-10 karma · joined March 19, 2016
These studies also leave out all of the good jobs created by the 1% and the massive amount of taxes going back into the state from these employees.
If you counted this, they are responsible for nearly all of the taxes.
Once again, we are giving away more of our power for convenience.
Even our divorce laws were 100% in women's favor until the 70s or 80s. Alimony was paid out for life.
I want true equality for everyone, but instead we have special interest groups that want to dominate and create lopsided laws on their favor.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wage-gap-myth-that-wont-die-...
Funny, coming from a guy that is close with the leaders of China. China has more walls and restrictions than any other country.
I might take Mark more seriously if he actually fought for freedom of speech in China rather than embrace tyranny and government control.
The book he wanted his employees to read about getting a different 'perspective' was filled with so much propaganda, I had to stop reading it after a few pages.
I believe he also started his non-profit, so he can avoid the taxes of whatever new government that comes into power during the next election.
This all started with file sharing 15 years ago. Everyone thought they were helping out the independent artists, but in reality, it made it so they could no longer compete without a huge corporation backing them. File sharing has only helped big labels by increasing the barrier to entry.
I know so many independent artists that were making a decent living (not rich, but enough to support themselves instead of having to get a job) selling music online. File sharing changed all of this. The value of music (CD/MP3s) slowly approached 0 and now that we have streaming, copyright infringement still hasn't gotten any better, it's worse.
Live shows, the profit model so many people tried to use as justification for sharing, don't really pay much unless you are doing huge venues and have big label connections. A small gig might get you a couple hundred bucks in a night. With gas, time, and splitting it with everyone in the band, there isn't much to be passed around.
This also puts many of these artists in completely desperate situations, where they will sign pretty much any contract. The big labels know this and use it to their full advantage.
The big corporations with tons of cash reserves will always be able to survive the slaughtering of an industry's profits...and we still have all of the major music labels. What we don't have is many of the independent artists and labels.
The main reasons are taxes and restrictions that paralyze your company before it can make that move from startup->mid-sized company->large company. You are essentially a partner with the government (in Sweden, they have the majority share) and big bureaucratic governments aren't really known for their efficiency.
I was a hiring manager before starting my own company ~5 years ago and we looked into opening a branch in France. When you have more than 10 employees, firing a person is a court case with the unions (which are involved in almost every company). If they decide that the person should stay employed, there isn't anything you can do.
This is one of the reasons youth (and immigrant) unemployment is so high in France: hiring anyone with little to no experience is a huge risk to the company because you may not be able to fire them without wasting thousands and thousands of dollars. Needless to say, we didn't end up opening that branch.
In this sort of environment, you will never be able to grow a business to the size of Amazon. You will only be able to create a large corporation in a more favorable country like the US and open an office/branch there (which is what is happening now).
We can't really discuss race. As soon as we do and anything is brought into the discussion that does not conform to the current progressive narrative, we are called 'racist', shouted down, and ignored. This might have to do with the low 'tolerance' when discussing 'race'.
Having these discussions online with your name attached will most likely lead to your firing or a relentless group of 'activists' that go to your boss, your friends, or your co-workers and attempt to ruin your life. There are countless examples of this behavior happening in the last couple of years, all in the name of 'tolerance'.
Sorry, but this will never be discussed openly and honestly until we stop giving the online/offline bullies the power to ruin a person's life because they are unwilling to have an actual adult discussion and are offended by anything that goes against their own personal views.
'safe spaces' is a perfect example of this pervasive and destructive cultural shift.
Even podcasts don't do that well as a business. The longest lasting podcasts are the ones that are essentially one large advertising vehicle for products or services owned by the individual or company running the podcast.
open source, another example of this, has pushed many individuals out of business because they give away many of the same set of features for free and then charge for support. A support company doesn't scale well with a single person or even a couple. This is why pretty much all popular open source projects are funded by large corporations. I can't think of one that isn't.
The pattern has been pretty clear in the last decade: push to give something away for free, the big corps take over because the individual can't compete with free, complain that big corps are ruining everything, and the latest: we now need a basic income because there are no jobs left.
Money is a necessary evil. It can give even the individual more power over their own life. I'm just surprised that so many people here advocate the voluntary shift in power away from the individual and into the hands of big corporations.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The whole progressive movement does exactly this. In the Nordic countries for instance, it's nearly impossible to run your own company due to the crippling taxes and regulations involved. Your only choices for employment are big corporations and the government.
This sounds like theory. In practice, capitalism beats communism in pretty much every way. Of course there are people that own capital. Private ownership is one of the main tenets of capitalism.
Capitalism works because it is on the correct side of human nature. It pushes people to earn more capital, which in turn, helps the rest of us.
Do you think our technology would have advanced this far if we didn't have capitalism? The only reason computers, phones, the Internet are getting better and better is because of competition. The more competition in a market, the cheaper the price is to us, the consumer.
Communism, on the other hand, makes everyone a slave to the state. Why would you want to compete and earn more when it will just be taken away from you by the government?
There were many experiments in the 1970s with communism. People created their own small communities and shared everything. Everyone was equal. The end result was always a disaster: jealousy always fueled the collapse of the group.
Would you want the person in school that never studied for his tests and partied every day to earn the same amount as you, who studied for every test and did well? I sure wouldn't.
Communism, in any form, is a failure. I don't know how much death, poverty, and famine we need to go through for some people to learn this.
Now that we have Republican candidates using this to their full advantage, it needs to be stopped.
The problem is that pesky human nature gets in the way.
The US has done a lot to help out climate change and the environment. We have all kinds of EPA standards on our vehicles (that are actually followed), which have been in place for at least a decade or more. I can go to most major cities and not feel like I'm choking from the rancid air.
These taxes only end up strangling our economy because we follow the rules and other countries go un-checked because there is virtually no penalty.
"Carbon credits are a good market-based solution too, but it seems likely that people and industries will try to game the system."
Carbon credits are a joke. Huge companies pay for them and then just continue polluting. I thought the goal was to fix our environment, not make carbon credit companies wealthy. Money shouldn't give you a free pass to pollute.
Are we also going to tax electric vehicles because the batteries cause damage to the environment (and we don't have a good way to dispose of them yet)? How about the electricity used to charge the vehicle itself? Will that be taxed as well unless it's solar/wind/hydro?
It's not like they will be able to do much about it. If they do, you can use it as a bargining chip and go after them for infringing on your copyright.
Parasite companies in China think that they have an advantage by not having to follow US laws, but what they don't realize is that it can also work against them.
You don't see this as much in cities that are not as liberally run.
I see no problem with it.
It's the same on Amazon: They treat the third-party sellers like garbage and allow scams to continue. If you go through the Amazon seller forums, you can see many stories about sellers that were scammed, then banned, and ignored.
You should never rely on either of these companies for your business (as a seller). It's just too risky.
In the short-term, it might work. In the long-term, you will have more people relying on the income and less people paying anything back into the system.
We should be enpowering people to get some sort of an education, learn a new skill, and make a living. Not creating more wage-slaves that will only be a burden on everyone.
On top of all this, companies and the wealthy would most likely move if they had to pay a tax rate that is this excessive.
What we really need to be doing is looking over our tax laws and figuring out a happy medium that will keep the people with the most money from leaving in droves.
I feel like there is a tendency to punish anyone with money.
Closing these loopholes may bring in some more revenue in the short-term, but if it no longer makes sense financially, they will just move their HQ to another country completly.
In most countries in Europe, for example, it's nearly impossible to start a company without lots of capital. This is because of the crippling amount of taxes and restrictions, which results in an economy comprising of near government and big corporation monopolies. You can see this in most of the nordic countries.
The problem with going the socialism route is that the system will need to take more and more income as new generations completely rely on it. At some point, you don't have enough money to fund it, and it collapses.
With the ability for any company to move to any country, there is also the real possibility that companies will just go elsewhere.
It would be better to just donate to an open source project.
Honestly, If this is the case, drugs should never be fully legalized. People just can't handle the responsibility. Will addiction be the fault of the company that sold it to you?
"and arguably the game of chicken at teaching responsibility by making it illegal to discharge student loans in bankruptcy has just made things worse."
It hasn't really made things worse. If it wasn't illegal to discharge loans, students would know full well that they most likely would never have to pay it back and just declare bankruptcy when they graduated. That would be a much worse situation for our economy. On top of this, banks would never even take on these loans knowing full well that they would probably never get their money back.
The student debt problem has been bad for at least a decade. Students continue to knowingly put themselves in this position and then cry afoul when they can't pay the debt back. Lack of knowledge is no longer an excuse. Anybody with half a brain and an Internet connection can clearly see the risks (and nearly everyone now is connected to the Internet 24/7 through their phone).
I see it more as a millennial problem: the culture is to no longer take responsibilities for your own actions and blame others for all of your failures.
"full nationalized colleges"
I can't see this working out with the current climate, unless it completely ruins the intent of a university.
Fully national colleges aren't based on money any longer, they are based on making the grade. IE: if you can't pass the entrance exams, you won't get into school (as seen in pretty much any country with nationalized universities).
The system we have setup now was a response to people complaining that not everyone has a chance to go to school (back in the 50s, college was a luxury only the wealthy could afford). Now that pretty much everyone does have a chance, there are further complaints that some people made an irresponsible decision. You can't force someone to major in something that will make the ma decent living.
When I was in college, I met many people that really had no business being there (didn't care, didn't put the effort in, or just couldn't handle any of the subjects). With the dumbing down of the SATs and many other measures to make it easier to get into school not based on academics, it seems we are well on our way to ruining our institutions. The ultimate form of anti-intellectualism.
A college education is a major investment. It's sad that culturally, our financial education is this poor.
I majored in a science and had all of my debts paid off within 5 years. I have friends that majored in things like history and still haven't paid their debts off after 10 years.
The popular thing to to is blame society, the university, or even high school teachers for recommending someone go to college. But, students need to take personal responsibility for taking out a loan and being unable to pay it back.
When this happens, we will have less students making foolish decisions.
So you don't think you have this right? I believe you have the right of opportunity, but not of outcome.
I learned what this guy learned pretty early on: If you are an employee (developer or not), you will be paid to do things you are against and people less intelligent and experienced than you will be making decisions for you at some point...and you can't do anything about it.
This is the sole reason I started my own company. I was sick of being forced to go down a path of failure..after every attempt to do otherwise was ignored.
After our failure, management never wanted to look bad, so they almost always picked someone to blame. Sometimes it was me or my team, sometimes someone else. Speaking up about it meant you weren't a 'team player' and you would probably be on the chopping block during the next round of layoffs.
I was able to survive most layoffs because I learned how to play politics, but at the cost of never feeling satisfied with my job.
I've had my own company for 5 years and I don't regret a thing. It was the best decision I ever made.
"I just have to say this: So typically american"
Really? I was thinking it was typically Chinese. My wife's family is from China and they pretty much all try to one up/compare each other in terms of assets, money, or jobs.
"If you want to control your destiny, you'd better learn how to make money."
This message is pretty truthful. The more you rely on someone to support you (the government, friends, family, job), the less control you have over your life. Money gives you the ultimate power and freedom to do what you want.
Regardless of your culture, this doesn't change. If you have more more money, you will always have more options/freedom.