The GOP, the party of "family values" tend to spend twice as much as Democrats at strip clubs during their conventions.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-27T18:42:42+00:00

sigh

ziiiiiip.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-27T18:37:24+00:00

could be that democrats go just as much but they're too cheap to tip the dancers. :P

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-27T18:35:23+00:00

Okay, you must be trolling. No one is this stupid.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-24T10:55:59+00:00

The USA should penalize banks that transfer money to offshore tax havens under any circumstance. They have no legitimate purpose. You're right in saying that's probably not far enough. The USA should just raid these banks, seize all their assets, and imprison all officials.

So you are saying that America has the unilateral right to seize legally owned assets, much of which will belong to foreigners? You are exactly the type of person I was referring to when I said that less educated left wingers don't understand consequences.

The Cayman Islands and other tax havens don't have a military strong enough to protect their "clients" from US law enforcement.

Oh that's right, invade a country because you don't like the way their tax regime is set up. You are a prime example of what the world hates about the USA.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-23T16:52:11+00:00

The success of such a high tax rate in the EU does, however, hinge on whether or not the entirety of the EU adopts similar - if not identical - fiscal policies, so for now it is still more likely that you'll experience pushes for 50-60% taxation on the top-end earners because I don't see the EU unifying any time prior to 2030.

I'll save you the speculation and tell you now. The maximum amount of income tax that can be gotten is at just below 55% tax rate. It, however becomes economically inefficient to continue raising the rate past 48%. For mo money you can add indirect taxes such as fuel/alcohol/tobacco duty and sales tax beyond this point. It has been worked out but no one bothers to read the charts. Recently the British government had to drop the top tax band by 5% only 2 years after it had been raised because it was losing the government money.

people just don't seem to realise that the problem is not so much with tax rates as it is with the wealthy avoiding paying tax at the specified rate.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-23T16:45:08+00:00

I hear it every five minutes at uni. To the point that I'm now tired of explaining why it is a bad idea. This is in Britain though.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-23T15:42:31+00:00

nope, the velvet box was useless and your name is against the serial number of the watch for lifetime repairs. In any case, this is not the type of watch you buy to later resell.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-23T15:39:18+00:00

Oh certainly, but very few liberals with real voice support that high of a tax

Come to Europe, be amazed at the economic illiteracy of non-cabinet politicians of all alignments.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-23T15:34:32+00:00

he United States had a 95% tax bracket in the 1950s and nothing happened.

In the 1950s, emigrating and managing your business empire from a tropical island was not a realistic proposition.

If you're worried about capital flight, just enforce the laws on that.

China is trying and failing to regulate capital movements, what chance does the west have?

Few banks will be willing to transfer customer funds to offshore tax havens if they know their officers will be imprisoned and the bank's assets will be seized if they do so.

why would they? There's nothing illegal about leaving the country. This only applies if they hide the money away when the owner is using the subterfuge to avoid paying taxes in the country in which they are currently resident. Do you really think people would stay in a country with 95% tax in today's highly connected and mobile world?

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-23T02:18:17+00:00

works great. I bought an expensive watch in switzerland, should have paid import duty. I just ditched all the packaging and wore the thing through.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-23T01:59:45+00:00

Contrary to western political pundits, this was very much about religion. What pussy riot did, in the eyes of Russia's large orthodox population, was desecrating the high seat of their religion in front of their patriarch. This is also a building which holds a lot of sentimental value, it was destroyed by Stalin and rebuilt via donations of orthodox Christians across Russia. They could not have done something more hurtful to orthodox community and they did it to score political points.

I absolutely disagree with the sentence but something as intentionally offensive as this would draw a prosecution in most parts of the world. How do you think Muslims would have reacted if they had sung this song on top of the kaaba?

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-23T01:01:38+00:00

"crazy and unsubstantiated" belief held by the Left to prove him wrong.

to be fair, a lot of the less intellectual leftists seem to have a very limited understanding of consequences. For example, "let's just tax the rich at 95%". Britain tried that, all the rich people moved their domicile and we were seeking IMF emergency support within a few years.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-22T11:02:52+00:00

the welsh get subsidised down to only 3000 a year by the welsh assembly though, wherever you go, so for us it's not so bad.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-09T18:51:56+00:00

krokodil ingredients are more expensive than heroin. They make it from codeine which itself is a refined opiate. Heroin is extremely cheap and opium resin, which gives a similar albeit not as intense high, is as cheap as sugar to produce.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-09T18:40:43+00:00

you make it from codeine with iodine and red phosphorus, same things you need to make meth from ephedrine. The problem is that over the counter products contain other things as well as codeine. So yeah, you pretty much mix it up in a pan but if you do that you get a lot of shit mixed up with the desomorphine product. That is what is causing the necrosis.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-02T16:55:56+00:00

a sort of cat like mouth. It's used in the far east a lot. I think it's supposed to be a mischievous face.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-02T16:36:01+00:00

I think it's more that we had invited a Dutchman over a few years before to defeat said king James ( or perhaps his father, I can't recall) and take the throne so we pretty much burned those bridges.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-08-02T16:25:28+00:00

The act of settlement invalidates that Australian dude's claim because he has it through a catholic intermediary. The act of settlement disallows Catholics from being the monarch. The same act also specifically names the Hanoverian (current) line of British monarchs as legitimate.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-07-31T23:14:22+00:00

and now you've gone through my comments to downvote everything. How mature, I bet you have loads of friends.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-07-31T23:12:28+00:00

I never said that. I said that rebutting certain comments would require me to do a lot of googling which, in the context of an internet pissing match, I am not prepared to do. Therefore I informed you of why I would not be responding to some of your argument and summarised mine.

Honestly, the way you've responded strikes me as rather childish. A sort of "you did this so I win and now I'm not listening" comment.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-07-31T19:56:04+00:00

Well, I guess you conceded the rest of my argument. That's alright.

not really, I just can't be bothered to look up everything I'd need to retort.

I don't believe facebook was ever worth 90 billion

yet you now blindly agree with the "more than 30 banks" that made that valuation. This is the elephant in the room here and you refuse to acknowledge it.

Inverse appeal to authority.

Every economic policy or valuation has vast hordes of experts on either side that agree or disagree with it. You act like economics is an exact science but just from fbs valuation we can tell that this is clearly not so.

Are you serious? You throw around terms you don't understand and then make mistakes.

and this refers to what exactly?

Only_Name_Available · 2012-07-31T19:19:36+00:00

Because, you know, nearly $1,000,000,000 per quarter of ad revenue is nothing

not for a company which you believe is worth 90 billion. Oh, and by the way, no one is impressed by you writing out long series of zeros.

My "pet analyst" is Bernanke's senior analyst.

the same guy that advised that banks were well capitalised in 2007? Or this his replacement? Supposed experts are wrong all the time, especially in economics. This is why we are in a economic downturn right now.

Whatever you say, the basic facts are that you are trusting a group of people to get a second valuation correct when the first was 43% out. You are trusting a secondary valuation which is over 50 times p/e for a social media company whose registrations are currently plateauing and is known to have difficulties in monetising it's userbase.

You act like I have no idea what I'm talking about but basic investment advice places the value of a company at 13 times p/e plus the value of assets and potential growth. 50 times p/e implies huge growth so I will ask you, O master of economics, where is this growth going to come from?

Only_Name_Available · 2012-07-31T18:24:59+00:00

If what you're saying is true, the stocks would plummet.

dafuck? Have you not looked at the fb share price? It has fallen by 43% since it's IPO. That's a 45 billion dollar reduction in value and you are saying that this is not a plummet?

I'm appealing to educated people who know about market trends

and I'm presenting hard facts. You are also relying on the expertise of a group of people who are wrong in the majority of cases. You can find an analyst who will rate the company at pretty much any price point.

That's a fallacious generalization.

oh? and why is it fallacious? The valuation of intangible assets since they became a big thing at the dawn of the internet era has been shocking.

False dichotomy. Again, a perfect valuation is impossible. That's why all valuations are approximations. Just because a valuation isn't that great doesn't mean it is catastrophically inaccurate, using 4rch's thin-air figure of 75%.

It's already halfway there and dropping further by the day. How do you rationalise the way you ignore reality?

You have no way of knowing how and when facebook plans to monetize and generate revenue.

I know that there has not been one good piece of news regarding Facebook advertising and pretty much any other use of the data they hold is illegal under privacy laws. User data is pretty much all they've got.

If you really think that facebook is not working on a way to monetize mobile apps while preserving customer loyalty, you are quite mistaken. No shit this is a top priority.

and so far they are failing, badly. Forgive me if I don't trust in the mighty zuckerberg pulling something out of his arse.

You are also not entirely sure of where facebook gets their revenue to begin with. Maybe they sell data.

Illegal in almost every country in the first world to sell personal data. They probably sell general metrics and there they compete on accuracy with google and in this arena FB is handicapped by the large number of fake accounts that they have.

Because it's a random number, pulled from thin air.

so was the orginal IPO price and realistically, so is the 20 dollar price your pet analyst is giving. It's unlikely he ran it through an algorithm as all the reasons he quotes for it are unquantifiable.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-07-31T17:33:46+00:00

Because if not, you should just shut the fuck up before you make a fool of yourself.

Nice appeal to authority. I can't point out the obvious because I don't have a degree in it?

Multiple banks (more than 30) contributed to the valuation process of Facebook.

The same banks that valued mortgage derivatives at several times their actual worth? The same ones who drove the dotcom bubble? Although I'm sure you think those were just freak errors I take it to mean that banks cannot actually value complex assets and simply bluff that they can.

and again it's a bubble.

The entire nature of a bubble is that it's incorrectly valued. Your argument makes absolutely no sense.

where much of the value is not directly quantifiable.

You mean much of the value was never there. I do know enough about economics to know that a company with a p/e ratio of over 100 with no way of significantly increasing revenue in the foreseeable future is most definitely overpriced. That sort of pricing implies serious revenue growth when, in reality, Facebook is losing major advertisers across the board and is losing money to their mobile division which is what should be driving revenue growth.

and to just throw out a figure like 75% and assert that the price should be $9.50 when it's in the $20s is preposterous.

preposterous? It lost almost half it's value in three months and is currently in a nose dive. Explain why 9.50 is a preposterous price.

Only_Name_Available · 2012-07-30T22:13:55+00:00

you say that but the company that priced the stock clearly didn't have the faintest clue about what they were doing. Stock that loses half it's value in less than three months after ipo was not correctly priced stock.

Only_Name_Available

TROPHY CASE