If one thinks that it is not solvable by action by the electorate, look to Scandinavia to see that significant inroads can be made without sacrificing economic productivity.
It does not magically turn into "willful" simply by passing through court.
I don't see the use of this discussion anymore since it's a circular discussion. The last few iterations have run thusly: I restate my point, you address something else.
I have someone to drink coffee with. It's more fun than this.
"Evasion" is willful avoidance per definition. And I stand by my claim that there is no threat of force behind tax payment (unless payment is being willfully evaded) which is not present in any other debt situation.
This is not really a matter of ideology, it's more a matter of semantics.
Jail time for unpaid debt is not the exclusive domain of taxes. Six US states, and several nations, practice it. On the other hand, I have not found any indication that unpaid taxes in the US can trigger jail time. You can go to jail for evading taxes, but that's different; that's basically fraud.
So if your distinction is supposed to be that tax is collected by "threat of force" since there is a possibility of jail time then you are basing your argument, as best as I can tell, on a fallacy.
I don't know how I can possibly make this point any clearer, and I almost get the feeling you are actively working to avoid understanding my point. Tax is a contract you sign by staying in a country. Both ends of the bargain are enforced by the legal system - the State gets in trouble if they fail to deliver on their end of the deal, too - but you are never forced to enter into the deal. Buying the product is voluntary, payment once bought is not; just like with any other product.
Saying "Tax is forced payment" is exactly as silly as saying "Buying a TV on credit is forced payment". Once you obtain the TV, payment will be taken through threat of force, but nobody forced you to buy the TV in the first place.
No; in other words: Pay the rent or leave. It's not theft unless you're being forced to stay in the area for which you're being levied a tax. International waters have no tax. Build a raft and see how well you'll cope with independence.
If you choose to stay and avail yourself of the commons' resources without contributing back - and if you're staying there, you are using them whether you want to or not - then you're not paying your debts and society has ways of penalizing that.
For hell's sake! "Trying to avoid torture" isn't something that gives you credit. Not using torture is something that is expected of civilized people. Period.
There is also the not-insignificant dimension of what torture does to the moral standing of those who apply it.
If you care about moral standing and freedom and that kind of stuff that was supposed to make it a Good Thing that the US won the cold war, that should be quite significant.
As a Norwegian politically active youth - center-left - I sometimes find myself missing the Soviet Union. Do you have any idea how angry that makes me?
Tax is a social contract no more collected by force than the rent on an apartment; as long as you have the choice to terminate the contract (ie. move somewhere else) you're not forced to pay, you're simply paying through implicit contract the commons for the land you're on, as set by the majority of the people in that segment of land.
I'm a little annoyed by people calling what is essentially backstabbing and poor management politics. I dabble in politics, and this is not not how it works.
Sorry, not true. Norway, which is the only country I know the phone history of, had free local calls in most areas. Then we realized we may as well settle for a flat national landline fee, which was set to around 2 cents in 1994, IIRC - although the closest geographical parallel would be a "flat state price". And it's 5 cents from landline to cellphone and vice versa. We have 99.9% GSM coverage, and 100% ISDN coverage (60% of landline users use ISDN).
We don't have all that silliness with 38947293 different telephone plans. There are tendencies to it with mobile phones, which is a bit irritating.
Mind you, if you correct this for average salary, your phone prices will probably appear even more insane.
The US phone infrastructure is third-world. I am apalled every time I visit the country, and there is no nicer way to put it.
Occasionally being startled is vastly different from being fearful. And sure, the right wing of the US has been isolationist for a while - even when history has judged it to be unethical - but they're not anymore and have been extremely militarized for quite a long while!
Trying to invalidate a criticism against a current political movement by contradicting it with what they at one point used to be is really pretty silly.
"Your presidential candidate is senile!" -"Oh yeah? Well, he wasn't 60 years ago! So HAH!"
That's a fairly bogus claim, since those examples aren't things you fear - those are just decisions about what one finds morally and financially reasonable, whereas the death penalty has no real base in reason, and is a purely emotional thing: Believing in allowing the judicial system to murder people is believed by some to be a justifiable way to deal with a perceived societal threat to yourself.
I'm thinking this might be a troll or something. They found physical blood (is there any other kind of blood?) in the car the married couple had shared for years. There's a heapin' helpin' of reasonable doubt that the blood might be related to the murder, right there.
Due to a run-in with some trash with glass shards quite a few years back, my mom has visible blood stains of mine in her trunk, but she hasn't - to the best of my knowledge - murdered me - at least not yet.
It is not an exaggeration to say that technical development of the American phone system has slowed to a halt since the demonopolization.
Wow, really? I didn't know that in 1982 you could get ubiquitous cheap cell phones,
Let me just stop you there for a moment, and remind you that the American cellular phone system is pretty much the laughing stock of the industrialized world. I am in Norway, a country with a population density which is one third of that of the United States, and the cellphone service here is immeasurably better than that of the United States, with its multiple incompatible standards, vendor-locked phone, geographically locked numbers for cell phones (Come on, WTF.), and having to pay to receive phone calls (seriously, WTF).
When I was last in the US (in June this year), participants at a conference in New Hampshire - a state with five times the population density of Norway - had to walk out into the parking lot to complete a phone call. Their absence of outrage was interesting.
residential internet connections with speeds of 5Mbit and up,
Again, the United States is badly lagging in broadband rollout, especially in areas outside the big cities.
unlimited calling plans to anywhere in the country for less than the cost of two good restaurant meals a month,
That really isn't remarkable. I haven't been looking at U. S. prices, but I'm going to go ahead and assume they're higher.
and calls to other countries for prices so low they're practically free.
Actually, I consider international calling rates in the United States to be completely insane. On the landline network, it costs an order of magnitude more to make a call from the US to Norway, than it does to call Norway to the US. The difference would have been even greater if the Dollar hadn't recently nigh-on halved in value to the Krone. And since you later go on to deprecate the landline network and claim that cellphones are the future, let me note that the last time I checked this year, phone calls from the US to Moscow by cellphone cost something like 5 USD PER MINUTE. Compare this to 18 cents here in Norway.
Maybe you're referring specifically to the circuit-switched POTS network. Yeah, that's probably in bad shape, along with the canal system, the buggy-whip makers, the steamship yards, and all the other obsolete technology of yesteryear.
The fact that we're talking about a phone network at all is a bit of an anachronism. VoIP has made the phone network utterly obsolete.
That's an absurdly uninformed statement, but I'm not going to bother doing that spiel.
It's all just data now, so we should be talking about the data network, which is in fine shape and gives us an absurd amount of choice and features for our telephony. This most assuredly never would have happened without the AT&T breakup and subsequent deregulation.
OK, I'll give you that. They can shovel packets now, using technology developed at Bell Labs, just as they did before the breakup, for the ARPAnet. Just as the Norwegian telemonopoloy Televerket did in 1973.
Did I even imply that? All I said was that "demonopolization" didn't automagically make the prices lower; ignoring the importance of the advance of technology which happened in that space is silly.
That said, Bell Labs basically no longer exists - as a direct cause of the demonopolization - and that's where the semiconductor was invented, and a large, large amount of groundbreaking fiber optics research was done.
And the current state of the American phone network is absolutely depressing. It is not an exaggeration to say that technical development of the American phone system has slowed to a halt since the demonopolization. I suppose all that money has to be diverted into more important stuff, like logo designs for all the new company names.
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If one thinks that it is not solvable by action by the electorate, look to Scandinavia to see that significant inroads can be made without sacrificing economic productivity.
It does not magically turn into "willful" simply by passing through court.
I don't see the use of this discussion anymore since it's a circular discussion. The last few iterations have run thusly: I restate my point, you address something else.
I have someone to drink coffee with. It's more fun than this.
Guerrilla != gorilla. Man am I ever glad you don't work in a zoo.
"Evasion" is willful avoidance per definition. And I stand by my claim that there is no threat of force behind tax payment (unless payment is being willfully evaded) which is not present in any other debt situation.
These laws cover tax evasion, not failure to pay tax, a distinction I made in the previous post.
This is not really a matter of ideology, it's more a matter of semantics.
Jail time for unpaid debt is not the exclusive domain of taxes. Six US states, and several nations, practice it. On the other hand, I have not found any indication that unpaid taxes in the US can trigger jail time. You can go to jail for evading taxes, but that's different; that's basically fraud.
So if your distinction is supposed to be that tax is collected by "threat of force" since there is a possibility of jail time then you are basing your argument, as best as I can tell, on a fallacy.
No; in other words: Pay the rent or leave.
That's not what we do. We say pay or sit in jail.
I don't know how I can possibly make this point any clearer, and I almost get the feeling you are actively working to avoid understanding my point. Tax is a contract you sign by staying in a country. Both ends of the bargain are enforced by the legal system - the State gets in trouble if they fail to deliver on their end of the deal, too - but you are never forced to enter into the deal. Buying the product is voluntary, payment once bought is not; just like with any other product.
Saying "Tax is forced payment" is exactly as silly as saying "Buying a TV on credit is forced payment". Once you obtain the TV, payment will be taken through threat of force, but nobody forced you to buy the TV in the first place.
No; in other words: Pay the rent or leave. It's not theft unless you're being forced to stay in the area for which you're being levied a tax. International waters have no tax. Build a raft and see how well you'll cope with independence.
If you choose to stay and avail yourself of the commons' resources without contributing back - and if you're staying there, you are using them whether you want to or not - then you're not paying your debts and society has ways of penalizing that.
For hell's sake! "Trying to avoid torture" isn't something that gives you credit. Not using torture is something that is expected of civilized people. Period.
There is also the not-insignificant dimension of what torture does to the moral standing of those who apply it.
If you care about moral standing and freedom and that kind of stuff that was supposed to make it a Good Thing that the US won the cold war, that should be quite significant.
As a Norwegian politically active youth - center-left - I sometimes find myself missing the Soviet Union. Do you have any idea how angry that makes me?
Hydro is far from free of environmental problems, it's just that the problems are local, rather than global.
Tax is a social contract no more collected by force than the rent on an apartment; as long as you have the choice to terminate the contract (ie. move somewhere else) you're not forced to pay, you're simply paying through implicit contract the commons for the land you're on, as set by the majority of the people in that segment of land.
During the reactors operational life, a total of 47,078 gallons of radioactive liquid waste was discharged into the icecap.
I'm a little annoyed by people calling what is essentially backstabbing and poor management politics. I dabble in politics, and this is not not how it works.
Thanks. I wish there was a +6.
Show's what you know.
No. Clearly, show is what *you* know.
Sorry, not true. Norway, which is the only country I know the phone history of, had free local calls in most areas. Then we realized we may as well settle for a flat national landline fee, which was set to around 2 cents in 1994, IIRC - although the closest geographical parallel would be a "flat state price". And it's 5 cents from landline to cellphone and vice versa. We have 99.9% GSM coverage, and 100% ISDN coverage (60% of landline users use ISDN).
We don't have all that silliness with 38947293 different telephone plans. There are tendencies to it with mobile phones, which is a bit irritating.
Mind you, if you correct this for average salary, your phone prices will probably appear even more insane.
The US phone infrastructure is third-world. I am apalled every time I visit the country, and there is no nicer way to put it.
Score one for laissez-faire, or something.
That is for 50A at 110V, not for 50A at 19V.
I hang out far too much on IRC and I have never seen "l2". l2communicate.
Occasionally being startled is vastly different from being fearful. And sure, the right wing of the US has been isolationist for a while - even when history has judged it to be unethical - but they're not anymore and have been extremely militarized for quite a long while!
Trying to invalidate a criticism against a current political movement by contradicting it with what they at one point used to be is really pretty silly.
"Your presidential candidate is senile!" -"Oh yeah? Well, he wasn't 60 years ago! So HAH!"
That's a fairly bogus claim, since those examples aren't things you fear - those are just decisions about what one finds morally and financially reasonable, whereas the death penalty has no real base in reason, and is a purely emotional thing: Believing in allowing the judicial system to murder people is believed by some to be a justifiable way to deal with a perceived societal threat to yourself.
I'm thinking this might be a troll or something. They found physical blood (is there any other kind of blood?) in the car the married couple had shared for years. There's a heapin' helpin' of reasonable doubt that the blood might be related to the murder, right there.
Due to a run-in with some trash with glass shards quite a few years back, my mom has visible blood stains of mine in her trunk, but she hasn't - to the best of my knowledge - murdered me - at least not yet.
Hahaha. Need mod points!
It is not an exaggeration to say that technical development of the American phone system has slowed to a halt since the demonopolization.
Wow, really? I didn't know that in 1982 you could get ubiquitous cheap cell phones,
Let me just stop you there for a moment, and remind you that the American cellular phone system is pretty much the laughing stock of the industrialized world. I am in Norway, a country with a population density which is one third of that of the United States, and the cellphone service here is immeasurably better than that of the United States, with its multiple incompatible standards, vendor-locked phone, geographically locked numbers for cell phones (Come on, WTF.), and having to pay to receive phone calls (seriously, WTF).
When I was last in the US (in June this year), participants at a conference in New Hampshire - a state with five times the population density of Norway - had to walk out into the parking lot to complete a phone call. Their absence of outrage was interesting.
residential internet connections with speeds of 5Mbit and up,
Again, the United States is badly lagging in broadband rollout, especially in areas outside the big cities.
unlimited calling plans to anywhere in the country for less than the cost of two good restaurant meals a month,
That really isn't remarkable. I haven't been looking at U. S. prices, but I'm going to go ahead and assume they're higher.
and calls to other countries for prices so low they're practically free.
Actually, I consider international calling rates in the United States to be completely insane. On the landline network, it costs an order of magnitude more to make a call from the US to Norway, than it does to call Norway to the US. The difference would have been even greater if the Dollar hadn't recently nigh-on halved in value to the Krone. And since you later go on to deprecate the landline network and claim that cellphones are the future, let me note that the last time I checked this year, phone calls from the US to Moscow by cellphone cost something like 5 USD PER MINUTE. Compare this to 18 cents here in Norway.
Maybe you're referring specifically to the circuit-switched POTS network. Yeah, that's probably in bad shape, along with the canal system, the buggy-whip makers, the steamship yards, and all the other obsolete technology of yesteryear.
The fact that we're talking about a phone network at all is a bit of an anachronism. VoIP has made the phone network utterly obsolete.
That's an absurdly uninformed statement, but I'm not going to bother doing that spiel.
It's all just data now, so we should be talking about the data network, which is in fine shape and gives us an absurd amount of choice and features for our telephony. This most assuredly never would have happened without the AT&T breakup and subsequent deregulation.
OK, I'll give you that. They can shovel packets now, using technology developed at Bell Labs, just as they did before the breakup, for the ARPAnet. Just as the Norwegian telemonopoloy Televerket did in 1973.
That said, Bell Labs basically no longer exists - as a direct cause of the demonopolization - and that's where the semiconductor was invented, and a large, large amount of groundbreaking fiber optics research was done.
And the current state of the American phone network is absolutely depressing. It is not an exaggeration to say that technical development of the American phone system has slowed to a halt since the demonopolization. I suppose all that money has to be diverted into more important stuff, like logo designs for all the new company names.