Problem with a mortgage is you can declare bankruptcy to get out of it if you quit or get fired so young people who don't have to have medical coverage are more difficult to threaten with firing. Student loans? No bankruptcy allowed. Gotem by the ballz!
Even if there is no legal contention of the patent, the international patent fees, alone, place an already-strapped-by-development-costs independent inventor at the mercy of concentrated wealth.
Patent fees are the only asset tax imposed by the Federal government -- and they fall directly on those least capable of paying them at the same time as they fall on those we should least expect to pay them.
Of course, the wealthy will oppose this in every way since they currently benefit from the protection of their property rights without having to pay for that protection, while those producing wealth pay the taxes.
This means political solutions are out of the question.
Sortocracy -- sorting proponents of political theories into governments that test them -- is the correct constitutive dimension of States -- not mere population.
It seems that proponents of more immigrant STEM labor have relentlessly argued that STEM immigrants create more jobs than they take.
OK, so, I'll admit that the simple fact that the job-crash following the massive increase in STEM immigrants circa 1995 to 2002 doesn't prove that increasing STEM immigration damages the economy, but by the same token it can hardly be taken as evidence for the relentlessly argued position that STEM immigrants create more jobs than they take.
Kjella writes: "Doesn't matter how disenfranchised people feel, as long as they can't get organized or coordinated without the government knowing"
You underestimate how unenlightened is the self-interest of our tyrants.
They have intransigently pursued a narcissistic course creating a civil infrastructure so fragile that it hardly requires organized or coordinated attacks to inflict unacceptable cost. Mere recognition that one should, entirely at one's convenience and leisure, inflict whatever damage one can get away with on the supply lines to the cities, is sufficient to bring down the tyranny.
Since I just turned 59, I've a senior's license to wax loquacious on the topic:
A young Nebraska farmer's son went to war against Germany and came back with code-breaking skills, as well as good DoD contacts. His name was William Norris. He started Control Data Corporation with a young engineer named Seymour Cray and, with 34 people out on Seymour's farm in Wisconsin (only one of whom was a PhD and he was a Jr. programmer) built what is widely regarded as the first supercomputer -- even as IBM's armies of PhD's and unlimited resources foundered in the effort much to the dismay of IBM's CEO, Thomas Watson, Jr.
Somewhere along the line, they hired me.
What I learned was that both Bill and Seymour had very strong feelings about the national security implications of an increasingly urbanized population. That's one reason Seymour had his lab out in the north woods of Wisconsin. Bill, as CEO of CDC, had made this allowance for Seymour while keeping CDC HQ in Minneapolis St. Paul (right across from the airport).
The reason I signed on with them was the promise that I could fulfill part of Bill's vision for America:
National security through dispersed population structure -- both its preservation as an American heritage and its promotion as recovery from the recent urbanization that threatened that heritage. Basically, its virtually impossible to take out a decentralized society -- whether you are a nuclear superpower or an international terrorist organization.
My particular part in this effort was that I was to prototype a mass-marketable version of the PLATO network, which I did circa 1980. I won't go into the details of that network except to say that the contribution it would have made to national security would have been to connect "smart" rural homesteads with information, education and business resources that would contribute to their self-sufficiency. Yes, I know, this is starting to be realized today, but a lot of water has passed under the bridge since 1980, no?
The rest of Bill's vision was that these smart homesteads would be energy and food self-sufficient.
The reason you never heard of these things is that they were in direct conflict with Wall Street's interests and Wall Street made no secret of its hatred of Bill's vision.
I succeeded in prototyping the mass market PLATO system and it was quashed by a mutinous middle management more identified with Wall Street than the "crazy old koot" in the executive suite. Unlike many of Bill's other technology directions in support of decentralized population structure, the PLATO system was poised to make immediate profits and roll out mass produced Macintosh equivalent network computers for a service that would have cost $40/month in 1980 dollars -- and that includes terminal rental. So it was particularly egregious that this technology was killed for the noble purpose of making America vulnerable to 9/11 type attacks.
Bottom line, as technology advances, there is an increasing call for oppression to maintain the centralized population structure, just as there was to create it by moving the boomers out of their small midwestern towns, through universities and into the sterilizing urban environments in which they could not afford children -- but the attack on na
If you want economic evolution to select for the right characteristics, you don't tax economic activities, you tax the market-assessed liquidation value of assets. So Stallman's not really offering anything new -- its just another flavor of progressive income tax.
Second, if you're a/. editor you might pay attention to the fact that the original post's assertion:
his measure would create a required minimum 'Return on Investment' scale that corporations need to follow to be viable, and these types of metrics are very industry specific.
doesn't stand up to even cursory arithmetic. To wit:
The liquid value of an company can be considered the cash value invested in it since, as the liquid value, it can be exchanged for cash. The decision not to exchange it for cash is an act of investment or re-investment depending on one's perspective. The liquid value of a company is calculated by taking its projected future profit stream, adjusting it for risk (which gets larger as you go into the future so the risk-adjusted profit stream trends toward zero with time) and then asking how bit of a loan you could pay off with that risk-adjusted profit stream at what modern portfolio theory calls the "risk free interest rate" which is basically the long term average of the return on short term government treasuries, like 3-month T-Notes.
So now we have a basis from which to talk about "return on investment" because we have defined exactly what we mean by "investment".
On this, mathematically correct, definition of "investment", as the liquid value of the company, we can see that Stallman's plan taxes only the return, regardless of the investment. Moreover, in this mathematically correct definition of investment, its clear you should tax only the risk free return on "investment" aka "liquid value" -- as that is what keeps network effect monopolies from getting huge profit streams that get bigger just because they are the biggest. For example Bill Gates had a network effect monopoly bootstrapped when IBM distributed MS-DOS on its PC's and made everyone dependent on paying Gates money or else they wouldn't be able to run most of the software on the market -- and software developers had to write software for MS-DOS because that was where the market was.
Harvard, Yale, etc. are the source of our leaders -- our elites -- and as we all know the first rule of an elite is to never get caught screwing the little guy.
Clearly these esteemed institutions have failed in their mission.
Only immigration politics could come up with a concept like a "cap" that "would be allowed to automatically rise with demand" during a jobless recovery.
Aside from the fact that there were undocumented MS-DOS calls that were used by MS applications, MS's applications wing was able to anticipate new directions in the soon-to-be public aspects of new versions of the API.
This rendered it impossible for competitors to write MS-DOS clones the way Phoenix wrote a clone of the IBM-PC bios.
The bid must be cash escrowed at an effective 0 rate of return. If the asset is something like land, yes, the tax rate is going to be "high" because just about anybody can extract rent from land at the same rate. If the asset is something like stock in some startup that is having trouble raising capital, clearly the cash value to others is going to be close to zero while the actual value may be as large as Google.
Baxter is correct in his prediction that Java isn't going away anytime soon but otherwise he's off on his reasoning hence predictions.
Java will dominate the server side and a lot of other places simply because Vinod Khosa made it the instructional language of India combined with the drive by the Fortune 1000 to lower programming wages regardless of quality or long-term consequences.
Java failed on the client side. Javascript/HTML5/CSS won.
Even in the new mobile devices, with all the weight of Google and Apple thrown behind Java and the JVM, Java will, once again, lose to Javascript/HTML5/CSS.
Yes, Java is the new MS-DOS of the server world and if someone could actually own it by keeping secret the API (hence upward compatibility paths), the way Gates owned MS-DOS, they'd be the new richest man on Earth regardless of the fact that Java and its entire culture is basically about throwing gibbering hoards at a problem. Java is a jobs program for Indians. I suppose distributing the wealth in a jobs program has merits compared to giving a bunch of money to one guy.
From TFA: "Uncontrolled flight is possible over most of the US (except for cities, which are going to miss out on this, like so many other post-industrial innovations)."
Karlsruhe-based E-volo says the Ministry has commissioned a two- to three-year trial program to create a new category of ultralight aviation to cover the two-seat VC200 rotorcraft now in development. In Europe, ultralights are aircraft weighing less than 450kg and carrying up to two people.
In place of a conventional helicopter rotor, E-volo's Volocopter has a fixed branch-like structure on which is mounted an array of battery-powered, electrically driven, individually controlled, multiply redundant mini-rotors.
Under the trial program, the German Ultralight Aircraft Association, Sport Aircraft Association and Federal Aviation Office will work with E-volo to create a manufacturing specification, legal regulations and training requirements for the new "Volocopter" ultralight rotorcraft category.
What this means is that the payload capacity of Dronet is potentially large enough to provide personal transportation given a standardized passenger "shipping container".
IPv6 wireless mesh networking between the drones for 3 reasons:
1) Drones keeping each other informed of their vectors for distributed traffic control.
2) Additional revenue for Internet service provision to wide area near-lines-of-sight of sight to the drones current aloft. This has the added benefit of actually bootstrapping Paul Baran's original intention of packet-switching: route around the damage which, in this case, is damage to the Internet now potentiated by increasing centralization of internet infrastructure.
3) IPv6 offers the potential to finally put into place what I called "the primary discipline of network architecture" when I was designing Knight-Ridder/AT&T's multi-city videotex architecture back in the early 80s: "The terminal is merely the host computer nearest the customer." Getting rid of the client-server paradigm is key to recapturing the internet's potential.
"I'd strongly encourage people today to ignore the IETF, and get focused on mobile, unlicensed wireless, highly reconfigurable and pervasive networking. Pursue overlays and co-existence, and create the next bigger "Internet" - the universal glue for networking things together. "
-- David P. Reed
Open Cobalt's synchronization architecture is a good option for an open peer-to-peer network synchronization standard currently in operation. But, as I said about the wireless mesh standard, contact David P. Reed, as this synchronization standard is based on Reed's PhD thesis, which, with minor modifications, I adopted for videotex architecture clear back in 1982 and it still has no RFC.
The primary problem with "violent uprising and revolution" is that fifth generation warfare (what might be called Web 2.0 warfare) depends on the "plausible promise" which must be simply and transparently stated so that it can organize action toward its realization.
Any system opposed to that can be considered an enemy to be neutralized by any means available to individuals acting alone or in concert with each other.
I don't know whether you failed to do the arithmetic or to understand the proposal. First of all there is no requirement that anyone sell their property. There _is_ however a requirement that everyone pay tax. In this, there is nothing distinguishing this from other forms of govenance. Secondly, even if one has no income, one needn't sell one's property so long as the accumulated tax liability does not equal or exceed the liquid value.
The Curse of the Network Effect is obvious enough in real estate that there is an entire school of political economy geared toward a single tax on land value -- a school most identified with the 19th century political economics author, Henry George.
That the M$ tragedy is all but history does not erase it's nearly 25 years of dominance over Moore's Law. That the Facebook tragedy is just starting and you don't recognize it merely means you haven't learned from history and are, therefore, projecting your own myopia.
Slashdot Mirror
Problem with a mortgage is you can declare bankruptcy to get out of it if you quit or get fired so young people who don't have to have medical coverage are more difficult to threaten with firing. Student loans? No bankruptcy allowed. Gotem by the ballz!
Even if there is no legal contention of the patent, the international patent fees, alone, place an already-strapped-by-development-costs independent inventor at the mercy of concentrated wealth.
Taxing the net liquid value of assets at modern portfolio theory's risk free interest rate, rather than taxing economic activity, is the way out of this abominable situation in which independent inventors are put through the meat-grinder.
Of course, the wealthy will oppose this in every way since they currently benefit from the protection of their property rights without having to pay for that protection, while those producing wealth pay the taxes.
This means political solutions are out of the question.
So, rather than having the corrupt, evil, stupid and/or ignorant drag down the rest of us into political economic Hell, all inventors should demand sortoracy: Sorting proponents of political theories into governments that test them.
Sortocracy -- sorting proponents of political theories into governments that test them -- is the correct constitutive dimension of States -- not mere population.
OK, so, I'll admit that the simple fact that the job-crash following the massive increase in STEM immigrants circa 1995 to 2002 doesn't prove that increasing STEM immigration damages the economy, but by the same token it can hardly be taken as evidence for the relentlessly argued position that STEM immigrants create more jobs than they take.
You underestimate how unenlightened is the self-interest of our tyrants.
They have intransigently pursued a narcissistic course creating a civil infrastructure so fragile that it hardly requires organized or coordinated attacks to inflict unacceptable cost. Mere recognition that one should, entirely at one's convenience and leisure, inflict whatever damage one can get away with on the supply lines to the cities, is sufficient to bring down the tyranny.
Since I just turned 59, I've a senior's license to wax loquacious on the topic:
A young Nebraska farmer's son went to war against Germany and came back with code-breaking skills, as well as good DoD contacts. His name was William Norris. He started Control Data Corporation with a young engineer named Seymour Cray and, with 34 people out on Seymour's farm in Wisconsin (only one of whom was a PhD and he was a Jr. programmer) built what is widely regarded as the first supercomputer -- even as IBM's armies of PhD's and unlimited resources foundered in the effort much to the dismay of IBM's CEO, Thomas Watson, Jr.
Somewhere along the line, they hired me.
What I learned was that both Bill and Seymour had very strong feelings about the national security implications of an increasingly urbanized population. That's one reason Seymour had his lab out in the north woods of Wisconsin. Bill, as CEO of CDC, had made this allowance for Seymour while keeping CDC HQ in Minneapolis St. Paul (right across from the airport).
The reason I signed on with them was the promise that I could fulfill part of Bill's vision for America:
National security through dispersed population structure -- both its preservation as an American heritage and its promotion as recovery from the recent urbanization that threatened that heritage. Basically, its virtually impossible to take out a decentralized society -- whether you are a nuclear superpower or an international terrorist organization.
My particular part in this effort was that I was to prototype a mass-marketable version of the PLATO network, which I did circa 1980. I won't go into the details of that network except to say that the contribution it would have made to national security would have been to connect "smart" rural homesteads with information, education and business resources that would contribute to their self-sufficiency. Yes, I know, this is starting to be realized today, but a lot of water has passed under the bridge since 1980, no?
The rest of Bill's vision was that these smart homesteads would be energy and food self-sufficient.
The reason you never heard of these things is that they were in direct conflict with Wall Street's interests and Wall Street made no secret of its hatred of Bill's vision.
I succeeded in prototyping the mass market PLATO system and it was quashed by a mutinous middle management more identified with Wall Street than the "crazy old koot" in the executive suite. Unlike many of Bill's other technology directions in support of decentralized population structure, the PLATO system was poised to make immediate profits and roll out mass produced Macintosh equivalent network computers for a service that would have cost $40/month in 1980 dollars -- and that includes terminal rental. So it was particularly egregious that this technology was killed for the noble purpose of making America vulnerable to 9/11 type attacks.
Bottom line, as technology advances, there is an increasing call for oppression to maintain the centralized population structure, just as there was to create it by moving the boomers out of their small midwestern towns, through universities and into the sterilizing urban environments in which they could not afford children -- but the attack on na
Its the fact that you have disenfranchised the people who support you.
Ultimately, it will be trivial for them to cut the supply lines to cities and there will be f***all you can do about it.
So, just keep it up...
Second, if you're a /. editor you might pay attention to the fact that the original post's assertion:
doesn't stand up to even cursory arithmetic. To wit:
The liquid value of an company can be considered the cash value invested in it since, as the liquid value, it can be exchanged for cash. The decision not to exchange it for cash is an act of investment or re-investment depending on one's perspective. The liquid value of a company is calculated by taking its projected future profit stream, adjusting it for risk (which gets larger as you go into the future so the risk-adjusted profit stream trends toward zero with time) and then asking how bit of a loan you could pay off with that risk-adjusted profit stream at what modern portfolio theory calls the "risk free interest rate" which is basically the long term average of the return on short term government treasuries, like 3-month T-Notes.
So now we have a basis from which to talk about "return on investment" because we have defined exactly what we mean by "investment".
On this, mathematically correct, definition of "investment", as the liquid value of the company, we can see that Stallman's plan taxes only the return, regardless of the investment. Moreover, in this mathematically correct definition of investment, its clear you should tax only the risk free return on "investment" aka "liquid value" -- as that is what keeps network effect monopolies from getting huge profit streams that get bigger just because they are the biggest. For example Bill Gates had a network effect monopoly bootstrapped when IBM distributed MS-DOS on its PC's and made everyone dependent on paying Gates money or else they wouldn't be able to run most of the software on the market -- and software developers had to write software for MS-DOS because that was where the market was.
Clearly these esteemed institutions have failed in their mission.
What is your Chi squared estimate applied to those results? That is to say, the probability that those results are due to chance?
You've just got penis envy because you got screwed.
Only immigration politics could come up with a concept like a "cap" that "would be allowed to automatically rise with demand" during a jobless recovery.
Yeah, only creatures like Morgan Freeman are meant to play at god.
And he's a professor who is pissed that the coeds he used to be able to nail because of the "inefficient market" are all taken.
This rendered it impossible for competitors to write MS-DOS clones the way Phoenix wrote a clone of the IBM-PC bios.
The bid must be cash escrowed at an effective 0 rate of return. If the asset is something like land, yes, the tax rate is going to be "high" because just about anybody can extract rent from land at the same rate. If the asset is something like stock in some startup that is having trouble raising capital, clearly the cash value to others is going to be close to zero while the actual value may be as large as Google.
Java will dominate the server side and a lot of other places simply because Vinod Khosa made it the instructional language of India combined with the drive by the Fortune 1000 to lower programming wages regardless of quality or long-term consequences.
Java failed on the client side. Javascript/HTML5/CSS won.
Even in the new mobile devices, with all the weight of Google and Apple thrown behind Java and the JVM, Java will, once again, lose to Javascript/HTML5/CSS.
Yes, Java is the new MS-DOS of the server world and if someone could actually own it by keeping secret the API (hence upward compatibility paths), the way Gates owned MS-DOS, they'd be the new richest man on Earth regardless of the fact that Java and its entire culture is basically about throwing gibbering hoards at a problem. Java is a jobs program for Indians. I suppose distributing the wealth in a jobs program has merits compared to giving a bunch of money to one guy.
From TFA: "Uncontrolled flight is possible over most of the US (except for cities, which are going to miss out on this, like so many other post-industrial innovations)."
What this means is that the payload capacity of Dronet is potentially large enough to provide personal transportation given a standardized passenger "shipping container".
1) Drones keeping each other informed of their vectors for distributed traffic control.
2) Additional revenue for Internet service provision to wide area near-lines-of-sight of sight to the drones current aloft. This has the added benefit of actually bootstrapping Paul Baran's original intention of packet-switching: route around the damage which, in this case, is damage to the Internet now potentiated by increasing centralization of internet infrastructure.
3) IPv6 offers the potential to finally put into place what I called "the primary discipline of network architecture" when I was designing Knight-Ridder/AT&T's multi-city videotex architecture back in the early 80s: "The terminal is merely the host computer nearest the customer." Getting rid of the client-server paradigm is key to recapturing the internet's potential.
Get in touch with David P. Reed regarding the strategic approach to take for wireless mesh networking in this new regime.
"I'd strongly encourage people today to ignore the IETF, and get focused on mobile, unlicensed wireless, highly reconfigurable and pervasive networking. Pursue overlays and co-existence, and create the next bigger "Internet" - the universal glue for networking things together. "
-- David P. Reed
Open Cobalt's synchronization architecture is a good option for an open peer-to-peer network synchronization standard currently in operation. But, as I said about the wireless mesh standard, contact David P. Reed, as this synchronization standard is based on Reed's PhD thesis, which, with minor modifications, I adopted for videotex architecture clear back in 1982 and it still has no RFC.
Here's a proposed plausible promise.
"Sorting proponents of political theories into governments that test them."
Any system opposed to that can be considered an enemy to be neutralized by any means available to individuals acting alone or in concert with each other.
I don't know whether you failed to do the arithmetic or to understand the proposal. First of all there is no requirement that anyone sell their property. There _is_ however a requirement that everyone pay tax. In this, there is nothing distinguishing this from other forms of govenance. Secondly, even if one has no income, one needn't sell one's property so long as the accumulated tax liability does not equal or exceed the liquid value.
Again, the real solution is to stop taxing economic activity (capital gains, income, sales, value added, etc) and instead tax market-assessed liquid value of assets.
And, again, of course, not many people are going to really understand this idea so it must be demonstrated by those who do get it.
That's why we need Sortocracy.
I'm not sure why anyone would care about "nytimes.com" let alone some guy who blogs there. What the hell is a nytimes anyway?
That the M$ tragedy is all but history does not erase it's nearly 25 years of dominance over Moore's Law. That the Facebook tragedy is just starting and you don't recognize it merely means you haven't learned from history and are, therefore, projecting your own myopia.