You tax businesses to discourage people from hiding assets and economic activity within a shell corporation to avoid taxation. (ie, I don't own anything or draw a salary, but my consulting company lets me live in this nice house and provides a generous entertainment budget) The US has decided to minimize the taxation of the individuals comprising the business (ie, highly favorable treatment of capital gains and dividends), and you can't simultaneously argue against taxing the business because its participants are taxed and against taxing the distributions because the business is taxed.

As you say, though, it is all the same money, so the only question is where to impose a tax. The US used to get the lion's share of tax revenue from businesses, where clear accounting rules make it clear what a business can "afford." Taxing individuals is much more complicated for everyone - I have to discount my salary by some 35%, between Federal, Social security, and State taxes to figure out my budget, nevermind the various discounts and incentives.

Surely you're joking. Just who do you think is paying all those lobbyists? Who do you imagine supports the campaigns of the elected officials? BP may not get to cast a ballot in any particular district, but their interests are far better represented than your own. And again, corporate suffrage would enable the creation of armies of shell companies with no purpose other than to sway elections. Patently ridiculous.

They probably don't even need to worry about getting rid of their existing workforce. If your boss spends a lot of time loudly whining about how he can't afford to keep all these IT people; about how he wishes he could replace them all with H1B's, but then tells you not to worry about your job, you'd be an idiot not to fire up the resume printer. Before long, the only people left will be the ones who can't get work elsewhere.

Github is not selling out: they're offering a 10% stake. Even if the entire offering is bought by one entity, that entity will not have the power to force github to do anything the existing structure doesn't want.

Possibly worth noting that Andreessen Horowitz already has a 13% stake, and he hasn't managed to make them Evil. Raising outside ownership to 23% isn't going to give the vultures control.

So, you favor government shouldering the cost, giving away ownership, and guaranteeing profitability for the utility company. Honestly, that system has worked out pretty well, in many cases. The private industry part tends to encourage cost minimization while the regulatory oversight discourages price gouging and customer abuse.

The problem with purely private solutions is that the people involved have a financial incentive to provide poor service at exorbitant prices. The problem with purely government solutions is that disinterest and incompetence may result in poor service and high costs. Striking a healthy balance between the two requires careful analysis, an understanding of policy, and an interest in the public good that we have systematically bred out of our politicians by insisting that they be attractive fund-raisers.

No government based on the unanimous support of the entire population will ever work. If that's your working definition of democracy, you may want to revisit your civics lessons.

The whole concept behind a government is that everyone agrees to abide by its rules. You don't have to believe that the rules are right or best, but you do have to abide by them. In a representative democracy, the representatives create those rules on behalf of individual citizens. Again, you don't have to agree that a particular rule is the best, but you do have to accept that your opinion is in the minority.

This is why civilized cultures see bribery (or even "campaign contributions") as such a serious threat to society. If you can appeal to and corrupt the people's representative and distort him not to represent those people, then you no longer have a representative democracy. Instead, you've created a plutocracy, where the rules are created by those rich enough to pay for representation. A plutocracy will force people to abide by rules that lack popular support. A representative democracy will force a minority to abide by rules that most people favor.

Every May, I call Comcast and threaten to cancel. In exchange, they usually offer me the same "discount" as new subscribers. Last year's offer was internet+basic cable for $50, vs internet only for $65.

I figure Comcast must have such a massive stockpile of set-top boxes that they're willing to pay their customers $15/month to store them. Or, like "12 CDs for the price of 1," they make so much money off the people who forget to cancel after the trial that they don't mind the "loss."

There's a surprisingly strong movement, at least in the US, essentially claiming that it's "better" to rent almost anything. Rent your cable modem and get a free upgrade when DOCSIS 3 is retired. Lease your car and save on depreciation. Rent a house and save thousands on taxes and maintenance. These notions are so logically and economically flawed that it's hard not to imagine a (at best) disingenuous campaign, but maybe it goes along with the disposable-everything culture and inability to see past the next paycheck.

You're mistaken: Rockoon is so principled, he never uses any subsidized product. He obviously doesn't own a car, as the automotive industry itself has been bailed out far too often. Public transit is right out, obviously, He can't even bike, because the rubber subsidy means no tires. So, Rockoon walks everywhere on pure leather shoes, bought only from chain stores with over 1000 employees to avoid "small business" subsidies. He rents a house rather than accept the government subsidy on a mortgage. Even there, he has to sit in the dark to avoid subsidies on all forms of electrical generation. He eats no sugar, corn, wheat or dairy. He is fortunate to be able to wear wool clothes these days, because the cotton subsidy means no BVDs. But it's all worth it, to avoid selfishly taking money from other taxpayers.

Really, when you think about it, it's easy to understand why he's such an angry guy. If you spent your days in woolen underwear, you'd be a little irritable, too.

He was right at the time. He said that circa 1995, and it was mostly about Usenet. Usenet had a distributed system for maintaining discussions, somewhat like a BitTorrent for blogs. Even though individual servers could become quite large and popular, thus potentially gaining the power to filter, censor, or delete content, that content was simultaneously mirrored across multiple other servers. Users could therefore tell whether a particular server was censoring and switch to a different provider.

The web (as opposed to the net) is largely centralized. Economies of scale and growing bandwidth have largely quashed the ancient system local mirrors. Have largely allowed ad-supported commercial entities to replace more altruistic university-run services. The web can not route around censorship very well, and the web has killed off the internet services that can

At most state schools, the per student spending on undergraduate instruction has increased at very close to, or below, the rate of inflation over the past 10-20 years. This is really very impressive, considering the massive increase in enrollment over that time.

Meanwhile, the student cost to attend those schools has increased at 2-3x the rate of inflation. The difference is due to states, across the board, failing to increase education spending to meet the expansion and, in many cases, actually reducing education spending. Education is no longer considered a public benefit, and taxpayers refuse to pay for some other kid's schooling.

That is spin. Many of those Republicans - McConnell, McCain, Hatch, etc - opposed the bill not because the authorized data collection programs trample the rights of Americans, but because the restrictions placed on the NSA damage its ability to protect Americans. The Republican 'opposition' prefer more spying.

The Patriot act did not explicitly empower the bulk collection of communication metadata. That power was based on a broad interpretation of the text that the courts seem increasingly likely to deem illegal. In contrast, the "Freedom" act will require ISPs and phone companies to log and retain this metadata, and will explicitly allow NSA to demand that data based on 'reasonable articulable suspicion' going out two hops a named individual. So, if NSA has a 'reasonable suspicion' that someone might be bad, and that person googles "famous US landmarks," then NSA can ISPs provide data from anyone else who used google.

This may be a restriction over just having a desktop tool to query their own database, but the FISA not historically been much of an impediment. They're mostly just moving the data warehouse from NSA to the ISPs. ISPs that used not to log your every connection will now be required to. ISPs that used those logs only for technical troubleshooting will now be required to develop tools for identifying and connecting endpoints, in order to provide that data to the government upon request. They are certain to find commercial uses for that data to offset the costs.

So, the law that the NSA twisted to justify the bulk metadata program ended, but it was replaced with a law that explicitly authorizes bulk metadata collection and moves that collection to private companies that are not restricted by the 4th amendment. It's being sold to the public like a big curtailing of power, but it doesn't look that way to me

People like authoritarian, protective governments. They like for someone to focus their fear on a particular movement or group. They like to think that something is being done about that threat. They know they're not doing anything wrong and will be untouched by those protective measures. Even if there is some small consequence, the security is worth it.

These people don't speak, so you don't know they exist. They're part of the 95% of slashdot readers who have never posted a comment. They don't have strong opinions. They are good people, always ready with a smile and a wave, always ready to help a neighbor in need, and never asking for anything in return. They just want to go about their life, and a strong, protective government with visible police and pro-active defense is very comforting.

Just make sure you divest this regularly and diversify. You do not want to have both your job and your emergency/retirement savings to be dependent on the continued success of one company.

Starting a business is very risky, regardless of when you do it or what your skills are. In countries, like the US, without a social safety net to support those who try-but-fail, it is much better to try while it's not too big a lifestyle adjustment to live on rice and beans, while you can sleep in your car (tough to do with a 2-year-old), and while you can fall back on your parents should worse come to worst.

Kids spend 16 years being taught to follow instructions and wait for guidance from anointed leaders. 16 years being prepared to trade the majority of their labor value for the false security of a "regular" paycheck. The sooner they try to take initiative and responsibility for their own success, the better. If they fail, at worst they'll appreciate that there's more to running a successful organization than the armchair CEOs seem to think. At best, they'll learn from their failure, start over, and be succeed on the second or third try.