By filing with Intuit you have already put your trust into a big corporation.
At least I have some recourse when that big corporation screws up.
The government already has my social security number... what do I do when one of the millions of employees of the government goes rogue and steals my SSN?
Section 8 Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States
I am still waiting to read the powers given to Congress to promote the general welfare? The clause above gives the Congress the power to collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises. It does list what the money can be used for (common defence and general welfare of the united states).
Of course, we're back to pedantry again if we start arguing over the definition of "general Welfare". We could say that instead of the payola version of "welfare" that we use now, it means "well-being".
Of course. It is obvious their use of the word "welfare" is not connected in any way to our "welfare system." They even specify "the welfare of the United States," not its citizens. I am sure they could never imagine the government collecting taxes from everyone and creating social welfare programs. Indeed, they did not even give Congress the power to collect income taxes. You can thank the modern Congress for that great idea, in the 16th Amendment.
Basically, I add people to my foe list if their arguments are consistently, factually wrong. I love debating with people that have different opinions, but when someone continues to misrepresent facts, it's a waste of my time.
No, I'm just annoyed that you're more than happy to take money when you feel its "yours" but go into paroxyisms when I take money that I feel is "mine" (after all, I paid taxes too, and since unemployment is partially paid at the state level, I've paid a lot of that back through our state sales tax).
First of all, I never said anything to you about taking unemployment, did I? Although my feelings on whether the government should be providing unemployment service (I lean against it), you are paying taxes (presumably) and can take advantage of that service.
Secondly, I'm more than happy to take the theoretical FairTax prebate, and I support the use of that prebate system, because it is not a "service" provided by the government. It is simply the fairest way I can think of to keep the tax system progressive and fair, without giving the lobbyists an opening.
As for progressive vs. regressive, sorry, but giving everyone $5000 doesn't make the tax any less regressive.
Well, if you would use actual numbers and not made up ones like $5000, you would see that poor people would typically spend no money on taxes, where as rich people would spend a huge amount on taxes, under this system. Read www.fairtax.org's many, many research papers on this if you want more info.
As a fraction of the money they earn, people with less money will generally spend more on goods than people with more money (regardless of where they are relative to the poverty line), which means they will spend more on taxes than rich people percentage-wise, which seems to be the very definition of the word.
I am tired of explaining to you what you can easily find out on www.fairtax.org and www.fairtaxvolunteer.org.
Point blank, poor people will keep more of their money under the FairTax than they do under the current tax system. If you want to find out how this is possible, please read their site. I can boil it down simply: (a) They no longer pay payroll taxes out of their paycheck, (b) all or most of the money they have to spend towards taxes will be covered by the monthly prebate, and (c) the prices of goods will be about what they are now, even after the tax is added in, due to market economics.
All the $5000 does is shift the scale so that people who are really poor end up either making money or having no taxes, but then the scale starts climbing from there.
Actually, you're wrong. The FairTax shifts a lot of the tax burden to people that currently defraud the system by getting paid under the table and pay no income taxes. It also taps the tax potential of foreign tourists buying things here. And it encourages foreign companies (and American companies) to run their businesses in America. Money is also saved in the enforcement side.
Exactly. I called it a flat tax because its a flat rate, the only difference is in how the money is collected. Sorry if that confused you.
It is never referred to as a flat tax because most people equate "flat tax" with "flat income tax."
Of course, pushing a system where the government hands out thousands of dollars to everyone really jives with your position. You'd turn down your share, right? I'd hate to see you vomit all over it.
Why would I turn down my share, when I am paying my share of taxes? The only alternative would be to not tax food and similar necessities, but then you open the door for lobbyists to get loopholes into what gets taxed and what doesn't. That is what we are trying to avoid with the prebate.
Man, it must really bug you that the FairTax isn't regressive, since that kind of kills your argument against it. Sorry!
It most certainly is not pedantry. The post I was responding to was implying that the Constitution mandates the government to promote the general welfare. That would be an extremely broad and nebulous power to give the government. The founding fathers were not that stupid. The preamble simply states that all the powers laid out in the Constitution (which are explicit) are being established for several reasons. And one of those reasons is to promote the general welfare.
Let me give you an exercise. First, I assume you understand that the explicit powers granted to the government are laid out in Articles, Sections, and Amendments of the Constitution, right? Please name the Article and Section or Amendment where the Constitution tells the government to promote the general welfare.
All it says is "in order to do these things, we have created this Constitution." It does not tell the government to do those preceding things. It tells them what they can do in order to achieve those things, as the founders intended.
I find your viewpoint especially intriguing based on your pimping of the fairtax.org website.
That's probably because, based on the rest of your reply, you fundamentally misunderstand the FairTax.
So lets say I picked myself up off my bootstraps and did something else. Say I started my own company. You would still tell me that you're gagging and vomiting for requesting small business loans from the government in order to obtain funding to hire employees and develop a product.
Yes.
Of course, you seem to not have such a violent reaction when it comes to the existing companies taking government money hand-over-fist.
How exactly did you come to this conclusion? I cannot stand government subsidies. They simply fuck with the market, and in the end, it's bad news. Maybe not immediately, and maybe not obviously, but inevitably it is bad news.
If you were having such fits over each of these companies and their subsidies, loans, breaks, and contracts, you'd never leave your house...
Ummm... why would I never leave my house? I'm having trouble following your "logic."
Back to your support of a flat tax
The FairTax is not a flat tax. It is a national, retail sales tax.
what is the point of paying our government at all if its not providing services
First of all, the FairTax has nothing to do with how much taxes the government collects, only with HOW the money is collected, what effect it has on our economy, the fairness of who it is collected from, etc. In my perfect world, we'd have the FairTax, and its tax rate would be a very small percentage. The government would use the money as the Constitution mandates, to maintain law and order, essentially.
Especially in the form of one of the most regressive taxes known to man (the sales tax)
Please study the FairTax proposal before trying to discredit it. If you'd read anything about it, you'd know it is PROGRESSIVE, not regressive. Everyone gets a prebate based on poverty level spending, so that the poor are not spending tax money on the necessities. In addition, poor workers would now get ALL of their paycheck, rather than what we have now, where at least 7.5% is taken out for social security by their employer.
If you lost your job and your savings, you'd curl up on the side of the road and wait for the end with your pride intact right?
No, why would I curl up on the side of the road. Are you saying the two choices a person has when they get in trouble are (a) beg the government for help, or (b) curl up and die? How sad.
Oh, but you have psychic powers to make sure you never work for a company like Enron or Worldcom, so its not like you'd EVER lose your job through no fault of your own, and should anything like that happen, you're already a genious so you'd NEVER need education or training should you need to find a new field of employment.
Where did I say any of that? The difference between me and the person I was responding to is that I would not whine about how the government is not helping me, like it's my mother, and I'm here to suckle. How pathetic, weak, and needy we've become.
It says in the Constitution that the government should "promote the general welfare."
No, it most surely does not say that. It says they created the Constitution to, in part, promote the general welfare. Nowhere in it does it say the government's role is to promote the general welfare. I hope you can see the huge difference between these two things.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
BTW, the government is "We the People", i.e. you, your family, and your friends. The government shouldn't be your enemy. If it is, vote or run for office...
I do vote, and I would run for office if it was possible for a 3rd party candidate to be treated equally and have an equal chance of winning an election. Right now, 3rd parties generally can only win local elections, and so that is where I put the pressure.
As for the government being my enemy, you are wrong. The government as defined in the Constitution is not my enemy, but the huge, bureaucraptic behemoth that exists now is no one's friend.
What a disgusting and truly saddening post to read. It really breaks my heart to see someone become so dependent on the government.
What the fuck happened to American ingenuity, to picking yourself up by your bootstraps, to working hard and making your life better on your own and with your family and friends?
Instead you whine, "what am I supposed to do?" "Nobody is providing retraining." Where is my government assistance? Why can't I borrow more money from the government?
I'm sorry, but it really makes me want to vomit, to see how far we've sunk in the last 200 years.
I'm a libertarian because I believe in getting the government out of private life.
Right, this is what Democrats believes also.
Rampant corporations need to be controlled, because they're destroying our country.
See, this is what makes you a Democrat and not a Libertarian.
If that offends you, get the fuck over it.
Ha, it doesn't offend me. Though I do think it's amusing that you call yourself a libertarian, and then when you actually say what you believe in, it's actually a Democrat's viewpoints.
The LP needs moderating influences if it's ever going to be more than a bunch of freaks on the fringe of the political world.
The LP is a lot closer to the center than either of the two big parties. Every party has their share of quacks on the fringe. However, the LP certainly would not see "tightly leashed business" as becoming more moderate, just more liberal.
Unless you actually enjoy having advertising on every available flat surface, and being treated as a 'consumer' rather than a citizen, in which case, there's no hope for you at all.
Ha! That's kinda the same way I feel about roads. I've ridden a bike for the last six years and don't own a car, but I still have to pay for roads and traffic infrastructure that I don't use and that in some cases works directly against my best interests as a rider.
So you only ride your bike cross-country, dirt roads, etc?
I get where you're coming from, but I just don't agree with your stance. Were I to take your position on wi-fi towards roads, I'd be morally right to do so. I don't use them and have to pay for someone else to benefit by them. Unfair? To me, absolutely. To society at large? I'm pretty sure that society, in order to exist in its present form, needs roads.
Here is a fact: Right now Valve is watching you every time you play, and gathering information on your user habits, play times, durations of play, PC settings, hardware configuration, and storing it for market research data.
I don't see anything in any municipal Wi-Fi proposal, anywhere, that says the municipality will be the sole mandatory provider of wireless services. So I'm unclear as to how "the government" obtains a monopoly from these proposals. They're just one provider among many.
Yeah, with the huge exception that they are using money taken from you by threat of force to pay for this service for "everyone." This will lead to some people paying for wifi twice, and some people paying for it but not even needing or using it.
I consider myself to be a liberal libertarian. IMO the corporate world has proven for hundreds of years that it cannot be trusted to do the right thing unless the right thing also happens to be the profitable thing, and as such needs to be regulated tightly. However, I'm also a non-Christian and I resent the enforcement of hardline Christian morality, such as the ban on gay marriage, that the Republican Party advocates.
So how exactly are you a libertarian? You sound just like a liberal?
A libertarian does not believe in government tightly regulating businesses, generally because the government does a shitty job of it and screws something else up in the meantime.
Sounds a bit like the failed DiVX DVD wannabe we all hated doesn't it?
Oh, except the player was really good though, so everybody wanted one.
The player is really good, the store interface is the best (IMHO), the amount of music choices available legally is the best, the software is easy to use, the value is decent, the DRM protecting the files is the least intrusive and annoying of all their (legal) competitors.
Kind of a different comparison when you actually include all the reasons iTunes/iPod is so popular, eh?
[blah blah blah] I'm not sure I like the idea of a Apple (read: recording company) dominated digital music scene.
So don't buy Apple products.
But no, you want to get the government involved. I just LOVE people that think like this.
Face it, the iPod is killing everything else sales wise. As a result, nobody but Apple can legally sell music for it....
Even if I ignored for the fact that the iPod actually also plays regular AAC and MP3 files in addition to Apple's fairplay-restricted files -- why the fuck does the government have to get involved?
This is a market issue. If people were really tied to iTunes and sick of it, they'd buy something other than an iPod. It's not like the iPod is the only digital music device you can buy.
Thank you, I thought this would be obvious but I guess some people don't see it. The market works. Artificially tipping the supply/demand see-saw by taxation just screws up the market's efficiency.
Except that I wasn't comparing old SUVs to new SUVs, but rather old gas-guzzling cars (of any shape or size) to newer cars (including SUVs) which benefit from new technology.
If you increase taxation, the people will ask for more efficient cars.
No, if the cost of gas goes up, the market will lean towards more efficient vehicles. Raising taxes is only one way in which the cost of gas might go up.
20 years later you have a country with efficient cars and highly priced gas. That's what happened in most European countries and that's why europeans cars are more efficients than those in North America.
Are your cars so efficient that you now break even with us in terms of how much you spend on gas? Europe ans pay about 78% of the cost of gas towards taxes, versus 31% in the US. In other words, you pay 2.5 times what we do in gas taxes. Therefore, your cars better be going 2.5 times further than ours on a tank of gas, or your idea of how taxation really helps is kind of loopy.
I bought a DVI-only LCD about 5 years ago. It was an IBM T55D, and cost me $1000. I mention this because it was more expensive than the analog LCDs at the time, and also at the time, I do not remember seeing any Analog+DVI monitors. It was either analog OR DVI. Yet it was more expensive.
So what I'm getting at is if the DVI-only monitors weren't cheaper than analog-only monitors then, why would they be now?
FYI calibration profiles aren't something unique to MacOS. I've had these available to me on most of my high-end cards on my Windows machine for years. However, as I don't work in the graphics/print industry, I've never needed to use them.
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By filing with Intuit you have already put your trust into a big corporation.
At least I have some recourse when that big corporation screws up.
The government already has my social security number... what do I do when one of the millions of employees of the government goes rogue and steals my SSN?
Section 8 Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States
I am still waiting to read the powers given to Congress to promote the general welfare? The clause above gives the Congress the power to collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises. It does list what the money can be used for (common defence and general welfare of the united states).
Of course, we're back to pedantry again if we start arguing over the definition of "general Welfare". We could say that instead of the payola version of "welfare" that we use now, it means "well-being".
Of course. It is obvious their use of the word "welfare" is not connected in any way to our "welfare system." They even specify "the welfare of the United States," not its citizens. I am sure they could never imagine the government collecting taxes from everyone and creating social welfare programs. Indeed, they did not even give Congress the power to collect income taxes. You can thank the modern Congress for that great idea, in the 16th Amendment.
Basically, I add people to my foe list if their arguments are consistently, factually wrong. I love debating with people that have different opinions, but when someone continues to misrepresent facts, it's a waste of my time.
No, I'm just annoyed that you're more than happy to take money when you feel its "yours" but go into paroxyisms when I take money that I feel is "mine" (after all, I paid taxes too, and since unemployment is partially paid at the state level, I've paid a lot of that back through our state sales tax).
First of all, I never said anything to you about taking unemployment, did I? Although my feelings on whether the government should be providing unemployment service (I lean against it), you are paying taxes (presumably) and can take advantage of that service.
Secondly, I'm more than happy to take the theoretical FairTax prebate, and I support the use of that prebate system, because it is not a "service" provided by the government. It is simply the fairest way I can think of to keep the tax system progressive and fair, without giving the lobbyists an opening.
As for progressive vs. regressive, sorry, but giving everyone $5000 doesn't make the tax any less regressive.
Well, if you would use actual numbers and not made up ones like $5000, you would see that poor people would typically spend no money on taxes, where as rich people would spend a huge amount on taxes, under this system. Read www.fairtax.org's many, many research papers on this if you want more info.
As a fraction of the money they earn, people with less money will generally spend more on goods than people with more money (regardless of where they are relative to the poverty line), which means they will spend more on taxes than rich people percentage-wise, which seems to be the very definition of the word.
I am tired of explaining to you what you can easily find out on www.fairtax.org and www.fairtaxvolunteer.org.
Point blank, poor people will keep more of their money under the FairTax than they do under the current tax system. If you want to find out how this is possible, please read their site. I can boil it down simply: (a) They no longer pay payroll taxes out of their paycheck, (b) all or most of the money they have to spend towards taxes will be covered by the monthly prebate, and (c) the prices of goods will be about what they are now, even after the tax is added in, due to market economics.
All the $5000 does is shift the scale so that people who are really poor end up either making money or having no taxes, but then the scale starts climbing from there.
Actually, you're wrong. The FairTax shifts a lot of the tax burden to people that currently defraud the system by getting paid under the table and pay no income taxes. It also taps the tax potential of foreign tourists buying things here. And it encourages foreign companies (and American companies) to run their businesses in America. Money is also saved in the enforcement side.
Exactly. I called it a flat tax because its a flat rate, the only difference is in how the money is collected. Sorry if that confused you.
It is never referred to as a flat tax because most people equate "flat tax" with "flat income tax."
Of course, pushing a system where the government hands out thousands of dollars to everyone really jives with your position. You'd turn down your share, right? I'd hate to see you vomit all over it.
Why would I turn down my share, when I am paying my share of taxes? The only alternative would be to not tax food and similar necessities, but then you open the door for lobbyists to get loopholes into what gets taxed and what doesn't. That is what we are trying to avoid with the prebate.
Man, it must really bug you that the FairTax isn't regressive, since that kind of kills your argument against it. Sorry!
Ineffective pedantry.
It most certainly is not pedantry. The post I was responding to was implying that the Constitution mandates the government to promote the general welfare. That would be an extremely broad and nebulous power to give the government. The founding fathers were not that stupid. The preamble simply states that all the powers laid out in the Constitution (which are explicit) are being established for several reasons. And one of those reasons is to promote the general welfare.
Let me give you an exercise. First, I assume you understand that the explicit powers granted to the government are laid out in Articles, Sections, and Amendments of the Constitution, right? Please name the Article and Section or Amendment where the Constitution tells the government to promote the general welfare.
All it says is "in order to do these things, we have created this Constitution." It does not tell the government to do those preceding things. It tells them what they can do in order to achieve those things, as the founders intended.
I find your viewpoint especially intriguing based on your pimping of the fairtax.org website.
That's probably because, based on the rest of your reply, you fundamentally misunderstand the FairTax.
So lets say I picked myself up off my bootstraps and did something else. Say I started my own company. You would still tell me that you're gagging and vomiting for requesting small business loans from the government in order to obtain funding to hire employees and develop a product.
Yes.
Of course, you seem to not have such a violent reaction when it comes to the existing companies taking government money hand-over-fist.
How exactly did you come to this conclusion? I cannot stand government subsidies. They simply fuck with the market, and in the end, it's bad news. Maybe not immediately, and maybe not obviously, but inevitably it is bad news.
If you were having such fits over each of these companies and their subsidies, loans, breaks, and contracts, you'd never leave your house...
Ummm... why would I never leave my house? I'm having trouble following your "logic."
Back to your support of a flat tax
The FairTax is not a flat tax. It is a national, retail sales tax.
what is the point of paying our government at all if its not providing services
First of all, the FairTax has nothing to do with how much taxes the government collects, only with HOW the money is collected, what effect it has on our economy, the fairness of who it is collected from, etc. In my perfect world, we'd have the FairTax, and its tax rate would be a very small percentage. The government would use the money as the Constitution mandates, to maintain law and order, essentially.
Especially in the form of one of the most regressive taxes known to man (the sales tax)
Please study the FairTax proposal before trying to discredit it. If you'd read anything about it, you'd know it is PROGRESSIVE, not regressive. Everyone gets a prebate based on poverty level spending, so that the poor are not spending tax money on the necessities. In addition, poor workers would now get ALL of their paycheck, rather than what we have now, where at least 7.5% is taken out for social security by their employer.
Please educate yourself before speaking about it.
If you lost your job and your savings, you'd curl up on the side of the road and wait for the end with your pride intact right?
No, why would I curl up on the side of the road. Are you saying the two choices a person has when they get in trouble are (a) beg the government for help, or (b) curl up and die? How sad.
Oh, but you have psychic powers to make sure you never work for a company like Enron or Worldcom, so its not like you'd EVER lose your job through no fault of your own, and should anything like that happen, you're already a genious so you'd NEVER need education or training should you need to find a new field of employment.
Where did I say any of that? The difference between me and the person I was responding to is that I would not whine about how the government is not helping me, like it's my mother, and I'm here to suckle. How pathetic, weak, and needy we've become.
It says in the Constitution that the government should "promote the general welfare."
No, it most surely does not say that. It says they created the Constitution to, in part, promote the general welfare. Nowhere in it does it say the government's role is to promote the general welfare. I hope you can see the huge difference between these two things.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
BTW, the government is "We the People", i.e. you, your family, and your friends. The government shouldn't be your enemy. If it is, vote or run for office...
I do vote, and I would run for office if it was possible for a 3rd party candidate to be treated equally and have an equal chance of winning an election. Right now, 3rd parties generally can only win local elections, and so that is where I put the pressure.
As for the government being my enemy, you are wrong. The government as defined in the Constitution is not my enemy, but the huge, bureaucraptic behemoth that exists now is no one's friend.
Carter was a nuclear engineer. He was also one of our most unpopular presidents. That says a lot about the American people.
Actually it says nothing about the American people, but a whole lot about your inability to formulate logical conclusions.
What a disgusting and truly saddening post to read. It really breaks my heart to see someone become so dependent on the government.
What the fuck happened to American ingenuity, to picking yourself up by your bootstraps, to working hard and making your life better on your own and with your family and friends?
Instead you whine, "what am I supposed to do?" "Nobody is providing retraining." Where is my government assistance? Why can't I borrow more money from the government?
I'm sorry, but it really makes me want to vomit, to see how far we've sunk in the last 200 years.
I'm a libertarian because I believe in getting the government out of private life.
Right, this is what Democrats believes also.
Rampant corporations need to be controlled, because they're destroying our country.
See, this is what makes you a Democrat and not a Libertarian.
If that offends you, get the fuck over it.
Ha, it doesn't offend me. Though I do think it's amusing that you call yourself a libertarian, and then when you actually say what you believe in, it's actually a Democrat's viewpoints.
The LP needs moderating influences if it's ever going to be more than a bunch of freaks on the fringe of the political world.
The LP is a lot closer to the center than either of the two big parties. Every party has their share of quacks on the fringe. However, the LP certainly would not see "tightly leashed business" as becoming more moderate, just more liberal.
Unless you actually enjoy having advertising on every available flat surface, and being treated as a 'consumer' rather than a citizen, in which case, there's no hope for you at all.
Non-sequitur.
Ha! That's kinda the same way I feel about roads. I've ridden a bike for the last six years and don't own a car, but I still have to pay for roads and traffic infrastructure that I don't use and that in some cases works directly against my best interests as a rider.
So you only ride your bike cross-country, dirt roads, etc?
I get where you're coming from, but I just don't agree with your stance. Were I to take your position on wi-fi towards roads, I'd be morally right to do so. I don't use them and have to pay for someone else to benefit by them. Unfair? To me, absolutely. To society at large? I'm pretty sure that society, in order to exist in its present form, needs roads.
And wi-fi?
Here is a fact: Right now Valve is watching you every time you play, and gathering information on your user habits, play times, durations of play, PC settings, hardware configuration, and storing it for market research data.
OH MY GOD!!!!!
Wait, how does this negatively effect me?
I don't see anything in any municipal Wi-Fi proposal, anywhere, that says the municipality will be the sole mandatory provider of wireless services. So I'm unclear as to how "the government" obtains a monopoly from these proposals. They're just one provider among many.
Yeah, with the huge exception that they are using money taken from you by threat of force to pay for this service for "everyone." This will lead to some people paying for wifi twice, and some people paying for it but not even needing or using it.
I consider myself to be a liberal libertarian. IMO the corporate world has proven for hundreds of years that it cannot be trusted to do the right thing unless the right thing also happens to be the profitable thing, and as such needs to be regulated tightly. However, I'm also a non-Christian and I resent the enforcement of hardline Christian morality, such as the ban on gay marriage, that the Republican Party advocates.
So how exactly are you a libertarian? You sound just like a liberal?
A libertarian does not believe in government tightly regulating businesses, generally because the government does a shitty job of it and screws something else up in the meantime.
I did try it. When I read the sentence, it said, "Pat Choate was the 1996 Reform Party of the United States of America Vice President candidate."
It is not saying the person is the answer to your question, though I guess you might have to actually read what it says to discern that.
Sounds a bit like the failed DiVX DVD wannabe we all hated doesn't it?
No, the DIVX fiasco was destroyed by the market, and not by the government.
Ahem.
Sounds a bit like the failed DiVX DVD wannabe we all hated doesn't it?
Oh, except the player was really good though, so everybody wanted one.
The player is really good, the store interface is the best (IMHO), the amount of music choices available legally is the best, the software is easy to use, the value is decent, the DRM protecting the files is the least intrusive and annoying of all their (legal) competitors.
Kind of a different comparison when you actually include all the reasons iTunes/iPod is so popular, eh?
[blah blah blah] I'm not sure I like the idea of a Apple (read: recording company) dominated digital music scene.
So don't buy Apple products.
But no, you want to get the government involved. I just LOVE people that think like this.
Be careful what you wish for...
Face it, the iPod is killing everything else sales wise. As a result, nobody but Apple can legally sell music for it....
Even if I ignored for the fact that the iPod actually also plays regular AAC and MP3 files in addition to Apple's fairplay-restricted files -- why the fuck does the government have to get involved?
This is a market issue. If people were really tied to iTunes and sick of it, they'd buy something other than an iPod. It's not like the iPod is the only digital music device you can buy.
Thank you, I thought this would be obvious but I guess some people don't see it. The market works. Artificially tipping the supply/demand see-saw by taxation just screws up the market's efficiency.
Some people never learn.
Except that I wasn't comparing old SUVs to new SUVs, but rather old gas-guzzling cars (of any shape or size) to newer cars (including SUVs) which benefit from new technology.
If you increase taxation, the people will ask for more efficient cars.
No, if the cost of gas goes up, the market will lean towards more efficient vehicles. Raising taxes is only one way in which the cost of gas might go up.
20 years later you have a country with efficient cars and highly priced gas. That's what happened in most European countries and that's why europeans cars are more efficients than those in North America.
Are your cars so efficient that you now break even with us in terms of how much you spend on gas? Europe ans pay about 78% of the cost of gas towards taxes, versus 31% in the US. In other words, you pay 2.5 times what we do in gas taxes. Therefore, your cars better be going 2.5 times further than ours on a tank of gas, or your idea of how taxation really helps is kind of loopy.
I bought a DVI-only LCD about 5 years ago. It was an IBM T55D, and cost me $1000. I mention this because it was more expensive than the analog LCDs at the time, and also at the time, I do not remember seeing any Analog+DVI monitors. It was either analog OR DVI. Yet it was more expensive.
So what I'm getting at is if the DVI-only monitors weren't cheaper than analog-only monitors then, why would they be now?
FYI calibration profiles aren't something unique to MacOS. I've had these available to me on most of my high-end cards on my Windows machine for years. However, as I don't work in the graphics/print industry, I've never needed to use them.