.
Bush did plenty of stupid things himself (the stupid tax cuts and the Iraq war). But the narrative that everything bad was his fault simply isn't true.
tl;dr version is that the H1B program short-circuits the natural market dynamic: Shortage of engineers -> salaries for engineers increases -> more kids study to become engineers -> more engineers -> salaries for engineers decreases.
The much larger pool of foreign engineers acts like an electrical ground at a lower potential (lower salary expectation). The H1B program shorts the above system by connecting it to that ground. Perpetually low engineer salaries -> lack of incentive for native students to enter engineering fields -> lack of native engineers -> (perverse) rationale for expanding the H1B program.
People make verbal arguments which try to explain why the above doesn't happen. But if you model it as a control system it's pretty obvious what the steady state response is. Unfortunately almost none of our lawmakers have engineering backgrounds so have no clue what my previous sentence means. They get swayed by the verbal argument instead.
The one benefit the H1B program does bring is that it encourages skilled foreign workers to immigrate to the U.S. It's just that while that's a laudable goal with all other things remaining constant, it mostly defeats its own purpose if it reduces the number of native-born students entering engineering fields.
Bush wasn't afraid of a quagmire. He respected the UN. The UN mandate only authorized us to eject Iraq from Kuwait, nothing more. So that's all he felt we could do. That was the reason he did not come to the defense of Iraqis rebelling against Saddam after the war. He didn't protect them until the UN authorized the no-fly zones over Northern and Southern Iraq.
Bush Jr. OTOH decided the UN was unimportant and invaded Iraq on his own.
I originally found them at Office Max. Later Home Depot started carrying them. Other stores may carry them now. They're $5-$6 for fifty 8" long strips. That's 10-12 cents apiece, and being velcro they're much more versatile than traditional plastic cable ties. You just tear one off, wrap it around the cable bundle, and the velcro sticks to itself - takes just a couple seconds. If you mess up, it's velcro so you just lift it up and try again. No need to cut them or fiddle with a knife to release them like you do with plastic cable ties. They come with a little hole at one end if you want to affix it around a single cable for a more permanent (but reusable) installation.
I use em for network cables, video cables, audio cables, wrapping cables around ducting, hanging a picture frame on a fence, everything. I've used one to hold down a broken switch on a kitchen faucet. Heck, I've used them to create a hanging cradle to isolate HDD vibrations and noise from a computer case. They're very handy.
In many countries with low literacy rates, they simply add a picture of the candidates next to their names.
So someone doesn't go to one poll, registers, votes, goes to another poll, registers, votes, repeat.
Remember, your ballot is not linked to your voter registration. Once your ballot drops into the box, it is anonymous and decoupled from any means to identify whose ballot it is. There's no way to separate out the multiple fraudulent ballots dropped in by someone perpetrating the above scam, so any fraud needs to be stopped before the actual vote. Hence the delay between registration and when you can actually vote. During the delay, they're verifying that yes indeed you are eligible to vote, and are switching your registration from your old voting precinct to your new one.
Sorry, screwed up the html and lost the link to the LTE royalty rates. Here it is (PDF). And to address the anonymous comment claiming it's a percentage of the cost of the LTE radio, the PDF makes it pretty clear that it's a "percent of the sale price of the handset."
I agree with the reasons you list, and think this whole fiasco is Apple's fault. But there's another possible reason here, one that I think is much more likely:
Google wants Apple to stew in the mess it created by dropping Google Maps. They want to delay the (re)introduction of Google Maps for iOS for as long as they can without letting Apple's Maps app gain traction. But they don't want people blaming them for the delay. They want people blaming Apple. So they make a lot of noise about how it'll take them a long time to prepare the app, how it's likely Apple will reject it, etc.
The reason I think it's the more likely reason is because Google doesn't need to create a Google Maps app for iOS. They already have one - the one Apple yanked with iOS 6. Unless their contract with Apple stipulates they can't release it as a regular App Store app, they could've submitted it to the App Store the day after Apple announced iOS 6. If the contract had stipulated that, I think we would've heard of it by now. The anti-Apple PR from saying "We cannot release Google Maps for iOS yet because our contract with Apple prohibits it, and there's still a year left in the contract." would have been priceless.
They don't even need to delay their app to add turn-by-turn navigation. They can introduce it as-is (as it was in iOS 5). Then roll out an update once they have turn-by-turn navigation ready. So I'm pretty sure the delay in getting Google Maps in the App Store is entirely to make Apple lie in the bed it made for itself.
That means Apple cannot re-file the case again.
Actually, Apple Reality Distortion Field notwithstanding, pretty much all patent royalties are based on a percentage.
This study puts the average royalty rate for a patent in the electronics industry at about 4.5%. The $1/device Apple is requesting would be about 0.2%. As way of comparison, Here are royalty rates other companies are asking for essential LTE patents. They range from 0.8% to 3%. Motorola's 2.25% is a bit on the high end but within the norm. Apple's requested 0.2% OTOH is off the scale at the low end.
Based on what 5 minutes of googling turned up, Apple is going to lose this, and lose it badly.
That's the reason I'd take these statistical forecasts with a grain of salt. I love Nate Silver's methodology, but election poll data has two sources of uncertainty. Regular sampling error, which is mathematically easy to account for. And uncertainty over how likely a respondent is to actually vote, which is difficult to account for. If you look at the 2008 and 2010 elections, their divergent results were only slightly due to people deciding to support Democrats (2008) or Republicans (2010). It was more due to differences in turnout. In 2008, Republicans stayed home while Democrats came out in force to vote. In 2010 it was reversed.
So if Nate calculates an 86.3% chance of an Obama victory, then I'm inclined to believe Obama's chances are somewhere between 80%-90%. But there's no way he's got 3 significant figures of accuracy even though that's what the math says. A single incident or news story breaking today or early Tuesday, while not actually changing people's minds on who to vote for, could dramatically shift voter turnout in favor of one side or the other.
How about just keeping an old-fashioned telephone (the kind that doesn't need to be plugged into a power outlet) in your closet? If the pay phones are working, that phone will work too when plugged into your house's phone jack. If you don't have landline phone service but still have a landline phone jack, you can usually still make 911 and toll free calls.
Traditional manufacturing had huge barriers to entry. You needed to buy millions of dollars worth of equipment before your factory could actually produce anything. That meant the labor market was captive, creating a pressure for labor to unionize.
Software development has almost no barriers to entry. You need a computer, some development tools, and network access. These are easily within reach of any developer (and in fact any developer who loves what they do will already own these for "recreational coding" at home). If you're in software development and are unhappy with the level of autonomy and self-management your employer gives you, simply quit and start your own company.
What's to stop a bar from having an HDMI splitter, with the monitoring device hooked up to a TV in a back room where employees on break can watch, while the non-monitored outputs go to the TVs in the bar? (For that matter why would a bar even have an XBox able to see people at the bar when it works best with a static background?)
It's a lot easier to just randomly send inspectors posing as customers to various bars and slap them with fines if they're showing broadcast events without a public exhibition site license.
No they wouldn't pay less. Money is just a representation of productivity. The only source of productivity is people. Consequently, if the government wishes to take 30% of the country's productivity (GDP) via taxes, that means the income which goes into people's pockets represents only 70% of the productivity they generated regardless of where you extract the taxes. Unless there's an increase in productivity, if the government is taking 30%, then the amount the people have to spend for themselves is 70%. Where there 30% comes from is irrelevant.
Say there are just two types of taxes - corporate taxes and personal income taxes. First consider a case where there are no corporate taxes and the government gets all its revenue from personal income taxes. The guy who makes $50k/yr pays $15k/yr in taxes, and has $35k/yr to spend by himself.
Now say the people get upset that corporations "aren't paying their fair share," and government reallocates taxes so that its 30% of GDP comes entirely from corporate taxes. That is, there are no personal income taxes. Do you think the guy who used to make $50k and paid $15k in taxes now suddenly has $50k to spend? Nope. To pay for the corporate taxes, the guy's employer has to drop his salary to $35k/yr. Or they have to raise their prices, meaning that the $50k the guy takes home can now only buy as much as $35k used to buy when he was paying $15k in personal income taxes. Or some combination of the two. (A third alternative - fix wages and prices while increasing corporate taxes - would result in widespread bankruptcies and a dead economy.)
There's no free lunch. If the government takes 30%, that leaves 70% for the people regardless of whether the government takes the 30% directly from the people, or indirectly via the corporations the people work at and buy from.
"But what about the rich guys who own the corporations!?!?" you ask? Having wealth in the corporation gets them nothing (unless they're breaking laws and secretly embezzling, or using corporate assets as if they were personal property). For the corporate wealth to benefit them personally, they have to take an income from the company. And that income will be taxed via the personal income tax. If you think rich corporate executives and owners are making too much money, simply raise the tax rate on higher incomes and eliminate the many tax breaks (e.g. capital gains tax rate), deductions, and loopholes they enjoy.
Shifting taxes to corporations doesn't increase the purchasing power of the people. You can justify corporate taxes as a means to discourage certain behaviors (e.g. middlemen are discouraged by a 10% VAT because instead of a 1% arbitrage being sufficient justification for a flip, suddenly you now need an 11% arbitrage to justify it). Or because the paperwork for a corporate tax is easier and it allows you to collect the tax revenue at less cost. But you can't justify them as a way of giving people more spending power - it just doesn't work that way.
Having so many taxes (income, corporate, sales, property, excise, etc) is a really inefficient way to collect government revenue. It just creates excess bureaucracy and paperwork. Except for a few cases where taxes are used to discourage certain behaviors (e.g. fuel and property taxes), we'd really be better served by having just one tax. I think making it just one big personal income tax would make the most sense since that's the only way to implement a progressive tax system. And it would let everyone see exactly how big government is relative to the economy instead of hiding it in taxes they never see. But if you want to count corporations as "legal persons" and foist a personal income tax on them, I d
This really needs to be run by the government. Rather than make it the responsibility for every company out there to collect sales tax info from every jurisdiction in the country, the Federal government needs to set up a web site. The jurisdictions update the site with their current sales tax info every day (or week). Businesses then just download the tax tables from the site at the start of the business day (or week).
Yes there are companies that collect all the sales tax rates throughout the country, and you can pay them to subscribe to their tables. The problem is they don't indemnify you from their mistakes. If they screw up and you fail to collect $5000 in sales tax before they notice the mistake, you owe the extra $5000, not them.
By having the government run it, the party making the error bears the consequences.
- If a jurisdiction fails to update their tax rate correctly causing a shortfall in tax revenue, then the government website has a record of their error and the jurisdiction simply loses out on the tax revenue.
- If a business fails to update their tax tables and fails to collect the right sales tax, then it's their mistake and they're liable for paying the shortfall.
- If the federal government screws up and the website goes down, then either they can compensate the jurisdictions for lost revenue, or say the federal government is immune to liability and tell the jurisdictions tough luck.
United and Lufthansa are codeshare partners. One trip a few years ago, I was on a Lufthansa flight to Germany, and a United flight back to the U.S.
On the Lufthansa flight, the stewardesses were constantly roaming around the cabin. In addition to the two meal and drink services plus one hot towel service, they were passing out snacks, drink refills, drinking water and orange juice, magazines, toys, shuffling around pillows and blankets. It actually got annoying (I had an aisle seat), and people couldn't get to the lavatory without having to squeeze around one of them. But I really appreciated the work they were putting in.
On the United flight, we got two meal services, two drink services, and one hot towel service. That's it. Most of the 8 hour flight, the stewardesses were sitting in empty seats chatting with each other.
The manufacturers don't control the seats - the airlines do. Both Boeing and Airbus try to choose cabin widths which maximize the width of each seat, while not quite providing enough room for the airlines to squeeze in an extra seat. But they can't do anything if an airline chooses to forgo 2-4-2 seating (8 across), shrinks the aisles and seat widths, and makes it 3-3-3 seating (9 across).
Since you work for the company that makes the windows, a question: Is there a failsafe to turn the windows to clear in an emergency? In an accident, there's typically a fire on just one side, or only forward or only aft. With physical shades, there are usually enough shades open to quickly determine from inside if/where there's a fire outside. Are there safeguards in place to make sure there's never a situation where there's an accident, a fire outside, and nobody inside can see where the fire is because all the windows are stuck on full dark?
The EPA mileage ratings aren't meant to predict the mileage you'll get with a car. There's too much variance between drivers to try to predict that. The EPA ratings are meant to allow car buyers to compare the mileage of different cars. Run every car in an identical fashion through identical courses which approximate typical real-world driving, and record their mileage.
So if the EPA rates one car at 30 MPG and another at 33 MPG, you're unlikely to get exactly 30 and 33 MPG when you drive them. But whatever mileage you do get, chances are pretty good you'll get about 10% better MPG with the second car than you would the first.
What jurisdictions are these? The UK ruling covers the entire EU and overrides the local Germany ruling. The U.S. jury award was for copying the iPhone (likely due to the judge disallowing Samsung from introducing internal documents showing that the design of the F700 Apple claimed was a copy was actually established in-house before the iPhone was ever released), which was not at issue in the UK ruling. On the tablet front the U.S. jury actually cleared Samsung, finding that they did not copy the iPad.
This shouldn't really matter, as any unrealized value of the PV panels would presumably be recouped by increased resale price of the house.
The hang-up is up-front costs. The average home in the U.S. uses 11,500 kWh in a year. So at a constant power draw that's 1311 Watts. Factor in PV solar's average capacity factor o 0.145 and that means you need 9050 Watts of nameplate capacity installed to (on average) zero out your electricity bill (in reality it's a bit less because peak electric prices are during the middle of the day when nobody's home but the panels are generating the most).
If panels are $1/Watt, that's a $9k up-front cost the homeowner has to pay, plus several thousand more for installation, mounting, inverters and regulation, etc. That's simply out of the reach of most homeowners unless they can somehow roll it in with their mortgage.