Posts by Tom 13

@ Red Bren

Quite the opposite. As you get older you come to recognize and regret the greed and avarice you shamelessly showed in your youth, and seek to protect those who have actually worked and done things that are useful to society.

Re: a likely predisposition among the feckless, disorganised and unreliable

The thing is, we have many decades of polling research and that's something that has been studied and for which they have correction factors.

I'm not certain of the exact lay of the land on your side of the pond, but on our side of the pond there is a general consensus that on those occasions where the polls were greatly wrong about the election it has been because the polling companies generated the wrong target sample population. Essentially you want your sample to match the actual voting population. But the voting population varies from the general population. So based on the previous election outcomes the pollsters say something like "20% of the voting population is hard Rep, 22% leans Rep; 25% leans Demt, 20% is hard Dem and the rest are undecided." Then they try to match their sample to those numbers. If the sample for some reason shows say 25% hard Rep, they adjust their prediction by weighting that element less. This works so long as you have the right numbers for the next election. But if it turns out that the voting population has actually shifted to 25% hard Rep, you're predictions are screwed.

In other words, any time there is a real, fundamental change in the electorate, even a small one, the polls are actually useless.

Re: Shy Tories

All the literati agree with each other that only the sort of simpletons* who read The Daily Mail would ever vote Tory. That's the sort of societal pressure even campaign donations on my side to the pond can't buy.

*Frauds who are in it only for personal gain excepted of course.

Re: it will almost always result in coalition governments

It might be bad for those in the party, but an examination of actual coalition governments shows it almost always works out even worse for those who aren't: Italy, Greece, even your own country for the last few years.

Re: Optional

Nastiness is the issue. Problem is you're framing the question wrong:

"How nasty do I think my neighbors who profess to be Labour are?" is the correct formulation.

- Not nasty at all and willing to respect my opinons.

- Nasty enough to call me names every chance they get.

- The really nasty sort who will vandalize my property and beat the crap out of me when they can.

- The extremely nasty sort who will kill me in my sleep then blame it on my party.

Given about 40% of El Reg posters seem to fall in the name calling category, it does seem reasonable to expect most conservatives to not be open about it.

Re: Let's see more loose coalitions!

So you want to turn Britain into Italy or worse Greece? Sounds like a very, very bad plan to me, and as noted above, I'm not even a Brit.

Re: Err, not so fast ther Mr Miller.

You can dance around it all you want, but an outlier that more closely matches the actual results is not an outlier. It may have been an outlier from their targeted distribution amongst the voters, but that only corrects a systemic problem.

The claim that people haven't made up their minds/are changing their minds quickly is blowing smoke up your arse. They don't. It may be polite to accept that fiction in most social situations, but polling isn't one of them.

Re: The poll might have been accurate to the stated degree

Not a Brit so I can't confirm your observation about the poll differentials, but assuming what you said is true, that means they should have been aware of a systemic problem. The truth is, most people's opinions won't vary that wildly that quickly. While there are multiple possible reasons, the bottom line is that you should already know you have at least one systemic problem.

Re: there is a uniform national swing

The outcome of the election DOES show a uniform national swing: away from Labour and toward Tory. There's no way around that fact.

If there were a bunch of swings as you describe, they would have been offsetting with no noticeable change in the national election. At the very least you would have had a situation where the nominal majority needed to form a coalition with another party. That didn't happen.

Re: The Holocaust was not only Jews

You were doing so well until you got to the last sentence. The loonies were Socialists walking the path to Communism. That makes the extreme Lefties, not extreme right. This lie continues to do more damage to society than Hitler inflicted on it with his war.

Also, you left out his targeting of homosexuals who were hunted as viciously as the Jews.

Re: So enlighten me

Objectively speaking there are probably more than just two on body counts. Off the top of my head:

Stalin's reign of terror

Mao's Cultural Leap Forward

Pol Pot

are all power mad dictators who have killed more people out of hate.

BUT, that is a broad usage of "hate" and doesn't quite the same focus as Hitler had on the Jews. So in the end an invalid criticism and one which earned him a down vote.

Re: Missing votes

For all the problems we have with voting on my side of the pond, this isn't one of them. If you show up at the polling place and you aren't registered you can still vote. All you need are two utility bills for your address with your or your spouses name on them. They hand you a provisional ballot and you vote. Granted the provisional ballots only get counted after their verified and IF the margin of victory is close to the number of absentee and provisional ballots cast, but you do still get to vote. Not that this doesn't potentially cause other problems, but you can vote even if you aren't on the roles.

Re: is actually greater usage than 10 or 20 people on one bus

Typical libtard statement. The 10 or 20 people on the bus aren't paying near what the 10 or 20 people in the cars are toward road maintenance. Most of that comes from the petrol tax so the "efficiency" of the bus mitigates against road maintenance.

@James 51

There is nothing undesirable about removing the names of people who don't live in the voting district from the voter rolls. You seem to have no concept of how corrupt the registration rules and maintenance of those rolls are here in the States. In fact, I would bet my name is still on the rolls back where I went to college even though I have not lived there in 30 years and it is in another state.

Re: Solid Labour seats

Whether or not the missed votes affect the OUTCOME of the election has nothing to do with whether or not being unable to vote effects the LEGITIMACY of an election. I'm on the other side of the pond. I live in a state where my vote is never going to effect the outcome of the election because the opposition out numbers me 2 to 1. Still, if 5,000 legitimate voters on their side were unable to cast ballots in the election, it's legitimacy would be suspect.

Re: People need to learn to be far more paranoid on-line

As the earlier posters noted, it would be helpful if it weren't an ALL or NOTHING choice.

Re: "Nearly"?

If they didn't learn from requiring people to hit Y if you used a wild card in the delete command in DOS, they never will. I can't think of a single instance in which that "safety" mechanism stopped somebody from deleting the wrong directory/disk.

Re: Great day for crony capitalism !

You WANTED language to make patent troll liable for the legal bills of legitimate manufacturers. This is EXACTLY what the language needs to look like.

I warned against this and was repeatedly told I needed to remove my head from my nether region. Guess we'll all have to live with it now.

Re: Use the initial pricing

That you have never worked in the accounting department of even a small manufacturer is obvious from your stick figure drawing of how manufacturing pricing for retail works. And, in order to get the level of detail you'd need to implement your plan in the real world, you'd necessarily have to reveal company trade secrets. You're doomed to failure before you even get out of bed.

Re: Two points to make here:

1) I'm pretty sure Apple et al have far more clever accountants than you. If the effective tax rate in Oz is as low as you claim it is, they'd be headquartered there, not elsewhere.

2) Unless Singapore has some secret ninja army controlling other governments and sending tax money to them, they're not parasites to anyone. They're just more efficient. That might be because they are more geographically compact, but if their tax rates support their governments only your own greed and avarice causes you to accuse them of your own sin.

Re: The real villains of the piece are

Those places aren't taking taxes from anybody. That's EXACTLY why businesses locate their headquarters there: they are taxing less than elsewhere. Switch to sane tax policies and the problem will go away. The tighter you grasp productive people in your greed to get tax dollars, the more you kill the golden goose.

Re: in exchange for "properly" taxing *real* profits, not taxing *expenses*.

Except you can't. First off, you can't provide a legal definition of "*real* profits" that also works in the world of reality. Next up, business don't pay taxes anyway. They may collect them (and probably need to make a profit from collecting them), but they certainly don't pay them in the way a real person does. Finally, sales taxes are the only actual moral taxes out there. They tax consumption, not production. All this crap about taxing income progressively because some people make too much money or taxing greedy corporations is nothing but your own greed and avarice masquerading as a moral good. Even a highway man is more honest about what he's doing than people making the arguments you are.

Re: we don't pay tax on some portion of our income deemed to be "profit"

Sure we do, we've just changed the words. You've got your standard deduction, the child care credits you are so eager to exclude, mortgages, health expenses, IRA/retirement fund contributions, non-profit contributions, solar/wind energy tax credits, capital loss offsets and probably more that I can't think of because I mostly file the short form. Many of these are justified on what is effectively the same basis as excluding business costs from what they are taxed on. And your example provides the proof of the folly: the $10 tax on the $990 item means that business made no profit at all. You've got no way of knowing what the "real cost" of the goods being sold is. You're picking on Apple because given their financial disclosures, you THINK you know what their real cost is. If it's something like gems or precious metals, you have the same disparate impact on business.

Re: It's not rocket science

Except that's not actually fair either. Simple yes, but so is strong arm robbery and there's no real difference between it and what you propose. Because what it comes down to in the end is your guy with guns (and worse) is demanding money from somebody who isn't your guy. Tribalism at its worst.

Re: those large companies siphon off a large amount of money

I see the problem here. The problem is that you regard someone else's money as your money. Until you fix YOUR problem with immorality, you'll never understand the correct way to collect taxes. By definition, when someone in Oz buys a iPhone at price X, they have gotten exactly what they exchanged.

Re: why should the coumtry in which the item is sold enjoy the biggest tax 'take'?

Who paid is irrelevant. What is relevant is who did the work. That really wasn't the sales guy in Oz. And to the extent he did any work, you're getting those tax dollars directly from HIS salary.

Stop trying to tax Americans and Chinese from Oz.

Re: pays more tax than a corporation (per dollar earned).

Corporations NEVER pay taxes. At best they act as for profit tax collectors for the government. The ONLY people who ever pay taxes are citizens. Until you get this concept you can't create a tax system that works.

What does sometimes happen is a wealthy or well-placed citizen manages to arrange his affairs in such a way that he does not draw a salary and lives on the corporation dime. While this is truly improper, it cannot be addressed via tax law.

Re: thus there is no "moral" in our tax code.

I haven't heard a tax hiker argument yet where the fundamental argument wasn't that it is immoral for companies to pay so little in taxes.

Re: Wait and see

So you think it is proper for Australia to collect 80% of the price of an iPhone even if 80% of the cost is overseas? Sorry, that's an epic fail and probably violates at least a couple of international treaties. This whole concept of "we know what corporations should be paying so we'll just use fiat decrees from unelected committees to fleece bounce it out of them just doesn't fly.