Of course they do. The default tax rate is something like 40%. However expenses are deductible, reducing that rate to what may seem like a pittance.  Maybe it would make more sense to look at it like this:

Suppose I go out and start a C-Corp as a second business and (as a simple number), I make $10,000 this year in profit. I manage to whittle my effective tax rate down to 10% by tracking my expenses really well. So I end up with $9,000 in after-tax business profit. Assume that I distribute this all out to myself at the end of the year. Now I have to pay personal income tax on $9,000 of income. Let’s pretend I have to pay 15% on those gains through some tax trickery where I pay a low rate. By the time I’m done, I’m left with: $7650

1 – (7650/10000) = 1 – .765 = .235 = 23.5%

There’s a reason why the LLC and S-Corp organizational structures are the preferred structure of small businesses – these structures avoid the double taxation problem and both entities essentially serve as a pass-through.

The problem with growth stocks is that they do not pay out dividends, making this example a bit more difficult to see. However growth stocks typically re-invest profits to grow the share value. Assuming the stock price increases between the time you purchase it and when you sell it, you are paying taxes at the corporate level and then at the personal level when you cash in.

Even if the price of the stock loses value and you sell at a loss, the taxes have already been paid. Even then, your ability to claim a loss in a diversified portfolio is minimized. You have to take all of your capital gains, subtract the loss and then claim the loss on your tax form. The max loss you can take is $3,000 (you can can carry excess losses forward). However, because the stock is a growth stock, you essentially re-invested your share of the profits in the business. You paid taxes on a portion of the corporate income, but when it comes time to claim your capital loss, you can’t claim those taxes, paid at the corporate level, as a part of your capital loss. This effectively reduces the value of the loss you can claim/carry.

For non-dividend-paying stocks, the only time you are not double-taxed is when the business pays a 0% tax rate and you have a capital loss that exceeds your capital gains. Over a diversified portfolio, the likelihood of such an event is minimal. You will have to pay some taxes at the corporate level, as a shareholder, somewhere in the portfolio mix.

And for those who seem to think double-taxing of dividends is a myth or a “privilege” of being a shareholder in a corporation, the IRS specifically states it is a double-tax.

Early-on, Amazon had 90% market share of the ebook marketplace, essentially making them a monopoly-of-sorts. Amazon could sell ebooks at deeply discounted prices, undercutting paper-based books simply on the lower distribution costs alone. This irks the brick-and-mortar booksellers who are starting to look like record stores looked last decade.

Enter Apple who wants a 30% cut on the books they sell. This magically erodes the margins of book publishers. Apple also starts whacking away at Amazon’s market share, cutting Amazon down 60% or so. Then, in order to still turn a dime, Apple and some book publishers collude in some price-fixing scheme effectively ensuring that Apple’s prices aren’t undercut. This means Amazon can’t deep-discount as easily.

At the same time, the price fixing ends up skewing the book market. Consumers have to pay more for ebooks that effectively cost drastically less to distribute. Consumers catch wind when they see the pricing on sites like Amazon – where a trade paperback of a novel like “Starship Troopers” – a book that has been out for several decades in paper form, costs more in ebook format than it does in (new) paperback format (even worse when you see the used copy price).

One general trade off for buying an ebook format over a print format currently is the ebook format can’t be re-sold (I’m willing to walk this back, but I, and I’m guessing, many consumers are not so sure about copyrights with electronic media – thanks alot record and movie companies suing the bejeezus out of their customers).

So not only is the paper version cheaper to purchase, you can resell it without encountering the potential wrath of copyright holders. You buy an ebook at an equal price as a paperback (and oftentimes a higher cost), but you can’t resell it. You’d think publishers would be rallying around ebooks and be more willing to deal with the lower price. The faster they push paper out of the market, the faster they can begin moving volume of “new” book sales.

But back to the subject – the antitrust part. So if you believe in antitrust, you might believe that Amazon held an illegal monopoly on the ebook market and it should have been broken up. But how do you break it up? Price fixing appeared to have worked. Publishers colluded with the help of a third party and all parties, except Amazon and consumers, came away winners.

So Apple and publishers are being sued for what the government wouldn’t (or couldn’t) do. If you’re an antitrust advocate, it would be interesting to hear how antitrust law is somehow going to fix this. If the government is successful in their prosecution, then the likely beneficiary is Amazon who has an opportunity to, again, regain monopoly status by using market position to undercut on prices.

By pursuing Apple and publishers, the government will have to risk taking “anti-competitive” action with a potential of obtaining an “anti-competitive” result.

From a rhetorical perspective -

• If you side with Apple and the publishers – you hate consumers. That is unless you are an Apple consumer. Then it might just be self-loathing.
• If you side with Amazon, you are a monopolist apologist who hates book retailers, publishers, authors and the like. You also hate competition
• If you side with ebook consumers – you hate traditional book retailers and publishers. But it doesn’t matter because the government will decide what is in your best interest.

The “solutions” put forward are largely “voluntary” – I’m assuming as some parts are fairly vague on just how such a plan might be implemented. And yes, I’m using scare quotes for a reason. And this reason: ideas that often sound good on paper, are never implemented in the manner most academics, altruistically, hope them to be.

So just to give a quick recap, here are the ideas presented:

• Meat patches – patches that will basically make you sick from eating animal proteins
• Creating Toy Children – use genetic and biological enhancement to make your kids smaller. Maybe small enough to put in a small purse until they’re 18 – 20.
• Brainwashing – Before we even get to creating Toy Humans, we need to give the youngin’s some “cognitive enhancement” to be sure they don’t reproduce too early, if at all.
• Pharmacological “Enhancement” to make people whiny, sad bitches more empathetic and altruistic. This method is to remove the word “I” from the lexicon of all people. We need to be more willing to take one for the Team every time someone says “we need”.

Unfortunately, ideas that didn’t seem to make the cut:

• Post birth abortion – Give parents a 30 day return policy on kids
• Suicide is good – cognitive enhancement to ensure that everyone knows suicide is really a “good” thing.
• Gay Water – If you can invert the 90% straight / 10% gay percentages, we’ll have fewer children (and better fashion). Spike the water and no one will be the wiser.

My (quite possibly, equally unoriginal) ideas are just as equally valid. I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes:

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepare to see them misunderstood. (H.L. Menken)

The question is, where does it fit in? There’s a couple of references to business-use cases in the specs. But there’s also a lot that businesses might not be too pleased with – namely access to apps that would otherwise be restricted on the desktop. I’d venture a guess that phones are more commonly lost than are laptops, leading to questions (at least in my head) about how much security can be applied to the Ubuntu side of the phone.

According to this article at PCWorld, Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t seem to concerned on the security angle -and admittedly, Linux does have more than a few security options out there that can be applied.

Why would I make any more when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are.

Lucas’ position is an interesting place at the intersection of creativity and product delivery. I tend to believe Lucas hasn’t quite found the balance between art and product – something, I would assume, creative types often struggle with.

There’s no doubt that Lucas has been successful (monetarily and popularity-wise) with the Star Wars franchise. Yet, all of the creativity that went into the first three movies (IV, V, and begrudgingly VI) occurred at a juncture where the the films were primarily driven by creativity and art. With Star Wars IV being such a surprise hit, the gravitational mass of the Star Wars enterprise has long eclipsed the creative cycle and become more marketable-product. And when consumers expect a product, they don’t necessarily like divergence from what they originally bought into.

However we should not forget the need to look at the flip side of the coin. The right has often been long on the talk of capitalism and free markets – but let the left slide and even doing their own part.

Romneycare anyone? What’s a more free market – a market free of government coercion or government coercion as the core means of product delivery?

Earmarks? Nothing beats padding the wallets of the connected and Republicans haven’t done much to conceal their hypocrisy here.

Or how about the tenure of Republican Ray LaHood in his fiefdom of regulation and taxpayer-funded handouts?

So  I’m often torn when I see posts like Coyote’s. The (arguably flawed) choice we’re left with is, which is better: those who deliver all of the wrong solutions because they often don’t know better or those who deliver all of the wrong solutions when the already know better.

First impression: Uh, what the…?!

Unity. Meh. Opened a terminal. How do I open a new one? I’ll try clicking on the icon. Nope. It just brings the original to the front. Right click! Yes! ‘New Terminal’ brings up a new window. How about a new terminal in a tab. I thought [ctrl]+t is it. Nope. Where do I go? *Mousing around for a while*…. Where the hell is it? And where are the prior menus for the terminal? Gone missing. Wait a sec… something just flashed as my mouse shot up to the top. Ha! They’re hidden from view. Hrmmm. That’s kind of dumb. Does Apple have a patent on having all of your options show at the top? Well, I’ll just have to fix that.

There has to be a way to configure it. Let’s go to settings. Settings… where the hell are they? Let’s click the Ubuntu icon, maybe… Well this isn’t helpful.  No settings in the default menu. Let’s click around on icons and…. nope. I guess I’ll have to ‘Search’ for my settings. Ok, there we go: “System Settings”. How to fix the stupid menu and show the menubar for the program in focus all the time… No luck. Come on now, there has to be a Unity option for the configuration to get to. Nothing.

We’ll check the Internet. Ok. So I now have to download another application just to make changes. I hope it lets me move this bar from the left-hand side.I’d much rather see it on the bottom, preferrably with smaller icons. Ok. CompizConfig Settings Manager should do… oh. no. it won’t. Well, let’s just make a few small edits and I’ll just force myself to live with it. Save. Close. Now let’s tool around this weird menu full of hidden items that I must be too stupid to view any other way. Filters are kind of cool. But it still feels weird not having some kind of hierarchy of menus. Let’s go back to Compiz. I want to see what other changes I can make…

CompizConfig Settings Manager opens, freezes and then… I lose the launcher bar and the main bar on the top of the screen. I can’t do anything on the desktop. except use what apps are open on the desktop. I can’t close out or… change user! Ctrl-Alt-Del to the rescue. Let’s try logging out and back in. Nope. How about rebooting?… Nope. Let’s log in under the Guest session and – hey, the Unity desktop is working under Guest. Back to doing a web search. Now I need to delete some config file under my regular user. No problem. And everything is back to… not quite normal. Now a little black box shows up under my mouse pointer. I install some updates and reboot. Everything is back to “normal”.

Let’s watch something on Netfl…. Suck. No Netflix player. Roku has one. Ubuntu none. It’s a Netflix issue. Let’s check out Hulu – christ. wrong version of Flash. A couple of hours later and after installing a browser add-on to detect the correct version to install, I’m in business, watching “TV”. No Netflix. Suck. (Not that I’m happy with Netflix… but still something).

Now I’ve got my PS3 within reasonable range. I’m on a automatically-working wi-fi connection (that wasn’t working under 11.04). I can do something like Internet Connection Sharing in Ubuntu. Plug it in and :

Connected. Disconnected.Connected.Disconnected.Connected.Disconnected.

Can’t keep a connection open on eth0. Must  be a buggy driver or something. Works fine under Windows. Although there is one funny thing, my usb wireless adapter works much better under Linux than it does under Windows! It doesn’t drop connections nearly as often. I wonder if Belkin knows this device they don’t make Linux drivers for works better under Linux than it does Windows.

And that pretty much covers my first week with the addition of some aggravations of getting Netbeans installed, having issues with Enemy Territory sound (and lack of playability)… I swapped over to Windows last night to check in on Netflix, watch a show and play a game or two.

I’ve been tempted to try Hulu Plus but I just can’t seem to get past the content limitations that are seemingly applied all over the place. It seems as if Hulu has just given up any pretense of running anything more than a paid ad engine for media distributors.

They keep content places for shows they don’t have access to and probably won’t ever provide to their clients. They have an endless supply of clips for shows they can’t even offer to stream through their service. So what’s the point? All of the clips are nothing but advertising. Add in the 10-12 ads I repeatedly see and you have an ad network sprinkled with doses of content.

To add to this, Hulu Plus will give you earlier access to some locked content. But the premium content doesn’t always mean you can stream to a TV. In other words, you’re tied to the computer to really get the most out of your subscription. It’s hard to reach a technology convergence (PC & TV) point when your suppliers force the separation.

The only benefit Hulu seemingly provides customers with is a wide-open view of the convoluted world of content distribution and licensing. Let your suppliers drive your business and your customers suffer.

• Tax the rich (who already pay most of the personal income tax revenue)
• Free healthcare (pick favorite corporations)
• Tax the rich
• Tax Wall Street (pick favorite corporations)
• Tax the rich
• Green Energy (pick favorite corporations)
• Tax the rich
• End the Wars (token argument – they really don’t mean this)
• Tax the rich
• Increase minimum wages (pick favorite corporations)
• Tax the rich
• End individual rights (by forcing non-consenting individuals into unions and collective bargaining)
• Tax the rich
• Stop certain groups of people (corporations) from exercising their right to free speech in favor of other groups and associations (hiding behind other organizational legal structures)
• Tax the rich

The Reuters piece linked above discusses responses to Larry Summers’ recent editorial (but Reuters can’t seem to make a working link to it), Robert H. Frank responds with gems like:

I’d also have hit harder on the claim by ostensible deficit hawks that extra spending right now would impoverish our grandchildren. Some of the most vivid and easily understood counterexamples involve infrastructure maintenance. According to the Nevada Department of Transportation, repairing a damaged 10-mile stretch of Interstate 80 would cost $6 million if we did the work today. But if we postpone repairs, weather and traffic will continue to damage the roadbed. If we wait just two years, the cost of bringing that same stretch of road up to par rises to $30 million. There are thousands of similar projects crying out to be done.

These are the very same “shovel ready” projects that were supposed to be funded by the so-called “stimulus”. And even if this specific project (I80 in Nevada) was not covered by the stimulus program, these projects should be covered by the road and fuel taxes. Yet Congress, the same institution that Frank seems should help remedy this problem, has been looting these fees and spending them on anything but the roads the taxes were designed to support. So in essence, Frank advocates spending more because Congress hasn’t done its job and spent the money on what it was supposed to be spent on.