You are not multiplying the complexity times 50, you are multiplying it times the number of taxing authorities in the entire United states(cities+counties+states+ special purpose districts+transit districts+who knows what else) and all of those can be updated a any time.
Texas alone has at least 1500 distinct taxing entities for example.
Your'e talking about a max of 50 entities that will receive disbursements. Checking against a particular table to see the sales tax rate and then calculating it and adding it to a particular line item wouldn't be all that complicated.
I live in Texas (one of 50 states) we have a state sales tax.
I also live in Travis County(One of 254 counties in Texas) and Travis County has its own sales tax rate.
I do not live in, but do most of my shopping in Austin(one of 1,215 incorporated cities in Texas), and Austin has it's own tax rate.
Because Austin is Incorporated, things bought in Austin only have the state and city taxes, not the county taxes.
Looking at the state tax information page(http://www.window.state.tx.us/taxinfo/sales/) there are also 'Transit' and 'Special Purpose Districts' with their own tax rates.
Because I do not even know what sorts of Transit sales tax or Special purpose district sales tax might apply to me, I will ignore those for now.
This gives 1,470 independently managed tax rates in Texas alone. (Cities+Counties+state)
I would hardly be surprised is some of these taxing entities did not even have an online presence to contact about what the current tax rate is, and you can be certain that they will not all remember to send their updated tax information to every online retailer each time they tweak their local regulations.
Admittedly Texas is a pretty big state, and there are probably less than (1470*50=)73,500 distinct and independent taxing bodies (that can update their tax code either at any time they feel like it or according to a set of regulations that are probably distinct for each one) in the United states, but that is at least the correct scale of the problem.
Or it is if you *only* sell to the United States, if you sell international too, things start to get messy...
Do you even know if the city but not county rule/law is in effect for all the states in the US?
I have lived in different parts of Travis County for more than 30 years, and I do not even know if there are any Transit or Special District sales taxes that I currently pay, and you think that some start-up that sells novelty bobble-headed dolls and pez dispensers could easily track down all the taxes they need to charge each and every one of their customers?
You've fallen for the fallacy that when rich people have money, they invest it, and all investment leads to more economic activity. Unfortunately, it's not true. Real investment that creates wealth only happens when there's enough demand for the wealth created.
When there is not enough demand for the wealth, the cost of that wealth is reduced until there is demand for it.
A bank is not going to just sit on a pile of money, they will re-loan that money even if they only get a small return on it because a small return is better than no return. That would be called 'lowering interest rates'.
(not counting the roughly 10% that the feds require banks to keep on-hand)
And this will do nothing to solve carbon emissions, you are taking it out of the air, to put it back again while loosing 75% of energy in the process.
That will actually make that gas-guzzler carbon-neutral if they only use gas produced from the air.
Better even since there are usually some carbon deposits left in/on the vehicle.
Also, what kind of energy losses would you usually expect when sending electricity to a station out in the middle of nowhere that needs to have connectors that will allow you to recharge your car the equivalent of 4-5 gallons/minute?
There will probably be a legal classification for cars that are fuel-inefficient so that they can only use carbon-neutral gas, assuming there are not regulations to require all cars to use carbon neutral gas...
It's also probably worth noting that impulse control is a resource, and the more you have to use it, the harder it becomes.
I have found impulse-control to be more like a muscle: the more you exercise it the stronger it becomes.
You would be surprised how much easier this sort of thing becomes when you make a habit of things like parking on the far-side of the lot, using a hand-basket instead of a cart when shopping, and using the stairs any time it is feasible(back when my office was on the 3rd floor I would even hold my breath while running up the stairs). Just a little bit of effort over a long time can have a huge effect.
It seems I misremembered the dates, GURPS 4th(2004) was only released 16 years after 3rd edition(1988) which was released only 2 years after the 1st and 2nd editions(1986).
According to the Wikipedia article, the Fallout game was originally going to license GURPS, but then changed to use their own derivative version during development.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GURPS#Licensed_works
Have you ever encountered GURPS? (Generic Universal Role Playing System)
They recently released a 4th edition(the 3rd edition was released in the 80's).
It has a point-based character generation system that uses d6 (mostly 3d6 for success rolls), but there are enough rules/optional rules to give any degree of realism you with to put in the effort to achieve. While everything you need to play is in the basic set(two books in 4th edition), they also have hundreds of generally well-researched source-books from Aztecs(pre-Spanish mezzo-America) to Biotech to Ogre(the giant cyber-tanks) to Lens-man(Based on the books by 'Doc' Smith) to Wheel of Time(Robert Jordan) to Diskworld(Terry Pratchett) to Martial arts to Celtic Myth to Supers. http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/
Of course all of the source-books from 3rd edition work just fine for 4th edition, you may want to tweak the point-costs for the few things that were not very balanced in 3rd edition, but even that is pretty optional.(4th edition mostly ironed out the bugs found in 20+ years of playing and publishing new material for 3rd edition)
My company produces a certain software product for which our customers buy licenses.
I on the other hand make changes to that package and have roughly 20 copies of it sitting on my hard-drive right now. (customized for different deployments mostly)
I just copy them down from the repository and build.
It would be hard to say that I have a license for each and every copy of the platform I have, and thus you could technically say I am running unlicensed software.
On the other hand, my employer owns all the copyrights to this platform and they pay me to make these changes, so I am also not in danger of being pursued for this.
If I were asked if I had a license for every piece of software on my work computer, I would consider the truthful answer to be 'no' just on the situation specified above(one that is no doubt common to many if not most in the software industry).
As the BSA wants to scare their supporters with this sort of survey(to get more $upport), I have little doubt that they make the question as vague as possible to get lots of 'Yes' answers. As such I would consider this survey to be about as accurate as a pop-up alert in my web browser claiming to have found malware on my PC.
Considering that low levels of autism-like symptoms seem to be prevalent in engineering disciplines, is this something that could be used to turn your dreamy/artistic/social child into more of a nerd/engineer type?
Also, I wonder what sort of reaction there would be if instead of autism, this paper was dealing with a potential to detect/fix some more politically sensitive group such as the GLBT community
That really depends on if you are buying 100% organic-whole-grain-gauaranteed-to-improve-your-chakra-karma-enhancing food, or just plain basic food that is good for you like carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes, etc.
All of those are available for less than $1/lb, generally under $.50/lb.
Shop the produce section in Walmart and you can find a lot of healthy food for cheap.
If they are just concerned about music, just replace every audio portion that is returned in Germany with a voice explaining that Gema has made it impossible for YouTube to play sounds in Germany for the time being. Here is their contact information.
Internet is from IP which stands for Internet(work) Protocol
If you are crossing form one network(say Ethernet) to another(say DSL/Cable Internet/802.1 wireless/token ring/etc) you are on an internet
If that internet is connected to the Internet Backbone then you are on The Internet.
Unless Comcast's network is unconnected to the rest of the 'net, their network is part of The Internet.
For the consumer, The Internet is anything on the other side of their connection(be that a cable modem, DSL modem, ISP provided wireless router or their cellular connection.
If the Comcast service and Netflix/YouTube come in over the same IP connection, then treating them differently *IS* a net neutrality issue. The only justification for treating them differently is if they come in over different wires/media
Now, I understand the science behind vaccination, and am actually PRO vaccine, but when you can the ingredients to a box of cereal, but NOT the ingredients to a shot your a directly injecting into your infant, and more importantly a giant mega-corporation's shot with a proven track record of including known toxins like mercury.....
Sure, there is ignorance out there, but blaming parents who want to protect their children is stupid. Blame the giant corporations who included mercury in the shots in the first place.
According to the FDA and Wikipedia the only commonly recommended vaccination for children under 7 years of age that still contains Thiomersal is an Influenza vaccination for children over 2 years of age.
That suggests that those parents were not only panicky and over-reacting, but also over-generalizing and uninformed.
Also, I am pretty sure that manufacturers are not allowed to put inactivated viruses inside a box of cereal they intend to sell in stores, but that inactivated virus is the entire point of a vaccine, making your box of cereal example less than useful.
Finally, the reason that those Evil Giant Corporations put it in those vaccines in the first place might not be quite so evil...
Thiomersal's main use is as an antiseptic and antifungal agent. In multidose injectable drug delivery systems, it prevents serious adverse effects such as the Staphylococcus infection that, in one 1928 incident, killed 12 of 21 children inoculated with a diphtheria vaccine that lacked a preservative.[4] Unlike other vaccine preservatives used at the time, thiomersal does not reduce the potency of the vaccines that it protects.
(this is the first three sentences of the Use section of the Wikipedia Thiomersal article)
References:
http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/VaccineSafety/UCM096228
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal
TFA did not specify any pre-injury base-line for intelligence.
Did they all take intelligence tests before enlisting?
Seems unlikely.
Did they have any other way to check cognitive function prior to the injury so they had some sort of a useful base-line?
Is it possible that a majority of the differences, especially in general intelligence, were less related to the injuries and more related to nature/nurture?
How about compensation?
Humans are great at adapting.
Did they check their results with people who had more recent injuries?
Might be a good starting point, but it sounds like there is a lot that could affect the things they were testing for that were not isolated or otherwise accounted for.
Actually, that is a relatively new thing from what I understand.
Prior to the US specifically prohibiting the state to have an official religion, the secular and religious authorities were generally two different parts of the same authority structure.
If the founders had been Muslim, that would not have been possible since Islam is supposed to encourage the formation of Islamic states. Many other religions(most perhaps?) also have specific secular authority structures as part of the religion(Church of England when the king was also the pope for example, or the religion in North Korea where the 'Dear Leader' is also a religious authority).
I think it says a lot about the wisdom of the founders of this country that so many people now consider their radical idea to be the way things really ought to be.
Heisenberg may have been here.
