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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (415)	11/13/2002 4:08:07 PM
From: MSI	Respond to of 7936

national referendum Trying to legislate reduction in the power of politicians, won't work at the national level since they control almost all of the debate. However, since this is an internet issue and since 60% of homes have it and 80%-90% of poltically-aware people make it a part of their daily routine, there are other possibilities, such as public-area assemblies and rallies that the media can't refuse to cover (or at least find it hard not to -- even PBS lied about the Oct 26th rally in San Francisco saying it was 10,000 people when it was 100,000...) Another counter to that nonsense are technical means to circumvent it, such as foreign clearinghouses where orders are processed, and like the wine industry, local repositories. Wine is the most hidebound retail industry there is, with a three-level taxation requirement, and different bonding and tax laws in every state, so that you HAVE TO have a retail outlet in some states, and HAVE TO have certain types of distributors rather than direct sales. You just can't mailorder a nice Merlot from California w/o paperwork. However, operators have set up presence in various states as bonded warehouses to distribut from there, and as those proliferate costs trend down. This is only conjecture but similar warehouse-distribution intermediaries could spring up to handle in-state or out-of-state distributions, depending on which was more tax-advantageous. Further, more commerce is becoming digital, so that's going to be real hard to regulate and tax. Especially with all the new forms of digital funds-clearing like paypal, one-time credit card numbers, not to mention the usual pre-paid accounts.