From what I can find online[1,2], for a dual-income family earning 250k CAD/ 250k USD, tax in BC Canada[1,2] is 33% Federal + 16.80 % State = 49.8%. For California it is 24% Federal + 9.3% State = 33.3%. Is there a big difference in other taxes (like Payroll/Social Security) between California and BC that makes the overall marginal tax same?
I agree with you. Though I do think that this is not an unsolvable problem with the right incentives. As I noted, the people at company X might be the best people at heart, but the current legal system does not encourages drafting of a contract that precisely (and easily) describes the terms being agreed between the two parties. This is not even a unique feature of contract law, the same to true to various extend for all branches of the law.
My gut feeling (of which I have no proof) is that the current legal system is costing more money to the society than is necessary. For one thing, it is decreasing the trust in the legal system, since people now (correctly) assume that in many facets of modern life, they are agreeing to things they don't understand, that they are giving up more rights than they should, and that there is no reasonable solution to this problem yet.
Some complication in the law is necessary since the world is a complex creature, but I think that the common person (say at least half of the population) should have reasonable understanding of the legal language. One way to approach it is to have a requirement for simpler contract, but I don't know if it is _the_ way to deal with this problem. I am not a lawyer after all. All I know is that something is broken, and if not fixed, will lead to more problem down the line. A system like this where no-one trusts nobody is clearly not sustainable. It's just not a good way to organize as a society.
> which are absolutely nothing like what Imgur intends
But how do we know this? If they intend something, they should write that down in the contract. I am having hard time imagining that their lawyers cannot draw a contract which waives only the copyright requirement for the purposes of image hosting and restricts the images from being used for other things. The principle of charitable interpretation tells me to believe what people/company write in their contract. In my opinion, the expansive definition in the contract is there to
a) Save their ass when they do something which does not seems kosher to the public.
b) Allows them to pivot to other use of the data which might have nothing related to their current business model.
c) It is cost effective to draw up the contract in this way, given the current legal system and its requirements.
Note that I am not saying that Imgur is doing something immoral or whatever. I am just saying that if they wrote down this
> When you upload pictures, you have to give us the right to make as many copies of the pictures as we want, modify them however we'd like, and send those copies to whoever we want anywhere in the world.
as the simplified legalese, that it is the current interpretation. I contend that the average Joe will have better understanding of the _current_ contract with the simplified statement. I also think that Imgur (and other services) will find money to draft a better contract if they were required to make a simplified language version.
> When you upload pictures, you have to give us the right to make as many copies of the pictures as we want, modify them however we'd like, and send those copies to whoever we want anywhere in the world.
But isn't it precisely what the legalese means? I mean, unless otherwise restrict by some law other than the copyright laws, Imgur can use those images for anything. The statement does not limits the use to "reasonable business activities". Why will it be severely misleading to write it that way?
>Relativistic effects weren't known to be reality at the time this theory was proposed.
Umnn, Michelson–Morley and Maxwell equations were enough experimental evidence before Einstein. Einstein work was reconciling Mechanics to confirm with electromagnetism, and not the other way round.
EDIT: Not to say there isn't some physics theory developed independent of experiments. But relativity is not a good candidate.
Take this comment as what I think 5th amendment should imply, not how it is currently applied by the courts.
The concept of forgone conclusion is very weird. Imagine that I tell someone that I maintain a diary with log of all the events everyday. Then I tell this to my friends, family, (the police), etc.
Let's say the prosecution can prove that I was at a spot where something illegal happened. If they knew I wrote a diary everyday, they can compel me to produce my diary, which will then be used against me (if needed).
If on the other hand, I tell everyone (and the police) that I have photographic memory and remember anything I see and do, that information is protected by fifth amendment. So in this case, I won't provide something that will be used against me.
It is very weird that when the plain words of the amendment read "compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself", it is only thought to include literal production of testimony from mind as confession, while on the other hand, the first amendment is not read literally to allow only freedom of (say) owning a press, the press being a physical printing press.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individ...
[2] https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/taxes/income-taxes/person...