731–740 of 817 posts
In particular the quality of UX has decline rapidly since jobs' decline. Have you looked at the stopwatch app for example? Where did the seconds go? Milliseconds?
There are many many more things like this that have changed for the worse. And their hardware has always been sub par afaik.
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Many people believe this is an overstep on the government's part. These people believe it's not the government's job to be paternalistic and nudge people into the "right direction". This is based on the complete abhorrence of "scope creep" mixed with near total surveillance and control over the use of force. Those with that much power should not be able to enforce social mores, even if they reflect the will of the pe…
What if we frame it as a financial problem, not a well-being problem. Argument: it is in everyone's best interest if fewer people smoke. Smoking overwhelmingly affects poorer citizens who are already more reliant on social services. And since effects are tied to age, older smokers will more heavily put a burden on both the healthcare system as well as the entire insurance market (including Medicare/ Medicaid). Ergo i…
If other developed countries did the same, these problems might be easier to manage. Investors could still get bigger dividends from these transfer pricing rorts, but they would have to hand them back as income tax at home, and the rorts might stop being worthwhile.
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~"Capitalism is the worst system ever devised except for all the others." ;) Until we get to a Star Trek-like unlimited resources, it is the best way to allocate our resources to properly incentivize progress and innovation.
Well, this was an unpopular comment. How do we properly incentivize progress and innovation? This is the safest, most prosperous time to be alive in the history of humanity, despite what you have been told.
There is no progress or innovation without qualifiers.
> safest, most prosperous
And most depressed, most suicidal, most alienated, most amok running, most hysterical, most sophistry laden, most marketing raped, most mass produced, most polluted times ever. Millionaires today are poorer than paupers, artists today are more cloned and out of touch with themselves and the world than random citizens of other times and places. The ones who aren't 100% market whores, anyway, who at least pretend to themselves they're artists. We went from turning our world into meaninglessness to turning our selves into meaningless, mass produced objects.
We can't even afford to make something for the sake of craftsmanship, or leave a blank space blank instead of smearing marketing. We went from everybody and their dog being a member of 20 and running 5 forums to everybody being on Facebook. We went from RSS to fucking Twitter, who "let users express themselves". Companies openly brag about wanting to create "compelling experiences", marketing people dog food their own idiotic slogans and are now honest when repeating them ad nauseam, because they're now actually this small and weak to actually believe actually all of it. We went from browser makers doing whatever to user agents and back to browser makers doing whatever and users just sitting there and hoping some of that will be fun for them, too. We went from metacrawlers to Google. We went from Apple, Atari, Amiga, IBM-PC to -- a few player essentially all doing the same user hostile, uninspired shit. How many newspapers are owned by how many conglomerates? And look at company names. Herply this, derply that. Look at people's names. Are you meaning to look me in the eye and tell me we're not approaching Idiocracy? 500 years was the science-fiction part about it. Give it 20.
But safety and prosperity? Heh. It's the safety of securely being born dead. The biggest threat used to be death, now there is less and less difference between existing for a while, to shove some franchises in the mental and physical orifices, and not having been born. What does it profit a man? What does a man lose? I can't tell you the answer, but I can tell you who you shouldn't ask for that answer; the man who did lose his soul to gain the dissolution of the world, like some Midas turning things to poop. Nietzsche was right about some things, Erich Fromm was right about others, Hannah Arendt was right about everything, Einstein was right about people and who gives two shits about physics anyway, Orwell and Huxley were on to it, and then there's the thousands of others who I don't know but who all said the same things in various ways. Safety and prosperity? Fuck that. Life isn't safe, the whole universe isn't. Only death wants safety, only fear wants more, life wants to live. And yes, life is more fun when it's not reckless, when it is intentional. Food and shelter and medicine are great. That we focus on power and alienation while pretending they have anything to do with safety and prosperity, that we killed the point of living in the first place, that's the problem.
Sorry for ranting, but you don't get to tell me what I've been told or how I judge things. If it's the safest and best in your opinion, fine. But if you simply state that as fact, you brought nothing to an everything fight.
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How would it benefit society? Reduced state income that could be used to invest in infrastructure and people? Will the companies invest that money with society's interest at best better than the govt would? I don't think so. What do Apple do with their money? They horde it, waiting for a windfall to bring it back to the States and pay low/no corporate tax on the repatriated profits.
You tax things you want less of, not more if. Taxing corporate profits is a tax on investment. Apples actual income tax rate is in excess of 60% if they repatriate. First, they have to pay corporate income taxes in all their foreign countries. Then, they owe 9% to state of California on what’s left. Then they owe 35% to the US treasury on what’s left. Then they pay the remainder as dividends, and shareholders owe up…
You could just as well argue that anything Apple sells should be free on account of them wanting more sales, not less. And the goal of government is not to maximize corporate income. For that matter, companies don't really have a right to make more money, only to participate in a fair economy.
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Sounds like we need an 'uber for tax avoidance' where the start up creates a holding company in a low tax environment and then you sign up and for a 3% going down to say 1% of your "normal" tax obligation they will slosh all your revenue through the tax haven. This is not a joke, it is a serious suggestion. The issue here is governments and regulatory capture where the wealthy have insured these tax avoidance schemes…
Well as you can see with the poor OPSEC, the offshore incorporation industry is ripe for disruption. Although I've never had any of my entities "leaked", as if they were secret anyway, these leaks are mana from heaven as these are client lists you can POACH and offer better services for cheaper. I've been using OTONOMOS for some time for incorporation and offshore entity management, which stores some client signature…
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There are actually things like the expatriation tax and "name and shame" provisions which discourage people from renouncing for tax purposes. Also (note that I am not an accountant or lawyer and this is not advice), most ordinary people won't see any problem with taxation while abroad beyond the actual inconvenience of filing a 1040 because the foreign earned income exclusion ( https://www.irs.gov/individuals/interna…
You don't know what you're talking about. Social Security isn't earned income for example, so expat retirees get to pay taxes on that in the US AND their country of residence. You also don't seem to understand how FATCA works and taxation from stuff such as rental properties or retirement account income or even ordinary capital gains such as selling a house. > Since ordinary people pretty much all earn less than this…
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Do you have any examples of monopolies arise naturally in unregulated market?
I’m hesitant to answer you, because the internet has made me jaded, and I foresee getting into a long discussion about what constitutes an unregulated market and what constitutes a monopoly. As to how natural monopolies arise, Wikipedia has a good article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
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We cannot expect companies to voluntarily pay more taxes than the minimum, while there are legal loopholes at their disposal. The solution may mean reducing the tax rate for all companies, closing the loopholes, and then enforcing the law. But that would require elected government leaders to put their jobs on the line (lowering corporate taxes sounds bad to many voters since corporations have been vilified, even thou…
Can you give a citation on "bipartisan support among economists"? All I have read seems to indicate economists are all in support for the other direction - that lowering corporate taxes at this moment is bad economics. [1] http://larrysummers.com/2017/10/22/one-last-time-on-who-bene... [2] https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/corporate-rate-cut... [3] http://microeconomicinsights.org/benefits-corporate-tax-cuts.…
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-...
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Your ultra simplistic idea has been tried before to some extent. It doesn't work. VAT is a trivial tax to avoid since it involves the business letting the tax department know how much tax they collected. So what happens is that they under report either (a) by flat out lying or (b) doing more business in cash or through a barter system. Also it is incredibly regressive rewarding the rich (who are generally hoarding mo…
Given your comments, we seem to be similarly minded. What do you think about a wealth tax? To me, that would be the most appropriate given that incomes can vary year to year. Corporate taxes are a separate matter altogether, IMO, since corps just include their tax burden in the price of the products. edit: What I'm thinking is some sort of total asset valuation placing one in a given bracket, rather than income level…
Given how Prop 13 was enacted to not push existing homeowners out of their homes if their property values increased significantly, would there be a similar push under such a system?