Suppose you get a paycheck from Arby's for $400. You spend that $400 on a TV. You think you had no income, right, because you spent that $400? Where you're mistaken is this - through this scenario you started out with $0 and ended up with a $400 TV. That's an increase of $400, income of $400. It works the same whether it's a business, or you going to work and buying stuff on Craigslist.
So how does one write off the depreciation of assets like this TV? As an individual, I mean. I know how a business does it. I was under the impression that individuals aren't allowed to write off the depreciation of assets. Am I wrong in my understanding and leaving shitloads of money on the table with the IRS? Or are you wrong in your assertion that businesses and individuals are both alike taxed on net income?
With $0 in revenue, you probably don't have a business. You may have a hobby. Be aware, this is something the IRS watches for, falsely classifying hobby expenses as business expenses. The $35 you save in taxes may not be worth committing the federal crime of tax fraud. If it legitimately is a business, in most states you should be paying business personal property tax and many other taxes.
Your faux concern isn't relevant here: my business has no revenues and no expenses either. I formed it after having risked doing work under my own name. Unfortunately, after I formed it, I no longer had time to continue freelancing. I've found it easier to pay for my annual filing than it would be to figure out how to "close" it.
Nonetheless, maintaining a business is costing me $0 (well, aside from the annual filing fee of ~$100) specifically because my revenues (and expenses) are $0. This seems to contradict your claim that there's some vast sum in taxes that extracted from job creators' pockets independent of the profits they exploit the market for.
I'm not taxed based on my profit, I'm taxed based on my revenue. Businesses are not taxed based on their revenue, they're taxed based on their profit. If a business is in the red, it doesn't pay "income" tax, since net income is less than zero. If an individual is in the red, they still pay "income" tax, even though net income is less than zero.
In case my point is still lost on you, what I'm saying is that businesses can write off expenses and only pay "income" tax on net income, whereas individuals cannot write off expenses and pay "income" tax on gross income.
And regarding your other claims, I question them because my own business does not pay any taxes, period. No taxes on "personal property" (I've never heard of this before), no taxes on "franchise" (nor this). I'm not sure where you're getting this stuff from. Are you in the US? Are these federal taxes that you're talking about?
I wouldn't say that, you are just so focused on contradicting irrelevant details
I already apologized for being precise with my language. You won't extract multiple apologies from me on this point. My aversion to using language loosely is not compatible with your conversational style, so it may not make sense to continue this conversation if neither of us is willing to accomodate the other.
I would assume it's because you can't contradict the actual point.
I suppose everyone is entitled to their own assumptions.
For instance the exact number of hours a migrant works when a serf works considerably more then your highest estimate.
Based on your claims alone. You never cited a reference for your 60-80 hours claim. Also, I didn't know there were reliable labor statistics that went that far back. My understanding is that the amount of leisure time afforded the average person has been steadily decreasing since the hunter-gatherer era. Since neither of us have cited any references to support our positions, I don't see why I should simply assume your claim has more validity than my own.
Or being pedantic about the wording of my claim that we have fewer farmers and a larger population which could only happen with huge increases in efficiency, none of which you disputed.
That wasn't your claim. Perhaps it's what you intended to claim. We do have fewer farmers. We do have a larger population. We have had huge increases in efficiency. However, these are all orthogonal claims, and it is not true that one follows from the other(s), which is what your original claim stated (intentionally or not). Either way, neither of these three facts contradicts my claim that workers have not seen the full benefit of these huge increases in efficiency because their productive output must have increased for them to have maintained a constant quality of life.
The bottom line is no reasonable person would believe for one second serfs had it better then migrant workers.
This is either an unsubstantiated claim or a statement of opinion.
You have not provided a single source except a racist joke to back any of your outlandish claims.
It wasn't racist, and it wasn't a joke. It might have been racist if I had somehow suggested that sparse living arrangements are superior to dense ones, or that Mexican immigrants are inferior to others due to their choice in housing accomodations. However, those are value judgements that you seem to be projecting onto me. As an immigrant whose own family shared housing with other families in a single-family home, it's unlikely that those are values that I share with you, unless you suggest that I'm some sort of self-hating immigrant myself.
This thread got rather long. I don't like that. The last time I participated in a thread this long, it got way too long. The lesson I learned there is that some people have trouble communicating with me, and that it takes a considerable amount of effort to resolve the issue. Since I'm not willing to dedicate sufficient effort to accomplish that in this thread, I think this is as good a time as any to throw in the towel.
That's fascinating. As a small business owner, I don't pay any of those taxes. My revenues have been $0, and I don't have any employees. I haven't been paying tax on business personal property beyond the sales tax at time of purchase.
As an individual, however, I do pay most of those taxes. Social security, medicare, federal and state unemployment, state disability, sales, and use taxes. And indeed, it's all unrelated to profit or margin, since even when my net worth plummets, I still pay quite a bit of tax. 100% of the taxes are paid whether I'm in the red or in the black. At least with your business, it's only 80%.
If we graph the line from point 1A to point 2A then what you should find is that revenue peaks in the middle and then falls off dramatically.
This is what's known as begging the question. In explaining why revenues are maximized by a tax "in the middle" of 0% and 100%, you refer to a graph of revenue as a function of tax rate that peaks "in the middle". Of course, this graph is based on the assumption that revenues are maximized by a tax "in the middle" of 0% and 100%. It's circular reasoning because you assume the conclusion to be true by stating it as one of your assumptions.
Indeed, that's what American society needs. Another generous tax cut for the rich, with the lost revenues made up by increasing taxes on the poor. Because the problem we face today is insufficient stratification of wealth.
If you can't see the difference between consumption (which generally creates demand) and investment (which generally does not create demand), then you really shouldn't be talking about issues like these.
I guess that's one more instance where Europe and USA differ.
I've been enrolled in two different masters programs (Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering) where nobody was planning on staying for a doctorate. I've also been enrolled in one doctoral program (Computer Science) where nobody had gotten a masters. My roommate, who got an MS in physics, decided to continue on for a PhD in the same field; having the MS is only shaving one year off the five years he's expecting to spend on the PhD. As an intentional 'perpetual student', he figured the negligible overlap between the MS and the PhD would extend his academic 'career' by a number of years.
Interesting read, thanks for the link. That article brings up a very valid point: it's not likely to do us any good to simply simulate, in silicon, a human brain as an isolated system. However, if at some point we can simulate the human brain, I don't see why simulating "the motor system, the perceptual system, the body's interactions with the [simulated] environment (situatedness) and the ontological assumptions about the [simulated] world that are built into the body and the brain" would be any more difficult.
Admittedly, I find it fascinating that he actually holds opinions and communicates about something other than his hosts file. News to me.
Frighteningly, he doesn't seem any better or worse than a typical slashdotter when he's not talking about the hosts file. Case in point: his reply to your post. Totally blows away any preconceptions I had of him, to say the least. Weird.
I'm still irritated by his frequent misuse of punctuation and capitalization, but that's par for the course here.
But really, I'm surprised you're not a bot. And that you posted not once, but twice on the same day without mentioning your hosts file. I apologize to the rest of slashdot for bringing it up (in jest), as I had no idea it would backfire like this.
Anyway, apk, while Mr. Musk is doing cool shit here, it's important to admire the cool shit, not Mr. Musk, as the last thing we need is another cult of personality. Kudos to SpaceX for recently setting a new (personal best) record for launch cadence, and good luck setting that firecracker back down on the ground next time.
While I'm happy that you went and actually sought out some numbers, I can't say that they've swayed me.
Regarding the hours, your link claims that "NAWS respondents are asked how many hours they worked in the previous week at their current farm job", "agricultural employers' labor needs vary by season, crop and task, and workers are sometimes needed for longer than normal hours over short periods of time", and "NAWS data reflect the fluctuating nature of labor use". The methodology seems like it has some limitations, which they themselves call out, but then they don't really explain their methodology in sufficient detail for me to evaluate its relevance. When were workers surveyed about how many hours they worked "in the previous week", February or September? Are these numbers year-round averages? If so, then these numbers don't tell us much without also providing information about variance or standard deviation. It's still possible (and in my eyes, likely) that they work 80+ hours per week in-season and struggle to make ends meet in the off season.
Regarding the housing, what you're saying doesn't contradict what I said. I never claimed they lived in barracks or multi-family structures. I claimed they lived in cramped conditions with very large numbers of individuals sharing housing that was intended for a single family. If 80% do indeed live in single-family homes off-farm, considering the cost of renting a single-family home and the prevailing wage of migrant workers, I think it's not unreasonable to suspect that they're "packed in like Mexicans".
So are you disagreeing that there are fewer farmers or that the population has not grown in 600 years. The were 40 million farmers in Europe in the middle ages with a population of 50 million. Today there are 13 million farmers and a population of 740 million.
No, I'm saying something very specific: exactly what I wrote. To clarify, I'm saying that just because there are fewer people farming today than there were 600 years ago, does not necessarily imply that they are doing the farming for a larger population (which they are). While both statements are true, it is not correct to say that one logically follows from the other, which is what you were originally claiming (and I was disagreeing with). My apologies for being precise with my language.
People no longer have to farm for a living they do one of a million other things because of technology. If technology was not there they would have to farm.
I'm not sure what you're trying to communicate with your first sentence. People no longer have to farm for a living, this is true. People do one of a million other things because of technology, this is an empty statement. People do one of a million other things because inaction is not possible; even the most idle person is still doing something, even if that something is merely circulating the blood through their body. This is by the very nature of life and has nothing to do with technology. Even prehistoric man did one of a million other things in the absence of agriculture, independent of technology. If technology was not there, they would not have to farm (indeed, they couldn't farm, since farming depends on technology). They could hunt/gather instead, or they could lay around and die, or they could do countless other things. This has nothing to do with technology though.
I'd like to see your proof that those other jobs did not replace farming jobs, you are missing a few rungs in your logic chain.
If those other jobs replaced farming jobs, there would have been no gain in productivity (because the productive output of those other jobs is an input to modern farming). Since there was in fact a gain in productivity (or at least that's what economists have been consistently claiming for decades, if not centuries), we know that those jobs did not rep
Slashdot Mirror
Ask and you shall receive!
Suppose you get a paycheck from Arby's for $400. You spend that $400 on a TV. You think you had no income, right, because you spent that $400? Where you're mistaken is this - through this scenario you started out with $0 and ended up with a $400 TV. That's an increase of $400, income of $400. It works the same whether it's a business, or you going to work and buying stuff on Craigslist.
So how does one write off the depreciation of assets like this TV? As an individual, I mean. I know how a business does it. I was under the impression that individuals aren't allowed to write off the depreciation of assets. Am I wrong in my understanding and leaving shitloads of money on the table with the IRS? Or are you wrong in your assertion that businesses and individuals are both alike taxed on net income?
With $0 in revenue, you probably don't have a business. You may have a hobby. Be aware, this is something the IRS watches for, falsely classifying hobby expenses as business expenses. The $35 you save in taxes may not be worth committing the federal crime of tax fraud. If it legitimately is a business, in most states you should be paying business personal property tax and many other taxes.
Your faux concern isn't relevant here: my business has no revenues and no expenses either. I formed it after having risked doing work under my own name. Unfortunately, after I formed it, I no longer had time to continue freelancing. I've found it easier to pay for my annual filing than it would be to figure out how to "close" it.
Nonetheless, maintaining a business is costing me $0 (well, aside from the annual filing fee of ~$100) specifically because my revenues (and expenses) are $0. This seems to contradict your claim that there's some vast sum in taxes that extracted from job creators' pockets independent of the profits they exploit the market for.
I'm not taxed based on my profit, I'm taxed based on my revenue. Businesses are not taxed based on their revenue, they're taxed based on their profit. If a business is in the red, it doesn't pay "income" tax, since net income is less than zero. If an individual is in the red, they still pay "income" tax, even though net income is less than zero.
In case my point is still lost on you, what I'm saying is that businesses can write off expenses and only pay "income" tax on net income, whereas individuals cannot write off expenses and pay "income" tax on gross income.
And regarding your other claims, I question them because my own business does not pay any taxes, period. No taxes on "personal property" (I've never heard of this before), no taxes on "franchise" (nor this). I'm not sure where you're getting this stuff from. Are you in the US? Are these federal taxes that you're talking about?
I wouldn't say that, you are just so focused on contradicting irrelevant details
I already apologized for being precise with my language. You won't extract multiple apologies from me on this point. My aversion to using language loosely is not compatible with your conversational style, so it may not make sense to continue this conversation if neither of us is willing to accomodate the other.
I would assume it's because you can't contradict the actual point.
I suppose everyone is entitled to their own assumptions.
For instance the exact number of hours a migrant works when a serf works considerably more then your highest estimate.
Based on your claims alone. You never cited a reference for your 60-80 hours claim. Also, I didn't know there were reliable labor statistics that went that far back. My understanding is that the amount of leisure time afforded the average person has been steadily decreasing since the hunter-gatherer era. Since neither of us have cited any references to support our positions, I don't see why I should simply assume your claim has more validity than my own.
Or being pedantic about the wording of my claim that we have fewer farmers and a larger population which could only happen with huge increases in efficiency, none of which you disputed.
That wasn't your claim. Perhaps it's what you intended to claim. We do have fewer farmers. We do have a larger population. We have had huge increases in efficiency. However, these are all orthogonal claims, and it is not true that one follows from the other(s), which is what your original claim stated (intentionally or not). Either way, neither of these three facts contradicts my claim that workers have not seen the full benefit of these huge increases in efficiency because their productive output must have increased for them to have maintained a constant quality of life.
The bottom line is no reasonable person would believe for one second serfs had it better then migrant workers.
This is either an unsubstantiated claim or a statement of opinion.
You have not provided a single source except a racist joke to back any of your outlandish claims.
It wasn't racist, and it wasn't a joke. It might have been racist if I had somehow suggested that sparse living arrangements are superior to dense ones, or that Mexican immigrants are inferior to others due to their choice in housing accomodations. However, those are value judgements that you seem to be projecting onto me. As an immigrant whose own family shared housing with other families in a single-family home, it's unlikely that those are values that I share with you, unless you suggest that I'm some sort of self-hating immigrant myself.
This thread got rather long. I don't like that. The last time I participated in a thread this long, it got way too long. The lesson I learned there is that some people have trouble communicating with me, and that it takes a considerable amount of effort to resolve the issue. Since I'm not willing to dedicate sufficient effort to accomplish that in this thread, I think this is as good a time as any to throw in the towel.
We can only hope. But, based on how slowly the AIDS epidemic has been changing their customs, my hopes are not high.
Unless death actually increases the contagion, as it does in Africa, due to "hands on" funeral customs.
All money is spent eventually.
In what year will the Rockefeller fortune finally hit a value of $0? That's what I thought.
That's fascinating. As a small business owner, I don't pay any of those taxes. My revenues have been $0, and I don't have any employees. I haven't been paying tax on business personal property beyond the sales tax at time of purchase.
As an individual, however, I do pay most of those taxes. Social security, medicare, federal and state unemployment, state disability, sales, and use taxes. And indeed, it's all unrelated to profit or margin, since even when my net worth plummets, I still pay quite a bit of tax. 100% of the taxes are paid whether I'm in the red or in the black. At least with your business, it's only 80%.
If we graph the line from point 1A to point 2A then what you should find is that revenue peaks in the middle and then falls off dramatically.
This is what's known as begging the question. In explaining why revenues are maximized by a tax "in the middle" of 0% and 100%, you refer to a graph of revenue as a function of tax rate that peaks "in the middle". Of course, this graph is based on the assumption that revenues are maximized by a tax "in the middle" of 0% and 100%. It's circular reasoning because you assume the conclusion to be true by stating it as one of your assumptions.
So you're saying we should tax the fast food that poor people eat, but leave tax-free the organic produce that the well-off purchase from Whole Foods?
Sounds progressive.
Indeed, that's what American society needs. Another generous tax cut for the rich, with the lost revenues made up by increasing taxes on the poor. Because the problem we face today is insufficient stratification of wealth.
If you can't see the difference between consumption (which generally creates demand) and investment (which generally does not create demand), then you really shouldn't be talking about issues like these.
I guess that's one more instance where Europe and USA differ.
I've been enrolled in two different masters programs (Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering) where nobody was planning on staying for a doctorate. I've also been enrolled in one doctoral program (Computer Science) where nobody had gotten a masters. My roommate, who got an MS in physics, decided to continue on for a PhD in the same field; having the MS is only shaving one year off the five years he's expecting to spend on the PhD. As an intentional 'perpetual student', he figured the negligible overlap between the MS and the PhD would extend his academic 'career' by a number of years.
I dropped out of a PhD program and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.
Actually, no, I bought this lousy t-shirt on Amazon. Looks like I didn't get shit after all.
Terrible link. You fail at citing.
Interesting read, thanks for the link. That article brings up a very valid point: it's not likely to do us any good to simply simulate, in silicon, a human brain as an isolated system. However, if at some point we can simulate the human brain, I don't see why simulating "the motor system, the perceptual system, the body's interactions with the [simulated] environment (situatedness) and the ontological assumptions about the [simulated] world that are built into the body and the brain" would be any more difficult.
You are so focused on trying to disprove my claim that you are missing the point all together.
So it seems we are talking past each other.
on top of 50 million illegal aliens
Offtopic, unless you're suggesting that Mexicans are taking over the software development industry.
The rest of your post is comical. You should be posting in the comments section of Fox News' website, not on slashdot.
I don't think submitter mentioned anything about having a masters degree.
Relatively few people pick up a masters on their way to a doctorate.
Admittedly, I find it fascinating that he actually holds opinions and communicates about something other than his hosts file. News to me.
Frighteningly, he doesn't seem any better or worse than a typical slashdotter when he's not talking about the hosts file. Case in point: his reply to your post. Totally blows away any preconceptions I had of him, to say the least. Weird.
I'm still irritated by his frequent misuse of punctuation and capitalization, but that's par for the course here.
Oh lord, what have I done!
But really, I'm surprised you're not a bot. And that you posted not once, but twice on the same day without mentioning your hosts file. I apologize to the rest of slashdot for bringing it up (in jest), as I had no idea it would backfire like this.
Anyway, apk, while Mr. Musk is doing cool shit here, it's important to admire the cool shit, not Mr. Musk, as the last thing we need is another cult of personality. Kudos to SpaceX for recently setting a new (personal best) record for launch cadence, and good luck setting that firecracker back down on the ground next time.
too.
Mod parent up. Not a single mention of a hosts file.
Human consciousness is not hardware agnostic.
[citation needed]
Regarding the hours, your link claims that "NAWS respondents are asked how many hours they worked in the previous week at their current farm job", "agricultural employers' labor needs vary by season, crop and task, and workers are sometimes needed for longer than normal hours over short periods of time", and "NAWS data reflect the fluctuating nature of labor use". The methodology seems like it has some limitations, which they themselves call out, but then they don't really explain their methodology in sufficient detail for me to evaluate its relevance. When were workers surveyed about how many hours they worked "in the previous week", February or September? Are these numbers year-round averages? If so, then these numbers don't tell us much without also providing information about variance or standard deviation. It's still possible (and in my eyes, likely) that they work 80+ hours per week in-season and struggle to make ends meet in the off season.
Regarding the housing, what you're saying doesn't contradict what I said. I never claimed they lived in barracks or multi-family structures. I claimed they lived in cramped conditions with very large numbers of individuals sharing housing that was intended for a single family. If 80% do indeed live in single-family homes off-farm, considering the cost of renting a single-family home and the prevailing wage of migrant workers, I think it's not unreasonable to suspect that they're "packed in like Mexicans".
So are you disagreeing that there are fewer farmers or that the population has not grown in 600 years. The were 40 million farmers in Europe in the middle ages with a population of 50 million. Today there are 13 million farmers and a population of 740 million.
No, I'm saying something very specific: exactly what I wrote. To clarify, I'm saying that just because there are fewer people farming today than there were 600 years ago, does not necessarily imply that they are doing the farming for a larger population (which they are). While both statements are true, it is not correct to say that one logically follows from the other, which is what you were originally claiming (and I was disagreeing with). My apologies for being precise with my language.
People no longer have to farm for a living they do one of a million other things because of technology. If technology was not there they would have to farm.
I'm not sure what you're trying to communicate with your first sentence. People no longer have to farm for a living, this is true. People do one of a million other things because of technology, this is an empty statement. People do one of a million other things because inaction is not possible; even the most idle person is still doing something, even if that something is merely circulating the blood through their body. This is by the very nature of life and has nothing to do with technology. Even prehistoric man did one of a million other things in the absence of agriculture, independent of technology. If technology was not there, they would not have to farm (indeed, they couldn't farm, since farming depends on technology). They could hunt/gather instead, or they could lay around and die, or they could do countless other things. This has nothing to do with technology though.
I'd like to see your proof that those other jobs did not replace farming jobs, you are missing a few rungs in your logic chain.
If those other jobs replaced farming jobs, there would have been no gain in productivity (because the productive output of those other jobs is an input to modern farming). Since there was in fact a gain in productivity (or at least that's what economists have been consistently claiming for decades, if not centuries), we know that those jobs did not rep