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I hate the current trend of renting, or leasing, every possible thing there is ... what's next, the clothes and underwear you're currently wearing?
The end of ownership
- Thread starter cmartinez
- Start date
That's pure sophistry that does nothing to address the issue.
The underlying issue is that what is meant by "buy" needs to be clearly understood by buyer and seller, regardless of what word is used as a label for the transaction. It can't be hidden in the terms of some User Agreement.
I virtually never "buy" anything in digital format unless I can download a local copy that is completely under my control. I hate subscription models for anything that I want access to indefinitely. I have never bought a movie on Amazon Prime or Netflix, since I have no idea what will happen in the future. There is no guarantee that either company will remain in business, or at least not in the streaming business. There is no guarantee that I will want to continue being a member. There is no guarantee that they will not change their policies and remove my access to purchased content even if I do.
But I also don't demand that they not use a subscription or licensing model -- I simply choose not to use it for durable access.
I think that, eventually, we will have a broad understanding of what it means to buy something digitally. That may evolve naturally, or it may come about because of regulation or court decisions. It may or may not involve the adoption of a new term (eBuy?) with widely understood and legally binding meanings. One possibility might be that when you eBuy something, you are purchasing an indefinite access license with a guaranteed initial access period of five years (or whatever length it turns out to be). If the provider removes access to the content before that, they must make a refund (possibly according to some prorating schedule). After that period, no refund is owed, but access can only be removed if it is being removed for everyone. Perhaps this would also require providers to maintain a surety bond that would cover its liability to eBuyers should they go out of business or if the change were forced upon them through no fault of their own. The providers would then likely have similar requirements for the sources that they obtain content from.
Ah, yes, I can see it now. Summon an autonomous vehicle to go look for my dog that wandered off. Or summon an autonomous vehicle to take me to the missing airplane that I'm on the search team for. Or summon an autonomous vehicle when I need to evacuate because of the wildfire coming towards my home.
One thing that bothers me to no end is the concept of property tax.
I mean, one puts an enormous financial effort and discipline for many years into buying a house only for it to be taxed for eternity by the state. And what that means for all practical purposes is that you actually end up paying rent for your own property to the government.
I mean, one puts an enormous financial effort and discipline for many years into buying a house only for it to be taxed for eternity by the state. And what that means for all practical purposes is that you actually end up paying rent for your own property to the government.
What's worse is personal property tax, not because it is that huge a financial burden, but because the of extreme headache involved. I'm supposed to file an annual statement that lists all tangible personal property (as opposed to things like real estate (not personal) or intellectual properly (not tangible)) that I own that is used in the business that indicates what it is, when it was purchased, what it's original purchase price was. I can group things into asset categories and year groups, but then the state decides how much I have to pay in tax for owning it and the privilege of doing business in Colorado (yes, they actually say that the tax is for the privilege of doing business here). The saving grace is that the revenue that it brings into the county from small business is so small that most counties recognize that it costs more to enforce it than to brings in, and thus turn a blind eye. I first learned about it the hard way when the company I worked for got audited and so they explained that most of the computers and lab equipment was leased. They had to provide the names of the owners, which included me, so I got a phone call and had to spend about four hours with someone from the county assessors office going through the house identifying what was and what wasn't owned by the business as he made copious notes. Since most of my stuff was bought by me originally for non-business purposes, I didn't have records of when it was bought or for how much. But since it was being used for business purposes, it still had to be included and taxed. So we had to come up with reasonable estimates for everything. In discussing it with him, it because clear that the county would rather do away with it completely or make it a simple tiered fee. He said that it was virtually guaranteed that the tax that would be due wouldn't even pay for his time and mileage to get to and from my house, let alone pay for the time he actually spent there. When I got the bill, it was $19. When I asked him if I now had to maintain and file this with the county every year, he said that, technically, I did, but that he would recommend only dealing with it when and if the county reaches out and makes an issue of it. Basically, if I file it, someone there has to take the time to process it, which they know is unlikely to bring in enough to cover the cost of doing so. So they only make a point of contacting small business when something else happens that makes it unavoidable (such as happened in this case). That's the only time I've ever been contacted and, I'm pretty sure, was also the only year that my employer was ever contacted. Any rational government (assuming that such a critter is not an inherent contradiction in terms) would revise the system to make it reasonably
Estate tax is also pretty insidious and causes a lot of family-owned business to go out of business when the owner dies because the heirs have no option but to liquidate the assets in order to pay the tax. The thresholds are high enough that individual personal estates seldom exceed it, but even a very small family business easily can, and the 40% tax rate is so high that an asset-rich, cash-poor (which describes a LOT of family-owned businesses) can't pay it.
All of these are a form of wealth tax, which is gaining more and more of a following and is being sold the same way as so many other taxes as being a way to make the rich pay "their fair share" (which the proponents never seem to get around to defining what their "fair share" is). It is also always pushed so that the vast majority of people wouldn't be subject to it. It's much easier to get a majority of people to vote for something that they benefit from but aren't subject to. Of course, they never mention that this is the exact same approach that has been used to pass many taxes that now virtually everyone is subject to. In today's dollars, the exemption for a single person was $70k, compared to today's $16k. Plus, the tax on income over the exemption was just 1% compared to starting at 10% today. The top bracket was 7% and to hit that you had to have over $500k of taxable income (well over $11 million today), while today a single filer hits the 37% bracket at just $650k.
The same was true when the Alternative Minimum Tax came in. It was sold in response to discovering that there are 155 (yes, less than 200 filers) that had high incomes but had used various specific tax preferences to result in zero federal tax liability. But instead of looking at those specific preferences and addressing them, the approach was to come up with the AMT which initially only applied to about 0.01% of tax payers. Within just four decades or so, that fraction has grown over 100x and, worse, had gotten to the point where people earning incomes right at the median often had to calculate their taxes twice each year in order to determine whether AMT applied to them.
Another one was the self-employment tax. whose starting point was set at $400 (over $5500) so that most side businesses would not be subject to it. The initial rate was 2.3%. Today, it's still $400, which means even if you only clear $8 a week you get to pay 15.3% of it to Uncle Sam.
And then there's Social Security. Up until 1984, these benefits weren't taxable. Then they decided that "high income" beneficiaries weren't paying their "fair share", so if a couple's combined income (their non-SS AGI plus half of their SS benefits) exceeded $32k (~103k today), up to half of their SS benefits would be taxable income. The threshold meant that about 90% of beneficiaries weren't subject to the tax. Today, the threshold is still $32k and right at half of beneficiaries are subject to it -- and now up to 85% of benefits are taxable. There are already lots of people that are paying income tax on their SS benefits even though their benefits are their ONLY income. In another thirty years or so, most people will be in that situation.
So it escapes me how anyone can believe the claim that any "wealth tax" that gets passed is only going to apply to the uber-rich. Give it a few decades and nearly everyone will be subject to it.
We rented all of our computers at work. It served two purposes. First after a typical 3-year lifespan of the lease (at that time) you weren't left with truckloads of equipment to dispose of and even more significantly you could then upgrade on the new lease. Putting yearly leases into the operating budget was also far simpler than getting approval for capital projects to buy new computers. An approach the Plant Controller loved as to his calculations it was far more cost efficient to the plant budget. Which insured that operating equipment stayed operational and didn't suffer from "Gee, we can't afford to add that to our budget this year." Or as Archie Bunker put it "youse don't buy beer, youse just rents it!" From a personal standpoint, I never lease and continue to use goods until they are no longer useful and then repair or replace them if I still need them.
Here the majority of property tax goes to the schools then the rest goes to the County operations. State income tax goes to the State Government. Sales tax rate is 6-7% (depending on local options) which goes to the state (4%) and county and that includes groceries in Georgia. Gasoline tax goes... who knows? Then there are "sin" taxes on alcohol and tobacco... I've heard of some large cities additionally having city income taxes as well.
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The company I worked for (small company of about a dozen employees most of the time I was there) preferred leases from a cash-flow standpoint. The company operated debt-free, so when a new significant purchase was needed they would see if any of the employees wanted to buy it and then lease it to the company. Several people did that with the computer on their own desk. Only a couple of us did so with more than that, with the president and myself being, by far, the most prolific. At one point I think I had eight computers, two oscilloscopes, and some software on lease. The standard lease was a three-year lease that was heavily front end loaded. You were paid quarterly and the first quarter you got 20% then it was 4%/mo for a while, then it dropped 1%-pt until it ended up at 2%/mo at the end. At the end of the lease, you had been paid 119% of the purchase price and could either take possession of the equipment (which had little value at that point) or leave it on lease indefinitely for 1%/mo. Even if the equipment was worthless at that point, your rate of return was 13.5% APR (based on monthly compounding). Given that most people (me included) hate migrating from to a new computer, they tended to stay on lease for several more years. I continued to have equipment on lease with them long after I stopped working there (I even bought some computers and put them on lease after I had left). The first computer I leased was a 200 MHz Pentium Pro that, with the 21" Trinitron monitor, came out to just over $5000. That machine was on lease for more then ten years after the end of the lease as it ended up being the only machine they had that had an ISA bus and we had some data acquisition boards that were ISA-based that were still needed from time to time. I had an oscilloscope that was on lease for even longer and I convinced them that, beyond the three-years, it should continue to pay 2%/mo because of the relatively high retained value. I made some serious money off of those leases.
This article can also fit in the "Right to Repair" thread. But I think that it's also related to the meaning of true ownership.
France criminalizes everything, including air conditioning.
In the end, they always wind up Robespierre-ing themselves.
panic mode
- Joined Oct 10, 2011
- 5,250
same reason one may choose to not take public transit. comfort and space, ability to use it to transport and lock own property such as tools, avoid risk of stench and filth left by somone who managed to scrape $5 to use it and deem it disposable, but not spend $50000 to own it and take pride in taking care of it etc.
Court tosses Microsoft's appeal in pre-owned software licenses battle
https://www.theregister.com/softwar...in-pre-owned-software-licenses-battle/5267742
Or, if you prefer not to have your carotid artery cut from behind by a random fellow traveler.
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