Ok, I followed the source, but there is less there than meets the eye.
According to the data, taxes as a fraction of corporate profits has been in a declining trend since WWII. I knew that already; it is hardly a Bush phenomenon like that source tries to spin it. (Nor is it an American phenomenon; that trend is global.) When they make the claim that taxes, as a share of corporate profits, decline during years of high profits, all that says to me is that tax revenue is less volatile year-over-year compared to profits. That policy dates back to at least the 1970's, when the "windfall profits tax" was repealed to spur domestic oil investment and other high-risk/high reward businesses (setting the stage for Silicon Valley, by the way). When they say a large number of corporations aren't paying any taxes, not enough information is given to tell if these corps are the same ones pulling in consistent profits. It could be simply a large number of unprofitable corporations (or highly volatile, having a big windfall year after many years of losses), which is consistent with a shift toward high-risk/high-reward business models.
Now it may be possible to go back to the GAO report and analyze it myself to answer all these questions, but the write-up you cite doesn't make that particuarly easy. All it gives is a vague reference to a report and a date. Am I suppossed to find this in the Federal Register? Arrgh!
Can you name the source? Those statistics (on capital gains, at least) may not be so surprising when you consider that stocks are often held in IRA's & 401k's. So of course there are no capital gains paid; that is, afer all, the whole point of an IRA or 401k. Without more information about how that study was done, it isn't clear whether this evidence supports your argument.
Why didn't they just charge him under a state statute?
The Feds can get away with much more. Federal laws usually carry much heavier penalties than state laws against the same crime, and the Feds can get away with much more procedurally. The result is fewer cases going to trial: when faced with (for example) decades of prison sentence for molding plastic vials (that happen to be popular with crack dealers), defendants often cop a plea.
Apparently heavy-handed federal law enforcement hasn't drawn public outcry that limits the state & local because
(a) There are fewer Feds compared to local & state prosecutors
(b) Their expansive power is still mentally associated, among the liberal elite, with breaking up segregation in the South. So those who once upon a time had a principled stance on the rights of the accused have been complicit. Defending the rights of only their favorite causes makes them appear partisan rather then principled, the broader electorate unconvinced, and federal law enforcement unchecked.
A gallon of gasoline has about 34 kWh of energy. At 10 cents/kWh that's $3.40 a "gallon", but the electric car is at least 80% efficient vs about 35% for IC engine, so you come out ahead. Get a dual-rate electric meter to use cheaper night-time electricity rates and it gets even better.
More realistically, buying a separate high-mpg car, specifically for commuting, pays off when you have to drive that far. If a Prius breaks your budget, a 50-mpg Honda Civic VX can be gotten used for $4000. You'll recover the purchase price in less than 2 years, a no-brainer.
...your efficiency would only be as good as the worst individual module. Like when you replace flashlight batteries.
Not to worry, current electric cars use a more capable system than simply series-connecting the batteries flashlight-style. Each battery individually connects to a computer-controlled power converter module, which can convert power from various batteries in variable condition and state of charge quite handily.
We would have to get better gas station attendants though. But then where are college students going to find a job where they can study all night?
Well, gasoline can be used in a fuel cell. Can't ask for a better fit in the existing infrastructure than that! But methanol does have its charms:
It can be intermixed with gasoline in existing engines. Incrementally sliding over from 100% gasoline, to 50% gas, to 100% methanol requires only minor changes in engine design
It is made from natural gas. Currently uneconomic gas fields, too small for a pipeline, can be exploited with an on-site methanol former. The liquid is hauled out in tanks.
Renewable potential: It can be made from biomass. Farm the oceans for seaweed!
Hydrogen cars are great, but hydrogen infrastructure still has many unsolved problems with efficiency, cost, and safety (ok most of the safety problems have solutions, but at the cost of even worse efficiency and cost). There are also scaling issues; to make hundreds of millions of them requires more palladium than is known to exist.
The advantage of battery-powered vehicles is that they don't assume some as-yet-undiscovered technology to make a workable system. They do require tons of as-yet-unbuilt infrasructure. But still, they are very much a bird in the hand compared to hydrogen proposals.
Most roadside stations would have to have the batteries trucked in, and the batteries recharged at a specially designed recharging facility located close to a high-voltage line. An ordinary utility feed couldn't come close to supplying the energy doled out by even a moderately busy gas station. At 34 kWh per gallon, a mere 100 gallons an hour comes out to over 14,000 amps.
You could see some low-traffic, way-rural stations (that double as an ice-cream stand and bait shop) that do local charging though, and ordinary commuting can run on at-home recharges.
That's easily solved by changing the way the system is billed. Rather than the dollar bill model (you own it and can redeem it) use the milk-crate model (the dairy owns it and permits the customers to use it). In my vision of battery-powered cars, most consumers would not own changeable batteries, but subscribe to a battery service, and get a bill at the end of the month for x number of battery changes plus y joules of energy. It may get a little complicated when worn-out batteries require more changes, thus unfairly running up the bill, but that can be adjusted for on the monthly statement.
Standards, standards, standards....
Standards evolve in the private sector when the parties who benefit from the commoditization are in control. Hence, we have standardized PC hardware (MS in control, PC makers not) rail guage (freight haulers in control, steel mills not), gasoline (automakers in control, oil companies not), and disposable alkalines (gizmo makers in control). In a triumph of consumerism, we have a standardized HTML (consumers in control, but MS bitterly resists).
We don't have standardization in laptop batteries (laptop makers in control), music file formats (iTunes, MS, Sony all at odds), or a global language (nobody in control).
Gov't standards usually come about when private parties must use a public resource. Broadcast radio modulation, highway load limits, and monetary units are examples. In this light, I would consider highway electrification the proper role of a gov't standard, for voltages, catenary heights, or whatever. But "infrastructure" battery dimensions and specifications are properly left to industry. If the auto companies don't standardize, then the battery-powered car initiatives will fail, so they have an interest on standardizing on no more than 2 or 3 types.
We seem to differ on matters of fact, and on those, mostly on mattters of degree. Yes some bad execs get promoted in the private sector, but less often and not as far, and they are usually not as bad. Yes corporate performance figures can be fudged, but they are still better than public sector performance metrics. School boards do scrutinize superintendent candidates, but for the wrong things. A privatized school system will have managerial bottlenecks, but less extreme. I'm not claiming perfection in the privatized world, only that it is better than the current system (when properly implemented...no Amtraks here!).
In the end, I can say it's true, but I can't make you believe it. This is not the sort of thing I can post a link to, "blah blah webpage whatever sez so." A web cite is not credible on this topic, and few print sources are. These are conclusions I have accumulated while maneuvering my career through the minefield and watching with a critical eye over many years. I've explained it the best I can, take it for whatever it is worth.
If you must know, in my 18 years in engineering, I have been employed by 4 large organiztions of the sort you describe, covering 9 of those years. Plus, as a component supplier, I see quite a bit of the politcial tribulations that go on inside our customers (who are mostly large companies). In the short term it can look like corporate players can beat the system, but market forces are as inexorable as gravity, and my career has seen four company presidents above me, and countless middle management, get canned (deservedly). Having said all that, I perhaps should include the caveat that I avoid getting jobs at organizations that have a pervasively pathological management culture, so my experience may be better than most, but I hope you will excuse me for not wanting to have the experience of an employer's bankruptcy on my resume!
Oh, they don't all get caught, my point is is that, in the public sector, poorly performing executives continue to be promoted. In the private sector, some get caught, but some simply get pushed out and have to live out their remaining days sipping pina coladas in the Caymans, as happened to Gerald Levin, whose merge of T-W with AOL was really, really bad business, but not a criminal act. That may not appeal much to our sense of justice, but it does stop them from doing any more harm.
There is a reason for this. Corporate CEO's are hired by the board of directors, who themselves are elected by the stockholders. That tends to populate the board with major stockholders, because (a) they vote for themselves, and (b) smaller stockholders vote for those who have an interest improving the value of the stock. That means CEO's are selected by a group of people that have a strong interest in scrutinizing the candidate. Any past "irregularities" will probably be discovered.
(On a side note, the rise of the mutual funds over the last couple decades has weakened this system. Mutual funds are restricted from participating in boardroom politics, so, as in democracy, poor leaders are elected by stockholders that don't vote. Warren Buffet, however, is free to meddle as much as he wants. By finding companies, owned largely by mutual funds, that need boardroom reform, he has made almost as much money as Bill Gates. In a twisted sort of way, mutual funds' popularity has undermined our public schools: emasculated boardrooms overpay corporate executives, which sucks talent out of the school systems, leaving political players in those jobs, and truly competent businessmen aghast when they discover how schools are run.)
The process of hiring a superintendent, however, consists of looking at what college he went to and what districts he has previously managed. Schools (as of today) aren't intended to turn a profit so metrics of performance are hard to come by and easily gamed (fudged). Promotions ride more on being politically connected and not spouting off something that might look bad in the papers. (The latter is one reason public schools are so resistant to reform...a superintendent is better off being fired by a reform-hungry electorate than doing something bold & innovative.) So up the ladder they go.
This is why I say large school districts should be broken up, or even better, privatized. Right now, the community has to vest a tremendous amount of power (and money) in a superintendent for which they have very little information to judge his competency, and little means to oversee his performance. That's a huge mangerial bottleneck. You wouldn't, after looking at a resume, hand $20,000 to someone to buy a car for you. But that is exactly what we do with public schools.
Let me tell you a story about corporate mismanagement...
Dennis Kozlowski, CEO of Tyco International, had Wall Street fooled as he pumped the stock and lived high on the hog at corporate expense. But after a few years, the effects of competition, along with enforcement of ordinary fiduciary malfeasance laws, caught up with him.
Now let me tell you a story about public school mismanagement...
Clifford B Janey was superintendent of Rochester Public schools from 1995 to 2002, until the budget was wrecked and he got the boot while the people cheered (admittedly in poor taste). Career ending event? Nope, he got $262,000 severence and, a year later, the $250,000 a year job as
superintendent of DC schools!
That, my friend, is the diference between corporate mismanagement and public school mismangement. It's not just bad students bringing the public schools down.
Promoting a clean environment and working for better schools is all well & good, but to do so at the expense of your own chilren's welfare seems a bit extreme.
From what I have seen on studies of privatizing education, the suburban schools wouldn't improve all that much; they already face some competition, and the districts are small enough (though probably still larger than optimum) that the community can oversee them reasonably effectively. In fact, opponents of school choice have been known to drum up support by presenting the specter of masses of urban children from broken homes flooding the local district (which is a fallacy, the incoming children will be the most ambitious achievers, not the most problematic). Costs, however, would probably go down because the management would be in a better position to resist many of the stupider conceits promulgated by the teachers' unions. And the "service factor" would improve (in-school daycare, early graduations, more convienient locations by renting commercial space instead constructing special-purpose buildings, instruction over the internet, etc.)
The big improvement would be in the big urban districts. There is always going to be the bottom 20% who have no interest in learning or whose homes are too broken for any school to make a difference, and the top 10% will self-educate even against tremendous obstacles. It's that middle 70% that can be saved if schools can be privatized or otherwise reformed for real competition.
I don't know if the utterly stifling, conformist environment, that makes high school such an awful place, will improve. That may be a unavoidable consequence of putting so many teenagers in the same place.
There are some private schools that take in "high-risk" students on charity-funded grants (or recently, gov't vouchers), so we have a test of how much difference is attributable to the self-selection bias you describe. Private schools still perform better, though not as dramatically (yeah, yeah, should have a source here).
Beyond that, public schools that operate in areas where strong private or parochial schools exist often perform much better. The performance of the private schools puts a lower limit on how bad the public schools can get before political pressure takes the form of, "do it the way they do it." Suburban public schools have to compete with each other; poorly performing schools slow down new development and that hits the tax base, so they have an incentive to perform.
The worst thing to happen to public education was the massive consolidation of school districts after WWII. What little competition existed got snuffed out and administrators became far too close to gov't beauracracy and far too removed from the students in their charge. A logical reform would be to break them up again, but privatization seems be more in the current zeitgeist.
In the end, it is really about competition and institutional incentives to perform. It is possible to do that within a gov't framework and, conversely, possible to botch privatization by providing the poor incentives (witness Amtrak). But a privatized structure makes it much easier to provide proper incentives.
Regulation against bundling is not the only answer though. Reform of copyright (by not granting copyright to non-human-readable machine code, for example) can also take away the harmful monopolistic dynamic in the software industry. It is more in line with the ideals of limited gov't to remove the problem-causing regulation (expansive copyright) rather than pile another layer of legal code on (antitrust law).
Slackware gives you a range of options, from tarballs, to native *.tgz, to more automatic swaret. It can take in rpm's or.debs if you want, but dependency resolution doesn't work that well.
For my use, I would rather deal with a few dependency issues here and there, than break the whole dependency database whenever I have to compile a tarball. But others find apt-get to be very labor-saving. There is no single correct answer: Different choices for different needs.
I saw this claim trotted out a few times during the heat of the election season (back then it was often "Bush supporters hold factually incorrect beliefs..."). Every time I try to trace back to the source (as with the link in the above post), I can get as far as "some poll says..." without ever finding a specific reference to who took the poll or what methodology was used.
Does anyone know what the source of this claim is?
You may want to switch to Cingular or t-Mobile. Their GSM-based networks scale better to high urban traffic than Verizon's (and Sprint's) CDMA. CDMA is better in rural fringe areas though.
Pre-paid from the major carriers is a rip. Use Tracfone (link currently down) for very light-duty use (the phone is pretty basic), or Virgin Mobile for more moderate use (better phones available, 10 to 25c a minute).
Why would you do that? To have children. To live close to family (who can help with watching the children). To live in a better school district (for your children).
They have already done that, sort of. I have mis-typed URL's and gotten re-directed to MSN search. MS apparently assumed that people would just type "hamburger and hot dog" in the address bar when they are hungry. Don't know if that still happens; I haven't used a default install of Windows in years.
If so, then Google has already cleared the hump of having enough brand recognition to get people to walk past the defaults. It's not just the quality of the results, but trust that they are unbiased. The non-evil reputation is Google's real asset. Trust is hard to come by on the internet.
I'm not saying Google will win, but MS will have a harder time crushing them than they did with Netscape.
Oh hell, even if they are not, Google, as a web services company, has an interest in advancing (and standardizing) browser technology. IE hasn't been feature-updated in years. If more people switch to Firefox, Google has more freedom to do cool & non-evil stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the data, taxes as a fraction of corporate profits has been in a declining trend since WWII. I knew that already; it is hardly a Bush phenomenon like that source tries to spin it. (Nor is it an American phenomenon; that trend is global.) When they make the claim that taxes, as a share of corporate profits, decline during years of high profits, all that says to me is that tax revenue is less volatile year-over-year compared to profits. That policy dates back to at least the 1970's, when the "windfall profits tax" was repealed to spur domestic oil investment and other high-risk/high reward businesses (setting the stage for Silicon Valley, by the way). When they say a large number of corporations aren't paying any taxes, not enough information is given to tell if these corps are the same ones pulling in consistent profits. It could be simply a large number of unprofitable corporations (or highly volatile, having a big windfall year after many years of losses), which is consistent with a shift toward high-risk/high-reward business models.
Now it may be possible to go back to the GAO report and analyze it myself to answer all these questions, but the write-up you cite doesn't make that particuarly easy. All it gives is a vague reference to a report and a date. Am I suppossed to find this in the Federal Register? Arrgh!
Can you name the source? Those statistics (on capital gains, at least) may not be so surprising when you consider that stocks are often held in IRA's & 401k's. So of course there are no capital gains paid; that is, afer all, the whole point of an IRA or 401k. Without more information about how that study was done, it isn't clear whether this evidence supports your argument.
The Feds can get away with much more. Federal laws usually carry much heavier penalties than state laws against the same crime, and the Feds can get away with much more procedurally. The result is fewer cases going to trial: when faced with (for example) decades of prison sentence for molding plastic vials (that happen to be popular with crack dealers), defendants often cop a plea.
Apparently heavy-handed federal law enforcement hasn't drawn public outcry that limits the state & local because
(a) There are fewer Feds compared to local & state prosecutors
(b) Their expansive power is still mentally associated, among the liberal elite, with breaking up segregation in the South. So those who once upon a time had a principled stance on the rights of the accused have been complicit. Defending the rights of only their favorite causes makes them appear partisan rather then principled, the broader electorate unconvinced, and federal law enforcement unchecked.
More realistically, buying a separate high-mpg car, specifically for commuting, pays off when you have to drive that far. If a Prius breaks your budget, a 50-mpg Honda Civic VX can be gotten used for $4000. You'll recover the purchase price in less than 2 years, a no-brainer.
Not to worry, current electric cars use a more capable system than simply series-connecting the batteries flashlight-style. Each battery individually connects to a computer-controlled power converter module, which can convert power from various batteries in variable condition and state of charge quite handily.
We would have to get better gas station attendants though. But then where are college students going to find a job where they can study all night?
The advantage of battery-powered vehicles is that they don't assume some as-yet-undiscovered technology to make a workable system. They do require tons of as-yet-unbuilt infrasructure. But still, they are very much a bird in the hand compared to hydrogen proposals.
You could see some low-traffic, way-rural stations (that double as an ice-cream stand and bait shop) that do local charging though, and ordinary commuting can run on at-home recharges.
That's easily solved by changing the way the system is billed. Rather than the dollar bill model (you own it and can redeem it) use the milk-crate model (the dairy owns it and permits the customers to use it). In my vision of battery-powered cars, most consumers would not own changeable batteries, but subscribe to a battery service, and get a bill at the end of the month for x number of battery changes plus y joules of energy. It may get a little complicated when worn-out batteries require more changes, thus unfairly running up the bill, but that can be adjusted for on the monthly statement.
Standards evolve in the private sector when the parties who benefit from the commoditization are in control. Hence, we have standardized PC hardware (MS in control, PC makers not) rail guage (freight haulers in control, steel mills not), gasoline (automakers in control, oil companies not), and disposable alkalines (gizmo makers in control). In a triumph of consumerism, we have a standardized HTML (consumers in control, but MS bitterly resists).
We don't have standardization in laptop batteries (laptop makers in control), music file formats (iTunes, MS, Sony all at odds), or a global language (nobody in control).
Gov't standards usually come about when private parties must use a public resource. Broadcast radio modulation, highway load limits, and monetary units are examples. In this light, I would consider highway electrification the proper role of a gov't standard, for voltages, catenary heights, or whatever. But "infrastructure" battery dimensions and specifications are properly left to industry. If the auto companies don't standardize, then the battery-powered car initiatives will fail, so they have an interest on standardizing on no more than 2 or 3 types.
In the end, I can say it's true, but I can't make you believe it. This is not the sort of thing I can post a link to, "blah blah webpage whatever sez so." A web cite is not credible on this topic, and few print sources are. These are conclusions I have accumulated while maneuvering my career through the minefield and watching with a critical eye over many years. I've explained it the best I can, take it for whatever it is worth.
If you must know, in my 18 years in engineering, I have been employed by 4 large organiztions of the sort you describe, covering 9 of those years. Plus, as a component supplier, I see quite a bit of the politcial tribulations that go on inside our customers (who are mostly large companies). In the short term it can look like corporate players can beat the system, but market forces are as inexorable as gravity, and my career has seen four company presidents above me, and countless middle management, get canned (deservedly). Having said all that, I perhaps should include the caveat that I avoid getting jobs at organizations that have a pervasively pathological management culture, so my experience may be better than most, but I hope you will excuse me for not wanting to have the experience of an employer's bankruptcy on my resume!
There is a reason for this. Corporate CEO's are hired by the board of directors, who themselves are elected by the stockholders. That tends to populate the board with major stockholders, because (a) they vote for themselves, and (b) smaller stockholders vote for those who have an interest improving the value of the stock. That means CEO's are selected by a group of people that have a strong interest in scrutinizing the candidate. Any past "irregularities" will probably be discovered.
(On a side note, the rise of the mutual funds over the last couple decades has weakened this system. Mutual funds are restricted from participating in boardroom politics, so, as in democracy, poor leaders are elected by stockholders that don't vote. Warren Buffet, however, is free to meddle as much as he wants. By finding companies, owned largely by mutual funds, that need boardroom reform, he has made almost as much money as Bill Gates. In a twisted sort of way, mutual funds' popularity has undermined our public schools: emasculated boardrooms overpay corporate executives, which sucks talent out of the school systems, leaving political players in those jobs, and truly competent businessmen aghast when they discover how schools are run.)
The process of hiring a superintendent, however, consists of looking at what college he went to and what districts he has previously managed. Schools (as of today) aren't intended to turn a profit so metrics of performance are hard to come by and easily gamed (fudged). Promotions ride more on being politically connected and not spouting off something that might look bad in the papers. (The latter is one reason public schools are so resistant to reform...a superintendent is better off being fired by a reform-hungry electorate than doing something bold & innovative.) So up the ladder they go.
This is why I say large school districts should be broken up, or even better, privatized. Right now, the community has to vest a tremendous amount of power (and money) in a superintendent for which they have very little information to judge his competency, and little means to oversee his performance. That's a huge mangerial bottleneck. You wouldn't, after looking at a resume, hand $20,000 to someone to buy a car for you. But that is exactly what we do with public schools.
Dennis Kozlowski, CEO of Tyco International, had Wall Street fooled as he pumped the stock and lived high on the hog at corporate expense. But after a few years, the effects of competition, along with enforcement of ordinary fiduciary malfeasance laws, caught up with him.
Now let me tell you a story about public school mismanagement...
Clifford B Janey was superintendent of Rochester Public schools from 1995 to 2002, until the budget was wrecked and he got the boot while the people cheered (admittedly in poor taste). Career ending event? Nope, he got $262,000 severence and, a year later, the $250,000 a year job as superintendent of DC schools!
That, my friend, is the diference between corporate mismanagement and public school mismangement. It's not just bad students bringing the public schools down.
Promoting a clean environment and working for better schools is all well & good, but to do so at the expense of your own chilren's welfare seems a bit extreme.
The big improvement would be in the big urban districts. There is always going to be the bottom 20% who have no interest in learning or whose homes are too broken for any school to make a difference, and the top 10% will self-educate even against tremendous obstacles. It's that middle 70% that can be saved if schools can be privatized or otherwise reformed for real competition.
I don't know if the utterly stifling, conformist environment, that makes high school such an awful place, will improve. That may be a unavoidable consequence of putting so many teenagers in the same place.
Beyond that, public schools that operate in areas where strong private or parochial schools exist often perform much better. The performance of the private schools puts a lower limit on how bad the public schools can get before political pressure takes the form of, "do it the way they do it." Suburban public schools have to compete with each other; poorly performing schools slow down new development and that hits the tax base, so they have an incentive to perform.
The worst thing to happen to public education was the massive consolidation of school districts after WWII. What little competition existed got snuffed out and administrators became far too close to gov't beauracracy and far too removed from the students in their charge. A logical reform would be to break them up again, but privatization seems be more in the current zeitgeist.
In the end, it is really about competition and institutional incentives to perform. It is possible to do that within a gov't framework and, conversely, possible to botch privatization by providing the poor incentives (witness Amtrak). But a privatized structure makes it much easier to provide proper incentives.
Regulation against bundling is not the only answer though. Reform of copyright (by not granting copyright to non-human-readable machine code, for example) can also take away the harmful monopolistic dynamic in the software industry. It is more in line with the ideals of limited gov't to remove the problem-causing regulation (expansive copyright) rather than pile another layer of legal code on (antitrust law).
For my use, I would rather deal with a few dependency issues here and there, than break the whole dependency database whenever I have to compile a tarball. But others find apt-get to be very labor-saving. There is no single correct answer: Different choices for different needs.
Does anyone know what the source of this claim is?
You may want to switch to Cingular or t-Mobile. Their GSM-based networks scale better to high urban traffic than Verizon's (and Sprint's) CDMA. CDMA is better in rural fringe areas though.
Pre-paid from the major carriers is a rip. Use Tracfone (link currently down) for very light-duty use (the phone is pretty basic), or Virgin Mobile for more moderate use (better phones available, 10 to 25c a minute).
Parents like TV, too!
If so, then Google has already cleared the hump of having enough brand recognition to get people to walk past the defaults. It's not just the quality of the results, but trust that they are unbiased. The non-evil reputation is Google's real asset. Trust is hard to come by on the internet.
I'm not saying Google will win, but MS will have a harder time crushing them than they did with Netscape.
Also, check to see if those pop-ups are coming from Javascript mouse-over actions.
Oh hell, even if they are not, Google, as a web services company, has an interest in advancing (and standardizing) browser technology. IE hasn't been feature-updated in years. If more people switch to Firefox, Google has more freedom to do cool & non-evil stuff.