Really? You have a multimillion dollar corporation in 2 boutique pet stores? Your reported annual revenue is less than $500k/yr. After expenses, you're a multi-thousand dollar enterprise.

No, but he's trying to put the good PR spin on things.

How about this one to start.
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,2533850.story#axzz2jXU69lfS

Basically, he does humanitarian work to the locals, but is a large stake holder in the factories that are making the locals sick. Because he's "helping" them, he's the good guy. Because he's only a large stake holder in the factory, he's not the bad guy. He brings in more money from the factory than he puts out to help the locals.

Profit/Loss. If you bring in $100M, and you pay out $20M, and look like the good guy, you're doing it right, as it's still an $80M profit. Since you're dumping the $20M in to "help" the people, the locals won't complain.

If he had more loss than profit, he would simply cut ties to both sides. It's not worth it.

Trust me, I have. The lowest profit company where I made company wide business decisions was $2M/yr. The highest, over $100M/yr.

That's absolute pure fragrant BULLshit. Microsoft itself has admitted this fact under oath.

If they can't cut it, then why did Microsoft hire them?

Both are caused by the same kind of thinking. That's what makes poverty possible, asshole.

Yeah, why pennies, and why a cup? I'm guessing the answer is D, 1, based on the number on the side of the cup, but that's a guess.

And what about #12? What the heck is a "subtraction sentence"? Why are there no subtractions in the answers?

They're not forced. to.

To have this tax collected for them, instead of trying and failing to collect a "use tax" as they do now, they would have to agree to this simplified system which is not burdensome on the small business collecting it.

Either the entities sharing the zip code agree, or they watch the revenue pile up on trust.

hawk

Search works Dan Ashman on article life. That particular one may be apocryphal (given how AL is designed, it probably is, as most are run in artificial environments, and not on the machine themselves).

Anyway, it's well known that the experiments *do* evolve to take advantage of flaws in the environment. I had a sign error in an economic model, and it found an equilibrium at a negative price.

Dan had a bad random number generator, and the things evolved to take advantage of its sequence! (I assume he's written about this at length, as much as he talked about it . . .).

In another case where someone in that same group was evolving programs, they instituted a random choice after a certain number of program steps as a penalty for taking too long. Turns out that the critters evolved to use that as a synchronization device . . .

Either of these could be the source of your tale after being relayed a couple of times.

A second system would be unlikely for most of these--even on a 486, complex experiments were done on single computers.

hawk

Speaking as a lawyer . . .

"in court" is the catch.

*which* court?

There isn't a court in the country with jurisdiction to prosecute "he sped somewhere in some jurisdiction." A court needs to convict for a specified violation within it's own jurisdiction. An acknowledgment that means a crime was committed *somewhere* that *might* have been in that jurisdiction isn't sufficient to convict.

hawk, esq.

>Collecting sales tax on behalf of the states has
>been proposed, but some states don't collect sales
>tax and again, it probably would be struck down as
>unconstitutional based on state's rights to collect
>the tax.

Speaking as a lawyer . . .

you're just plain wrong on this.

The Supreme Court has made it clear that while states cannot force out of state entities to collect sales tax for them, it is for Congress to find a solution. It is not that states *cannot* tax the purchases, but that they cannot tax *out of state* entities. Congress indisputably has the power to handle the issue.

hawk, esq.

The solution has been obvious for more than a decade.

Each zipcode gets a tax rate. If it crosses jurisdictional lines, either the jurisdictions resolve the split between themselves, or it stays in trust until a court resolves the split.

This is a *very* small array for an electronic report.

The company writes a single check, with a monthly electronic report breaking it down by zip code.

My google search on the issue came up with Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Bangladesh. Two of which seem to be African, the latter South Asian I guess.

I'm sure you can come up with better data.

Besides infant mortality, there's probably unreported miscarriage.

There's no room in business for humor. No good business person makes a decision without calculating their potential profit and loss (or risk/benefit, if you prefer those terms). If you don't understand it, I'd hazard to guess that you've never been involved in senior business decisions for a multimillion dollar company.

When I was a kid I did Unicef collection every Haloween. We got an orange cardboard coin box at school, and collected donations to it along with our trick-or-treat. Unicef used these funds to build water wells for people in Africa who had only access to contaminated surface water.

A decade or two later, we found that many of these wells accessed aquifers that were contaminated by arsenic. And that thus we kids had funded the wholesale poisoning of people in Africa, and that a lot of them had arsenic-induced cancers that were killing them.

OK, we would not make that mistake again, and today we have access to better water testing. But it caused me to lose my faith that we really do know how to help poor people in the third world, no matter how well-intentioned we are.

And we had better not go around curing disease withoput also promoting birth control. Despite what the churches say, and the local dislikes and prejudices. Or we'll just be condemning more people to starve.

It's a very obvious capitalistic endeavor.

Every person that dies is one less customer. You don't have to be Internet connected to be a Microsoft customer.

Facebook, on the other hand, requires Internet connectivity. Every person that doesn't have Internet service is an untapped customer.