The United States Social Security Administration provides Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance pensions. Like all of our welfare systems, it experiences an incredibly-low degree of recipient abuse, largely thanks to the Office of the Inspector General's effectiveness in identifying fraudulent applicants by a broad array of investigatory means including simple spot-checks. Largely, however, OASDI is practically-immune to fraud in the Old-Age and Survivorship pensions services, as it's hard to fake a dead person being alive for very long, especially with public records of death; only Disability Insurance experiences direct fraud to any significant degree, and that's caught in surprisingly short order.
What sets OAS in particular apart from TANF, WIC, SNAP, unemployment insurance, and especially HUD is its sheer effectiveness. Only 10% of Americans above retirement age live below the Federal old-age poverty line. Social Security's Old-Age and Survivors pension program would completely-eliminate old-age poverty if it restructured around a flatter (or flat) benefit using the same total disbursal. This would also address the recent problem of eligibility: because many of today's low-income workers are in and out of employment, they don't even qualify for OAS; a flat benefit would address that.
Compare that to TANF and WIC, which don't adequately reach all recipients; SNAP, which frequently provides an inadequate benefit; Unemployment Insurance, which creates a disincentive to work by both discounting itself from any offered wage and placing a large risk of not qualifying for unemployment again if the job doesn't work out; and HUD Housing Assistance, which provides benefits to 1/4 of qualified applicants, and places the other 3/4 on a waiting list from which they never graduate, effectively denying benefits to 75% of qualified households while telling them they legally are owed benefits.
As you can see, the OASDI program is wildly-successful, and still has room for improvement. A program of universal social security can provide similar success, both by stabilizing the economy at large, all individual households, and other aspects of our welfare system, all while reducing the tax burden on America's citizens and businesses.
Restructuring TANF, WIC, SNAP, unemployment, and HUD housing assistance around a universal social security program with supplemental assistance (largely childcare support services--Cash for Kids is a really, really bad idea) would provide more-effective welfare while reducing taxes on every taxpaying individual in the United States, immediately lowering payroll taxes by 0.9%, and reducing the business income taxes from 35% to 32.5%. This would include retaining OASDI as a supplemental service which fills the gap between the universal benefit and the OASDI benefits of today.
This system stabilizes OASDI and takes a large amount of load off WIC, SNAP, and HUD. It completely-obviates unemployment insurance. HUD housing assistance can ignore the 3/4 of applicants currently not receiving, or it can attempt to address them; in either case, the benchmark number for HUD to use from the universal benefit is 45% of the benefit's payout, and HUD can discount its annual subsidy by that much (plus any received OASDI, for households receiving OASDI) for recipient households. Most two-adult households will exceed their HUD benefit by this calculation, and thus become ineligible. Note that HUD housing assistance today only costs $60 billion annually, or $39/month per taxpaying household.
So yes, our Social Security system provides the most-successful anti-poverty system ever seen; it can be improved; and we can design a better service based around it. Our current total crop of welfare plans has severe defects and doesn't accomplish its mission; we need to re-orient that mission to something achievable by providing an effective baseline service from which to build.
So your bug report, when submitted, can include the document and registry keys, and some diagnostic information. So don't submit the crash report, then.
I wasn't talking about attached data to bug reports; that's a hazard you should be aware of--even Fedora and Ubuntu collect that kind of data (and I daresay more of it) when a package manager failure or an application crash occurs. There was a large, alarmist scream when Windows 10 came out that it was vacuuming up every keypress, every password, and even all of your files, digging through all personal data. Not selectively; all of it.
And yeah, I knew about the cloud stuff for voice and tablet recognition. Nobody does that locally anymore; they use a cloud service, and it goes away when your internet connection goes away. It's kind of annoying. That's a far cry from "spying", though, albeit samples of handwriting can easily identify a person. Generally, I turn that part off, anyway.
Logically, the OS doesn't need a "rootkit" because it is a rootkit. Most other software (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) is either an open-source browser (no rootkit) or something running in an open-source browser.
My point was we generally leak a lot of (mostly-benign) information upstream, and that nobody has actually described the data fished from Windows 10. People complained about Microsoft knowing what software you install for a while (which turned out to be false: the installer has a short blacklist), so that's become my de-facto example of information leaking upstream, largely to avoid the first round of exchanges and move onto the next suggestion of what might be leaking upstream.
Honestly I'm just waiting for people to stop with the hallucinated bullshit and actually put down what exactly Microsoft is pulling from their machines. There's currently a list of things you can turn off, and then an ambiguous list of shit you can't turn off that amounts to "whatever evilness I imagined today in my little fantasy world." I'm waiting for real talk on that last bit, instead of just frothing insanity.
Nobody knows what spying is happening, but the thing talks to the 'net so it obviously must be doing something unconscionable.
Excuse me while I switch to Linux and broadcast my IP address, version of my distribution, repositories from which I'm using software, and the occasional download of specific software which I've actually installed to all of the us.distro.org mirrors partnered with my distribution maintainer.
I've still yet to see an accounting of what spying is happening on Windows 10. We know it used to store wifi passwords as a published feature; there was also chatter about it being a file sniffer and keylogger, but that was debunked pretty hard. There's a short list of software that Windows 10 upgrades disable once at upgrade time, which lead people to conjecture that Microsoft gets a list of all third-party software you use continuously. So far, nobody's clearly and definitively defined the spying; usually, when pressed, they give up arguing the conspiracy theories and say something about encrypted connections making it hard to identify what's being leaked, but that it must be something important if encryption is being used.
Corporations hide as much of their profits as possible.
You'd mostly see increases in indirect unemployment. When the economy shifts, jobs are lost and gained. You lose 0.1%, gain 0.1%, everything is fine. These movements of jobs come from consumer demand: the new jobs are created by consumers buying from new companies, buying new products, and so forth.
What happens when consumer demand moves, and the businesses don't have the cash to outlay for changes necessary to provide for that demand?
Taxing business income at 0% is probably a bad idea; taxing it at 80% is also a bad idea. I favor lower business income taxes, where it makes rational sense; and I favor them in the context above. Prosperity doesn't trickle down; prosperity drives its way upwards. It's not a matter of taking away money for jobs--we deduct wages paid from a business's incomes, after all--but rather a matter of reducing the agility of our economy. The question, thus, is simple: How much agility do we need?
Payroll taxes, on the other hand, directly increase wages without transferring those wages to the worker. If you pay a worker $100/hr and have a 10% payroll tax, then you pay that worker $110/hr, but he receives $100/hr, on which he pays his own income taxes. To sell the output of his work, you must charge enough to bring in $110/hr of revenue. I cannot eliminate all payroll taxes in some policies I would like to deploy, as it would be economically disruptive; I would argue heavily against any new payroll taxes, however.
The Social Security system is one of the most-successful anti-poverty systems in the world, if not the most-successful. I've been targeting a Universal Social Security, and I figure it will fare rather well. Unfortunately I'm bad at Web design and communicating in general.
Also the argument about the welfare system sucking down tons of money in either overhead or abuse is a red herring. That's not a real thing; most such systems are actually quite efficient, and nearly all of the so-called abuse is bureaucratic--caseworkers tend to see that you technically don't qualify for food stamps, but that you're exactly the type of case for which we have SNAP and WIC, and so they approve applications which later fail bureaucratic review and get flagged as inappropriate disbursements.
Most UBI advocates have a distorted view of welfare, of economics, and of the dynamics of government. They have no idea what they're talking about and are easily-dismissed. That's a big problem, because a universal social security is a good policy if implemented properly, and the loud voice of the public is a ridiculous ass-dance that ties itself to the idea. Sort of a giant well-poisoning attack against any such thing.
Other things UBI advocates imagine that don't line up with reality are corporate-supplied welfare (bullshit jobs, make-work, any idea of a job existing because people need jobs instead of because corporations need labor); the end of work thanks to automation; and a great need to tax the rich, either because they have too much or because of a lack of capacity to figure out how to finance a UBI.
Actually, a universal social security would stabilize the social security OASDI system permanently by providing a basis; reduce total income tax burden on all income earners (the rough, unadjusted model cuts the top tax bracket from 39.6% to 35%); reduce payroll taxes by 0.9%; and reduce corporate income taxes by 2.5%.
I also did further math on the handling of childcare welfare and naturalized American households, which came out (in 2013) to cost ~1.4% more of all AGI on top of this. This system shifts OASDI from payroll to income taxes and redistributes it into a universal benefit, then restores OASDI's full benefit to OASDI recipients by restoring the OASDI payroll tax at 5.3%, hence why it's only a 0.9% reduction in payroll taxes and not a 6.2% reduction.
Note that this is a rough model, and needs adjustment by the CBO. The tax brackets actually peak at the middle-income level, then fall back down again. Even without adjusting to smooth tax brackets, the low point is at $200,000, where a single earner takes home $2,700 more spendable income than he does today, and a two-adult household (joint filer) takes home around $11,000 more. Everyone with more or less income than this is more-advantaged by this system.
That middle-class peak tax bracket, by the way, comes from the Social Security OASDI tax being currently capped at $121k ($118k in 2016). There's an extra 6.2% paycheck + 6.2% payroll tax (or 12.4% FICA, for the self-employed) on top of the Federal tax brackets. Once you break out of the Social Security Wage Base, your tax burden drops.
Do any of you people bother doing the math before you talk about whether the math works out?
I've never had a problem, and I've lived in The Wire... I mean Baltimore.
Once, some guy grabbed me, and I turned and pushed him back against the wall. Dude backed off quick, said he thought I was someone else.
Another time, a guy came asking me for money, like homeless dude. I didn't have cash, told him I didn't, pulled out my wallet to get a parking ticket out of the parking meter (takes credit cards!). Next thing I know, I'm surrounded by 3 big dudes shouting and demanding money (the homeless dude was a probe to see if you'll pull out a wallet). I pretty much ignored them. The biggest one was in my way, so I went that way; he backed off, and they all shut up.
People don't know if you're a fucking ninja or some shit. They don't know if you'll rip their head off and shit down their neck, and then have tea while holding a conversation with the pike-mounted heads. I don't know how to interact with people and, in unfamiliar and complex social situations, I don't emote; people can't get a read on me, and I seem disconnected from the real world, which pretty much telegraphs insanity.
Nobody wants to mess with me. I don't behave like they expect; that's terrifying. Even the muggers don't want anything to do with that shit.
In general, if you don't play along, the situation de-escalates. Without the correct emotional feedback, people can't get angry and pumped and ready to carry out a beat-down. That deflation works in any case; if you're actually crazy enough that people start to think you might be crazy, it moves from "lack of motivation" to "serious discomfort", and they fuck right the hell off.
Everyone wants to shout back at people, puff up, look big, and talk about how they can lay a beat down; but if you want to stay safe, learn to manipulate other peoples's emotions, and take away the fight-or-flight feeling. Make their blood stop pumping. The lull puts them off-balance when they were expecting a fight; if the situation isn't one they can just shrug off, it's suddenly disturbing and uncomfortable, and they switch into flight mode and leave. If you fluff yourself up and declare that they should back off unless they want to be on the receiving end of a major thrashing, they're going to get that surge of energy that drives them to stand up and show you just whose ass within which their boot is to take up residence.
I've talked to a lot of people on the Internet in my time, and I've learned one thing through all these years: if a robber has a loaded gun pointed in your face, you pull out your gun and shoot him before he can react. Works every time.
The world is filled with delusional people who believe they're a magical magnet for trouble, that they have super powers when they carry a certain object or take a certain martial arts class, and so forth. When they think of risks, they consider everything as causal: a robber wants to beat and rob you if you have $1,000, therefor carrying $1,000 means you'll be hunted by robbers. Never mind that there's no reason for them to sniff you out any more-frequently than any day you're flat broke; the moment you have cash on you, you're in the scenario where you get beaten and robbed.
Of course, if you have a gun, you're automatically invincible.
All that petty cash vanishing away. Your spending is so good... so good....
Yeah, I don't use cash. I have to face the harsh realities of what I spend on every day. I trim my budgets constantly. Mint.com isn't following my petty cash expenses that closely; fortunately I don't use cash.
To me it's a matter of stability. This system is stable, so whatever. Yes, they abuse the loopholes; and it doesn't matter. We can design new tax strategies that don't address this behavior without opening up new loopholes, so our economic data about what's out there to tax is safe.
There's some logistics we can look at about this, too. They don't form a coherent argument; they're just worth a thought.
When we buy things from a seller in China, we don't tax that seller on profits. We might issue a tariff, but that's generally a bad idea; instead, we just tax the profits of the business selling the good domestically. That gets the good to the consumer at the lowest price.
Likewise, the business doing the selling has employees locally. It pays some of its revenue to those employees, who are taxable, and who spend money into the local economy. We also tax it on any of its profits.
If the business abroad takes a huge profit margin, it starts charging more than domestic manufacture. In such a case, trade makes no sense: we can make it cheaper ourselves, and so do so.
So what's with these tech businesses?
A tech business will supply a good or service to a country. In essence, it's selling to the country, but not necessarily in the country. Where the business is selling from is... well, it's not clear. It's pretty much arbitrary.
A business like Google might or might not have a presence in a country, such as France. That is to say: Google might or might not have employees in France. If it has employees in France, then it's doing productive work in France; that productive work is part of France's GDP, because it's producing a product in France. Those employees's labor represents the actual production, although the business profits represent the expenditure for that productive output: the total contribution to GDP should be the entire revenue stream created by that particular productive unit.
Even that's fuzzy: Google in France is using Google in the U.S.. Face it: local Apple, local Google, local Microsoft, all are leveraging the products of business efforts of other parts of the business in other parts of the world. No, we can't accurately model this; we can, of course, say that an empty office in Ireland receiving all the taxable income is not providing productive output.
You also have secondary effects of presence. Google, Apple, or Microsoft might have a data center, an office building, something. If Google is hosting Google's French services in France, then Google is paying money to a French data center buying French power, French internet, and French office space. That's even more of the revenue stream of Google France going to France. If Google France's servers are colocated in Ireland and not France, well... that chunk of Google's revenue stream represents the GDP of Ireland; taxing it in France is a nifty legal trick, and dishonest.
So it's somewhat of a complex issue. It's also one that doesn't much matter, usually; and when it does, it's often a matter of perspective. Apple, for example, chews through $234Bn of revenue, keeps $53Bn of profits; Apple gets that revenue from sales all over the world of devices manufactured in China and services (iTunes) provided from wherever they locate their servers. Apple draws $2Bn of global revenue to Cupertino, paying the workers there, who spend into the local economy of Cupertino and the surrounding municipalities. Apple expends billions of dollars into the United States economy for products and services supplying its business activities.
That $53Bn seems like a lot to dodge if you're only diffusing $100Bn into the U.S. economy.
It is.
Apple's effective tax rate is 25.8% (the statutory rate is 35%). They paid $15.8 billion in U.S. taxes, after all the dodging they did.
On $53Bn, Apple would owe $18.55Bn. (Irrelevant factoid: under the Universal Social Security I designed, the the
if we just pegged the budget increases to inflation plus population growth
Not a good strategy. Government shifts strategy continuously, and the amount of service delivered changes year-to-year. In 2011, the amount spent on Federal welfare was 69.8% of the total collected income taxes; in 2016, it was just over 50%.
There are calls always to increase tax rates
I'm more concerned about the "rich need to pay their fair share" complaint. People point at the poor, then point at the rich, then say "they aren't paying enough." No, you fuck sandwich, the problem is the first guy you pointed to doesn't have enough to eat.
You can literally solve that problem and end up with massive tax cuts everywhere. It's trivial. "Tax the rich more" isn't a plan. We need to get aid and stability to the people who need it, not take shit away from the people we think have too much. If that requires raising taxes, fine, so be it; thing is... it doesn't. We can't have a perfect social safety net; we can have a much-more-optimal one for less, though.
When we cut taxes on the rich, we gain the ability to tax them more to fund other efforts. Think about it. We can obviously tax them 40%. If we can get all of our services working and get the poor taken care of while taxes fall on the middle-class, the rich, and the businesses, then what? Suddenly the rich are being taxed 35%, and we... well, we can tax them 40%. In the future, when someone wants to raise taxes, you have less of that upwards creep to 50%, 70%, 90% taxes; you've gained headroom.
Maybe we should have a plan to lower taxes sometimes, under the assumption that taxes are necessary and sometimes we have to raise taxes, but also that we can't raise taxes endlessly. Consider the tax rate an exhaustable resource and try to reclaim some now and then.
We can actually get a better social security net with tax cuts everywhere. Not kidding. No tax increases on any individual or business. Decrease in all income taxes, decreased payroll taxes.
Everyone keeps asking for more. People don't want to solve problems; they want to tax someone.
It may be shocking to learn, but putting money into the hands of people who'll actually spend it in the community boosts the economy. Your spending is my income, my spending is your income. You get paid more, then you spend more.
Wages come from consumers. You're pulling largely from the middle-class consumer base, and preventing them from spending elsewhere; effectively, you're taking money out of middle-income-earner hands and moving it into low-income-earner hands.
This is only a net-gain if you have a lot more spending on those goods from tourism than from local consumers.
(What hurts an economy? A few rich assholes sucking up all the money for themselves and then sending that money out of the economy to their Swiss bank accounts.)
What percentage of McDonalds food purchases are made by top 10% income earners?
Industry groups work together to develop solutions to problems all the time.
The "Fake News" part of this is a red herring. There's lots of bullshit news. There's lots of bullshit news in print newspapers. There's lots of bullshit news on Fortune, Forbes, and WSJ. More to the point, that's not really what they care about; their entire argument is that their businesses are failing and they need to somehow keep themselves relevant, bullshit news or none.
What you describe suggests everyone wants to read these newspapers, but can't. The problem is most of everybody is more interested in their bullshit news. Whenever the real world tramples upon your little ideals, you have to reorient yourself emotionally. It's hard to go back and fix all the links to broken data; the brain doesn't want to expend that energy--and, besides, if you either just accepted when somebody told you you're wrong or sat down to verify that your head is indeed on straight, you'd do a lot of excessive thinking and your brain would find itself incapable of actually reasoning about anything--and so it responds to new facts conflicting established facts by shutting off the prefrontal cortex (reasoning) and activating the amygdala (emotion).
In other words: the natural, hard-coded response to learning that you're wrong is to throw a tantrum. Accepting that you might be wrong hurts.
Solution? Cake and donuts for every meal. People group together with like-minded folks who claim some facts are wrong and select the news that confirms this. Each group believes their news is right and the other guys's news is fake news.
So, again: the problem they're working together to solve is the one of not having enough revenue for themselves. Facebook and Google deliver information in aggregate form; a bunch of industry players want to get together and do the same, classing themselves as some sort of traditional selection. I don't believe such a strategic option necessarily must violate anti-trust laws, so it's fine they do that.
My point was that government deciding everyone is playing fair but we need to bend the rules to shore up $someone is basically government deciding on what consumers should consume--command economy. (Socialism is government owning the means to production; Communism ideals largely suggested that the people owned such things and the government handled instrumentation to get the most optimum outcome, which... didn't work.) They're essentially asking the government to favor their industry for special reasons. There's also a reason I said it's the murkiest form of such things: we're not looking too far down the scale in that direction.
No, this is pretty much just communism in its murkiest still-identifiable form.
Essentially, Facebook and Google deliver information. People on Facebook need stuff to talk about, so they talk about common interests. This includes... news. Google, of course, can connect anything you're asking about to the news that's probably why you're asking about it.
Now the newspapers aren't hot items anymore. People aren't buying newspapers, just like they're not buying physical CDs. In a generation, newspapers won't be a thing. There's all this online news from the likes of CNN and Washington Post, and it's being shared and commented on across all these Facebook feeds; you can't hold an argument in comments with strangers and friends on newspaper.
So the newspapers essentially are asking Congress to step in and change the market place. They want the government to decide what businesses should exist and, specifically, how people should get their news.
In our case, the government has limited power to try and shore up one industry and cut down another. The newspaper industry, of course, wants them to use what power they have to shore up newspapers and cut down online news. Part of that is the power to selectively exempt the newspaper industry from regulations which preserve capitalism from conglomerates of colluding market players who would otherwise work to shut out others from the market.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the main line of thinking would be, "WOW! Microsoft pushed Windows 10 so hard to get people protected from all this shit!"
Then you realize Microsoft didn't have patches and didn't know about this shit until the storm came.
Never attribute to brilliance what can be attributed to dumb luck.
The United States Social Security Administration provides Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance pensions. Like all of our welfare systems, it experiences an incredibly-low degree of recipient abuse, largely thanks to the Office of the Inspector General's effectiveness in identifying fraudulent applicants by a broad array of investigatory means including simple spot-checks. Largely, however, OASDI is practically-immune to fraud in the Old-Age and Survivorship pensions services, as it's hard to fake a dead person being alive for very long, especially with public records of death; only Disability Insurance experiences direct fraud to any significant degree, and that's caught in surprisingly short order.
What sets OAS in particular apart from TANF, WIC, SNAP, unemployment insurance, and especially HUD is its sheer effectiveness. Only 10% of Americans above retirement age live below the Federal old-age poverty line. Social Security's Old-Age and Survivors pension program would completely-eliminate old-age poverty if it restructured around a flatter (or flat) benefit using the same total disbursal. This would also address the recent problem of eligibility: because many of today's low-income workers are in and out of employment, they don't even qualify for OAS; a flat benefit would address that.
Compare that to TANF and WIC, which don't adequately reach all recipients; SNAP, which frequently provides an inadequate benefit; Unemployment Insurance, which creates a disincentive to work by both discounting itself from any offered wage and placing a large risk of not qualifying for unemployment again if the job doesn't work out; and HUD Housing Assistance, which provides benefits to 1/4 of qualified applicants, and places the other 3/4 on a waiting list from which they never graduate, effectively denying benefits to 75% of qualified households while telling them they legally are owed benefits.
As you can see, the OASDI program is wildly-successful, and still has room for improvement. A program of universal social security can provide similar success, both by stabilizing the economy at large, all individual households, and other aspects of our welfare system, all while reducing the tax burden on America's citizens and businesses.
Restructuring TANF, WIC, SNAP, unemployment, and HUD housing assistance around a universal social security program with supplemental assistance (largely childcare support services--Cash for Kids is a really, really bad idea) would provide more-effective welfare while reducing taxes on every taxpaying individual in the United States, immediately lowering payroll taxes by 0.9%, and reducing the business income taxes from 35% to 32.5%. This would include retaining OASDI as a supplemental service which fills the gap between the universal benefit and the OASDI benefits of today.
This system stabilizes OASDI and takes a large amount of load off WIC, SNAP, and HUD. It completely-obviates unemployment insurance. HUD housing assistance can ignore the 3/4 of applicants currently not receiving, or it can attempt to address them; in either case, the benchmark number for HUD to use from the universal benefit is 45% of the benefit's payout, and HUD can discount its annual subsidy by that much (plus any received OASDI, for households receiving OASDI) for recipient households. Most two-adult households will exceed their HUD benefit by this calculation, and thus become ineligible. Note that HUD housing assistance today only costs $60 billion annually, or $39/month per taxpaying household.
So yes, our Social Security system provides the most-successful anti-poverty system ever seen; it can be improved; and we can design a better service based around it. Our current total crop of welfare plans has severe defects and doesn't accomplish its mission; we need to re-orient that mission to something achievable by providing an effective baseline service from which to build.
As for numbers, that $20,000 per person number is
So your bug report, when submitted, can include the document and registry keys, and some diagnostic information. So don't submit the crash report, then.
I wasn't talking about attached data to bug reports; that's a hazard you should be aware of--even Fedora and Ubuntu collect that kind of data (and I daresay more of it) when a package manager failure or an application crash occurs. There was a large, alarmist scream when Windows 10 came out that it was vacuuming up every keypress, every password, and even all of your files, digging through all personal data. Not selectively; all of it.
And yeah, I knew about the cloud stuff for voice and tablet recognition. Nobody does that locally anymore; they use a cloud service, and it goes away when your internet connection goes away. It's kind of annoying. That's a far cry from "spying", though, albeit samples of handwriting can easily identify a person. Generally, I turn that part off, anyway.
Yeah, turn off updates and never install software again.
Were you being serious, or do you just not know how computers work?
it's not like windows where you have a rootkit
Logically, the OS doesn't need a "rootkit" because it is a rootkit. Most other software (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) is either an open-source browser (no rootkit) or something running in an open-source browser.
My point was we generally leak a lot of (mostly-benign) information upstream, and that nobody has actually described the data fished from Windows 10. People complained about Microsoft knowing what software you install for a while (which turned out to be false: the installer has a short blacklist), so that's become my de-facto example of information leaking upstream, largely to avoid the first round of exchanges and move onto the next suggestion of what might be leaking upstream.
Honestly I'm just waiting for people to stop with the hallucinated bullshit and actually put down what exactly Microsoft is pulling from their machines. There's currently a list of things you can turn off, and then an ambiguous list of shit you can't turn off that amounts to "whatever evilness I imagined today in my little fantasy world." I'm waiting for real talk on that last bit, instead of just frothing insanity.
Nobody knows what spying is happening, but the thing talks to the 'net so it obviously must be doing something unconscionable.
Excuse me while I switch to Linux and broadcast my IP address, version of my distribution, repositories from which I'm using software, and the occasional download of specific software which I've actually installed to all of the us.distro.org mirrors partnered with my distribution maintainer.
I've still yet to see an accounting of what spying is happening on Windows 10. We know it used to store wifi passwords as a published feature; there was also chatter about it being a file sniffer and keylogger, but that was debunked pretty hard. There's a short list of software that Windows 10 upgrades disable once at upgrade time, which lead people to conjecture that Microsoft gets a list of all third-party software you use continuously. So far, nobody's clearly and definitively defined the spying; usually, when pressed, they give up arguing the conspiracy theories and say something about encrypted connections making it hard to identify what's being leaked, but that it must be something important if encryption is being used.
Corporations hide as much of their profits as possible.
You'd mostly see increases in indirect unemployment. When the economy shifts, jobs are lost and gained. You lose 0.1%, gain 0.1%, everything is fine. These movements of jobs come from consumer demand: the new jobs are created by consumers buying from new companies, buying new products, and so forth.
What happens when consumer demand moves, and the businesses don't have the cash to outlay for changes necessary to provide for that demand?
Taxing business income at 0% is probably a bad idea; taxing it at 80% is also a bad idea. I favor lower business income taxes, where it makes rational sense; and I favor them in the context above. Prosperity doesn't trickle down; prosperity drives its way upwards. It's not a matter of taking away money for jobs--we deduct wages paid from a business's incomes, after all--but rather a matter of reducing the agility of our economy. The question, thus, is simple: How much agility do we need?
Payroll taxes, on the other hand, directly increase wages without transferring those wages to the worker. If you pay a worker $100/hr and have a 10% payroll tax, then you pay that worker $110/hr, but he receives $100/hr, on which he pays his own income taxes. To sell the output of his work, you must charge enough to bring in $110/hr of revenue. I cannot eliminate all payroll taxes in some policies I would like to deploy, as it would be economically disruptive; I would argue heavily against any new payroll taxes, however.
Sales taxes are even worse.
The Social Security system is one of the most-successful anti-poverty systems in the world, if not the most-successful. I've been targeting a Universal Social Security, and I figure it will fare rather well. Unfortunately I'm bad at Web design and communicating in general.
Also the argument about the welfare system sucking down tons of money in either overhead or abuse is a red herring. That's not a real thing; most such systems are actually quite efficient, and nearly all of the so-called abuse is bureaucratic--caseworkers tend to see that you technically don't qualify for food stamps, but that you're exactly the type of case for which we have SNAP and WIC, and so they approve applications which later fail bureaucratic review and get flagged as inappropriate disbursements.
Most UBI advocates have a distorted view of welfare, of economics, and of the dynamics of government. They have no idea what they're talking about and are easily-dismissed. That's a big problem, because a universal social security is a good policy if implemented properly, and the loud voice of the public is a ridiculous ass-dance that ties itself to the idea. Sort of a giant well-poisoning attack against any such thing.
Other things UBI advocates imagine that don't line up with reality are corporate-supplied welfare (bullshit jobs, make-work, any idea of a job existing because people need jobs instead of because corporations need labor); the end of work thanks to automation; and a great need to tax the rich, either because they have too much or because of a lack of capacity to figure out how to finance a UBI.
People who advocate for UBI don't math.
Actually, a universal social security would stabilize the social security OASDI system permanently by providing a basis; reduce total income tax burden on all income earners (the rough, unadjusted model cuts the top tax bracket from 39.6% to 35%); reduce payroll taxes by 0.9%; and reduce corporate income taxes by 2.5%.
Try actually doing the math once.
Math tallying government budgets and universal social security projections. Also math about impacts on take-home wages.
I also did further math on the handling of childcare welfare and naturalized American households, which came out (in 2013) to cost ~1.4% more of all AGI on top of this. This system shifts OASDI from payroll to income taxes and redistributes it into a universal benefit, then restores OASDI's full benefit to OASDI recipients by restoring the OASDI payroll tax at 5.3%, hence why it's only a 0.9% reduction in payroll taxes and not a 6.2% reduction.
Note that this is a rough model, and needs adjustment by the CBO. The tax brackets actually peak at the middle-income level, then fall back down again. Even without adjusting to smooth tax brackets, the low point is at $200,000, where a single earner takes home $2,700 more spendable income than he does today, and a two-adult household (joint filer) takes home around $11,000 more. Everyone with more or less income than this is more-advantaged by this system.
That middle-class peak tax bracket, by the way, comes from the Social Security OASDI tax being currently capped at $121k ($118k in 2016). There's an extra 6.2% paycheck + 6.2% payroll tax (or 12.4% FICA, for the self-employed) on top of the Federal tax brackets. Once you break out of the Social Security Wage Base, your tax burden drops.
Do any of you people bother doing the math before you talk about whether the math works out?
With the NDA, we should probably not mention precisely what type of extension was sold, how the transaction went down, and so forth....
I've never had a problem, and I've lived in The Wire ... I mean Baltimore.
Once, some guy grabbed me, and I turned and pushed him back against the wall. Dude backed off quick, said he thought I was someone else.
Another time, a guy came asking me for money, like homeless dude. I didn't have cash, told him I didn't, pulled out my wallet to get a parking ticket out of the parking meter (takes credit cards!). Next thing I know, I'm surrounded by 3 big dudes shouting and demanding money (the homeless dude was a probe to see if you'll pull out a wallet). I pretty much ignored them. The biggest one was in my way, so I went that way; he backed off, and they all shut up.
People don't know if you're a fucking ninja or some shit. They don't know if you'll rip their head off and shit down their neck, and then have tea while holding a conversation with the pike-mounted heads. I don't know how to interact with people and, in unfamiliar and complex social situations, I don't emote; people can't get a read on me, and I seem disconnected from the real world, which pretty much telegraphs insanity.
Nobody wants to mess with me. I don't behave like they expect; that's terrifying. Even the muggers don't want anything to do with that shit.
In general, if you don't play along, the situation de-escalates. Without the correct emotional feedback, people can't get angry and pumped and ready to carry out a beat-down. That deflation works in any case; if you're actually crazy enough that people start to think you might be crazy, it moves from "lack of motivation" to "serious discomfort", and they fuck right the hell off.
Everyone wants to shout back at people, puff up, look big, and talk about how they can lay a beat down; but if you want to stay safe, learn to manipulate other peoples's emotions, and take away the fight-or-flight feeling. Make their blood stop pumping. The lull puts them off-balance when they were expecting a fight; if the situation isn't one they can just shrug off, it's suddenly disturbing and uncomfortable, and they switch into flight mode and leave. If you fluff yourself up and declare that they should back off unless they want to be on the receiving end of a major thrashing, they're going to get that surge of energy that drives them to stand up and show you just whose ass within which their boot is to take up residence.
Just carry a sack of money in one arm and a grenade in the other, while shouting "I HAVE A GRENADE" the entire time.
Actually, a debit card used for debit rather than credit has no fraud protection. If you use it as a Visa Cheque Card, it does.
Yes but that's not the point.
I've talked to a lot of people on the Internet in my time, and I've learned one thing through all these years: if a robber has a loaded gun pointed in your face, you pull out your gun and shoot him before he can react. Works every time.
The world is filled with delusional people who believe they're a magical magnet for trouble, that they have super powers when they carry a certain object or take a certain martial arts class, and so forth. When they think of risks, they consider everything as causal: a robber wants to beat and rob you if you have $1,000, therefor carrying $1,000 means you'll be hunted by robbers. Never mind that there's no reason for them to sniff you out any more-frequently than any day you're flat broke; the moment you have cash on you, you're in the scenario where you get beaten and robbed.
Of course, if you have a gun, you're automatically invincible.
All that petty cash vanishing away. Your spending is so good... so good....
Yeah, I don't use cash. I have to face the harsh realities of what I spend on every day. I trim my budgets constantly. Mint.com isn't following my petty cash expenses that closely; fortunately I don't use cash.
I can do better than that.
It'll be hilarious to hack Trump by shouting louder than him.
To me it's a matter of stability. This system is stable, so whatever. Yes, they abuse the loopholes; and it doesn't matter. We can design new tax strategies that don't address this behavior without opening up new loopholes, so our economic data about what's out there to tax is safe.
There's some logistics we can look at about this, too. They don't form a coherent argument; they're just worth a thought.
When we buy things from a seller in China, we don't tax that seller on profits. We might issue a tariff, but that's generally a bad idea; instead, we just tax the profits of the business selling the good domestically. That gets the good to the consumer at the lowest price.
Likewise, the business doing the selling has employees locally. It pays some of its revenue to those employees, who are taxable, and who spend money into the local economy. We also tax it on any of its profits.
If the business abroad takes a huge profit margin, it starts charging more than domestic manufacture. In such a case, trade makes no sense: we can make it cheaper ourselves, and so do so.
So what's with these tech businesses?
A tech business will supply a good or service to a country. In essence, it's selling to the country, but not necessarily in the country. Where the business is selling from is ... well, it's not clear. It's pretty much arbitrary.
A business like Google might or might not have a presence in a country, such as France. That is to say: Google might or might not have employees in France. If it has employees in France, then it's doing productive work in France; that productive work is part of France's GDP, because it's producing a product in France. Those employees's labor represents the actual production, although the business profits represent the expenditure for that productive output: the total contribution to GDP should be the entire revenue stream created by that particular productive unit.
Even that's fuzzy: Google in France is using Google in the U.S.. Face it: local Apple, local Google, local Microsoft, all are leveraging the products of business efforts of other parts of the business in other parts of the world. No, we can't accurately model this; we can, of course, say that an empty office in Ireland receiving all the taxable income is not providing productive output.
You also have secondary effects of presence. Google, Apple, or Microsoft might have a data center, an office building, something. If Google is hosting Google's French services in France, then Google is paying money to a French data center buying French power, French internet, and French office space. That's even more of the revenue stream of Google France going to France. If Google France's servers are colocated in Ireland and not France, well... that chunk of Google's revenue stream represents the GDP of Ireland; taxing it in France is a nifty legal trick, and dishonest.
So it's somewhat of a complex issue. It's also one that doesn't much matter, usually; and when it does, it's often a matter of perspective. Apple, for example, chews through $234Bn of revenue, keeps $53Bn of profits; Apple gets that revenue from sales all over the world of devices manufactured in China and services (iTunes) provided from wherever they locate their servers. Apple draws $2Bn of global revenue to Cupertino, paying the workers there, who spend into the local economy of Cupertino and the surrounding municipalities. Apple expends billions of dollars into the United States economy for products and services supplying its business activities.
That $53Bn seems like a lot to dodge if you're only diffusing $100Bn into the U.S. economy.
It is.
Apple's effective tax rate is 25.8% (the statutory rate is 35%). They paid $15.8 billion in U.S. taxes, after all the dodging they did.
On $53Bn, Apple would owe $18.55Bn. (Irrelevant factoid: under the Universal Social Security I designed, the the
if we just pegged the budget increases to inflation plus population growth
Not a good strategy. Government shifts strategy continuously, and the amount of service delivered changes year-to-year. In 2011, the amount spent on Federal welfare was 69.8% of the total collected income taxes; in 2016, it was just over 50%.
There are calls always to increase tax rates
I'm more concerned about the "rich need to pay their fair share" complaint. People point at the poor, then point at the rich, then say "they aren't paying enough." No, you fuck sandwich, the problem is the first guy you pointed to doesn't have enough to eat.
You can literally solve that problem and end up with massive tax cuts everywhere. It's trivial. "Tax the rich more" isn't a plan. We need to get aid and stability to the people who need it, not take shit away from the people we think have too much. If that requires raising taxes, fine, so be it; thing is... it doesn't. We can't have a perfect social safety net; we can have a much-more-optimal one for less, though.
When we cut taxes on the rich, we gain the ability to tax them more to fund other efforts. Think about it. We can obviously tax them 40%. If we can get all of our services working and get the poor taken care of while taxes fall on the middle-class, the rich, and the businesses, then what? Suddenly the rich are being taxed 35%, and we ... well, we can tax them 40%. In the future, when someone wants to raise taxes, you have less of that upwards creep to 50%, 70%, 90% taxes; you've gained headroom.
Maybe we should have a plan to lower taxes sometimes, under the assumption that taxes are necessary and sometimes we have to raise taxes, but also that we can't raise taxes endlessly. Consider the tax rate an exhaustable resource and try to reclaim some now and then.
So, the newspapers aren't asking for any regulations to be changed or legal actions to be deferred particularly for the interest of their businesses?
We can actually get a better social security net with tax cuts everywhere. Not kidding. No tax increases on any individual or business. Decrease in all income taxes, decreased payroll taxes.
Everyone keeps asking for more. People don't want to solve problems; they want to tax someone.
It may be shocking to learn, but putting money into the hands of people who'll actually spend it in the community boosts the economy. Your spending is my income, my spending is your income. You get paid more, then you spend more.
Wages come from consumers. You're pulling largely from the middle-class consumer base, and preventing them from spending elsewhere; effectively, you're taking money out of middle-income-earner hands and moving it into low-income-earner hands.
This is only a net-gain if you have a lot more spending on those goods from tourism than from local consumers.
(What hurts an economy? A few rich assholes sucking up all the money for themselves and then sending that money out of the economy to their Swiss bank accounts.)
What percentage of McDonalds food purchases are made by top 10% income earners?
Industry groups work together to develop solutions to problems all the time.
The "Fake News" part of this is a red herring. There's lots of bullshit news. There's lots of bullshit news in print newspapers. There's lots of bullshit news on Fortune, Forbes, and WSJ. More to the point, that's not really what they care about; their entire argument is that their businesses are failing and they need to somehow keep themselves relevant, bullshit news or none.
What you describe suggests everyone wants to read these newspapers, but can't. The problem is most of everybody is more interested in their bullshit news. Whenever the real world tramples upon your little ideals, you have to reorient yourself emotionally. It's hard to go back and fix all the links to broken data; the brain doesn't want to expend that energy--and, besides, if you either just accepted when somebody told you you're wrong or sat down to verify that your head is indeed on straight, you'd do a lot of excessive thinking and your brain would find itself incapable of actually reasoning about anything--and so it responds to new facts conflicting established facts by shutting off the prefrontal cortex (reasoning) and activating the amygdala (emotion).
In other words: the natural, hard-coded response to learning that you're wrong is to throw a tantrum. Accepting that you might be wrong hurts.
Solution? Cake and donuts for every meal. People group together with like-minded folks who claim some facts are wrong and select the news that confirms this. Each group believes their news is right and the other guys's news is fake news.
So, again: the problem they're working together to solve is the one of not having enough revenue for themselves. Facebook and Google deliver information in aggregate form; a bunch of industry players want to get together and do the same, classing themselves as some sort of traditional selection. I don't believe such a strategic option necessarily must violate anti-trust laws, so it's fine they do that.
My point was that government deciding everyone is playing fair but we need to bend the rules to shore up $someone is basically government deciding on what consumers should consume--command economy. (Socialism is government owning the means to production; Communism ideals largely suggested that the people owned such things and the government handled instrumentation to get the most optimum outcome, which ... didn't work.) They're essentially asking the government to favor their industry for special reasons. There's also a reason I said it's the murkiest form of such things: we're not looking too far down the scale in that direction.
Newspapers are surprisingly full of bullshit, too.
No, this is pretty much just communism in its murkiest still-identifiable form.
Essentially, Facebook and Google deliver information. People on Facebook need stuff to talk about, so they talk about common interests. This includes ... news. Google, of course, can connect anything you're asking about to the news that's probably why you're asking about it.
Now the newspapers aren't hot items anymore. People aren't buying newspapers, just like they're not buying physical CDs. In a generation, newspapers won't be a thing. There's all this online news from the likes of CNN and Washington Post, and it's being shared and commented on across all these Facebook feeds; you can't hold an argument in comments with strangers and friends on newspaper.
So the newspapers essentially are asking Congress to step in and change the market place. They want the government to decide what businesses should exist and, specifically, how people should get their news.
In our case, the government has limited power to try and shore up one industry and cut down another. The newspaper industry, of course, wants them to use what power they have to shore up newspapers and cut down online news. Part of that is the power to selectively exempt the newspaper industry from regulations which preserve capitalism from conglomerates of colluding market players who would otherwise work to shut out others from the market.