That fits pretty well with the definition of "out of touch" and "insane", I think. :-)
Well, it depends if you consider sociopaths to be "out of touch" and "insane." I just consider them to be uncaring greedy bastards.
If only your Cayman island strategy were true. You see, that is also my plan!
The reason it is definitely not true is that these rich people already have enough money to flee.
They probably feel they have more opportunity to milk the US for even more money before fleeing.
If I have $1 billion and you have $2 billion and we both retire to tropical island paradise, we will both have equal standards of living. There's no extra luxury to get. What are you going to get with your extra billion that I can't get? Your own private space program?
What are you going to get with your extra billion that I can't get?
Extra e-penis size.
Basically, that.
These people are money hoarders, pure and simple. Having enough money to basically have every toy they could possibly want and live a lifestyle so high cost that it makes even royalty blush isn't enough for them. They just want more for the sake of having more.
At least some of them plan to put all their "more" to good use at some point. Warren Buffett may be still raking in the dough like crazy, but he's going to donate the vast majority of it to charity once he passes on and has already started doing so. One may argue that his money hoarding is only a temporary thing so that more money will be made available to charity when he's gone (especially when you consider that he lives a very modest lifestyle for someone so wealthy).
Most of them, though, they just seem to want it for the sake of having it with no idea on what to do with it.
These people are money hoarders, pure and simple. Having enough money to basically have every toy they could possibly want and live a lifestyle so high cost that it makes even royalty blush isn't enough for them. They just want more for the sake of having more.
Yeah, you can't analyze greed with logic or rationality. They don't get the "What good is an extra billion?" argument that Scott makes because that is an argument based on reason. Those people just want more for the sake of having more, and nothing they acquire will ever really be enough for them.
That's what's at the heart of most of the shenanigans that put us in this state. people like Bernie Madoff had more monies than any of us here could reasonably envision before they started doing crimes and bad stuff. So why would they do it? To get more. That's all they care about. More, more, more.
I want to be in a party that's associated with extremism towards science, education, and technology. Like, flip the combined budgets of those three departments and the military extremist.
If I have $1 billion and you have $2 billion and we both retire to tropical island paradise, we will both have equal standards of living. There's no extra luxury to get. What are you going to get with your extra billion that I can't get? Your own private space program?
This is what you do. That one billion is important for this kind of thing. NSFW (language)
Now I get a week of bad memes on facebook about how viagra is ok but birth control is not... Why can't people read before sharing such poorly thought out and inaccurate memes???
What was the case about intelligent person? : The decision released today was regarding three closely held corporations whose owners had uncontested deeply held religious views that life begins at conception and that the termination of a post-conception embryo is a sin. Specifically the companies sought to exclude four types of FDA approved contraceptives that are uncontested to possibly terminate a post-conception embryo including the morning after pill and two IUDs.
The courts ruling was that a corporation is a business model and tool allowed to perform any lawful purpose according to the relevant local laws, not that corporations have rights but that the people who own and run those corporations do have rights and those rights don't end because of the corporation. Further it said that the RFRA applies to corporations through existing precedent surrounding the definition of the word person under federal law.
So then the case came down the least restrictive means of enforcing a compelling interest test as defined under the RFRA. Scalia gave the compelling interest to the government despite questioning if the government really had a compelling interest to make sure companies provided this specific coverage. SCOTUS found for the companies because the government put no effort in actually coming up with a working alternative for these companies. Especially considering that the government has already created an alternative program to guarantee no cost access to the contraceptives for employees of nonprofits made exempt from the requirement under the regulations.
My liberal friends: A couple of religious wacko corporations want to stop people from having access to birth control!!! The pill is used for other things aside from pregnancy protection!!!! OMG, Why are they ok with paying for old white man's Viagra but they wont cover my birth control pills!!! ZOMG!!!!!!
My Conservative friends: HAhahaha!!! Fuck Obama!!!! Corporations have rights and if a business does not want to offer birth control as part of their health plan then they have that right! Womans can pay for their own pills cuz no one is giving me free condoms!!!!
What do both the liberals and conservatives have in common? Neither side knows shit about the case yet both seem to think that the plaintiffs were against birth control pills, as in the pill that is not just used for birth control but also for other things that can be regulated via hormone therapies. I have tried asking my liberal friends what other uses morning after pills and IUDs have aside from pregnancy prevention and I have yet to receive an answer.
Hmmmm, my disagreement with the law, is I don't think a corporation with 18k employee's or probably more then 20 other employees can be considered a family business and should not have a right to free expression of religion at that point. I have a huge problem with the rights we are affording corporations. I don't even think Corporations should have the right to free speech as afforded to individuals and groups.
I feel like my Conservative friends are a lot more level-headed than the average person's. This is what I woke up to:
"The Democrats put this in the ACA because they knew Republicans wouldn't support it. This would assist Democrats in creating a narrative that Republicans want to return women to the stone age. It was a wedge issue, and Republicans invented wedge issues, so it pisses me off that our tactics are now being used against us. I suppose karma is a bitch.
If the Republican leadership had any sense of what was actually going on (and had some respect for the intelligence of their base), they would have immediately countered this back in 2012 with a bill to make birth control OTC."
My problem with the ruling is that I think it gets corporate law wrong. Isn't the point of incorporating to put a legal wall between the business and the owners?
Or as one of my more informed lawyer friends put it: At the end of the day, this is about 2 things. First, corporations may seek relief under RFRA. Second, the HHS Mandate fails the Leas Restrictive Means requirement under RFRA, because a less restrictive means was made available to another group. That's all this is about.
My problem with the ruling is that I think it gets corporate law wrong. Isn't the point of incorporating to put a legal wall between the business and the owners?
That's what I learned during my economics classes back in college.
The whole point of a corporation is to limit the liability of the owners of said corporation, or, as you said, put a legal wall between the business and the owners. As a result, there are trade-offs. For instance, in addition to the owners being taxed based on the share of the profits they bring home, the corporation itself is taxed as if it was a separate person (which is where the whole notion of "corporate personhood" probably came from, although it has been horribly perverted by recent SCOTUS rulings). This "double taxation" is the one of the trade-offs you get in exchange for the liability shield. However, where things break down is that a corporation, by its very nature, can't do all the same things or have the same responsibilities as a person. For example, up until now anyway, corporations can't vote whereas real people can. They can't go to jail, get executed (at least in the same way a person can), practice their faith at a religious house of worship, etc. The only way a corporation can truly be punished for any criminal activity is forfeiture of property (money, capital, etc.). In practice, if enough property is forfeited, the corporation could effectively be "executed" by bankrupting it, but this almost never happens (and bankruptcy laws are structured so that more often than not a bankrupt corporation is more akin to a person on crutches than someone who has died). As an entity, a corporation is no more a person than a bot in a multiplayer FPS.
Turns out I was wrong about something else. Plan b type pills and IUDs do not work by stopping a fertilized egg from attaching to the iterine wall. They work by stopping the egg from being fertilized.
Apparently early science on the issue said it stopped implantation and even once the truth was discovered that erroneous information was still left out there... Even some reputable health sites still list these things as stopping a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus.
Yeah, I'm mostly mad because I think that, because they are legally separate from their owners, the owners' religious beliefs shouldn't extend to the corporations (unless said corporation is a non-profit church).
A lot more articles on SCOTUS Blog about the case but the tldr version is one side says a plain reading says no subsidies for federaly created exchanges and the other says if you take the law as a whole they have to be there.
This is actually a mixed bag. I know several people who have their part time hours capped at 29 per week to keep them under the 30 in the law. Raising the hour requirement from 30 to 40 could allow them to get 39 hours a week. On the other hand how many people that work 40 hour weeks might find themselves cut back to 39?
Working less hours and earning less money also allows people to more easily qualify for high dollar subsidies.
I really need to see more data on the expected impact because I don't know which group is bigger.
Comments
These people are money hoarders, pure and simple. Having enough money to basically have every toy they could possibly want and live a lifestyle so high cost that it makes even royalty blush isn't enough for them. They just want more for the sake of having more.
At least some of them plan to put all their "more" to good use at some point. Warren Buffett may be still raking in the dough like crazy, but he's going to donate the vast majority of it to charity once he passes on and has already started doing so. One may argue that his money hoarding is only a temporary thing so that more money will be made available to charity when he's gone (especially when you consider that he lives a very modest lifestyle for someone so wealthy).
Most of them, though, they just seem to want it for the sake of having it with no idea on what to do with it.
That's what's at the heart of most of the shenanigans that put us in this state. people like Bernie Madoff had more monies than any of us here could reasonably envision before they started doing crimes and bad stuff. So why would they do it? To get more. That's all they care about. More, more, more.
What was the case about intelligent person? : The decision released today was regarding three closely held corporations whose owners had uncontested deeply held religious views that life begins at conception and that the termination of a post-conception embryo is a sin. Specifically the companies sought to exclude four types of FDA approved contraceptives that are uncontested to possibly terminate a post-conception embryo including the morning after pill and two IUDs.
The courts ruling was that a corporation is a business model and tool allowed to perform any lawful purpose according to the relevant local laws, not that corporations have rights but that the people who own and run those corporations do have rights and those rights don't end because of the corporation. Further it said that the RFRA applies to corporations through existing precedent surrounding the definition of the word person under federal law.
So then the case came down the least restrictive means of enforcing a compelling interest test as defined under the RFRA. Scalia gave the compelling interest to the government despite questioning if the government really had a compelling interest to make sure companies provided this specific coverage. SCOTUS found for the companies because the government put no effort in actually coming up with a working alternative for these companies. Especially considering that the government has already created an alternative program to guarantee no cost access to the contraceptives for employees of nonprofits made exempt from the requirement under the regulations.
My liberal friends: A couple of religious wacko corporations want to stop people from having access to birth control!!! The pill is used for other things aside from pregnancy protection!!!! OMG, Why are they ok with paying for old white man's Viagra but they wont cover my birth control pills!!! ZOMG!!!!!!
My Conservative friends: HAhahaha!!! Fuck Obama!!!! Corporations have rights and if a business does not want to offer birth control as part of their health plan then they have that right! Womans can pay for their own pills cuz no one is giving me free condoms!!!!
What do both the liberals and conservatives have in common? Neither side knows shit about the case yet both seem to think that the plaintiffs were against birth control pills, as in the pill that is not just used for birth control but also for other things that can be regulated via hormone therapies. I have tried asking my liberal friends what other uses morning after pills and IUDs have aside from pregnancy prevention and I have yet to receive an answer.
"The Democrats put this in the ACA because they knew Republicans wouldn't support it. This would assist Democrats in creating a narrative that Republicans want to return women to the stone age. It was a wedge issue, and Republicans invented wedge issues, so it pisses me off that our tactics are now being used against us. I suppose karma is a bitch.
If the Republican leadership had any sense of what was actually going on (and had some respect for the intelligence of their base), they would have immediately countered this back in 2012 with a bill to make birth control OTC."
Or as one of my more informed lawyer friends put it:
At the end of the day, this is about 2 things. First, corporations may seek relief under RFRA. Second, the HHS Mandate fails the Leas Restrictive Means requirement under RFRA, because a less restrictive means was made available to another group. That's all this is about.
The whole point of a corporation is to limit the liability of the owners of said corporation, or, as you said, put a legal wall between the business and the owners. As a result, there are trade-offs. For instance, in addition to the owners being taxed based on the share of the profits they bring home, the corporation itself is taxed as if it was a separate person (which is where the whole notion of "corporate personhood" probably came from, although it has been horribly perverted by recent SCOTUS rulings). This "double taxation" is the one of the trade-offs you get in exchange for the liability shield. However, where things break down is that a corporation, by its very nature, can't do all the same things or have the same responsibilities as a person. For example, up until now anyway, corporations can't vote whereas real people can. They can't go to jail, get executed (at least in the same way a person can), practice their faith at a religious house of worship, etc. The only way a corporation can truly be punished for any criminal activity is forfeiture of property (money, capital, etc.). In practice, if enough property is forfeited, the corporation could effectively be "executed" by bankrupting it, but this almost never happens (and bankruptcy laws are structured so that more often than not a bankrupt corporation is more akin to a person on crutches than someone who has died). As an entity, a corporation is no more a person than a bot in a multiplayer FPS.
Apparently early science on the issue said it stopped implantation and even once the truth was discovered that erroneous information was still left out there... Even some reputable health sites still list these things as stopping a fertilized egg from attaching to the uterus.
A lot more articles on SCOTUS Blog about the case but the tldr version is one side says a plain reading says no subsidies for federaly created exchanges and the other says if you take the law as a whole they have to be there.
Working less hours and earning less money also allows people to more easily qualify for high dollar subsidies.
I really need to see more data on the expected impact because I don't know which group is bigger.