Solution to the Tea Party.

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Mon Jan 03, 2011 7:01 pm

tzor wrote: "counter balance reductions in short term demand" means that even though fewer people bought Spacely's Sprockets fancy sprokets last month if expenses could be reduced until the next economic cycle when more people would buy spockets allowing for further corporate growth, then one can either maintain the status quo or prepare for the next economic cycle.

Sorry, but I'm still not quite sure what you are talking about. Grammar broken is in sentence you written. Please do repeat.

I could try to make something from that first paragraph, but I'm not sure whether I'd get the right message.

tzor wrote:New regulations that would require them to spend lots of money they do not have, new tax burdens, are the types of fears that keep small businesses from expanding, because they have to make assumptions on their costs and their revenues. When they can't do that, they do not take risks.

While the last paragraph does make sense, what you are saying doesn't. Definite and accountable higher taxes are bad because potential taxes mean businesses can't plan ahead based on the potential taxes. As in, tax A is bad because a possible tax B may or may not be implemented. What?

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Mon Jan 03, 2011 7:49 pm

In other words, if you think you can make it for a couple of more months until better times come along you may be more enclined to gamble on it. If not, you won't even bother to try.

Most small businesses do not run on high profit margins. Even small costs increases can mean significant problems. Taxes are even more dangerous because most small businesses are middle men; taking on the burdens of all those who have to supply them the materials they need, often unable to pass those costs down because they would loose customer base.

"We have to pass the law to find out what's in it."

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Jan 03, 2011 8:07 pm

Uh... corporate taxes and income taxes can't make the difference between profitability and unprofitability. Because if your expenses are as big as your earnings, you don't pay taxes. Your income is just the profit part, and taxes are never going to be more than 100%.

The bogey man of "if you raise taxes, corporations will go out of business!" is laughable on the face of it. We're not talking about tariffs here, it's just literally discussing what percentage of the profits go towards running society. That's it. It can't change a positive number into a negative number, because it's only a portion of the positive part at the end of the equation.

-Username17

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Mon Jan 03, 2011 9:18 pm

I see where you are going with that. Something like: "I need £3,000 profit to pay my mortgage this month. With tax rate A then I'll make enough to pay that, but with tax rate B I won't have enough and will have to fire an employee."

But that is only a small part of it.

You are still arguing that tax X is bad because a possible tax Y may or may not happen.
You are still showing that lower taxes allow more investment and employment, but not how lower taxes in any way encourages investment or employment.
You still haven't explained how lowering taxes relates to multi-national companies or encourages them to invest in 1st world countries.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 12:34 am

tzor wrote:
Zinegata wrote:The problem is when businesses realize that it's simply so much cheaper to setup operations abroad because of cheaper labor.
Ironically, that is not the case for a variety of market sectors. (Corporations learn the hard way.) It is possible in some manufacturing sectors, not because the low cost of overseas labor, but because of the relatively cheap (really? yes really) cost of transportation fuel; getting raw materials across the world and back again as finished products does not significantly impact the cost savings for the cheaper labor.

Not really. Transporting goods nowadays has become ridiculously cheap. Plus, the exchange rate can make goods even cheaper over and above labor costs.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 4:33 am

FrankTrollman wrote:Uh... corporate taxes and income taxes can't make the difference between profitability and unprofitability. Because if your expenses are as big as your earnings, you don't pay taxes. Your income is just the profit part, and taxes are never going to be more than 100%.

Wikipedia wrote: The United States system defines taxable income for a corporation as all gross income (sales plus other income minus cost of goods sold and tax exempt income) less allowable tax deductions, without the allowance of the standard deduction applicable to individuals.

AllBusiness wrote:You can legally deduct a number of expenses commonly associated with your trade or business. Allowable deductions include:

•Employee wages and most employee benefits
•Rent or lease payments
•Interest on business loans
•Real estate taxes on business property
•State, local and foreign income taxes assessed to your business
•Business insurance
•Advertising and promotion costs
•Employee education and training
•Education to maintain or improve your own required business skills
•Legal and professional fees
•Utilities
•Telephone costs
•Office repairs

Of course that only works in the long run on average, because certain items need to be depreciated over the legal liftime of the item. So, yes, for small businesses, it is possible to not make a profit one year and still be taxed because you have to disburse the expenses over several years and not the one year you purchased the items necessary to grow the business.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 4:42 am

Parthenon wrote:You still haven't explained how lowering taxes relates to multi-national companies or encourages them to invest in 1st world countries.

Actually you can get a better bang for your buck by removing stupid regulations than you can by lowering taxes. The company I work for is currently in the process of moving its data centers to the United States, mostly because the EU (and the UK where most of our data centers were is in the EU) is shooting itself in the leg (it's far worse than just the foot) with stupid rules and regulations on the nature of data centers in the EU.

Never underestimate the power of "reach out and choke someone" in the corporate mentality. This is the driving force that keeps most companies from adopting a work at home policy. It is also the hangover after the attempt to outsource, which coincides with the culture clash problem that all outsourcing companies face.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 4:52 am

Pfft. Anyone who does a lot of outsourcing should know they outsource to the Philippines.

Our national economy now revolves around young adults working 24/7 to serve clueless Americans over a phone.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 10:33 am

I would say Tzor couldn't possibly mean THIS incredibly mild rather sensible sounding and entirely VOLUNTARY data center "regulation" from a year ago.

But then I thought, no wait, it's fucking batshit crazy Tzor, that is almost certainly EXACTLY what he means.

After all he has already proven...
a) he believes global warming is a "big science" conspiracy.
b) he believes his own governments attempts to provide healthy food in government funded school lunches and SUGGESTIONS for how to eat healthy for their public is Obama literally ramming food you don't want to eat down your throat with legislation, regulation and a totalitarian facist police state.

Which when combined together would certainly make him see an optimistic opt in program designed as soft encouragement to assist data centers in reducing energy wastage contributing to the destruction of our environment as being both "stupid" and "onerous regulation".

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 11:38 am

tzor wrote:Never underestimate the power of "reach out and choke someone" in the corporate mentality. This is the driving force that keeps most companies from adopting a work at home policy. It is also the hangover after the attempt to outsource, which coincides with the culture clash problem that all outsourcing companies face.

Fine, great, but what is "reach out and choke someone"? I seriously have no idea, and it could range from encouraging employees to murder, to Carpe Diem, to screw everyone else over in deals as much as possible.

tzor wrote:Actually you can get a better bang for your buck by removing stupid regulations than you can by lowering taxes.

So you are supporting deregulation rather than cutting taxes? So theres no real argument for reducing corporate taxes for large companies?

And somehow you still haven't answered the other questions.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 2:42 pm

tzor wrote:Never underestimate the power of "reach out and choke someone" in the corporate mentality. This is the driving force that keeps most companies from adopting a work at home policy.

What do you mean? How's that related to work-at-home?

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 3:12 pm

I'm guessing how the Pointy-Haired Boss wants to have someone to strangle personally, which they can't do if all his underlings are working at home.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 4:13 pm

PhoneLobster wrote:I would say Tzor couldn't possibly mean THIS incredibly mild rather sensible sounding and entirely VOLUNTARY data center "regulation" from a year ago.

I do not know the exact regulations that prompted the change, but we currently have two major datacenters in England (one in Docklands and I forget offhand where the cold standby system is located). It might have actually been a year ago when they announced a new initative to put the core datacenters in two midwest United States cities.

The move may have been related to the following ...

A much less ambitious but nonetheless important objective of the document, however, is simply to make IT directors and datacentre operators aware of how inefficient their existing facilities are by encouraging them to measure power usage. This is useful, says Lawrence, because: "A few years ago, most CIOs didn't know what their electricity bill was, but now about half do - and once they do, they pay real attention to where power is being used and tend to take action because consumption is massive."

As a result, one of the requirements of signing up to the code is that interested parties with existing datacentres must submit initial energy usage measurements of at least one month's duration, before undertaking an energy audit to identify where savings can be made.

The next step is to submit an action plan, which includes a range of intended best practices which need to be implemented in only 40% of the datacentre's floor space within three years of the plan being approved by the code of conduct secretariat. Suggested measures include improving system resource utilisation by employing technologies such as virtualisation as well as optimising the design, configuration and management of energy-hungry cooling systems.

I know there has been problems with electricity supply and the inability to get more to meet the growing demand for more servers in the past sevreal years (demand for financial information and coverage of markets has grown exponentially in the past years). It may have been that the requiement for reducing power consumption was best met simply by moving functionalty out of the facility to a country that isn't looking to put chokeholds on power consumption.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 4:30 pm

PhoneLobster wrote:b) he believes his own governments attempts to provide healthy food in government funded school lunches and SUGGESTIONS for how to eat healthy for their public is Obama literally ramming food you don't want to eat down your throat with legislation, regulation and a totalitarian facist police state.

Actually, no, I don't believe that.
I am sceptical because the first lady is a hypocrite.
I am sceptical because what the first lady says she is doing and what she does isn’t always the same.
I would prefer a state driven solution as opposed to a federal one, because of that Constitution thing.

But, no, I really have nothing against her proposal at face value. It’s the Bully Pulpit at work and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. Understanding, of course that old “Sleeper” Quote

Sleeper wrote: Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk."
Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible.

I think food education is just as important as reading, writing, and science, and tastes better!

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 4:35 pm

RobbyPants wrote:
tzor wrote:Never underestimate the power of "reach out and choke someone" in the corporate mentality. This is the driving force that keeps most companies from adopting a work at home policy.
What do you mean? How's that related to work-at-home?

A supervisor's tendency to "micromanage" tends to give rise to a desire for near constant face to face time with those he or she is micromanaging. Email, IM, and phone conversations are not sufficient, compared to the power to walk over to their cube and see them face to face.

The technical reasons for this is that those channels do not support non verbal communication systems that are available when people talk face to face. Non verbal communication is a very interesting topic and remember the majority of bosses and supervisors lifed in the era before facebook and twitter.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 4:49 pm

tzor wrote: The move may have been related to the following ...

A much less ambitious but nonetheless important objective of the document, however, is simply to make IT directors and datacentre operators aware of how inefficient their existing facilities are by encouraging them to measure power usage. This is useful, says Lawrence, because: "A few years ago, most CIOs didn't know what their electricity bill was, but now about half do - and once they do, they pay real attention to where power is being used and tend to take action because consumption is massive."

As a result, one of the requirements of signing up to the code is that interested parties with existing datacentres must submit initial energy usage measurements of at least one month's duration, before undertaking an energy audit to identify where savings can be made.

The next step is to submit an action plan, which includes a range of intended best practices which need to be implemented in only 40% of the datacentre's floor space within three years of the plan being approved by the code of conduct secretariat. Suggested measures include improving system resource utilisation by employing technologies such as virtualisation as well as optimising the design, configuration and management of energy-hungry cooling systems.

Tzor, that's insane. You just read off some of the requirements to join a voluntary energy awareness action group. Seriously. Voluntary. No one is going to leave a country because someone creates a club that they feel is too much trouble to join.

-Username17

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 7:58 pm

Plus every CIO on the fucking planet is paying attention to power consumption, because they've all suddenly discovered in a cloudy virtualised world their per RU consumption has doubled and not all their data centres were specced for that - mostly the air conditioning.

Also, everyone on the planet is currently doing a major data centre consolidation, thanks to virtualisation you can use less RUs! The UK is doing it, Australia is doing it, most major corporations are doing it. It's nothing to do with being in Europe. Read the latest mound of gartner spam about it.

Really, that is total madness from Tzor.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 8:25 pm

I gave a specific example; an example which is specific. A specific example is not a generalization, nor was it a universal rule. It was an example of an action where a company moved from A to B because of the Regulations in A that were not in B. The example was used to point out that both regulations and taxation can keep people from expanding in a given location.

But, go ahead and think I'm mad. We all know I don't exist.

PoliteNewb · Post by **PoliteNewb** » Tue Jan 04, 2011 9:25 pm

tzor wrote:I gave a specific example; an example which is specific. A specific example is not a generalization, nor was it a universal rule. It was an example of an action where a company moved from A to B because of the Regulations in A that were not in B. The example was used to point out that both regulations and taxation can keep people from expanding in a given location.

But you gave no evidence that your specific company moved from A to B because of C; there's correlation, but no proof of causation. And people are pointing out that claiming that causation makes no sense. So your specific example is not only anecdotal and irrelevant...it's kind of nonexistent.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Wed Jan 05, 2011 3:32 pm

I'm only going by the unofficial excuses given my those above me in the chain. Remember, corporations aren't vulcans, they don't always do things logically, but often through gut emotions.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Wed Jan 05, 2011 5:59 pm

So we should change regulations because people are crazy?

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed Jan 05, 2011 6:15 pm

RobbyPants wrote:So we should change regulations because people are crazy?

No, we shouldn't have any mandatory regulations at all, because the existence of voluntary regulations scares people.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Wed Jan 05, 2011 9:00 pm

Well fair enough, potentially profitable voluntary opt in schemes are apparently crushing the sector...

... or you know, maybe Tzor is just crazy.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Thu Jan 06, 2011 2:07 am

RobbyPants wrote:So we should change regulations because people are crazy?

No, all regulations have good things and bad things (often unintended consequences). The trick is to design regulations that provide more good than bad. Regulations, for the sake of regulations, or those regulations where people don't want to consider the unintended consequences can often wind up doing more harm than good.

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Sun Jan 09, 2011 12:44 am

Tzor, get an example that makes sense. Power consumption of a nonvirtualised datacentre is one of the highest OpEx costs. Especially since every watt used requires more AC, it double dips on increasing the costs.

Every sane business is currently voluntarily trying to slash costs by reducing power load. Virtualisation being the easiest way and also the one that has the most benefits in areas other than power usage.

Come back with a good example, not one based on patently inaccurate hearsay.