Offshoring doesn't change the argument at all. They can offshore whether they pay corporate taxes or not.

Correct. They have no legal obligation.

Well, it is their job, and if they do it badly enough the voters might get upset and replace the police commissioner/chief/sheriff. But if they choose not to come help you or, if as is more likely, they come and decide to wait outside until they're sure the situation is safe, you (or your remaining family) can't sue them.

That's not necessary. Profits not paid out as dividends get passed through to investors another way, in the form of higher share values. If investors are taxed on capital gains, they'll pay those taxes when the gains are realized. Plus, eventually the corporation will either spend that money or pay it out, at which point it will be taxed.

No, they're not. Numerous court rulings, all the way to the Supreme Court, make it clear that the police have no duty whatsoever to defend you. Lots of them are nice guys and will if they happen to be in the right place at the right time, but they have no obligation to do it, and many of them won't.

Suggesting no corporate taxation is not the same as suggesting no taxation.

Even if Facebook were paying more in taxes, that money wouldn't be paying police in my town. It wouldn't even be paying police in the town where Facebook's employees live. Or fire departments, or roads, etc. Taxes paid by Facebook employees, however, do pay for government services where they live.

Focus on taxing the money at the point it gets transferred to individuals and the only way the taxes can be avoided is to move the people... but if they move the people they move the costs as well as the revenues. Note that companies can't work around this by giving employees (or executives) cars, houses, etc., because those sorts of benefits are treated as taxable income.

Counties and cities can, and should, also use property taxes to get the cash required to maintain roads and other local infrastructure used by corporations and their employees.

Set corporate taxes to zero and focus on taxing the money as it flows out. This would include taxing capital gains. Then corporations would have no reason to move to Dublin... unless they really are looking to use Irish labor.

Office suites in 1993 had real-time collaboration?

I understand what you mean, but I think your comment overlooks both features that were common in 1993 word processors and the huge benefits (for many workflows) of the collaboration capabilities of Docs. Do not underestimate the efficiencies that can be achieved in a meeting where everyone can edit the spreadsheet or document around which the meeting revolves. And with the Docs/Hangout integration, the meeting can even be distributed. The versioning of Docs is something else that 1993 word processors didn't have, at all, and is very valuable.

Whether or not the cloud-ish features of Docs are useful to you depends on what you're trying to do. If they are, though, Docs is light years ahead of 1993 word processors.

Including Google.

And it's incomplete!

There are numerous elements whose function isn't spelled out. Instead, the "spec" just points to previous implementations of Word and says "do it like that".

What exactly are you referring to? Exceptions in C++? If so, did you actually read the rationale in the style guide? Its conclusion is that exceptions are a good thing on balance, but that retrofitting them onto a large code base (hundreds of millions of lines of code) which was not written to be exception-safe is not feasible. It's not a matter of being straight-jacketed, it's a matter of making appropriate engineering tradeoffs in a context where extreme scalability and reliability is a basic requirement, and agility is a critical business goal.

"Lowest common denominator" is not a good description of the programming done at Google, BTW.

I agree, but this doesn't counter the argument laid out in the Google style guide, which boils down to "it's really hard to safely add exceptions into a large code base which wasn't written with exception safety in mind."

Nope. But you really should stop deluding yourself.

Both are stupid and counterproductive decisions which do long-term damage to our economic prospects.

Utter nonsense. Granted that the deficit means treasuries have soaked up a large portion of available investment capital, but that's far from saying none was available. None was available to the automakers in their current form, because investors quite rightly recognized that it would be throwing good money after bad (as was the federal bailout money). But automakers forcibly restructured into greater efficiency would have been a different issue.

(BTW, using obscenities doesn't add strength to your arguments... quite the opposite. Facts and logic work much better.)

LOL. You do know that CDSs, and various other mortgage-backed securities existed and were growing in popularity before the end of Glass-Steagall (note the correct spelling, BTW). The most that economists (actual economists, not media talking heads) agree upon is that GLBA probably accelerated the banking crisis. Many, however, think that's probably a good thing since delaying the crises would have made it worse.

Here's a question for you: Which specific investment banking practices which led to the sub-prime lending collapse would have been curtailed had Glass-Steagall remained in effect? If you find something and document it well you'll have a publishable econ research paper.

Pot, kettle. There is no evidence that the same problem wouldn't have happened without GLBA, and to believe that banning one very particular form of financial instrument will save us all... that's pure ideology.

So... your claim is that there aren't significant numbers of criminals? That's a heck of a claim.

The comparison with terrorists -- who really are very, very small in numbers -- is silly.