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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (606992)	4/7/2011 1:57:43 PM
From: Bill	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1579864

How long did it take you to write that post? You need a life.

To: tejek who wrote (606992)	4/7/2011 3:06:31 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1579864

How else to explain someone who defends those who would hurt him. I defend against the greater encroachment of our liberty by the government which would harm us both directly (less liberty is a harm) and indirectly (negative economic effects). I also speak out against mindless bashing, whether its of corporations or any other group. Want to attack corporations? There is plenty of legitimate reasons to complain, most prominent of which is their working with the government to restrain competition or to get special government benefits. But oddly enough those who seem to hate corporations the most, also seem to support restraint of trade and/or government dispensing cash or giving targeted tax breaks. I opposed subsidies and special targeted tax breaks for corporations, That's doesn't hurt corps. Those are freebies......the icing on the cake. No corp. would die from your concerns. If the benefits don't help the corporations than why have them? If they do help corporations reducing them would hurt corporations. "Hurting" doesn't equal killing. Although in some cases corporations would actually die (or at least be drastically restructured) if they couldn't get any subsidies, targeted tax breaks, or restraint of trade (not only monopolies, and trade restrictions, but licensing requirements, and even things like environmental and financial reporting requirements can be structured to make things hard on potential new competitors). Its not that I want to hurt corporations, let alone kill them, I just don't want them to feed off my tax dollars, or to have the government burden their competitors in order to strengthen the entrenched incumbents. You want to allow monopolies How do you get "you want to allow monopolies" from "I oppose restraint on trade, like government granted monopolies". That's a logical leap to say the least. What specifically do you mean by "you want to allow monopolies". I'm not exactly for very aggressive anti-trust law, but generally government involvement creates or protects monopolies much more than it prevents or eliminates them. I'm against government caving to such rent-seeking. It can be in a number of companies interests to lobby for restraint on trade so they can be a monopoly or at least in a dominate position, but the government should not act to limit competition, doing so is harmful. If a company charges $10 for a cup of coffee and someone is willing to pay the price, most people will say its extortion but its not illegal I have some doubt that most people would call it extortion. If they would, they would be wrong. High prices are not extortion. Its only extortion if your forced to pay the high prices (or fork over the money without buying anything). If your not attacked, or threatened (not even with subtle threats so that it would be hard to charge extortion or prove it in court), your not being extorted. Twitter is overcharging the city of SF for the privilege of maintaining a facility in SF. I don't think Twitter is charging anything to SF. SF is charging Twitter, and Twitter is saying reduce the charge or we won't stay. Even if Twitter actually was charging SF (and that would be unusual, and I've seen no evidence indicating it is the case), it still wouldn't be extortion. "Buy our product or we kill you" is extortion, "pay more for our product or we won't sell it to you" is not. Taxes are a necessary part of the free market system because gov't is a necessary part of the free market system. For humans air is necessary in order to live, and we need to live to participate in the market economy, but generally air is not bought and sold, and is not part of the market. Its the same with government except government isn't necessary for a market to exist, its beneficial even highly beneficial up to a point (too much of it is harmful), but not necessary. Anarchy is generally considered a bad idea, and I agree with that assessment, but in a situation of anarchy you still have people trading goods and services for money or for other goods and services.

To: tejek who wrote (606992)	4/17/2011 10:53:56 AM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1579864

San Francisco Doing Everything It Can To Drive Zynga And Twitter Away Michael Arrington San Francisco, unlike most other cities in Silicon Valley, has a 1.5% payroll tax. And even more stunning is that they consider gains on stock options part of payroll, meaning that any San Francisco based company going public or being acquired could get hit with a massive tax bill in the tens of millions of dollars... techcrunch.com Its not that Twitter is expected some unusual low tax rates, they are trying to avoid a 1.5% payroll tax that applies to stock option as well as base pay and bonuses. A tax that almost no city or county level jurisdiction applies. Twitter is fine if they get an exemption and others don't, but really such an tax is a bad idea in the first place.