Yes. When hardware manfacturers build a new printer they include a Windows driver in it because if they don't, very few people will buy it. This increases Windows' capabilities (and Microsoft's power) a little bit more, without Microsoft paying a dime for it.

In other words, Microsoft has power because people believe it has power. Not something the framers of anti-trust law could ever imagine.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

And people seem to think they need furniture. You don't need furniture. You can save a huge amount of money right there. When I lived in Japan I didn't have any furniture and I didn't have any problems. Mind you, all my Japanese friends thought I was nuts.

Sure -- in fact, I personally know (exceptionally capable) people who are in the same position. But as a general rule of thumb, I think my earlier post holds.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

I still disagree with your earlier post. Most people look at the the job they can get when they leave school. Entry level positions are (mostly) better with a degree.

But; there are at least 3 curves that need to be considered. In addition to education (which is generally flat), you have skill, experience, and drive. Skill and experience might be They could be considered the same curve, but someone with talent has capabilities that may or may not be affected by experience. And someone without the drive will make the other curves meaningless.

When you consider that someone without a degree generally has a 4 year head start on the other curves, the other curves start to play a larger role in what you can afford to do in life.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

They had 95%+ of the OS market share at the time. When you have that much of the market, you can enforce lock-in. Thus, it's a monopoly in fact.

And the problem wasn't that Microsoft was a monopoly. The problem was that Microsoft was using its monopoly position to explicitly leverage other markets. (Browsers, most notably, but also media players and a few other products.) That's an antitrust no-no.

Microsoft's argument that through integration, the browser and media player were inseperably part of the OS. Both claims were shown to be incorrect, and the judge ruled accordingly.

They did, but unsuccessfully.

And actually, I have to correct you: Microsoft actually lost the case. (This next bit comes very close to partisan politics by its very nature, but I'm sticking strictly to factual information. I really don't want to get into merit. - Moose) At about the same time the appeals were winding down, the government changed. The Justice Department decided to not pursue the penalty phase aggressively and settled with Microsoft in 2001. I can't remember if the settlement terms were ever released.

The part of the ruling that was overturned was the order to split into seperate units. The ruling that Microsoft was an "abusive monopoly" stuck.

They also lost a similar case in Europe in 2004 and faced very large fines plus the requirement that versions of windows without media player (and possibly without IE?) had to be made available.

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

Been thinking... Maybe a less painful way to achieve the proposition in the OP would be taxing heavily inheritance transmission. It would be compatible with the notion of meritocracy, so dear to the western culture. The money could be returned to society as government incentives to foment entrepreneurship, via subsidized interest rates, for instance.

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If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you.

They can be an effective monopoly when they have the market share to dictate price without real competition

From what I remember the settlement was that Microsoft paid a large fine, but with the nasty twist that the fine was paid in kind, by Microsoft providing their software for free to a lot of schools.
So in effect Microsoft paid the fine with something that cost them almost nothing, and at the same time ensured that the next generation of buyers will be used to using Microsoft products by the time they are ready to buy them.
Not a shining example of justice being served.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

I think most peoples earned income is the
market value placed on their skills. And when
someone reaches a position where they can
ditate their remuneration, it is a bit more!
Or a lot more! Read a few company reports and
note the descriptions of payments. I really
like "emoluments". And when reading keep in
mind the Queen ant waving her antenni madly
to signal the workers to stop that runaway
piece of...stuff Its a Galbraith sign to
wind up discussion on farm subsidies.

Probably one unintentional consequence is that there are families who have had a farm for many generations, but now they would have to sell it to pay the inheritance tax.

Imagine, all that you get from grandpa when he dies is the land that you, your father, and his fater, etc. grew up on. That's all you get. Then the government comes in and says, "well this land is worth one million dollars - so you owe us $500,000. Pay up." Now you have to sell your grandpa's farm, probably pay taxes on the sale, and give over half of the rest to the government. And why? What right does the government have to do that?

Meanwhile, the people you wanted to punish - the really rich people like Paris Hilton, hired accountants and lawyers to set things up so that they didn't get any inheritance at all, but the money still stays in the family.

So what exactly have you accomplished?

See folks, this is the fundamental problem with basing legislation on wealth-envy. It always ends up like this. There are actually people who really idolize leaders like Hugo Chavez, because they have this romantic notion that "everyone should have the same amount of stuff." And you can actually show these people two alternatives:

Alternative A:
Person X has 20 apples
Person Y has 4 apples
Person Z has 3 apples

Alternative B
Person X has 2 apples
Person Y has 2 apples
Person Z has 2 apples

And they will actually prefer Alternative B. That's really pretty close to what happens with communism (not the theory, which is great, but all of the actual implementations), and everybody can see that, but some people still choose it because Alternative A somehow makes them feel bad. And so we, that is to say, all of us in the West live in countries where "poor" people have two TVs, a car, and hot and cold running water, but we're upset because there exist rich people with jet airplanes. Meanwhile there are whole towns in the greatest communist nation on Earth where every house has a dirt floor. Yet, in the link above, the teacher is quoted as saying "a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive."

Actually, what alternative b turns out to be is Person X (from the polit bureau) has 5 apples, Person Y, loyal party member gets 1 apple and Person Z starved to death in the gulag. The other 21 apples in alternative a don't exist in alternative b because they were not successfully grown. Worms got several because the protective pesticide was sprayed after havest time. Other apples rotted before the scheduled harvest date. And, one of the apple trees was chopped up firewood and to make sticks to knock down apples during harvest time.

Disagree. I make enough now that with a wife/fiancee/assorted variation of significant other of the reproductively compatable persuasion who's income was +/- 50% of my own, affording a child would not be out of the question.

If you modify this to include "or acquire other skills allowing for similar earnings," you'd be right.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Actually, I was thinking of 700,000.

In fact, this is just an amusement, an abstraction, since I´m a hard-core capitalist [and I hate taxes]. Adam Smith and Milton Friedman are my idols.

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If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you.

This is harking back a bit far in the thread now, but I have to respond to the stuff about high pay rates being important as incentives to attract good CEOs and other high-level managers...

How do you decide how high is high enough? After all, once they're as good as they'll get, they're as good as they'll get, and throwing more money at them won't make them better. Above that point, you're just wasting company money on a justification that has ceased to apply because you could have spent less (down to the breakover point I'm talking about) and still have gotten people that were just as good. For that matter, somewhere below that breakover point, there's another: the point at which more money might get you a better manager, but only slightly so, by a margin that isn't worth the large amount of money you spent on the difference, which means you would have gotten better results from spending the money some other way.

There's also the possibility that at some third point above, below, or between those two, instead of attracting the best managers, you're disproportionately attracting greedy opportunists and con artists who bring DOWN the overall quality of your candidate pool at that salary level.

So the response that superhigh salaries are important for that reason does support some difference between upper and lower income levels, but doesn't necessarily justify any and all magnitudes for that difference without an upper limit. It just challenges you to define the limit and prove we're below it, or challenges your liberal opponent to define the limit and prove we're above it.

College is pretty-much a requirement, isn't it? And if you want the best possible chance of being able to finish it, you really do have to put off other goals, like having a family, until after you graduate. Sure, sure, there are many possible paths. Some people have a family while in college or without every going and they do just fine. But in general, if you want the best chance of being happy and successful, it's a good idea to go to college and wait to get married afterwards. So, that means we have pushed back "the start of your life" to your mid twenties.

Now consider this paper:
http://www.teenpregnancy.org/resourc.../pdf/BRAIN.pdf

The part of the brain that assesses risk does not fully develop until your mid twenties.

Great. So here's the society that we have built: You become sexually mature around 15 or so. You live in a very permissive society (and I'm not suggesting we change this) where you are constantly, shall we say, visually stimulated. You have and instinct, in fact, the most powerful instinct that has ever evolved, and it's driving you to do something. But... if you want to have the best chance of happiness and success in our society, you can't act on that instinct for about 10 years.

And best of all, your brain doesn't work well enough yet for you to figure all of this out.

Talk about being set up for failure! This gets back to something I said earlier about looking at why people made certain choices. We need to look at this situation and think about what we are doing wrong as a society and what we can change to better enable people to make good choices.

I think (with no source to cite, it's just my opinion) that once you actually get to college, you are in a much better environment to finish and succeed. Everybody talks about birth control and they talk about it all the time. So when you have sex, protecting yourself comes as second nature. But in high school, we totally fail kids. They get one or two classes and then after that it is taboo to talk about it. The first time I had sex, I knew about birth control like I knew about math - I could pass a math test but I couldn't balance a checkbook. I think things are getting better, but I wanted to make this point.

The subject of this thread is economics. I have an acquaintance that I went to high-school with who had kids right after he graduated, and although he got a job and supported his family, that's basically it for him. A low-paying job forever. And that would be fine if he were happy (part of me wishes I could change places with him - I'd rather have a loving wife than an easy job where I can read BAUT all day). When I ran into him a few years ago, he was kind of smiling awkwardly and said several times, "yeah, I knew you were going to make it."

My view of the world is that *I* didn't "make it" but rather that he did *not* make it because he made more bad choices and fewer good ones than I did. And that is the basis for all of my views on economics. I didn't get particularly lucky and he's not particularly unlucky. Therefore, it is wrong to do what the original poster suggested and try to even things out by taking my money away and giving it to him - apart from making sure he has basic necessities and can live with dignity.

Instead, let's talk about fixing things that are wrong in our culture that lead to people making poor choices.

That's happened quite a bit, and not just for farm land and not just for inheritance. Some years ago in California, property values were going up wildly, property taxes went up as well, and a good portion of folks were finding they couldn't stay in their homes. They could sell them, but would either need to move out of state or into a smaller place. That led to a reaction from the public on property taxes ("proposition 13") which probably was a more extreme change than might have happened if officials had made some accomodations a bit earlier.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

In a lot of places (notably Washington State, which rehashed all of this in an initiative last November), family farms are specifically exempted from estate taxes. In some places, family businesses (up to a certain dollar amount, anyway) are, too. At least here, too, the first, oh, million or two dollars are exempted. In Washington State, only some one tenth of one percent of people incur estate taxes when they die, and they pay well over a hundred million dollars into the state budget annually.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"