Well actually, "frack" was used on the original BSG, along with other made-up words (like the "centon" unit of time). So its use on the new BSG is more of a nod to the earlier show than a way of avoiding censorship.
But yeah, you're right that this will lead to new swear words to bypass the filters. After a while the old swear words will be passe and no one will use them, and Microsoft will start filtering the new words, and the cycle of swearing and filtering will continue ad infinitum.
Your discussion of capital gains is illuminating, I must admit I had not thought about it in that way. Point to you.
I disagree with your argument regarding depreciation. If I am reading the IRS publication correctly (and I could be wrong), depreciation only affects the original structure and any capital improvements, not repairs. And of course repairs are a deductible expense. Naturally any building owner will try to characterize any spending as an expense rather than an improvement. This issue was brought to my attention by a friend of mine who owns an apartment building. He and I used to have the same employer, but he married into money and now makes income from investments. He often talks about how the tax code works in his favor where his investments are concerned.
But these are minor points. What about tax shelters? offshore accounts? transfer pricing? Here's a tidbit from the link I mentioned:
More than half of world trade is within corporations, not between them. And half the world's trade goes through offshore centers, as corporations shift profits to where they can avoid taxes. Companies set up offshore "subsidiaries" that, on their books, perform functions that allow the firms to cut their taxes. The simplest ploy is the "sale" and "rental" back of a company's logo or other intangible assets. Or money stashed in tax havens is "loaned" back to the U.S. company, which then deducts interest payments on its tax returns.
That's where the real chicanery is taking place. And it's perfectly legal.
There was a great story about Enron and its tax avoidance strategy a few years back, unfortunately I can't remember where I saw it. Basically Enron's tax lawyers set up a multitude of partnerships, shell corporations and similar paper entities to hold assets. They prepared "letters of opinion" for the IRS declaring how these entities worked. The structure was so dense and complicated that the IRS simply gave up trying to figure out whether it was legal - they could not prove there was anything wrong because they could not devote the time to understanding it.
One last quote from the same document:
In a little reported but revealing (and honest) slip of the tongue, George W. Bush said in a campaign speech at the Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale last August, "On the subject of taxes, just remember when you talk about 'we're just going to run up the taxes on a certain number of people,' first of all, real rich people figure out how to dodge taxes, and the small business owners end up paying a lot of the burden of this taxation."
As in all things, the surest way to better yourself is through education.
I don't disagree with that. And I will agree that there are ways for the average person to improve his tax situation. My point was that the reduction in tax liability is very small compared to what can be accomplished by someone with a professional accountant, lawyers and lobbyists.
I'd love for you to share some of these tricks. Outside of estate plans, I've never really seen any. Or perhaps are you only upset with the "rich" people who inherited that wealth? The rest of them had to earn it somehow.
I have no problem with rich people who earned their money. Inheritances do trouble me, but I can accept them (certainly if they were my kids I would want to pass on my wealth). What bugs me is when people take the attitude that they shouldn't have to pay taxes.
A friend of mine likes to travel frequently, and because he accumulates frequent flyer miles he often upgrades and flies business class. Recently he sat next to a guy who was flying down to South America to see his wife, a trip he takes twice a month. He was a retired business owner who had sold two businesses after making them profitable. The two started chatting, and my friend, who makes about $90K annually in pre-tax wages, bemoaned how much of his salary was eaten up by taxes.
"Oh.." said the businessman, "...you pay taxes?" He proceeded to tell my friend that he cleared $25K each month from his various business interests and investments, and paid no tax. He was not ashamed of this - in fact he was rather proud.
Now I'm not against the man having wealth and enjoying it. He clearly had worked hard to build up his businesses, and deserved the fruits of his labor. But to think that he had no responsibility to the society that made his wealth possible is outrageous.
As to how it is done, I am no expert. Surely it is obvious though, that the tax system is tilted so that income from investments is favored over wages. The mere fact that capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than wages is troubling enough. Corporations and wealthy individuals pay lots of money to accountants and lawyers to work the tax code. Take a look the link I posted earlier in this thread for some examples of how corporations shuffle money around in ways that have absolutely no legitimate purpose except to avoid taxes. The main theme seems to be: move your assets into corporations, move your corporations assets offshore.
Anatole France does a wonderful job of pointing out an unfortunate fact of life. He does not, however, propose a solution, does he? I am reminded of an observation from a tax law scholar: The tax law can be simple, or it can be fair, but it cannot be both.
I respectfully suggest that you missed the point of the quotation, which was to comment on your statement that "the same rules apply to everyone". The rules might very well be uniform and applied equally, but the situations of the people affected by the rules are very different. In the context of taxation, if there is a law giving favorable treatment to someone who owns a 100-unit apartment building, who can write off the value of the structure to "depreciation" despite the ever-increasing value of the property (true), said law means nothing to a waitress making minimum wage (and who does not own an apartment building), and whose meager opportunity to avoid taxes on her income from tips is precluded by the IRS assessing her for them without even knowing how much she made! (also true). Of course if the apartment owner has income from tips he will be assessed as well - it's only fair! This is no "fact of life", it is the result of a government policy steered by one class of people to favor themselves.
Anatole France did in fact propose a solution - he was a rabid communist. I certainly don't agree with that approach. And as to the tax law being complex, it's various twists and turns mainly come
I get the impression you don't like the "mega rich" and "large corporations." What'd they ever do to you?
It's not so much what they've done to me as what they've done to the country as a whole, i.e. cheated, connived and slimed their way out of paying their fair share into government coffers. And they run no risk of going to jail, since their methods are completely legal, according to the laws that their cronies in Congress slipped through at 11:00 PM on a Friday to avoid the news cycle.
Is that enough dislike for you?
Most of the tax-reducing rules in the Code were put there by Congress to ENCOURAGE certain types of behavior
So? The tax avoidance schemes of the wealthy rely on loopholes in the tax code. No doubt they snicker at the measly crumbs of tax relief that are parsimoniously dropped at the feet of the middle and working class taxpayers.
If you don't want to hire a lawyer, you just have to be patient enough to RTFM (or in this case, the tax code). The same rules apply to everyone.
Here's a fun quote about the tax code:
According to the US Government Printing Office, it's 13,458 pages in total. The full text of Title 26 of the United States Code (the part written by Congress--available for an additional $179) is a mere 3,387 printed pages, bringing the adjusted gross page count to 16,845.
Are you seriously suggesting that a typical working person can devote time to reading the tax code?? Rich people certainly don't - they hire people to read it for them.
The tax avoidance options for any person who relies on wages for income are strictly limited. Sure there are IRA's, Medical Savings Accounts, etc., but they are nothing compared to the tricks of people with real money.
The same rules apply to everyone.
True enough. I'm reminded of the following quote:
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." -- Anatole France
Tax evasion is hiding income, lying on your tax forms, and otherwise cheating by illegal means. Tax avoidance is using legal means to avoid taxes, like tax shelters, transfer prices, profit laundering and other tactics used by the mega-rich and large corporations. The impact of tax avoidance is greater than that of tax evasion, because tax avoiders have more money and better accountants and lawyers.
This report has an excellent discussion of legal tax avoidance schemes by the rich and their impact on society.
Your ideas interest me, and I wish to order a copy of your Manifesto.
It's in the mail, and I've also enclosed a fashionable red star for your cap. Wear it with pride, comrade! (but not pride in yourself, only pride for the glorious revolution!)
Unfortunately, the cheap non-unionised labour that's causing all the trouble is in China, where they've already had a Communist revolution.
True, but they are no longer being exploited by their former communist masters - now they are being exploited by capitalist masters.:)
Obviously communism is a bad way to run a country, but I don't equate the labor movement in general with communism. When labor insists on total political control of society (the "dictatorship of the proletariat"), political power quickly concentrates itself in the hands of a small class of party faithful who grab the nation's meager wealth and make the rest of the population into slaves. But when labor shares power with the other elements of society (namely, rich bastards) it can ensure the rights of workers without destroying the basis of the economy. The post to which I was replying mentioned OSHA - that and other protections are the result of labor fighting for basic rights. Many positive aspects of our current working environment were won only after a long struggle between labor and capital - we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater by assuming that all labor movements seek to impose a communist political system.
Of course there are extremes in the labor movement. Here in Hollywood unions are notorious for demanding ridiculous work rules (e.g. one guy has to unload the truck, another guy has to pick up the box and move it, a third has to open it and remove the contents). The market must be free to route around such excesses (and it has - production has started to move out of Hollywood to other countries).
Look at the companies in China today. Several years ago many of those companies had plants in Mexico, and before that, the U.S. Capital is now able to pick up stakes and move whenever they find a cheaper source of labor. Today China, tomorrow - Bangladesh? Indonesia? Chad? As China's standard of living rises workers will demand higher wages and better working conditions. Won't they be surprised when factories start to shut down and move elsewhere.
I think the labor movement will be forced to organize across borders to fight this vicious cycle of workers in one country being played off against those in another.
That's how our fathers and grandfathers would have handled it. Now of course the jobs just go to countries where there are no laws to protect the rights of workers.
Ultimately the labor movement will have to organize workers in those countries. At some point in the far, far future, all workers will enjoy protection from employers who agree to one policy but enact another. And then capital will have to make investment decisions on some other basis than figuring out which labor market is the cheapest and easiest to exploit.
and pigs will fly, and Israel and Palestine will make kissy-kissy, and the Cubs will win the World Series, etc., etc.
Yes, but you run the risk of tiny menopausal gun-toting women shooting your tiny fuel tanks and destroying your tiny biodiesel truck in a tiny fireball.
Surely it is best to drink the beer and then urinate on the power supply. Admittedly this increases your risk of electrocution, but at least you are not wasting beer!
P.S. you seem to have found an exception to my sig...
The full report card is certainly interesting, especially since those agencies that have high profiles in national security matters (Defense, State, Homeland Security) all received an "F". Department of Justice (think FBI, DEA), and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission fared about as poorly with a "D-".
The Social Security Administration scored an "A". As I recall they were also one of the first federal agencies to complete their work on the Y2K project. Score another one for monolithic bureacracies over fragmented bureaucracies:)
That reminds me of driving down the length of the Baja Peninsula to La Paz in 1991 to view that year's total eclipse of the sun. It's over a thousand miles, asphalt the whole way, but the road had no centerline, no shoulders and very few guard rails. Every so often, at a sharp curve, you could peer out the window and see the remains of a car or truck that had pitched over the side. These weren't rusted out hulks either, but recent accidents. And now and then the site would be marked with one or more crosses, sometimes flowers or votive candles, as a memorial to someone who had died.
I'm guessing there wasn't a whole lot of money to improve that road. We took those curves very, very carefully.
As could easily happen when they rent a car, or borrow one from a friend.
I agree driving tests should be more difficult, and represent a variety of road conditions and control systems. Sadly, most people view driving as a civil right, especially here in the U.S., where tests are absurdly simple.
Yes, I think that where porn consumers are concerned, bigger is better. The magnification of things one doesn't want to see (blemishes and scars) will be trumped by the huge size of the parts one does want to see. Plus, the "seedy" side of porn is attractive to a large segment of consumers (viz the popularity of cheaply produced "gonzo" titles), who instead of being repelled by imperfections, will rather be turned on by them.
The one hangup will be cost: it will take more money to master and duplicate HD titles, and since the vast majority of porn is done on the cheap, producers may balk at shifting to the new format(s). But the demand will be there...
You make an excellent point regarding the "virtualization" of porn, but the computer enhancement will only serve to reinforce the superiority of HD, since you can now erase any imperfections (or make enhancements), thus removing the drawback of higher resolution.
And then what happens when the CG is rendered in real-time? You could have interactive characters doing all sorts of nasty things while you control the action from your XBOX or PS/3. The mind reels at the possibilities...:) (and the guy who invents the first "no-hands" controller will make a lot of money).
I completely agree. Consumers have shown over and over that they will spend ridiculous amounts of money for porn (remember the cost of the first VHS porn tapes?)
And the quality of porn on these high-def formats is going to be incredible! Once guys see their first HD porn they will go apeshit. Stores should advertise porn bundles ("Happy Deals?") consisting of an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player, five or six porn titles, a lotion dispenser, and a rag.
... it would have been even better if it had been Steve Ballmer walking down the street and seeing a copy of Microsoft Office for sale, and getting into a fight with the pirate - but the pirate was actually Hulk Hogan, and they were stopped by the police, and Hulk was all like "You want some more, punk!?", and Ballmer was all like "Bring it on, bitch! I'll fucking kill you!", and they got in a cage wrestling match and Ballmer threw a chair at him.
Someone should tell that guy about her past. She let every Tom, Dick and Harry.com run their nasty code in her and then passed on the infections to her boyfriend. And then she had the gall to claim that the two of them were inseparable!
That reminds me of our old Data General Nova 2, which was still running in the late 1980's. We were always replacing components, including the whopping 8K of magnetic core (that ran a few grand).
Anyway, one day the tech was over working on it with me late at night. He sealed it up and plugged it in, then hit the power switch. There was a high pitched whine that increased in pitch and volume, and then BANG!, and we were choking on the magic smoke. The cap had blown - and it was huge, easily as big as a can of hairspray. The tech looked at it sadly, then looked at me and said, "Well, it looks like we smoked it".
I could never power it on after that without wincing...
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. And all that time I thought IE was shitting all over my system ... turns out it was elephants.
Well actually, "frack" was used on the original BSG, along with other made-up words (like the "centon" unit of time). So its use on the new BSG is more of a nod to the earlier show than a way of avoiding censorship.
But yeah, you're right that this will lead to new swear words to bypass the filters. After a while the old swear words will be passe and no one will use them, and Microsoft will start filtering the new words, and the cycle of swearing and filtering will continue ad infinitum.
I disagree with your argument regarding depreciation. If I am reading the IRS publication correctly (and I could be wrong), depreciation only affects the original structure and any capital improvements, not repairs. And of course repairs are a deductible expense. Naturally any building owner will try to characterize any spending as an expense rather than an improvement. This issue was brought to my attention by a friend of mine who owns an apartment building. He and I used to have the same employer, but he married into money and now makes income from investments. He often talks about how the tax code works in his favor where his investments are concerned.
But these are minor points. What about tax shelters? offshore accounts? transfer pricing? Here's a tidbit from the link I mentioned:
That's where the real chicanery is taking place. And it's perfectly legal.
There was a great story about Enron and its tax avoidance strategy a few years back, unfortunately I can't remember where I saw it. Basically Enron's tax lawyers set up a multitude of partnerships, shell corporations and similar paper entities to hold assets. They prepared "letters of opinion" for the IRS declaring how these entities worked. The structure was so dense and complicated that the IRS simply gave up trying to figure out whether it was legal - they could not prove there was anything wrong because they could not devote the time to understanding it.
One last quote from the same document:
Truer words were never spoken!
I don't disagree with that. And I will agree that there are ways for the average person to improve his tax situation. My point was that the reduction in tax liability is very small compared to what can be accomplished by someone with a professional accountant, lawyers and lobbyists.
I'd love for you to share some of these tricks. Outside of estate plans, I've never really seen any. Or perhaps are you only upset with the "rich" people who inherited that wealth? The rest of them had to earn it somehow.
I have no problem with rich people who earned their money. Inheritances do trouble me, but I can accept them (certainly if they were my kids I would want to pass on my wealth). What bugs me is when people take the attitude that they shouldn't have to pay taxes.
A friend of mine likes to travel frequently, and because he accumulates frequent flyer miles he often upgrades and flies business class. Recently he sat next to a guy who was flying down to South America to see his wife, a trip he takes twice a month. He was a retired business owner who had sold two businesses after making them profitable. The two started chatting, and my friend, who makes about $90K annually in pre-tax wages, bemoaned how much of his salary was eaten up by taxes.
"Oh.." said the businessman, "...you pay taxes?" He proceeded to tell my friend that he cleared $25K each month from his various business interests and investments, and paid no tax. He was not ashamed of this - in fact he was rather proud.
Now I'm not against the man having wealth and enjoying it. He clearly had worked hard to build up his businesses, and deserved the fruits of his labor. But to think that he had no responsibility to the society that made his wealth possible is outrageous.
As to how it is done, I am no expert. Surely it is obvious though, that the tax system is tilted so that income from investments is favored over wages. The mere fact that capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than wages is troubling enough. Corporations and wealthy individuals pay lots of money to accountants and lawyers to work the tax code. Take a look the link I posted earlier in this thread for some examples of how corporations shuffle money around in ways that have absolutely no legitimate purpose except to avoid taxes. The main theme seems to be: move your assets into corporations, move your corporations assets offshore.
Anatole France does a wonderful job of pointing out an unfortunate fact of life. He does not, however, propose a solution, does he? I am reminded of an observation from a tax law scholar: The tax law can be simple, or it can be fair, but it cannot be both.
I respectfully suggest that you missed the point of the quotation, which was to comment on your statement that "the same rules apply to everyone". The rules might very well be uniform and applied equally, but the situations of the people affected by the rules are very different. In the context of taxation, if there is a law giving favorable treatment to someone who owns a 100-unit apartment building, who can write off the value of the structure to "depreciation" despite the ever-increasing value of the property (true), said law means nothing to a waitress making minimum wage (and who does not own an apartment building), and whose meager opportunity to avoid taxes on her income from tips is precluded by the IRS assessing her for them without even knowing how much she made! (also true). Of course if the apartment owner has income from tips he will be assessed as well - it's only fair! This is no "fact of life", it is the result of a government policy steered by one class of people to favor themselves.
Anatole France did in fact propose a solution - he was a rabid communist. I certainly don't agree with that approach. And as to the tax law being complex, it's various twists and turns mainly come
It's not so much what they've done to me as what they've done to the country as a whole, i.e. cheated, connived and slimed their way out of paying their fair share into government coffers. And they run no risk of going to jail, since their methods are completely legal, according to the laws that their cronies in Congress slipped through at 11:00 PM on a Friday to avoid the news cycle.
Is that enough dislike for you?
Most of the tax-reducing rules in the Code were put there by Congress to ENCOURAGE certain types of behavior
So? The tax avoidance schemes of the wealthy rely on loopholes in the tax code. No doubt they snicker at the measly crumbs of tax relief that are parsimoniously dropped at the feet of the middle and working class taxpayers.
If you don't want to hire a lawyer, you just have to be patient enough to RTFM (or in this case, the tax code). The same rules apply to everyone.
Here's a fun quote about the tax code:
Are you seriously suggesting that a typical working person can devote time to reading the tax code?? Rich people certainly don't - they hire people to read it for them.
The tax avoidance options for any person who relies on wages for income are strictly limited. Sure there are IRA's, Medical Savings Accounts, etc., but they are nothing compared to the tricks of people with real money.
The same rules apply to everyone.
True enough. I'm reminded of the following quote:
This report has an excellent discussion of legal tax avoidance schemes by the rich and their impact on society.
It's in the mail, and I've also enclosed a fashionable red star for your cap. Wear it with pride, comrade! (but not pride in yourself, only pride for the glorious revolution!)
Unfortunately, the cheap non-unionised labour that's causing all the trouble is in China, where they've already had a Communist revolution.
True, but they are no longer being exploited by their former communist masters - now they are being exploited by capitalist masters. :)
Obviously communism is a bad way to run a country, but I don't equate the labor movement in general with communism. When labor insists on total political control of society (the "dictatorship of the proletariat"), political power quickly concentrates itself in the hands of a small class of party faithful who grab the nation's meager wealth and make the rest of the population into slaves. But when labor shares power with the other elements of society (namely, rich bastards) it can ensure the rights of workers without destroying the basis of the economy. The post to which I was replying mentioned OSHA - that and other protections are the result of labor fighting for basic rights. Many positive aspects of our current working environment were won only after a long struggle between labor and capital - we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater by assuming that all labor movements seek to impose a communist political system.
Of course there are extremes in the labor movement. Here in Hollywood unions are notorious for demanding ridiculous work rules (e.g. one guy has to unload the truck, another guy has to pick up the box and move it, a third has to open it and remove the contents). The market must be free to route around such excesses (and it has - production has started to move out of Hollywood to other countries).
Look at the companies in China today. Several years ago many of those companies had plants in Mexico, and before that, the U.S. Capital is now able to pick up stakes and move whenever they find a cheaper source of labor. Today China, tomorrow - Bangladesh? Indonesia? Chad? As China's standard of living rises workers will demand higher wages and better working conditions. Won't they be surprised when factories start to shut down and move elsewhere.
I think the labor movement will be forced to organize across borders to fight this vicious cycle of workers in one country being played off against those in another.
Form a union and go on strike?
That's how our fathers and grandfathers would have handled it. Now of course the jobs just go to countries where there are no laws to protect the rights of workers.
Ultimately the labor movement will have to organize workers in those countries. At some point in the far, far future, all workers will enjoy protection from employers who agree to one policy but enact another. And then capital will have to make investment decisions on some other basis than figuring out which labor market is the cheapest and easiest to exploit.
and pigs will fly, and Israel and Palestine will make kissy-kissy, and the Cubs will win the World Series, etc., etc.
You. Me. A barren planet to serve as our battlefield.
It's GO time.
Yes, but you run the risk of tiny menopausal gun-toting women shooting your tiny fuel tanks and destroying your tiny biodiesel truck in a tiny fireball.
P.S. you seem to have found an exception to my sig ...
In this case, the sender of the email admitted to sending it, so the legitimacy was never an issue.
Todays closing price for GOOG: $409.66 per share.
Time to sell.
The Social Security Administration scored an "A". As I recall they were also one of the first federal agencies to complete their work on the Y2K project. Score another one for monolithic bureacracies over fragmented bureaucracies :)
I'm guessing there wasn't a whole lot of money to improve that road. We took those curves very, very carefully.
Well said. From the Wikipedia article:
"Those days" referring to 1962. Quite a different landscape from today ...
As could easily happen when they rent a car, or borrow one from a friend.
I agree driving tests should be more difficult, and represent a variety of road conditions and control systems. Sadly, most people view driving as a civil right, especially here in the U.S., where tests are absurdly simple.
and he would never have time to listen to pirated music anyhow, seeing as he sleeps all night and he works all day...
Yes, I think that where porn consumers are concerned, bigger is better. The magnification of things one doesn't want to see (blemishes and scars) will be trumped by the huge size of the parts one does want to see. Plus, the "seedy" side of porn is attractive to a large segment of consumers (viz the popularity of cheaply produced "gonzo" titles), who instead of being repelled by imperfections, will rather be turned on by them.
The one hangup will be cost: it will take more money to master and duplicate HD titles, and since the vast majority of porn is done on the cheap, producers may balk at shifting to the new format(s). But the demand will be there...
You make an excellent point regarding the "virtualization" of porn, but the computer enhancement will only serve to reinforce the superiority of HD, since you can now erase any imperfections (or make enhancements), thus removing the drawback of higher resolution.
And then what happens when the CG is rendered in real-time? You could have interactive characters doing all sorts of nasty things while you control the action from your XBOX or PS/3. The mind reels at the possibilities ... :) (and the guy who invents the first "no-hands" controller will make a lot of money).
And the quality of porn on these high-def formats is going to be incredible! Once guys see their first HD porn they will go apeshit. Stores should advertise porn bundles ("Happy Deals?") consisting of an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player, five or six porn titles, a lotion dispenser, and a rag.
Now THAT would be cool ...
Someone should tell that guy about her past. She let every Tom, Dick and Harry.com run their nasty code in her and then passed on the infections to her boyfriend. And then she had the gall to claim that the two of them were inseparable!
Run like hell, Winslow.
Anyway, one day the tech was over working on it with me late at night. He sealed it up and plugged it in, then hit the power switch. There was a high pitched whine that increased in pitch and volume, and then BANG!, and we were choking on the magic smoke. The cap had blown - and it was huge, easily as big as a can of hairspray. The tech looked at it sadly, then looked at me and said, "Well, it looks like we smoked it".
I could never power it on after that without wincing...
Yeah, let's all paean the youth!
Yours Truly,
R. Kelly
Thats shows how old I am - I saw that headline and immediately thought that Morris Day was getting back together with Prince!.