The problem is that capital gains aren't considered income until you sell.

Thus you can have a situation where someone has a net-worth of $100M one year, and $110M the next year - despite reporting "no income", that's patently absurd and one of the main problems with the current tax-system.

Borrowing against something does not make you richer or poorer. A guy owning an asset at $1M is exactly as rich as a guy owning an asset at $1M plus $500K that he borrowed with the asset as security, and a $500K loan. (both guy have a net-worth of $1M)

Taxing people based on short-term fluctuations and the randomness of what the stock-price happens to be on the last day of the year is probably overdoing it, and as others have pointed out, ripe for manipulation. But there's other, more moderate suggestions.

For example there could be a time-limit on capital gains, say 3 years. Any gains you had 3 years ago, and still hold, are taxed as income. Example:

y0 $10M, no tax. y1 $11M, no tax. y2 13M, no tax. y4 12M.

At year 4, you'd be treated as if you'd bought the stock 3 years before, in y1 at $11M. The first million gained is taxed as income.

This isolates you from short-term fluctuations, but still avoids the problem where today you can earn humongous amounts every year for your entire life, and not ONCE have to report ANY of it as income.

I think if you earned the money 3 years+ ago, and you still have it, it's fair to tax what you earned as income.

The thing is though, tape *sucks*.

The most common reason for needing a restore, is accidental deletion. With modern backup-systems using online disc, the user can in this case simple open his backup-client, find the file, and click "restore" - time elapsed 2 minutes, help needed, none.

Tape means talking to IT, and wait for hours, at significant personnel-cost. Unless there's a fancy automatic tape-switching-robot kind of deal, but if there is, the price is no longer $30/TB.

Yes you need off-site-backup in addition, and it's acceptable for that one, to have higher latency, so perhaps tape is okay for that.

But you can combine:

Make local backup to disc, and use cloud-based backup as the off-site-storage.

This was you easily get near-zero-administration. You get quick restores for the more common scenarios (server died, user accidentally deleted something important, disc crashed).

Yes you get slow restores for the uncommon cases (those where both the primary storage, and the on-site-backup are fubared) this happens if, for example, a fire destroys the building or thieves steal everything that looks electronic and expensive - but in these scenarios it's going to take some time to get back on the air anyway, aslong as you ain't got atleast two physically disjoint datacenters.

If you ain't got huge amounts of data, this is cheap. If you *do* have huge amounts of data, it can get expensive and inacceptibly slow, in that case you might need a different solution. We've got around a terabyte in the cloud (it automatically de-duplicates, so the same file is only ever stored once), and this costs us $750/year which is cheap enough to be a no-brainer. (it'd be different if we needed to backup hundreds of terabytes though)

We've got a 100Mbit link, so restores happen reasonably fast, but a complete restore from nothing of everything, would still take time.

It's both - offcourse you will not generally do stuff that you personally hold to be wrong - but you'll also do less stuff that you're likely to be punished for, even if you personally find it okay.

And to have copyright actually enforcable, would required a totalitarian police-state, and even then it'd be tricky to discover violations of the "hand a copy on a usb-stick to your cousin" variety.

Requiring a totalitarian police-state to be practical, is a pretty strong argument against a law - there's few things important enough that it'd be worth that price, and copyright sure as hell isn't.

It depends where you are - in Norway (and many other european countries) the government guarantees for private bank-balances up to a certain limit (about $200K here in Norway).

This guarantee is offcourse only worth as much as the government is credit-worthy, but if you're in a non-euro-country (such as Norway) where the government has the power to simply print money, it's a pretty safe bet they'll give you the money. (besides, our particular government has zero debt, and infact a substantial crisis-buffer - around $100K/capita)

But offcourse, there's no guarantee that inflation won't reduce the -value- of that money.

And while on the order of 0.2 kids/year end up dead as a result of wandering off from childcare, 20% of all deaths are caused by insufficient physical activity.

Agree with your general point - that it's silly to haul out the linguistic heavy guns for the purpose of shooting sparrows.

I do think something can become a crisis, without getting worse though.

Lacking adequate internet-connection isn't really a crisis - but it is a problem that becomes larger as the Internet grows in importance. If you where without broadband a decade ago, and you're still without broadband, then that particular problem is growing - despite your connectivity being the same it always was.

You're right that the poor pays low or zero in income-taxes. Nevertheless one of the major differences between different tax-systems, is to which degree they're progressive.

(Notice that I consider health-insurance and suchlike to be part of the tax-system. Otherwise it becomes impossible to compare and contrast different tax-systems. When we're talking wealth-distribution, it's fairly irrelevant if you've got 30% taxes that includes health-insurance, or if you've got 17% taxes plus 13% for health-insurance.)

Income-tax is progressive everywhere as far as I know (though with very different slopes), but one of the main differences between the rich and the middle-class is that the middle-class, overwhelmingly live from salaries on which income-tax is paid, while the primary income of the rich is capital gains of various sorts.

If one person has a salary of $100K, and another person has a salary of 0$, but a stock-portfolio that grew in value by $100K, then those two people will pay very different taxes - despite the fact that they've both made the same amount of money. (indeed, the latter guy can easily get away with paying -zero- in taxes in many jurisdictions)

Offcourse huge jumps in social class, especially upwards, are much more rare than smaller climbs. That's true everywhere. Nevertheless there's significant variation in social mobility between different nations, and USA ranks rather poorly for a wealthy nation. I guess I should be specific here, when I say social mobility, the actual proxy number that I'm mostly thinking of is: "To what degree does the income of your parents predict your future earnings?" i.e. if you guesstimate that children end up in the same relative place as their parents, how often are you wrong ? (being often wrong, would indicate high social mobility)

For example, according to the latest OECD-report, (available here: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/2/7/45002641.pdf ) the income of your father, explains 47% of the variation in your income. This compares to numbers under 20% in Scandinavia and low thirties for Spain and Germany. (but the UK is even less socially mobile with fathers income accounting for 50% of the variation)

Same for education: In USA your parental background explains 64% if the variation in PISA test-scores, whereas in Scandinavia it accounts for about 35% of the differences.

In practice, this means in USA it's comparatively rare for children with resourceful parents to do badly, and comparatively rare for children of marginal parents to do well. In Scandinavia and much of the rest of Europe, it's much *less* rare. (allthough those with resourceful parents have an advantage everywhere, the advantage is smaller)

There's many reasons for this. I *do* think additional government-provided for-everyone services is one piece of the puzzle, but offcourse that's just one small piece of it, and there's many other reasons. (for example, making access to education independent of parental income obviously results in increased mobility - saving for your kids college is a non-topic in much of Europe)

You don't - that was my point, I listed it as awesome for the young and independent. I guess particularily for those who like to travel.

When you've got no kids, there are no daycare to schedule. Scheduling work may or may not be tricky, if you have a independent work where meetings and suchlike aren't occupying a large fraction of your time, being available for meeting every tuesday, wednesday and thursday might be sufficient (it was for me)

I'd feel better about it if you quantified anything. There ain't many companies around who do -not- claim to pay fair wages, but there's widely differing opinions about what is "fair".

Your "pricing" page says nothing about prices, and you "fair wages" page says absolutely nothing about wages. Without a firm public commitment, it's impossible for prospective customers to judge your estimate of fair.

So, what is "fair" wages to you ?