It’s really quite strange to me how quickly Internet Sales Taxes went from being unthinkable to imminent. I think it’s time, though Dave Schuler is concerned.
Megan McArdle and Matt Welch disagree with Garance Franke-Ruta’s assertion that you can’t have major conservative newspapers because their markets are intrinsically liberal. Heck, I’d settle for agreement that the major newspapers at-all reflect their constituencies and yes, in fact, lean to the left. In an ideal world, I don’t think Franke-Ruta is right about the possible existence of major conservative media outlets in large – and largely liberal – cities. In the real world, this is something that conservatives have demonstrated that they can’t pull off under far less challenging circumstances.
I’m not sure how I feel about Newtown voters voting down more money for school security. On the merits, i guess I agree. But something feels… odd about it.
The EPI demonstrates the limits of “Everyone should go into STEM!” policy-making. That said, it’s hard to argue with the returns that many (not all, but many) STEM degrees bring in, regardless of whether they end up actually working in STEM or not. The question is whether the degree qualifies you, or it’s the new Rush Stamp.
T-Mobile is already paying a price for its no-contract philosophy. I guess I can understand where the Washington AG is coming from on this, though I still think it’s lame because T-Mobile is legitimately using a different model, and requiring that they state all of their costs up-front while the others get to tuck theirs in to the contract puts them at a disadvantage.
This is a pretty awesome story. Drop off some tablets into Ethiopia with no instructions, and a bunch of illiterate African kids, and within days they are using apps and within five months they hacked the operating system.
The New York Times (of course) reports on the race for elite colleges and the tradeoff between paying full tuition at one of those or accepting a merit scholarship somewhere less prestigious.
If this causes the downfall of the NCAA, they’ll have it coming. Not because they are evil or even exploitive, but because they are stupid.
Will “Peak Oil” (which I remain a skeptic of, in the large-frame) be solved by methane-hydrate? As Dave Schuler says, interesting times.
The future of smartglasses.
Some awesome engineers in Texas have created Mario Kart… for real!
One of the interesting things about watching Japanese Animation is their portrayal of American culture. So I got a kick out of this, which posits what our news coverage of other countries might look like in reverse.
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You buried the lede on the EPI study:
Until about 2001, when the dot-com bubble burst, the IT labor market performed in the way that economic fundamentals suggest it should, with the supply of IT graduates and workers responding to strong wage increases and reflected in growing employment. Since then, however, the IT field appears to be functioning with two distinct labor market patterns:
– The domestic supply of IT workers exhibits increasing but slow growth in line with market signals.
– The supply of IT guestworkers appears to be growing dramatically, despite stagnant or even declining wages.
The immigration debate is complicated and polarizing, but the implications of the data for enacting high-skill guestworker policy are clear: Immigration policies that facilitate large flows of guestworkers will supply labor at wages that are too low to induce significant increases in supply from the domestic workforce.
Actually, I have written nearly (I am stuck on the conclusion) an entire post dedicated to the ramifications as it pertains to immigration policy. To their credit, The Atlantic ran a piece by Jordan Weissman connecting this with the proposed expansion of H1-B visas and pointing out the obvious.
I’m not sure if I will run my piece. If I don’t, I’ll email it to you.
“Now imagine that some foreigners slapped a crappy pseudo-anthropological analysis on top, full of weird historical references, non-sequitur references to the church, and misguided assumptions about ethnicity.”
Except . . . what follows could have been excerpted from just about every NYT story about a RMM by a white person.
More to the point . . . the background reality should have some bearing on what we think about things that happen. In point of fact, white Southern Christian TEA partiers of Scotch-Irish heritage are NOT actually engaged in armed insurrection against the government, NYT claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Meanwhile, Chechen Muslims ARE so engaged against Russia, and Muslims in general, with the usual caveats, ARE easily motivated to violence. This kind of background information does, and should, help us understand what happened in Boston.
RMM?
I thought that the piece went overboard to make its point, but I’ve heard that our own media gets things ridiculously wrong in its coverage. Which, considering the coverage of places I do know, doesn’t surprise me.
By the way, I think you didn’t close your italics tag after the word “stupid” in the main post, and everything after that is now italicized, regardless of the tags.
IST: Regarding the argument that this levels the playing field, Rush brings up the point that the proper way to level the playing field is to get rid of the sales taxes in the brick-and-mortar stores. This goes against the normal Republican talking point that sales taxes are one of the few taxes that the 47 percent actually pays.
Of course technology makes the implementation of this trivial. Every Zip+4 maps to a specific sales tax rate. I don’t know if only state sales taxes are included, or if regional. county, and municipal sales taxes apply as well. NYC’s sales tax (inclusive) is 8 7/8%, but NYS is only 4%.
Newtown: I am reminded of an old expression with horses and barns.
NCAA: Only the NCAA would be arrogant enough to think they could do this.
IST: That taps into something that infuriates me about the contemporary right. The sales tax is historically the least offensive tax to the right. Everybody pays it, it doesn’t penalize income, it’s not tied tied to ownership. This current tactic is incoherently cynical.
Anyway, the way it is supposed to work is that they do have to pay local taxes, but they’ll pay it through the state. So they only have to deal with a limited number of tax entities. One of the concerns was having to deal with hundreds and hundreds.