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Florida Proposes Taxing Local LANs
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Aug 25, 2003 06:17 PM
from the please-alert-dave-barry dept.
from the please-alert-dave-barry dept.
Vellmont writes "From the state that brought you the 2000 presidential election debacle, now comes the proposal to tax your LAN. The Orlando Business Journal is reporting that the the state of Florida is thinking about putting a 9% tax on LANs within the state. Exactly what they will be taxing isn't clear, since the tax amounts to 9% of... something. Will taxing the electrical wires within your home be next?"
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Florida Proposes Taxing Local LANs
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Fark says it best... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://seattletimes....001757992_kay06.html | Last Journal: Saturday December 07 2002, @12:29AM)
Re:Fark says it best... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://freescreencast.com/ | Last Journal: Monday September 01 2003, @07:40PM)
This ranks right up there with Minnesota regulating VOIP like a normal telephone service. [slashdot.org]
Why the hell do law makers seem to think that every new technology needs to regulated to hell, or treated like some form of existing technology??? The internet LIVES the way it does today because it happened so damn fast than lawmakers couldn't keep up...
A substitue comm system? They must have needed a catch all to ensure they could screw every penny of tax of everything out there. Would this cover two tin cans with a string between them? I'd hate to see that go to court, I'm sure they'd rule it taxable.
I can understand the need for a 'tax' on very much public infrastructures like a massive telephone land line system or cable systems... but why would you need to tax someone extra for laying out 4 pair wire? Do in house telephone systems get covered? Do you have to have a certain type of equipment to 'qualify'?
Re:Fark says it best... (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't mean to be redundant, but there's a very good (not good good, but "explains things" good) reason they do: they're paid to do so.
Minnesota imposed VoIP regulations to protect the incumbant carriers. ILECs are aggressive at lobbying and throw a lot of money around during election time. (After all, they've got to spend some of that money the fleeced you on your business line somewhere).
Florida's proposal is bizarre. Granted, the ILEC tax model is old, though they're still finding creative ways to pump back money to the old boy network like re-inventing the rural telephone fund to tax broadband service and give the money back to ILECs in exchange for their promise to think about rural customers occasionally. (In an odd twist, our company which provides service to half a state in fly-over-country, would be taxed in order to give the money to ILECs who don't offer broadband! Go figure...). But this Florida one even has me puzzled. It's as loopy as use tax (sales tax for sales that a state does not have legal jurisdiction for, and then creates a tax on using products, but exempts you if you paid in-state sales tax, meaning the only people that pay use tax are interstate purchases which didn't pay sales tax. How's that for simple?)
Since nobody wants to cut budgets in state gubmints, it makes you wonder what's next. Don't be surprised if we see:
- a simple "per-foot" tax on cable. We'll have to have 14-page exemption forms for farmers who have long rural distances to run between the barn and the house, of course.
- a MIPS tax, socking it to the rich suckers who can afford that top-of-the-line processor (sort of a PC SUV tax)
- CPU cycle credits: download and run GUBMINT.EXE in the background, allowing the state's tax computers to load share when your PC is idle, and get a $25 annual rebate on your LAN tax. (Of courses, the state will hire consultants from Intuit to write spyware that measures your LAN length and other taxable details and reports back thru the exe program).
Come on, public servants. Certainly you can find more creative ways to part us from our hard-earned money while you play solitare all day at the DMV!
*scoove*
Re:Fark says it best... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.hyperlogos.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday July 18, @08:19PM)
Okay, look, duh. It's an opportunity to make money. Why are you even asking this question? the only reason marijuana isn't legal today is that people make too much money on maintaining the status quo. This is the same thing.
Smoking pots gives me ideas... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.landoverbaptist.org/)
Re:Fark says it best... (Score:5, Insightful)
Communications has traditionally been (in the US and elsewhere) quite regulated. The reasons are logical in general, he who has the wires, holds a monopoly. People who have monopolies are dangerous to consumers. I agree with that, in fact I think all monopolies are dangerous and inherently bad for a country and the gov't should sponsor competitors to monopolies wherever possible. But I digress.
There is a common misconception that ALL communications is thus monopoly like, and subject to regulation. They try to do this with VOIP, internet traffic etc. They have lost site of the INTENTION of regulation, which is to protect consumers against dangerous monopolies. This is exagerrated by regulated monopolies (telco's, cable co's etc) which would be forced to compete with cheaper alternatives. They fuel the fire and confuse the issues. VoIP for example is a major annoyance to telco's at the moment, as it might allow cable companies (for example) to deliver voice service without the normal federal regulation. This is ridiculous of course, and spoken by people who know better and wish to hide the fact that almost EVERY wired network connection in the world is regulated by at least one gov't agency, and the cost of regulation is passed on to the buyer. The internet (not that I'd necessary use this for business class VOIP mind you) is just as much subject to regulation as anything else. The issue here is that you're not paying $24/month on phone service in addition to your data. So these groups are constantly lobbying any politician who will listen about how unfair things are. A politicians education on many issues may consist ONLY of parties interested in changing something, and regrettebly money plays a lot into who he listens to most.
Politicians on the other hand are given the unenviable job of solving various government crises with the tools at their disposal. They can solve financial problems by cutting or taxing. If they choose to cut, they must select something to cut, and face public wrath. If they choose to tax they must face the wrath only of the public affected. So this relatively creative guy (ignorant perhaps) decided he's going to tax "LANs". How many people have LANs? Few individuals. Those individuals use them at work probably, but hey, that's someone elses pocket. So now he fixes a financial snafu AND pleases a local telco. The public won't argue, he probably gets some in pocket, this is a winner, right?
I love how impassioned politicians get during their campaigns about ideals and visions. Democrats and Republicans argue about the most inane things and come off sounding as if they are opposite poles of the universe. Whoever gets elected usually pulls one or two publicity stunts to show the world how he follows his ideal and spends most of his time with it. Simultaneously the ideal falls by the wayside on every other issue in the interests of time, image and greed. I'm not saying I believe they're all evil like satan, but most of their actions can be understood.
Somehow it's up to us to fix this, but how....
Many regulations solve real problems (Score:5, Insightful)
The bottom line is if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and is being baked with an orange glaze and served to hungry diners, it's a duck. Paypal is a bank and the sooner it is treated as one the better off everyone will be -- too many people have been burned by arbitrary and opaque dispute resolution policies. VoIP that replaces conventional phone service *is* phone service and the users need to have the same protections (e.g., against unauthorized wiretaps, arbitrary charge dispute resolutions, etc.) as regular phone service users, etc.
What they'll tax... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.bigbrother.net/)
Re:Fark says it best... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Re:Maybe I have missed somthing... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/ | Last Journal: Saturday August 14 2004, @05:03PM)
Where do you live?
Around here, when we were first permitted to get to the Internet via a phone line, there was already a tax on every phone bill. Then the cable folks supplied Internet service, and part of every cable bill is a tax. I've bought a few wires (thin ethernet first, then the hub that the vendors have forced on us for the last few years, all to connect a few home computers, and part of every purchase is a tax.
We need electricity to run our computers, and part of every electric bill is - you guessed it - a tax.
So what they're talking about is a special, higher tax for those of us on the Net. Every little bit of the net has been taxed right from the start; they just want networks taxed even higher than any other sort of comm or power equipment.
Re:Maybe I have missed somthing... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.shiner.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday August 22 2001, @09:56PM)
'Oh, so they have the internet on computers now do they?'
I think that quote about sums up this plan.
Re:Maybe I have missed somthing... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/ | Last Journal: Saturday August 14 2004, @05:03PM)
Some of these taxes have been rather extreme. In several histories, I've read the claim that the biggest documented improvement in human health was in the UK early in the 1800's, when Parliament repealed the luxury tax on soap. Just think about that one for a moment
"Those people are all so smelly; I don't know how they stand it."
A special tax just for the privelege of having your two computers talk to each other is small stuff in comparison.
It's been taxed several times. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
This reminds me of the bizarre logic that was used by advocates of the 'Intangibles' tax we collect here in KS. They said that if you invested your money in farm land
you'd pay property taxes on it, but if you just put it in the bank and 'clipped coupons' you don't pay them, so it's only fair to tax intangibles too.This reasoning completely ignores the fact that the capital that your investment goes to is already subject to property tax, and taxing intanbibles qua intangibles is double taxation, just as taxing computer networks is as well.
Before anyone clicks on the Reply to This link to pipe up that it's double taxation on the telcos too... yes, it is. It's an extra tax they pay in exchange for having a government-mandated monopoly. They pass that tax along to their captive customer base, which is oblivious to the fact that businesses don't pay taxes, they collect them.
Re:It's been taxed several times. (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Tuesday November 08 2005, @10:48PM)
So why is it fair for states to still doubletax? It's because they have no power to tax commerce outside their jurisdiction. So they tax ANY income earned in their jurisdiction (including that of "people who live in another state but work here") and ANY sales in their jurisdiction (including "people who live elsewhere but went shopping here"). Income/sales tax rates self-balance and you can't avoid paying state taxes by being clever and living (and shopping) in a no-sales-tax state and working in the neighboring no-income-tax state, which if done en-masse would cripple the budgets of both states. In theory the sum of the two taxes equals a fair amount, no matter what state you work in and what state you shop in.
Consolidating ALL taxes won't work. You'd have to basically eliminate the states entirely by passing an amendment to the constitution stripping the states of the right to collect taxes. Only reps/senators from the top 10 most populous states would support that - hence it is impossible for that amendment to pass in Congress (2/3 vote) or state convention (3/4 vote). Even if it did pass, would YOU trust the feds to collect the taxes fairly and then fairly distribute some of the haul back to the states?
Re:Maybe I have missed somthing... (Score:5, Funny)
They appear to not know what they're talking about... "OK everyone, the tax assessor's coming. Unplug your computers, and we'll power down and disconnect the routers." You may think that's silly, but if you do that, there is no LAN. If you want to tax something, tax the hardware or the software...O, wait, they already do.
But what is this "LAN" that you're leasing?
Re:Maybe I have missed somthing... (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason that you don't understand it is because it's fucking insane. I'm all for taxing businesses, the wealthy, etc. for their fair share but this is ridiculous on so many levels.
If this tax is to be fair, then they have to tax any other business leases (e.g. equipment) and depreciation on any other business assets at the same rate (assuming this isn't already done, which I doubt). If they propose this "tax parity," the shit will hit the fan in FL and this tax will disappear.
What will probably happen however is that they'll put it up to a vote and a bunch of ancient Palm Beach County residents will fuck up the butterfly ballot and the tax will pass.
Now that I've said all of that, if the proceeds from this tax were used to set up low cost (~$20/mo or less) statewide broadband access (available to individuals and businesses), regardless of location then perhaps this would be a good thing. More thank likely though the money's just going to go to that other Bush's campaign war chest.
BFL
Re:Maybe I have missed somthing... (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 14, @10:49PM)
Re:Maybe I have missed somthing... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Maybe I have missed somthing... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yes, politicians understand technology... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 27 2002, @10:43AM)
(Idiotic laws/implementation is part of why SCO is trying to pull off crazy moves)
--
I hear there are two types of people in Florida... Really really old people, and their parents.
+1 for good karma, love for the DMCA, SCO, and low user id.
Which state? (Score:5, Funny)
Would that be Texas?
Re:Which state? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:GEORGE W. BUSH IS NOT A TEXAN! (Score:5, Funny)
Texas Constitution (Score:4, Informative)
Who the hell is going to enforce this? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who the hell is going to enforce this? (Score:4, Funny)
God, this is going to get confusing fast.
Re:Who the hell is going to enforce this? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Jeb (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.funwithheadlines.net/)
Come and listen to a story about a guv named Jeb
A rich southernor, barely got his bro Prez,
Then one day he was lookin' for more dough,
And got the idea he could tax the LANs too.
Data that is, ethernet, Texas bits.
Well the first thing you know ol' Jeb's still a millionaire,
Kinfolk said Jeb give some cash from there
Said Floridee is the place for dough and fun
So they loaded up the vaults and moved to Washington.
DC, that is.
Greedy pols, movie stars.
Great! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.themeparkinsider.com/)
Heck, take 100 percent. Anything I can do to help.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be so nice if people would read the actual article. (Yes, I realize the above was a joke.) Here's the vital line:
Computer networks would be taxed at that percent on either annual lease payments or depreciation.
What they're talking about, in nine cases out of ten, would be taxing equipment depreciation. (I assume that they're referring to dedicated WAN lines when they talk about annual lease payments, since I don't know anyone who leases LANs.)
What's really boneheaded about this is that LANs are so cheap, even for relatively large LANs, that equipment expenses are more likely to be written off as capital expense rather than being depreciated over time. Even then -- since annual depreciation is usually defined by tax codes -- most LANs would last well beyond their depreciation period, resulting in an exemption from further taxation.
What'll be interesting to see is how they define what a LAN actually is. Hubs, routers, switches, and spools of CAT-5 or coax, sure, but will they be including NICs -- which are arguably part of the PC rather than the network proper -- or network operating systems?
The worst part is that this won't be a good source of revenue, but will impose considerable expense on businesses to comply with the reporting requirements.
About that rate. (Score:5, Funny)
> Exactly what they will be taxing isn't clear, since the tax amounts to 9% of... something.
Clearly, they'll charge you 94,371.84 bytes per megabyte.
Presumably you can pay by simply sending them a big e-message.
Tax on purchase? (Score:3, Insightful)
What I don't understand is why this would be treated differently than buying desktop organizers or office chairs.
Morons.
what they are taxing... (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody Expects... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.rant.st/)
NOBODY expects the LANquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the IRS.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.
Misses the point of communications taxes... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.lenticularshareware.com/)
Get with the program people... sounds as wacky as Seattle's proposed tax on espresso!
MadCow.
Don't fret, folks. (Score:5, Funny)
(http://matt.waggoner.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday February 17 2004, @02:03PM)
Taxman (Score:5, Funny)
Should 95% appear to small, be thankful I don't take it all, 'cause I'm the taxman, yeah, I'm the taxman.
If you drive your car, I'll tax the street, if you take a walk, I'll tax your feet, if you get too cold, I'll tax the heat, if you take the bus, I'll tax your seat, TAXMAN!!!
Recount! (Score:5, Funny)
If it's by the byte, for heavily black/jewish democratic networks 1MB= 1024kB. On republican networks 1MB will = 1000kB.
Oh...and will they count hanging patch cords? What about ones that are plugged in, but haven't fully clicked into the port, and fall out during counting?
God help Florida users if the government learns of half versus full duplex...
Maybe this will involve RIAA-style math (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see the headlines now. "Joseph McMurphy has been artrested in Altamonte Springs, Florida, for allegedly possessing the equivalent of 6 Internet servers without paying network wiring taxes. This amount, roughly equivalent to 60 small Web sites or 600 personal sites......."
Good luck (Score:5, Interesting)
There are some amazingly difficult terminology problems for them to define:
Will taxing the electrical wires within your... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well lets see, I pay tax on my telephone bills, on my power bill, on my gas bill. I pay it on any wires I buy to install in my house and I pay tax on my house itself. What isn't taxed within my house?
Fantastic idea (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd send them a check... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.l4l.org/)
National Athem, Rev2 (Score:4, Funny)
Wha'?! It's what?
A Floridian speaks (Score:4, Interesting)
I've pretty much grown use to shite like this from our legislature. When they're not too busy cutting money from education or giving HMO's a get-out-of-lawsuit-free card, they occasionally manage to do something I find surprising and refreshing, but no less assinine.
I think this law is fine, but I say reverse it: instead of levying a tax on private companies for their LANs, how about they levy a tax on themselves for every piece of copper and fiber in the state, county, and city government networks. Then they should take that money and invest it in supporting the bits of Florida's economy that aren't tourism or hospitality, and see how that works out.
Fucktards.
"That clanging you hear ..." (Score:4, Funny)
Funny, I could swear it was businesses moving to other states...
Here's a good reason WHY this is being attempted. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.commoncause.org/)
1. Outsourcing jobs overseas = massive amounts of lost taxes for USA. Since IT jobs were hit the hardest and California was the hottest IT area, it doesn't take a genius to figure out one substantial reason why they're in a budget crisis (which is a taste of things to come for our federal budget).
2. Huge tax cuts without requirements on how it should be spent = lost tax revenues that might not be spent at all or spent in ways that improve the economy. This is kinda like giving a total stranger $100K and expecting him to spend it in ways that help you while not giving him any expectations on how to spend it (i.e. he can spend it all on building offshore infrastructure to move even more US jobs overseas!).
3. Our president's failure to build consensus in the UN to attack Iraq and then being exposed for making false justification statements means that other countries are less willing to send their young soldiers to die in Iraq. This means more of OUR taxes going to pay for this ongoing fiasco which will likely INCREASE the odds of future terrorist attacks & boycotts against US-made products.
4. and so on including our mounting budget deficit which is like running up a huge credit card bill with mounting interest that YOU and I must pay later with...you guessed it--more freaking taxes than EVER given the aging demographics of babyboomers and their impact on social security, medicare and reduced collection of income taxes from them as they retire.
NOTE: $100K is roughly how much VP. Cheney will save in taxes in one year due to the Bush tax cuts. Since that money has to come from somewhere, many of our brave soldiers sacrificing their lives in Iraq will receive PAY CUTS of around $200/month.
Don't be surprised if you find important services like public schools and homeland security facing massive budget cuts in the future--it doesn't HAVE to happen but I don't see a way out if we continue managing our government in the most idiotic way I've seen in decades.
I feel sorry for the poor soul who'll get elected as our president next because he's gonna have an almost impossible task on his hands (he'll need to take massive and very unpopular action to fix this mess being created by the current politicians).
Re:Here's a good reason WHY this is being attempte (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday December 13 2006, @06:43PM)
Good point. The only solution is a 100 per cent flat tax rate. Clearly, the only organization that can spend money wisely is the government.
While we're at it, if we can't trust the people to spend money wisely, why can we trust them to pick the government? We should also close the "voting loophole".
Re:Here's a good reason WHY this is being attempte (Score:5, Informative)
Here's why you'll start seeing more crazy-sounding initiatives like this "lan tax":
Didn't Vice President Gore support a telecommunications tax? And didn't several states want to tax internet commerce during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s?
This is kinda like giving a total stranger $100K and expecting him to spend it in ways that help you while not giving him any expectations on how to spend it
So taking less money from taxpayers is the same as giving it to strangers? Funny -- I thought paying taxes was more like giving money to strangers.
many of our brave soldiers sacrificing their lives in Iraq will receive PAY CUTS of around $200/month.
After the Wall Street Journal cited a story about the $200 pay cut, printed this clarification [opinionjournal.com]:
Many readers also pointed out that in addition to the $6,000 death benefit for families of servicemen killed in action, the Department of Veterans Affairs also offers low-cost Servicemembers' Group Life Insurance, which pays even if a soldier or veteran dies while not on duty.
Note the "tax free status," which is like giving money to a rich stranger.
Don't be surprised if you find import
Probably just a typo (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.cinenet.net/~cberry/ | Last Journal: Friday January 11 2002, @04:07PM)
Of course, another sense of property taxation would be pretty hard on enterprise Java developers.
Ok Florida (Score:5, Funny)
What constitutes a LAN? And how would this work? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.madtasty.com/)
Furthermore, how would this work in practice? Would you have auditing commissions travelling from house to house inspecting crawlspaces for 3Com switches? Would you have to have a license to own networking equipment, like a TV license in the UK? What would the penalty be for operating a LAN without a license? They justify this as "taxing other forms of communication." Are they going to charge a 9% tax on children's walkie-talkies too? How about taxing the morons with their Nextel 2-way radios in a movie theater? Maybe that wouldn't be so terrible.
Unless the exact devices to be taxed are made insidiously clear, this could be a great way to ensure that arbitrary people are taxed on arbitrary things. Democrats especially.
Greedy government. (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://wcmi.myftp.org/)
Everyone who has two PC's sharing internet from a router has a LAN and would be subject to tax.
Taxation that would be COMPLETELY unjustifiable. How can PRIVATE infrastructure that government has no role in creating or maintaining be justifiably taxed?! That I've ALREADY paid tax on, for the income that BOUGHT the equipment, and then on the router, NICs, switch and cabling when I purchased them?
If this flies, don't think that other tax-hungry states, like WV or KY (where I work and live) won't follow suit. At home here, I have a LAN infrastructure that rivals most small businesses... It seems unfair to tax me because of my expertise in creating it!
So, what will happen? Government revenue agents busting down doors looking for CAT 5 cable and 802.11 antennas?
But then, don't sucessful people have broadband and home LANs? Taxation is all about punishing (discouraging) success to feed failure, I guess.
Now the geeks have been targeted.
Let Me Explain Something About Florida (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.flying-rhenquest.net/)
Now it's IT Company story time! Everyone gather 'round! Ready? Once upon a time, a huge IT company by the name of IBM opened an office in Boca Raton, Florida. The ever-money hungry Floridian politicians, sensing a windfall, quickly went to work to enact legislation allowing the state of Florida to tax IBM's entire profits because they had a presense in Florida. IBM said "Screw you guys, we're going North!" The legislation was quickly dropped after that, but IBM held a grudge after that and eventually closed the IBM Boca plant (Which was by far the most beautiful one I've worked at to date) in the mid 90's, costing thousands of jobs in the Boca Raton area. The moral of this story is that you can try to fix something after you've broken it, but it probably won't do much good in the long run.
Oh yeah and a while back they also played the most self-rightious and annoying commercial about how if you went out of state and bought something, you owed Florida sales tax on it. So I'd like to send mad propz out to the penis of the country.
So... (Score:4, Funny)
Communication Taxes (Score:4, Insightful)
I live in Orlando, and I'm totally stumped (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Thursday July 12, @12:30PM)
"Most of Florida communications case law stems from the rotary dial era," saith the article. OK, so to my layman's brain, that sounds like "Our case law is old, so we need to do some crazy think to generate more court activity so we can update our case law." Kind of like "throw some shit at the wall and hope some sticks." Am I on the right track here?
"'The standard response is on the border between surprise and outrage,' says Arthur Simon, senior vice president of big-business lobby Associated Industries of Florida."
Aha, big business is against higher taxes. (Makes sense.) Finafuckingly, our Disney lobbyists will do something worthwhile by figting this. I'll bet the Mouse has a pretty big fscking LAN. Remember, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
"'What did surprise the business community was the extent and reach of the rule,' says the lobbyist."
In 2003, a LAN tax is akin to a breathing tax. Like they said in the article, "Practically any office with two computers will have a local area network."
Oh well. I'll have to see how this one goes. As long as we don't have to vote on it, I think we'll come through OK.
take the red pill (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Thursday February 27 2003, @03:22PM)
What else are they talking about? Clearly they are not talking about taxing the flow of electric current, otherwise they would tax your extension cord by length for every year you have it hanging in the garage. But you take that same copper wire in a different form factor and with a certain number of twists per foot, those same electrons modulated in a particular way, and now you have something new you can tax. That is a very interesting transition.
There is a peculiar kind of mind at work here. It's almost exactly the same mind working in the shadowy deeps at SCO, and in Redmond, and in government agencies across the country. It is a business mind only superficially. More specifically, it is the mind bent on control.
I am not a revolutionary. I probably should be and when I was younger I might have been but these days I don't have time for it. But I can sense when someone is making a move on me and the things I hold to be important, and this is one of those times. The hair on the back of my neck starts to rise and I stop configuring the firewall and I sit back and I think.
We are in for a rough ride, I'm afraid. The authorities have arrived. Between the RIAA and the FBI and the bean counters and Microsoft it is getting uncomfortable to be where we are, doing what we are doing, in the way we are doing it and have done it for decades. We are not domesticated enough, not cowed. They cannot control this, any of it, and it worries them endlessly. There is no business model for cattle that won't stay in their pen. But there are plenty of professionals who can round up your cattle for you, for a fee. And then to the factory.
Do the cows in the feedlot know where they are headed? They have had an easy life, haven't they. Grown fat and complacent. Did the jump-over-the-fence thing once, got hit with a prod, gave it up after that. The grass wasn't really all that much better on the other side anyway. Do the cattle ever stop to wonder about that day? And about the fence? About why it was so important to stay behind the fence?
Here we are grazing the tall green grass, belly deep and well pleased, and the herders have noticed we're out. Feel the first shock of the prod...hear the order to move out...what are you going to do...
Just a 21st Century Window Tax (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I think taxation should be directly related to the public cost for the item or activity. For instance, having a home means that you make police, fire, schools, prisons, water service, etc. necessary. So tax a home based upon the costs incurred to support these things. Tax a vehicle based on the costs needed to maintain the roads -- i.e., wear and tear on the roads. Tax pollution and garbage.
The things that seem the most unjust are the taxes which are completely disconnected from the use of the tax money. A tax on LANs is ridiculous because there is no reason to think that it costs the state any money for you to have one -- the public incurs no costs to support your LAN. In addition, LANs are things that are needed by people and businesses. So, like windows and hearths, it seems even worse that the state is collecting taxes on them because they know people cannot live without them. It makes you feel very powerless at the hands of the state.
This is closing a loop hole (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday December 09 2003, @01:25AM)
This BTW is the is one of the reasons M$ didn't pay ANY fedral taxes last year