Corporate Taxation

I was talking to someone about the Apple taxation debacle that is going on right now, and he was going on and on about how unfair it was that Apple wasn’t paying taxes on a large portion of its income for overseas sales. 

He thought that Apple should have to pay corporate taxes on all the money they make, whether foreign or domestic, since they are based here in the US. 

I told him that he was barking up the wrong tree. 

You see, in my opinion, we should eliminate corporate taxes altogether.  It doesn’t matter to me whether a corporation makes its money here in the US, in a foreign country, or on the moon; we should not tax corporations at all. 

I know that this comes as a bit of a shock, but hear me out. 

The reason that I believe this is because no matter how you tax a corporation, the end user – the consumer – ends up paying the tax.  The corporation will ensure that they are making profit, and so whatever costs they have associated with taxes will just be passed on to the end user through increased product prices.  It all comes back to the middle class – it always does. 

And so, in my opinion, if we are going to be paying the taxes, anyway, it would be a very good thing for us to know how much we’re paying.  You see, the corporate tax is a stealth tax: levied on the taxpayer without them knowing how much it is and how much they’re paying.  Rest assured, they ARE paying it.  My feeling is that if we are paying it, anyway, why not pay it directly, without the corporate markup and with the knowledge of exactly how much we’re paying?

As I’ve said before, if the American people truly understood how much they are paying in taxes, there would be torches and pitchforks on the Washington Plaza tomorrow.  So why hide it?  Why not have a line item showing how much you’re paying, and just get it from the end payer and cut out the middle man (and his requisite markup)? 

I’m not talking about reducing taxes – I’m talking about being honest and upfront about how much you’re charging, and that’s why Washington will never allow it – they don’t want us to know how much we’re actually paying, because they know it will be torches and pitchforks soon after, and any talk of actually raising taxes, as they’ve done every single year of my life, would result in rope and lampposts.    

Belated Memorial Day Post

I’ve done a little looking into the root causes of WWI, and I’ve determined that 7 men are responsible for the resultant decline of Western Civilization caused by their entry into that war.  7 men. 

7 men who could have stopped the madness, and maintained our sanity, and who instead chose war, spawning a chain of events that lead to the deaths of untold millions, and loosed on this Earth the worst evils we’ve seen since the dark ages. Now, I understand that most of these men had congresses and parliaments backing them, but any one of these men could have talked sense into their parliament, and none did.  They chose war.

They had no good reason to choose as they did.  There was no good cause for war.  There was no real reason for entire nations to fall into conflagration – for several entire generations of young men to be butchered like cattle. 

It was ego; arrogance; belligerent nationalism and nothing more.  It was an intertwined web of treaties that ensured that the actions of one bumbling assassin resulted in the deaths of millions of people, and all because 7 men chose war. 

And any of these men could have said “STOP!  This is not right, what we’re doing here, and we need to keep our heads!”

But none did. 

They all chose war. 

In doing so, they chose a series of events that lead to fascists and communists coming to power.  Without the defeat of the current heads of state in WWI, neither ideology would have moved outside the minds of a handful of crackpots and fringe-thinkers, but with the utter ruin and chaos that ensued, both ideologies found their day in the sun.  Hitler, Stalin, and Mao collectively killed hundreds of millions of people, and an entire second world war was fought (and a third, through proxy theaters in the form of the Cold War) all as a result of 7 men being too proud to stop themselves as they lead the world to ruin. 

Korea and Vietnam would have never been known for being places where there were wars, because communism would have never come to power.  The Soviets and Americans wouldn’t have been on the edge of total destruction for 60 years, Kim Jong Il and Un wouldn’t be playing their current brinksmanship games, and the world may have never seen the horror of nuclear weapons being used against each other (or maybe even nuclear weapons, at all), and all because 7 men chose war. 

Israel would not exist, inflaming the ire of a billion Muslims.  The mujadeheen would not have been a thing because the Russians would have never invaded Afghanistan, and as a result, Al Qaeda and terrorism might not have ever come to be. 

The Twin Towers might still be standing if only one of these 7 men had just chosen peace. 

On this day – Memorial Day – let us pause to remember not only the men who died in these wars, but also that it was their governments that turned them against each other.  Let us remember that French and German farmers and factory workers probably would have never met each other in 1916, much less come to blows, and even less likely gassed and shelled each other by the millions, if it weren’t for the arrogance and ego of the men that held the power in the governments that ruled them. 

Understand, gentle reader, that hundreds of millions died in the 20^th century, alone, because governments were granted too much power to wreak havoc and destruction in the lives of the people that they governed.  Understand this when you give the government more power over your life, your security, and your personal decisions.  Realize that you have far less to fear from a criminal with a gun, than you do a government with all of the guns.  You have far less to fear from being in debt to a hospital for the care they’ve given you, than you do going without the care at all because the government decided it to be so.  If the 20^th century has taught you anything, it should be that your government should not ever be trusted.  The graves of millions of soldiers, who we remember and honor on this Memorial Day, should be your constant reminder that government is more often than not the root of evil, not the vanquisher of it; the cause of problems, not the solution.

Ask their children, who they left behind, if it was worth it.  Ask their wives, who lost their loved ones, if it was worth it.  Ask the millions of children who have never been born, and the cure for cancer that was never developed, and the trillions of dollars in wasted treasure if supporting the arrogance of 7 men who held the reins of power in 1914, and the congresses and parliaments that backed them, was worth all they gave in doing so. 

None would say “yes.” 

On this Memorial Day, let us honor their memory by doing everything we can to not fall into that trap ever again.  Let us eye our government with suspicion and mistrust, as it was designed to be by our Founding Fathers.  Let us honor the memory of those who pledged everything that they had, and gave it, by making sure that no government, ever again, has the power to send us to slaughter for the better part of a century because their egos couldn’t handle peace.  

No, Discovery Channel, Greenland Sharks Don't Live in Fresh Water...

I just watched something last night that has me completely confused. 

Okay, starting from the tippy-top…

I watch River Monsters on the Discovery Channel.  I’m addicted to it.  I do find the premise a bit campy, however.  I wish that they could do away with it and just go out and catch awesome, huge fish all over the world and film Jeremy Wade doing it.  I don’t understand why they always have to tie the search for the fish to danger to humans, and try to find past attacks before they can try and catch the thing, because it forces them to come to strange conclusions just to find an excuse to tie certain fish back to their premise. 

The episode on Lake Iliamna and his conclusion that it is white sturgeon that are the source of the reported human disappearances really made me shake my head, and you could tell that Mr. Wade was sort of uncomfortable making the association, but really had to in order to justify it being on “River Monsters.”  If they could just do away with the “monster-as-danger” as being a prerequisite and just focus on “monster as monster” (ie, large, or odd) or “monster as legend”, they’d lose that campy feel and get back to the meat-and-potatoes of the show, which is the chronicles of a well-spoken, multi-lingual, very intelligent biologist traveling the globe in search of strange and rare freshwater fish species, often shrouded in mystery and legend, and perhaps sometimes dangerous to humans. 

The Lake Iliamna monster is, in my opinion, almost certainly a misidentified white sturgeon.  

Ascipenser Transmontanus

As you can see from my post and pictures earlier, they really are monsters (and the one that I caught, at 9 feet long and 400 pounds, is less than half the size of the largest ever recorded!).  So I do not disagree with Mr. Wade’s determination that what people saw on Lake Iliamna was a sturgeon.  The ludicrous part was his trying to make a white sturgeon into something dangerous, which they are not.  They are about as harmful as a puppy dog – no teeth, not aggressive or predatory at all, and more or less just kind of, well, there.  His uncomfortable conclusion (made, in my opinion, in order to justify having this awesome and odd fish on the show so that it satisfied the "dangerous to humans" pre-requisite) was that maybe a sturgeon breeched and knocked over the canoe, and that the men inside the canoe vanished because they drowned.  The problem with this is that there are places on Earth where sturgeon are far more plentiful and around people more often, and we just don’t have that kind of problem with them.  I’ve never heard of such a thing happening.  Besides, why do you need a river monster to explain the disappearances of some men paddling about on a very large and frigid subarctic lake in a bark canoe?  Couldn’t there be much more likely explanations than a sturgeon breech? 

Like, for instance, the fact that it is fucking cold?

So the show and I have a sort of bipolar relationship – I absolutely love watching him trot the globe catching really cool and really nasty freshwater critters.  I love the biology and the angling aspect of it, but I get a little turned off by the “danger” aspect of it quite often; more often than not because it quite obviously is silly and forced. 

But last night, I’m left sort of shaking my head about what the hell just happened.  Jeremy Wade decided that he was going to look into Loch Ness, which is something for which I’ve been waiting on for quite some time.  It started out pretty well – he interviewed locals who had claimed to have seen the beast; he dove into the lake to survey what life he could see; he even fished the lake a bit.  The conclusion that he came to was that the Loch did not have the biomass in it to support a large creature, and that therefore, the creature in question must’ve come in from the sea.  This is a sound conclusion based on his assessment of the loch – one which many scientists agree with. 

The first suggestion was that it was possible that a sturgeon had blundered up the River Ness from the ocean, and that, like Lake Iliamna, that was what people were seeing.  Jeremy canoed down the River Ness to survey the river conditions, and found rapid sections that he determined were too shallow and fast for a sturgeon to successfully get through. 

This was the first time that he went off the rails in this show, but it wouldn’t be even close to the last.  The reason that I say that he went off the rails here is due to the fact that I’ve seen sturgeon in rivers with lots of shallow, fast rapids.  In fact, some of the most successful sturgeon populations we have around these parts are in fast, shallow rivers.  So I reject his assessment that a sturgeon could not make its way into the Loch.  In fact, if there is a population of sturgeon living in the ocean at the mouth of the River Ness, I’d be greatly surprised if they haven’t, on occasion, swam up into the Loch in search of food.  And so, I come to the conclusion, once again, that many monster sightings are actually mis-identified sturgeon.  This is especially true in that sturgeon are not a known denizen of the loch, and so folks wouldn’t be expecting to see them. 

Jeremy Wade, however, rejected this premise. So he continued to look for likely culprits, and found that river and lake monsters were generally associated with Viking lore, and that in many places like Scotland, where Vikings once were, there are river monster legends.  So he went to Iceland to investigate some lake monster sightings there.  While there, he learned about a sub-arctic shark that might have an appearance similar to the sightings that he’d heard about.  So he went fishing for Greenland Sharks in Norway.  When he caught one, he suggested that the Greenland Shark might be the culprit for the Loch Ness sightings. 

This is where I went dudeomgwtf??? 

A quick listing of all the things totally fucked up about this concept:

1.      Greenland Sharks do not have the ability to osmo-regulate, meaning that, like most salt-water fish, they cannot live in fresh water.  Some sharks do, in fact, have this ability.  The most famous and well-known is the bull shark.  Jeremy made this point in the show, while not mentioning that the Greenland Shark does not have this ability, failing at logic forever in the process (a species of shark has this ability, therefore the Greenland Shark, which does not, can live in freshwater???).  Loch Ness is fresh water.  Greenland Sharks would hyper-hydrate in a fresh water lake and die within hours from electrolyte imbalance.  As a quick aside, sturgeon do have this osmo-regulation ability, and move from salt to fresh water commonly.

2.      Greenland sharks are much, much bigger than the local Atlantic sturgeon that would be found in the waters of Scotland.  They are also very slow and lethargic, whereas sturgeon are not.  If, as per Jeremy’s conclusion, a sturgeon could not navigate the rapids of the River Ness, how does he presume that a Greenland Shark could?  Also, add to that the fact that sturgeon are renowned athletes – prized for their speed and fighting ability on hook and line.  Greenland Sharks, however, have a blistering, maximum balls-out speed of less than 2 miles per hour.  So if the rapid is too shallow and too fast for a sturgeon that can swim at speeds 8 times faster than that, and is half the size of a Greenland Shark, how, exactly, do you come the conclusion that a Greenland Shark could navigate the rapid when a sturgeon could not? 

3.      Greenland Sharks live in the ocean depths.  The one that Jeremy caught was in over 2,000 feet of water.  To get into the River Ness, Greenland Sharks would need to come up to the surface – something that they very rarely do.

I’m sort of shaking my head at this episode of what is otherwise a really great show.  I truly don’t understand how the hell you can come to the conclusion that a salt-water shark came up a freshwater river, into a lake, and does so often enough that it’s been seen hundreds of times in the last 100 years. 

Outdoor Update - Sturgeon Fishing over Memorial Day

Humans understand the world that they live in through the lens of their lifetime – on average, the sum of their entire life experience will span 75 years or so, and what they know and understand typically is a product of the timeframe in which they were alive.  Sometimes, it comes as difficult for us to believe that there are animals out there that have lived longer, and seen more than we have.

Yesterday, I caught a fish that was older than most people have ever lived to be.  This fish has lived to see an amazing list of things that few living humans can claim to have seen, and it is only about halfway through its life, if its allowed to live for its full life expectancy. 

For instance, this fish was alive when the Columbia River flowed free and undammed for its entire length.  It knew a day when it could swim from hundreds of miles inside Canada, to the saltwater at Astoria, Oregon with no man-made barrier stopping its migration.  Maybe it did just that once.  Maybe it did it more than once. 

Somehow, the wheels of fate and chance now have this fish stranded.  He currently resides between the Dalles Dam and John Day Dam on the Columbia River, and there is no way for him to get past either.  Who knows how he got stranded there, but what we do know is that he was, indeed, alive during the construction of both of these dams. 

My buddy Isaac and I caught him this weekend. 

 Isaac holding his prize.  Notice it looks bigger when he is holding it.  Scale means everything in photography.  

Me.  Holding the tail of the biggest fish I've ever caught.

 So Isaac was holding the rod when the fish came in.  I grabbed the fish and held it 

by it's lip and pulled the hook.  Then, I handed the fish over to Isaac for  him

to get his picture taken with the fish.  Sometimes the process of handing the fish over

 looks somewhat inelegant, as is the case here.  Obviously.  

 The pictures don't really do it justice.  It was HUGE.  Part of the problem is forced

perspective - the fish is behind me so it looks smaller (look at the angle of my arm).  Also, I'm

a very big person and so I sort of bias the scale of this photo.

It took him over an hour and a half to get this leviathan to the boat.  It fought hard the whole time.  He breached out of the water five times, tail walking in a manner more reminiscent of a marlin than something that you’d expect to find 300 miles inland. 

When we finally got him to the boat, we measured him to see what he was all about, and the results were stunning. 

This fish was over nine feet long.  The internet tells me that a white sturgeon this size weighs 400 pounds.  He is something like 80 years old, and he will live to over twice that if he manages to live for his entire life expectancy.  He also has the potential to grow to over twice his current size – white sturgeon have been caught up to 20 feet long and weighing in at a ton.    

You thought I was fucking kidding, didn't you?  

We thanked him for allowing us to catch him and let him go, back into the murky depths of the river that he has known for as long as my Dad and I have known it, combined.  Even if it was legal to kill it and keep it, I couldn’t have brought myself to do it.

This was a truly awesome experience.  

Because I recognize that our photography was horrible, here is a pic of a lady holding what appears to be about an 8 footer - similar in size to the one we caught.  

Polymath

My wife and I bought a half a beef with another family last fall.  We’ve done that for the last couple of years and its worked out pretty well.  This year was a little different, though. 

They showed us a year-old fattened steer, but sold us, I speculate, a 6 year old worn-out breeder cow.  The meat is so tough that the steaks are almost inedible.  In addition to never trusting that meat packer ever again, I decided to get out my ½ horsepower industrial meat grinder that I keep around for reducing deer and elk to edible hamburger and grind up all the steaks and roasts into hamburger.  The benefit to tough meat is that while it makes shitty steak, it makes the leanest, bestest hamburger. 

So I defrosted it all a couple nights ago, and got the grinder out yesterday.  I ran it all through a rough grind, then reserved some of that for my chili (rough chili grind is hard to find in the local markets) and then ran the rest through a fine plate on a second pass to give it a more even texture.  Then, I used our commercial grade vacuum sealer to seal it all up and threw it in the freezer. 

The result is 48 pounds of hamburger in my freezer.  We took that meat, which we would not have eaten, and turned it into something that we will enjoy and will be very handy to keep around. 

Being a polymath, as Borepatch put it, is actually quite awesome.  

IRS Targeting President's Political Opponents

This is just corrupt.  It’s fucking evil.  I cannot imagine how the people in our country accept things like this happening without demanding someone’s head.

Do we think these things are okay?  Do we accept the fact that whoever is in power is going to use the awful power of the federal government for his own personal gain without questioning that at all? 

Or do we just not care?  Until, that is, we are caught in the gears of the machine and ground into a pulp. 

Someone needs to go down for this.  Many, many someones, in fact.  There really ought to be people going to jail for this, but in fact, it looks like no one is even going to lose their job. 

And all I hear from the public, who should be outraged, are crickets.  What in the fuck?

Project Gunrunner was a plot in which your own government purposely smuggled guns into the hands of Mexican cartels, got a bunch of people killed (including a US Border Patrol Agent), and then covered it up like it never happened. 

Crickets.

The Federal Government violated the contracts of thestockholders of Chrysler Corporation by giving preferential treatment in the realignment to the sitting president’s political allies, ILLEGALLY screwing people in good standing in our country so that the party could buy a couple votes.  The government was on record telling people this exact quote when they protested: "Sorry but this is how it is and we really don't care what the law is.  We are the law and we can do whatever we want."

Crickets.

The Federal Government forced their hand in the housingmarket to forward their political goals, collapsing the entire US economy in the process, bankrupting millions and reallocating massive amounts of wealth from the middle and lower classes to the wealthiest folks in the country (and largest political donors).

Crickets.  Oh, and an 80 plus percent re-election rate.

The terrorist attack on the consulate at Benghazi was covered up as being a protest gone awry, and now we’re finding out that we left those people to die because we were too chickenshit to send them some help.  President Obama and Secretary Clinton both had some big back-and-forths about those 3 am phone calls and who would deal with them better – turns out they both would have just cleared their messages so the beeper would stop bothering them and went back to sleep, because that’s what both of them did.

Crickets. 

Now, we find out that the IRS is targeting the political opponents of the current president, and what do we hear?

Fucking crickets!

Wake up, folks, we’ve got a long list of really bad things going on here; a laundry list of bad actions committed by our Federal Government in the name of political opportunism, and no one is saying a thing. 

Stop with the crickets, already…

Can't Believe I Haven't Mentioned this Yet...

I can’t believe that I haven’t mentioned the huge changes that my state made in the last referendum vote yet. 

In the last referendum vote, the people of Washington State took some huge leaps in two currently controversial topics:

1.      We voted to legalize the personal, recreational use of marijuana, and set up legal marijuana exchanges to supply the demand.

2.      We voted to legalize same-sex marriage.

5 Reasons That I am Glad That My State Legalized Marijuana*

1.      Law enforcement officials throughout the state have gone on record as saying that they will be happy to stop “busting” people for marijuana possession, and many have chimed in to say that the only societal damage caused by marijuana in our state has been problems springing from the fact that it is illegal.  Once legalized, many LEOs feel like marijuana will be less troublesome than alcohol.  Time will tell, but I’m tuning in to this massive experiment with great interest.

2.      I don’t believe in punishing victimless crimes.  Any recreational drug use, no matter how damaging to the individual using the drugs (meth, I’m looking in your direction) is harmless to other people until the drug use starts causing other problems that don’t necessarily need to be coupled to the use of the drug.  Case in point: use of drugs may lead to violent episodes or thievery in order to finance the habit.  The point is, those things are already illegal, regardless of whether triggered by a drug or not, so let’s de-couple the drugs from the crimes, punish the crimes, and get help for the user instead of locking him up.  If a meth-head hasn’t hurt anyone or stolen anything, I don’t think we have a right to hurt him by arresting him and throwing him in jail simply because he used a drug.  This is a step in that direction.

3.      I’m tired of spending immense amounts of tax dollars to fund our legal system prosecuting and incarcerating marijuana users.  There is no societal benefit to this, whatsoever, and a huge societal cost as people’s lives are uprooted, and their life choices narrowed by the shiny new criminal record that they now carry around for smoking a little weed. 

4.      I have close personal friends who use marijuana, and every one of them is a highly productive member of society, and I love the fact that they are no longer criminals in my state and we don’t have to worry about the ramifications of a small business owner that employs 40 people getting thrown in the slammer because he got pulled over with a bit of weed in his ashtray.

5.      It is a huge step in the right direction as regards personal freedoms.  We’ve been doing a good job of taking down laws recently that fly in the face of self-determination and personal freedom.  It has only been in the last decade that many states removed their “sodomy” laws from the books, making it legal in those states, for the first time in history, to get a BJ.  The more we can get the government and its laws out of our personal lives, and instead focused on capturing and punishing the harmful predators among us, the better.  In item #1, the LEOs in my state almost unanimously said that they are glad to now have more time and resources to go after the real bad guys. 

*Just to clarify, I don’t have a dog in this hunt.  The only thing I smoke are cigars, occasionally.  I have no personal interest in smoking weed, and to boot, it is still not legal for me to smoke weed because I have a commercial driver’s license, and get randomly tested to keep it.  Also, the company that I work for has a “no drug” policy because we are in heavy commercial construction and really don’t need stoned dudes running around our jobsites.

4 Reasons that I’m Glad My State Legalized Same-Sex Marriage

1.      See #5 above.  The point made there fits here as well.  Personal freedom is personal freedom, regardless of the issue.

2.      I’m still not sure how the hell the government got involved in marriage at all.  I’ve posted on this point before, and still maintain that the people fighting for the government’s permission to get married are fighting the wrong fight and asking the wrong questions.  Their questions shouldn’t be “why can’t we get married?” and rather should be “Who the hell gave you permission to say whether someone can get married or not in the first place? Why is that any of your business, and why are you involved in this at all?”  That being said, this is a positive step in the direction of getting people to ask those questions.

3.      On a completely selfish note, I’m sick to fucking death of hearing about it, and I’m hoping that now that its legal here, it won’t be “all gay marriage, all the time” on the TV news anymore. 

4.      Consenting adults should be allowed to do whatever the fuck they want as long as it doesn’t cause harm to another individual.  Our government needs to figure that out, and this is a good step in that direction.

All that being said, I want to reiterate that none of this is meant to be an endorsement of drug use, or of being gay, or any other thing any more or less than it is meant to denigrate those lifestyle choices – I’m not making judgment calls on whether any of these things are good, bad, or neutral to each person’s individual situation.  I would be disappointed if my daughter decided to use pot, for instance, and will do everything I can to keep her from doing so, regardless of its legality.  My points above all revolve around the fact that these are personal decisions, which don’t harm any other person, and so should be decisions left up to the people making them – the individual. 

That being said, if you want to see what my opinion is on these things, I’ve written about them all at length in other postings.