In other words, it annoys you that he's correct, so all you've got is some lazy ad hominem and snark in an effort to distract from the reality you're trying to wish away.
Socialism has been seen to work fine at the scale of "tribe" or "village".
Though it never produced things like antibiotics, refrigeration, or steam engines. And at the tribal/village level, it only ever "works" when there is a strong authoritative figure who can brandish the threat of violence if someone isn't pulling their weight, and that person (and inevitably that person's sub-tribe) always end up living more equally than others. You know, for the good of everyone else. Same old story.
Well you certainly don't fix it with socialism. Socialism is why Venezuelan prosperity is now gone. Leftist pursuits ruin every economy they touch, and chase productive people and all they build and invest in, right out of the country - while simultaneously attracting more of what drags down what's left. Venezuela is a perfect case study. No surprise that the only "investment" they're getting is in the form of colonial maneuvering from a totalitarian socialist state like China, who is now running Venezuela's internet infrastructure.
usually the sale is complete when the carrier picks up
Depends on whether it's FOB Dest or FOB Origin. Every vendor of every type handles transactions differently. Most CUSTOMERS don't consider the sale to be complete until they have the goods in their hands, and will hold the seller responsible. Any retailer that tells a customer "too bad, that's between you and UPS" will suffer exactly the fate they deserve. It's the SELLER that has the leverage with the carrier, and the experience, and the vested interest in fixing the situation immediately. But from a legal perspective, it's all about whether the terms of the transaction are destination or origin.
And did nothing to prevent an avalanche of EXTREMELY burdensome requirements. That will take the legislature, which is where all of this should be handled.
I work for a small brick-and-mortar and ecommerce business and we worked it out pretty easily.
You "worked out" collecting, tracking, reporting on and remitting sales and use taxes to over 10,000 different jurisdictions all around the country? You've got all of their biweekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reporting and remittance schedules tracked, know which ones require you to cut checks or file electronically through each of their separate portals? How many hours a day does that take, out of curiosity? And how do you discover when one incorporated town in Mississippi has suddenly decided that one particular product has just shifted from being a food item with no tax to a luxury item at a special rate? How are you dealing with the people who claim to be sales tax exempt in each of those cities, counties, and states - do you have a way to verify the authenticity of their claims and the paperwork they present? Do you get copies of their photo IDs as some of those jurisdictions require? Man, you are REALLY ahead of the game, here.
No, a sales tax isn't on the person selling the item. A sales tax is the state forcing the seller to be a tax collecting agent on behalf of the state (or county, or city, or all of the above). The seller just collects it, reports on it, and passes it along. Of course the seller does have to bear the expense of doing all of that. But it's the BUYER who is actually paying the tax. But only in states where the state decides to generate some of their operating revenue that way, instead of, say, increasing vehicle fees or raising property taxes, or doing something else to raise funds.
No, they are delivering to you, where YOU are located. That's where the sale is considered to be completed. Whether you walk into a local store to pick it up, or UPS delivers it to your address, it's where you take possession of the goods that makes the sale a sale in a given jurisdiction. Has always been this way, and this ruling doesn't change that.
So, eBay is responsible for making sure that it knows that a town in Texas is having a Labor Day no-sales-tax-on-clothes-likely-to-be-bought-for-school event that lets clothing retail customers (and the retailers serving them) off the hook on specific types of merchandise on particular days? Is eBay supposed to be who tells a seller from Boston who's piecemealing out a case of Old Spice that Texas taxes deodorant at 6%, but if it's a deodorant-antiperspirant, the sales tax on that one line item is 0%?
No. Wrong. Sales taxes are based on the VALUE OF THE SALE, without any regard to whether the person selling the item was smart enough to make a profit. You're thinking of INCOME taxes, which don't take a piece of the transaction's earnings if it's a loss.
Was referring to the comment about how almost all photographers manipulate images before sharing them, rather than taking them right out of the camera. My point was that the camera's software is already doing a substantial amount of the kind of manipulation that "most photographers" are (in the way that poster seemed to mean) going to do anyway. Just telling the camera to render JPGs that are more saturated or contrasty would head off 99% of what "most photographers" do in post production anyway.
I don't think any photographer takes a photo from their camera and just puts it on the Internet anymore. Every photo goes through some editing process even it it's just to fix lighting levels, crop, or add crappy Instagram filters.
Even when they DO take an image directly from a camera in a usable format (say, a JPG), the image has already gone through a tune-up, lens correction, compression, etc. It may not be Photoshop running on the camera, but it's still a highly processed image by the time it lands as a JPG on that camera's (or phone's) storage.
The probability of him using his computer for a crime is much lower that the probability of students using their smartphones for cheating during an exam
So if your culture is raising an entire generation of untrustworthy kids willing to lie and cheat, just search bags and hold phones at the door of the classroom while exams are being administered. Shut down the entire nation's internet access? Insanity. The implication is that even the teachers/proctors administering the exams can't be trusted, at a nation-wide level. That has nothing to do with the internet.
What? You can choose to enter a neighboring state to buy a cup of coffee or not. If you don't do that, and buy it instead in YOUR state where there's no sales tax, that's your choice. If you'd rather buy it across the river in the next state where it happens to be taxed as a luxury item, that's your choice. That's not in any way similar to shipping goods. Sure, I suppose a mom-and-pop coffee roasting company could simply refuse to ship goods to your state so they don't have to act as a tax collecting agency for your state.
Yes it does matter because the state where they are warehoused is going to want a cut of the tax revenue.
They already get it! They can charge you property taxes on your warehouse, utility taxes, income taxes, licensing fees - whatever they want. YOU choose where to locate your warehouse according to what you like or don't about a given jurisdiction's policies that way. But now, all the sudden, you have to deal with the tax whims and administrative costs of 10,000 other jurisdictions, and have no choice in the matter. How are you not seeing the distinction?
That is incorrect.
No, it IS correct. Sales tax laws ALWAYS operate based on the final destination of the product. If you walk into the store, you're taking possession of the goods in that store, which is in whichever jurisdiction it sits in. Sales taxes are local to the store. If you SHIP goods to your door, the goods are considered delivered when the carrier hands them over. The "sale" has taken place, delivery-wise, at the delivery address. Any sales tax considerations revolve around THAT address. That's why - until now - a state could only enforce tax collection orders against a business that also had a physical presence in the same state as the delivery. I've been working in and around these topics for thirty years. I know what I'm talking about, and you can too by just looking it up. The new ruling doesn't change where the sales is considered taxable (it's still based on the ship-to address), but changes the fact that even if a business doesn't have a physical presence in the ship-to state, that state can still force the out-of-state business to collect taxes for them. THAT is what's changed.
Probably the easiest thing to do (still not easy) would be to establish some sort of standard interstate tax rate which recovers most of the lost tax revenue for states and simplifies the transactions.
Which is also a non-starter, because every state has different ideas about the appropriate way to raise and mange the funds they need to operate their jurisdictions. There are many that have NO SALES TAX at all, and like it that way. They'd have to completely re-tool their entire citizen/business/government relationship with everyone in their state just because some OTHER state now thinks they should be able to make a remote state collect taxes for out of state shoppers. If congress set up some sort of nationwide flat sales tax, it would impact people's mortgages, business leases, multi-year licensing rules... it would change the reason that thousands of businesses and residents even live and operate where they do.
Or... those states that feel they're missing out on the cash, here, could do something crazy like make their state an attractive place for mail order operations to do business, and bring some of that revenue back in the form of income and property taxes instead of trying to make some one-woman knitting supply company in Maine work as a tax agent for California.
It's adorable that you actually believe the elected representatives in my municipality have any interest in speaking or voting on my behalf.
It's adorable how you think that condescendingly using words like "adorable" in a fit of lazy ad hominem to avoid the topic is somehow persuasive. I live in a state that is totally gerrymandered by the Democrats, and so I too am not satisfied by my local state legislature's reflection of my own views. But if I can be persuasive enough and join up with enough like-minded people, there is a structural, functional mechanism in place for people in this state to impact the way that this state charges sales and use taxes. There is no such path for me to alter who sits in YOUR legislature or governor's office and sets/executes your local sales tax laws.
When I travel to another state in person they often charge sales tax on purchases I make while there and I didn't get any vote on that tax rate
But YOU are making the choice to physically enter that state and subject yourself to those tax laws. And their local traffic laws. And their local recycling ordinances. And whether and how you have to pick up after your dog. So what? When in Rome. But this is about the people in that state saying that the people in ANOTHER state have to act on their behalf and serve an out of state government's tax collection wishes.
I suspect you'll see a lot of internet businesses start to warehouse products in states where there isn't a sales tax if states get too greedy.
You are completely, 100% not understanding what this is about. It doesn't MATTER where the goods are warehoused. With this new situation, it's where you SHIP it to that suddenly becomes the issue. You could operate your business in Delaware where there is NO sales tax. But if you ship to South Dakota, you in Delaware now have to act as a tax collection agent for South Dakota, collecting, filing, and remitting money according to every little twist and turn of that state's tax code on its own in-state buyers. If you ship, from your Delaware business, a stick of deodorant to Texas, you need to know that means collecting 6.2% sales tax on that item, and where (and how often) you need to report that TO TEXAS and pay them. But you also need to know that if it's a deodorant-antiperspirant product, the sales tax on that, in that state, is 0%. Got it? Now recognize that there are over 10,000 taxing authorities you'll have to interact with, on millions of products that have different rules in each of them, and which also have the tax rules change on different days depending not on when you ship the goods, but on the day they are delivered.
And without the tool...they don't do it because they can't.
And it's really hard to cut someone's throat without a sharp implement. I'll bet you own knives. Are those kitchen knives causing you to go out and murder? No? Do you have any idea how absurd you sound?
I see you're using some sort of internet-connected computer or other device to type out your comments here. Do you realize that it's just a matter of time before you use that device to commit identity theft, rip people off, and read up on how to make bombs, and then go out and actually use those bombs to kill people? You'd better get rid of the inanimate device to prevent yourself from doing those things. Right? Yeah.
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell is wrong with people?
Knives.
In other words, it annoys you that he's correct, so all you've got is some lazy ad hominem and snark in an effort to distract from the reality you're trying to wish away.
Socialism has been seen to work fine at the scale of "tribe" or "village".
Though it never produced things like antibiotics, refrigeration, or steam engines. And at the tribal/village level, it only ever "works" when there is a strong authoritative figure who can brandish the threat of violence if someone isn't pulling their weight, and that person (and inevitably that person's sub-tribe) always end up living more equally than others. You know, for the good of everyone else. Same old story.
The problem in Venezuela is a corrupt government with a child's understanding of how an economy works.
Right. That poor understanding of where growing prosperity comes from is called "socialism."
Well you certainly don't fix it with socialism. Socialism is why Venezuelan prosperity is now gone. Leftist pursuits ruin every economy they touch, and chase productive people and all they build and invest in, right out of the country - while simultaneously attracting more of what drags down what's left. Venezuela is a perfect case study. No surprise that the only "investment" they're getting is in the form of colonial maneuvering from a totalitarian socialist state like China, who is now running Venezuela's internet infrastructure.
No, too many people stopped realizing that it was intended for starter jobs out of high school while you prepared yourself for real work.
usually the sale is complete when the carrier picks up
Depends on whether it's FOB Dest or FOB Origin. Every vendor of every type handles transactions differently. Most CUSTOMERS don't consider the sale to be complete until they have the goods in their hands, and will hold the seller responsible. Any retailer that tells a customer "too bad, that's between you and UPS" will suffer exactly the fate they deserve. It's the SELLER that has the leverage with the carrier, and the experience, and the vested interest in fixing the situation immediately. But from a legal perspective, it's all about whether the terms of the transaction are destination or origin.
At that point, with the sale complete, he mails it to me.
No. The sale isn't complete until the goods are delivered. Usually, the seller hires a third party to see to that part on their behalf.
That's just daffy.
And yet that's what South Dakota wanted, and they just won in court. Which is why it's time for congress to step in.
And did nothing to prevent an avalanche of EXTREMELY burdensome requirements. That will take the legislature, which is where all of this should be handled.
who said it's the sellers responsibility?
The Supreme Court just said that any state in the union can make it the seller's responsibility. Are you even paying attention to this?
CAPITAL GAINS taxes, not INCOME taxes.
It depends on how you came by the item, and how you sell it.
I work for a small brick-and-mortar and ecommerce business and we worked it out pretty easily.
You "worked out" collecting, tracking, reporting on and remitting sales and use taxes to over 10,000 different jurisdictions all around the country? You've got all of their biweekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reporting and remittance schedules tracked, know which ones require you to cut checks or file electronically through each of their separate portals? How many hours a day does that take, out of curiosity? And how do you discover when one incorporated town in Mississippi has suddenly decided that one particular product has just shifted from being a food item with no tax to a luxury item at a special rate? How are you dealing with the people who claim to be sales tax exempt in each of those cities, counties, and states - do you have a way to verify the authenticity of their claims and the paperwork they present? Do you get copies of their photo IDs as some of those jurisdictions require? Man, you are REALLY ahead of the game, here.
No, a sales tax isn't on the person selling the item. A sales tax is the state forcing the seller to be a tax collecting agent on behalf of the state (or county, or city, or all of the above). The seller just collects it, reports on it, and passes it along. Of course the seller does have to bear the expense of doing all of that. But it's the BUYER who is actually paying the tax. But only in states where the state decides to generate some of their operating revenue that way, instead of, say, increasing vehicle fees or raising property taxes, or doing something else to raise funds.
No, they are delivering to you, where YOU are located. That's where the sale is considered to be completed. Whether you walk into a local store to pick it up, or UPS delivers it to your address, it's where you take possession of the goods that makes the sale a sale in a given jurisdiction. Has always been this way, and this ruling doesn't change that.
So, eBay is responsible for making sure that it knows that a town in Texas is having a Labor Day no-sales-tax-on-clothes-likely-to-be-bought-for-school event that lets clothing retail customers (and the retailers serving them) off the hook on specific types of merchandise on particular days? Is eBay supposed to be who tells a seller from Boston who's piecemealing out a case of Old Spice that Texas taxes deodorant at 6%, but if it's a deodorant-antiperspirant, the sales tax on that one line item is 0%?
No. Wrong. Sales taxes are based on the VALUE OF THE SALE, without any regard to whether the person selling the item was smart enough to make a profit. You're thinking of INCOME taxes, which don't take a piece of the transaction's earnings if it's a loss.
Was referring to the comment about how almost all photographers manipulate images before sharing them, rather than taking them right out of the camera. My point was that the camera's software is already doing a substantial amount of the kind of manipulation that "most photographers" are (in the way that poster seemed to mean) going to do anyway. Just telling the camera to render JPGs that are more saturated or contrasty would head off 99% of what "most photographers" do in post production anyway.
It's a tool. The software isn't "complicit" in anything. Photoshop doesn't make fake photos, PEOPLE make fake photos.
I don't think any photographer takes a photo from their camera and just puts it on the Internet anymore. Every photo goes through some editing process even it it's just to fix lighting levels, crop, or add crappy Instagram filters.
Even when they DO take an image directly from a camera in a usable format (say, a JPG), the image has already gone through a tune-up, lens correction, compression, etc. It may not be Photoshop running on the camera, but it's still a highly processed image by the time it lands as a JPG on that camera's (or phone's) storage.
The probability of him using his computer for a crime is much lower that the probability of students using their smartphones for cheating during an exam
So if your culture is raising an entire generation of untrustworthy kids willing to lie and cheat, just search bags and hold phones at the door of the classroom while exams are being administered. Shut down the entire nation's internet access? Insanity. The implication is that even the teachers/proctors administering the exams can't be trusted, at a nation-wide level. That has nothing to do with the internet.
A distinction without a difference.
What? You can choose to enter a neighboring state to buy a cup of coffee or not. If you don't do that, and buy it instead in YOUR state where there's no sales tax, that's your choice. If you'd rather buy it across the river in the next state where it happens to be taxed as a luxury item, that's your choice. That's not in any way similar to shipping goods. Sure, I suppose a mom-and-pop coffee roasting company could simply refuse to ship goods to your state so they don't have to act as a tax collecting agency for your state.
Yes it does matter because the state where they are warehoused is going to want a cut of the tax revenue.
They already get it! They can charge you property taxes on your warehouse, utility taxes, income taxes, licensing fees - whatever they want. YOU choose where to locate your warehouse according to what you like or don't about a given jurisdiction's policies that way. But now, all the sudden, you have to deal with the tax whims and administrative costs of 10,000 other jurisdictions, and have no choice in the matter. How are you not seeing the distinction?
That is incorrect.
No, it IS correct. Sales tax laws ALWAYS operate based on the final destination of the product. If you walk into the store, you're taking possession of the goods in that store, which is in whichever jurisdiction it sits in. Sales taxes are local to the store. If you SHIP goods to your door, the goods are considered delivered when the carrier hands them over. The "sale" has taken place, delivery-wise, at the delivery address. Any sales tax considerations revolve around THAT address. That's why - until now - a state could only enforce tax collection orders against a business that also had a physical presence in the same state as the delivery. I've been working in and around these topics for thirty years. I know what I'm talking about, and you can too by just looking it up. The new ruling doesn't change where the sales is considered taxable (it's still based on the ship-to address), but changes the fact that even if a business doesn't have a physical presence in the ship-to state, that state can still force the out-of-state business to collect taxes for them. THAT is what's changed.
Probably the easiest thing to do (still not easy) would be to establish some sort of standard interstate tax rate which recovers most of the lost tax revenue for states and simplifies the transactions.
Which is also a non-starter, because every state has different ideas about the appropriate way to raise and mange the funds they need to operate their jurisdictions. There are many that have NO SALES TAX at all, and like it that way. They'd have to completely re-tool their entire citizen/business/government relationship with everyone in their state just because some OTHER state now thinks they should be able to make a remote state collect taxes for out of state shoppers. If congress set up some sort of nationwide flat sales tax, it would impact people's mortgages, business leases, multi-year licensing rules ... it would change the reason that thousands of businesses and residents even live and operate where they do.
... those states that feel they're missing out on the cash, here, could do something crazy like make their state an attractive place for mail order operations to do business, and bring some of that revenue back in the form of income and property taxes instead of trying to make some one-woman knitting supply company in Maine work as a tax agent for California.
Or
It's adorable that you actually believe the elected representatives in my municipality have any interest in speaking or voting on my behalf.
It's adorable how you think that condescendingly using words like "adorable" in a fit of lazy ad hominem to avoid the topic is somehow persuasive. I live in a state that is totally gerrymandered by the Democrats, and so I too am not satisfied by my local state legislature's reflection of my own views. But if I can be persuasive enough and join up with enough like-minded people, there is a structural, functional mechanism in place for people in this state to impact the way that this state charges sales and use taxes. There is no such path for me to alter who sits in YOUR legislature or governor's office and sets/executes your local sales tax laws.
When I travel to another state in person they often charge sales tax on purchases I make while there and I didn't get any vote on that tax rate
But YOU are making the choice to physically enter that state and subject yourself to those tax laws. And their local traffic laws. And their local recycling ordinances. And whether and how you have to pick up after your dog. So what? When in Rome. But this is about the people in that state saying that the people in ANOTHER state have to act on their behalf and serve an out of state government's tax collection wishes.
I suspect you'll see a lot of internet businesses start to warehouse products in states where there isn't a sales tax if states get too greedy.
You are completely, 100% not understanding what this is about. It doesn't MATTER where the goods are warehoused. With this new situation, it's where you SHIP it to that suddenly becomes the issue. You could operate your business in Delaware where there is NO sales tax. But if you ship to South Dakota, you in Delaware now have to act as a tax collection agent for South Dakota, collecting, filing, and remitting money according to every little twist and turn of that state's tax code on its own in-state buyers. If you ship, from your Delaware business, a stick of deodorant to Texas, you need to know that means collecting 6.2% sales tax on that item, and where (and how often) you need to report that TO TEXAS and pay them. But you also need to know that if it's a deodorant-antiperspirant product, the sales tax on that, in that state, is 0%. Got it? Now recognize that there are over 10,000 taxing authorities you'll have to interact with, on millions of products that have different rules in each of them, and which also have the tax rules change on different days depending not on when you ship the goods, but on the day they are delivered.
And without the tool...they don't do it because they can't.
And it's really hard to cut someone's throat without a sharp implement. I'll bet you own knives. Are those kitchen knives causing you to go out and murder? No? Do you have any idea how absurd you sound?
I see you're using some sort of internet-connected computer or other device to type out your comments here. Do you realize that it's just a matter of time before you use that device to commit identity theft, rip people off, and read up on how to make bombs, and then go out and actually use those bombs to kill people? You'd better get rid of the inanimate device to prevent yourself from doing those things. Right? Yeah.
Nope. The problem is tools that are misused
Right. By people. Who choose to do so.
Because students don't cheat, the internet cheats!
The problem is broken culture, not internet access.