61–70 of 79 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adding on state tax gets you there. California, for example, has a top rate of 10.3%.
One small point: at the income level where the 39.6% bracket applies, you are almost certainly itemizing deductions (especially if you live in a state with an income tax). In that case, every dollar of state tax paid is deductible for federal purposes, measurably lowering the effective combined rate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem can't always be left up to pure market forces, though. VCs do not fund projects that they don't believe will stand a chance of producing a large return. They may fund several ideas with a small chance, but a business that will provide for the greater good, cost a lot of money up front, and only provide small returns simply won't get funded. Sometimes government must be used to provide for the greater good…
It's not a matter of free markets, it a matter of corruption. Solyndra's business model as a company was provably unsound years before it emerged as scandal but it still received funding from the government because people believed in the idea of a solar company. The thing is that Solyndra ended up not actually contributing much to solar as a business or technology because their source of income was based on politics…
The great thing about government is we can involve media, we can send FOIA, and we can scare politicians into doing the right thing if necessary. If government corruption was as bad as you seem to think, Solyndra would still be getting paid and none of us would know about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> verifiable fact that the U.S. government deserves credit for funding and helping create the Internet? Because it's NOT verifiable. Some of us believe in historical determinism. Moore's Law meant that chips were getting better and cheaper. Telecommunications was growing. People were already using modems to build ad-hoc networks. I argue that there was going to be an internet in the year 2000 whether or not the US go…
> I argue that there was going to be an internet in the year 2000 whether or not the US government pushed a piddly amount of funding into Arpanet or not. Indeed. How about Fidonet? Fidonet developed as a network of interconnected BBSes, starting from 1984 and widely accessible by about 1994, without government stimulus. Fidonet had a backbone and a hierarchical structure for routing messages. It's not hard to envisio…
But none of those became what we use today. That's the key point here. You can argue that it would have happened anyway, or that some other network protocol or technology was superior and should have been used instead of what we use today, but that's not what the article is saying.
The research that was funded by ARPA became the baseline for what would become the Internet. That's what happened.
Why would anyone try to revise history, casting doubt on the verifiable fact that the U.S. government deserves credit for funding and helping create the Internet? Why would the Wall Street Journal publish this garbage? Short, simplistic answer: because the mere existence of this article, published in a newspaper widely perceived as reputable, is "evidence" of debate about the government's role for all those politicia…
The U.S. government, including ARPA, NSF, DOE, NASA among others absolutely facilitated, underwrote, and pioneered the development of the Internet. The private sector engaged around 12 years into the program (about 1984-85) and was very much involved in powering the spread of the system. But none of this would have happened without this research support.
I have great faith in the human ability to trench forward and evolve solutions to problems as well as innovate. This also leads to a belief that if person A does not invent or discover something then B, or C, or D eventually will invent or discover that same thing. Proof of this exists across many fields where nearly simultaneous discoveries or developments happened across the globe (powered flight?).
It is clear that the interconnected network of computers that ultimately became the consumer Internet had its roots in a number of government-sponsored programs.
At the same time, interconnected networks of USERS had already existed for quite some time. Examples of this were Compuserve and AOL, the myriad of BBS providers across the world and services like Minitel in France.
It was this existing audience that provided the early adopters that made the Internet take off as a commercial product. Government couldn't have done that.
More to the point: The US Government couldn't have made the Internet a commercial success available in every home and every city of the world. It was entrepreneurial drive across the globe that made this happen. If the US Government had kept control of it all it would have remained at a level and a scale not useful to anyone but a few literally well-connected sites.
So, yes, kudos for letting go. Here's a perfect example of government getting the hell out of the way to see private enterprise take something well beyond anyone's imagination.
I wish they'd do that with a myriad of other areas that government touches that would do far better in private hands.
The Internet is a massive example of why government should not be involved in our activities beyond a very basic level. We can do a far better job.
Getting back to the invention and discovery issue. I have no doubt that the Internet would have been developed privately if the government had not had any involvement whatsoever. It would have been different, or not, but the human drive to innovate and invent coupled with the equally powerful drive to connect, share and explore would have made it happen. It really isn't too far of a stretch to see that BBS systems would have sought to create more efficient and scalable topologies to reach and service more people. And, as computers and technology evolved this would have pushed the need for speed in order to provide media services.
Key quote: "Cerf: I would happily fertilize my tomatoes with Crovitz' assertion."
The claim he's referencing: Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished...In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia. Is Cerf's argument against the notion that it was private concerns that created the internet on top of a languishing prot…
The Boucher Bill was 1992, prior to that commercial traffic was not allowed on the ARPA/NSFNET. Now, I wasn't around for the early Internet, since it wasn't particularly common until the mid '80's, but "languish" is not how I would describe what I saw. At that time, it connected every research and most educational organizations and did almost everything it does now except carry specifically commercial traffic. HTTP was not developed until the early '90's, and there was essentially no private interest in the Internet until HTTP had become prevalent, except for what it was already doing: email, news, and file transfer. And between the introduction of commercial traffic and infrastructural improvements which were part of the dot-com boom, the Internet did those three things significantly less well than it had previously.
So, yes it wouldn't be where it is today without private sector investing (particularly the massive infrastructure build-out in the late '90's). But "languish" for "30 years"? "Private concerns" created "technological revolutions"?
Why would anyone try to revise history, casting doubt on the verifiable fact that the U.S. government deserves credit for funding and helping create the Internet? Why would the Wall Street Journal publish this garbage? Short, simplistic answer: because the mere existence of this article, published in a newspaper widely perceived as reputable, is "evidence" of debate about the government's role for all those politicia…
> verifiable fact that the U.S. government deserves credit for funding and helping create the Internet? Because it's NOT verifiable. Some of us believe in historical determinism. Moore's Law meant that chips were getting better and cheaper. Telecommunications was growing. People were already using modems to build ad-hoc networks. I argue that there was going to be an internet in the year 2000 whether or not the US go…
Why would anyone try to revise history, casting doubt on the verifiable fact that the U.S. government deserves credit for funding and helping create the Internet? Why would the Wall Street Journal publish this garbage? Short, simplistic answer: because the mere existence of this article, published in a newspaper widely perceived as reputable, is "evidence" of debate about the government's role for all those politicia…
It's part of the campaign to undermine Net Neutrality, 'deregulate' the Internet, and turn it over to the telecoms to run as they see fit.
If the Conservatives can convince the public that the private sector and unregulated free markets, not government, are responsible for creating the Internet as it now - a truly level platform where all comers have equal access to audiences and bandwidth (services like Akamai excepted) - then it's easy to make the case that Net Neutrality, common carrier, and all that stuff is just more government regulation that impedes progress and economic growth, or worse control what people do on the Internet.
Looks like a new front in the battle for the Internet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it probably would have happened anyway, therefore what did happen didn't happen?
Correlation is not causality. If it rains this afternoon, and you later tell me that you did a rain dance outside ten minutes before hand, why should I assume that you caused the rain?
The US government funded (or provided funding for) many of the early developments that made the internet as we know it possible. As others have pointed out, the government also made it possible for the telcos to lay the infrastructure by providing them access to public lands and private lands (easements and eminent domain).
How would the companies have assembled the capital to acquire that land or land access themselves at that time? Keep in mind, unlike the Google Fiber announcement, the thing they were building had no demonstrated value as it does today.
In your painful analogy, you suggest that the spending and research and construction the government did or enabled was akin to tossing coins into a wishing well, and magically the internet came into existence. How does that fit with the facts that we have? Or do you also deny that anything in history is knowable?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a matter of free markets, it a matter of corruption. Solyndra's business model as a company was provably unsound years before it emerged as scandal but it still received funding from the government because people believed in the idea of a solar company. The thing is that Solyndra ended up not actually contributing much to solar as a business or technology because their source of income was based on politics…
Heh, well, the private sector is immensely corrupt, too. Witness the news from Wall Street on just about any given day. It's not fair to point to one thing the government screwed up and say that government is wholly corrupt. It is imperfect but we're supposed to be working towards a "more perfect union," not that we had achieved it already. The great thing about government is we can involve media, we can send FOIA, a…
The problem isn't that the government is currently actively corrupt (it isn't for the most part,) it's that the more it get's involved in the economy as member rather than a governing body, the more motive individual government members and workers have to be corrupt. We have an active free press and law enforcement agency which catches corruption but that's not a good reason to create conflicts of interest where there shouldn't be.