In relatively unskilled labor immigrants do not necessarily win out, but in the US today the undocumented workers win because they are accepting lower wages.
If the cost of employing an all-undocumented labor force is 50% that of other people... but I need a foreman that speaks their foreign jabber, then the undocumented win, hands-down every time. Since the US has pretty much chosen not to require a legal workforce and only make a few examples every year, of course you are going to turn over any low-skill job to undocumented workers. It gets the same work done for cheaper.
The trade off for the undocumented is simple. They can make 10x (or more) what they could in their home lands, live on 3x in a dirt-poor subsistance existance in a big city and send the 7x back home so the relatives can live very very well. Of course, since around 80% of these undocumented workers are coming from places where land ownership is very much tied to tribal, cultural and heredity they can send as much money as they want back home and it will never make a difference in the end. The relatives will still be poor, their children will be poor, and there is no escape for them.
Europe has had a strong tradition of government support for non-working people. One of the attractions for immigrants is to immediately be eligible for whatever "the dole" is called in a particular country. Used to be that was a major attractor for immigrants to Germany. I don't know if it is still that way.
The US has pretty much never had a "dole" program. Welfare from around 1966-1996 was sort of that kind of a program but it has been gone for quite a while now. Supposedly, immigrants have never been eligible for Welfare but we continually hear about government support programs for illegal immigrants.
Today, supposedly around 47% of the people in the US are not paying federal taxes, generally because their income is either exempt from taxation or their income is too low to meet the base taxation threshold. They are still paying sales taxes and such but no direct-to-the-government income tax or other federal taxes. So we have 53% of the people funding the government to support the other 47%. I'd say a government non-working benefit program is unlikely in this climate to work out very well.
Can't put PV in the desert - it disrupts the fragile ecosystem. Can't have nuclear because it might have a problem - any sort of problem. Most of the other "clean' stuff is experimental or we already know it doesn't scale. Geothermal is one example of that.
We haven't been building and we need more power NOW. So the only alernative is to start turning stuff off because we can't possibly build new plants in time.
Does every person getting stopped for DUI need to have their arrest posted on YouTube? How about someone getting arrested for what is proven in the end to be something they had nothing to do with? There is of course no "retraction" possible on the Internet, so whatever is posted is there to stay forever.
If you are successful in recording an arrest, did you know you can sell the recording? Most of the TV News folks will buy it and if it is of someone that turnes out to have an interesting job they will pay lots and lots for it. But even Joe Sixpack being arrested for domestic violence can get picked up on the local news. Extra money if Joe resists or slaps his slut wife on camera.
This is stupid really. OK, you believe you have a right to record the police on a cell phone while they are performing their duty. Great. Now how about having someone standing nearby recording you are you are arrested. Let's say it is a DUI stop. Or that the police have completely erroronously stopped you and arrest you for armed robbery while a witness is standing by pointing at you going "That's him, officer!"
Until you are happy with having your arrest recorded by someone else and possibly posted on various web sites, sit down and be quiet. If there is an explicit law that enables video recording of police performing their duty it will most certainly include the right of anyone to record the police arresting or questioning anyone. You have just lost any potential privacy rights you might have had.
This is why a lot of police are actively antagonistic towards people recording them - there is no control on what happens to the video. If they allow person A to record person A's arrest they have pretty much opened the door and now have to allow person B to record person A's arrest. You can argue that there is a difference, but there really isn't except a small matter of degree. No, the police do not allow the random taping of their efforts and only in somewhat rare cases will not chase anyone with a camera off or threaten them with arrest if they continue.
In some celebrity cases they let it go often because the person being arrested specifically agrees with allowing it to continue or are playing up to the photographers.
As long as you include in your individual rights the right to do as you please, then of course a red light camera is a violation of your rights.
Most people believe they have a right to drive faster than the speed limit. Many people believe they have the right to enter an intersection when the light is yellow, and in some jurisdictions they do. Most people believe they have the right to drive regardless of their impairment, whether it is from drinking, drugs or not wearing glasses when they should.
The problem is that "individual rights" have a tendency to interfere with other people's lives. In Phoenix we are supposedly tied with Boston for red light fatalities but nobody likes red light cameras. Not sure if they are doing all that much good because unless you have an Arizona driver's license they can't do anything to you. Get a Mexican driver's license and practice saying "No hablo ingles" with a good Mexican accent - the police do not want to deal with undocumented workers because it will use up the rest of their shift between the translator and immigration. Fortunately, the immgration people have stopped dealing with minor crimes - you need to kill someone before you are a candidate for deportation.
In Chandler AZ there are five video cameras at every intersection with a traffic light. In the few cases where there are also red light/speed cameras, this is in addition to the other five cameras.
However, most people just focus on the two cameras with the flashy lights.
If Chandler can do the whole intersection video thing with the low-low-low property taxes they have here, I would imagine that everywhere has intersection video cameras these days, especially if they are putting up red light cameras.
In Illinois "at cost" meant that in 1996 the state commission for telephone rates wrote down what could be charged and left it there until it was discontinued in 2003. Whatever that rate was, it had already been decided and locked in.
Obviously there was nothing done that wasn't absolutely necessary. Anything new was done with a fiber vault which had no space for co-located equipment, which got them out of having to provide space.
I don't know about everywhere, but in Illinois the government-mandated rates were below cost to Ameritech/SBC/AT&T. The result was that after a couple of years Ameritech was able to get the mandated rates recinded and they no longer had to effectively support the competition.
For a while in Illinois you could connect your phone line up to at least 3 or 4 different DSL services. None of them had any investment or incentive to provide any customer service, so you got what you got. A few people got good service, the rest got nothing but headaches. Ameritech could do little as much of the problem was bad copper pairs going to 80-120 year old homes and with getting paid less than it cost to maintain the lines there was no incentive to do hugely expensive upgrades.
This happened because around 1996 the rates were established and left there. In 2001 I know I got a T1 connection with no local loop charge because the fees to Ameritech were so low that it was practical for the company (McLeod) to absorb them. One side effect of this was greater use of fiber vaults in new construction because there was physically no space for competing companies to get for a DSLAM, effectively eliminating competing DSL in those neighborhoods. I believe sometime in 2003 the whole co-location requirements ended because it was simply not practical any longer given the rate situation and other requirements.
With a fiber vault the copper is from the home to the vault and a fiber link from there to the CO. It eliminates most of the copper from the system and puts everything into the digital domain right from the vault. The only problem is there is no space to put in more than a single DSLAM in the vault so it eliminates DSL competition.
Where are we today? I don't know how it is in Phoenix, but the only DSL provider is Qwest. Obviously no co-location requirements here. Based on the experience in Illinois, I can't imagine anyone really wanting things to go back. It was a disaster for everyone concerned, except maybe a few customers (5%?) that got decent service. I don't see how you can go back if your neighborhood is wired to a vault today.
The emails in question were on Yahoo which has no export function. I don't think there is a way other than forwarding them to get them off that service onto anything else. Except by printing them out. It obviously could have been printed to a PDF, that is the only export available.
Because it is the responsibility of the State of Alaska to distribute it. If they passed it off somewhere else they would not be fulfilling their responsibilities and could be subject to some kind of court sanctions because of it.
Say they paid Montana to do it and Montana lost the files. In the court's view of it the responsibility would still rest with Alaska. No, there isn't any easy way out of this and if they do not fulfill their responsibilities themselves they are responsible for anyone else's screwups. Which could get very, very expensive in the end.
The problem with that idea is it would not be possible for the state to control distribution - or even to effectively support distribution. This could be viewed by a court as not fulfilling their responsibility to distribute the data.
They were on Yahoo to begin with. No, there isn't any export from Yahoo.
The usual way for people to receive things from governments is hard copy. When was the last time an official FOIA request was handled electronically? Never has happened yet, so there is ample precidence for this being done this way.
Sure, they could have dumped the Yahoo email to PDFs rather than hard copy. But then, how would they have distributed it? Printed the PDFs probably.
Hard to do a satellite transceiver in a country that is blocked on most technology export lists.
I suppose you could pay 2x for one and get it smuggled in, but 2x for an already expensive piece of equipment is a lot. Plus you need to find someone that will provision you without asking too many questions. A US-based provider would not do it for Syria again because of prohibitions on doing any business at all with Syria and people in Syria.
I suppose you could find someone in Europe that would ignore or pay off the right government people. Not like that hasn't happened before (Iraq, Iran, etc.) Only they would want a lot of money, far more than a quasi-legal Internet cafe might be able to generate.
I think the only people that could afford such an Internet connection would have to be in the government or affiliated with it already. There is no chance of the "common people" having access. And no, things are spread out enough over there that you aren't going to be able to use cell phone service near a border.
What is needed is an absolute way of identifying a person and confirming their unforgeable identity. Clearly it cannot be anything they hold, which could be forged.
Fingerprints are perhaps one way, but just taking a fingerprint and saying it belongs to one of 300 million people isn't going to work at all. A fingerprint MAY be unique at that scale but the subtleties of it make it far more complex than can be dealt with in any automated way. DNA again MAY be unique at that level but it still takes weeks to process it. Something is needed which can be immediately used to confirm an identity at a bank, a car dealer and an employer.
The current identity document (driver's license) in the US is a joke. Illinois, among other states, allows a matricula consular card to be used as proof of identity. While I don't know anyone that has actually done this, the process for getting one is so simple that virtually anyone could obtain one in any name they chose. Then getting a driver's license with that name means you have the gateway to all government services without any connection to a real identity.
Today we are operating a 21st Century economy with 19th Century documentation. The cracks show and they are easily exploited. It is clear that the government has little interest in solving the problem for real, just passing the buck down to the states in most cases. And blocking the states when they get frustrated with the non-solutions and try to do something themselves.
One thing that would be a step towards a real solution would be to deed Arizona and New Mexico back to Mexico and make it their problem. It has gotten to the point that WalMart has started posting some signage in Spanish only. No need for English because the English-speaking folks don't shop at WalMart anymore.
No, all of the responsibility for enforcing immigration and identity management belongs to the government.
Sorry, the US Federal Government has said pretty clearly they are not going to enforce any immigration laws, ever. Obama is going around saying the border is secure and we need to legalize all the folks that are here now. Well, there are still 10,000-20,000 folks streaming into Arizona every month across the "secure" border.
If the economy was growing at 5% a year there might be jobs for all the folks coming over plus the citizens that are here already. We could give the low-wage jobs to the immigrants and they would be happy because they are making as much as 100x what they could back home. Even if they sent 80% of their income back home it still wouldn't be that bad a deal. But the economy isn't growing at 5% a year, it is at 1%, if that. There are no jobs for both the immigrants willing to work for less and the citizens, so the citizens are going to lose out to low-cost competitors. As a business owner that knows there are no penalties I would much rather pay someone $4 an hour rather than $10 a hour for the same job.
And as long as there are no penalties, the $4 a hour "undocumented worker" is going to get the job every time. And since it is 20x more than he could possibly get back home they don't mind taking chances with murderous human trafficing smugglers and a desert with signs saying "if you cross, you will die." Death is a reasonable gamble because the possible earnings are so great.
For most of the country if you employ an undocumented worker there are no penalties. If you employ 1000 undocumented workers the government might make an example out of your business - except after they round up the undocumented workers there are another 1000 at the gate waiting for the jobs that just opened up. Is anyone coming back the next week to round them up? No. How much did the company pay in fines? Almost nothing. Certainly less than employing legal workers would have cost.
Arizona has a law the requires every business to use E-Verify to check out an SSN to make sure someone is legal. It can only be done after the person is hired and if the test comes back "Illegal" you still can't fire the person or turn them in. No, they have to go down to the local office and try to straighten things out. If they don't go there are no consequences other than "they are breaking the law and could be deported." Around 200,000 people come in through Arizona alone every year. Last year around 350,000 were deported which is down from 2009. Most of these people being deported are criminals that have committed some crime in the US, been caught and convicted. What about the rest?
I don't think anyone has a handle on how many people in total came into the US illegally - even the Arizona numbers are approximate. The current guess is there is between 12 and 20 million "undocumented workers" in the US today - nobody knows really.
The government solution to immigration is clearly to open the border and let Mexico dump their people up here. The benefit for the US is cheap labor. The benefit for Mexico is fewer people complaining about the horrible economy and real healthy cash flow from remittances.
It could be done by simply having businesses collect the withholding tax and there being no deducations or exemptions other than being completed exempted out of withholding. This would (obviously) end the mortgage deducation and tax refunds, but it is how it is done in many countries already. It is acceptable there because they have always had a history of never seeing the money so they don't miss it. Take away tax refunds in the US and people would certainly notice - and a lot of consumer businesses would as well.
Taking away the mortgage deduction would mean the current housing situation would be permanent - few would pay $20,000 a year in interest when they can point to a time when it didn't cost that. Renting would be as practical if not more so, thus ending the continual churn of housing in the US. Might be a good thing for some people, but the "American Dream" of owning a house would pretty much disappear in a generation.
If you read much on DailyKos and Michael Moore you will quickly see that the "answer" these people seek is to simply confiscate whatever money people have - if you have money in saving or invested then obviously you have too much and need to fork it over. This would keep the government going and eliminate most of the threat from China. We could finally have a way out from the debt and being owned by China.
The problem is, if a program like that were announced anyone with anything would quickly move it (and maybe themselves) offshore before it took effect. Rich people (i.e., people with money) aren't stupid.
Nice plan - confiscate the rich people's money - but it won't work. Taxing the rich beyond what they consider to be reasonable will result in the same thing - just move it all offshore. Nobody with more than a million dollars to their name is stuck in the US these days. So most of the ideas on how to deal with the "1 percenters" is just so much talk that has no practical impact.
If the parents are incompentent to raise a child, I guess it takes a village to step in and take over. Otherwise, the Hillaryism is just silly - you end up with a child with the values of a mob (the village) rather than the values of a person. Mobs are good for some things, but ethics and morality get left behind.
Businesses aren't manufacturing anything in the US partly because of regulation but also because it makes no sense to do so any longer. The cost of manufacturing stuff in China is so low that it makes more sense to make it there and ship it - even at outrageous shipping costs - than it does to make it in the US.
I recently had some stuff made in China and shipped here. The shipping cost was 25% of the cost of the finished products, but the total cost was about 50% of the cost of doing the same thing in the US. So why wouldn't anyone go this route?
The real problem is that there is no hope of any trade balance with China because the government actively blocks imports from the West. It is incredibly difficult to sell anything to China and currency transfer regulations are just the beginning of the problem. The US is completely barred from any sort of tariffs on imported goods and services (outsourcing) when China is free to impose regulations that block foreign goods. This means the US will always be owing China with no possible recourse. Somehow, this doesn't seem fair, just or right.
I'd say the only way to go would be to make goods from China simply unavailable in the West. There doesn't seem to be any way to do that without an open declaration of war however. That would be messy. One way to get this done with relatively clean hands would be for the US to repudiate the debt with China - just tell them to go pound sand and that we're not paying. The response from China would have to be (1) blockade of any future trade and (2) declaration of war, probably with a nuclear exchange. Messy, but at least it would be "their fault for starting it." But the result would be no more trade with China and a forced repatriation of manufacturing in the US and probably EU.
You have to understand that $3400 in China is a lot closer to a year's salary than you might think. In the US $100K is a decent salary for a year, but not too long ago a Chinese company that was building an aftermarket navigation system for cars said they were paying top software engineers $3500 a year. Now a few years have gone by and things change in China pretty quickly these days but still $3400 is probably more money in one pile than most people ever dream of having.
It would be easily equivalent to someone handing you $100K or more in one lump sum. Actually for this person it is probably two or three times the largest amount of money they might ever make in a year, so it would be a lot closer to $500K for someone living in the West.
Buy one later? Ha! They might give the kid $3400 for his but the price the recipient is paying is probably over $100K as it is. The markup is terrific.
There is no such thing as privacy. Privacy requires a compact between people that what person B knows about person A will not be distributed. Well, today what you know is worth money, so goodbye compact. Even if all it does is create one more visitor to a web site with ads, that translates to real or at least potential money in someone's pocket.
Then there is mirroring, archiving and copying. Sorry, but lots of stuff is mirrored and archived. The minute it appears the mirroring and copying start. This means that even the person that posted something has lost control over it. Can you find all the copies? No. You are going to get braindead bloggers that think it is cute to find something salacious and copy it for their blog. It gives them "content" which drives traffic - braindead, non-creative content but content all the same. Again, the driver today is money - no content = no money.
This person is trying to stop a tidal wave with a teacup. It isn't going to happen. The idea that you can collect up all the pieces and make them go away is a fantasy and it is impossible today.
The universal answer is the only thing that counts is where the item is being shipped. Taxes have to be paid for that locality.
Unfortunately, it isn't just at a state level.
Once you figure out which state gets the money, it would help to have some sort of file or server that sites can check to figure out how much tax to charge- sites shouldn't have to expend resources to stay on top of tax rates in all 50 states.
If it was just 50 states it would be simple. It isn't. There is a separate tax rate for every state, county, township, city, and village. This means you have to have an exact address - zip code doesn't really cut it I don't believe. There are several services that are available today that will compute tax for you, but they are expensive services that you have to pay for. Or, you can just turn all your sales processing over to Amazon who can obviously do it all now. Once you get to a certain size it makes more sense to just have your own files and staff to maintain them rather than paying someone else to do it at a higher cost.
But there is no mistaking that it is a huge problem. I know there are city/county overlaps where within a single city there are two different tax rates depending on which county you are in. Buffalo Grove, IL (used to live there) is split in two different counties (Lake and Cook) which have different tax rates. I seem to recall there being even worse problems in Ohio with townships, villages and counties all having their own tax rates and the final answer was the sum of the three for a particular address. No, there is no central authority for this - everyone that is doing nationwide sales tax collection today is either paying for a very expensive service or is doing it themselves. And it changes constantly.
My guess is that this will be a huge windfall for Amazon and a few other very large retailers that are able to offer shopping cart/purchasing services to other retailers that can't afford the services to compute the tax.
Amazon isn't the problem. Amazon could turn on collecting sales tax for California in about a hour - they already have to collect sales tax in California for some sellers.
The problem is places much smaller. They aren't collecting sales taxes on any Internet purchases out of state today. They do not have the infrastructure to allow for all the different taxes even in a relatively sane state like California. Likely as not if this becomes law they just change things so that purchases cannot be sent to California, period. At least until they can justify the infrastructure changes required. Which will likely mean turning over all sales processing to some place like Amazon and paying their cut, whatever that might be.
This isn't going to hurt Amazon but it will hurt any smaller folks.
Slashdot Mirror
In relatively unskilled labor immigrants do not necessarily win out, but in the US today the undocumented workers win because they are accepting lower wages.
If the cost of employing an all-undocumented labor force is 50% that of other people... but I need a foreman that speaks their foreign jabber, then the undocumented win, hands-down every time. Since the US has pretty much chosen not to require a legal workforce and only make a few examples every year, of course you are going to turn over any low-skill job to undocumented workers. It gets the same work done for cheaper.
The trade off for the undocumented is simple. They can make 10x (or more) what they could in their home lands, live on 3x in a dirt-poor subsistance existance in a big city and send the 7x back home so the relatives can live very very well. Of course, since around 80% of these undocumented workers are coming from places where land ownership is very much tied to tribal, cultural and heredity they can send as much money as they want back home and it will never make a difference in the end. The relatives will still be poor, their children will be poor, and there is no escape for them.
Europe has had a strong tradition of government support for non-working people. One of the attractions for immigrants is to immediately be eligible for whatever "the dole" is called in a particular country. Used to be that was a major attractor for immigrants to Germany. I don't know if it is still that way.
The US has pretty much never had a "dole" program. Welfare from around 1966-1996 was sort of that kind of a program but it has been gone for quite a while now. Supposedly, immigrants have never been eligible for Welfare but we continually hear about government support programs for illegal immigrants.
Today, supposedly around 47% of the people in the US are not paying federal taxes, generally because their income is either exempt from taxation or their income is too low to meet the base taxation threshold. They are still paying sales taxes and such but no direct-to-the-government income tax or other federal taxes. So we have 53% of the people funding the government to support the other 47%. I'd say a government non-working benefit program is unlikely in this climate to work out very well.
That sounds like it would be illegal under new WTO rules. Anything that blocks trade is going to be illegal.
Can't put PV in the desert - it disrupts the fragile ecosystem. Can't have nuclear because it might have a problem - any sort of problem. Most of the other "clean' stuff is experimental or we already know it doesn't scale. Geothermal is one example of that.
We haven't been building and we need more power NOW. So the only alernative is to start turning stuff off because we can't possibly build new plants in time.
How about the people being arrested?
Does every person getting stopped for DUI need to have their arrest posted on YouTube? How about someone getting arrested for what is proven in the end to be something they had nothing to do with? There is of course no "retraction" possible on the Internet, so whatever is posted is there to stay forever.
If you are successful in recording an arrest, did you know you can sell the recording? Most of the TV News folks will buy it and if it is of someone that turnes out to have an interesting job they will pay lots and lots for it. But even Joe Sixpack being arrested for domestic violence can get picked up on the local news. Extra money if Joe resists or slaps his slut wife on camera.
How about the case where you have a camera pointed at the street and record someone being arrested for DUI? Can you sell that video?
This is stupid really. OK, you believe you have a right to record the police on a cell phone while they are performing their duty. Great. Now how about having someone standing nearby recording you are you are arrested. Let's say it is a DUI stop. Or that the police have completely erroronously stopped you and arrest you for armed robbery while a witness is standing by pointing at you going "That's him, officer!"
Until you are happy with having your arrest recorded by someone else and possibly posted on various web sites, sit down and be quiet. If there is an explicit law that enables video recording of police performing their duty it will most certainly include the right of anyone to record the police arresting or questioning anyone. You have just lost any potential privacy rights you might have had.
This is why a lot of police are actively antagonistic towards people recording them - there is no control on what happens to the video. If they allow person A to record person A's arrest they have pretty much opened the door and now have to allow person B to record person A's arrest. You can argue that there is a difference, but there really isn't except a small matter of degree. No, the police do not allow the random taping of their efforts and only in somewhat rare cases will not chase anyone with a camera off or threaten them with arrest if they continue.
In some celebrity cases they let it go often because the person being arrested specifically agrees with allowing it to continue or are playing up to the photographers.
As long as you include in your individual rights the right to do as you please, then of course a red light camera is a violation of your rights.
Most people believe they have a right to drive faster than the speed limit. Many people believe they have the right to enter an intersection when the light is yellow, and in some jurisdictions they do. Most people believe they have the right to drive regardless of their impairment, whether it is from drinking, drugs or not wearing glasses when they should.
The problem is that "individual rights" have a tendency to interfere with other people's lives. In Phoenix we are supposedly tied with Boston for red light fatalities but nobody likes red light cameras. Not sure if they are doing all that much good because unless you have an Arizona driver's license they can't do anything to you. Get a Mexican driver's license and practice saying "No hablo ingles" with a good Mexican accent - the police do not want to deal with undocumented workers because it will use up the rest of their shift between the translator and immigration. Fortunately, the immgration people have stopped dealing with minor crimes - you need to kill someone before you are a candidate for deportation.
In Chandler AZ there are five video cameras at every intersection with a traffic light. In the few cases where there are also red light/speed cameras, this is in addition to the other five cameras.
However, most people just focus on the two cameras with the flashy lights.
If Chandler can do the whole intersection video thing with the low-low-low property taxes they have here, I would imagine that everywhere has intersection video cameras these days, especially if they are putting up red light cameras.
In Illinois "at cost" meant that in 1996 the state commission for telephone rates wrote down what could be charged and left it there until it was discontinued in 2003. Whatever that rate was, it had already been decided and locked in.
Obviously there was nothing done that wasn't absolutely necessary. Anything new was done with a fiber vault which had no space for co-located equipment, which got them out of having to provide space.
I don't know about everywhere, but in Illinois the government-mandated rates were below cost to Ameritech/SBC/AT&T. The result was that after a couple of years Ameritech was able to get the mandated rates recinded and they no longer had to effectively support the competition.
For a while in Illinois you could connect your phone line up to at least 3 or 4 different DSL services. None of them had any investment or incentive to provide any customer service, so you got what you got. A few people got good service, the rest got nothing but headaches. Ameritech could do little as much of the problem was bad copper pairs going to 80-120 year old homes and with getting paid less than it cost to maintain the lines there was no incentive to do hugely expensive upgrades.
This happened because around 1996 the rates were established and left there. In 2001 I know I got a T1 connection with no local loop charge because the fees to Ameritech were so low that it was practical for the company (McLeod) to absorb them. One side effect of this was greater use of fiber vaults in new construction because there was physically no space for competing companies to get for a DSLAM, effectively eliminating competing DSL in those neighborhoods. I believe sometime in 2003 the whole co-location requirements ended because it was simply not practical any longer given the rate situation and other requirements.
With a fiber vault the copper is from the home to the vault and a fiber link from there to the CO. It eliminates most of the copper from the system and puts everything into the digital domain right from the vault. The only problem is there is no space to put in more than a single DSLAM in the vault so it eliminates DSL competition.
Where are we today? I don't know how it is in Phoenix, but the only DSL provider is Qwest. Obviously no co-location requirements here. Based on the experience in Illinois, I can't imagine anyone really wanting things to go back. It was a disaster for everyone concerned, except maybe a few customers (5%?) that got decent service. I don't see how you can go back if your neighborhood is wired to a vault today.
The emails in question were on Yahoo which has no export function. I don't think there is a way other than forwarding them to get them off that service onto anything else. Except by printing them out. It obviously could have been printed to a PDF, that is the only export available.
Because it is the responsibility of the State of Alaska to distribute it. If they passed it off somewhere else they would not be fulfilling their responsibilities and could be subject to some kind of court sanctions because of it.
Say they paid Montana to do it and Montana lost the files. In the court's view of it the responsibility would still rest with Alaska. No, there isn't any easy way out of this and if they do not fulfill their responsibilities themselves they are responsible for anyone else's screwups. Which could get very, very expensive in the end.
The problem with that idea is it would not be possible for the state to control distribution - or even to effectively support distribution. This could be viewed by a court as not fulfilling their responsibility to distribute the data.
They were on Yahoo to begin with. No, there isn't any export from Yahoo.
The usual way for people to receive things from governments is hard copy. When was the last time an official FOIA request was handled electronically? Never has happened yet, so there is ample precidence for this being done this way.
Sure, they could have dumped the Yahoo email to PDFs rather than hard copy. But then, how would they have distributed it? Printed the PDFs probably.
Hard to do a satellite transceiver in a country that is blocked on most technology export lists.
I suppose you could pay 2x for one and get it smuggled in, but 2x for an already expensive piece of equipment is a lot. Plus you need to find someone that will provision you without asking too many questions. A US-based provider would not do it for Syria again because of prohibitions on doing any business at all with Syria and people in Syria.
I suppose you could find someone in Europe that would ignore or pay off the right government people. Not like that hasn't happened before (Iraq, Iran, etc.) Only they would want a lot of money, far more than a quasi-legal Internet cafe might be able to generate.
I think the only people that could afford such an Internet connection would have to be in the government or affiliated with it already. There is no chance of the "common people" having access. And no, things are spread out enough over there that you aren't going to be able to use cell phone service near a border.
What is needed is an absolute way of identifying a person and confirming their unforgeable identity. Clearly it cannot be anything they hold, which could be forged.
Fingerprints are perhaps one way, but just taking a fingerprint and saying it belongs to one of 300 million people isn't going to work at all. A fingerprint MAY be unique at that scale but the subtleties of it make it far more complex than can be dealt with in any automated way. DNA again MAY be unique at that level but it still takes weeks to process it. Something is needed which can be immediately used to confirm an identity at a bank, a car dealer and an employer.
The current identity document (driver's license) in the US is a joke. Illinois, among other states, allows a matricula consular card to be used as proof of identity. While I don't know anyone that has actually done this, the process for getting one is so simple that virtually anyone could obtain one in any name they chose. Then getting a driver's license with that name means you have the gateway to all government services without any connection to a real identity.
Today we are operating a 21st Century economy with 19th Century documentation. The cracks show and they are easily exploited. It is clear that the government has little interest in solving the problem for real, just passing the buck down to the states in most cases. And blocking the states when they get frustrated with the non-solutions and try to do something themselves.
One thing that would be a step towards a real solution would be to deed Arizona and New Mexico back to Mexico and make it their problem. It has gotten to the point that WalMart has started posting some signage in Spanish only. No need for English because the English-speaking folks don't shop at WalMart anymore.
No, all of the responsibility for enforcing immigration and identity management belongs to the government.
Sorry, the US Federal Government has said pretty clearly they are not going to enforce any immigration laws, ever. Obama is going around saying the border is secure and we need to legalize all the folks that are here now. Well, there are still 10,000-20,000 folks streaming into Arizona every month across the "secure" border.
If the economy was growing at 5% a year there might be jobs for all the folks coming over plus the citizens that are here already. We could give the low-wage jobs to the immigrants and they would be happy because they are making as much as 100x what they could back home. Even if they sent 80% of their income back home it still wouldn't be that bad a deal. But the economy isn't growing at 5% a year, it is at 1%, if that. There are no jobs for both the immigrants willing to work for less and the citizens, so the citizens are going to lose out to low-cost competitors. As a business owner that knows there are no penalties I would much rather pay someone $4 an hour rather than $10 a hour for the same job.
And as long as there are no penalties, the $4 a hour "undocumented worker" is going to get the job every time. And since it is 20x more than he could possibly get back home they don't mind taking chances with murderous human trafficing smugglers and a desert with signs saying "if you cross, you will die." Death is a reasonable gamble because the possible earnings are so great.
For most of the country if you employ an undocumented worker there are no penalties. If you employ 1000 undocumented workers the government might make an example out of your business - except after they round up the undocumented workers there are another 1000 at the gate waiting for the jobs that just opened up. Is anyone coming back the next week to round them up? No. How much did the company pay in fines? Almost nothing. Certainly less than employing legal workers would have cost.
Arizona has a law the requires every business to use E-Verify to check out an SSN to make sure someone is legal. It can only be done after the person is hired and if the test comes back "Illegal" you still can't fire the person or turn them in. No, they have to go down to the local office and try to straighten things out. If they don't go there are no consequences other than "they are breaking the law and could be deported." Around 200,000 people come in through Arizona alone every year. Last year around 350,000 were deported which is down from 2009. Most of these people being deported are criminals that have committed some crime in the US, been caught and convicted. What about the rest?
I don't think anyone has a handle on how many people in total came into the US illegally - even the Arizona numbers are approximate. The current guess is there is between 12 and 20 million "undocumented workers" in the US today - nobody knows really.
The government solution to immigration is clearly to open the border and let Mexico dump their people up here. The benefit for the US is cheap labor. The benefit for Mexico is fewer people complaining about the horrible economy and real healthy cash flow from remittances.
It could be done by simply having businesses collect the withholding tax and there being no deducations or exemptions other than being completed exempted out of withholding. This would (obviously) end the mortgage deducation and tax refunds, but it is how it is done in many countries already. It is acceptable there because they have always had a history of never seeing the money so they don't miss it. Take away tax refunds in the US and people would certainly notice - and a lot of consumer businesses would as well.
Taking away the mortgage deduction would mean the current housing situation would be permanent - few would pay $20,000 a year in interest when they can point to a time when it didn't cost that. Renting would be as practical if not more so, thus ending the continual churn of housing in the US. Might be a good thing for some people, but the "American Dream" of owning a house would pretty much disappear in a generation.
If you read much on DailyKos and Michael Moore you will quickly see that the "answer" these people seek is to simply confiscate whatever money people have - if you have money in saving or invested then obviously you have too much and need to fork it over. This would keep the government going and eliminate most of the threat from China. We could finally have a way out from the debt and being owned by China.
The problem is, if a program like that were announced anyone with anything would quickly move it (and maybe themselves) offshore before it took effect. Rich people (i.e., people with money) aren't stupid.
Nice plan - confiscate the rich people's money - but it won't work. Taxing the rich beyond what they consider to be reasonable will result in the same thing - just move it all offshore. Nobody with more than a million dollars to their name is stuck in the US these days. So most of the ideas on how to deal with the "1 percenters" is just so much talk that has no practical impact.
If the parents are incompentent to raise a child, I guess it takes a village to step in and take over. Otherwise, the Hillaryism is just silly - you end up with a child with the values of a mob (the village) rather than the values of a person. Mobs are good for some things, but ethics and morality get left behind.
Businesses aren't manufacturing anything in the US partly because of regulation but also because it makes no sense to do so any longer. The cost of manufacturing stuff in China is so low that it makes more sense to make it there and ship it - even at outrageous shipping costs - than it does to make it in the US.
I recently had some stuff made in China and shipped here. The shipping cost was 25% of the cost of the finished products, but the total cost was about 50% of the cost of doing the same thing in the US. So why wouldn't anyone go this route?
The real problem is that there is no hope of any trade balance with China because the government actively blocks imports from the West. It is incredibly difficult to sell anything to China and currency transfer regulations are just the beginning of the problem. The US is completely barred from any sort of tariffs on imported goods and services (outsourcing) when China is free to impose regulations that block foreign goods. This means the US will always be owing China with no possible recourse. Somehow, this doesn't seem fair, just or right.
I'd say the only way to go would be to make goods from China simply unavailable in the West. There doesn't seem to be any way to do that without an open declaration of war however. That would be messy. One way to get this done with relatively clean hands would be for the US to repudiate the debt with China - just tell them to go pound sand and that we're not paying. The response from China would have to be (1) blockade of any future trade and (2) declaration of war, probably with a nuclear exchange. Messy, but at least it would be "their fault for starting it." But the result would be no more trade with China and a forced repatriation of manufacturing in the US and probably EU.
You have to understand that $3400 in China is a lot closer to a year's salary than you might think. In the US $100K is a decent salary for a year, but not too long ago a Chinese company that was building an aftermarket navigation system for cars said they were paying top software engineers $3500 a year. Now a few years have gone by and things change in China pretty quickly these days but still $3400 is probably more money in one pile than most people ever dream of having.
It would be easily equivalent to someone handing you $100K or more in one lump sum. Actually for this person it is probably two or three times the largest amount of money they might ever make in a year, so it would be a lot closer to $500K for someone living in the West.
Buy one later? Ha! They might give the kid $3400 for his but the price the recipient is paying is probably over $100K as it is. The markup is terrific.
There is no such thing as privacy. Privacy requires a compact between people that what person B knows about person A will not be distributed. Well, today what you know is worth money, so goodbye compact. Even if all it does is create one more visitor to a web site with ads, that translates to real or at least potential money in someone's pocket.
Then there is mirroring, archiving and copying. Sorry, but lots of stuff is mirrored and archived. The minute it appears the mirroring and copying start. This means that even the person that posted something has lost control over it. Can you find all the copies? No. You are going to get braindead bloggers that think it is cute to find something salacious and copy it for their blog. It gives them "content" which drives traffic - braindead, non-creative content but content all the same. Again, the driver today is money - no content = no money.
This person is trying to stop a tidal wave with a teacup. It isn't going to happen. The idea that you can collect up all the pieces and make them go away is a fantasy and it is impossible today.
The universal answer is the only thing that counts is where the item is being shipped. Taxes have to be paid for that locality.
Unfortunately, it isn't just at a state level.
Once you figure out which state gets the money, it would help to have some sort of file or server that sites can check to figure out how much tax to charge- sites shouldn't have to expend resources to stay on top of tax rates in all 50 states.
If it was just 50 states it would be simple. It isn't. There is a separate tax rate for every state, county, township, city, and village. This means you have to have an exact address - zip code doesn't really cut it I don't believe. There are several services that are available today that will compute tax for you, but they are expensive services that you have to pay for. Or, you can just turn all your sales processing over to Amazon who can obviously do it all now. Once you get to a certain size it makes more sense to just have your own files and staff to maintain them rather than paying someone else to do it at a higher cost.
But there is no mistaking that it is a huge problem. I know there are city/county overlaps where within a single city there are two different tax rates depending on which county you are in. Buffalo Grove, IL (used to live there) is split in two different counties (Lake and Cook) which have different tax rates. I seem to recall there being even worse problems in Ohio with townships, villages and counties all having their own tax rates and the final answer was the sum of the three for a particular address. No, there is no central authority for this - everyone that is doing nationwide sales tax collection today is either paying for a very expensive service or is doing it themselves. And it changes constantly.
My guess is that this will be a huge windfall for Amazon and a few other very large retailers that are able to offer shopping cart/purchasing services to other retailers that can't afford the services to compute the tax.
Amazon isn't the problem. Amazon could turn on collecting sales tax for California in about a hour - they already have to collect sales tax in California for some sellers.
The problem is places much smaller. They aren't collecting sales taxes on any Internet purchases out of state today. They do not have the infrastructure to allow for all the different taxes even in a relatively sane state like California. Likely as not if this becomes law they just change things so that purchases cannot be sent to California, period. At least until they can justify the infrastructure changes required. Which will likely mean turning over all sales processing to some place like Amazon and paying their cut, whatever that might be.
This isn't going to hurt Amazon but it will hurt any smaller folks.