There's little difference between a cost incurred by a company and a cost incurred by a consumer of that company. Eventually, the company has to reacoup whatever it paid by getting money from the consumer. If it fails to do so, it goes into the red and if it tries to keep doing that, it ceases to exist as a company. The only real difference is WHEN the cost hits the consumer. If the cost hits the company first, there will be a delay before the consumers pay for it. Incurring a cost onto a company merely delays the cost to the consumer for a short while.
This is not about taxing the internet. It's about taxing sales, as you mention, regardless of whether the order came via phone or internet. Calling it an internet tax is dishonest - it's analogous to calling the existing sales tax for mail order a tax on telephones, based on the screwy argument that the telephone was used to place the order therefore it's a telephone tax.
Again, I fail to see what the problem in understanding it. Just because it's funded by taxation does not make it government controlled.
A company is *always* driven by he who holds the purse-strings. When that's ultimately the consumer, it's a good thing. When it's not, you get the downside of capitalism - and that usually happens with monopolies - where the consumer has no choice in whether or not to patronize a particular company, so the company is no longer beholden to it's customers. The BBC is a government-mandated monopoly since you cannot use a TV in Britain without paying the BBC, regardless of which channels you choose to watch. If the government stays out of it and doesn't take an active role in control, it's merely because they choose to delegate - for the same reason Tony Blair isn't running the health care system, or patrolling the streets in a checkered hat directing traffic - it's delegated to others. The BBC just has a greater degree of delegation.
Now, that being said, the BBC isn't so bad precisely because they are still in the long run beholden to the people, just in a roundabout way - they are beholden to the government that funds them, which in turn is beholden to the people that elect it. Your claim that the fact that the BBC is allowed to criticise the government means it's not a government institution would only make sense if you start from the premise that your government is totalitarian.
The BBC is not a government organisation. Why do some people have so much trouble getting this?
Because it is funded mostly through television taxation. The difference between that and an actual government organization is irrelevant. It's a "private" company in the same way that the electric company is "private" or the sewage treatment company is "private", or the construction company that does nothing but road repair is "private". You cannot choose to patronize a competing company instead. (Can you get a TV, watch JUST ITV for example, and not pay the BBC any license fee? No. BBC gets the same fee either way, whether you watch them or some competitor. Not surprisingly, under that climate the competitors are very small in number.)
You miss the point. The point is that you pay the same flat rate whether you use the TV to receive TV shows once a year, once a month, once a day, or once and hour. Thus there is no feedback mechanism by which the company has to respond to the needs of its customers beyond just making something they want to watch on rare occasions maybe, and in that regard the BBC isn't like a real company at all. A real TV production company would have revenue for a show vary depending on how popular the show is.
And note how the BBC gets the money for a TV license for watching ANY TV show, not just ones broadcast by the BBC. Watch ITV, and BBC gets the money. Nice racket they've got going there.
"If you use or install television receiving equipment to receive or record television programme services you are required by law to have a valid TV Licence."
English is an ambigious langauge sometimes. The above can be parsed two different ways, both of which are equally valid:
[ If you use or install ] [ television receiving equipment ] [ to recieve or record television programmes ]...
[ If you use or install ][ television receiving equipment to recieve or record television programme services ]...
The first way is the way you interpet it. The second states that equipment whose purpose is to recieve or record television requires a license, regardless of whether you are using that ability or not. I'm not calling you wrong - just pointing out how it is that people end up interpeting it the other way.
In a time when the telephone had been invented but had not become ubiquitous, and mobile radio units were extremely bulky, the telephone on the outside of the box was the beat cop's means of contacting the station. If he needed some help, or needed to report something, he could run to the nearest police box and use the phone there.
The box could be opened and a suspect could be locked inside for a short while. Thus the officer could hold the person there, then make the phone call (using the phone on the box) to have more people come down from the station to escort the detainee back.
This became obsolete when the constables started using automobiles in addition to walking cops. First, the automobile could carry a radio and the battery to power it, which made the police box telephone obsolete. Second, the automobile was used to transport the suspect back to the station directly, which made the second use of the police box obsolete.
By the time of the show, they were already obsolete and only a few were left. Thus the first Doctor and his granddaughter (or was it niece? I can't remember), kept the TARDIS in a back alley piled with random junk (where an old unused Police Box would look normal.
Furthermore, I've just realized that Galifreyan society letting other civilizations get destroyed draws a parellel to the United States standing by while Europe became overrun by Hitler's Arian nation.
Hardly. Time Lord politics was meant to be a good natured self-mocking parody of British government.
And if you don't like the company that built the road segment out in front of your driveway, and would rather patronize a competing company, how exactly do you do that?
I wouldn't make religious charities 2nd class organizations based on their faith.
The problem is that "Here, have this food from our soup kitchen, and then learn about our wonderful religion." amounts to the "carrot" of the "carrot and stick" approach to prosthlytising (I can never spell that word right), and THAT is an instance of casting federal support toward a religion if federal funds are used to do such a thing.
In my experience, there are militant atheists out there who simply don't like charity. Many of them claim to be libertarian but they actively attack private charity, something that I find false to the libertarian ethos.
I don't see that as contradictory to the libertarian ethos. In fact I see that as the chief PROBLEM with the libertarian ehtos - that it does not distinguish between he who wants less taxes so he can spend on he charities he prefers versus he who wants less taxes because he just wants to keep more money - not because he has any higher-minded purpose for it.
The objection I have to this argument is that it assumes that if the feds didn't pay for these highways, they wouldn't get built.
Who benefits most from the ability to get goods across your state from one side to the other? People in YOUR state, or people in states to either side of you who are trying to get the goods through your state? But who has to pay for the roads when there is no federal organization doing it? The state in the middle, with no incentive whatsoever to make travel across it's area fast, and every incentive to force people to slow down and patronise its businesses.
Roads that let people zip through your state are a benifit more to your neighboring states than to your own.
You will note that in the days before federal funding, we had few freeways.
We will privatize utilities and end inefficient regulations and monopolies.
One of the sticking points I have with the Libertarian party is this one. They hold the delusion that the above quote is actually possible, and this denial of reality makes their platform very dangerous. Which is a shame because they have a lot of other good points. There are some needs which MUST NECCESSARILY be served by monopolies, such as the contractor that builds the roads. I can't very well choose to patronize a different company's roads than the one my neighbors use. For such needs where monopolies are inevitable (at least within a geographical area) I want the government involved so I have some say, which I would not if it was run by a monopoly company. I'm for the REDUCTION of government, but not to the point where it is powerless to do ANYTHING. As long as people live together there have to be laws, and as long as there have to be laws there has to be a government with the power to enforce them or the laws might as well not even exist.
And what about that communist subset of the country that was created under a libertarian country? Would you be allowed to go make a libertarian subset of THAT subset of the country? No, not by the premises you put forward here. So then how much of the country is covered by this communist enclave? Let's say 10% of the country is under it - those 10% of the population would be receiving nothing at all of benefit from the fact that the other 90% are libertarian. Now what if the society that starts libertarian becomes 99% communist? What's the difference between that and an actual communist society? About 1%.
What an idiotic comment.
By your definition the entire world is already a libertarian country, under which there exist over 100 different subcountries - so why complain?
Aside from the atheists who cloak their atheism in libertarian argument, libertarians don't have a problem with private charity.
What?!?! The only way that makes any sense is if you begin from the false premise that the only charities that exist are religious, which is a blatant lie told by those who also believe the false premise that religion is a requirement for human decency.
The complaints of atheists with regard to religious charity is when it is FEDERALLY FUNDED RELIGIOUS charity, which the constitution should be forbidding since that amounts to a federal establishment of religious preference. This is a stance perfectly in line with libertarianism. It's not a case of "cloaking" atheism and libertarianism. It's a case of them happening to agree on a point.
Yes they do. The states are not allowed to remove a freedom gauranteed at the federal level.
Re:Highway funds only persuasive to some states
on
The Free State Project
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Every time any sort of goods are transported to or from your state to other states your state is getting a benefit from the federal funding for highways.
Unless your state never trades any goods and is totally insular, you DO benefit from the highways in other states.
My boots usually take so long that I turn the machine on and then *leave*, go get something from the 'fridge, come back in time to answer the LILO question before it times out and picks a default.
It takes my machine at least 20 seconds just to get to the part where it starts looking on the hard drive for a boot sector.
To render that 3-page printout of the seattle map, I had to download the linux version of the MrSID viewer, download the SID file, and display it that way (the web interface scales gifs down to 640x400 at most).
Here's some stuff about the MrSID view (at least the linux version. I didn't try any of the other ports).
1 - All it lets you do is view on the screen. It has no "print" option. 2 - It does have the ability to dump out to a number of common image file formats, but it only dumps out the image at the resolution being displayed currently on the screen, so it cannot make an image larger than your screen's resolution. 3 - I know the SID files are actually capable of much higher resolution than that. 4 - So what I ended up having to do to make the big hi-res version of the image was to have MrSID zoom in on various sections of the picture, and save those zoomed-in areas as seperate files. 5 - Then I glued the seperate images together in GIMP into one big image. This I had to do visually since there was no way to tell MrSID to size itself to a specific section of the image by coordinates, and so my zoomed-in dumps had overlapping bits.
Summary: The site is very very cool, but the MrSID viewer you have to use to get the full resolution images is annoying. I'd much rather just download the large version as a really big JPEG and use whatever image editor I feel like once I have it.
I'm currently game-mastering a Deadlands roleplaying game (real system, not the d20 port) where the action has centered around the Pacific Northwest in 1878. I've used the "American Memory" site for all sorts of stuff in that game, including a bird's eye view of Seattle, 1878that I rendered into a big three-page size printout, glued it to some cardboard, and am using it as the GM's screen, with the map facing outward to the players.
That site is great. The other handy thing about it is the indications of what areas were yet unexplored at the time. By looking at a map of the era I know what fuzzy unknown wilderness areas are ripe to be populated with all sorts of Bad Guy hideouts and such.
On another note, I noticed an awful lot of the birds-eye artist rendition maps are from the Wisconsin area, where I live, and I thought that was a bit odd. It turns out the reason for it is that the Library of Congres' project of comissioning maps of all the new cities happened to be in effect at about the time the artist's birds-eye rendition was in vouge, which was also about the time this part of the country was starting to be heavily settled.
The reason to hate the guru meditation errors is that they came up too often. That was a big problem on the Amiga. I don't know what caused it, but it's annoying as all get out to have to reboot because of some unknown problem, several times a day.
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There's little difference between a cost incurred by a company and a cost incurred by a consumer of that company. Eventually, the company has to reacoup whatever it paid by getting money from the consumer. If it fails to do so, it goes into the red and if it tries to keep doing that, it ceases to exist as a company. The only real difference is WHEN the cost hits the consumer. If the cost hits the company first, there will be a delay before the consumers pay for it. Incurring a cost onto a company merely delays the cost to the consumer for a short while.
What a misleading alarmist title.
This is not about taxing the internet. It's about taxing sales, as you mention, regardless of whether the order came via phone or internet. Calling it an internet tax is dishonest - it's analogous to calling the existing sales tax for mail order a tax on telephones, based on the screwy argument that the telephone was used to place the order therefore it's a telephone tax.
There's no point in talking to someone who chooses to be an ass.
I hope you're not being serious.
A company is *always* driven by he who holds the purse-strings. When that's ultimately the consumer, it's a good thing. When it's not, you get the downside of capitalism - and that usually happens with monopolies - where the consumer has no choice in whether or not to patronize a particular company, so the company is no longer beholden to it's customers. The BBC is a government-mandated monopoly since you cannot use a TV in Britain without paying the BBC, regardless of which channels you choose to watch. If the government stays out of it and doesn't take an active role in control, it's merely because they choose to delegate - for the same reason Tony Blair isn't running the health care system, or patrolling the streets in a checkered hat directing traffic - it's delegated to others. The BBC just has a greater degree of delegation.
Now, that being said, the BBC isn't so bad precisely because they are still in the long run beholden to the people, just in a roundabout way - they are beholden to the government that funds them, which in turn is beholden to the people that elect it. Your claim that the fact that the BBC is allowed to criticise the government means it's not a government institution would only make sense if you start from the premise that your government is totalitarian.
Because it is funded mostly through television taxation. The difference between that and an actual government organization is irrelevant. It's a "private" company in the same way that the electric company is "private" or the sewage treatment company is "private", or the construction company that does nothing but road repair is "private". You cannot choose to patronize a competing company instead. (Can you get a TV, watch JUST ITV for example, and not pay the BBC any license fee? No. BBC gets the same fee either way, whether you watch them or some competitor. Not surprisingly, under that climate the competitors are very small in number.)
You miss the point. The point is that you pay the same flat rate whether you use the TV to receive TV shows once a year, once a month, once a day, or once and hour. Thus there is no feedback mechanism by which the company has to respond to the needs of its customers beyond just making something they want to watch on rare occasions maybe, and in that regard the BBC isn't like a real company at all. A real TV production company would have revenue for a show vary depending on how popular the show is.
And note how the BBC gets the money for a TV license for watching ANY TV show, not just ones broadcast by the BBC. Watch ITV, and BBC gets the money. Nice racket they've got going there.
- [ If you use or install ] [ television receiving equipment ] [ to recieve or record television programmes ]
...
- [ If you use or install ][ television receiving equipment to recieve or record television programme services ]
...
The first way is the way you interpet it. The second states that equipment whose purpose is to recieve or record television requires a license, regardless of whether you are using that ability or not. I'm not calling you wrong - just pointing out how it is that people end up interpeting it the other way.- In a time when the telephone had been invented but had not become ubiquitous, and mobile radio units were extremely bulky, the telephone on the outside of the box was the beat cop's means of contacting the station. If he needed some help, or needed to report something, he could run to the nearest police box and use the phone there.
- The box could be opened and a suspect could be locked inside for a short while. Thus the officer could hold the person there, then make the phone call (using the phone on the box) to have more people come down from the station to escort the detainee back.
This became obsolete when the constables started using automobiles in addition to walking cops. First, the automobile could carry a radio and the battery to power it, which made the police box telephone obsolete. Second, the automobile was used to transport the suspect back to the station directly, which made the second use of the police box obsolete.By the time of the show, they were already obsolete and only a few were left. Thus the first Doctor and his granddaughter (or was it niece? I can't remember), kept the TARDIS in a back alley piled with random junk (where an old unused Police Box would look normal.
Hardly. Time Lord politics was meant to be a good natured self-mocking parody of British government.
And if you don't like the company that built the road segment out in front of your driveway, and would rather patronize a competing company, how exactly do you do that?
Who benefits most from the ability to get goods across your state from one side to the other? People in YOUR state, or people in states to either side of you who are trying to get the goods through your state? But who has to pay for the roads when there is no federal organization doing it? The state in the middle, with no incentive whatsoever to make travel across it's area fast, and every incentive to force people to slow down and patronise its businesses.
Roads that let people zip through your state are a benifit more to your neighboring states than to your own.
You will note that in the days before federal funding, we had few freeways.
One of the sticking points I have with the Libertarian party is this one. They hold the delusion that the above quote is actually possible, and this denial of reality makes their platform very dangerous. Which is a shame because they have a lot of other good points. There are some needs which MUST NECCESSARILY be served by monopolies, such as the contractor that builds the roads. I can't very well choose to patronize a different company's roads than the one my neighbors use. For such needs where monopolies are inevitable (at least within a geographical area) I want the government involved so I have some say, which I would not if it was run by a monopoly company. I'm for the REDUCTION of government, but not to the point where it is powerless to do ANYTHING. As long as people live together there have to be laws, and as long as there have to be laws there has to be a government with the power to enforce them or the laws might as well not even exist.
And what about that communist subset of the country that was created under a libertarian country? Would you be allowed to go make a libertarian subset of THAT subset of the country? No, not by the premises you put forward here. So then how much of the country is covered by this communist enclave? Let's say 10% of the country is under it - those 10% of the population would be receiving nothing at all of benefit from the fact that the other 90% are libertarian. Now what if the society that starts libertarian becomes 99% communist? What's the difference between that and an actual communist society? About 1%.
What an idiotic comment.
By your definition the entire world is already a libertarian country, under which there exist over 100 different subcountries - so why complain?
Yes they do. The states are not allowed to remove a freedom gauranteed at the federal level.
Every time any sort of goods are transported to or from your state to other states your state is getting a benefit from the federal funding for highways.
Unless your state never trades any goods and is totally insular, you DO benefit from the highways in other states.
My boots usually take so long that I turn the machine on and then *leave*, go get something from the 'fridge, come back in time to answer the LILO question before it times out and picks a default.
It takes my machine at least 20 seconds just to get to the part where it starts looking on the hard drive for a boot sector.
A lot of these maps were comissioned BY the library of Congress.
Really? Where did Columbus land in 1492 then?
India?
The site shows GIFs. The SID files are what you download if you want the full resolution version.
To render that 3-page printout of the seattle map, I had to download the linux version of the MrSID viewer, download the SID file, and display it that way (the web interface scales gifs down to 640x400 at most).
Here's some stuff about the MrSID view (at least the linux version. I didn't try any of the other ports).
1 - All it lets you do is view on the screen. It has no "print" option.
2 - It does have the ability to dump out to a number of common image file formats, but it only dumps out the image at the resolution being displayed currently on the screen, so it cannot make an image larger than your screen's resolution.
3 - I know the SID files are actually capable of much higher resolution than that.
4 - So what I ended up having to do to make the big hi-res version of the image was to have MrSID zoom in on various sections of the picture, and save those zoomed-in areas as seperate files.
5 - Then I glued the seperate images together in GIMP into one big image. This I had to do visually since there was no way to tell MrSID to size itself to a specific section of the image by coordinates,
and so my zoomed-in dumps had overlapping bits.
Summary: The site is very very cool, but the MrSID viewer you have to use to get the full resolution images is annoying. I'd much rather just download the large version as a really big JPEG and use whatever image editor I feel like once I have it.
That site is great. The other handy thing about it is the indications of what areas were yet unexplored at the time. By looking at a map of the era I know what fuzzy unknown wilderness areas are ripe to be populated with all sorts of Bad Guy hideouts and such.
On another note, I noticed an awful lot of the birds-eye artist rendition maps are from the Wisconsin area, where I live, and I thought that was a bit odd. It turns out the reason for it is that the Library of Congres' project of comissioning maps of all the new cities happened to be in effect at about the time the artist's birds-eye rendition was in vouge, which was also about the time this part of the country was starting to be heavily settled.
The reason to hate the guru meditation errors is that they came up too often. That was a big problem on the Amiga. I don't know what caused it, but it's annoying as all get out to have to reboot because of some unknown problem, several times a day.