That's rather different than your previous contention that the problem was that "Bonch has successfully diverted the discussion at the top of the comments for regular viewers into a discussion of whether it's appropriate to editorialize when presenting news items." But keeping moving those goalposts, maybe you'll find a defensible position somewhere.

I've moved no goalposts. You're either deliberately missing my point, or you're obtuse. There is no conflict between those two statements; the second is a clarification of the first.

Insofar as it was ever a discussion of those other things, it still is -- as plenty of subthreads show. So, no, neither your first contention about how he diverted the discussion nor your second is correct.

On the first item, prima facie, the subject of discussion is the article and the content of the article. On the escond point, that was not the case at the time of my posting, especially considering the default display options for readers of Slashdot.

to the extent that action you complain about is an inappropriate diversion, so is your discussion of it.

Agreed. But once we're in navel-gazing mode, might as well sort out what's really in there.

The idea of being taxed on options offends me greatly. I was given a bunch of options when I went to work at a big company in early 2000. Guess what happened to those options? They were worthless in a year.

You accepted a form of compensation with a significant level of risk attached to it. Your choice.

Stock options do have value, as evidenced by the willingness of banks to accept them as collateral. While future value of the options is uncertain, there is a present value.

By taking a loan against the options, you are exchanging some amount of cash for some of that negative risk, while preserving any positive appreciation of your options for yourself.

In a poster further down, you state that a solution would be to outlaw using stock options as collateral. That's a horrible micromanagement style of regulating the economy, and for someone with your politicoeconomic bent, I'm very surprised you would suggest it.

US Currency is valid for all debts, public and private.

The loophole is that payment for goods or services does not create debt, so US Currency doesn't need to be accepted for sale of an item -- this is why merchants don't need to accept cash.

But it's not tax free.

Unless you're dead. Then the capital gain is only from the date of your death to the realized gain,and there is no income tax on the shares taken in lieu of salary.

His lender(s) would call in the loan long before the stock hits zero. They'll also lend less than the value of the collateral in order to reduce their risk.

The only way out is to save or invest, and well, you won't save forever. All money is spent at some point.

False. Plenty of people who are very wealthy live purely off investment income, their principal would never get taxed in your scenario. And an aggressive sales tax on consumer spending would simply drive wealthy peoples' spending offshore outside the tax jurisdiction. The wealth flight under such a scenario would be terrible.

Furthermore, such systems have other major flaws -- one being the progressive nature of such a system, which would serve to reduce systemic demand for goods. Another major flaw is that it would reduce capital flowing through the economy by subjecting the same money to tax every time it changes hands; a VAT gets rid of this particular problem, but the tax rate necessary to support our federal government with a VAT would be around 40% (6T 2012 spending vs 15T GDP) , assuming there are no economic class (food, housing, etc) exemptions to the VAT, and that the tax is fully regressive (no exemption for first $X of income, etc). This kind of high-percentage extremely regressive tax would slaughter the consumer demand that drives our economy.

In short, compared to the status quo, such a system would greatly inhibit our economy, would benefit the wealthy at the expense of the rest of the country (both by lowering their effective tax rate since they spend far less than they earn and by driving their spending offshore).

Don't these loans need to be paid back at some point? They're going to have to either sell their shares, or earn money from somewhere else, to pay that loan. When that happens, they have to pay tax.

After you die, your estate can pay back the loans. And guess what? The estate doesn't pay that income tax, it only has to pay the capital gains from the FMV on the date of your death to the realized value from selling the stock.

The risk for the lender is that the value of the stock will plummet before your death, which is why (1) they lend only a fractional amount of the shares used as collateral and (2) if the share price drops dramatically, they may call in the loan (a la Ellison's situation a few years back).

My father has been advised by his financial planner to make use of this technique to maximize his estate when he dies (he's working for start-ups in his retirement and supports himself off of retirement fund withdrawals, which because of the amount he withdraws, are taxed at a lower rate than his income would be if he took salary instead of stock).

Is it somehow off topic to post about the article submission in the topic dedicated to that submission?

An ad hominem argument is off-topic no matter where it is posted, IMO. If Bonch had bothered to actually dispute what was written, it would be one thing. But instead he just metaphorically threw his hands in the air and complained about biased editorialization on slashdot.

What slashdot chooses to do, even if its in the same topical area as the article, has nothing to do with the RIAA's claims or Google/Wikipedia's presentation and their possible responsibility to present in an unbiased fashion.

He turned it from a discussion of RIAA, SOPA/PIPA, traditional news outlets and Google/Wikipedia as news outlets, to yet another slashdot navel-gazing session. It's a form of ad hominem fallacy where he has successfully diverted the discussion from the content to the messenger.

They have moved on to calling it theft now that "pirate" has been ingrained in the public mind. Maybe in a few years it will be called copyright rape or intellectual property murder.

Nah, we're desensitized to murder and rape -- we hear about them every day on the news. It'd have to be something to elicit a more visceral dislike from the masses... maybe copyright sodomy?