Then everyone says: "Hey look, the USA is ignoring international patent treaties. I guess we're not bound by them any more either." China sends the USA a gift basket.

This isn't the way I remember it - unless we're remembering different things. From what I recall, companies were forcing their employees to get a business number, and hiring them as contractors so as to avoid paying for entitlements like superannuation, holidays, etc. The Fair Work Ombudsman slapped them down.

In any case, you'll pay more tax as a company than you will as an individual - you will pay corporate tax on your company's profits, and then personal income tax in all money that you receive from your company. If you spend corporate money as if it was your own to dodge tax, then ASIC will want to have a long, hard talk with you, regardless of what the ATO does.

Then you'll drive every retail industry into the ground.

Say I'm an electronics store. I operate on a profit margin of about 2%, because there's really not that much margin in electronics (or most retail, except the high end). I buy $100,000 worth of stock. I sell that entire volume for $102,000, making myself $2000 profit. I then receive a tax bill based off my revenue of $100,000, instead of my actual income of $2,000.

And I'm sure a licensing requirement would have totally stopped that. I mean, he might have been willing to flaunt federal laws against sexual exploitation of a minor, but he would totally have respected state licensing requirements. Right?

That's pheasant. Although, traditionally, it was fine to harass peasants, but peasants weren't allowed to hunt pheasants.

Bloody English.

Same thing. It's inclusive, by being vague.

Yes, I'm sure that when they sat down to formulate legislative regulations on corporate finance records, they thoroughly intended that it be used for punishing fishermen who caught undersized fish.

If they're going literal, then the groupers weren't destroyed. They were just placed in an indeterminate location. Hell, take it up a notch, and rely on the second law of thermodynamics.

Stupidly vague laws resulting in legislative over-reach is one of many reasons the law is an ass.

I know, right. I've been making payments online by stuffing bank notes into my drive case for years. Funny, I never seem to get the goods I order.

You mean, programs about educating people on how to engage in useful and productive activities?

How terrible.

Says the man who works at a public college teaching English, women’s studies, comparative literature, and classical studies - fields noted for the career prospects of their graduates.

David Halperin

MP3 players existed before the iPod
Smartphones existed before the iPhone
Tablets existed before the iPad
Smartwatches exist, and the iWatch doesn't

Apple doesn't create new categories; they polish and popularise them - sort of the way Blizzard has done with the RTS, action-RPG, and MMO genres in gaming.

Or, you believe the government should be limited in the things they are allowed to do, removing the incentive for bribing them in the first place.

In other words, tax evasion is what other people do when I don't like it.

The whole of climate science and meteorology is predicated on the fact that those systems are not random. Yeah, the more iterations of a random event, the closer you get to the statistical average. But that doesn't mean that the more variables you add to a system, the more it converges on a predictable single value.

Is an orange the aggregate of millions of apples over a long period of time?

Really? Weather is a simpler, shorter-term analysis than climate, pretty much by definition. If we can't perform the simpler task particularly well, it argues against us being able to do the more complex.