i'm not from the US :) Either way that legend is hard to believe. Reportedly the US code itself is 16k pages and with the IRS rulings you get to 73k o.O
According to the internet France is somewhere around 2k pages and i doubt Germany is different.

as for corps not being easy to uproot - well, what you say is probably true. Still, individuals don't hire whole departments of people whose only job is to shave off 1% here and there that will translate to hundreds of millions. With that kind of incentive you can afford to set up all kinds of schemes involving dozens of entities, subsidiaries and all that BS that will make the taxman's head spin.

i hope you got some hard numbers supporting that notion that they are a net drain. What if the gains from reduced prices for consumers are in fact greater than the additional burden on the taxpayer?
Either way corps are pass-through entities, a fiction conjured by law. They don't live, they don't eat, they don't spend, they don't earn - people do. Chasing corps is an excercise in futility, a game of whack-a-mole.

so how about keeping it simple. Set the corporate tax to 10% no ifs no buts and get rid of all the bs. Why is there a corporate tax anyway? Corps are merely pass-through entities that can uproot and move with few strokes of a pen. Just wait at the exit, where the money gets passed to the flesh-and-bone people who actually get to spend it.

I've read somewhere that the compliance with the US tax code costs in aggregate something to the tune of 200 billion dollars. Nobody cares about that but that's countless man-hours thrown at a completely unproductive activity, a pure waste.

and that means that you can't write a rather polite letter without being crucified by the anti-fanboys all over the internet? If simple 'NO' was sufficient, why the owner went all 'HEY GUISE, UNBUNTOO ARE CENSORING TEH FREE SPEECH!!!' ?

unity has these lenses, right? If you have them enabled they query the internet for answers. Some of these lenses like the Amazon one allow you to buy stuff and in case of these purchases done from the dash Canonical gets a cut as the partner or whatever. You don't like it, you disable it and the drama is over.

how do you know these people didn't get the consent from Canonical to use the *buntu umbrella? You don't.

how was he silenced? He was asked to remove branding not to shut the whole thing down.
If you ran a company, would you like it if somebody had a www.fix<your_product/companyname>.com with your logo all over the place? Try that with Apple and you can watch your inbox fill with C&Ds in real time.
It's entirely different from someone running the critical article with the url "ubuntucritic.blogspot.com/how_to_fix_privacy"

You can criticize MS and Canonical for many things, but for this? Come the fuck on.

yes, but it is a bit unintuitive but not that hard to grasp. It's one of the easiest parts of general relativity to understand.

there is no universal time scale and the reason is the speed of light being the hard cap. To make observations about chronology in the universal sense you'd have to be theoretically able to travel instantly to any point in the universe to witness simultaneous events as they happen or the information about these events would have to be able to propagate instantly so you can perceive them as simultaneous from any point in the universe. We know that can't happen - information and everything else can travel at c at best. That means that every point in universe has its unique frame of reference with its own meaning of 'before', 'after' and 'now'. 'Now' is when the info about the event moving with the speed of light like a shockwave throughout the universe reaches the observer and there is no sense in mixing other frames of reference when talking about your own. It's a million years old event there, but it's happening NOW here. The end.

so EVs get to freeload? It's not like the owners of these expensive toys are having trouble to make ends meet.

2 words: electric cars
They would be effectively freeloading. Sure, some might say 'good because carbon something something', but it's not like people who drive expensive EVs need subsidies.

they matter but they should be minimized. Right now what you get is a shitton of uninformed people screaming 'there out to be law' every time something bad happens and politicians rushing to appease them with half assed bills. Feel-good policies are rarely good from the macro perspective. Piling bad opportunistic laws upon laws leads to a contradictory, opaque mess that is impossible to track and understand by an average citizen so now you apparently need that enlightened ancient Egypt priesthood class aka the bureaucrats to keep things in order and the citizen can safely go back to his favorite TV show.

Cold analytic minds who are able to see through the complex systems, understand the concept of unintended consequences and don't fall for pretty soundbites are important, but they are undervalued in democratic systems, as their vote still counts as 1.

the problem is that the preventative care is not cheaper.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/229356/preventive-care-myth/michael-fumento
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/29/us-preventive-economics-idUSBRE90S05M20130129

doesn't matter, it should be paid out of pocket. You pay for it either way as your preventative care is included in the premium so you might as well drop the BS and see the price tag, black on white.
Paying via insurer with some sweet rebates thrown in the mix only left uninsured out in the cold and they face hundred of dollars in bills for most trivial things. It would have never happened if the insurers didn't have that much power in the market, but that's a consequence of using the insurance system to pay for every little BS. This is what happens when someone is allowed to act as an intermediary in almost every transaction, not unlike the banks who have the world by the balls because everybody has money parked in them.

sure, the system is byzantine but thousands of pages of govt regulations certainly don't help either, compliance costs too.

the rich have the stock market to park their money on, what do the poor have? It's not like the will get a raise any time soon to offset the ballooning costs of living.

the problem with centrally planned price ceilings is that they tend to ignore economic reality and if they happen to be too low in at least some areas, you can expect shortages of things affected by them. The Hippocratic oath takes you only so far when the doctor has $200k to repay.