Most states don't deal with checks and postage any more. Most are electronic. Physically mailing in a check for sales tax is no longer an option in my state. Most programs like Quickbooks already do automatic electronic payments.
"here is no way a person can really believe that it would be more fair if more taxes are collected simply on the fantasy that if etailers are punished somehow brick retailer will get more customers? Do people really forget that any activity that is punished with more taxes will reduce"
Basic math has escaped you. If somebody buying item X has to pay 8% less online because of a lack of sales tax, they'll buy it online. If they'd have to pay the same 8% online, then they're more likely to buy it locally, since there's really no price advantage anymore, to buying online.
"Moreover, requiring sales tax collection for every state of every online retailer would create undue burden on MANY THOUSANDS of small business sellers and drive them out of business."
That's simply not true. Basic accounting software already does this.
"I think #1 would be a pretty serious issue for a small Internet-based business (say, a person or small company selling apps on Android Market, where developers are responsible for collecting and remitting sales taxes--a nuisance!). In fact, for a small enough Internet-based retailer, it could make the cost of doing business prohibitive. But #1 does not apply very well to an operation with as many resources as Amazon, and the CA law isn't aimed at very small businesses since they usually don't have affiliates of the relevant sort. Getting local tax rates isn't that hard. Figuring out which goods are taxable may be some work, but does not seem overly onerous."
No, that's not a valid argument. Businesses use software that can calculate all kinds of taxes automatically. Every business with even a single employee has to do very complicated calculations for payroll taxes, or just pay a company like Intuit $100/year to send them the tax tables to automatically calculate all of the taxes. Calculating taxes is generally a one-button procedure.
No, it ain't hard. Quickbooks has a subscription service for doing payroll and all of the crazy taxes involved with that and it's like $100/year. If the sales tax thing had to be done across multiple jurisdictions, I'm sure Quickbooks and other accounting software would add a subscription service. It's very easy. The software tells you exactly how much to pay and to whom. It even pays them electronically with one click if you want to do it that way. As long as the sales are entered properly, it's very very simple.
As the manager of a small retailer, I have to say that you're completely wrong. Most cash registers are actually "computers", which are, contrary to popular belief, very good at calculating things like simple percentages. Sales tax payments are a very simple calculation that can be done with pencil and paper if need be.
"So many people eager to jump on the bandwagon of disingenuous brick and mortar chains who can't compete and just want to hobble the competition in any way they possibly can, with no regard for the principal."
Excuse my french, but shove it up your ass. That's simply not true. No brick and mortar retailer can compete with an online retailer who instantly gets to pass along a 7-10% price discount just because they choose not to collect sales tax.
" Just doing sales taxes for a small company that does business in 3 or 4 states is a nightmare"
No it isn't. It's called "software". It's brain dead simple, in fact.
You have to be a real idiot to ride a motorcycle in regular traffic in the US these days. The skill of the motorcycle rider is irrelevant, as are the laws. Dead is dead.
$29? For a software update? And you're happy about it? Wow. I've been running Windows XP for almost 10 years, and haven't spent another dime on it. But, by all means, keep handing money over to Apple if it makes you happy.
Wow. Apple has made it such that every Apple device owner pretty much needs to be tied in to the company with an umbilical cord made out of money. I can't believe people still buy this shit. Apple has attained a level of lock-in with its customers never before seen, yet the customers continue to eat it up. It's amazing to watch people hand over their privacy and their paychecks to a company like this.
It doesn't really matter what the company's value is. Stock price is completely and totally unconnected to any kind of company value or profit. Stock price is purely a measure of how much people are willing to pay for a "share" of a company. It used to be that people bought stock because they pay dividends, but now few stocks pay any dividend, and people are simply gambling that one day in the future people will pay more for the "share" than they are willing to pay now. All of the analysis into a stock's "value" are about as useful as "analyzing" numbers on a roulette wheel.
There's not much that I can hate more than banks. Facebook doesn't cost me money. If I used it for personal use, it would cost me some privacy, but that's nothing relative to banks. Banks, if I used them more than I do, would cost me a *fortune*.
Can somebody please explain what the point of this is? I don't get it. A file server isn't complicated or expensive. I do own a small business, and I read all of the marketing stuff, but I can't find a single reason why I'd switch from plain ol' Office + fileserver + hosted Exchange. If anything, I'd have to spend MORE money on bandwidth.
It's one of those awesome IBM keyboards. Found it at a thrift store for $1. But, a company called "Unicomp" bought the patent and still makes them. You can get knockoffs here: http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/
Why did you buy a keyboard with a "Windows" key on it, then? Are you just looking for some reason to bitch? I'm typing on a keyboard with no "Windows" or "Start" key on it right now.
I have to say that I agree with the article, although not for the same reasons. Firefox was unceremoniously dumped from my business in favor of Chrome after months (years) of nonstop "upgrades" that broke extensions, bugs that never got fixed, and more memory leakage than I've ever seen in a widely used application. We're very happy with Chrome, and I don't see trying Firefox again any time in the the future unless the project radically improves and gives me a reason to spend precious time to give it another shot.
If the guy's signing a few years' contract, and if there's even a contract involved. We're probably looking at a value of a few hundred thousand dollars. A lawyer would be $1000, tops. That's less than 1% of the contract. It's not a lot of money. Of course, if he didn't want to get a lawyer, he could've just walked away, too. Nobody put a gun to his head and made him sign something he didn't read or pay a professional to read.
Of course, working for stock options is silly, in and of itself. You're gambling with years' worth of labor.
Any contract lawyer would read over it and tell you what the holes are for a few hundred bucks. It's no big deal. There's no reason NOT to go to a lawyer if you're considering signing something like this. It happens every day. It just so happens that this guy decided to cut corners, got burned, and then whined about it publicly.
When you buy a house, lawyers are involved, so you are protected there.
And no, you're wrong. Any competent lawyer would have said "whoa, don't sign that with that clause or until we see those documents". A lawyer who missed that would be negligent and could be held liable. That's why lawyers earn so much money. So yes, if somebody plops an employment contract down in from of you, the only intelligent thing to do is to hand it to a lawyer and get back to them later. You apparently don't have any experience with lawyers outside of TV and movies. A lawyer isn't going to be literally reading the contract at the employer's office over your shoulder. That's not how it works.
If you don't want to take the time or the money to do it.... well, you get what you deserve.
Cable news is all online, video and all. Of course, those are all terrible "news" sources, but to each their own.
Professional sports... well... each sport is one privately owned corporation, so there's no way around that. If you want to watch a major professional sport, the company is going to charge you as much as they possibly can because so many people are so willing to pay it. Even online, they can charge an absurd amount of money (somebody just told me about how much it costs to watch NFL, Inc. content). I don't get it, personally but, to each their own.
A decent job with Youtube? You think so? In my experience, Youtube's performance is so bad that I've just blacklisted them from my network to save myself the frustration. I know it isn't just my connection, because I get the same really, really poor results from several different connections. I haven't been able to successfully watch a Youtube video without interruption since before the acquisition, and as such, I've always wondered what Google did to screw up the service so badly.
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Most states don't deal with checks and postage any more. Most are electronic. Physically mailing in a check for sales tax is no longer an option in my state. Most programs like Quickbooks already do automatic electronic payments.
"here is no way a person can really believe that it would be more fair if more taxes are collected simply on the fantasy that if etailers are punished somehow brick retailer will get more customers? Do people really forget that any activity that is punished with more taxes will reduce"
Basic math has escaped you. If somebody buying item X has to pay 8% less online because of a lack of sales tax, they'll buy it online. If they'd have to pay the same 8% online, then they're more likely to buy it locally, since there's really no price advantage anymore, to buying online.
"Moreover, requiring sales tax collection for every state of every online retailer would create undue burden on MANY THOUSANDS of small business sellers and drive them out of business."
That's simply not true. Basic accounting software already does this.
"I think #1 would be a pretty serious issue for a small Internet-based business (say, a person or small company selling apps on Android Market, where developers are responsible for collecting and remitting sales taxes--a nuisance!). In fact, for a small enough Internet-based retailer, it could make the cost of doing business prohibitive. But #1 does not apply very well to an operation with as many resources as Amazon, and the CA law isn't aimed at very small businesses since they usually don't have affiliates of the relevant sort. Getting local tax rates isn't that hard. Figuring out which goods are taxable may be some work, but does not seem overly onerous."
No, that's not a valid argument. Businesses use software that can calculate all kinds of taxes automatically. Every business with even a single employee has to do very complicated calculations for payroll taxes, or just pay a company like Intuit $100/year to send them the tax tables to automatically calculate all of the taxes. Calculating taxes is generally a one-button procedure.
No, it ain't hard. Quickbooks has a subscription service for doing payroll and all of the crazy taxes involved with that and it's like $100/year. If the sales tax thing had to be done across multiple jurisdictions, I'm sure Quickbooks and other accounting software would add a subscription service. It's very easy. The software tells you exactly how much to pay and to whom. It even pays them electronically with one click if you want to do it that way. As long as the sales are entered properly, it's very very simple.
As the manager of a small retailer, I have to say that you're completely wrong. Most cash registers are actually "computers", which are, contrary to popular belief, very good at calculating things like simple percentages. Sales tax payments are a very simple calculation that can be done with pencil and paper if need be.
"So many people eager to jump on the bandwagon of disingenuous brick and mortar chains who can't compete and just want to hobble the competition in any way they possibly can, with no regard for the principal."
Excuse my french, but shove it up your ass. That's simply not true. No brick and mortar retailer can compete with an online retailer who instantly gets to pass along a 7-10% price discount just because they choose not to collect sales tax.
" Just doing sales taxes for a small company that does business in 3 or 4 states is a nightmare" No it isn't. It's called "software". It's brain dead simple, in fact.
You know, there are plenty of smaller, independent retailers who are also getting hurt by Amazon's sales tax games, right?
You have to be a real idiot to ride a motorcycle in regular traffic in the US these days. The skill of the motorcycle rider is irrelevant, as are the laws. Dead is dead.
$29? For a software update? And you're happy about it? Wow. I've been running Windows XP for almost 10 years, and haven't spent another dime on it. But, by all means, keep handing money over to Apple if it makes you happy.
Wow. Apple has made it such that every Apple device owner pretty much needs to be tied in to the company with an umbilical cord made out of money. I can't believe people still buy this shit. Apple has attained a level of lock-in with its customers never before seen, yet the customers continue to eat it up. It's amazing to watch people hand over their privacy and their paychecks to a company like this.
It doesn't really matter what the company's value is. Stock price is completely and totally unconnected to any kind of company value or profit. Stock price is purely a measure of how much people are willing to pay for a "share" of a company. It used to be that people bought stock because they pay dividends, but now few stocks pay any dividend, and people are simply gambling that one day in the future people will pay more for the "share" than they are willing to pay now. All of the analysis into a stock's "value" are about as useful as "analyzing" numbers on a roulette wheel.
There's not much that I can hate more than banks. Facebook doesn't cost me money. If I used it for personal use, it would cost me some privacy, but that's nothing relative to banks. Banks, if I used them more than I do, would cost me a *fortune*.
Can somebody please explain what the point of this is? I don't get it. A file server isn't complicated or expensive. I do own a small business, and I read all of the marketing stuff, but I can't find a single reason why I'd switch from plain ol' Office + fileserver + hosted Exchange. If anything, I'd have to spend MORE money on bandwidth.
It's one of those awesome IBM keyboards. Found it at a thrift store for $1. But, a company called "Unicomp" bought the patent and still makes them. You can get knockoffs here: http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/
Why did you buy a keyboard with a "Windows" key on it, then? Are you just looking for some reason to bitch? I'm typing on a keyboard with no "Windows" or "Start" key on it right now.
I have to say that I agree with the article, although not for the same reasons. Firefox was unceremoniously dumped from my business in favor of Chrome after months (years) of nonstop "upgrades" that broke extensions, bugs that never got fixed, and more memory leakage than I've ever seen in a widely used application. We're very happy with Chrome, and I don't see trying Firefox again any time in the the future unless the project radically improves and gives me a reason to spend precious time to give it another shot.
Even more reason to use a lawyer. You what they say about a fool representing himself...?
If the guy's signing a few years' contract, and if there's even a contract involved. We're probably looking at a value of a few hundred thousand dollars. A lawyer would be $1000, tops. That's less than 1% of the contract. It's not a lot of money. Of course, if he didn't want to get a lawyer, he could've just walked away, too. Nobody put a gun to his head and made him sign something he didn't read or pay a professional to read.
Of course, working for stock options is silly, in and of itself. You're gambling with years' worth of labor.
Any contract lawyer would read over it and tell you what the holes are for a few hundred bucks. It's no big deal. There's no reason NOT to go to a lawyer if you're considering signing something like this. It happens every day. It just so happens that this guy decided to cut corners, got burned, and then whined about it publicly.
When you buy a house, lawyers are involved, so you are protected there.
And no, you're wrong. Any competent lawyer would have said "whoa, don't sign that with that clause or until we see those documents". A lawyer who missed that would be negligent and could be held liable. That's why lawyers earn so much money. So yes, if somebody plops an employment contract down in from of you, the only intelligent thing to do is to hand it to a lawyer and get back to them later. You apparently don't have any experience with lawyers outside of TV and movies. A lawyer isn't going to be literally reading the contract at the employer's office over your shoulder. That's not how it works.
If you don't want to take the time or the money to do it.... well, you get what you deserve.
Conservatives: If you possess this harmless plant, we'll lock you up in prison for the rest of your life because we say so.
Progressives: This products is really unhealthy. We want to make sure you know and can make informed decisions.
You're right... Exactly the same thing.
Cable news is all online, video and all. Of course, those are all terrible "news" sources, but to each their own.
Professional sports... well... each sport is one privately owned corporation, so there's no way around that. If you want to watch a major professional sport, the company is going to charge you as much as they possibly can because so many people are so willing to pay it. Even online, they can charge an absurd amount of money (somebody just told me about how much it costs to watch NFL, Inc. content). I don't get it, personally but, to each their own.
A decent job with Youtube? You think so? In my experience, Youtube's performance is so bad that I've just blacklisted them from my network to save myself the frustration. I know it isn't just my connection, because I get the same really, really poor results from several different connections. I haven't been able to successfully watch a Youtube video without interruption since before the acquisition, and as such, I've always wondered what Google did to screw up the service so badly.