Internet Tax Approved By Louisiana House 305
Stinky Litter Box writes "WWL-TV in New Orleans reports that the Louisiana House voted 81-9 on Thursday to propose that a '15-cent monthly surcharge should be levied on Internet access across Louisiana to fight online criminal activity.' Can you say 'slippery slope?' The good news is that Gov. Jindal opposes such a tax. Full disclosure: I grew up in south Louisiana and worked for WWL-TV in the late '70s."
Re:Awesome! Wait, Children's Protection? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sick and tired of thinking of the children, let's think about everybody for a while.
So you're saying that your anti-children? :-P
I agree that sex crime against children are very very bad but I think that if you look at the scope and size of the problems that plague the internet and ranked them in order, you'd find many other things precede sex crimes against children. Like Internet Fraud and Identity Theft. How much money do people lose to things like that? Hint: A lot.
I dislike the term "Internet Fraud". Fraud is fraud, whether it was conducted on eBay or at the local flea market.
That aside, I think you're saying that if you cut down on other crimes conducted online, sex crimes conducted online will drop as a matter of course. I tend to agree.
.
Did a politician actually say.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Bad policy yes, slippery slope... not really. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's just another tax on something that shouldn't be taxed... We already get taxed on ramen noodles, water, gasoline, cheeseburgers, cable television, telephones, and almost everything else.
If you're worried about a slippery slope, please glance downward at the icy incline and the skates on your feet.
It is kinda stupid to justify as way to pay for fighting "online crime". Why don't they levy an additional tax on retail sales and call it the "shoplifter arrest and incarceration tax".
Re:I'm confused (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'm confused (Score:3, Interesting)
Ahem. Yes, I'll have to agree. You're confused. Any tax fund, no matter what purpose it was intended for, is subject to raiding by the politicos. Not very many years ago, Social Security had a nice little surplus. Everyone already knew that SS would be bankrupted when the baby boomers reached retirement age. But, SS was actually showing a surplus, temporarily. Instead of re-investing those few billions, the politicos cast their greedy eyes on all that money, and passed new laws, entirely contrary to pre-existing law, so that they could pilfer that surplus. You can bet both cheeks of your arse that if politicians care that little about voting old people, they don't really give a damn about non-voting young people.
People are suckers, politicians know it, and they pull the heart strings whichever is necessary to rob us.
Besides which - the law sets bad precedent, even if they really DID use the money for children.
Re:I'm confused (Score:2, Interesting)
... They could definitely use a little extra cash in their coffers for education if their uneducated, violent, and poor urban populace is any indication. Also, their roads are pretty bad [drivinglou...orward.org], so extra money coming in could allow extra funds to go towards improving that.
BadAnalogyGuy, please don't dilute yourself or others if you think Louisiana is going to put any money toward education. Or more than anything for show. I am now convinced that they want to keep the people ignorant. The polls can be led by things like welfare. How do you think that Edwin "Fast Eddie" Edwards was re-elected after his first term when out of office he said I am a crook but you will never catch me? Two more terms for welfare; that is how. Then he sold the casino licenses that should have been properly bid for. Don't get me started on that. Tourism isn't everything. The money from the taxes on the casino's was supposed to get teacher pay to the regional average (from Louisiana to Georgia, where I am presently), but teachers had to picket in my hometown of Shreveport, just to get them to raise it to the state average. I always said if I made it out, I wouldn't return. I was able to leave five years ago.
The roads are bad they say because we wouldn't set the minimum drinking age to 21 for several years and were the last state to holdout. The government withheld federal funds for the rebuilding of roads until the laws were changed. So yea, the roads suck ass and you can tell you have left the state with your eyes closed at any border.
But enough about Louisiana, until the people decide to run the politicians out of town like the olds days, change will not come. But I think we live in a police state, until I see something like that happen.
Re:Whoa whoa whoa (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Awesome! Wait, Children's Protection? (Score:5, Interesting)
They killed Socrates this way, they can sure as hell ratchet down internet rights this way.
The Louisiana House Legislature killed Socrates? That's terrible.
I wouldn't be surprised, in 2001 (yes, within this millennium) they branded Darwin a racist [state.la.us] with the following flawless logic:
Be it resolved that the Legislature of Louisiana does hereby deplore all instances and ideologies of racism, and does hereby reject the core concepts of Darwinist ideology that certain races and classes of humans are inherently superior to others.
Yeah, they actually brought out this gem (page 2 line 1):
WHEREAS, Adolf Hitler and others have exploited the racist views of Darwin and those he influenced, such as German zoologist Ernst Haekel, to justify the annihilation of millions of purportedly racially inferior individuals.
Who knows where they'll set their sights next to appease their God? I certainly wouldn't want to be in their way lest I be likened to Adolf Hitler.
Re:Make 'em pay (Score:5, Interesting)
Sick of apartment dwellers voting in tax and bond initiatives funded only by property taxes
If property taxes go up, rents go up.
Signed, rent is theft.
Re:I'm confused (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Make 'em pay (Score:3, Interesting)
After this your concern seems to be about police funds in general and you quickly drop the subject about separate taxing. If I understand you correctly it's no longer about specific taxes for crimes but instead about why the police, with their current funds, are unable to fight certain types of crime that are relatively new.
OK let's break down why your entire argument fails horribly.
First of all let's say you have 5 tasks, all which must be done with maximum $5 funding. Let's keep it simple and say that you conclude that each task would cost you $1 to perform. After some time a new task is assigned to you, leaving you with 6 tasks. You've already concluded that each task would cost $5, so naturally you'd have to request for additional funding. I'm not going to draw the parallels to the real case at hand, I'll leave that for you.
This is why you need additional funding when a new type of crime comes along (I'm aware of the fact that internet crime is not new in one sense, but apparently it is in the sense of funding it). The same rule applies to the opposite. If a type of crime gets committed less frequent, the budget for that type of crime should naturally get cut in relation to the frequency.
So you see it kind of makes sense why you need more money to perform more work, and less money to perform less work.
It seems like you have an issue with law enforcement in general, correct me if I'm wrong. You say "Not my problem", which clearly states your view of the police in general. Whatever it has become law enforcement was created in order for everybody to have less problems.
To sum it all up, if your dissatisfaction lies within how the police spends their fundings you should focus on that.
But then again if you would focus on that and reply to the same post that you did, it wouldn't make sense without bringing this:
Traffic Cops - Are they funded by Car Tax? No Homoicide Detectives - Are they funded by Death Tax? No
into the "argument", now would it?
Thus we conclude that your problem lies within the police in general and that it has nothing to do with this particular tax more than any other tax. So your reply to my post about how crime funding is done in general was just an entry point for you to complain about the police funding. That's called offtopic and is modded -1, which I guess you understood when you clicked "post anonymously".
Re:Awesome! Wait, Children's Protection? (Score:3, Interesting)
Explaining slavery is easy. "Do this for me, or I'll hurt you." You're talking about justifying it, which is usually conveniently overlooked.
Re:Awesome! Wait, Children's Protection? (Score:5, Interesting)
Slavery was typically little more then a conquered nation doing the bidding of the conquerors. Even the slaves of colonial America were conquered tribes and the descendants of them. Once a person was a slave, they were considered property and not a citizen with citizenship rights and were treated as such. This treatment was more or less to enforce or reinforce their lack of freedoms in the society. It was a spoil of war, even if the war consisted of sending an overwhelming forces or raiding parties to round people up.
In fact, that's how the term Nigger came into play. Near the end of Slavery shipments to the US, most of the tribes in Africa along the slave coast had been captured and the rest fled into the interior portions of the African Jungle where Europeans feared entering. There was the Niger river that blocked a lot of their paths and they would find tribes on either side of it. Anyways, the Niger river which has a long speculation on the name origin the meant "river of rivers" rather then the french word for "black and night". But as property usually sold unseen to overseas buyers, slave being shipped needed several things. A lineage to prove their worth and ability to act as slaves, some types of slaves refused to cooperate and usually brought less money while the ones that resisted the longest and made it the deepest into the jungle were typically the strongest and most desirable, so the fact they were from the Niger river area was a plus. This is much like the lineage in animals and so on where a purebred and documents dog or horse or cattle or whatever commands more money then the same without the documentation. Now another practice which is still in use today was to have a bill of lading that included both the origin of the property and the destination. In keeping with the Lineage, Niger was used as the origin so traders in the Americas wouldn't become suspect of the lineage. Anyways, it has been determined that the first or one of the first written use of the term "Nigger" was from a shipping clerk in Maryland and the term was most likely in use before that by the phonetically speaking southerners who distinguished between domestic slaves and imports. This also explains the connection of skin color to race and why racist concentrated more on bloodline then color of skin.
Looks like I went way past your topic but slavery has typically been a spoil of war. Even the slavery from Africa brought to the Americas was tribal and kingdom warfare (in Africa) that got people classified as property and sold as slaves.
Re:Waste of time (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Awesome! Wait, Children's Protection? (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the more important reasons for the shift from white and black slaves stems of a US based British colony ran mostly by slaves in which the slaves, both white and black banded together for a slave rebellion in an attempt to escape to Spanish Florida where free colonies already existed. They killed a about 25 free whites in their attempt who were outnumbered enormously by slaves in the area at the time. They also burned several buildings and amassed a decent sized following but the rebellion was put down.
In 1740, 2 years after that Stono Rebellion [wikipedia.org] the South Carolina legislature (mostly a corporate board because of the colony situation) passed the Negro Act of 1740 in attempts to control the slaves. It provided protections against harsh working conditions and so on that would create a rebellious situation in the first place but was hard to enforce because a slave couldn't testify against a free man. One of the more influential parts of the Negro act was that it regulated manumissions which is more or less a fancy term for a slave owner granting freedom to their slaves. One of these regulations came to be a divide and conquer strategy in which 1 white slave to every 10 black slaves were required but black slave could never be anything more then a slave where the whites could regain their full citizenship.
This provided a situation where the white slaves would (were encouraged to) report suspected rebellion plots in hopes of gaining their freedom and stopped the entire slave groups from banding together again. This also led to the downfall of white slaves as other restrictions such as importation of new slaves were discouraged/banned and populations were breed from existing stock. A big issue here is corruption of blood, the blacks because of the manumissions laws would always be slaves, including their children where the children of the whites would/could be free people woth full citizenship rights (*another incentive to not rebel and report conspiracies).
This also created the concept of classes among the slaves in which the black slaves were at the bottom by default. This had to do with white slaves appearing smarter because they could already speak the language and mostly read and/or write. Once white slaves fell to the side, the class differences sort of remained which was part of the prejudices throughout early America. Although with the end of the civil war, freed slaves being dumped onto the populations and taking white jobs, and the north mandating the whites succeed power to the freed slaves made the system of racism far more worse then what this was about before then, but slaves weren't really treated with respect either.
The history of racism in the US is deeply tied to slavery and perhap unique to the US because a lot of the laws like the Negro act wasn't enacted in other countries. Combine that with slaves in other countries either finding support from manumissions and former slaves already living and integrating in the other areas or they simply wanted to go home, were in the US, they attempted to create a local stock in which they were already home so to speak and you can see some issues directly connected to slavery that fueled the hate and resentment on both sides.
Re:Awesome! Wait, Children's Protection? (Score:3, Interesting)
You needed to take an updated course in biology. What you've said is untrue. The micro/macro classification distinction exists outside of Creationist circles.
Mirco E. refers to the incremental changes w/in a species ( e.g. people born w/out wisdom teeth, darwin's finches ).
Macro E. refers to the change of an organism into a different one such that is is a new species (e.g. chimp->human, reptiles->birds).
The difference is important because we (scientists) have no proof for macroevolution aside from theories based on the DNA chain. We've never proofed or observed the evolution of one organism to a different [enough] organism.