That being said, there is some nasty stuff going on on wall street that very much needs to be strangled. Manipulations with total return swaps and similar instruments that put cash into the hands of folks with massive investment holdings without having to report the cash as income. I certainly don't understand all the machinations, but I fully support giving the IRS teeth to dig into the results, not the methods.

If you've got three yachts, five mansions, and twenty three luxury cars you'd better have paid income tax consistent with your level of spending. If it looks like income and it smells like income then as far as I'm concerned it's income. I don't care what elaborate financial transaction ultimately resulted into that valuable asset finding it's way physically into your hands.

If your houses collectively are worth 1000 times what my one house is worth and you're paying 1000 times the property taxes then I'm happy. If you're playing some trickery where they're not "really" your houses, you merely have exclusive access to them and control over them but they're "actually" expenses on the balance sheet of a Burmuda Corp that you own through seven subsidiaries then I've got a problem with that.

As long as the money just circulates through and never falls into any person's hands, who cares? At some point some human being is going to want another mansion or yacht. When they reach their hand into the pot that's when you grab them and take the government's cut.

Nobody is going to waste their life shuffling funds around and endless loop of shell corporations with no intention or method of eventually extracting some of it.

Imagine a Kennedy or Romney getting a house foreclosed on because the local government requires property taxes to be paid in cash. Or unable to restock on champagne and caviar because the clerk at the checkout doesn't accept "I own umpteen offshore corporations" as a valid method of payment. Or cleaning their own pool because every pool boy wants cash, no numbered Swiss accounts please.

The folks running these tax scams aren't doing it for kicks. They're doing it because they want to live high on the hog. As long as the taxes on their luxury lifestyles are in fair proportion to the taxes on us regular folks and our regular lifestyles who cares how the corporate books are structured.

Incidentally all those offshore shell corporations are setup by lawyers and accountants who ultimately want a cash paycheck to buy stuff with. If the CEO can buy another yacht by laying off the hoard of lawyers/accountants that spend their days fabricating shell corps he/she certainly will.

BTW, I support taxing cap gains same as income. If you had X dollars yesterday and X+Y today you owe tax on Y. I don't care where it came from or how you got it. If you're a human being you owe your fair share tax on $Y.

Well, that was a much longer and carefully structured comment on the preview screen. What's the point of a preview if what's on the preview gets truncated when you hit submit?

Oh well, I'm not going to retype that long and detailed dissertation.

How about we just eliminate the corporate taxes altogether. Instead ensure that all money paid out to individuals is properly taxed as income, apply sales tax to all purchas

So do dogs. Cats yawn too. I'm not sure about mice.

What's the point of this story, is there some burning question as to what organisms yawn? A yawning controversy I haven't heard of perhaps? Or some prospective line of in inquiry into the science of yawning?

This story seems like a puff piece devoid of any significant detail or content worth posting to Slashdot.

The UI on the SIII spends a much larger percentage of its time annoying me than the UI on the iPhone does. Among other things:

Autocorrect was so bad I had to turn it off.

Getting the insert point where I want it when editing text is much more cumbersome than the iPhone's magnifying glass mechanism.

It's not always clear why some functionality is available on screen while other functionality requires using the off screen button on the bottom left.

Way more preloaded junk apps than iPhone.

It doesn't handle my blue tooth keyboard as gracefully as my iPhone does.

The two types of app launcher screens aren't actually a problem but they seem to me like an indication of lack of a unified approach to UI design.

The main good point about the SIII is the voicemail to text feature, but if I remember correctly I had to locate and install the application to do that. Out of the box I don't think it could even do visual voicemail. Even now, tapping the little cassette tape icon on the phone screen initiates a voice call to a pre-iPhone-era touch tone driven voicemail system rather than bringing up a list of voicemails on screen.

That's nonsense. Do you even know what lockout/tagout is? How did those "suits" remove your coworker's lock? Did they cut it off or did he not put it on? Every person working on that circuit should have had their own lock and tag on that breaker.

I assume if they had cut his lock off you would have mentioned it since that's a much more serious offense than simply flipping a breaker that isn't locked/tagged.

Your coworker definitely should have been fired if he was working on an industrial power circuit without following lockout/tagout procedures.

BTW, for those not familiar the slash in this case means AND. It is always mandatory to use both a lock and a tag, it's not an either or choice.

I wonder if the definition of city limits (which is what those densities are based off of) has any general usefullness anymore. The only US city on that list is Union City which turns out to be in New Jersey. I've lived in New Jersey for 38 years and never heard of Union City and certainly wouldn't have recognized it as being bigger than New York City.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be able to identify any city limits between the northernmost part of New Jersey and at least halfway down the state. Things get a bit more spread out further south, but from central Jersey on up it's pretty much all contiguous. From residential to commercial to industrial it all pretty much flows together without any obvious boundaries.

I didn't see any contradiction in that person's post. Maybe you should re-read it. I don't have any personal knowledge of teachers' salaries, but the claim that was made is that they consist primarily of union guaranteed annual salary increases regardless of skill or talent. That is entirely consistent with the claim that during a budget crunch it would be difficult for new teachers (or even experienced teachers who have moved around rather than staying at one school for 40+ years) to get a job because the entire budget is consumed by paying large salaries to the small number of teachers who have been collecting annual increases for decades and are guaranteed continued employment and salary increases even if their performance falls short of the new teachers (whether they're fresh out of school or starting teaching after a decade or two of work in private industry.)

Frank Partnoy gives a pretty good explanation in F.I.A.S.C.O Blood in the Water on Wall Street of how the wealthy can use a Total Return Swap to avoid taxes.

We're running vCenter on a pair of physical (non-VM) servers with heartbeat. Heartbeat is a huge pain to get working and apparently pretty much requires Windows Active Directory and MS SQL (we would have preferred Oracle since we already had that in place, but our VMWare support folks couldn't get the combination of vCenter, Heartbeat and Oracle working together.)

This seems like it goes too far. I'd rather just see a ban on mandatory soda purchases. All those places that require you to buy a big gulp the moment you enter the door and refuse to allow you to leave until you've drunk it.

Oh, wait, you mean there aren't any places like that? We're only talking about banning voluntary purchases? Well we don't need the government to do anything in that case. If "the people" want to stop voluntary purchases they can do that themselves with no government effort or expense at all.

Mission accomplished! Good job mayor.

I'm pretty sure that acronym should be AFSTAR, I've never heard of the word "for" being spelled with an asterisk.

Sounds like it's even more useless than our current telepresence rooms.

We've got expensive telepresence rooms all over our company, but they're useless as far as I'm concerned. First of all, they didn't even bother to mount whiteboards on the walls, just a couple of easel style ones. Second, when you stand up to draw a diagram the fixed position cameras can't pick up anything above the middle to bottom of your chest (depending on how tall you are) and cut out the top half of even a tiny easel style whiteboard. If I wanted to be limited to screen sharing from my computer I don't need the telepresence room at all.

What sort of meeting is all about people staring at each other and walking in circles around each other examining each other from every angle? It doesn't appear that this cylindrical display is suitable for showing anything more than a single person just standing there.

I guess it would be useful for mail order prostitutes if there is such a thing, but I can't think of any other reason anyone would walk 360 degrees around another person examining them.

As far as I'm concerned a face to face meeting means standing up, drawing diagrams on the largest whiteboard available or at the very least drawing on sheets of paper and sliding them back and forth across the table.

If you're just going to show me Powerpoint slides, I'll sit in my home office and watch your screen sharing program or better yet just email me the Powerpoint. I don't need to stare at a fixed HD camera image of your face, nor do I need to walk around a "hologram" and stare at your butt.