I’ve been enamoured with VoIP and its integration with Asterisk the last few days. Specifically I’m running Asterisk@Home and interfacing it to a BroadVoice Voice over IP (VoIP) account.
It took quite a bit of fiddling with the configuration files to get everything working the way I wanted it to work. My biggest problem was pulling together all the information I needed in one place - I couldn’t find a complete guide. So I decided to write one.
I am happy to present my article: Configuring Asterisk@Home to use BroadVoice’s VoIP Services.
Hopefully if you’re interested in Asterisk@Home and its integration with VoIP providers (well, really just BroadVoice) you’ll find this article of some use. If so, drop me a note and let me know if it was helpful!
Governments are not - by and large - efficient organizations. They tend to take in huge amounts in tax dollars and then spend said dollars in wildly inefficient ways.
The last bastion of skirting the government was mail order and Internet ordering - true the burden is still on the company or individual buying out-of-state to report the sale and pay local state tax; but let’s be realistic, how many of us actually do that?
Today I received a letter from a vendor of ours politely informing me that since we (and by we, I mean the collective “we”) are not paying our state taxes they are going to go ahead and collect them form “us” to pay to the state (and by us, I mean the collective “us”).
They are doing this in an effort “to make tax compliance simpler” for us. If we want to opt out of having sales tax collected on our purchase, it’s not enough to simply ask them to not collect tax, we must provide them with a tax exemption certificate.
From where I sit this is a slippery slope towards a universal tax on all goods. Sure each state is free to set it’s own sales tax, but imagine all 50 governors getting together with the government to establish a universal tax that is collected by all online and mail order retailers and then divvied up among the states.
It creates a new bureaucracy, puts an additional burden on the online and mail order vendor to collect, record and make tax payments and will ultimately cause costs to rise as the support staff is put in place to handle this burden and the states create the bureaucracy to receive and disburse payments (and God forbid if the federal government gets its hands into the mix). It just creates a lot of arguable unnecessary costs centers all around.
If tax collection of these sales become compulsory it removes the advantage online and mail order retailers have over the traditional brick-n-mortar stores. Traditionally the argument has been made that shipping costs offset the “savings” people see by not paying a sales tax on the order.
Keeping in line with my staunch philosophy of smaller-government-is-better-government I am deeply opposed to this tactic. I can see this quickly becoming demanded by the states and once it’s picked up by the biggest online and mail order retailers it will quickly filter down to even the smallest mom-and-pop shop. And in the process it will increase costs for us all by increasing the size of government and increasing back-office costs to the merchant which will be immediately passed on to us, the consumers.
