You can call it "to the bottom" if you think you somehow benefit from high taxes. (I don't, because I work and pay taxes instead of sitting at home collecting a benefit check.)
Consider yourself lucky then. Many are born without the ability to work a single productive day in their life. Are you suggesting that they should be euthanized?
Let food-buyers pay for USDA inspections and medicine-buyers pay for FDA.
Yeah, that makes sense. If the poor can't afford taxes, just let them not eat.
The problem with these kinds of schemes is that they tend to be incredibly regressive. You can't have socialism without fairly high tax rates on the parts of the economy that actually produce wealth.
As Ms. Carnegie points out, if you want stuff taxed in your jurisdiction, change the law so that happens - dont wave the "spirit" of the law around as if it has any meaning other than a method of blackmail.
I think it would be far wiser to take the opposite approach.
The most effective form of enforcement is self-enforcement. You want to give companies incentive to just stick with boring accounting and to stop using schemes designed for tax avoidance. The best way to do that is not to create lots of well-defined rules to ban particular practices, because that means that companies can simply use different practices with relatively little risk. What you want to do is create a lot of uncertainty around whether a particular practice is legal or not. This means that companies are going to err on the side of caution, and minimize their use of tax avoidance schemes.
Any businessperson will tell you that the worst thing for a company is uncertainty in regulation. That means that in areas where you want business to grow, you want simple laws that get rid of the risk and allow companies to invest. On the other hand, in areas of the economy like derivatives and tax avoidance schemes that don't really create true value for the average citizen, you want there to be a LOT of uncertainty in risk. Make those CEOs find it impossible to sleep at night for fear that the FBI will kick down their doors while they're sleeping. Give them a reason to have their finances audited twice to make sure there isn't any activity that anybody might construe as a tax dodge. When somebody makes a minor mistake make their shareholders lose their retirement accounts. Then you'll see a return to simple accounting practices.
In an ideal world, the electorate can deal with the immoral government, and the government can deal with the immoral company by making their actions illegal (if indeed it's the will of the people to crack down on immoral activity).
I'm not arguing that they should be punished for being immoral, but long term, they probably *should* expect the law to stop treating them so favourably.
Agree, but governments should really do these kinds of tax law fixes in a way that creates tremendous expenses for companies that have been gaming the system.
Otherwise they'll just keep finding another loophole.
It might even make sense to make tax code changes ex post facto for some period of time. That would create tremendous risks for anybody taking advantage of loopholes, and thus companies would just be boring and use traditional accounting.
Any taxes paid by corporations are directly and immediately passed on to their customers anyway so what the hell is the difference?
You could argue the same thing of any tax. Sales taxes raise costs of living, which means workers won't live in the area unless employers pay more, which means their costs go up, which means prices go up, which raises the cost of living. Income taxes get passed on to employers (since they have to pay more so that people are still willing to work for them), that gets passed on to customers, and so on.
And yet, taxes still work and have worked for centuries. There might be a loop, but as long as people can keep a reasonable return on their work, they'll work. It isn't like the taxes add up to 150%.
That's not true. Companies charge what the market can bear, and if they had lower taxes, they'd mostly just reap higher margins. Do you really think Apples prices would significantly rise if their tax burden went up? That's certainly not true of all markets.
Of course they'd raise their prices when their tax burden goes up and they'll cry foul "B-B-B-but it's the ebil gubbermint thats making us raise our prices" before doing another line of coke off a high end escort's arse with rolled up $100 note that is then used to light a cigar.
That depends greatly on the specifics, but it generally isn't true. Companies can't just substantially change prices without losing money. It may be more profitable to leave the prices alone and just make less money per sale, than to raise prices and watch the volume drop.
You'd be amazed how much effort it takes to jump through all those hoops. I've seen ERP systems with fairly complex configurations to keep track of all the shell games.
When the transaction is A pays B, B ships product to A, the systems are pretty easy to build/maintain. When the transaction involves money and physical goods going through completely different paths it gets really messy staying on top of it all.
Companies do it because it still pays off, but as with most of the finance sector this stuff is just a drain on the economy. If we could get rid of it all we'd be much better off as a society.
People close tabs and browsers for a reason. Because they're fucking *done* with the page. If you want something running, you leave it running.
Maybe they just want to have a chance at being able to read the page titles in the tab list, which is impossible when you have 47 tabs open?
I don't get the problem with opt-in push notifications any more than I get the problem with opt-in desktop notifications. They allow browser applications to do stuff that non-browser applications are used for all the time.
even on smartphones the first thing people ask me is to help them shut of the annoying notifications that all apps love to spam them with
You'll need to enable these for them to work, unlike on phones where they tend to be enabled by default. However, on android you can completely suppress the ability of an application to display notifications from its settings page.
As someone mostly in the "I dun get it" crowd, I'll say the problem for me is that I feel like while I can use it, I don't have a great deal of understanding as to what it's actually doing outside of the basics. I feel like I'm following a bunch of recipes that I know work.
Git is one of those tools which you have to grok to really be effective with. The data model in the tool is not intuitive, but it works really well in practice. Once you understand how it actually works, then the rest falls into place.
Now, something git really suffers from is inconsistency in its command-line tools. Specifying a branch name varies in syntax from tool to tool, and there are a million other cases like this. So, even if you understand what you need git to do, it can take a lot of digging to figure out the right way to do it.
Not to start a flamewar, but I find systemd to be in a similar boat. It has what amounts to a class inheritance aspect to it with units, and targets are often poorly understood. There are tons of "instead of this type that" guides out there, but I think that if you want to effectively use systemd you have to grok its data model.
[Turing machines] don't figure out what they'd do and then do the opposite, unless you just invert the programming.
Again, there is nothing that the Turing machine would ever need to figure out... it simply needs to just blindly do the opposite of whatever some black box says is supposed to happen...
A Turing machine is a mathematical construction. You're trying to use the halting problem as a rationale for the universe being non-deterministic. However, the halting problem only applies to Turing machines. A Turing machine can't contain a black box, because that isn't part of the definition of a Turing machine.
It is a bit like proving that there are a countable number of integers and then trying to say that there must be a countable number of irrational numbers by just redefining the meaning of "integer." You're playing word games, but that doesn't prove anything.
To be honest, I'm not really sure how you could prove anything about the universe using an argument purely from discrete mathematics, unless it is a proof that there is no such thing as determinism at all (which certainly would be an interesting claim for a mathematician to make). Math is a world all its own, and while it can be used to describe the physical world, it has an existence apart from it in a sense.
It just means that you can't write down the state of the entire universe using only the matter present inside of it.
Except that's generally understood to be what materialistic determinism *IS*... so I'm not sure if you meant to or not, but you've really just sort of agreed with me there.
Again, you're playing word games. Determinism requires that the universe has some state, and some set of rules that determines what its next state will be (which is a really rough way of putting it when time isn't discrete and is relative, but I don't think we're arguing about that). If you're arguing that determinism means something else, then we're just talking past each other.
I have no idea whether the universe is deterministic.
For someone who is professing to have no idea, you seem to be abnormally determined to convince me that my conclusions are invalid... perhaps you should try to figure out why you believe what you do.... or if you don't know what you believe, I might suggest you should stop trying to point out what you think may be wrong with another person's ideas just because you don't happen to agree with their conclusions, because otherwise you just come across as somebody who wants to disagree for the sake of being disagreeable, and not somebody who has actually made any real attempt to rationally think through their beliefs.
Honestly, the only reason I'm continuing this discussion is because I thought you might have an interesting argument for determinism based on the halting problem, which was your original point. I wasn't sure if you were just having trouble communicating your ideas, or if they were not established in rigor.
I don't really care whether I convince you. I don't intend to be disagreeable for its own sake. I'm just skeptical. If you're going to assert that the universe is non-deterministic that is a really bold statement, and I'm not going to simply accept it at face value.
The only stand I'm taking is that I don't believe anybody has shown conclusively whether the universe is deterministic or not. I'm open to arguments one way or the other. I'm fine with thought experiments and hand-waving arguments, but I'm not going to accept them as some kind of conclusive proof.
It doesn't have to "figure out" anything... if the sufficient state to predict the future exists, then you could at least theoretically use some alleged "magical" black box to say whatever a future state is going to be based on the universe's current state, and just have the deterministic turing machine query that.
The problem with such an approach is that your machine is part of the universe, and therefore must modify it as part of performing its evaluation of the future state of the universe. The machine must also be larger than the universe to do this, since it needs to maintain in its memory the entire current state of the universe and some number of future states to perform the calculation.
Such a machine cannot exist. The fact that it can't exist doesn't mean the universe isn't deterministic. It just means that you can't write down the state of the entire universe using only the matter present inside of it.
You can't build a machine that perfectly models itself for the same reason that you can't build a box that can fit itself inside unmodified.
And Turing machines execute the instructions they're told to execute. They don't figure out what they'd do and then do the opposite, unless you just invert the programming. A hand-waving argument about doing such a thing doesn't prove anything about the universe.
In fact, the *only* real reasons that I know of to rigidly hold onto the notion that the universe is deterministic are...
I have no idea whether the universe is deterministic. I'm just pointing out that neither does anybody else.
But if the instruction table says to move left when an alleged so-called analysis of the future says it will move right
What does that even mean? The instruction table says that if the condition is A, move left, if the condition is B, move left, if the condition is C, move right, and so on. A Turing machine operates entirely in the now (just like any other conventional computer). It doesn't have to guess what it might do - it just looks at the current state, looks it up in a table, and does what it says.
If you're saying that it should try to figure out what it will do 10 steps in the future, then that is basically the halting problem and it is not possible. Nor is it necessary for its behavior to be deterministic. The only thing determinism requires is that given a current state there is only one correct immediate future state. That is exactly what a Turing machine is - a mathematical construct that is perfectly deterministic.
Ahhh AT&T, doesn't want to be classified as Common Carrier unless it helps them get out of a lawsuit on jurisdictional grounds.
Actually, they still don't wan to be. They argued to another court that the FCC didn't have the right to make them a common carrier.
I think their goal was to get this case dismissed since they're a common carrier, and then get the controls of being a common carrier tossed since they aren't one.
The behavior of a halting machine is completely deterministic
Really? What happens if you ask it to tell you if a function will terminate when the function does the opposite of whatever the halting machine says the function will do?
Turing machines only support a few instructions. It can move left, move right, stay in the same place, change state, and write something in the current position.
There is no instruction called "terminate when the function does the opposite of whatever the halting machine says the function will do." I don't even know what that means. Turing machines don't say anything - they just execute instructions.
The behavior of a Turing machine is completely deterministic. If the instruction table says to move left given the current conditions, it will move left.
The halting problem requires a deterministic system, it does not require that the universe itself to be deterministic. The universe encompasses everything that ever was, is, or will be... including all deterministic systems.
I'll accept that definition of the universe, but recognizing that "all deterministic systems" might be an empty set.
My main point is that in a deterministic universe you should be able to contrive a deterministic thought experiment which will always be able to correctly predict the outcome of the experiment, but if you design the experiment so that its output is always the opposite of whatever was predicted, then it becomes evident that there can never be sufficient information at the beginning of the experiment to predict its conclusion, and if the current state of the universe is not sufficient to predict a future state, then the universe is not deterministic.
You're basically trying a proof by contradiction here, I believe. However, your wording is really loose.
First, what do you mean by "predict the outcome of the experiment?" What experiment?
Then you say that you "should be able to contrive" an "experiment" that can predict the outcome of the "experiment," but that it will have the "output" that is the opposite of whatever was predicted. What does this statement even mean, since it appears self-contradictory, like saying let the set A contain the number 5 and not contain the number 5. I can't tell whether your conclusions follow from your premise as your premise seems confusing at best.
It seems like you're trying to do something like this: Let f(x) = x + 3. So, f(5) = 8. So let's redefine f(x) = x + 3 if x5, and it equals 9 if x=5. You haven't made a contradiction, you've just swapped one deterministic function out with another.
You also brought up the halting problem, and it isn't obvious to me how that relates. The halting problem has nothing to do with determinism, just predictability. The behavior of a halting machine is completely deterministic - it has a finitely definable starting state, and given that starting state will always end up executing the same series of steps. However, it is unpredictable in the sense that you can't tell what the result will be with certainty without actually running through all the steps to get there.
"Engineering without management is art." -- Jeff Johnson
