Let the people at the top decide the pay structure for everybody. What could poss... oh never mind.

Ah, how I wish I could assume you were being sarcastic. :)

Economically, they may be the same thing. Psychologically, we tend to take punishments more seriously than rewards, so the second structure might conceivably lead to the least risky behavior.

Thank you! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Another thing to keep in mind is that the law of diminishing returns applies to dollars as well as anything else. Moving from $500/year to $5000/year is a big friggin deal. A proportional move from $10M/year to $100M/year doesn't have much effect on how you personally live, since you can already buy pretty much whatever strikes your fancy. When you get above, say, $1M/year, money stops being about improving your quality of life and starts to be a way to keep score or control the behavior of others.

So you have to offer a lot of money to get the employee to perceive just a little bit of extra incentive. At some point, all that money might better serve to motivate lower-paid employees.

Or simply put the bonuses in escrow, and pay them out over several years. Maybe even have a balloon payment at the end, if the short-term gains didn't clearly lead to long-term failure.

I'd say that this is a property of a certain subset of capitalism where influence of the political system is treated as any other good. That is to say, buy what you can afford, at whatever price it's worth to you.

The libertarian approach is to weaken government to the point where it can no longer aid corporations in their corruption. The liberal approach is to not treat it as a free market good. I can't for the life of me figure out what the conservative approach is. Seems to be, "What's the problem again?"

See? Third world country.

They really should have named it glubziclou. No hits for that one.

This is just going through the motions. DigiNotar has been dead since August 30, when Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft all revoked trust in their certificates. Anyone with at least two brain cells (which seems to exclude a large number of managers, unfortunately) could see the writing on the wall. No one would ever buy a new DigiNotar certificate, since it would always pop up a scary warning to the user in a web browser. Why bother with buying a certificate from DigiNotar and dealing with the resulting end-user support issues, when you can buy from someone else and not have to deal with the problem?

More interesting to me is what will happen to DigiNotar's corporate parent, Vasco Data Security? The purchase of DigiNotar is relatively recent (January 10, 2011), so it's not clear how much influence Vasco's management had over DigiNotar's operations. At the very least, Vasco is going to need to pay for an audit of its own systems to reassure its direct customers.

--Paul

Live off $250K for the rest of my life? Depending on my investment strategy and my forecasted lifespan, I could probably do it. I live cheap, I have almost no debt, and I don't have a family to support.

But that's beside the point. The definition of "winning" that you're using is "never having to work again." If you make $250K for even one year, you can live quite comfortably while stashing away most of it. Do it for a few years in a row, and you can retire. Given the current state of the country, that sounds an awful lot like winning to me.

And it's not as though we're asking a whole lot from the $250K crowd by taking away the Bush tax cuts. If you make $250K on the nose, your taxes aren't increased. If you make $250,001, your taxes go up by a few cents. If you make $260K, your taxes go up by $500. Not enough to substantially change your buying habits or cause any sane, reasonable person to "go Galt."

The Making Work Pay tax break was a new tax break, and therefore increased taxes on nobody.

Yes, people do pay other taxes besides federal income taxes. State taxes, local taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, use fees, payroll taxes, the works. Which is why the whiners who whine that "half of Americans don't pay any taxes" are just being whining whiners who whine whinily.

Please explain to me why it's fair for us to tax capital gains at a lower rate than income.

Like my dad always said, "I'd love to be earning enough to pay that much in taxes." Yes, close to half of Americans aren't paying federal income tax. But they may be paying state income taxes. They're probably paying property taxes, use fees, sales taxes, and payroll taxes. If you put them together, my understanding is that the tax structure is regressive overall.

My dad also says "statistics prove that you can prove anything with statistics." When you say,

Additionally, a larger share of Federal tax revenues are paid by the top 1% of income earners today than was paid by them before the Bush tax cuts were passed.

what you leave out is that during the Bush administration, the average person's income actually went down (even excluding the economic collapse), while the top 1% (and especially the top 0.01%) were lavished with more money than they knew what to do with.* When you point out that the top 10% pay 50% of the income tax without at the same time pointing out that they have 70% of the wealth, you're using statistics to conceal the truth, not reveal it.

* What they did with the money was send it to Wall Street. Wall Street, completely failing in its societal function of putting money into investments that would yield long-term value, used it to inflate commodities bubbles, bet on derivatives and credit default swaps, and sell investors on investments that they themselves were betting against. Well done, free enterprise.

http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/08/10/2113246/Feds-Radios-Have-Significant-Security-Flaws

APCO 25 doesn't seem to be very well thought through. Easily jammed at multiple levels and vulnerable in many ways.

--Paul

No, the morons who whine "half of Americans don't pay taxes!" are the ones who are trying to tax those attempting to become rich. By the time you're up to the sort of income where liberals like me want to raise your taxes, you've already made it into the winner's circle.

Folks,

I have detailed info and tools on my website at

http://ps-enable.com/articles/diginotar-revoke-trust

The short story is that it is possible to protect yourself, but it requires deleting the DigiNotar root cert(s), then revoking trust on the two roots plus four intermediates.

--Paul

Apple is behind the curve on this, almost certainly due to a bug in the handling of Extended Validation certificates that needs to be fixed. Until then, I have info and tools on my web page to help users with the problem.

http://ps-enable.com/articles/diginotar-revoke-trust

--Paul