Corporate taxes are not deterrent to this, companies simply make sure they pay out all the money they make as wages, and presto: no tax liability because they made no profit. It's perfectly legal, and you see small businesses doing it all the time. Of course, if you have shareholders, they will sue you for it, but if you own it yourself, or all the shareholders are employees, it's easy.
CEO would have multiple "company cars" and live in a "company owned house" all of which might depart the company on him when he left - or just be granted to his use, depending on his exit.
The tax code explicitly defines what can be considered a business expense. Basically the cars and houses you've hypothesized would need to serve a business purpose, and you can only write off the portion used for business (for example, if you have a home office in a rented apartment, and the office uses 300 square feet of a 1,200 square food apartment, you can only write off 25% of the rent as a business expense). It's true that people try to be sneaky and claim personal items business expenses, but like I said before, that's a problem today.
Corporations are entities which are supposed to represent the collective interests of their shareholders. So when Romney said "corporations are people" what he meant was that they are made up of people (their shareholders). Now, you don't have to grant people the right to form limited liability corporations, but placing restrictions on corporate rights, or the rights of corporations, violates the first amendment, which guarantees the right to freely associate. This is a precedent that was established by the supreme court, so I'm not just talking out of my ass here, and it makes a lot of sense, so it's not going to be overturned anytime soon.
I have a gun, and I am capable of acting unilaterally. Should I be restricted from speaking my mind as a result? Isn't that a crazy suggestion? There's a difference between stating an opinion, and taking an action. It is possible to say you disagree with the government without violently overthrowing it.
Without such tactics, Apple's federal tax bill in the United States most likely would have been $2.4 billion higher last year
No, it would be the same as it is now, they'd just locate their facilities elsewhere. Whoever wrote this is an idiot who doesn't know anything about how businesses make decisions.
This is not true if you are talking about government positions, other than the military (why should they be expected to enjoy the freedoms they are supposedly dying for?).
That's like saying an infinitely large container is guaranteed to contain a corvette. It's certainly big enough to contain one, but if only has air in it, there will be no corvette. Likewise, infinite space, and infinite mass, and infinite energy does not actually mean infinite possibilities.
Or to put it another way: if you have an infinite series of random, real numbers between 0 and 100 there is no chance that you will ever encounter a number larger than 100.
But what's more mind boggling than that, there's no way to guarantee that series contains any particular number. That's because a real number could be anything including pi, e or any number we can conceive of. If life arises out of an incredibly specific set of events, the same way pi is a very specific ratio, even in an infinite universe it could arise only once, or only a few times, or maybe not at all. There's just no way to know.
Companies like Apple and Netflix and Hulu are still trying to work out the advertising and licensing associated with making everything available on an internet based platform. Apple's the closest to having it all, but there's still a lot they're missing and you have to pay on a per show basis (thought there's no advertising, so that's a plus). Once you can get it all, Apple and other TV media device manufacturers will have an easy time getting that market away from idiots like Time Warner and Motorola who wouldn't know a good user experience from their own assholes.
Full-on socialist policies . . . actually free the citizenry from having to worry about the very trials and tribulations that consume the time and energy of a capitalist society
Indeed. They free them from the ability to do so. They free them to accept whatever they've been given. And they free them from the aspiration to do more. Such a wonderful system.
But that just makes's the poster's point. We don't even know how big the universe is, or whether it is infinite. So if you wanted to do a calculation, not only do you not know the probability that life will exist on a particular planet, you don't even know the number of planets to multiply that probability by. And it doesn't matter if the number could be arbitrarily large, as you contend, because the probability could still be small enough that there is only one planet with life, since you don't know what it is.
The odds would have to be astronomical, which isn't actually all that unusual in the universe, as it does exist on an astronomical scale.
You can't just say, "the universe is very big, so there must be other life out there" any more than you can say a container is very large and so must contain what you are looking for.
Isn't the idea that other planets found in a star's habitable would be earth-like and have life also somewhat earth-centric? The whole point of the article is that without more information, there is no way to know how prevalent life may be in the universe.
You're wrong about solar. Prices of solar panels have come down to the $1/W range, and they are going to fall by another 50% over the next couple years as new technologies for reducing the amount of silicon used become common place. From there the remaining problem is finding a way to store the power you generated during the day to use during the night. But I think that if you used the power to produce hydrogen in an 80% efficient process, then burned it in a combined cycle plant that's 60% efficient you could get half your power back. I think that would be a workable solution, especially if you put solar panels on everyone's food so they could use a portion of it when it is generated, generate hydrogen for heating, then put the excess on the grid for storage by a smallish (50MW or so) local combined cycle facility. If you factor in the cloudy/nightime hours, and the 50% storage efficiency, you'd need to install 6 W of solar panels for every 1 W of power you intend to use. Combined cycle generators cost about $0.50 / W, and you could probably build an electrolysis unit for about the same. If you can install the solar panels on people's roofs for about $0.50/W you end up with a total installed cost of about $7/W. That compares with about $4/W which they are expecting for new nuclear plants. If you want a 10% annual return of the installed cost, you'd need to pay $700/kW-yr for the electricity, or $0.08/kW-hr. That's comparable to what people are paying today in SoCal, and bear in mind that the actual costs you'd pay out of pocket are lower depending on how much power you produce with the solar panels on your roof.
I know what you're going to say: what about areas where you don't get enough sun? Well, it turns out the economics are similar for wind power, though you'll end up paying more like $0.12/kWh in the end because there aren't any new technologies being rolled out to radically reduce the price of wind power in the immediate or foreseeable future.
A free market is a market where prices are determined by supply and demand. Free markets contrast with controlled markets in which prices, supply or demand is directly controlled. Various economic theories require specific properties of free markets, for example, a perfect market with perfect information and perfect competition. Regulation which does not affect these specific properties can be in place without disqualifying the market as free under supply and demand.
Just because you have a particular definition of a "free market" doesn't mean it's the definition other people use. You can't just make up your own meanings for words to win arguments and expect other people to go along with it. Do some research next time.
for the first couple hundred years our entire tax base was levied on imports.
That's pretty impressive for a nation that's only 236 years old. In reality, however, the income tax was first levied in 1861 in order to pay for the Civil War, so we actually made it income tax free for just 85 years. Of course, the changing sources of funding says more about the size of the federal government than anything.
Now, you are saying "zero market regulations", but the person you are replying to said "a free market." It's important for you to understand that some regulation is implied in any market since property in the US is defined in legal terms and property rights in the US are enforced by government agencies. So there is a difference between a free market, where private actors are free to make economic decisions, and an wholly unregulated market, where no government regulation exists of any kind. A free market is the alternative to a command economy (where a governing body makes all the economic decisions), but an unregulated market is a contradiction in itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Recall that F/A 18 that hit an apartment complex in Virginia Beach? No one died. If the plane hit a packed sports arena, that would be a different story entirely.
They don't have to move them to Bangalore, the office they use to dodge CA's absurd corporate tax is in LasVegas.
This is the exact line of reasoning that caused the .com bubble.
Corporate taxes are not deterrent to this, companies simply make sure they pay out all the money they make as wages, and presto: no tax liability because they made no profit. It's perfectly legal, and you see small businesses doing it all the time. Of course, if you have shareholders, they will sue you for it, but if you own it yourself, or all the shareholders are employees, it's easy.
The tax code explicitly defines what can be considered a business expense. Basically the cars and houses you've hypothesized would need to serve a business purpose, and you can only write off the portion used for business (for example, if you have a home office in a rented apartment, and the office uses 300 square feet of a 1,200 square food apartment, you can only write off 25% of the rent as a business expense). It's true that people try to be sneaky and claim personal items business expenses, but like I said before, that's a problem today.
Corporations are entities which are supposed to represent the collective interests of their shareholders. So when Romney said "corporations are people" what he meant was that they are made up of people (their shareholders). Now, you don't have to grant people the right to form limited liability corporations, but placing restrictions on corporate rights, or the rights of corporations, violates the first amendment, which guarantees the right to freely associate. This is a precedent that was established by the supreme court, so I'm not just talking out of my ass here, and it makes a lot of sense, so it's not going to be overturned anytime soon.
I have a gun, and I am capable of acting unilaterally. Should I be restricted from speaking my mind as a result? Isn't that a crazy suggestion? There's a difference between stating an opinion, and taking an action. It is possible to say you disagree with the government without violently overthrowing it.
No, it would be the same as it is now, they'd just locate their facilities elsewhere. Whoever wrote this is an idiot who doesn't know anything about how businesses make decisions.
This is not true if you are talking about government positions, other than the military (why should they be expected to enjoy the freedoms they are supposedly dying for?).
One which will not be upheld if it makes it to the supreme court.
That's like saying an infinitely large container is guaranteed to contain a corvette. It's certainly big enough to contain one, but if only has air in it, there will be no corvette. Likewise, infinite space, and infinite mass, and infinite energy does not actually mean infinite possibilities.
Or to put it another way: if you have an infinite series of random, real numbers between 0 and 100 there is no chance that you will ever encounter a number larger than 100.
But what's more mind boggling than that, there's no way to guarantee that series contains any particular number. That's because a real number could be anything including pi, e or any number we can conceive of. If life arises out of an incredibly specific set of events, the same way pi is a very specific ratio, even in an infinite universe it could arise only once, or only a few times, or maybe not at all. There's just no way to know.
Companies like Apple and Netflix and Hulu are still trying to work out the advertising and licensing associated with making everything available on an internet based platform. Apple's the closest to having it all, but there's still a lot they're missing and you have to pay on a per show basis (thought there's no advertising, so that's a plus). Once you can get it all, Apple and other TV media device manufacturers will have an easy time getting that market away from idiots like Time Warner and Motorola who wouldn't know a good user experience from their own assholes.
Indeed. They free them from the ability to do so. They free them to accept whatever they've been given. And they free them from the aspiration to do more. Such a wonderful system.
What could possibly go wrong?
I would just like to point out that you actually have no idea how big the universe is.
But that just makes's the poster's point. We don't even know how big the universe is, or whether it is infinite. So if you wanted to do a calculation, not only do you not know the probability that life will exist on a particular planet, you don't even know the number of planets to multiply that probability by. And it doesn't matter if the number could be arbitrarily large, as you contend, because the probability could still be small enough that there is only one planet with life, since you don't know what it is.
The odds would have to be astronomical, which isn't actually all that unusual in the universe, as it does exist on an astronomical scale.
You can't just say, "the universe is very big, so there must be other life out there" any more than you can say a container is very large and so must contain what you are looking for.
Isn't the idea that other planets found in a star's habitable would be earth-like and have life also somewhat earth-centric? The whole point of the article is that without more information, there is no way to know how prevalent life may be in the universe.
You're wrong about solar. Prices of solar panels have come down to the $1/W range, and they are going to fall by another 50% over the next couple years as new technologies for reducing the amount of silicon used become common place. From there the remaining problem is finding a way to store the power you generated during the day to use during the night. But I think that if you used the power to produce hydrogen in an 80% efficient process, then burned it in a combined cycle plant that's 60% efficient you could get half your power back. I think that would be a workable solution, especially if you put solar panels on everyone's food so they could use a portion of it when it is generated, generate hydrogen for heating, then put the excess on the grid for storage by a smallish (50MW or so) local combined cycle facility. If you factor in the cloudy/nightime hours, and the 50% storage efficiency, you'd need to install 6 W of solar panels for every 1 W of power you intend to use. Combined cycle generators cost about $0.50 / W, and you could probably build an electrolysis unit for about the same. If you can install the solar panels on people's roofs for about $0.50/W you end up with a total installed cost of about $7/W. That compares with about $4/W which they are expecting for new nuclear plants. If you want a 10% annual return of the installed cost, you'd need to pay $700/kW-yr for the electricity, or $0.08/kW-hr. That's comparable to what people are paying today in SoCal, and bear in mind that the actual costs you'd pay out of pocket are lower depending on how much power you produce with the solar panels on your roof.
I know what you're going to say: what about areas where you don't get enough sun? Well, it turns out the economics are similar for wind power, though you'll end up paying more like $0.12/kWh in the end because there aren't any new technologies being rolled out to radically reduce the price of wind power in the immediate or foreseeable future.
At what point will psychiatrists have to stop classifying people as paranoid simply because they believe the government is tracking them?
Everyone knows the constitution doesn't apply when you're doing something in a public space.
Reporting "older man" is pretty silly, but reporting "rape" makes sense to me. 50% isn't bad when you're talking about the US legal system.
Most runaway teens eventually return home, so this isn't surprising at all.
Are you sure about that?
Just because you have a particular definition of a "free market" doesn't mean it's the definition other people use. You can't just make up your own meanings for words to win arguments and expect other people to go along with it. Do some research next time.
That's pretty impressive for a nation that's only 236 years old. In reality, however, the income tax was first levied in 1861 in order to pay for the Civil War, so we actually made it income tax free for just 85 years. Of course, the changing sources of funding says more about the size of the federal government than anything.
Now, you are saying "zero market regulations", but the person you are replying to said "a free market." It's important for you to understand that some regulation is implied in any market since property in the US is defined in legal terms and property rights in the US are enforced by government agencies. So there is a difference between a free market, where private actors are free to make economic decisions, and an wholly unregulated market, where no government regulation exists of any kind. A free market is the alternative to a command economy (where a governing body makes all the economic decisions), but an unregulated market is a contradiction in itself.
Ah, there it is.