Wha? There are tax treaties, dude. If you actually paid twice on the same income, either you have a very unique situation or you did it wrong.
Tax treaties generally focus on earned income. Unearned income (interest, capital gains) tends to fall through the cracks. For example, Canada's tax treaty with the U.S. doesn't cover Roth IRAs. In the U.S., the Roth IRA is a retirement device where you invest income which has been taxed, but you don't have to pay tax on the returns (in exchange for the money being locked up until you retire). If you were a U.S. citizen residing in Canada (thus making you liable for Canadian taxes), you would have to pay Canadian taxes on the returns from your Roth IRA. If you have a high amount of unearned income especially if it comes from atypical sources, you can end up being double-taxed.
USA taxes are incredibly low compared to just about anywhere else (obviously not EVERYWHERE else, but just about).
No they're not. Most comparisons showing an "incredibly low" tax rate for the U.S. only look at Federal taxes, forgetting that the U.S. has substantial local government taxes which are absent in other countries. If you add up all the Federal, State, and local taxes, the U.S. ends up around a 25%-30% effective tax rate, vs. around 30%-40% for Europe. Lower yes, but only slightly.
The Laffer curve is just a specific case of the mean value theorem in Calculus, worded slightly differently. It is indisputably correct. The only question is if we're to the left or to the right of the maximum (or if the maximum lies at 100% taxation).
Unfortunately, because it's inconvenient for certain political ideologies, people have taken to disputing it for political reasons, not realizing they're simultaneously disputing Calculus when they do so.
But even if he were being punished for causing Clementi's suicide, he had to have known that he was selecting an extremely vulnerable victim. He knew that Clementi was a loner and semi-closeted and was afraid of being open about it--and then he exploited him.
This is actually a separate problem, one for which Ravi likely bears no responsibility. Our elementary, jr, and high schools pretty much turn a blind eye to bullying. When kids grow up in an environment where there's little to no consequences for bullying, it should come as no surprise that 18 year-old college students sometimes don't immediately see the problem with "pranking" another student. In a way, Ravi could be as much a victim here.
Most IPO's underprice themselves slightly and there's euphoria in the just-after-IPO trading that usually sees a good 20-50% upside and a good downswing in the same day of the IPO. This never happened (it opened at $42, hit $45 in a few minutes and was $38-40 range bound the rest of the day meaning that the IPO was priced pretty much at the maximum that investors are willing to go at. Therefore any hope for upwards movement now comes from positive surprises and better than expected earnings. However considering the valuation at 100x trailing 12m earnings the valuation already assumes exponential earnings growth. Therefore as someone already put it... only way is down.
From FB's perspective, this may actually be a good thing. The company only sees money from the original stock sale in an IPO. Any future stock sales are just money changing hands between shareholders - the company sees none of that money.
Imagine a bell curve of people's valuation of the IPO stock. Some think it's worth little. Some think it's worth a lot. Most think it's worth something in the middle. Some think it's worth little. If the IPO price of a stock exactly matches its final stable market valuation, that means everyone on the bell curve at that point and higher bought the stock at that price.
With Google's IPO, the share price was set too low, so everyone in that stock price point and higher in the bell curve only paid that low amount for GOOG stock, and hence Google did not get as much investment money as they could have. Additional money realized from appreciation in GOOG ended up going to the early investors instead of to Google.
With Facebook's IPO, the people high up on the curve paid that high amount to Facebook. As the price of FB shares drops, the people in the middle will now pay that middle amount to Facebook. And when the share price settles somewhere at the low-mid end, the people there will pay that low-mid amount to Facebook. It wreaks havoc with the market and screws over the people who bought FB at the higher prices, but it maximizes the amount of capital Facebook makes off the initial sales of FB stock to investors.
If you want to know why your taxes are so high you only need to look at the deals which are given to major corporations to attract and retain their business. It's getting to be a bit like CEO compensation packages. Will the best ones make you money - sure. But that money is collected from everyone else - essentially a tax increase on the everyman.
No it isn't. Unlike economic growth (where new money is "printed" to reflect the increase in economic productivity), taxes are zero-sum. If government spending is 20% of GDP, and the government takes in as much in taxes as they spend, then the average person will contribute 20% of his/her productivity to the government.
It's mathematically impossible to get around this. If you aren't paying for taxes directly via income taxes or sales taxes, you're paying for them indirectly through higher prices or lower wages. Corporations don't generate productivity. People who work for them do. And as the only source of productivity, they're the only source for tax revenue, whether it's direct (sales and income taxes) or indirect (corporate taxes).
e.g. Scenario 1: No government (ignore the beneficial effects of government, this is just to provide a baseline)
Result: You make $100,000 a year.
Scenario 2: Government spends 20% of GDP. The only tax is an income tax.
Result: You make $100,000 a year, pay $20,000 in taxes. Net effect is $80,000/yr take-home pay
Scenario 3a: Government spends 20% of GDP. The only tax is a corporate tax.
Result: Company pays $20,000 on your behalf to the government, your take-home pay is $80,000/yr
Scenario 3b: Government spends 20% of GDP. The only tax is a corporate tax.
Result: Company pays you $100,000. Raises their prices 25%. Your take-home pay is $100,000, but its purchasing power is equal to $80,000 in scenario 1, 2, and 3a.
All this arguing about corporations not paying enough tax is pointless from a government revenue standpoint. It's all paid for by people in the end. Now, if you want to use taxes to encourage/discourage certain types of behavior, then you can argue why there should be more or less corporate taxes vs. individual taxes. But from a government revenue standpoint, it is irrelevant.
If your taxes (sum of direct and indirect) are too high, then the only cause is because the government is spending too much.
For all the crap Sony does, they get some things right. When I bought a Sony laptop for a client, I had to make system restore DVDs (it had a SSD and the restore partition was eating up too much space). During the process, I noticed a "minimal" restore option in addition to the complete restore. I did some reading and found that it's just the OS and necessary drivers. None of the crapware that normally comes preinstalled.
So I wiped the drive, did the minimal restore, and it was exactly as advertised. Clean system, all drivers preinstalled, no crapware. Hats off to the Sony engineer or manager who insisted on that feature.
From TFWU: "If I have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay me nothing for ten years, at best, whereas social media will go big in two years, what do you think I'm going to pick?"
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How did the economy get so skewed that something that is a real product which can serve a social good is ignored for sheer speculation?
Wants vs. needs. Just because a need exists doesn't mean all wants have zero value. The entire entertainment industry is unnecessary. Yet it's a significant chunk of the economy and a huge part of people's lives. Why? Diminishing returns.
If cancer research and Facebook were the only two parts of the economy, the economy is not best served by having 100% of money in cancer research and 0% of money in Facebook. It's best served by having x% of money in cancer research, (100-x)% in Facebook. As more money is poured into cancer research, it experiences diminishing returns. Eventually the return on a dollar spent on cancer research (a need) dips below the return on a dollar spent on Facebook (a want), at which point money starts getting spent on Facebook. Even though the overall goal of cancer research is more noble, you've reached a point where the marginal return on a dollar spent on cancer research is less than the marginal return for a dollar spent on Facebook. And it becomes more cost-effective to spend the next dollar on Facebook.
Mathematically, multi-variable systems which reach maximums when all variables except one are zero are exceedingly rare.
And don't give me: "Rapid communications makes the economy more efficient" The economy was OK, even better, before Facebook. The economy even was OK before the internet, it just took a little longer to get things done( which may not be a bad thing).
Then I invite you to continue shopping for computers at Best Buy and Frys, where you have a limited selection and no reference for prices or quality. When I buy computers on the Internet, I do hours of cross-referencing reviews, benchmarks, and prices from dozens if not hundreds of retailers. Before the Internet, this would've taken me days if not months to do searching magazines at the library and going from physical store to physical store. Rapid communications on the Internet has made my economic purchases tremendously more efficient.
Not exactly. I noticed that look creeping into webcomics and anime long before it was implemented in OS X. Instead of a flat cartoon, you add highlights (especially on the eyes and the hair) and a shadow along one edge to give it a more 3D look. I think the increased use of computers in drawing and animation made it easier for artists to draw over otherwise completed art in order to enhance it.
The glossy look in OS X is just this carried over to icons and windows. While OS X may have been the first widespread implementation on a computer UI, in no way did they start it. (I'm not even sure they were the first to do it on a computer UI. I vaguely recall playing around with an early version of Enlightenment which made extensive use of gradients and faux-transparency. This was on my Thinkpad 600e which would put it in the late 1990s.)
Rather than embed popups and stuff in the video stream, they're trying to associate what you've watched with products that were placed in those particular shows.
Actually, I think Amazon is on to something. This is a potential solution to piracy of movies and TV shows.
Right now, content providers sell their content to viewers, and also sell interspersed advertisements within the content (commercials). The viewers don't like the ads, so they come up with popup blockers and commercial skippers to remove them. Likewise, the viewers don't like paying for the content, so they pirate it. The content providers have been fighting back with DRM and draconian copyright protection laws. And we get the huge mess we are in right now.
A possible solution is to give away the content for free, without 30 second commercials or popups. Instead, advertisers pay for product placement within the show itself. Because the ads are now placed within the show, it's difficult (not worth it) to remove the ads. A system needs to be developed where content producers will then be paid by the advertisers based on the number of people who view the show (whether estimated or counted somehow). Content provider gives away show for free, viewers watch, advertisers pay content providers. Everyone is happy.
I have to admit I've never seen anyone try to do that before. Largely, I think, because most advertisers and retailers realize consumers would hit the roof to have their viewing habits tracked and correlated in such a fashion.
I think you're approaching the problem too much from a privacy-centric point of view. The interest in the advertiser here is not just in correlating the product placement ads to what shows people have watched. It's also in making sure those ads are relevant to the viewing demographic. A product placement ad for feminine hygiene products in a robot fight movie is not going to be extremely effective. There needs to be some method developed which will allow advertisers and content producers to measure the efficacy of those product placement ads. That's where this patent comes into play.
Basically, we're going to be bombarded by ads anyway. Do you want to retain all your privacy and get completely random ads? Or do you want to give up some of your privacy and get much more relevant ads? I haven't owned a TV for 3 years. What I've realized when I do get to watch is that I am totally behind the times when it comes to new products that have come out over the last 3 years. That is, the ads are not merely beneficial for the advertiser; they also provide some marginal benefit to me. Enough so that I'd be willing to give up a little bit of my privacy to be kept informed of relevant new products which interest me. e.g. I gave my email address to VMWare so that I could be kept informed of their new products. I exchanged a little bit of my privacy for more timely product updates.
Landfill gas (methane), wood-burning, and biofuels are classified as renewables. There's a tendency for people to think that "gives off CO2 = not renewable". Renewable just means the net mass balance is zero - after all is said and done, you've left the chemical compounds in the same place they started at. In the case of landfill gas and burning wood and biofuels, the carbon in the CO2 released was originally extracted from CO2 in the atmosphere by plants as a part of photosynthesis a few years or decades ago. It got incorporated into the organic matter of the plant, and is eventually released when you burn the wood or biofuel, or the matter decomposes in a landfill. Essentially, they're just acting as a chemical battery storing solar energy originally captured by the plant.
Technically the same is true for fossil fuels. However, the carbon there has been sequestered underground, out of the system for millions of years. So the carbon is considered to have "started at" underground, rather than in the atmosphere. Burning them is considered adding "new" carbon into the atmospheric system. Unless you can figure out a way to convert the CO2 they generate back into carbon and O2 / H2O, and stick the carbon underground again, they're not considered renewable.
But my biggest gripe is sites that lock you out (requiring a phone call) after 3 incorrect guesses.
What's even more facepalm worthy is that when you call, they usually "verify" your identity using information about you which is frequently publicly available.
I had a long reply written up but lost it in a browser crash. So here's the short version. You don't want to convert all gasoline cars to diesel. You want there to be a healthy mix of the two.
When you refine crude oil, it distills out into a variety of substances, - kerosene, gasoline, diesel, fuel oil, tar, waxes, etc. Ideal case is when your gasoline and diesel use exactly matches the proportions of those which distil out.
The next-ideal case is when you use more gasoline than distils out. Gasoline is a lighter fuel, so can be created relatively easily from the heavier fuels - you break apart their hydrocarbon chains to form the shorter, lighter compounds in gasoline.
The least-ideal case is when you use more diesel than distils out. It's a heavier fuel, and converting lighter fuels into heavier fuels, while possible, is much more difficult and costly. You have to glue together the shorter hydrocarbon chains to form the longer, heavier compounds in diesel.
Also, bear in mind that a large chunk of diesel's higher efficiency is illusory. It's a denser material than gasoline, so 1 gallon of diesel cooked into gasoline would actually form about 1.15 gallons of gasoline. You need to account for this difference when comparing volumetric fuel efficiency (MPG or L/100 km). The proper way to compare their fuel efficiency would be mass-based (miles per pound, or kg per 100 km). It's still more efficient than gasoline due to the higher compression ratios, but not as much as the mpg figures would lead you to believe.
The thing is, corn isn't subsidized because the government wants cheap HFCS. It's subsidized because the government wants overproduction of food so we won't have people going hungry if there's a bunch of crop failures like in the 1930s. Cheap HFCS is merely a side effect ("gee, what can we do with all this excess corn?"). You can make completely valid and compelling arguments against cheap HFCS, but they won't get you anywhere because you're cherry-picking the most unfavorable aspect of corn subsidies to try to make them look bad. You're not addressing the real issue. The starvation argument will win out every time simply because it's more important. If you want to end corn subsidies, you need to address it from the starvation/crop failure angle.
Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa
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HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Well - in Whitman's defense, HP needs to retool itself. If their claim to fame is personal computers, they will be an also-ran within 5 years. They need to retool with services, get in on the cloud-storage/processing game, and start putting out products and services that people are interested in. Otherwise, they can sit in a corner with Gateway and talk about the olden days.
Eh? The old HP which everyone knew and loved (well, mostly) had a claim to fame to PCs, workstations, calculators, printers, scientific instruments, and a host of other fringe but cutting edge stuff. That's what gave them a competitive advantage, respect for their brand name. Y'know, back when they were a leader in the tech industry. Their problems right now are due to "retooling" to become a generic PC repackaging brand. They got exactly what they wanted - they're now leader in a market with probably the thinnest margins in the tech industry, indistinguishable from the likes of Gateway.
If you find yourself constantly chasing the hottest new thing, you are by definition an also-ran. You should be creating the hottest new thing. Like back in the day when businesses would pay a premium for HP workstations, printers and scientific equipment; and geeks would pay a premium for their calculators - because they were considered the best and most advanced. They didn't dominate the inkjet printer business because their sales department did a good job marketing them. They dominated the inkjet printer business because they paid a few geeks to play around with using electrostatic forces to spray ink - they nearly single-handedly invented the inkjet printer market.
Unfortunately they gutted their R&D which was producing their high-profit distinguishing products, in favor of sales to promote their high-revenue generic products. I'm sure the high revenue looks impressive on their sales staff's resume, but if it's on razor-thin profit margins it's not really helping the company. I don't see how shifting their sales from one thing to another is going to help. They need to revive their R&D departments if they want to become an industry leader again and enjoy cushy profit margins.
From my standpoint: Either pay or ads, but never both.
Well that was originally the idea. When cable TV first rolled out in the U.S., the non-local channels it carried didn't have commercials. But them some marketing exec noticed that nobody had promised customers that there would be no ads. So they started double-dipping by adding ads.
Here is one of her conversations with Siri (details paraphrased/redacted):
W: Find me a mexican restaurant in __city name__.
S: I found 23 places near you
W: (looking at list) Where is __first restaurant in list__.
S: I can't help you with that.
That's the real problem with this, assuming TFA is correct and Apple really did intervene to get Siri's answer changed. You get a list of restaurants from Siri and you have no way to know if the first one on the list is the closest, the highest rated, or the one which paid Apple the most to be placed higher. "I can't help you with that" may actually be a preferable answer.
You're making the same mistake most people who were for the GM bailout made. To increase the urgency of a bailout, you're exaggerating the direness of GM's (and Chrysler's) situation.
That's not how economics works. A bankruptcy doesn't mean game over, go home. A bankruptcy means the parts get sold off to the highest bidder. And bidders don't buy parts of bankrupt companies because they think it'll be cool to own a piece of memorabilia. They buy them because they want to use them to make money. The closer to being salvageable a company was, the more its parts sell for in a bankruptcy.
If, as you claim, in bankruptcy sale GM's creditors would've been paid pennies on the dollar, that points to GM being a grossly inefficient company. The best thing to do in that case would've been to let GM go bankrupt. A bailout would just be throwing good money after bad. If instead the creditors would've been paid 80-90 cents on the dollar, then that points to GM being a sound company which is just having some cashflow problems. A prime candidate for a bailout.
Likewise, if, as you claim, GM's manufacturing facilities around Detroit would've been idled with massive job losses, that points to gross inefficiency in GM's operations and they should've been forced into bankruptcy. But if instead their facilities would've been snapped up by competing manufacturers to add to their existing capacity (meaning little loss of jobs), then a bailout was more appropriate.
The truth is GM and Chrysler were probably not the best-run companies. But their dire economic situation was more the result of the credit crisis and economic downturn, not so much unsound operations. They were in good enough shape that their bankruptcies would not have been devastating to the economy, which is what made them worth bailing out. The issue just became a political hot potato because the unions had forgotten to demand the pension funds be spun off into a separate (and untouchable in a bankruptcy) pension management company. Faced with the prospect of becoming creditors lower on the totem pole than secured creditors (i.e. banks), they started a massive fear campaign about why bankruptcy would be bad, economics be damned.
You forgot the big one: photo-documentation. Nobody is ever going to get away with, "It's ok honey, we don't need to pay for a wedding photographer. I can just recreate it with CGI." Sift through anyone's photo collection and only a small fraction is of places they've been and sights they've seen. The vast majority is of people they know and the things they did together.
Most people just see the GPS side of this fight, afraid of losing GPS in the continental U.S. In reality it would have mostly affected those who needed extreme precision, not the average users.
It would've also affected cheap GPS receivers which can barely pull in enough signal to get a fix as is. Like the ones in your smartphone, and showing up in cameras and a gazillion other gadgets. Dedicated GPS units like found in boat and car GPSes probably would've been ok. But the reason GPS has spread to gadgets like phones and cameras is because the receiver unit has been made so simple you can buy them for 10 cents in bulk. The only way you can make them that cheap is by sacrificing filtering and signal strength until you're at the very limits of SNR to get a GPS fix.
This. While I do think Jobs is overrated, he's had one valuable contribution to the industry. Most other companies were content if their product worked, even if it shipped with a 300 page manual. Jobs was obsessed with making his products simple and easy to use, almost to a fault (e.g. only one button on the mouse).
IMHO it's this ease of use which is primarily responsible for Apple's success today. Regular people view computers as complicated, and computer geeks (e.g. the Linux community) as obsessed with that complexity. Apple has established a reputation for making computers easy to use, so they're the first (and often only) product people look at when buying a computing device, even if it costs more.
It's sad that they always aim at the lowest energy consumer in my household: my puny 1 W phone, instead of my 1000 W laundry machine, my 150 W fridge, my 300 W computer, or the lights in the house, which add up to at least 250 W (yes, I use energy saving lights).
They're not aiming at the lowest energy consumer. Those low-energy devices are just about the only things that can be powered by human power. During testing for the Gossamer Albatross, Paul MacCready found that a fit athlete could generate a bit more than a third of a horsepower while cycling. About 250-350 Watts. The average fit person is going to be closer to a quarter horsepower. When I was in jr. high, my science teacher had a hand-cranked generator hooked up to a 100 Watt light bulb to demonstrate that even though electricity has no moving parts, it still requires real force to make current flow. It was a *lot* of work to get that bulb to even half the brightness of a 100 W bulb in a socket. The best anyone in my class could manage was about 20 seconds.
And that's if you're deliberately doing nothing but pumping mechanical energy straight into a machine. If you're proposing using a device that siphons (say) 1% of your mechanical energy while doing heavy exercise, you're down to 2 Watts. If all you're doing is walking, then we're talking about a fraction of a Watt. If you have access to or can build the hand-cranked generator + light bulb, I really recommend trying it. It's a very visceral demonstration of how convenient cheap electricity is.
And not just because it'll kill the skin. I tried mounting my phone in my car using magnets, to use it as a GPS. The problem with magnets is that their field strength decreases with distance. So when I went over a bump which jostled the phone, the greater the jostle, the less force the magnets exerted to holding the phone in place. With each bump, the phone drifted further off the magnets, the retaining force decreased, making the phone less and less secure. Eventually after lots of bumps and jiggles, the phone fell off. It wasn't a matter of if, it was a matter of when unless I reached over to reposition the phone every few minutes. (It also screwed up the compass, but I knew that going in.)
In contrast, with something that retains physically like velcro, as the distance between the phone and velcro increases, the retaining force also increases up until the point where the velcro detaches. It makes for a much more secure connection. That's what I'm using now - a strip of velcro stuck to the back of the phone's case. The better magnetic phone holders I've seen recess the magnet inside a plastic mount. That way the metal plate it latches onto is physically prevented from sliding around and drifting off the magnet. Not an option for something you're mounting in your body.
Just because magnets are cool doesn't mean they're better. Use a strap.
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Tax treaties generally focus on earned income. Unearned income (interest, capital gains) tends to fall through the cracks. For example, Canada's tax treaty with the U.S. doesn't cover Roth IRAs. In the U.S., the Roth IRA is a retirement device where you invest income which has been taxed, but you don't have to pay tax on the returns (in exchange for the money being locked up until you retire). If you were a U.S. citizen residing in Canada (thus making you liable for Canadian taxes), you would have to pay Canadian taxes on the returns from your Roth IRA. If you have a high amount of unearned income especially if it comes from atypical sources, you can end up being double-taxed.
No they're not. Most comparisons showing an "incredibly low" tax rate for the U.S. only look at Federal taxes, forgetting that the U.S. has substantial local government taxes which are absent in other countries. If you add up all the Federal, State, and local taxes, the U.S. ends up around a 25%-30% effective tax rate, vs. around 30%-40% for Europe. Lower yes, but only slightly.
The Laffer curve is just a specific case of the mean value theorem in Calculus, worded slightly differently. It is indisputably correct. The only question is if we're to the left or to the right of the maximum (or if the maximum lies at 100% taxation).
Unfortunately, because it's inconvenient for certain political ideologies, people have taken to disputing it for political reasons, not realizing they're simultaneously disputing Calculus when they do so.
This is actually a separate problem, one for which Ravi likely bears no responsibility. Our elementary, jr, and high schools pretty much turn a blind eye to bullying. When kids grow up in an environment where there's little to no consequences for bullying, it should come as no surprise that 18 year-old college students sometimes don't immediately see the problem with "pranking" another student. In a way, Ravi could be as much a victim here.
From FB's perspective, this may actually be a good thing. The company only sees money from the original stock sale in an IPO. Any future stock sales are just money changing hands between shareholders - the company sees none of that money.
Imagine a bell curve of people's valuation of the IPO stock. Some think it's worth little. Some think it's worth a lot. Most think it's worth something in the middle. Some think it's worth little. If the IPO price of a stock exactly matches its final stable market valuation, that means everyone on the bell curve at that point and higher bought the stock at that price.
With Google's IPO, the share price was set too low, so everyone in that stock price point and higher in the bell curve only paid that low amount for GOOG stock, and hence Google did not get as much investment money as they could have. Additional money realized from appreciation in GOOG ended up going to the early investors instead of to Google.
With Facebook's IPO, the people high up on the curve paid that high amount to Facebook. As the price of FB shares drops, the people in the middle will now pay that middle amount to Facebook. And when the share price settles somewhere at the low-mid end, the people there will pay that low-mid amount to Facebook. It wreaks havoc with the market and screws over the people who bought FB at the higher prices, but it maximizes the amount of capital Facebook makes off the initial sales of FB stock to investors.
Better analogy: Robbing a bank of $100,000 vs. stealing 1 cent from each of 10 million visitors.
No it isn't. Unlike economic growth (where new money is "printed" to reflect the increase in economic productivity), taxes are zero-sum. If government spending is 20% of GDP, and the government takes in as much in taxes as they spend, then the average person will contribute 20% of his/her productivity to the government.
It's mathematically impossible to get around this. If you aren't paying for taxes directly via income taxes or sales taxes, you're paying for them indirectly through higher prices or lower wages. Corporations don't generate productivity. People who work for them do. And as the only source of productivity, they're the only source for tax revenue, whether it's direct (sales and income taxes) or indirect (corporate taxes).
e.g. Scenario 1: No government (ignore the beneficial effects of government, this is just to provide a baseline)
Result: You make $100,000 a year.
Scenario 2: Government spends 20% of GDP. The only tax is an income tax.
Result: You make $100,000 a year, pay $20,000 in taxes. Net effect is $80,000/yr take-home pay
Scenario 3a: Government spends 20% of GDP. The only tax is a corporate tax.
Result: Company pays $20,000 on your behalf to the government, your take-home pay is $80,000/yr
Scenario 3b: Government spends 20% of GDP. The only tax is a corporate tax.
Result: Company pays you $100,000. Raises their prices 25%. Your take-home pay is $100,000, but its purchasing power is equal to $80,000 in scenario 1, 2, and 3a.
All this arguing about corporations not paying enough tax is pointless from a government revenue standpoint. It's all paid for by people in the end. Now, if you want to use taxes to encourage/discourage certain types of behavior, then you can argue why there should be more or less corporate taxes vs. individual taxes. But from a government revenue standpoint, it is irrelevant.
If your taxes (sum of direct and indirect) are too high, then the only cause is because the government is spending too much.
For all the crap Sony does, they get some things right. When I bought a Sony laptop for a client, I had to make system restore DVDs (it had a SSD and the restore partition was eating up too much space). During the process, I noticed a "minimal" restore option in addition to the complete restore. I did some reading and found that it's just the OS and necessary drivers. None of the crapware that normally comes preinstalled.
So I wiped the drive, did the minimal restore, and it was exactly as advertised. Clean system, all drivers preinstalled, no crapware. Hats off to the Sony engineer or manager who insisted on that feature.
Wants vs. needs. Just because a need exists doesn't mean all wants have zero value. The entire entertainment industry is unnecessary. Yet it's a significant chunk of the economy and a huge part of people's lives. Why? Diminishing returns.
If cancer research and Facebook were the only two parts of the economy, the economy is not best served by having 100% of money in cancer research and 0% of money in Facebook. It's best served by having x% of money in cancer research, (100-x)% in Facebook. As more money is poured into cancer research, it experiences diminishing returns. Eventually the return on a dollar spent on cancer research (a need) dips below the return on a dollar spent on Facebook (a want), at which point money starts getting spent on Facebook. Even though the overall goal of cancer research is more noble, you've reached a point where the marginal return on a dollar spent on cancer research is less than the marginal return for a dollar spent on Facebook. And it becomes more cost-effective to spend the next dollar on Facebook.
Mathematically, multi-variable systems which reach maximums when all variables except one are zero are exceedingly rare.
Then I invite you to continue shopping for computers at Best Buy and Frys, where you have a limited selection and no reference for prices or quality. When I buy computers on the Internet, I do hours of cross-referencing reviews, benchmarks, and prices from dozens if not hundreds of retailers. Before the Internet, this would've taken me days if not months to do searching magazines at the library and going from physical store to physical store. Rapid communications on the Internet has made my economic purchases tremendously more efficient.
Not exactly. I noticed that look creeping into webcomics and anime long before it was implemented in OS X. Instead of a flat cartoon, you add highlights (especially on the eyes and the hair) and a shadow along one edge to give it a more 3D look. I think the increased use of computers in drawing and animation made it easier for artists to draw over otherwise completed art in order to enhance it.
The glossy look in OS X is just this carried over to icons and windows. While OS X may have been the first widespread implementation on a computer UI, in no way did they start it. (I'm not even sure they were the first to do it on a computer UI. I vaguely recall playing around with an early version of Enlightenment which made extensive use of gradients and faux-transparency. This was on my Thinkpad 600e which would put it in the late 1990s.)
Actually, I think Amazon is on to something. This is a potential solution to piracy of movies and TV shows.
Right now, content providers sell their content to viewers, and also sell interspersed advertisements within the content (commercials). The viewers don't like the ads, so they come up with popup blockers and commercial skippers to remove them. Likewise, the viewers don't like paying for the content, so they pirate it. The content providers have been fighting back with DRM and draconian copyright protection laws. And we get the huge mess we are in right now.
A possible solution is to give away the content for free, without 30 second commercials or popups. Instead, advertisers pay for product placement within the show itself. Because the ads are now placed within the show, it's difficult (not worth it) to remove the ads. A system needs to be developed where content producers will then be paid by the advertisers based on the number of people who view the show (whether estimated or counted somehow). Content provider gives away show for free, viewers watch, advertisers pay content providers. Everyone is happy.
I think you're approaching the problem too much from a privacy-centric point of view. The interest in the advertiser here is not just in correlating the product placement ads to what shows people have watched. It's also in making sure those ads are relevant to the viewing demographic. A product placement ad for feminine hygiene products in a robot fight movie is not going to be extremely effective. There needs to be some method developed which will allow advertisers and content producers to measure the efficacy of those product placement ads. That's where this patent comes into play.
Basically, we're going to be bombarded by ads anyway. Do you want to retain all your privacy and get completely random ads? Or do you want to give up some of your privacy and get much more relevant ads? I haven't owned a TV for 3 years. What I've realized when I do get to watch is that I am totally behind the times when it comes to new products that have come out over the last 3 years. That is, the ads are not merely beneficial for the advertiser; they also provide some marginal benefit to me. Enough so that I'd be willing to give up a little bit of my privacy to be kept informed of relevant new products which interest me. e.g. I gave my email address to VMWare so that I could be kept informed of their new products. I exchanged a little bit of my privacy for more timely product updates.
Landfill gas (methane), wood-burning, and biofuels are classified as renewables. There's a tendency for people to think that "gives off CO2 = not renewable". Renewable just means the net mass balance is zero - after all is said and done, you've left the chemical compounds in the same place they started at. In the case of landfill gas and burning wood and biofuels, the carbon in the CO2 released was originally extracted from CO2 in the atmosphere by plants as a part of photosynthesis a few years or decades ago. It got incorporated into the organic matter of the plant, and is eventually released when you burn the wood or biofuel, or the matter decomposes in a landfill. Essentially, they're just acting as a chemical battery storing solar energy originally captured by the plant.
Technically the same is true for fossil fuels. However, the carbon there has been sequestered underground, out of the system for millions of years. So the carbon is considered to have "started at" underground, rather than in the atmosphere. Burning them is considered adding "new" carbon into the atmospheric system. Unless you can figure out a way to convert the CO2 they generate back into carbon and O2 / H2O, and stick the carbon underground again, they're not considered renewable.
What's even more facepalm worthy is that when you call, they usually "verify" your identity using information about you which is frequently publicly available.
The lawyers will take 33% ($5 billion), so you'd only get a $10 coupon.
I had a long reply written up but lost it in a browser crash. So here's the short version. You don't want to convert all gasoline cars to diesel. You want there to be a healthy mix of the two.
When you refine crude oil, it distills out into a variety of substances, - kerosene, gasoline, diesel, fuel oil, tar, waxes, etc. Ideal case is when your gasoline and diesel use exactly matches the proportions of those which distil out.
The next-ideal case is when you use more gasoline than distils out. Gasoline is a lighter fuel, so can be created relatively easily from the heavier fuels - you break apart their hydrocarbon chains to form the shorter, lighter compounds in gasoline.
The least-ideal case is when you use more diesel than distils out. It's a heavier fuel, and converting lighter fuels into heavier fuels, while possible, is much more difficult and costly. You have to glue together the shorter hydrocarbon chains to form the longer, heavier compounds in diesel.
Also, bear in mind that a large chunk of diesel's higher efficiency is illusory. It's a denser material than gasoline, so 1 gallon of diesel cooked into gasoline would actually form about 1.15 gallons of gasoline. You need to account for this difference when comparing volumetric fuel efficiency (MPG or L/100 km). The proper way to compare their fuel efficiency would be mass-based (miles per pound, or kg per 100 km). It's still more efficient than gasoline due to the higher compression ratios, but not as much as the mpg figures would lead you to believe.
The thing is, corn isn't subsidized because the government wants cheap HFCS. It's subsidized because the government wants overproduction of food so we won't have people going hungry if there's a bunch of crop failures like in the 1930s. Cheap HFCS is merely a side effect ("gee, what can we do with all this excess corn?"). You can make completely valid and compelling arguments against cheap HFCS, but they won't get you anywhere because you're cherry-picking the most unfavorable aspect of corn subsidies to try to make them look bad. You're not addressing the real issue. The starvation argument will win out every time simply because it's more important. If you want to end corn subsidies, you need to address it from the starvation/crop failure angle.
Eh? The old HP which everyone knew and loved (well, mostly) had a claim to fame to PCs, workstations, calculators, printers, scientific instruments, and a host of other fringe but cutting edge stuff. That's what gave them a competitive advantage, respect for their brand name. Y'know, back when they were a leader in the tech industry. Their problems right now are due to "retooling" to become a generic PC repackaging brand. They got exactly what they wanted - they're now leader in a market with probably the thinnest margins in the tech industry, indistinguishable from the likes of Gateway.
If you find yourself constantly chasing the hottest new thing, you are by definition an also-ran. You should be creating the hottest new thing. Like back in the day when businesses would pay a premium for HP workstations, printers and scientific equipment; and geeks would pay a premium for their calculators - because they were considered the best and most advanced. They didn't dominate the inkjet printer business because their sales department did a good job marketing them. They dominated the inkjet printer business because they paid a few geeks to play around with using electrostatic forces to spray ink - they nearly single-handedly invented the inkjet printer market.
Unfortunately they gutted their R&D which was producing their high-profit distinguishing products, in favor of sales to promote their high-revenue generic products. I'm sure the high revenue looks impressive on their sales staff's resume, but if it's on razor-thin profit margins it's not really helping the company. I don't see how shifting their sales from one thing to another is going to help. They need to revive their R&D departments if they want to become an industry leader again and enjoy cushy profit margins.
Well that was originally the idea. When cable TV first rolled out in the U.S., the non-local channels it carried didn't have commercials. But them some marketing exec noticed that nobody had promised customers that there would be no ads. So they started double-dipping by adding ads.
That's the real problem with this, assuming TFA is correct and Apple really did intervene to get Siri's answer changed. You get a list of restaurants from Siri and you have no way to know if the first one on the list is the closest, the highest rated, or the one which paid Apple the most to be placed higher. "I can't help you with that" may actually be a preferable answer.
You're making the same mistake most people who were for the GM bailout made. To increase the urgency of a bailout, you're exaggerating the direness of GM's (and Chrysler's) situation.
That's not how economics works. A bankruptcy doesn't mean game over, go home. A bankruptcy means the parts get sold off to the highest bidder. And bidders don't buy parts of bankrupt companies because they think it'll be cool to own a piece of memorabilia. They buy them because they want to use them to make money. The closer to being salvageable a company was, the more its parts sell for in a bankruptcy.
If, as you claim, in bankruptcy sale GM's creditors would've been paid pennies on the dollar, that points to GM being a grossly inefficient company. The best thing to do in that case would've been to let GM go bankrupt. A bailout would just be throwing good money after bad. If instead the creditors would've been paid 80-90 cents on the dollar, then that points to GM being a sound company which is just having some cashflow problems. A prime candidate for a bailout.
Likewise, if, as you claim, GM's manufacturing facilities around Detroit would've been idled with massive job losses, that points to gross inefficiency in GM's operations and they should've been forced into bankruptcy. But if instead their facilities would've been snapped up by competing manufacturers to add to their existing capacity (meaning little loss of jobs), then a bailout was more appropriate.
The truth is GM and Chrysler were probably not the best-run companies. But their dire economic situation was more the result of the credit crisis and economic downturn, not so much unsound operations. They were in good enough shape that their bankruptcies would not have been devastating to the economy, which is what made them worth bailing out. The issue just became a political hot potato because the unions had forgotten to demand the pension funds be spun off into a separate (and untouchable in a bankruptcy) pension management company. Faced with the prospect of becoming creditors lower on the totem pole than secured creditors (i.e. banks), they started a massive fear campaign about why bankruptcy would be bad, economics be damned.
You forgot the big one: photo-documentation. Nobody is ever going to get away with, "It's ok honey, we don't need to pay for a wedding photographer. I can just recreate it with CGI." Sift through anyone's photo collection and only a small fraction is of places they've been and sights they've seen. The vast majority is of people they know and the things they did together.
It would've also affected cheap GPS receivers which can barely pull in enough signal to get a fix as is. Like the ones in your smartphone, and showing up in cameras and a gazillion other gadgets. Dedicated GPS units like found in boat and car GPSes probably would've been ok. But the reason GPS has spread to gadgets like phones and cameras is because the receiver unit has been made so simple you can buy them for 10 cents in bulk. The only way you can make them that cheap is by sacrificing filtering and signal strength until you're at the very limits of SNR to get a GPS fix.
This. While I do think Jobs is overrated, he's had one valuable contribution to the industry. Most other companies were content if their product worked, even if it shipped with a 300 page manual. Jobs was obsessed with making his products simple and easy to use, almost to a fault (e.g. only one button on the mouse).
IMHO it's this ease of use which is primarily responsible for Apple's success today. Regular people view computers as complicated, and computer geeks (e.g. the Linux community) as obsessed with that complexity. Apple has established a reputation for making computers easy to use, so they're the first (and often only) product people look at when buying a computing device, even if it costs more.
They're not aiming at the lowest energy consumer. Those low-energy devices are just about the only things that can be powered by human power. During testing for the Gossamer Albatross, Paul MacCready found that a fit athlete could generate a bit more than a third of a horsepower while cycling. About 250-350 Watts. The average fit person is going to be closer to a quarter horsepower. When I was in jr. high, my science teacher had a hand-cranked generator hooked up to a 100 Watt light bulb to demonstrate that even though electricity has no moving parts, it still requires real force to make current flow. It was a *lot* of work to get that bulb to even half the brightness of a 100 W bulb in a socket. The best anyone in my class could manage was about 20 seconds.
And that's if you're deliberately doing nothing but pumping mechanical energy straight into a machine. If you're proposing using a device that siphons (say) 1% of your mechanical energy while doing heavy exercise, you're down to 2 Watts. If all you're doing is walking, then we're talking about a fraction of a Watt. If you have access to or can build the hand-cranked generator + light bulb, I really recommend trying it. It's a very visceral demonstration of how convenient cheap electricity is.
And not just because it'll kill the skin. I tried mounting my phone in my car using magnets, to use it as a GPS. The problem with magnets is that their field strength decreases with distance. So when I went over a bump which jostled the phone, the greater the jostle, the less force the magnets exerted to holding the phone in place. With each bump, the phone drifted further off the magnets, the retaining force decreased, making the phone less and less secure. Eventually after lots of bumps and jiggles, the phone fell off. It wasn't a matter of if, it was a matter of when unless I reached over to reposition the phone every few minutes. (It also screwed up the compass, but I knew that going in.)
In contrast, with something that retains physically like velcro, as the distance between the phone and velcro increases, the retaining force also increases up until the point where the velcro detaches. It makes for a much more secure connection. That's what I'm using now - a strip of velcro stuck to the back of the phone's case. The better magnetic phone holders I've seen recess the magnet inside a plastic mount. That way the metal plate it latches onto is physically prevented from sliding around and drifting off the magnet. Not an option for something you're mounting in your body.
Just because magnets are cool doesn't mean they're better. Use a strap.