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Comment Re:People have AMT (Score 1) 324

The problem here is the most of the money is either made or spent off shore from the incorporated nation. These corporations have created subsidiary corporations within other jurisdictions and sell to them at costs of a loss and the subsidiary ends up making the money in the jurisdiction that has low taxes.

And Alternative minimum tax would not be able to get around that because each incorporation is recognized legally as a separate corporation/company even when they are entirely owned by one of them.

Where the confusion happens is in the SEC (and equivalent) filings in which the owned subsidiaries get counted as an asset so it's activities are reported along with the parent corporation's activities. However, it doesn't reflect the obligations in differing nations or jurisdictions. Imagine it like this, you own an apartment building in the US and another in France. You form a corporation in France and place the apartment building there so make accounting and legal compliance easier. You pay property taxes on the properties only in the countries in which they actually are. Well, as long as you do not bring your rental income back to the US, you pay taxes on it only in France and it wouldn't even be counted on your US tax forms. But if I sued you because you got drunk and ran over my cat and you lost everything, those apartments in France would count as one of your assets.

Keep in mind, it's a bit more complicated then that, but that should give the gist of it.

Comment Re:Most taxes are legalized theft (Score 1) 324

Once in a while it is time to go pedantic.
Words have meanings. We can string words together without regard to their meanings, and create an aphorism that sounds good, but it leads to logical incorrectness and a misunderstanding of how things work. It would be better if you were just gibbering.

Theft
In common usage, theft is the taking of another person's property without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.

Tax
A tax (from the Latin taxo; "rate") is a financial charge or other levy imposed upon a taxpayer (an individual or legal entity) by a state or the functional equivalent of a state such that failure to pay, or evasion of or resistance to collection, is punishable by law.

Donation
A donation is a gift given by physical or legal persons,

Taxation is not theft. The two words describe different circumstances and processes. The outcome may be the same (your stuff is gone), but they are two different words with different meanings.

It would seem to me that if you do not want to pay your taxes but do so under threat of law, it would be theft. If you do want to pay your taxes voluntarily, it would be a donation. Of course this is using common understanding of definitions.

Comment Re:Most taxes are legalized theft (Score 1) 324

The first Budget in Obama's term put the war spending on budget.

They were off budget during Bush's terms but one of the first acts Obama did with a democrat congress was to put them on budget.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02...

Now, people may think "good, we need to account for that money anyways" but the fact is they were always accounted for in the end. The problem with this is the rules of congress say you have to pay for new spending. With the wars off budget, when congress decided to do something new or increase something, they had to either decrease somewhere else, raise taxes, or assume an influx of revenue with a realistic chance of it happening. Now, when the wars wind down, congress can simply spend the money as new spending without having to at minimum look for it.

Note, I saw some articles saying that we are still using some supplemental appropriates (off budget) for spending on the wars. I am led to believe this is minor compared to the on budget spending for it.

Comment Re: illogical captain (Score 1) 937

That's why I picked the religious equivalent of the college course "Underwater Basket-Weaving 101." (Which also has a Wikipedia page.) Treat it as a hypothetical example only, and we can focus on the meaning it was meant to convey instead.

Fair enough. but the point I was intending to make was that it never was a scientific endeavor that I can tell, just philosophical mental masturbation. But I understand what you meant, - when including unscientific parts, you cannot come to a scientific conclusion. But I disagree as even with fictional game characters, you can scientifically evaluate aspects of the traits of both the characters and game and determine if they are capable of performing challenges within the game. Or in other words, you can do scientific experiments with gravity without knowing exactly what makes gravity work.

So I don't mean a scientist can't be religious, or that you can't do a scientific study of how religious views have changed in the last fifty years. I mean that in most ways, science can't be used to verify or disprove many aspects of the world's religions. It's just not compatible, not up to that job. The two are mostly incompatible.

And I disagree. Whether God was on their side or not, you can scientifically test if a battle in a war actually happened, where it may have happened, and if one side won against all odds. You certainly cannot test if God made it happen or determined the outcome, but the rest you can.

Full disclosure: I'm not a scientist, but I enjoy science. I'm not religious either though, not having been raised with it. Though I did grow up in a diverse neighborhood with several religions represented. By the time I was old enough to be asked "What religion are you?" I realized I didn't have an answer and couldn't find a method of picking one that didn't feel any less arbitrary than throwing darts at a list while blindfolded. I still have not selected one and likely never will.

That doesn't make much difference to me. Religious or not, I think you might be putting too much emphasis on everything being true in order to move on to what you can tell is true. But this could come back and bite like in an experiment with Gravity, for the longest of time, we knew it existed, we have several theories to why it exists, but didn't know how/why it works other than an attraction. General theory of relativity is the common understanding now but it is being replaced with a quantum hybrid model and being soaked into the theory of everything. Yet it has been tested so much that we use it to our advantage all the time. We have even devised machines that take advantage of forces greater than gravity to defeat it (planes and air resistance/pressure) and we did this before our common theory of understanding was in place. This is a prime example of how you can discount what you don't know or cannot test yet still test and use to your advantage.

So the unknown and untestable should never be an impediment to your exploration of science. As with the war example, saying God was with them and guaranteed the outcome does not mean the battle never took place. It just means you cannot test one aspect of it.

Comment Re:News for Nerds? (Score 1) 67

Perhaps the ability to pick up the sound without outside interference too? Or the fact that the MEMS creates more or less a digital signal by default?

Actually, it likely isn't doing anything with sound in the traditional sense. The MEMS microphone is pressure sensitive so it is likely not listening for breathing but measuring pressure differentials when breathing occurs. This could aid speed because you could close your lips and move your tongue or mouth or even flex your throat to force air through your nose to do the Morse code quicker then short bursts of breathing. In this case, air pressure would be different with air moving verses not moving even if just by minute amounts. Although the article says distinguishable breaths so I may be wrong on it.

Comment Re:Car Dealers should ask why they're being bypass (Score 3, Interesting) 155

And even then... Tesla doesn't have to deal with the dealerships. That whole model of sales is obviously going to come under challenge from all the other car companies now that will all ask "why do we have to deal with you when Tesla can do what they want?"

Maybe Toyota or Ford will want to have their own stores. And the dealerships are going to have to justify themselves to those organizations.

They would have to cancel all their franchises first. The State Supreme Court ruling said they couldn't sue Tesla because Tesla were not franchised Tesla dealerships. So if Ford or Toyota had franchised dealerships- they would have to get rid of them first in order to sell direct.

Tesla could open franchised dealerships and sell in the states they are restricted in. But my guess is that margins are paper thin and they do not think the markup necessary for franchised dealerships would be attractive enough to sell the cars.

Comment Re: illogical captain (Score 1) 937

It is the many assumptions that are accepted in most religions that are the problem.

It's not a problem, it just isn't scientific. Philosophy is not scientific either, but there are many avenues where science can be applied.

A crude example would be the angels-dancing-on-a-pin religious question that some well-meaning people tried to apply the scientific method to once upon a time

I have never heard of this before so I looked it up. All I can find on it seems to be a philosophical exercise and not any scientific endeavor. Do you have information on it outside of that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Unfortunately, there are at least two assumptions that must be made before that question can be looked at scientifically: the existence of pins and the existence of angels. (There are many more, such as the motivation for divine pin dancing in the first place, but this is just a crude example anyway.) One can devise an experiment to demonstrate acceptable pin-ness of a given object, but there we have to stop. One cannot build science on unsupported (by science) assumptions.

Like I said, all I can find on it is philosophical concentration- and modern usages to somewhat denote the same as naval gazing. Are you one of those people who suffer this spokism or whatever in that you simply cannot fathom philosophy without passing it through a scientific lens?

This sort of thing happens at every level of religion. That is why science tends to be incompatible with most of them.

Not at all. The vast majority of religions is little more than historical accounting's with meaning pressed into them.

At the most basic level, there should be an experiment such that if I do X and Zeus exists, then A should happen, and if Zeus does not exist, then B should happen.

Is there an experiment you can conduct to see if my friend Frank exists like this (oh yeah, without gaining his explicit permission or demanding his attendance)? Does that mean Frank doesn't exist or he is incompatible with science? You are talking about an experiment to compel someone or something with a free will to do something specific in order to satisfy your curiosity. Try going hunting sometime. You can get all the calls in the world, spray yourself down with animal piss, spend shit loads of money on clothing that masks the human scent, and still sit in the woods all damn day without ever seeing the game you are after. That doesn't mean it isn't in the woods or even those woods, it just means they didn't pass by you. This happens all the time to some hunters and even nature watchers. You simply cannot force something with a free will to jump and that doesn't make it incomparable with science either. Think of free will as being a choice of when two mixture are combined, to either change color or not at it's choosing.

Science can't disprove many aspects of most religions and that is why it's incompatible. The devil is in the assumptions, you might say

Science cannot disprove many aspects of reality either. You cannot scientifically disprove the other guy ran the red light which caused the accident most of the time. You cannot scientifically disprove my friend Frank exists. You cannot disprove my accounting of something that happened in third grade when I was the only witness. What you can do is say there is not enough evidence. But more importantly, even without being able to disprove any of that, you can scientifically address aspects of the crash from the running of the red light, you can scientifically address things Frank has done, you can scientifically explain whatever I claims to have witnessed in third grade, therefore just like religion, it is not incompatible with science. There are just areas that reach outside of science.

Comment Re:No, no. Let's not go there. Please. (Score 1) 937

No, you are wrong. I said what I said because that is who I meet and that is what they do.

I know science proves religion _unnecessary_ but I was describing a specific type of person- of which there are a lot- who claim science proves_religion_wrong. Do you understand that I am saying specific people are doing a specific thing and not what reality is or should be?

Now, how does that bode for you when my username is so apt and you cannot follow a fucking sentence properly.

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