I hate paying taxes as much as everyone, but I'm not super-rich, so I don't have options to avoid it. Once you go above a certain income class, your tax burden drops, in both relative and absolute values, because you can make use of loopholes that normal people can't.
Corporations are the worst of it all. As they can split up, merge and do other trickery that physical humans can't, they can exploit the system to the maximum effect. And since everyone else does it, they almost have a duty to do so, because otherwise their shareholders will grill them about it.
The problem is that the tax systems allow this, which is caused by countries competing against each other to attract corporations. Which, if you are able to see it for a moment from outside the pot in which you're slowly being boiled, is quite insane and perverted.
As long as the countries of the world readily sell out to corporations and super-rich, nothing will change. Only when they realize that (at least yet) they have the tanks and the guns and the corporations don't and maybe the power-relationship should be the other way around, and then work together to fight the parasites, this will stop. All it needs would be a world-wide agreement to, say, leverage a fixed % of revenue from every corporation, no exceptions, no loopholes, no special deals.
This is no more extortion than an advert for CocaCola on a hot day.
I agree in principle, though not in degree. Let's be honest here: All advertisement is psychological warfare, and it is very, very imbalanced. It's millions of dollars in research and design vs. the usually untrained mind.
However, in the game there is also immersion, which is intentionally abused, and a situation that was artificially constructed. It's more like the soda stand in the theme park which is intentionally placed at exactly the distance from the intentionally way-too-salty french fries stand at which you realize that you're quite thirsty.
Only the weak minded will actually
This is what we all hear all the time when it comes to advertisement, and I'm quite certain the advertisement experts are giggling so much they can hardly catch a breath. This false belief is one of the core reasons advertisement is still legal and not very heavily regulated. It's the Emperor's New Clothes situation - as long as that meme is out there, most people won't admit that they are, in fact, influenced by advertisement.
But you are. More than you believe. And claiming you aren't only proves denial, not freedom.
Windows XP was released in October 2001. That's half a year after the initial release of OS X (March 2001). In fact, by the time XP came out, OS X was already on 10.1 (released in September 2001). MacOS 9 is a full two years older, it was released in October 1999.
No, your example is actually a good example for the evilness of "f2p".
Of course you could just walk away and not drop any money. It's not like they put a gun to your head. Except that psychologically, that's exactly what they are doing. They are putting you into a situation where you are a) drawn in and b) stand more to lose in time and effort than in money.
This is extortion, plain and simple. These games are intentionally designed to put you into these situations so you part with your money.
I know it's shooting fish in a barrel... with a shotgun... and they're already dead... but:
Look to OS X on how updates are done right. Why does MS always steal the somewhat-nice parts from Apple and never the really cool ones?
Upgrade OS on the same machine: Insert disc or download image. Click installer. Wait. Reboot. Done. All your data and configuration is intact, down to the desktop background and even the applications you had running will be open again after the reboot.
Move to a new machine: Get new computer. Turn on. It asks if you want to copy your stuff over from an old machine, so say yes. Connect (WLAN, cable, whatever). Wait. Done. New machine looks exactly like the old one, including all your applications, data and configuration.
So, it is technologically possible. Makes you wonder why one of the biggest IT companies on the planet is incapable of doing it this way.
Free is the dominant price point on mobile platforms
No, it isn't. free-to-play is, which is something else entirely. Most F2P games are considerably more expensive then traditional games if you buy the equivalent of what would've been in a box. It's the razor-blades business all over again. It is full of lies and deceit and psychological warfare on the customer who is lured in with "free" and then shaken down for every penny with addictive (instead of fun) gameplay, click-bait and carrot-and-stick tactics.
Flexcoin, Gox et al., -- Why would anyone trust their funds to these people? These fly by nights are either a bunch of incompetents or just plain old crooks.
Here's why - and I speak as someone who apparently lost a small amount there - because Mt. Gox was the only place where I could turn BTC into EUR. So I sent them the amount I wanted to convert, but not my entire wallet.
You are right that anyone who stores their wallet with someone else is crazy. But people actually used the exchanges as - surprise - exchanges. Which required at least temporarily transferring the coins.
Bullshit paranoia reply. Sure, it could happen, but seriously, would you buy this crap? Now ignorant Joe may - but when he comes home from the shop with his Brand X in hand only to find that he does, in fact, have Brand Y in the fridge, he'll consider it broken.
One way or the other, this kind of blatant abuse is not going to happen. The marketing parasites are smarter than that. They'll datamine the hell out of you, and they'll manipulate you, but they won't be caught lying to you outright in a way that you can spot.
A smart fridge is one where there's almost no use cases that don't involve product/marketing tie-ins -- selling my use of tagged products to marketers.
Uh, actually that's one of the very few examples I can think of that does have a use. How often have you been in the supermarket and wondered "do I have any X at home or not?"
...this is a publicity stunt. 300k is the total price money, the highest an individual entry can win is 75k. Sorry, but the real experts expect amounts like that as payment, not as maybe-couldbe-whoknows price money.
So you'll have participants largely being the B class who need the exposure and publicity. That's fine. Maybe not for a general concept, though.
More importantly: What's so different about the "Internet of Things"? That's just the latest buzzword. It's still network-connected devices. Sure, they're basically embedded devices so you have to use tools with low resource demands, but it's not like we invented a completely new computing system. Strip the buzzword and what you're really left with is small computers built into stuff around the house.
So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently?
Because I can ignore the food shop if I don't care, it only corrupts those who go there voluntarily. Creationists, on the other hand, are corrupting public schools, classrooms and textbooks with their bullshit.
Any food fanatic who triest to force his pseudo-science down the throats of school-children deserves the same opposition, but as long as they don't, they're not quite as evil as the religious child-mind-rapers.
Economics 101 teaches us about natural monopolies, which are a classic case of industry that works better if it is regulated, because any private entity would extract monopoly rent from the market.
I didn't say anything about starvation. You are the one making the assumption that public services are by necessity starvation. I'm pretty sure you think a private police force and privatized firefighters would be better, too. Newsflash: The very first firefighters in existence were private. That was ancient Rome. It made their owner into one of the richest man in Rome. It didn't do anyone else any good. Yes, including the people whose houses they saved. Google the story, it's fascinating and somewhat evil.
I refuse to accept such an animal state of existence.
I feel sorry for you because your mind is so shut. People who research economics as a profession agree with me in parts. Nobody sane with any actual knowledge of the subject on this planet believes that private enterprise is a magic pill that solves everything. The differences are in how narrow or wide people believe the area where it does work great is. You can disagree on that, but if you really think that one solution applies to everything, no matter if it is capitalism, socialism or any other -ism, then you're insane. Literally.
If using web technologies to build a native application is the answer, then we've asked the wrong question.
I agree on that, but...
if you're trying out a new concept, then for the prototype phase, re-using existing technology is a good idea. So using a rendering engine that can display text and colour it and format it instead of writing all that from scratch sounds like a good idea.
If it takes off, I'm fairly sure someone who thinks alike will re-write the lower-level parts.
While this is true, how is it related to the discussion at hand?
You said people pack up and leave if the community cuts services and I said it's not that easy, lots of people live in places they have because of job/spouse/kids/etc. There are many more factors to moving or not than what services the community offers, so the simple 1-2-3 mechanics of theoretical markets doesn't apply.
It's the price for being the most advanced -- we pay to develop the advances.
omg what a pile of nonsense. If it were that way, then you are also utter idiots because you pay the price and then export it for free. Of course that's bullshit. The price is what people are willing to pay. Your prices are high because people are "willing to" (i.e. have to, no alternatives) them.
Socializing any industry makes it less agile and thwarts its development.
That's another piece of nonsense. Every industry works differently. Europe has gone through several rounds of privatisation during the past 20-30 years. In some industries like telecommunication, prices have come done and quality has improved. Well, until maybe 5 years ago, when the market hit rock bottom, everyone was locked in a price war (I know what I'm talking about, I used to work in that industry) and now things are going downhill, but still overall the private companies are doing better than the public company did. But in railroads, for example, turning the public railroad company into a private entity was a total desaster. Prices have skyrocketed, service has become horrible, and the formerly famously punctual german trains have become the subject of many jokes regarding delays.
Everyone, and I mean everyone who proposes that one magic pill will solve every problem everywhere is full of shit.
Not because of their social structure though. Norway is a very large oil [exporter] -- it's how it subsidizes its largely inefficient economy. And Finland got lucky with Nokia for a while (which started and grew during the only 5 years in Finland's history when they didn't have a Socialist in power).
You have no fucking clue what you're talking about.
Hint: Sweden (which is an oil importer) is very close to Norway in all indices of development, wealth, standards of living, happiness, etc. - you'll probably come up with some other bullshit reason to explain that away. But when you have a bunch of countries all doing remarkably similar and sharing a set of social values then explaining their success away with entirely different "lucky breaks" instead of what they share just doesn't pass the giggle test.
More than anywhere else, this is not a problem geeks alone can solve. The perfect chat client is worthless if none of your friends use it. WhatsApp was huge because everyone used it - network effect.
So Tor - yes, definitely a good step. But you need a good client, ease-of-use is as important as cryptography, and details such as automatically finding your friends who also use it. Threema has a nice solution for that with their hashed address books.
The overhead, however, is considerable. People have jobs and houses. They have spouses with jobs. They have kids in school. They don't just pack up and relocate because water is two cents cheaper elsewhere.
Until Obamacare came in to decimate our advanced medical system, US was the leader in medical research
It also had the by far most expensive medical system in the world. Routine treatments that my insurance pays 50 bucks for over here are ten times as expensive in the US.
even though you probably have a whole argument laid out why it wont
No, I'll just wait a few years and then remember this argument and one of us will be laughing. Nothing beats an argument like the real world does.
Hope you realize that you are making my argument for the diversity of local governments empowered to pick their own paths.
Not at all. Some of the most fragmented countries are also some of the most corrupt ones. Others aren't. The relation isn't that simple. Scandinavia, for example, is very high in every quality of living index even though you americans call them socialists.
No they don't. You are applying american law internationally, which is a bit like saying your wife should be stoned to death because she went out in public without a Burka, which is illegal in Afghanistan.
German law states that your free speech ends where my personality rights begin. You cannot say just about anything without repercussion. If you intentionally lie in order to damage my reputation, that can well be illegal. The legal terms are libel, slander and defamation.
There are right and wrong things to do these questions.
Apple has generally gotten them right. Microsoft has almost always gotten them horribly wrong. Google is hit-and-miss.
If done well, people don't get conditioned and actually answer the question correctly. My experience with my iPhone is that it's done very well. I have, however, met someone on the street once who didn't realize that the Maps application works a lot better if it can know where you are.:-)
Steve was right that the iPhone doesn't need apps because it has the web and people should be writing web-apps.
Well, he was mostly right. 90% of the Apps out there could be web-apps and you wouldn't need to have two versions (iOS, Android) and I could access them from the desktop.
Instead, the opposite happened: Every other stupid forum tells me to install its app. Where... I can read the forum. Uh, what? When you tell me on your forum to install your app so I can do what I am already doing before you interrupted me with that stupid pop-up then someone somewhere had his brain turned off or he would've realized how utterly stupid that is.
It's like stopping me in front of the grocery shelf in your supermarket to hand me a flyer that tells me that if I go to your supermarket, I can buy groceries there. Uh, yes, dumbo?
The problem is the insanity called advertisement agencies. These people are not selling your product to your customers as they are trying to make you believe. Their product is not your product and their customers are not your customers. Their product is advertisement and their customer is you. As long as you will pay for it, they will sell you any crap they can get away with. And so they will happily repackage the website, forum or whatever else you already created and sell it back to you. And for some reason, people are dumb enough to pay for their own product.
We can only hope that sanity will win in the end and product managers the world over start to kick out these parasites. I, for one, consider a pop-up telling me to install an app that allows me to view the website that I am already viewing as a surefire sign that your company is too stupid to spend money on. Or in simple terms: Want to drive me off? Tell me to install your app.
I agree that everyone in this fuck-up acts rationally. At the same time, this exact behaviour leads to a prisoners dilemma kind of solution, where everyone is worse off in the end.
No, I don't. The tragedy is exactly that everyone behaves rationally and it leads to the whole thing going down the drain.
The vicious cycle very, very simplified: a) company goes to a cheap community b) other communities want jobs, too, so they become cheaper c) company moves to a new community that is now cheaper d) original community is miffed and can't attract any replacements because everyone is cheaper, so they drop their taxes, too, make special excemptions, etc. e) rinse and repeat
in the end, just like free market theory dictates, taxes and all other government costs will drop to zero. Except that then we can't finance streets, police, firefighters and all the other nice things we prefer to have anymore.
There is no race to the bottom among shoe stores or food stores... there is just the market place.
That's because a store has a minimum cost it needs to cover. It can't sell below x because otherwise it would be selling at a loss.
A community never has any services that it could not cut or reduce further - until there's nothing at all left.
There is a price point at which the services that companies need cannot be provided. The market place will discover that price point.
We already know. It's 3rd world cheap labour countries. Where a workers hour is pennies and nobody sane wants to live their because they don't have running water, working hospitals, non-corrupt police, streets that don't destroy your car or basically anything we've become used to as a standard of living.
like they are in Russia and Europe, we will end up with government as corrupt as they are in Russia and Europe (hint: they have elections too... they don't help)
Your world-view needs massive updating. Europe is a big place with 50 different countries. Some of them are corrupt and have pseudo-democracies, others are leading the Corruption Perceptions Index, far ahead of the USA (which barely makes it into the top 20, at #19).
So basically, you are asking strangers on the Internet to make a decision for you. One that is very personal and depends on so many individual factors that it is hard even for you to make?
I think what you really want is some help on decision making. Yes, it is probably a tough decision. Nobody is more qualified to make it then you are.
We are working on this, and so far we've found that tele-commuting doesn't deliver.
There are things that video-chat doesn't do for cooperation and teamwork. There are actual documents that need to change hands or need signatures. There are three people and a whiteboard who will hash out a concept faster and better than the same three people with even the best online collaboration tools.
Right outside of the Cleveland city limits. Close to the city, but not where they'd have to pay the extra taxes. Cleveland City Council was pissed of course but they only have themselves to blame.
omg what an argument. So they should've given these guys an excemption, meaning a tax cut, meaning everyone else gets to pay higher taxes instead, because if the city needs X taxes then every tax cut for someone means everyone else needs to pay more.
Slippery slope: You end up with corporations paying nothing and the people paying everything.
Frankly, if I were the city, I would consider closing the road leading to their new office building. If they don't want to pay my taxes, they don't get to use my infrastructure.
The real problem is not the council being boneheads, but the city and the countryside considering themselves rivals and undercutting each other in taxes. If the tax rate were the same everywhere, that tower would be in the city center.
The problem is that the current make-up has everyone locked in. Nobody can start changing it towards the better, because that would put him at a disadvantage compared to the others. The only way is down.
No, Cleveland City Council doesn't have only itself to blame, they're a victim of a bullshit culture that turns communities into market participants on a bullshit "attract companies" market whose only beneficiaries are the corporations because they can force a race to the bottom.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
I hate paying taxes as much as everyone, but I'm not super-rich, so I don't have options to avoid it. Once you go above a certain income class, your tax burden drops, in both relative and absolute values, because you can make use of loopholes that normal people can't.
Corporations are the worst of it all. As they can split up, merge and do other trickery that physical humans can't, they can exploit the system to the maximum effect. And since everyone else does it, they almost have a duty to do so, because otherwise their shareholders will grill them about it.
The problem is that the tax systems allow this, which is caused by countries competing against each other to attract corporations. Which, if you are able to see it for a moment from outside the pot in which you're slowly being boiled, is quite insane and perverted.
As long as the countries of the world readily sell out to corporations and super-rich, nothing will change. Only when they realize that (at least yet) they have the tanks and the guns and the corporations don't and maybe the power-relationship should be the other way around, and then work together to fight the parasites, this will stop. All it needs would be a world-wide agreement to, say, leverage a fixed % of revenue from every corporation, no exceptions, no loopholes, no special deals.
This is no more extortion than an advert for CocaCola on a hot day.
I agree in principle, though not in degree. Let's be honest here: All advertisement is psychological warfare, and it is very, very imbalanced. It's millions of dollars in research and design vs. the usually untrained mind.
However, in the game there is also immersion, which is intentionally abused, and a situation that was artificially constructed. It's more like the soda stand in the theme park which is intentionally placed at exactly the distance from the intentionally way-too-salty french fries stand at which you realize that you're quite thirsty.
Only the weak minded will actually
This is what we all hear all the time when it comes to advertisement, and I'm quite certain the advertisement experts are giggling so much they can hardly catch a breath. This false belief is one of the core reasons advertisement is still legal and not very heavily regulated. It's the Emperor's New Clothes situation - as long as that meme is out there, most people won't admit that they are, in fact, influenced by advertisement.
But you are. More than you believe. And claiming you aren't only proves denial, not freedom.
Uh, no we aren't.
Windows XP was released in October 2001. That's half a year after the initial release of OS X (March 2001). In fact, by the time XP came out, OS X was already on 10.1 (released in September 2001).
MacOS 9 is a full two years older, it was released in October 1999.
No, your example is actually a good example for the evilness of "f2p".
Of course you could just walk away and not drop any money. It's not like they put a gun to your head. Except that psychologically, that's exactly what they are doing. They are putting you into a situation where you are a) drawn in and b) stand more to lose in time and effort than in money.
This is extortion, plain and simple. These games are intentionally designed to put you into these situations so you part with your money.
I know it's shooting fish in a barrel... with a shotgun... and they're already dead... but:
Look to OS X on how updates are done right. Why does MS always steal the somewhat-nice parts from Apple and never the really cool ones?
Upgrade OS on the same machine: Insert disc or download image. Click installer. Wait. Reboot. Done. All your data and configuration is intact, down to the desktop background and even the applications you had running will be open again after the reboot.
Move to a new machine: Get new computer. Turn on. It asks if you want to copy your stuff over from an old machine, so say yes. Connect (WLAN, cable, whatever). Wait. Done. New machine looks exactly like the old one, including all your applications, data and configuration.
So, it is technologically possible. Makes you wonder why one of the biggest IT companies on the planet is incapable of doing it this way.
Free is the dominant price point on mobile platforms
No, it isn't. free-to-play is, which is something else entirely. Most F2P games are considerably more expensive then traditional games if you buy the equivalent of what would've been in a box. It's the razor-blades business all over again. It is full of lies and deceit and psychological warfare on the customer who is lured in with "free" and then shaken down for every penny with addictive (instead of fun) gameplay, click-bait and carrot-and-stick tactics.
It is, in two words, distasteful and dishonest.
Flexcoin, Gox et al., -- Why would anyone trust their funds to these people? These fly by nights are either a bunch of incompetents or just plain old crooks.
Here's why - and I speak as someone who apparently lost a small amount there - because Mt. Gox was the only place where I could turn BTC into EUR. So I sent them the amount I wanted to convert, but not my entire wallet.
You are right that anyone who stores their wallet with someone else is crazy. But people actually used the exchanges as - surprise - exchanges. Which required at least temporarily transferring the coins.
Bullshit paranoia reply. Sure, it could happen, but seriously, would you buy this crap? Now ignorant Joe may - but when he comes home from the shop with his Brand X in hand only to find that he does, in fact, have Brand Y in the fridge, he'll consider it broken.
One way or the other, this kind of blatant abuse is not going to happen. The marketing parasites are smarter than that. They'll datamine the hell out of you, and they'll manipulate you, but they won't be caught lying to you outright in a way that you can spot.
A smart fridge is one where there's almost no use cases that don't involve product/marketing tie-ins -- selling my use of tagged products to marketers.
Uh, actually that's one of the very few examples I can think of that does have a use. How often have you been in the supermarket and wondered "do I have any X at home or not?"
...this is a publicity stunt. 300k is the total price money, the highest an individual entry can win is 75k. Sorry, but the real experts expect amounts like that as payment, not as maybe-couldbe-whoknows price money.
So you'll have participants largely being the B class who need the exposure and publicity. That's fine. Maybe not for a general concept, though.
More importantly: What's so different about the "Internet of Things"? That's just the latest buzzword. It's still network-connected devices. Sure, they're basically embedded devices so you have to use tools with low resource demands, but it's not like we invented a completely new computing system. Strip the buzzword and what you're really left with is small computers built into stuff around the house.
So, why do many of us perceive Whole Foods and the Creation Museum so differently?
Because I can ignore the food shop if I don't care, it only corrupts those who go there voluntarily. Creationists, on the other hand, are corrupting public schools, classrooms and textbooks with their bullshit.
Any food fanatic who triest to force his pseudo-science down the throats of school-children deserves the same opposition, but as long as they don't, they're not quite as evil as the religious child-mind-rapers.
I am making rational arguments, you just ignore them whenever they don't fit into your preconceived mindset.
For example, I made an argument about natural monopolies just there, that you can verify in any textbook on economics.
It's not. It's absolutely accurate.
Claim without evidence.
Economics 101 teaches us about natural monopolies, which are a classic case of industry that works better if it is regulated, because any private entity would extract monopoly rent from the market.
I didn't say anything about starvation. You are the one making the assumption that public services are by necessity starvation. I'm pretty sure you think a private police force and privatized firefighters would be better, too. Newsflash: The very first firefighters in existence were private. That was ancient Rome. It made their owner into one of the richest man in Rome. It didn't do anyone else any good. Yes, including the people whose houses they saved. Google the story, it's fascinating and somewhat evil.
I refuse to accept such an animal state of existence.
I feel sorry for you because your mind is so shut. People who research economics as a profession agree with me in parts. Nobody sane with any actual knowledge of the subject on this planet believes that private enterprise is a magic pill that solves everything. The differences are in how narrow or wide people believe the area where it does work great is. You can disagree on that, but if you really think that one solution applies to everything, no matter if it is capitalism, socialism or any other -ism, then you're insane. Literally.
If using web technologies to build a native application is the answer, then we've asked the wrong question.
I agree on that, but...
if you're trying out a new concept, then for the prototype phase, re-using existing technology is a good idea. So using a rendering engine that can display text and colour it and format it instead of writing all that from scratch sounds like a good idea.
If it takes off, I'm fairly sure someone who thinks alike will re-write the lower-level parts.
While this is true, how is it related to the discussion at hand?
You said people pack up and leave if the community cuts services and I said it's not that easy, lots of people live in places they have because of job/spouse/kids/etc. There are many more factors to moving or not than what services the community offers, so the simple 1-2-3 mechanics of theoretical markets doesn't apply.
It's the price for being the most advanced -- we pay to develop the advances.
omg what a pile of nonsense. If it were that way, then you are also utter idiots because you pay the price and then export it for free. Of course that's bullshit. The price is what people are willing to pay. Your prices are high because people are "willing to" (i.e. have to, no alternatives) them.
Socializing any industry makes it less agile and thwarts its development.
That's another piece of nonsense. Every industry works differently. Europe has gone through several rounds of privatisation during the past 20-30 years.
In some industries like telecommunication, prices have come done and quality has improved. Well, until maybe 5 years ago, when the market hit rock bottom, everyone was locked in a price war (I know what I'm talking about, I used to work in that industry) and now things are going downhill, but still overall the private companies are doing better than the public company did.
But in railroads, for example, turning the public railroad company into a private entity was a total desaster. Prices have skyrocketed, service has become horrible, and the formerly famously punctual german trains have become the subject of many jokes regarding delays.
Everyone, and I mean everyone who proposes that one magic pill will solve every problem everywhere is full of shit.
Not because of their social structure though. Norway is a very large oil [exporter] -- it's how it subsidizes its largely inefficient economy. And Finland got lucky with Nokia for a while (which started and grew during the only 5 years in Finland's history when they didn't have a Socialist in power).
You have no fucking clue what you're talking about.
Hint: Sweden (which is an oil importer) is very close to Norway in all indices of development, wealth, standards of living, happiness, etc. - you'll probably come up with some other bullshit reason to explain that away. But when you have a bunch of countries all doing remarkably similar and sharing a set of social values then explaining their success away with entirely different "lucky breaks" instead of what they share just doesn't pass the giggle test.
More than anywhere else, this is not a problem geeks alone can solve. The perfect chat client is worthless if none of your friends use it. WhatsApp was huge because everyone used it - network effect.
So Tor - yes, definitely a good step. But you need a good client, ease-of-use is as important as cryptography, and details such as automatically finding your friends who also use it. Threema has a nice solution for that with their hashed address books.
So please look beyond the backend code.
People are not tied to a location. They leave.
The overhead, however, is considerable. People have jobs and houses. They have spouses with jobs. They have kids in school. They don't just pack up and relocate because water is two cents cheaper elsewhere.
Until Obamacare came in to decimate our advanced medical system, US was the leader in medical research
It also had the by far most expensive medical system in the world. Routine treatments that my insurance pays 50 bucks for over here are ten times as expensive in the US.
even though you probably have a whole argument laid out why it wont
No, I'll just wait a few years and then remember this argument and one of us will be laughing. Nothing beats an argument like the real world does.
Hope you realize that you are making my argument for the diversity of local governments empowered to pick their own paths.
Not at all. Some of the most fragmented countries are also some of the most corrupt ones. Others aren't. The relation isn't that simple. Scandinavia, for example, is very high in every quality of living index even though you americans call them socialists.
No they don't. You are applying american law internationally, which is a bit like saying your wife should be stoned to death because she went out in public without a Burka, which is illegal in Afghanistan.
German law states that your free speech ends where my personality rights begin. You cannot say just about anything without repercussion. If you intentionally lie in order to damage my reputation, that can well be illegal. The legal terms are libel, slander and defamation.
There are right and wrong things to do these questions.
Apple has generally gotten them right. Microsoft has almost always gotten them horribly wrong. Google is hit-and-miss.
If done well, people don't get conditioned and actually answer the question correctly. My experience with my iPhone is that it's done very well. I have, however, met someone on the street once who didn't realize that the Maps application works a lot better if it can know where you are. :-)
Steve was right that the iPhone doesn't need apps because it has the web and people should be writing web-apps.
Well, he was mostly right. 90% of the Apps out there could be web-apps and you wouldn't need to have two versions (iOS, Android) and I could access them from the desktop.
Instead, the opposite happened: Every other stupid forum tells me to install its app. Where... I can read the forum. Uh, what? When you tell me on your forum to install your app so I can do what I am already doing before you interrupted me with that stupid pop-up then someone somewhere had his brain turned off or he would've realized how utterly stupid that is.
It's like stopping me in front of the grocery shelf in your supermarket to hand me a flyer that tells me that if I go to your supermarket, I can buy groceries there. Uh, yes, dumbo?
The problem is the insanity called advertisement agencies. These people are not selling your product to your customers as they are trying to make you believe. Their product is not your product and their customers are not your customers. Their product is advertisement and their customer is you. As long as you will pay for it, they will sell you any crap they can get away with. And so they will happily repackage the website, forum or whatever else you already created and sell it back to you. And for some reason, people are dumb enough to pay for their own product.
We can only hope that sanity will win in the end and product managers the world over start to kick out these parasites. I, for one, consider a pop-up telling me to install an app that allows me to view the website that I am already viewing as a surefire sign that your company is too stupid to spend money on. Or in simple terms: Want to drive me off? Tell me to install your app.
Yes.
I agree that everyone in this fuck-up acts rationally. At the same time, this exact behaviour leads to a prisoners dilemma kind of solution, where everyone is worse off in the end.
Would expect them NOT to shop around?
No, I don't. The tragedy is exactly that everyone behaves rationally and it leads to the whole thing going down the drain.
The vicious cycle very, very simplified:
a) company goes to a cheap community
b) other communities want jobs, too, so they become cheaper
c) company moves to a new community that is now cheaper
d) original community is miffed and can't attract any replacements because everyone is cheaper, so they drop their taxes, too, make special excemptions, etc.
e) rinse and repeat
in the end, just like free market theory dictates, taxes and all other government costs will drop to zero. Except that then we can't finance streets, police, firefighters and all the other nice things we prefer to have anymore.
There is no race to the bottom among shoe stores or food stores... there is just the market place.
That's because a store has a minimum cost it needs to cover. It can't sell below x because otherwise it would be selling at a loss.
A community never has any services that it could not cut or reduce further - until there's nothing at all left.
There is a price point at which the services that companies need cannot be provided. The market place will discover that price point.
We already know. It's 3rd world cheap labour countries. Where a workers hour is pennies and nobody sane wants to live their because they don't have running water, working hospitals, non-corrupt police, streets that don't destroy your car or basically anything we've become used to as a standard of living.
like they are in Russia and Europe, we will end up with government as corrupt as they are in Russia and Europe (hint: they have elections too... they don't help)
Your world-view needs massive updating. Europe is a big place with 50 different countries. Some of them are corrupt and have pseudo-democracies, others are leading the Corruption Perceptions Index, far ahead of the USA (which barely makes it into the top 20, at #19).
So basically, you are asking strangers on the Internet to make a decision for you. One that is very personal and depends on so many individual factors that it is hard even for you to make?
I think what you really want is some help on decision making. Yes, it is probably a tough decision. Nobody is more qualified to make it then you are.
We are working on this, and so far we've found that tele-commuting doesn't deliver.
There are things that video-chat doesn't do for cooperation and teamwork. There are actual documents that need to change hands or need signatures. There are three people and a whiteboard who will hash out a concept faster and better than the same three people with even the best online collaboration tools.
Right outside of the Cleveland city limits. Close to the city, but not where they'd have to pay the extra taxes. Cleveland City Council was pissed of course but they only have themselves to blame.
omg what an argument. So they should've given these guys an excemption, meaning a tax cut, meaning everyone else gets to pay higher taxes instead, because if the city needs X taxes then every tax cut for someone means everyone else needs to pay more.
Slippery slope: You end up with corporations paying nothing and the people paying everything.
Frankly, if I were the city, I would consider closing the road leading to their new office building. If they don't want to pay my taxes, they don't get to use my infrastructure.
The real problem is not the council being boneheads, but the city and the countryside considering themselves rivals and undercutting each other in taxes. If the tax rate were the same everywhere, that tower would be in the city center.
The problem is that the current make-up has everyone locked in. Nobody can start changing it towards the better, because that would put him at a disadvantage compared to the others. The only way is down.
No, Cleveland City Council doesn't have only itself to blame, they're a victim of a bullshit culture that turns communities into market participants on a bullshit "attract companies" market whose only beneficiaries are the corporations because they can force a race to the bottom.