As you point out, someone needs to do the boring stuff. But now connect boring stuff with impacting other groups. The tax department needs to collect data that is of no use to the business, but required by the IRS. Someone in a different department needs to allocate resources to generate that data. Who manages that resource allocation?
I listen to music while I am browsing. Any ad executive that thinks he/she/it has the right to start their ad and automatically start playing audio, interfering with something else I am listening to, is the equivalent of home invasion. That is the fastest way to get me to block you and I will have no sympathy whatsoever.
For the people who complain about the gray line between the two existing categories - creating a third will not solve that problem. Then you just get two gray lines between three categories. This is sometimes referred to as the conservation of ambiguity.
Current cite demonstrating US having one of the lowest effective rates?
BTW, your definitions of effective rate and statutory rate are flat out wrong. Effective rate is the tax paid and accrued on net income on a financial accounting basis. The statutory rate is the rate of tax paid on net income on a tax accounting basis. The fact that there is a difference between the two is an indictment of how the tax system is written. It has nothing to do with having zero deductions.
Nope. Some of us old people still use lisp. Quicklisp.org solved the library problem and stockpiling parentheses is cheap - they stack nicely. We do, however, have a not-invented here syndrome problem which may never go away. Google bought ITA Software in 2011 for just under $1 billion and ITA's main product is largely driven by lisp. So still around, just not talked about much.
I remember Gosling pushing to get people to move to NetBeans in 2008 (surprisingly a product created by his company, Sun). I tried it. Didn't like it. It felt like it wanted to be a gui rather than an editor. So I went back to happily using Emacs. So, serious question from an old guy and lisp programmer - what do you suggest as a replacement and why?
In the United States, real property refers to land and anything permanently affixed to the land - i.e. house, but not a trailer on wheels. The fun part gets into whether things like partitions or furniture screwed into the wall constitutes "permanently affixed". I've seen arguments over whether ceiling lamps were part of the real property or were detachable.
OK. Reverse engineering a bit and filling in gaps in the media reporting, here is my educated analysis. If you, as a UK consumer, buy a book from amazon.co.uk, you are actually hitting servers in Luxembourg and buying the book from a Luxembourg company. Letâ(TM)s call it Amazon Lux. Current EU VAT rules mean that if you are downloading a e-book, Amazon Lux only charges the Luxembourg VAT rates on the sale and hands that VAT over to the Luxembourg government. (This rule is expected to change in two years.) If you are buying a dead tree version, then Amazon Lux has to charge UK VAT rates on the sale and hands that VAT over to the UK government.
There is a separate Amazon subsidiary in the UK, which operates a warehouse and shipping operation. Letâ(TM)s call it Amazon UK. Amazon Lux pays Amazon UK to operate the warehouse and perform the shipping. Typically this is done on a cost-plus basis, so Amazon UK is probably recovering its costs and getting a profit margin of 5-10%. Amazon UK will be paying UK income taxes on this small profit margin.
The tax treaty between the UK and Luxembourg states that if the only thing a Luxembourg company has in the UK is an agent that distributes stuff or stores stuff in a warehouse, then the UK government wonâ(TM)t treat that Luxembourg company as âoedoing business in the UKâ. Amazon Lux can take this position because they claim that the actual âoesaleâ event happened at the servers in Luxembourg when you made the final click on Amazon Luxâ(TM)s website. If this position is valid, then any profit on the sale above and beyond the cost-plus margin at Amazon UK is only taxable in Luxembourg. (And remember that the cost-plus margin is taxed at Amazon UK, not Amazon Lux â" the legal entity that actually entered into the transaction with the consumer.)
The complicating historical question is whether Amazon could move its historical business operation out of the UK to Luxembourg without paying an exit tax. EU law allows free movement of business and capital, but the issue of whether you can bail out of a country to a lower taxed country without any tax consequences is a bit of a muddle right now.
Assuming I download a copy of Gimp (gpl and free software), does that mean that I now need to pay a tax equal to what I would have to pay if I bought a copy of Photoshop?
Just to play devil's advocate here, assume Proctor and Gamble (they make Tide detergent and Pampers, etc) makes 50% of it's sales outside the U.S. This is bulky stuff that is actually made in the foreign country and sold in the foreign country because long distance transportation costs would be prohibitive. Other than the paper fact that the parent company is incorporated in the U.S., what is the U.S. tax policy interest in taxing those foreign subsidiary operations?
I own stock in P&G and I certainly don't expect to get taxed on P&G's income unless it pays me a dividend.
You need to actually pull apart the tax haven non-operations stuff from the tax haven real live operations stuff.
While some of them have subsidiaries located in the tax haven countries, but the subsidiaries have no offices, others have real live businesses there. Cisco, the one company I happen to know something about, actually has offices and sales people in every single "tax haven" country listed.
In my experience in these matters, it wasn't the code, it was the fact that management kept disagreeing with the results and changing the assumptions until the answer became something they wanted to hear.
I was agreeing with you all the way until your unfortunate last paragraph. As a law professor, you should be ashamed of that one. Make it "alleged unlawful combatant and alleged POW" and then read the Huzaifa Parhat case.
In case you need a refresher, an appeals court found that Huzaifa Parhat, a Uighur from China, was not an "enemy combatant." The court ordered the military to release him, transfer him to another prison or hold a new hearing. Only after this decision did the the US military finally realize, after holding the 17 Uighurs in Guantanamo for 6 years, that the only "enemy" of these people is actually China, not the US. The Uighurs were generally turned over to the US military by bounty hunters in Afghanistan and Pakistan, so we can't even argue that we captured them on the field of battle and could presume that they were combatants.
To be sure, copying for private use is still permitted - which is, after all, the reason for the flat-rate levy payable on certain devices. However, if special anti-copying technology has been employed to protect the medium, e.g. a music CD, such protection may not be circumvented by any means. The Ministry of Justice has given clear expression to this prohibition: "There is no 'right of private copying' at the expense of rights holders". This also means that consumers who download a file from the Internet must first check whether the offer is legal. How users are supposed to do so remains unclear, says the National Federation of Consumer Organisations.
While Lisp might be used for nuclear facilities, it is not because of lack garbage collection or because it is only interpreted. Lisp has garbage collection and while development typically takes place using the interpreter, the production program is typically compiled. I don't know Java, so I can't start a rational flamewar over why Lisp is better. (Irrational flamewars, on the other hand...)
Which is not to say that businesses are always efficient in the short run. In the long run the inefficient ones either become a monopoly (in which case they can become even more inefficient) or they go out of business. And yes, inefficient businesses can still become a monopoly through various means, no matter what an economics professor in college might tell undergraduates. The reason that governments can be inefficient is they are a monopoly.
In spite of the fact that it claims to be
legally binding, irrevocable and worldwide in scope I don't see anything that would actually make it so. You just have a promise that they won't revoke... and promises are as good as ???
I haven't seen this discussed yet, but consider the downstream impact of patents: New development discovery A is begins where old development discovery B left off. Old discovery B is patented.
Does the patent holder on discovery B effectively have a license (monopoly profit) on any developments which use B as a stepping stone? Should they (Such rights arguably increase the economic incentive to research and generate patents the same way that an Amway distribution chain creates an economic incentive to be higher up the chain)? However, as soon as a patent is granted, it also arguably reduces the economic incentive for further research in the area because any further research results would end up paying "rent" to the B patentholders. Does it decrease the incentive to further research B areas more than it increases the incentive to research in non-B areas?
We've been discussing this internally for a few months now. Looking at the patent applications involving tax, we saw three categories of items:
(1) claims on how to implement data tracking systems in order to pay taxes (think programs for calculating sales taxes depending on where the product is shipped). (2) claims on automating how to think through the tax consequences of a business deal (wow, if you do it with a database rather than pencil and paper, that should be patentable, right?) Side note: The hard part is not the algorithm, the hard part is getting the data and keeping it up to date. (3) claims on a certain sequence of transactions that are claimed to be non-obvious and achieve lower taxes than a different sequences of transactions.
These have all the same problems that the software industry is dealing with: Some of this stuff has been done for decades, but is not "obvious" to a patent examiner.
A lot of these seem to be filed for patent troll purposes - if the patent office grants the application, then the patent holder will show up at the big accounting firms and demand a payoff.
There are a couple of interesting additional twists when this stuff starts getting applied to things like tax law. The first relates to type 1 claims (e.g. data tracking implementations). Here is where we argue that the patent system should not be allowed to put roadblocks on people's attempts to follow the law (and we are not even talking about gaming the system, just trying to be legal).
The second tax law specific twist relates to telling the government about your new tax planning idea. A competent government would look at the idea, decide if it should be allowed, and if it doesn't like the idea, change the tax law even before the patent is granted. [Yes, you can argue whether the US has competent government, but hey, we can talk hypothetically.]
I generally agree that the patent system is broken, we've just found additional ways to demonstrate that fact.
I almost don't even know where to start on this one. No! this is not insightful. The poster starts off completely misunderstanding title transfer in car purchases and end ups complaining about personal debt. I'll limit my comments to the car purchase and ignore the rest of the incoherent rant.
The dealer buys the car from the manufacturer. (Dealer franchising laws in most, but not all, states prevent the manufacturer from selling directly to the customer.) The dealer sells the car to you. You get a receipt from the dealer indicating that you purchased the car. The Title indicating ownership interest in the car is documented by the state, but that is only documentation of the fact that you are the owner of the car. The state has no property interest in the car at all.
How you finance the purchase of the car from the dealer also has nothing to do with ownership of the car. If you borrow from a bank, finance company, or merely agree to pay the dealer over time, the lender gets a collateral interest in the car, but that is not ownership.
Licensing the car has nothing to do with ownership interest in the car, it merely gives you the legal right to drive the car on roads owned by the state. Different question than whether you own the car.
The Manufacturers Statement of Origin is not a title document and has nothing to do with having an ownership interest in the car. The statement of origin has to do with various combinations of consumer protection laws and customs duties. The MSO also has nothing to do with right to travel, use the roads or anything else in this post.
Undefined term "total assets" How much is your car worth today? How much is your pc worth today? How much is that bright idea that you just came up with, but haven't checked with the patent office today?
Slashdot Mirror
As you point out, someone needs to do the boring stuff. But now connect boring stuff with impacting other groups. The tax department needs to collect data that is of no use to the business, but required by the IRS. Someone in a different department needs to allocate resources to generate that data. Who manages that resource allocation?
I listen to music while I am browsing. Any ad executive that thinks he/she/it has the right to start their ad and automatically start playing audio, interfering with something else I am listening to, is the equivalent of home invasion. That is the fastest way to get me to block you and I will have no sympathy whatsoever.
For the people who complain about the gray line between the two existing categories - creating a third will not solve that problem. Then you just get two gray lines between three categories. This is sometimes referred to as the conservation of ambiguity.
Current cite demonstrating US having one of the lowest effective rates?
BTW, your definitions of effective rate and statutory rate are flat out wrong. Effective rate is the tax paid and accrued on net income on a financial accounting basis. The statutory rate is the rate of tax paid on net income on a tax accounting basis. The fact that there is a difference between the two is an indictment of how the tax system is written. It has nothing to do with having zero deductions.
You do realize that Denmark and The Netherlands are different countries, don't you?
The two whitespaces in the beginning of this line are not like the other. Get your tabs out of my spaces.
Nope. Some of us old people still use lisp. Quicklisp.org solved the library problem and stockpiling parentheses is cheap - they stack nicely. We do, however, have a not-invented here syndrome problem which may never go away. Google bought ITA Software in 2011 for just under $1 billion and ITA's main product is largely driven by lisp. So still around, just not talked about much.
Let me know when I can substitute postgresql instead of mysql.
I remember Gosling pushing to get people to move to NetBeans in 2008 (surprisingly a product created by his company, Sun). I tried it. Didn't like it. It felt like it wanted to be a gui rather than an editor. So I went back to happily using Emacs. So, serious question from an old guy and lisp programmer - what do you suggest as a replacement and why?
In the United States, real property refers to land and anything permanently affixed to the land - i.e. house, but not a trailer on wheels. The fun part gets into whether things like partitions or furniture screwed into the wall constitutes "permanently affixed". I've seen arguments over whether ceiling lamps were part of the real property or were detachable.
OK. Reverse engineering a bit and filling in gaps in the media reporting, here is my educated analysis. If you, as a UK consumer, buy a book from amazon.co.uk, you are actually hitting servers in Luxembourg and buying the book from a Luxembourg company. Letâ(TM)s call it Amazon Lux. Current EU VAT rules mean that if you are downloading a e-book, Amazon Lux only charges the Luxembourg VAT rates on the sale and hands that VAT over to the Luxembourg government. (This rule is expected to change in two years.) If you are buying a dead tree version, then Amazon Lux has to charge UK VAT rates on the sale and hands that VAT over to the UK government.
There is a separate Amazon subsidiary in the UK, which operates a warehouse and shipping operation. Letâ(TM)s call it Amazon UK. Amazon Lux pays Amazon UK to operate the warehouse and perform the shipping. Typically this is done on a cost-plus basis, so Amazon UK is probably recovering its costs and getting a profit margin of 5-10%. Amazon UK will be paying UK income taxes on this small profit margin.
The tax treaty between the UK and Luxembourg states that if the only thing a Luxembourg company has in the UK is an agent that distributes stuff or stores stuff in a warehouse, then the UK government wonâ(TM)t treat that Luxembourg company as âoedoing business in the UKâ. Amazon Lux can take this position because they claim that the actual âoesaleâ event happened at the servers in Luxembourg when you made the final click on Amazon Luxâ(TM)s website. If this position is valid, then any profit on the sale above and beyond the cost-plus margin at Amazon UK is only taxable in Luxembourg. (And remember that the cost-plus margin is taxed at Amazon UK, not Amazon Lux â" the legal entity that actually entered into the transaction with the consumer.)
The complicating historical question is whether Amazon could move its historical business operation out of the UK to Luxembourg without paying an exit tax. EU law allows free movement of business and capital, but the issue of whether you can bail out of a country to a lower taxed country without any tax consequences is a bit of a muddle right now.
Assuming I download a copy of Gimp (gpl and free software), does that mean that I now need to pay a tax equal to what I would have to pay if I bought a copy of Photoshop?
Just to play devil's advocate here, assume Proctor and Gamble (they make Tide detergent and Pampers, etc) makes 50% of it's sales outside the U.S. This is bulky stuff that is actually made in the foreign country and sold in the foreign country because long distance transportation costs would be prohibitive. Other than the paper fact that the parent company is incorporated in the U.S., what is the U.S. tax policy interest in taxing those foreign subsidiary operations?
I own stock in P&G and I certainly don't expect to get taxed on P&G's income unless it pays me a dividend.
You need to actually pull apart the tax haven non-operations stuff from the tax haven real live operations stuff.
While some of them have subsidiaries located in the tax haven countries, but the subsidiaries have no offices, others have real live businesses there. Cisco, the one company I happen to know something about, actually has offices and sales people in every single "tax haven" country listed.
In my experience in these matters, it wasn't the code, it was the fact that management kept disagreeing with the results and changing the assumptions until the answer became something they wanted to hear.
I was agreeing with you all the way until your unfortunate last paragraph. As a law professor, you should be ashamed of that one. Make it "alleged unlawful combatant and alleged POW" and then read the Huzaifa Parhat case.
In case you need a refresher, an appeals court found that Huzaifa Parhat, a Uighur from China, was not an "enemy combatant." The court ordered the military to release him, transfer him to another prison or hold a new hearing.
Only after this decision did the the US military finally realize, after holding the 17 Uighurs in Guantanamo for 6 years, that the only "enemy" of these people is actually China, not the US. The Uighurs were generally turned over to the US military by bounty hunters in Afghanistan and Pakistan, so we can't even argue that we captured them on the field of battle and could presume that they were combatants.
You mean like:
http://www.regular-expressions.info/
Critical bit from that article:
To be sure, copying for private use is still permitted - which is, after all, the reason for the flat-rate levy payable on certain devices. However, if special anti-copying technology has been employed to protect the medium, e.g. a music CD, such protection may not be circumvented by any means. The Ministry of Justice has given clear expression to this prohibition: "There is no 'right of private copying' at the expense of rights holders". This also means that consumers who download a file from the Internet must first check whether the offer is legal. How users are supposed to do so remains unclear, says the National Federation of Consumer Organisations.
While Lisp might be used for nuclear facilities, it is not because of lack garbage collection or because it is only interpreted. Lisp has garbage collection and while development typically takes place using the interpreter, the production program is typically compiled. I don't know Java, so I can't start a rational flamewar over why Lisp is better. (Irrational flamewars, on the other hand...)
Which is not to say that businesses are always efficient in the short run. In the long run the inefficient ones either become a monopoly (in which case they can become even more inefficient) or they go out of business. And yes, inefficient businesses can still become a monopoly through various means, no matter what an economics professor in college might tell undergraduates. The reason that governments can be inefficient is they are a monopoly.
In spite of the fact that it claims to be legally binding, irrevocable and worldwide in scope I don't see anything that would actually make it so. You just have a promise that they won't revoke
I haven't seen this discussed yet, but consider the downstream impact of patents: New development discovery A is begins where old development discovery B left off. Old discovery B is patented.
Does the patent holder on discovery B effectively have a license (monopoly profit) on any developments which use B as a stepping stone? Should they (Such rights arguably increase the economic incentive to research and generate patents the same way that an Amway distribution chain creates an economic incentive to be higher up the chain)? However, as soon as a patent is granted, it also arguably reduces the economic incentive for further research in the area because any further research results would end up paying "rent" to the B patentholders. Does it decrease the incentive to further research B areas more than it increases the incentive to research in non-B areas?
Disclaimer - I am a tax lawyer
We've been discussing this internally for a few months now. Looking at the patent applications involving tax, we saw three categories of items:
(1) claims on how to implement data tracking systems in order to pay taxes (think programs for calculating sales taxes depending on where the product is shipped).
(2) claims on automating how to think through the tax consequences of a business deal (wow, if you do it with a database rather than pencil and paper, that should be patentable, right?) Side note: The hard part is not the algorithm, the hard part is getting the data and keeping it up to date.
(3) claims on a certain sequence of transactions that are claimed to be non-obvious and achieve lower taxes than a different sequences of transactions.
These have all the same problems that the software industry is dealing with: Some of this stuff has been done for decades, but is not "obvious" to a patent examiner.
A lot of these seem to be filed for patent troll purposes - if the patent office grants the application, then the patent holder will show up at the big accounting firms and demand a payoff.
There are a couple of interesting additional twists when this stuff starts getting applied to things like tax law. The first relates to type 1 claims (e.g. data tracking implementations). Here is where we argue that the patent system should not be allowed to put roadblocks on people's attempts to follow the law (and we are not even talking about gaming the system, just trying to be legal).
The second tax law specific twist relates to telling the government about your new tax planning idea. A competent government would look at the idea, decide if it should be allowed, and if it doesn't like the idea, change the tax law even before the patent is granted. [Yes, you can argue whether the US has competent government, but hey, we can talk hypothetically.]
I generally agree that the patent system is broken, we've just found additional ways to demonstrate that fact.
I almost don't even know where to start on this one. No! this is not insightful. The poster starts off completely misunderstanding title transfer in car purchases and end ups complaining about personal debt. I'll limit my comments to the car purchase and ignore the rest of the incoherent rant.
The dealer buys the car from the manufacturer. (Dealer franchising laws in most, but not all, states prevent the manufacturer from selling directly to the customer.) The dealer sells the car to you. You get a receipt from the dealer indicating that you purchased the car. The Title indicating ownership interest in the car is documented by the state, but that is only documentation of the fact that you are the owner of the car. The state has no property interest in the car at all.
How you finance the purchase of the car from the dealer also has nothing to do with ownership of the car. If you borrow from a bank, finance company, or merely agree to pay the dealer over time, the lender gets a collateral interest in the car, but that is not ownership.
Licensing the car has nothing to do with ownership interest in the car, it merely gives you the legal right to drive the car on roads owned by the state. Different question than whether you own the car.
The Manufacturers Statement of Origin is not a title document and has nothing to do with having an ownership interest in the car. The statement of origin has to do with various combinations of consumer protection laws and customs duties. The MSO also has nothing to do with right to travel, use the roads or anything else in this post.
Undefined term "total assets"
How much is your car worth today?
How much is your pc worth today?
How much is that bright idea that you just came up with, but haven't checked with the patent office today?
Et cetera.