I think the "insurance" here is mostly historical, nothing more. An actual insurance (public or private) would never pay for your yearly health check-up or for your regular meds. If you tell your insurer that you're planning on having a minor car accident in May of every year, I doubt you'll be insured for very long.
I recognize that it is a historical result, but it still colors the discussion. It makes sense to charge different rates for insurance based on knowledge about the risks and the costs - thus we have different house insurance rates and payouts depending on where the house is and how it is constructed for example. We generally do not do that for the education system for example - everyone in town pays the same regardless of how much of the education system they directly use. Movement toward non-universal education systems have not met with much support.
While I agree that privacy issues extend beyond purely ones associated with getting medical coverage by your insurer, it is also true that absent the types of financial incentives that insurance providers and employers have in learning about your medical conditions, there is much less desire for anyone to access someone else's information.
If your employer does not pay increased rates due to your health issues - they don't have much incentive to snoop or discriminate. Yes there is some since a sick employee is not so great for the company in terms of replacements and training types of expenses, but this is almost nothing compared to the costs associated with the healthcare burden in systems without universal equal price coverage.
Maybe we should change the rules around insurance so that they have to insure people
That would be an improvement, but at the same time it creates another problem. Having an industry where only the buyer is allowed to use information is complete nonsense too. I know this opinion isn't popular around here, but for health insurance, the only thing that makes any sort of sense is a public system. It's just sad to see that the US is among the last to realize this.
Actually, in most of the world, it isn't called "medical insurance", it is called the "medical system", and it is a system where everyone pays for equal access to medical services. The idea that it is "insurance", where individuals have various levels of "risk" seems to be part of the problem. Society does not have "educational insurance" to pay for our educational needs, why would we want medical insurance?
How do you define "real"? In terms of a paper currency? Certainly not in terms of any other commodity that's on the market, right?
There's no great reason for silver to be more valuable this year than it was 1964. I'm interested to hear reasons if you think it should be.
I don't know any specific reason for it being "more valuable" but certainly the world economy, industrial practices, mining rates, and social structures are all pretty different now than they were 50 years ago. Being such a valuable industrial material, it would be surprising to me if the value of silver was NOT different now compared to then.
The US has been on fiat currency for how long? So the real worth of the silver in the coin would actually be worth less than the coin itself is valued. See the whole penny thing where when the copper in a penny became worth more than a cent, they changed to copper clad zinc. Now the value of the zinc in a penny is becoming worth more than a penny, so they want to just eliminate the penny.
Rather than saying that an ounce of silver was worth $1.25 because of quarters, why not look up what the cost of an ounce of silver was?
Yeah, trolling for wrong doing based on zero evidence is perfectly acceptable.
4th Amendment. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
It isn't that easy. Statistically valid decisions on who to audit would not necessarily have 4th amendment implications. If you notice that left handers are more likely to be tax cheats, it would not be inappropriate to target left handers for higher rates of close scrutiny, for example. The difficulty may be in deciding when such scrutiny becomes abusive or is based on political motivations.
And a big WHoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooSH to you, fucking moron.
When I first read it I thought you said "fucking Mormon", which was kind of clever what with the "fucking" part in regards to comments about birthrates.
I certainly understood the original poster's reference to various groups having some theological and social pressures towards higher reproduction rates. But none of them comes close to "once per year". Mormons seem to be about 3.0 births per child - http://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2012/10/03/mormon-fertility-in-the-21st-century/ pretty big but not insane.
That's actually the exact same reason I only tip in cash. The government had nothing to do with the waiter's excellent service (like they did with food safety), so I'd rather just tip the waiter for a job well done than tip the government for no job done. IMHO tip taxes are among the most regressive and unfair.
No more regressive than any of the income taxes paid to other low wage earners. Whether or not the government had anything to do with the service, income taxes are still due. The wider the tax base, the better off we all are (well, except those who were not paying the taxes they were owing I guess).
The problem is, nobody wants to wear glasses, even people who need them for vision correction. That's why contacts were invented, and laser vision correction. So why, oh why, would we ditch glasses, only to wear different glasses.
Last year on a Freakonomics podcast I learned that in the US, something like 30-40% of non-sunglasses eye-wear has lenses with no correction. Glasses are fashionable now.
I can't find any references, so maybe it is bogus.
You joke, but it's really not fair that people who choose to have kids get leave that the rest of us don't. I have to work harder to pick up the slack because of your lifestyle choice.
One could also argue that it is really not fair that non-parents get to enjoy the benefits of a system that, from a biological point of view at least, exists for the only purpose of creating children. If everyone chose to not have children then "we" would be gone in less than a century. Now, of course, the planet would not miss us. From an individual country point of view, we could just import our future generations from elsewhere I suppose.
Or just live with the results of policies that encourage those who are responsible, bright, and well informed to not have kids, and leave the parenting exclusively to those with poor planning skills, impulse control, and foresight. It makes for a funny movie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
You are wrong. It is a life event, not a yearly occurrence...
Clearly you are not Catholic, Mormon, or from the Bible Belt.
While members of those groups may have more children then others, none of them come close to yearly.
Poland is about 90% Catholic. The Polish birth rate is 1.4 births per child. (Compared to 2.1 for the USA - wow that is high for a developed country!) Clearly "Catholics" are not universally churning them out.
LOL go to a nursing home, no one is talking care of their parents.
Those nursing home workers were someone's children, eh?
Most of the "developed world" does not have a birthrate sufficient to keep the population stable. While there are good ecological arguments for decreasing the overall population, economically, "developed world" countries are "rich enough" to make sure that the local kids should be able to be well cared for, housed, fed, and schooled enough to make for positive outcomes when they are old enough to start contributing to the society.
How and where can I contribute to the legal costs for the family of this student? I want them to hire the best advocates money can provide, I want to see that judge humiliated for attempting to destroy the future of a curious student who made a mistake leading to an incident where no harm was either done or intended.
I would also be interested in such a fund.
It isn't really the judge we can blame for any of this, but rather all of the people who pushed this up each level until the decided to prosecute.
I can agree with the concept, but seriously, the wait-staff?
I usually try to not be a dick to the waiters/waitresses, especially in this economy.
Sorry? You don't think the wait staff should have to report all their income? Why should the wait staff be treated any different than the janitorial staff? It's not like I'm advocating cutting their pay, just making it harder for them to cheat. I don't know how the typical business treats CC tips - to the waitstaff just take cash out of the till or is in included in their paycheque? With the CC tip, it is also probably more difficult for the wait-staff to cheat their colleagues out of their share for places that distribute the tips between the waiters and the dishwashers or whatever. On the other hand, I would not be surprised to find that some owners don't give all the CC tips to the servers, or who charge the CC fees to the tip income.
Now if you want to argue that the tax rates at the low end are too high, or that minimum wage should be higher I probably would agree - (in Canada Minimum wage seems to be about $10/hour depending on the province, with only a few exceptions of 10-20% - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_in_Canada )
Credit card processing has fees attached to it. Many smaller shops tend to have a large flat transaction fee and some percent. if you charge $.50 on your credit card it might cost $.11 in fees meaning the merchant only gets $.39 for the $.50 worth of goods from a $.10 transaction fee + 3%.
And if the majority of your money (or a significant fraction) comes from sales under a dollar, then you should probably not make those types of transactions. However if you think about the day's commerce as a whole, eating a few $0.11 fees over the course of a day would probably be much better than pissing off people trying to buy stuff by refusing their business or asking them for a minimum purchase. Probably even better would be a sign that says "We prefer cash, but we will take Debit (which costs us XXX) or credit cards (which costs us YYY) for your convenience." Let your customers feel generous when they pay you - build up that good will by not seeming to nickle and dime them. I suspect that such signage would be prohibited by the CC agreements however. The CC people don't want the customers to be reminded that the CC payment is costing the merchant anything.
A 3% charge is likely less than the cost of dealing with cash. It must be counted, moved to the bank, change must be brought back to the store and so on. It is also easy lost or stolen.
Lets not pretend CCs offer no value to the store.
All true. I think the benefit of cash for the merchant is that it's easier to under report.
One of the reasons I like using my CC (in addition to making it easier for me to track my spending) is that it makes it more difficult for the vendor to avoid reporting. I want my vendor to pay all those taxes and I want my wait-staff to report their tip earnings, and pay the taxes due thereby. Gotta keep that national deficit under control, eh?
One thing I find slightly funny is when someone says to me - "Hey - do you want to commit a crime with me? If you can pay me in cash, I won't charge you the sales tax. That way I can not report it as income, and thus avoid paying at least 30% while still being able to deduct all of my business expenses from the income that I do report. Oh yeah, and that will remove your ability to sue me for bad service or not actually doing the work, or any complaint really."
Actually they usually just say: "No tax if you pay in cash" and leave the rest "understood".
"Barter transaction rules apply... whatever you've received in exchange for your $1 worth of vegetables must be documented as a taxable gain of at least $1 somewhere."
Seriously? You're required by law to convert the value of bartered vegetables into dollars and then claim the total value as a gain? Is there such a thing as a law making so little sense that it's less than zero?
What about the vegetables you gave up in the transaction? Obviously both parties thought there was equal value in the trade. Assuming that the equivalent market price was $1, the deal is a wash. You gave up $1 worth of items for $1 worth of items. Where's the "gain" unless you must claim the value of vegetables you grow as "income"?
Plus, he said "AT LEAST $1" how can the "gain" possibly be more than $1?
Government is the natural habitat of ignorant, authoritarian a$$#0lez.
Government may well be the natural habitat of certain types, but getting your panties in a knot in reaction to some dude's characterization of the rules for reporting income is a bit foolish. The tax code is not any stupider for barter exchanges than it is for non barter exchanges. When you trade $1 of veggies for $1 of plumbing repairs or whatever, the tax code says that you have to treat it the same as if you had sold $1 of vegetables for $1 and then paid $1 for plumbing. You have $1 extra of income to report, and you have $1 extra expenses on your books. You are certainly allowed to deduct your vegitable-production costs from your vegitable-derrived income, and you may be able to claim that plumbing expense against income supported by your plumbing - just like if you had done it with cash.
If this "barter tax" applies as-described in the summary, how is the vegetable farmer, which operates via the barter system supposed to get $CA to pay the taxes?
That certainly is a problem for people operating entirely via barter, but in some sense it is "their" problem, not the tax collector's. If they can't come up with the bucks, they get tossed into the slammer or have their assets seized and sold at auction to pay their bills. Or both.
Why is anyone at all surprised at this? These types of rules have been on the books since people started having to pay taxes. Read your tax forms the next time you fill them out - they have all sorts of words about how to report things in therms of "fair market value" or convert things from other currencies.
You know what Apple could have done in the real world with that kind of money? Imagine if they decided to use it on philanthropy.
They would have gotten beaten up by their owners. The people who own Apple (otherwise known as their shareholders) would be unlikely to allow their elected board members to give away one sixth of their investments.
If the company repurchases its stock with company funds, the company funds go away thus decreasing the value of the remaining shares. Get it? The net effect is zero. What people like is that there are fewer shares around so that FUTURE gains per share are greater.
Additionally, *anybody* purchasing shares tends to increase the share price. If someone buys up $60 billion worth of shares at price X, everyone who thinks the stock is worth price X or less who has those shares will sell them, and the remaining shareholders will be those who think it is worth more than X, thus future sales will need to be at above X. From a "supply/demand" point of view - a buyback program decreases the supply side of things, and while it is occurring it increases the demand side of things, both of which tend to increase the price paid.
One of the "rational" pricing "explanations" for the value of an investment is that it should be equal to the current value of all expected future payments adjusted by the return on a "risk-free investment". Much of the angst about the US defaulting on obligations is that typically US obligations have been thought of as that foundational "risk-free investment" against which all other investments have been being compared to - but I digress. Decreasing the number of outstanding shares, as Dunbai points out, increases the potential future payments on a per-share basis.
The reading level is closer to elementary school, but some of the math is fascinating to high school and above. It certainly could be used for an interesting math extra project. A great gift for kids:
The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure [Paperback] Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Author), Rotraut Susanne Berner (Illustrator), Michael Henry Heim (Translator)
Though at least these guys seem to have worked out how to stop the thing from sinking like a stone during rotor transition though, which is a welcome feature.
I don't know, the flight path from their simulation video looks a lot like it drops like a stone for a while: 1) Fly along in "airplane mode" with the rotor fixed perpendicular to the body, acting like a wing - regular amount of lift being generated 2) lift the nose until the airflow is perpendicular to the bottom of the rotor - not much lift being generated now 3) unlock the rotor so that the wind can start it rotating like an autogyro - starts to provide significant amount of lift 4) apply power to the rotor and get into helicopter mode - regular amount of lift being provided.
Step #2 looks a bit like falling.
Going the other way 1) Fly in helicopter mode, moving forward at a fast clip - regular amount of lift being provided 2) Lift the nose to get airflow perpendicular to the bottom of the rotor - 3) Stop the rotor and get it fixed perpendicular to the body - not much lift being generated now 4) drop the nose to get the airflow over the now fixed wing - regular amount of airplane lift.
My librarian friend had decided on Kobo as being the best of the bunch a few years back, largely for their good integration with the library lending system in use in Ontario (and in most of North America - "OverDrive" ) which uses predominantly ePub distribution (DRM via Adobe I think). Now I think many reader support the library system, but back then it was less widely supported.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the "insurance" here is mostly historical, nothing more. An actual insurance (public or private) would never pay for your yearly health check-up or for your regular meds. If you tell your insurer that you're planning on having a minor car accident in May of every year, I doubt you'll be insured for very long.
I recognize that it is a historical result, but it still colors the discussion. It makes sense to charge different rates for insurance based on knowledge about the risks and the costs - thus we have different house insurance rates and payouts depending on where the house is and how it is constructed for example. We generally do not do that for the education system for example - everyone in town pays the same regardless of how much of the education system they directly use. Movement toward non-universal education systems have not met with much support.
While I agree that privacy issues extend beyond purely ones associated with getting medical coverage by your insurer, it is also true that absent the types of financial incentives that insurance providers and employers have in learning about your medical conditions, there is much less desire for anyone to access someone else's information.
If your employer does not pay increased rates due to your health issues - they don't have much incentive to snoop or discriminate. Yes there is some since a sick employee is not so great for the company in terms of replacements and training types of expenses, but this is almost nothing compared to the costs associated with the healthcare burden in systems without universal equal price coverage.
Maybe we should change the rules around insurance so that they have to insure people
That would be an improvement, but at the same time it creates another problem. Having an industry where only the buyer is allowed to use information is complete nonsense too. I know this opinion isn't popular around here, but for health insurance, the only thing that makes any sort of sense is a public system. It's just sad to see that the US is among the last to realize this.
Actually, in most of the world, it isn't called "medical insurance", it is called the "medical system", and it is a system where everyone pays for equal access to medical services. The idea that it is "insurance", where individuals have various levels of "risk" seems to be part of the problem. Society does not have "educational insurance" to pay for our educational needs, why would we want medical insurance?
that the real-terms value of silver
How do you define "real"? In terms of a paper currency? Certainly not in terms of any other commodity that's on the market, right?
There's no great reason for silver to be more valuable this year than it was 1964. I'm interested to hear reasons if you think it should be.
I don't know any specific reason for it being "more valuable" but certainly the world economy, industrial practices, mining rates, and social structures are all pretty different now than they were 50 years ago. Being such a valuable industrial material, it would be surprising to me if the value of silver was NOT different now compared to then.
there's a rather major flaw in your logic.
The US has been on fiat currency for how long? So the real worth of the silver in the coin would actually be worth less than the coin itself is valued. See the whole penny thing where when the copper in a penny became worth more than a cent, they changed to copper clad zinc. Now the value of the zinc in a penny is becoming worth more than a penny, so they want to just eliminate the penny.
Rather than saying that an ounce of silver was worth $1.25 because of quarters, why not look up what the cost of an ounce of silver was?
According to http://www.silverinstitute.org/site/silver-price/silver-price-history/1971-1978/ it looks like it was about $1.75/oz
Yeah, trolling for wrong doing based on zero evidence is perfectly acceptable.
4th Amendment.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
It isn't that easy. Statistically valid decisions on who to audit would not necessarily have 4th amendment implications. If you notice that left handers are more likely to be tax cheats, it would not be inappropriate to target left handers for higher rates of close scrutiny, for example. The difficulty may be in deciding when such scrutiny becomes abusive or is based on political motivations.
And a big WHoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooSH to you, fucking moron.
When I first read it I thought you said "fucking Mormon", which was kind of clever what with the "fucking" part in regards to comments about birthrates.
I certainly understood the original poster's reference to various groups having some theological and social pressures towards higher reproduction rates. But none of them comes close to "once per year".
Mormons seem to be about 3.0 births per child - http://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2012/10/03/mormon-fertility-in-the-21st-century/ pretty big but not insane.
That's actually the exact same reason I only tip in cash. The government had nothing to do with the waiter's excellent service (like they did with food safety), so I'd rather just tip the waiter for a job well done than tip the government for no job done. IMHO tip taxes are among the most regressive and unfair.
No more regressive than any of the income taxes paid to other low wage earners. Whether or not the government had anything to do with the service, income taxes are still due. The wider the tax base, the better off we all are (well, except those who were not paying the taxes they were owing I guess).
The problem is, nobody wants to wear glasses, even people who need them for vision correction. That's why contacts were invented, and laser vision correction. So why, oh why, would we ditch glasses, only to wear different glasses.
Last year on a Freakonomics podcast I learned that in the US, something like 30-40% of non-sunglasses eye-wear has lenses with no correction. Glasses are fashionable now.
I can't find any references, so maybe it is bogus.
You joke, but it's really not fair that people who choose to have kids get leave that the rest of us don't. I have to work harder to pick up the slack because of your lifestyle choice.
One could also argue that it is really not fair that non-parents get to enjoy the benefits of a system that, from a biological point of view at least, exists for the only purpose of creating children. If everyone chose to not have children then "we" would be gone in less than a century. Now, of course, the planet would not miss us. From an individual country point of view, we could just import our future generations from elsewhere I suppose.
Or just live with the results of policies that encourage those who are responsible, bright, and well informed to not have kids, and leave the parenting exclusively to those with poor planning skills, impulse control, and foresight. It makes for a funny movie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
You are wrong. It is a life event, not a yearly occurrence...
Clearly you are not Catholic, Mormon, or from the Bible Belt.
While members of those groups may have more children then others, none of them come close to yearly.
Poland is about 90% Catholic. The Polish birth rate is 1.4 births per child. (Compared to 2.1 for the USA - wow that is high for a developed country!) Clearly "Catholics" are not universally churning them out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_by_country
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_fertility_rate
LOL go to a nursing home, no one is talking care of their parents.
Those nursing home workers were someone's children, eh?
Most of the "developed world" does not have a birthrate sufficient to keep the population stable. While there are good ecological arguments for decreasing the overall population, economically, "developed world" countries are "rich enough" to make sure that the local kids should be able to be well cared for, housed, fed, and schooled enough to make for positive outcomes when they are old enough to start contributing to the society.
How and where can I contribute to the legal costs for the family of this student?
I want them to hire the best advocates money can provide, I want to see that judge humiliated for attempting to destroy the future of a curious student who made a mistake leading to an incident where no harm was either done or intended.
I would also be interested in such a fund.
It isn't really the judge we can blame for any of this, but rather all of the people who pushed this up each level until the decided to prosecute.
:-)
"As God is my witness - I thought turkeys could fly"
WKRP certainly had some moments of comedy genius.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf3mgmEdfwg
I can agree with the concept, but seriously, the wait-staff?
I usually try to not be a dick to the waiters/waitresses, especially in this economy.
Sorry? You don't think the wait staff should have to report all their income? Why should the wait staff be treated any different than the janitorial staff? It's not like I'm advocating cutting their pay, just making it harder for them to cheat. I don't know how the typical business treats CC tips - to the waitstaff just take cash out of the till or is in included in their paycheque? With the CC tip, it is also probably more difficult for the wait-staff to cheat their colleagues out of their share for places that distribute the tips between the waiters and the dishwashers or whatever. On the other hand, I would not be surprised to find that some owners don't give all the CC tips to the servers, or who charge the CC fees to the tip income.
Now if you want to argue that the tax rates at the low end are too high, or that minimum wage should be higher I probably would agree - (in Canada Minimum wage seems to be about $10/hour depending on the province, with only a few exceptions of 10-20% - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_in_Canada )
Credit card processing has fees attached to it. Many smaller shops tend to have a large flat transaction fee and some percent. if you charge $.50 on your credit card it might cost $.11 in fees meaning the merchant only gets $.39 for the $.50 worth of goods from a $.10 transaction fee + 3%.
And if the majority of your money (or a significant fraction) comes from sales under a dollar, then you should probably not make those types of transactions. However if you think about the day's commerce as a whole, eating a few $0.11 fees over the course of a day would probably be much better than pissing off people trying to buy stuff by refusing their business or asking them for a minimum purchase. Probably even better would be a sign that says "We prefer cash, but we will take Debit (which costs us XXX) or credit cards (which costs us YYY) for your convenience." Let your customers feel generous when they pay you - build up that good will by not seeming to nickle and dime them. I suspect that such signage would be prohibited by the CC agreements however. The CC people don't want the customers to be reminded that the CC payment is costing the merchant anything.
A 3% charge is likely less than the cost of dealing with cash. It must be counted, moved to the bank, change must be brought back to the store and so on. It is also easy lost or stolen.
Lets not pretend CCs offer no value to the store.
All true. I think the benefit of cash for the merchant is that it's easier to under report.
One of the reasons I like using my CC (in addition to making it easier for me to track my spending) is that it makes it more difficult for the vendor to avoid reporting. I want my vendor to pay all those taxes and I want my wait-staff to report their tip earnings, and pay the taxes due thereby. Gotta keep that national deficit under control, eh?
One thing I find slightly funny is when someone says to me - "Hey - do you want to commit a crime with me? If you can pay me in cash, I won't charge you the sales tax. That way I can not report it as income, and thus avoid paying at least 30% while still being able to deduct all of my business expenses from the income that I do report. Oh yeah, and that will remove your ability to sue me for bad service or not actually doing the work, or any complaint really."
Actually they usually just say: "No tax if you pay in cash" and leave the rest "understood".
I usually respond with "How often do you think the average person informs on tax cheats via http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/gncy/nvstgtns/lds/menu-eng.html ? I have used it a few times, it is oddly satisfying."
Actually I usually just say "No, I don't think so." and leave the rest "understood".
"Barter transaction rules apply ... whatever you've received in exchange for your $1 worth of vegetables must be documented as a taxable gain of at least $1 somewhere."
Seriously? You're required by law to convert the value of bartered vegetables into dollars and then claim the total value as a gain? Is there such a thing as a law making so little sense that it's less than zero?
What about the vegetables you gave up in the transaction? Obviously both parties thought there was equal value in the trade. Assuming that the equivalent market price was $1, the deal is a wash. You gave up $1 worth of items for $1 worth of items. Where's the "gain" unless you must claim the value of vegetables you grow as "income"?
Plus, he said "AT LEAST $1" how can the "gain" possibly be more than $1?
Government is the natural habitat of ignorant, authoritarian a$$#0lez.
Government may well be the natural habitat of certain types, but getting your panties in a knot in reaction to some dude's characterization of the rules for reporting income is a bit foolish. The tax code is not any stupider for barter exchanges than it is for non barter exchanges. When you trade $1 of veggies for $1 of plumbing repairs or whatever, the tax code says that you have to treat it the same as if you had sold $1 of vegetables for $1 and then paid $1 for plumbing. You have $1 extra of income to report, and you have $1 extra expenses on your books. You are certainly allowed to deduct your vegitable-production costs from your vegitable-derrived income, and you may be able to claim that plumbing expense against income supported by your plumbing - just like if you had done it with cash.
If this "barter tax" applies as-described in the summary, how is the vegetable farmer, which operates via the barter system supposed to get $CA to pay the taxes?
That certainly is a problem for people operating entirely via barter, but in some sense it is "their" problem, not the tax collector's. If they can't come up with the bucks, they get tossed into the slammer or have their assets seized and sold at auction to pay their bills. Or both.
Why is anyone at all surprised at this? These types of rules have been on the books since people started having to pay taxes. Read your tax forms the next time you fill them out - they have all sorts of words about how to report things in therms of "fair market value" or convert things from other currencies.
You know what Apple could have done in the real world with that kind of money? Imagine if they decided to use it on philanthropy.
They would have gotten beaten up by their owners. The people who own Apple (otherwise known as their shareholders) would be unlikely to allow their elected board members to give away one sixth of their investments.
If the company repurchases its stock with company funds, the company funds go away thus decreasing the value of the remaining shares. Get it? The net effect is zero. What people like is that there are fewer shares around so that FUTURE gains per share are greater.
Additionally, *anybody* purchasing shares tends to increase the share price. If someone buys up $60 billion worth of shares at price X, everyone who thinks the stock is worth price X or less who has those shares will sell them, and the remaining shareholders will be those who think it is worth more than X, thus future sales will need to be at above X. From a "supply/demand" point of view - a buyback program decreases the supply side of things, and while it is occurring it increases the demand side of things, both of which tend to increase the price paid.
One of the "rational" pricing "explanations" for the value of an investment is that it should be equal to the current value of all expected future payments adjusted by the return on a "risk-free investment". Much of the angst about the US defaulting on obligations is that typically US obligations have been thought of as that foundational "risk-free investment" against which all other investments have been being compared to - but I digress. Decreasing the number of outstanding shares, as Dunbai points out, increases the potential future payments on a per-share basis.
The reading level is closer to elementary school, but some of the math is fascinating to high school and above. It certainly could be used for an interesting math extra project. A great gift for kids:
The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure [Paperback]
Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Author), Rotraut Susanne Berner (Illustrator), Michael Henry Heim (Translator)
ISBN: 0805062998
various Amazon links:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805062998/jbenterprises/
http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805062998/johannsbookst-20/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805062998/johansbooksparto/
Though at least these guys seem to have worked out how to stop the thing from sinking like a stone during rotor transition though, which is a welcome feature.
I don't know, the flight path from their simulation video looks a lot like it drops like a stone for a while:
1) Fly along in "airplane mode" with the rotor fixed perpendicular to the body, acting like a wing - regular amount of lift being generated
2) lift the nose until the airflow is perpendicular to the bottom of the rotor - not much lift being generated now
3) unlock the rotor so that the wind can start it rotating like an autogyro - starts to provide significant amount of lift
4) apply power to the rotor and get into helicopter mode - regular amount of lift being provided.
Step #2 looks a bit like falling.
Going the other way
1) Fly in helicopter mode, moving forward at a fast clip - regular amount of lift being provided
2) Lift the nose to get airflow perpendicular to the bottom of the rotor -
3) Stop the rotor and get it fixed perpendicular to the body - not much lift being generated now
4) drop the nose to get the airflow over the now fixed wing - regular amount of airplane lift.
Step #3 looks a whole lot like falling.
BTW if we have a single payer health insurance system, this would not even be an issue.
But that would be communism!
They are big in other countries. In France they are all over the place. Hell, I thought it was an European brand to be honest.
It looks like they are based in Toronto Canada and strategic partnerships with Cheung Kong Holdings, W H Smith, Whitcoulls, and FNAC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobo_Inc.
My librarian friend had decided on Kobo as being the best of the bunch a few years back, largely for their good integration with the library lending system in use in Ontario (and in most of North America - "OverDrive" ) which uses predominantly ePub distribution (DRM via Adobe I think). Now I think many reader support the library system, but back then it was less widely supported.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OverDrive,_Inc.