101–110 of 219 posts
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Income tax rates and corporate tax rates were higher during the post-war era than they are now.
Effective tax rates weren't much different, which is what matters.
Can I opt out from having my data shared with other companies? Or will some kind of privacy framework like ATT be applied to it?
Google doesn't share your data with other companies.
Americans have allowed the rich to become too wealthy. The kind of power that comes with billions of dollars just doesnt work with justice or democracy.
It is a sin to be poor
There being poor, is the sin of the rich
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It is theoretically and practically impossible that free market could exist. Every unregulated market will be quickly monopolized by a biggest player and it will stop being free by definition. It's like saying that humans can fly unassisted. Sure, we can jump in the air and for a few milliseconds remain completely in the air. But we can hardly call that process a flight, if it can last for extremely short period of t…
> unregulated market A free market is not unregulated. It's regulated by the voluntary choices of all market participants. The alternative is to have the market regulated by those who aren't participants--i.e., who have no skin in the game and who suffer no consequences if the regulations are bad. That's basically the situation we have now. Anyone who thinks that's a good thing isn't living on the same planet as I am…
Really?
* Search: What special privilege for Google?
* Desktop OS: Microsoft?
* On line retail: Amazon
What am I missing? These firms got no "special privilege " from government, did they?
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How does a 5 year old use their 401k to increase the quality of their education?
Probably should allow parents to open college investment accounts for kids at birth. Even $5k invested at birth would be $50k at 25, enough to mostly pay off a state school degree. So yeah, generally I think that would be a good idea.
> The government doesn't have to win an antitrust trial in order to create competition. As the saying goes, "the process is the punishment." Regardless of what you think of Google or this case specifically, this is an argument for authoritarianism: that it is legitimate for the government to "punish" any company at will, based only on them falling into political disfavor. > ... the only punishment Google would have t…
There's very little reason that Google should have been protected from the evidence of its wrongdoing being made public. That's not extrajudicial punishment, that is public record. Justice should be seen to be done as well as done. Who can know how appropriate or not the remedy was when the evidence is hidden? For full disclosure: I'm neither a google employee nor a US citizen.
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> people have the option to refuse to accept your money... This is the contradiction, isn't it? A free market that you or I might define requires safeguards like a social welfare net to make sure individuals are truly free to decline an offer that is harmful to them. Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your…
People like to talk about politically tyranny, but forgot about the tyranny of capitalism. We've financialized servitude is all.
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Effective tax rates weren't much different, which is what matters.
The effective income tax rate was still on the whole higher for the wealthy in the 20th century. Depending on where you put the percentile cutoff, I’m seeing peak-to-troughs between 5-20%.
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His quote is stunningly disingenuous, I'm surprised to hear that coming from Doctorow. That Google has paid Apple to be the default search engine was a business deal that has been open knowledge for a decade or more. Other search engines could've paid to be the default. Apple didn't have a search engine when they created the iPhone, and why would they start? Ever? MS didn't do so well. And why would Apple want to mak…
> Apple didn't have a search engine when they created the iPhone, and why would they start? Ever? I mean Apple Maps happened. Is it the same scale of problem? No, because Street View is harder than search in some sense! In all seriousness it's not the same problem, but it's something. $20B/year is real money, and I have a very easy time imagining that squashing the idea at all (even if the intent on Google's side is…
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I have nothing against rich. I have everything against a single person having a megaphone for themselves and a gag for everyone else and still calling it a democracy. We need strong laws that reduce the voice of money and increase the voice of individuals. Having said that, the practical implication is that money needs to loose power and there are very few ways to truly do that other than just take it away. So, I agr…
I'm not sure I understand what distinction you're drawing between ideological opposition to rich people existing and opposition to disproportionately powerful people existing. In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing? Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it, and is just another way of saying "power over others". A world where being rich doesn't grant power…
Citation required.
Money is an intermediary form of exchange. It arises organically because if, for example, you are a dairy farmer, there is no practical way for you to a) save enough milk to barter for a house (not only is it perishable but where do you store it all? Especially before refrigeration) and b) find someone with a house they want to trade for that much milk.
Money is just a commodity and in the absence of fiat currency it arises organically. People tend to seek intermediary forms of exchange that are non-perishable, easily divisible, transportable and difficult to forge/counterfeit because it is a necessity of life.
You simply cannot practically barter everything you'd ever want to trade. So instead we humans trade what we produce for something we can stash away and trade later more easily.
Money is not an invention to compel action. It is a natural product of trade that arises because most people, when they're not too busy spouting ideological drivel on Internet forums, have common sense.