Basically the same here in Finland. You get a pre-filled tax form in the mail. "Doing my taxes" every year takes no more than 5-10 minutes; checking the values are correct on the form, logging into the tax authority website, making corrections if needed (never needed to), adding deductions as needed, and then submitting it electronically. I even know when I will get my refund way ahead of time. The refund goes straight into my bank account automatically, I don't need to do anything. It's all very easy and simple to understand, even for a layperson without a finance degree.
I don't need a paper record, it's all on file electronically. I only need receipts if I have significant, large deductions.
It is FAR better than the system in the US, where a complete racket has been built up in the form of "tax services", and making the tax laws so complicated and full of loopholes that the average EDUCATED person cannot figure it out in 10 minutes or less. There is a serious problem when you need professional tax services or an accountant to do your personal taxes. I say this as an American living abroad for the past 12 years, so I have much experience with both systems.
Back to the OP, wow... it looks like the tax authority really screwed this up. However, that doesn't change my view that it's still the best way to handle taxes. Mistakes can and do happen in any system. Luckily the issue was discovered rather quickly and they made the correct decision and took the system offline.
Correction, HP used to make good products period. Not so much anymore... they are simply a commodity manufacturer that goes for the lowest manufacturing cost. Last time I opened up an HP PC, it was like "seriously, this is supposed to be well built?".
Not exactly true. Business-class Nokia smartphones (E-series) were made in Finland until very recently. Unfortunately, when Nokia signed a pact to switch to Windows Phone, production moved East for the new Lumia models. You can still pick up Nokias that were manufactured here, until current supply chain inventories run out. The E7 I got a couple weeks ago was Made in Finland and my previous E72 was also made here.
You see, here in the EU we actually have something called consumer rights. Our politicians are not completely owned by corporations as in the US, and corporations cannot screw over the consumer without consequences.
An electronic device is considered "durable goods", and as such comes with a 2 year warranty in the EU.
Why do you jump to defend the corporations that are trying to screw you with defective or poorly made merchandise?
I generally cannot wear a tie anymore. Never mind what kind of shirt or how expensive it is, the kind of detergent or the dry cleaner used, it always rubs my neck raw by the end of the day (yes, it is sized correctly). For this reason I rarely wear them anymore. I will wear a sportcoat or jacket if required by the situation, but with an open collar.
Luckily where I work, there is no real dresscode, unless attending tradeshows or meeting customers in the office. In the summer, t-shirts, shorts and flip flops are perfectly ok. Obviously, this is not in the US, but in Europe. Growing up in the US, there was far too much emphasis placed on how you dress and what you wear, rather than your knowledge or capabilities on the job. I don't miss that at all.
And in the Wild West, shooting someone who stole your horse was allowed in many cases. Are you saying we should allow someone to shoot someone else simply for taking away their phone and chucking it out the window?
Well, I can assure you that if actual mobile phone use during flights is approved, as in allowing passengers to make and receive calls, I will be first in line to boycott air transportation. I sincerely hope this is not even on the table.
Can you imagine what a cacaphonic mess it would be if everyone was allowed to use their mobile phones during flights? It's bad enough that you are sitting in a tin can with hundreds of people in close quarters for several hours. Add in mobile phones ringing all the damn time and people talking continuously on their phones and it will be a nightmare to travel by air. No thanks.
The US airlines created this problem. By charging ridiculous baggage fees, they are practically forcing you to carry-on everything but the kitchen sink.
Luckily in Europe, baggage fees are mostly an exception (oversize and extra pieces over the normal limit, excess weight, etc) and this problem does not exist. Even when I fly to/from the US on a codeshare flight booked on a European carrier, I don't have to pay the baggage fees even if some segments are on US carriers.
Perhaps because that 30 days is in fact 4-5 months of the year in some places, even longer in others? Sometimes we can go weeks without the temperature going above 0 F (Finland).
I'd say it's not the fault of the manufacturers; here in Europe you can buy CFL's in 2 and sometimes 3 different color temperatures. I believe it's consumers being ignorant that there is more than one type of CFL in combination with buying lamps based only on wattage as was common with incandescents.
I can buy warm CFL's in any size/shape/wattage needed. You need to be a little more "educated" when buying lamps these days, but it's not rocket science.
It's already "deceptively capable" for media consumption, casual gaming, light email and web. It's not built for content creation though. But for the average Joe Sixpack, this is what they have been using a computer for the last 15 years or so, since computers became commonplace in the home.
The average desktop or laptop computer today is vastly overpowered for the average home user, unless they have a video editing hobby or something else that needs more horsepower and a better user interface for content creation than a tablet has today.
I'm glad the EU has declared backscatter X-ray scanners to be illegal to use in European airports. I work in a radiation industry and know a considerable amount about X-ray physics and medical imaging, and these scanners should never have been taken into use for public screening.
I love going through the US airports and requesting a manual search when they try to put me through the backscatter machines. They always make a big drama over it, but I explain that I work in a radiation industry and I will not subject myself to additional radiation given a choice. Backscatter machines fall into this category, and so far I have not been through a single one. If they try to force me to go through one or not pass the security checkpoint, I will take it all the way to the top if needed. I will not tolerate being scanned by a backscatter machine, nor should anyone else. It's not been proven safe for human use or effective at increasing security.
And let's not even get started about the fact that the TSA have been caught multiple times storing images from the backscatter and millimeter wave machines, when they say publicly that the images are not saved. There is a reason why they earned the nickname, pr0n scanner. There is no valid reason to save the images after you pass screening, unless they are simply playing the CYA game. This should not be allowed.
Note, the backscatter machines are far different than the millimeter wave scanners used in some airports. Millimeter wave is known to be safe. Backscatter is NOT and should never be used on the public.
I'm participating in the European broadband performance monitoring trial going on right now across Europe. I have a little white box hooked up that runs ADSL line tests during off-peak times and when my line is not in use. I have a 24 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up connection to my ISP, and the latency average (taken from my monthly report, not made up) over the past month was 29 ms. Now, this is not the latency to my ISP, it's the latency to test servers somewhere in Europe, I really do not know where and haven't been bothered enough to dig. Considering I live in an historic neighborhood with old copper, I think that's pretty decent. I don't quite reach the throughput marketing numbers, but I do get decent speeds.
Whenever I visit family in the US, I notice the latency seems to be much higher there. I wonder if some or all ISP's intentionally insert delays to pump up latency and make the speed feel really low, because my parent's ISP calls them regularly to ask if they would like to upgrade their 20 Mbps service, which for reading email and light surfing should be WAY more than enough. Hell, I got by just fine ~12 years ago on a 128 kbps ISDN line for that stuff.
There is one important difference, we have laws in place in the EU to give teeth to our privacy rights. There was a recent example from last year... a guy (in Italy if I remember correctly) requested Facebook to provide all the data they were holding for him. They had to comply by law. Yes, they delivered a huge stack of data to the guy... but the point is they have to provide the data when asked. At least you can see what they have. In the US, companies will just laugh at you (together with snarky comments) if you ask them to relinquish such data.
I believe it will not be too long before we are able to request destruction of our private data to a third party and they will have to comply by law.
In the US, it seems the right to privacy has become a privilege and is no longer a right.
Is it any wonder why mass transit is mostly a big fail in the US? In Europe, we pay for it with taxes. You need to get over the idea that you have to drive your big SUV everywhere and use taxes to build the infrastructure to support a working mass transit system.
Gas is only going to get more expensive, at what point do you get off the gas-addiction wagon?
Disclaimer: As an American living abroad, let me say my view of the US has radically changed in just over 10 years. We were raised in the US that we were the best country in the world at practically everything. Let me tell you, most of it was dead wrong. Yes, there are some really good things about the US but on the whole, I have to say I'm happier, less overworked and enjoying life more in Europe. I would not move back the the US permanently at this point, it would be a downgrade in practically every category.
This is unlikely to hold up long term even if it gets through parliament, as a number of European governments and cities have already adopted open source software in recent years.
This is another sad attempt to get proprietary software back into where it has been kicked out.
And the OTHER real question is; why does the average American use so much water?
As an American living abroad for nearly 12 years, I noticed a dramatic difference in water consumption after moving out of the US. Where I live in Europe (Finland), we use roughly 10-20% of what I was used to in the US. People here don't let taps run. They don't take long showers. The appliances in the home (and machines in businesses) are designed to use FAR less water than the equivalent devices in the US. My washing machine uses worst-case 10-15% of a typical US-made washing machine. Ditto for the dishwasher. Yes, the appliances and machines cost more, better engineering is required.
When something is cheap, you don't CARE about waste. This is part of the problem with what I call the cheap-ification of America. Everything must be cheap, cheap, cheap. It is a too price-driven market. Witness the success of Walmart, which has completely destroyed large numbers of otherwise fully working businesses, all in the name of CHEAP. Let's not even get into their business practices, hiring practices and treatment of their own employees. I vowed never again to step into a Walmart and to be first in line to raise my voice should they attempt to set up shop here (luckily, they are mostly absent in the EU).
"..yeah, no thanks. All I want or need is something that displays a 1080p signal well,"
Why? If all you watch are the most recent Movies on BluRay, then I can understand that. but ALL cableTV and ALL satellite TV is 720P heavy compressed. I dont care what your settings on the receiver are, the signal is 720p and will stay that way for a very long time.
Everyone pines for 1080p but very few have seen 1080p content that is crisp and at a viewing distance where they can actually tell the difference.
If you know your source material, and you sit close enough to see it, Awesome for you! I also chased the 1080p dragon for my theater and succeeded. You will not find ANYTHING that will be a decent quality 1080p from a streaming service within the next 5 years. You just dont have the bandwidth.
I instead made my own. XBMC with a server in the basement that has 5 1tb drives in it. I rip the bluray discs to the server and use XBMC to play them back. XBMC will do a AC3 passthrough as well as HD audio passthrough toslink to the receiver that will recreate the audio perfectly. My theater with VOD system I have in my media center was in total $12,500 excluding the walls, sound control and seating.
If you want really good 1080p you are going to not only pay for it, but do it all yourself.
Perhaps in the US, HD satellite is squeezed down to 720p, but that does not make it so in every country. Here in Finland we do actually get 1080 HD over satellite, although my current older generation set-top box is only capable of 1080i. However, with a modern HDTV the differences between 1080i and 1080p are negligible.
I do notice the difference in broadcast quality when I visit the US, the channels are noticeably more compressed and blocky artifacts are common. I never see any compression artifacts at home. I believe it's an issue with trying to squeeze too many channels into the available bandwidth. Here we have a smaller selection of channels but the upside is that each channel gets more bandwidth. Although there is a noticeable difference compared to blu-ray, the difference is fairly small.
This is simply NIMBY (not in my back yard) at work. As long as it's happening in another country and they can get for $10 cheaper, most American consumers could care less. I'm not saying this is right, but this is very much true.
It's used in the US, where they are 20 years behind the rest of the world in mobile phones.
Yeah, US mobile phone companies like Apple, Motorola, RIM, and Palm are just decades behind European mobile phone companies, like Nokia, and... umm...
Actually, the radios in Nokias have been consistently more advanced than their American counterparts. First 3-band phone? I believe you'll find it's Nokia. First 4-band phone.. Nokia. First phone without an external antenna? Nokia. Sound familiar?
Hell, it took Apple until the iPhone 4S in late 2011 to have one phone model with a worldwide-capable radio in it. All previous gen iPhones had two different models with two different radios depending on what network you were on or which country you lived in. I hardly think it's fair to call an iPhone an advanced phone if you travel to another country (sorry US; Mexico and Canada do not count!) and the phone just won't work on the wireless system at your destination.
And by the way, being first-mover typically means you do it in a non-standard way since the standards are not yet ready. The consequence of this approach is you will almost always be incompatible with everything else that comes later. The US "leads" with this approach together with the drawbacks.
Are you actually implying that US-based multi-national corporations have corporate responsibility? I nearly snorted coffee out my nose when I read that.
Sure, if you count making maximum profit while squeezing maximum work from minimum paid workers working in slave-like conditions in third world countries, you may have a point there...
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Basically the same here in Finland. You get a pre-filled tax form in the mail. "Doing my taxes" every year takes no more than 5-10 minutes; checking the values are correct on the form, logging into the tax authority website, making corrections if needed (never needed to), adding deductions as needed, and then submitting it electronically. I even know when I will get my refund way ahead of time. The refund goes straight into my bank account automatically, I don't need to do anything. It's all very easy and simple to understand, even for a layperson without a finance degree.
I don't need a paper record, it's all on file electronically. I only need receipts if I have significant, large deductions.
It is FAR better than the system in the US, where a complete racket has been built up in the form of "tax services", and making the tax laws so complicated and full of loopholes that the average EDUCATED person cannot figure it out in 10 minutes or less. There is a serious problem when you need professional tax services or an accountant to do your personal taxes. I say this as an American living abroad for the past 12 years, so I have much experience with both systems.
Back to the OP, wow... it looks like the tax authority really screwed this up. However, that doesn't change my view that it's still the best way to handle taxes. Mistakes can and do happen in any system. Luckily the issue was discovered rather quickly and they made the correct decision and took the system offline.
Correction, HP used to make good products period. Not so much anymore... they are simply a commodity manufacturer that goes for the lowest manufacturing cost. Last time I opened up an HP PC, it was like "seriously, this is supposed to be well built?".
Not exactly true. Business-class Nokia smartphones (E-series) were made in Finland until very recently. Unfortunately, when Nokia signed a pact to switch to Windows Phone, production moved East for the new Lumia models. You can still pick up Nokias that were manufactured here, until current supply chain inventories run out. The E7 I got a couple weeks ago was Made in Finland and my previous E72 was also made here.
You see, here in the EU we actually have something called consumer rights. Our politicians are not completely owned by corporations as in the US, and corporations cannot screw over the consumer without consequences.
An electronic device is considered "durable goods", and as such comes with a 2 year warranty in the EU.
Why do you jump to defend the corporations that are trying to screw you with defective or poorly made merchandise?
I generally cannot wear a tie anymore. Never mind what kind of shirt or how expensive it is, the kind of detergent or the dry cleaner used, it always rubs my neck raw by the end of the day (yes, it is sized correctly). For this reason I rarely wear them anymore. I will wear a sportcoat or jacket if required by the situation, but with an open collar.
Luckily where I work, there is no real dresscode, unless attending tradeshows or meeting customers in the office. In the summer, t-shirts, shorts and flip flops are perfectly ok. Obviously, this is not in the US, but in Europe. Growing up in the US, there was far too much emphasis placed on how you dress and what you wear, rather than your knowledge or capabilities on the job. I don't miss that at all.
And in the Wild West, shooting someone who stole your horse was allowed in many cases. Are you saying we should allow someone to shoot someone else simply for taking away their phone and chucking it out the window?
Do you support vigilante justice by the way?
Well, I can assure you that if actual mobile phone use during flights is approved, as in allowing passengers to make and receive calls, I will be first in line to boycott air transportation. I sincerely hope this is not even on the table.
Can you imagine what a cacaphonic mess it would be if everyone was allowed to use their mobile phones during flights? It's bad enough that you are sitting in a tin can with hundreds of people in close quarters for several hours. Add in mobile phones ringing all the damn time and people talking continuously on their phones and it will be a nightmare to travel by air. No thanks.
The US airlines created this problem. By charging ridiculous baggage fees, they are practically forcing you to carry-on everything but the kitchen sink.
Luckily in Europe, baggage fees are mostly an exception (oversize and extra pieces over the normal limit, excess weight, etc) and this problem does not exist. Even when I fly to/from the US on a codeshare flight booked on a European carrier, I don't have to pay the baggage fees even if some segments are on US carriers.
Wow, get out of your parent's basement much? Hint: It's now 2012.
Perhaps because that 30 days is in fact 4-5 months of the year in some places, even longer in others? Sometimes we can go weeks without the temperature going above 0 F (Finland).
I'd say it's not the fault of the manufacturers; here in Europe you can buy CFL's in 2 and sometimes 3 different color temperatures. I believe it's consumers being ignorant that there is more than one type of CFL in combination with buying lamps based only on wattage as was common with incandescents.
I can buy warm CFL's in any size/shape/wattage needed. You need to be a little more "educated" when buying lamps these days, but it's not rocket science.
It's already "deceptively capable" for media consumption, casual gaming, light email and web. It's not built for content creation though. But for the average Joe Sixpack, this is what they have been using a computer for the last 15 years or so, since computers became commonplace in the home.
The average desktop or laptop computer today is vastly overpowered for the average home user, unless they have a video editing hobby or something else that needs more horsepower and a better user interface for content creation than a tablet has today.
Two crappy laptops, so what's the point? Real laptops cost a bit more than $250.
It still costs more than a laptop and does less than a laptop.
It still costs more than a cheap, crappy laptop and does less than a cheap crappy laptop.
There, fixed that for you.
I'm glad the EU has declared backscatter X-ray scanners to be illegal to use in European airports. I work in a radiation industry and know a considerable amount about X-ray physics and medical imaging, and these scanners should never have been taken into use for public screening.
I love going through the US airports and requesting a manual search when they try to put me through the backscatter machines. They always make a big drama over it, but I explain that I work in a radiation industry and I will not subject myself to additional radiation given a choice. Backscatter machines fall into this category, and so far I have not been through a single one. If they try to force me to go through one or not pass the security checkpoint, I will take it all the way to the top if needed. I will not tolerate being scanned by a backscatter machine, nor should anyone else. It's not been proven safe for human use or effective at increasing security.
And let's not even get started about the fact that the TSA have been caught multiple times storing images from the backscatter and millimeter wave machines, when they say publicly that the images are not saved. There is a reason why they earned the nickname, pr0n scanner. There is no valid reason to save the images after you pass screening, unless they are simply playing the CYA game. This should not be allowed.
Note, the backscatter machines are far different than the millimeter wave scanners used in some airports. Millimeter wave is known to be safe. Backscatter is NOT and should never be used on the public.
I'm participating in the European broadband performance monitoring trial going on right now across Europe. I have a little white box hooked up that runs ADSL line tests during off-peak times and when my line is not in use. I have a 24 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up connection to my ISP, and the latency average (taken from my monthly report, not made up) over the past month was 29 ms. Now, this is not the latency to my ISP, it's the latency to test servers somewhere in Europe, I really do not know where and haven't been bothered enough to dig. Considering I live in an historic neighborhood with old copper, I think that's pretty decent. I don't quite reach the throughput marketing numbers, but I do get decent speeds.
Whenever I visit family in the US, I notice the latency seems to be much higher there. I wonder if some or all ISP's intentionally insert delays to pump up latency and make the speed feel really low, because my parent's ISP calls them regularly to ask if they would like to upgrade their 20 Mbps service, which for reading email and light surfing should be WAY more than enough. Hell, I got by just fine ~12 years ago on a 128 kbps ISDN line for that stuff.
There is one important difference, we have laws in place in the EU to give teeth to our privacy rights. There was a recent example from last year... a guy (in Italy if I remember correctly) requested Facebook to provide all the data they were holding for him. They had to comply by law. Yes, they delivered a huge stack of data to the guy... but the point is they have to provide the data when asked. At least you can see what they have. In the US, companies will just laugh at you (together with snarky comments) if you ask them to relinquish such data.
I believe it will not be too long before we are able to request destruction of our private data to a third party and they will have to comply by law.
In the US, it seems the right to privacy has become a privilege and is no longer a right.
Is it any wonder why mass transit is mostly a big fail in the US? In Europe, we pay for it with taxes. You need to get over the idea that you have to drive your big SUV everywhere and use taxes to build the infrastructure to support a working mass transit system.
Gas is only going to get more expensive, at what point do you get off the gas-addiction wagon?
Disclaimer: As an American living abroad, let me say my view of the US has radically changed in just over 10 years. We were raised in the US that we were the best country in the world at practically everything. Let me tell you, most of it was dead wrong. Yes, there are some really good things about the US but on the whole, I have to say I'm happier, less overworked and enjoying life more in Europe. I would not move back the the US permanently at this point, it would be a downgrade in practically every category.
This is unlikely to hold up long term even if it gets through parliament, as a number of European governments and cities have already adopted open source software in recent years.
This is another sad attempt to get proprietary software back into where it has been kicked out.
And the OTHER real question is; why does the average American use so much water?
As an American living abroad for nearly 12 years, I noticed a dramatic difference in water consumption after moving out of the US. Where I live in Europe (Finland), we use roughly 10-20% of what I was used to in the US. People here don't let taps run. They don't take long showers. The appliances in the home (and machines in businesses) are designed to use FAR less water than the equivalent devices in the US. My washing machine uses worst-case 10-15% of a typical US-made washing machine. Ditto for the dishwasher. Yes, the appliances and machines cost more, better engineering is required.
When something is cheap, you don't CARE about waste. This is part of the problem with what I call the cheap-ification of America. Everything must be cheap, cheap, cheap. It is a too price-driven market. Witness the success of Walmart, which has completely destroyed large numbers of otherwise fully working businesses, all in the name of CHEAP. Let's not even get into their business practices, hiring practices and treatment of their own employees. I vowed never again to step into a Walmart and to be first in line to raise my voice should they attempt to set up shop here (luckily, they are mostly absent in the EU).
"..yeah, no thanks. All I want or need is something that displays a 1080p signal well,"
Why? If all you watch are the most recent Movies on BluRay, then I can understand that. but ALL cableTV and ALL satellite TV is 720P heavy compressed. I dont care what your settings on the receiver are, the signal is 720p and will stay that way for a very long time.
Everyone pines for 1080p but very few have seen 1080p content that is crisp and at a viewing distance where they can actually tell the difference.
If you know your source material, and you sit close enough to see it, Awesome for you! I also chased the 1080p dragon for my theater and succeeded. You will not find ANYTHING that will be a decent quality 1080p from a streaming service within the next 5 years. You just dont have the bandwidth.
I instead made my own. XBMC with a server in the basement that has 5 1tb drives in it. I rip the bluray discs to the server and use XBMC to play them back. XBMC will do a AC3 passthrough as well as HD audio passthrough toslink to the receiver that will recreate the audio perfectly. My theater with VOD system I have in my media center was in total $12,500 excluding the walls, sound control and seating.
If you want really good 1080p you are going to not only pay for it, but do it all yourself.
Perhaps in the US, HD satellite is squeezed down to 720p, but that does not make it so in every country. Here in Finland we do actually get 1080 HD over satellite, although my current older generation set-top box is only capable of 1080i. However, with a modern HDTV the differences between 1080i and 1080p are negligible.
I do notice the difference in broadcast quality when I visit the US, the channels are noticeably more compressed and blocky artifacts are common. I never see any compression artifacts at home. I believe it's an issue with trying to squeeze too many channels into the available bandwidth. Here we have a smaller selection of channels but the upside is that each channel gets more bandwidth. Although there is a noticeable difference compared to blu-ray, the difference is fairly small.
This is simply NIMBY (not in my back yard) at work. As long as it's happening in another country and they can get for $10 cheaper, most American consumers could care less. I'm not saying this is right, but this is very much true.
Yeah, US mobile phone companies like Apple, Motorola, RIM, and Palm are just decades behind European mobile phone companies, like Nokia, and... umm...
Actually, the radios in Nokias have been consistently more advanced than their American counterparts. First 3-band phone? I believe you'll find it's Nokia. First 4-band phone.. Nokia. First phone without an external antenna? Nokia. Sound familiar?
Hell, it took Apple until the iPhone 4S in late 2011 to have one phone model with a worldwide-capable radio in it. All previous gen iPhones had two different models with two different radios depending on what network you were on or which country you lived in. I hardly think it's fair to call an iPhone an advanced phone if you travel to another country (sorry US; Mexico and Canada do not count!) and the phone just won't work on the wireless system at your destination.
And by the way, being first-mover typically means you do it in a non-standard way since the standards are not yet ready. The consequence of this approach is you will almost always be incompatible with everything else that comes later. The US "leads" with this approach together with the drawbacks.
Are you actually implying that US-based multi-national corporations have corporate responsibility? I nearly snorted coffee out my nose when I read that.
Sure, if you count making maximum profit while squeezing maximum work from minimum paid workers working in slave-like conditions in third world countries, you may have a point there...
Yeah, I nearly snorted my coffee through my nose when I read that. Who are they kidding?