It's trite but it sounds like you need it repeated.
Corporations deal with you according to your will. Any transaction a corporation has with anyone else is a free and fair one where the other person willingly enters into a transaction which he or she feels benefits him or her.
The government is not subject to such restrictions. Governments use the point of a gun to enforce their will. That's the reason the founding fathers specified restrictions on the government but not on private entities.
A tax shelter is a means of retaining your wealth without paying taxes on it. Giving your wealth away does not qualify as a tax shelter.
There's also a huge difference between supporting an organization and speculating on it. Buying a corporations stock on the open market does not put any money into that corporations pockets or support its goals in any way. Besides, the definition of "bad" corporations is so ambiguous as to be meaningless. Secondly, The goal of the investment arm of the charity is wealth preservation and creation to supply the needs of the giving arm of the charity. You conflate those two goals and you end up with a muddled mess that fails to meet either goal.
It has nothing to do with safety. It has to do with the deluded belief that creating busy work for people to do is a good thing for everyone concerned.
The post you are quoting has a rating of 1 because it is mostly nonsense.
Microsoft employees are not "avoiding" paying state income taxes. Washington does not have "income tax exemptions" either. Washington simply does not assess a state income tax and collects the revenue needed to sustain the services it provides to its residents through other means. You make it sound as if it is somehow unethical to do business in Washington.
Most Microsoft Offices are in the Seattle area - it's a 360 mile roundtrip with 6 hours of traveling time to get to Portland to get those "lovely sales tax breaks" you speak of. I don't know many people who are stupid enough to do that to try and save a few dollars on their weekly grocery bill.
The corporate valuation argument is a completely separate argument from the taxation argument. The taxation argument is nonsense - stock options are not some loophole a corporation can use to avoid paying its fair share of taxes. The corporate valuation argument is actually a valid one. Most companies don't show stock options as an expense on the balance sheet making it look rosier than it really is. That's one of the reasons Microsoft did away with stock options a few years ago and went to stock awards (which are correctly shown as an expense) instead. Meanwhile, most other companies continue to play this scam on their investors.
Regarding the reinvestment you speak of, the exercise of stock options represents a dilution of the companies shares just as if the company issued additional shares and sold them in the market. A company could do that regardless of stock options - pay the money as a wage and then sell additional stock to pay for it. The two situations are identical, both from a tax and real valuation purpose. There's no loophole involved and no advantage to doing one v/s the other.
Add up the actual amounts involved and account for the dilution in share value and you'll realize that no one is cheating anyone else.
Employees exercising stock options pay taxes on the value of the benefit they receive just as if it were income through wages. The employer deducts the value of the benefit just as if it were income through wages and the net value of the corporation is reduced by the same amount just as if it were income through wages. Stock options allow you to tie that income to the stock performance but apart from that there is no difference taxwise between providing the income as stock options as opposed to wages. The article is either written by someone who is completely ignorant of basic accounting or is preying on an audience he expects to be ignorant of it.
Consider a hypothetical company with 1 million outstanding shares valued at $100 each. Now consider an employee exercising a 1000 shares with a strike price of $10. The employee receives a benefit of $90,000. The employee pays the company $10,000 for the options. The company now has two options: Option A: Buy back an equivalent amount of stock to provide the employee. This would cost $100,000. Subtract the $10,000 the employee paid and you see the company is faced with a cash outlay of $90,000 - exactly as if the amount were provided as wages. Option B: Don't buy the stock back. The total number of outstanding shares are now 1,001,000. Maintain the market cap of $100 million as before and the value of the 1 million shares held by the previous stockholders is now $100 million minus $90,000.
There is a real loss of $90,000 that the company experiences and a real profit of $90,000 that the employee experiences. The employee pays income tax on the $90,000 and the employer gets to deduct the $90,000.
If you're going to title your post geopolitics 101 you should know that there is no danger of India getting too chummy with China. The two countries have several issues including a long-standing border dispute. India is not going to get chummy with China anytime soon. It's more likely the US wants to build India up to be a stronger foil to China in the region.
I had registered my domain with an email address that is no longer valid and a physical address where I no longer live. I had forgotten all about renewing it until I saw this article. Turns out my domain expires on Feb 7th and I was able to renew it (and update my contact information) in time!
Accrual accounting isn't a trick used to balance out taxes or any of the other stuff you mentioned. Accrual accounting is part of the GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Practices) and is required by the SEC. You don't recognize revenue until you actually expend the effort required to earn that revenue.
If you sell someone a 3-year contract which they pay you for upfront, you don't declare the money they gave you as income on this years balance sheet because you haven't incurred all the costs associated with that revenue yet. You prorate the income over the period of the contract and each year or quarter you recognize both the revenue and the cost associated with that contract on that year or quarters balance sheet. It's the only way to keep your balance sheet from grossly misstating your business situation.
Public deserves atleast a lowcost emergency phone which doesn't need the monthly and yearly contract slavery.
This already exists. Pick up any used cellphone from any carrier. They will always allow you to make 911 calls regardless of whether or not you are under contract. If you mean emergencies that don't involve calling 911, you can buy a prepaid phone card which will allow you to do the same without having any sort of contract or annual fee.
You should try to gain a better understanding of the problem before you try to propose solutions to it.
The process ofa parent busting a kid in a lie and then doing something about it is good for the kid, good for the parent, and good for the relationship. More to the point, it's damned good for the *adult* that the kid will someday become. Isn't that the whole point?
No, it's not. It does nothing positive for the adult the child will become. The only thing you teach your child when that happens is that they're being punished for getting caught. It does nothing to improve their judgment and harms their self-confidence. You want your kids to grow up to be adults who understand the true consequences of their actions, not the consequences imposed upon them by a parent who won't always be able to do so.
Ask yourself this question: You catch your child playing a video game when they shouldn't be and bust them up for it. Now the next time you have to leave the child unsupervised for a few hours when they are not supposed to be playing video games, do you think it's any more likely that the child won't than before? The answer is no. The child will play when he thinks he can do it without getting caught because you haven't taught them that it's not something they should be doing - just that it's something they should not get caught doing.
The real problem is that the kid is most likely too young to understand why it is not something they should do. It's your responsibility as a parent to prevent them from doing it, not punish them for doing so. And this is a great tool to do just that. Your child sees nothing wrong with playing video games longer than he should. Leaving such a child unsupervised with a video game is only setting them up to fail. If they do what they see nothing wrong with doing, they get in trouble. If they suspend their own judgment and blindly follow what their parents tell them, they get rewarded for it.
Last mile connectivity is not a natural monopoly. The solution to problems created by government regulation should be less, not more government regulation.
You could see the pace of Leopard seeds and the progress you saw in those seeds really slow down while the iPhone was in development and then see the pace pick up as the iPhone was getting ready to hit the shelves.
Profit(P) = Sales Price(S) - Cost of US input(U) - Cost of Canadian input(C)
Imagine all those figures staying constant in their respective currencies. In USD terms, S and U are the same but C has gone up so P is smaller than it used to be in USD. Convert that back to Canadian Dollars and P becomes even smaller.
Things in economics do tend towards an equilibrium but that doesn't mean the same state as before. The reason for the fall in the USD is because the previous value meant foreign imports were a lot cheaper than local production, which resulted in the trade deficit, which in turn causes the USD to fall in value.
Slashdot Mirror
Find the cure a Bing.com.
Your post is the second link on the resuls page :)
They've already closed their borders.
The Trojan marching band only knows how to play one song.
Fixed for you:
I'm starting to miss the dupes. I don't remember any egregious recent ones.
The Indians have it beat by a mile:
http://taz.de/blogs/wp-inst/wp-content/blogs.dir/44/files/2007/02/043%20overcrowded%20train%20India.jpg
All truly good bad analogies involve cars and technology.
This is like a company hiring a car to work for it and the car providing free rides to people on its way to and from work.
It's trite but it sounds like you need it repeated.
Corporations deal with you according to your will. Any transaction a corporation has with anyone else is a free and fair one where the other person willingly enters into a transaction which he or she feels benefits him or her.
The government is not subject to such restrictions. Governments use the point of a gun to enforce their will. That's the reason the founding fathers specified restrictions on the government but not on private entities.
A tax shelter is a means of retaining your wealth without paying taxes on it. Giving your wealth away does not qualify as a tax shelter.
There's also a huge difference between supporting an organization and speculating on it. Buying a corporations stock on the open market does not put any money into that corporations pockets or support its goals in any way. Besides, the definition of "bad" corporations is so ambiguous as to be meaningless. Secondly, The goal of the investment arm of the charity is wealth preservation and creation to supply the needs of the giving arm of the charity. You conflate those two goals and you end up with a muddled mess that fails to meet either goal.
To get from feet to cubits, you would divide by 1.5, not multiply by it.
Doesn't counter your point - just correcting a small error you made.
It has nothing to do with safety. It has to do with the deluded belief that creating busy work for people to do is a good thing for everyone concerned.
That's how much you rev the version number by when all you are doing is fixing bugs that only required very minor code change.
The post you are quoting has a rating of 1 because it is mostly nonsense.
Microsoft employees are not "avoiding" paying state income taxes. Washington does not have "income tax exemptions" either. Washington simply does not assess a state income tax and collects the revenue needed to sustain the services it provides to its residents through other means. You make it sound as if it is somehow unethical to do business in Washington.
Most Microsoft Offices are in the Seattle area - it's a 360 mile roundtrip with 6 hours of traveling time to get to Portland to get those "lovely sales tax breaks" you speak of. I don't know many people who are stupid enough to do that to try and save a few dollars on their weekly grocery bill.
The corporate valuation argument is a completely separate argument from the taxation argument. The taxation argument is nonsense - stock options are not some loophole a corporation can use to avoid paying its fair share of taxes. The corporate valuation argument is actually a valid one. Most companies don't show stock options as an expense on the balance sheet making it look rosier than it really is. That's one of the reasons Microsoft did away with stock options a few years ago and went to stock awards (which are correctly shown as an expense) instead. Meanwhile, most other companies continue to play this scam on their investors.
Regarding the reinvestment you speak of, the exercise of stock options represents a dilution of the companies shares just as if the company issued additional shares and sold them in the market. A company could do that regardless of stock options - pay the money as a wage and then sell additional stock to pay for it. The two situations are identical, both from a tax and real valuation purpose. There's no loophole involved and no advantage to doing one v/s the other.
Add up the actual amounts involved and account for the dilution in share value and you'll realize that no one is cheating anyone else.
Employees exercising stock options pay taxes on the value of the benefit they receive just as if it were income through wages. The employer deducts the value of the benefit just as if it were income through wages and the net value of the corporation is reduced by the same amount just as if it were income through wages. Stock options allow you to tie that income to the stock performance but apart from that there is no difference taxwise between providing the income as stock options as opposed to wages. The article is either written by someone who is completely ignorant of basic accounting or is preying on an audience he expects to be ignorant of it.
Consider a hypothetical company with 1 million outstanding shares valued at $100 each. Now consider an employee exercising a 1000 shares with a strike price of $10. The employee receives a benefit of $90,000. The employee pays the company $10,000 for the options. The company now has two options:
Option A: Buy back an equivalent amount of stock to provide the employee. This would cost $100,000. Subtract the $10,000 the employee paid and you see the company is faced with a cash outlay of $90,000 - exactly as if the amount were provided as wages.
Option B: Don't buy the stock back. The total number of outstanding shares are now 1,001,000. Maintain the market cap of $100 million as before and the value of the 1 million shares held by the previous stockholders is now $100 million minus $90,000.
There is a real loss of $90,000 that the company experiences and a real profit of $90,000 that the employee experiences. The employee pays income tax on the $90,000 and the employer gets to deduct the $90,000.
If you're going to title your post geopolitics 101 you should know that there is no danger of India getting too chummy with China. The two countries have several issues including a long-standing border dispute. India is not going to get chummy with China anytime soon. It's more likely the US wants to build India up to be a stronger foil to China in the region.
I had registered my domain with an email address that is no longer valid and a physical address where I no longer live. I had forgotten all about renewing it until I saw this article. Turns out my domain expires on Feb 7th and I was able to renew it (and update my contact information) in time!
Accrual accounting isn't a trick used to balance out taxes or any of the other stuff you mentioned. Accrual accounting is part of the GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Practices) and is required by the SEC. You don't recognize revenue until you actually expend the effort required to earn that revenue.
If you sell someone a 3-year contract which they pay you for upfront, you don't declare the money they gave you as income on this years balance sheet because you haven't incurred all the costs associated with that revenue yet. You prorate the income over the period of the contract and each year or quarter you recognize both the revenue and the cost associated with that contract on that year or quarters balance sheet. It's the only way to keep your balance sheet from grossly misstating your business situation.
Public deserves atleast a lowcost emergency phone which doesn't need the monthly and yearly contract slavery.
This already exists. Pick up any used cellphone from any carrier. They will always allow you to make 911 calls regardless of whether or not you are under contract. If you mean emergencies that don't involve calling 911, you can buy a prepaid phone card which will allow you to do the same without having any sort of contract or annual fee.
You should try to gain a better understanding of the problem before you try to propose solutions to it.
The process ofa parent busting a kid in a lie and then doing something about it is good for the kid, good for the parent, and good for the relationship. More to the point, it's damned good for the *adult* that the kid will someday become. Isn't that the whole point?
No, it's not. It does nothing positive for the adult the child will become. The only thing you teach your child when that happens is that they're being punished for getting caught. It does nothing to improve their judgment and harms their self-confidence. You want your kids to grow up to be adults who understand the true consequences of their actions, not the consequences imposed upon them by a parent who won't always be able to do so.
Ask yourself this question: You catch your child playing a video game when they shouldn't be and bust them up for it. Now the next time you have to leave the child unsupervised for a few hours when they are not supposed to be playing video games, do you think it's any more likely that the child won't than before? The answer is no. The child will play when he thinks he can do it without getting caught because you haven't taught them that it's not something they should be doing - just that it's something they should not get caught doing.
The real problem is that the kid is most likely too young to understand why it is not something they should do. It's your responsibility as a parent to prevent them from doing it, not punish them for doing so. And this is a great tool to do just that. Your child sees nothing wrong with playing video games longer than he should. Leaving such a child unsupervised with a video game is only setting them up to fail. If they do what they see nothing wrong with doing, they get in trouble. If they suspend their own judgment and blindly follow what their parents tell them, they get rewarded for it.
Last mile connectivity is not a natural monopoly. The solution to problems created by government regulation should be less, not more government regulation.
You could see the pace of Leopard seeds and the progress you saw in those seeds really slow down while the iPhone was in development and then see the pace pick up as the iPhone was getting ready to hit the shelves.
The USD is plummeting because of the trade deficit, not the budget deficit.
It's not a wash. Simplistically,
Profit(P) = Sales Price(S) - Cost of US input(U) - Cost of Canadian input(C)
Imagine all those figures staying constant in their respective currencies. In USD terms, S and U are the same but C has gone up so P is smaller than it used to be in USD. Convert that back to Canadian Dollars and P becomes even smaller.
Things in economics do tend towards an equilibrium but that doesn't mean the same state as before. The reason for the fall in the USD is because the previous value meant foreign imports were a lot cheaper than local production, which resulted in the trade deficit, which in turn causes the USD to fall in value.
Playing the victim in this case is pretty pathetic.
It's binary, not "binaries" and 11 in binary is 3 decimal. You only list 2 types of people. You're looking for 10, not 11.
You watch your mouth, Cadallin. The Native Americans were raped of their land and resources by white people like us!