Yeah - even here in Australia (same physical size as the lower 48 US states and similar low density suburban sprawl everywhere), that would be considered quite a long commute. The only significant group of people I know with that kind of distance commute might be people in the Blue Mountains who work in downtown Sydney, but even so, a lot of them take the train rather than drive...
Mind you, even gasoline powered vehicles suffer from cold weather mileage decreases. In my decidedly-not-electric Honda Accord V6 I get 6.5 L/100 km during summer, but ~ 8.5 L/100 km in the winter (note, winter where I am is cold, often minus 20s C, i.e. 'sub-zero' Fahreinheit).
Those figures in US MPG, roughly speaking, are "mid 30s" summer, "high 20s" winter.
Yeah agreed. I think the rollout will continue in many areas as originally planned. Scope of fibre might be cut back a bit, and it might take longer than Labor's (probably overambitious) schedule, but I don't think the NBN is completely a lost cause.
At least that's what I hope. Maybe I'm just clutching at straws hoping to get some sweet sweet fibre. My parents are lucky enough to be on the NBN already, before it got halted... they opted for the 50/20 speed tier (rather than 100/40), but even that is very, very nice. The upload speeds in particular are fantastic.
I moved here to the US from Australia last year. While speeds in Australia are nothing spectacular, we did have a LOT of choice when it came to ISPs. In Australia, in a mid-sized city (~350,000 people), there was a choice of 20-30 ISPs (ADSL2+, VDSL2 or in some areas, fibre). Here in the US, in a similarly-sized city, I have a choice of precisely one provider (the local cable monopoly).
Ok that's not entirely true - I also have AT&T DSL as a choice, at a whopping maximum speed of 6 Mbps down / 512 kbps up. But really, that's a non-option - it costs roughly the same and is 10 times slower than cable. (That upstream speed in particular is ridiculous in the year 2014... no idea why they don't use ADSL2+ with Annex M or similar tech to boost that up to 1-2 Mbps at least... but I digress)
Having at least just a couple more options for ISPs would help, you'd think. With the vast majority of people in the US having only one or two choices of provider, what incentive do those providers have to improve their product? They have a captive customer base who literally have nowhere else to turn.
Wrong. Moved to the US purely for family reasons. My wife's American and her parents are getting old... we hadn't seen much of them for a while. So fair is fair - we lived near my parents for many years, now it's time to return the favor.
I was able to transfer with my current employer to a US - kept the same job, level, title and everything. My salary went down slightly due to cost of living adjustment (US cost of living is cheaper than where I came from), and I lost 4 days/year of vacation, but that's about it. The health insurance stuff was the only really confusing/difficult thing to adjust to.
The US is no more 'free market' than where I came from! And it's certainly less prosperous, after the 2008 financial crisis here. I moved from Australia, but have lived in Singapore, Japan and NZ in the past too. Never stepped foot in Europe. So yeah, it's not like I moved here from a third world (or even second world) location. In fact the nation I came from consistently ranks higher than the US in economic freedom, quality of life and human development metrics.
So please don't make assumptions. Neither of us wanted to move here - almost every aspect of life was better in Australia (even my American wife admits this). But family ties are important and outweigh economics. There are some positive aspects to living here too - real winters (yay snow!) and the cost of living is a lot cheaper (yay cheap clothes/shoes/cars/etc).
Also - my time is worth money. Moving to the US and having to go through 100+ page documents comparing available health plans, filling all the damn paperwork out etc. took hours and hours of my time. I'll gladly paid a bit more tax (even if it's going to treat people other than myself) if it means I don't have to worry about all that. In universal health care countries, you never have to THINK about this kind of thing at all. You are covered. Automatically. From the moment you are born to the moment you die. Much less stressful and confusing... that's gotta be worth something.
In most single payer systems, yes, there are limits on what the payer (i.e. the government or other universal insurer) will pay, for precisely the reasons you state. However, the prices that are considered 'normal' for particular procedures and treatments are agreed upon and updated regularly by a board of generally independent medical professionals. These are people concerned mostly with the efficacy of the treatments and what the rules are for deciding whether they are medically necessary, rather than the financial aspects of the system per se. The government then uses these guidelines to make budgetary forecasts. So unless doctors are charging way-beyond-typical prices for things, it's fine. (And if they do, they'll be investigated and may be forced to eat the cost themselves, it can't legally be passed on to the patients).
However it's crucial to point out that if a procedure is medically necessary, it will be covered, regardless of how expensive it is. The government does not have unlimited funds, but the law of large numbers means that the costs over a whole population are quite predictable. Costs will increase over time as the population ages of course, which may require some tax increases or higher co-payments in future, sure, but this is still much more efficient than a non-single-payer system. The point of single payer is that a large customer (like a government) has bargaining power with providers and drug companies. They can negotiate cheaper prices for things than you or I could.
Everyone needs medical care at some point in their life. So it's not like insurance for things that may or may not occur (like car insurance or home insurance). Amortizing the costs across a huge population that uses their collective power as consumers to negotiate better prices with medical providers makes sense.
Yes technically this means you may be paying a few dollars more in tax to cover the tree-hitting motorcyclist or the drug addict or the VD dude. But that's a small price to pay for knowing that you will not have to worry at all about money if you yourself run into a tree the following day, or when you're old and are afflicted with cancer etc. Besides, the costs saved purely by the increased EFFICIENCY of having a single payer (i.e. much simpler, less paperwork, less billing, simpler IT systems etc.) I'd say more than makes up for that extra few bucks in tax.
Variously, I've lived in Australia, NZ, Singapore and Japan. Australia is a hybrid public-private system that works much as I described in the OP, though Singapore and Japan also have similarities.
My post was highlighting that not all 'universal' systems are necessarily government-run (ala the UK NHS or Canada's system). There is a spectrum between completely private and completely public.
Technically nothing really stops them - but the government will not pay an unlimited amount. There are schedules that dictate what a certain service should cost, and when such a service is deemed to be necessary. So a doctor that's ordering expensive, pointless tests will find that the government refuses to pay them. And if the patient themselves is also not liable (e.g. they didn't specifically ask for the tests etc.), then they just have to eat the cost. Which is a good way to discourage doctors doing useless tests.
The point of single-payer is that a LARGE customer (like a government) can negotiate better prices from medical providers, because of their sheer size. There's also savings due to the gains in efficiency (paperwork, IT systems etc.) when there's only single entity responsible for payment.
Perhaps not as low as 30 hours, but 35-38 is standard in most of the (non-US) world.
I'm Australian and most full time jobs I've had are 37.5h per week. Paid vacation is a standard 4 weeks per year, plus 10 public holidays (so 30 days/year in total). In some industries, working beyond that isn't permitted. In others, it would count as overtime paid at 150-200% of the normal hourly rate, so people take on the extra hours when they need a bit of extra cash.
Indeed. The #1 problem with the US education system IMO is that geography isn't a compulsory subject like it is in most other OECD countries (at least, a basic level). Geography encompasses a lot more than just rote learning where things are though. It takes about cultures and languages in various areas of the world. It teaches basic skills like how to represent a three dimensional view of something onto a 2D grid, how to orient yourself in space using a map, gives you some basic sense of distance and direction, explains basic principles of navigating on a sphere (the Earth) and why certain things aren't always intuitive (e.g. shortest distance between two points is usually not a constant compass bearing, i.e. great circle vs rhumb line distinction)...
I only did basic (year 7 and 8) geography myself but the number of people that simply cannot navigate, or look out at the horizon and understand where they fit within the wider picture, is astonishing.
Haha, very true. I'm a recent migrant to the US, having previously lived in a country with a universal single-payer system. One of my first challenges when I started work here was understanding my insurance options... open enrollment, deductibles, co-pays, in-network vs. out of network etc. All this new terminology was really quite overwhelming given that I'd never had to ~think~ about healthcare AT ALL before in my life. I was used to turning up to any old doctor/clinic I could find, getting treated, swiping my healthcare card on the way out and... leaving. Money barely came into it. But here - so many choices, so many restrictions. It's a minefield.
A lot of people I talk to here really can't wrap their mind around healthcare in a world where it isn't tied up intimately with the insurance industry. They also can't seem to understand that universal healthcare does not mean the government is somehow controlling your treatment. In my old country, doctors/clinics/some hospitals were regular, private businesses, just like in the US. If I didn't like one, I could go to another. The only difference is the government pays most or all of the bill at the end. Government-PAID healthcare does not always mean government-RUN healthcare...
Actually the 'US' country code is a weird one that covers a dozen-odd countries (all in North America). Canada being the other large one, but the NANP includes many Carribean countries too (with them essentially being assigned a North American area code as their de facto country code). This is for historical reasons. You don't see this occurring many other places - in all other regions, countries generally have distinct country codes. Two digits at a minimum, some three. Russia is the only exception I can think of with its +7 code.
Yes this is quite possible. It may be that the searches are bringing up what users entering previous Chinese-language searches for similar terms eventually clicked on (i.e. what is more commonly deemed 'interesting' or 'relevant' to the users searching for those terms). English-language users would generally be interested in different results than Chinese users, and from the search engine's perspective, English and Chinese searches for the 'same thing' are two completely unrelated searches.
Simple example. If an English user types in Tienanmen Square, chances are a good percentage of them are looking for information about the massacre. However, if a Chinese user types in the equivalent Chinese search term (stupid Slashdot, no Unicode), they ~may~ be looking for information about that... but probably not. There'd be a much higher proportion of Chinese-language results containing the term that have nothing to do with the massacre, compared to English sites (because in English, let's face it, it's one of the first things that springs into your mind when someone mentions Tiananmen). Because most Chinese ~sources~ are censored, the type of search results you get back reflects this.
So it's not necessarily active censorship, just search results (in a particular language) reflecting the predominant content (in that language) for the search term.
Not to say it's NOT active censorship... but there's a 'innocent' answer for this as well.
Indeed. Idiots doing this kind of thing is why they ended up de facto banning laser pointers greater than 1 mW here in Australia (technically, if you had one before the ban, you can keep it, but you require a firearms licence since the pointers are now governed by the same laws that regulate weapons).
For the same reasons as it is difficult to regulate firearms in the US (constitutional rights, porous borders, inconsistent State-level laws), I suspect it would be difficult to regulate high-power laser pointers though, so yeah, not sure what you guys can do that'll actually have some effect, other than harsh enforcement...
I have one of those. I do actually like having it, for the reasons you say. Though in winter I do note it gets confused by snowbanks on the side of the road and occasionally cars in other lanes. Beep beep beeeeeeeep. Ahhhhhhh what?!
No it's about the bloody paperwork involved. It's ridiculous. Yes we may end up owing nothing to the IRS but the administrative burden is huge (or you pay someone else to do it for you).
Secondly, your example works ok for a simple tax situation (earned income from a job), but let me tell you it gets complicated when you start throwing in franked dividends (the US doesn't recognise imputation credits, so you end up getting double taxed on these). Or foreign retirement accounts (which are taxed by the host country when the money is paid IN, usually by the company NOT by you, so when the money comes out once you retire, it's not taxed by the host country but is considered fully taxable income by the IRS).
FATCA itself has nothing to do with the above examples, you're right. But it's just another layer of ridiculous complexity and unfairness to the whole treatment of expats by the IRS. It's a nightmare. A nightmare citizens of any other country do not have to worry about. Just Americans.
1. You assume that it's easy to become a citizen of another country just because you want to. They aren't handed out like candy you know. There are usually set criteria, and these may not be possible to meet.
2. Gaining NZ citizenship wouldn't affect the US citizenship, which would still exist. Renunciation of US citizenship is expensive and the IRS will STILL require you to file for up to 7 years after doing so.
3. The $90k threshold doesn't apply to all income types. Furthermore, in many countries, retirement funds pay out in a lump sum at a certain age. So you might hit 65, retire, and have a $1,000,000 income for the year. The host country doesn't tax that money, because it's already been taxed at the time it was paid IN to the account, earlier in life. The IRS doesn't give a shit about that though - it sees $1M income, it sees you didn't pay taxes to the foreign government on that income (so, no tax credit/deduction is available) and taxes you at the full marginal rate on that income (which has actually already been taxed - double taxation ahoy!) Great to see your retirement nest egg that you have to live on for the rest of your life reduced by 35% or whatever in a single hit.
It's incredibly complex, because every country's local taxation laws are different and the IRS definitions for things seem to assume all countries work the same way as the US. But it all stems from the basic fact that America, alone, taxes non-resident citizens on their world wide income. No other place does that. If they acted like every other country, none of the above would be an issue at all.
In no other country on earth does maintaining a right to "come and go" require payment. That's the whole point of citizenship. Why should an American have to renounce that when anyone else in the opposite situation (retiring in America, but originally from somewhere else) would not have to do any such thing?
Also there are numerous situations where expat Americans are liable to pay tax to the US without making six figures. And in some cases, situations where they get double taxed on the same income by both governments. These are complex, but generally speaking are to do with retirement accounts, which may not be considered taxable income in the host country but are considered taxable by the IRS (the IRS' definition of retirement account pretty much ONLY covers American style 401(k)/Roth arrangements... but other countries do things very differently and in some cases double taxation is unavoidable... hooray for paying a combined ~60% tax on your retirement income!)
You're right - foreign banks cannot be COMPELLED to comply with a US law. Indeed, many of them ~cannot~ due to local privacy laws.
However, read the rest of the law and you'll see the issue. Foreign financial entities that do not comply with face a 30% withholding tax on all US-sourced income. And given that virtually every bank on earth trades in a mix of bonds and stocks from all over the planet, a fair proportion of which will be American... the bank suffers a significant financial penalty for non-compliance.
So realistically their only options are:
1. Comply; or 2. Refuse any American customers, and force existing American customers to close their accounts (no American customers = no data to report to the IRS).
Many banks are taking option 2 in countries all over the world before this new American law kicks in. It is a royal pain in the behind for Americans overseas, most of whom are not wealthy cat-stroking tax-evading megalomaniacs, but normal people just living normal middle class lives.
Everywhere does this. It's a new US law (google 'FATCA') - all foreign banks have to report account details for Americans to the IRS, or face a 30% withholding tax imposed on any earnings the bank makes from US sources (which given the interconnectedness of global equity markets, affects pretty much any reasonable-sized bank).
Some banks comply. Most simply say "that's impossible/ridiculous/breaches local privacy laws" and simply refuse to do business with Americans. But it's not just an EU thing, it's everywhere.
It might not be "about" expats, but it hurts them. I know - my wife is a dual Australian and American citizen. She hasn't set foot on US soil in a decade but still has to declare her worldwide (i.e. Australian) income every year and file her US tax return. Not only that, she has to report the details and balances of all her bank accounts, every year. And because some of those accounts are jointly held with me (a non-US citizen), then guess what, the US has my details as well.
Now with FATCA coming in (http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Corporations/Foreign-Account-Tax-Compliance-Act-(FATCA)), the IRS is requiring foreign banks to determine which of their account holders may be American, and provide access to a record of transactions/balances for those accounts directly to the US! Needless to say, many banks are refusing to do this, either because it's administratively difficult (how are you going to figure out who is and isn't American unless you mass mail every single customer?) or because it breaches privacy laws in the relevant country. So many banks are simply refusing to deal with American customers and are requiring them to close their accounts.
No wonder record numbers of expats are renouncing their citizenship in recent years (~500 per month, last I heard). The whole concept of taxing non-resident citizens on worldwide income is ridiculous in the first place, and now these new laws just make it intolerable. It's not about us trying to avoid taxes - we pay our fair share and are not wealthy people. It's the administrative burden. Having to file so many extra returns, forms, etc, every single year, to a country you aren't resident in...
It's not 'bad' objectively, for life in general, but it's bad for us - humans. It would make tropical and subtropical areas of the world unbearable to live in (noting that the majority of the earth's population live in such areas. Heat waves would regularly plague temperate areas too. Agriculture and thus our food supply would be severely disrupted.
Similarly with the oceans - they would have been far more acidic in the dinosaur's age than they are currently. There are life forms that can thrive in those conditions... but it's bad news for most species in the ocean today.
So yeah, it was a lush green world 100M years ago, due to the much higher temperature and abundance of CO2. A big, hot, sticky greenhouse. Great for 'life' generally, but death to us specifically. It'd be like living in a sauna.
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Yeah - even here in Australia (same physical size as the lower 48 US states and similar low density suburban sprawl everywhere), that would be considered quite a long commute. The only significant group of people I know with that kind of distance commute might be people in the Blue Mountains who work in downtown Sydney, but even so, a lot of them take the train rather than drive...
Very true.
Mind you, even gasoline powered vehicles suffer from cold weather mileage decreases. In my decidedly-not-electric Honda Accord V6 I get 6.5 L/100 km during summer, but ~ 8.5 L/100 km in the winter (note, winter where I am is cold, often minus 20s C, i.e. 'sub-zero' Fahreinheit).
Those figures in US MPG, roughly speaking, are "mid 30s" summer, "high 20s" winter.
Yeah agreed. I think the rollout will continue in many areas as originally planned. Scope of fibre might be cut back a bit, and it might take longer than Labor's (probably overambitious) schedule, but I don't think the NBN is completely a lost cause.
At least that's what I hope. Maybe I'm just clutching at straws hoping to get some sweet sweet fibre. My parents are lucky enough to be on the NBN already, before it got halted ... they opted for the 50/20 speed tier (rather than 100/40), but even that is very, very nice. The upload speeds in particular are fantastic.
Agreed - more competition is needed.
I moved here to the US from Australia last year. While speeds in Australia are nothing spectacular, we did have a LOT of choice when it came to ISPs. In Australia, in a mid-sized city (~350,000 people), there was a choice of 20-30 ISPs (ADSL2+, VDSL2 or in some areas, fibre). Here in the US, in a similarly-sized city, I have a choice of precisely one provider (the local cable monopoly).
Ok that's not entirely true - I also have AT&T DSL as a choice, at a whopping maximum speed of 6 Mbps down / 512 kbps up. But really, that's a non-option - it costs roughly the same and is 10 times slower than cable. (That upstream speed in particular is ridiculous in the year 2014 ... no idea why they don't use ADSL2+ with Annex M or similar tech to boost that up to 1-2 Mbps at least ... but I digress)
Having at least just a couple more options for ISPs would help, you'd think. With the vast majority of people in the US having only one or two choices of provider, what incentive do those providers have to improve their product? They have a captive customer base who literally have nowhere else to turn.
Wrong. Moved to the US purely for family reasons. My wife's American and her parents are getting old ... we hadn't seen much of them for a while. So fair is fair - we lived near my parents for many years, now it's time to return the favor.
I was able to transfer with my current employer to a US - kept the same job, level, title and everything. My salary went down slightly due to cost of living adjustment (US cost of living is cheaper than where I came from), and I lost 4 days/year of vacation, but that's about it. The health insurance stuff was the only really confusing/difficult thing to adjust to.
The US is no more 'free market' than where I came from! And it's certainly less prosperous, after the 2008 financial crisis here. I moved from Australia, but have lived in Singapore, Japan and NZ in the past too. Never stepped foot in Europe. So yeah, it's not like I moved here from a third world (or even second world) location. In fact the nation I came from consistently ranks higher than the US in economic freedom, quality of life and human development metrics.
So please don't make assumptions. Neither of us wanted to move here - almost every aspect of life was better in Australia (even my American wife admits this). But family ties are important and outweigh economics. There are some positive aspects to living here too - real winters (yay snow!) and the cost of living is a lot cheaper (yay cheap clothes/shoes/cars/etc).
Also - my time is worth money. Moving to the US and having to go through 100+ page documents comparing available health plans, filling all the damn paperwork out etc. took hours and hours of my time. I'll gladly paid a bit more tax (even if it's going to treat people other than myself) if it means I don't have to worry about all that. In universal health care countries, you never have to THINK about this kind of thing at all. You are covered. Automatically. From the moment you are born to the moment you die. Much less stressful and confusing ... that's gotta be worth something.
In most single payer systems, yes, there are limits on what the payer (i.e. the government or other universal insurer) will pay, for precisely the reasons you state. However, the prices that are considered 'normal' for particular procedures and treatments are agreed upon and updated regularly by a board of generally independent medical professionals. These are people concerned mostly with the efficacy of the treatments and what the rules are for deciding whether they are medically necessary, rather than the financial aspects of the system per se. The government then uses these guidelines to make budgetary forecasts. So unless doctors are charging way-beyond-typical prices for things, it's fine. (And if they do, they'll be investigated and may be forced to eat the cost themselves, it can't legally be passed on to the patients).
However it's crucial to point out that if a procedure is medically necessary, it will be covered, regardless of how expensive it is. The government does not have unlimited funds, but the law of large numbers means that the costs over a whole population are quite predictable. Costs will increase over time as the population ages of course, which may require some tax increases or higher co-payments in future, sure, but this is still much more efficient than a non-single-payer system. The point of single payer is that a large customer (like a government) has bargaining power with providers and drug companies. They can negotiate cheaper prices for things than you or I could.
Everyone needs medical care at some point in their life. So it's not like insurance for things that may or may not occur (like car insurance or home insurance). Amortizing the costs across a huge population that uses their collective power as consumers to negotiate better prices with medical providers makes sense.
Yes technically this means you may be paying a few dollars more in tax to cover the tree-hitting motorcyclist or the drug addict or the VD dude. But that's a small price to pay for knowing that you will not have to worry at all about money if you yourself run into a tree the following day, or when you're old and are afflicted with cancer etc. Besides, the costs saved purely by the increased EFFICIENCY of having a single payer (i.e. much simpler, less paperwork, less billing, simpler IT systems etc.) I'd say more than makes up for that extra few bucks in tax.
Variously, I've lived in Australia, NZ, Singapore and Japan. Australia is a hybrid public-private system that works much as I described in the OP, though Singapore and Japan also have similarities.
My post was highlighting that not all 'universal' systems are necessarily government-run (ala the UK NHS or Canada's system). There is a spectrum between completely private and completely public.
Technically nothing really stops them - but the government will not pay an unlimited amount. There are schedules that dictate what a certain service should cost, and when such a service is deemed to be necessary. So a doctor that's ordering expensive, pointless tests will find that the government refuses to pay them. And if the patient themselves is also not liable (e.g. they didn't specifically ask for the tests etc.), then they just have to eat the cost. Which is a good way to discourage doctors doing useless tests.
Er, taxes?
The point of single-payer is that a LARGE customer (like a government) can negotiate better prices from medical providers, because of their sheer size. There's also savings due to the gains in efficiency (paperwork, IT systems etc.) when there's only single entity responsible for payment.
Perhaps not as low as 30 hours, but 35-38 is standard in most of the (non-US) world.
I'm Australian and most full time jobs I've had are 37.5h per week. Paid vacation is a standard 4 weeks per year, plus 10 public holidays (so 30 days/year in total). In some industries, working beyond that isn't permitted. In others, it would count as overtime paid at 150-200% of the normal hourly rate, so people take on the extra hours when they need a bit of extra cash.
Indeed. The #1 problem with the US education system IMO is that geography isn't a compulsory subject like it is in most other OECD countries (at least, a basic level). Geography encompasses a lot more than just rote learning where things are though. It takes about cultures and languages in various areas of the world. It teaches basic skills like how to represent a three dimensional view of something onto a 2D grid, how to orient yourself in space using a map, gives you some basic sense of distance and direction, explains basic principles of navigating on a sphere (the Earth) and why certain things aren't always intuitive (e.g. shortest distance between two points is usually not a constant compass bearing, i.e. great circle vs rhumb line distinction)...
I only did basic (year 7 and 8) geography myself but the number of people that simply cannot navigate, or look out at the horizon and understand where they fit within the wider picture, is astonishing.
Haha, very true. I'm a recent migrant to the US, having previously lived in a country with a universal single-payer system. One of my first challenges when I started work here was understanding my insurance options ... open enrollment, deductibles, co-pays, in-network vs. out of network etc. All this new terminology was really quite overwhelming given that I'd never had to ~think~ about healthcare AT ALL before in my life. I was used to turning up to any old doctor/clinic I could find, getting treated, swiping my healthcare card on the way out and ... leaving. Money barely came into it. But here - so many choices, so many restrictions. It's a minefield.
A lot of people I talk to here really can't wrap their mind around healthcare in a world where it isn't tied up intimately with the insurance industry. They also can't seem to understand that universal healthcare does not mean the government is somehow controlling your treatment. In my old country, doctors/clinics/some hospitals were regular, private businesses, just like in the US. If I didn't like one, I could go to another. The only difference is the government pays most or all of the bill at the end. Government-PAID healthcare does not always mean government-RUN healthcare...
Actually the 'US' country code is a weird one that covers a dozen-odd countries (all in North America). Canada being the other large one, but the NANP includes many Carribean countries too (with them essentially being assigned a North American area code as their de facto country code). This is for historical reasons. You don't see this occurring many other places - in all other regions, countries generally have distinct country codes. Two digits at a minimum, some three. Russia is the only exception I can think of with its +7 code.
Yes this is quite possible. It may be that the searches are bringing up what users entering previous Chinese-language searches for similar terms eventually clicked on (i.e. what is more commonly deemed 'interesting' or 'relevant' to the users searching for those terms). English-language users would generally be interested in different results than Chinese users, and from the search engine's perspective, English and Chinese searches for the 'same thing' are two completely unrelated searches.
Simple example. If an English user types in Tienanmen Square, chances are a good percentage of them are looking for information about the massacre. However, if a Chinese user types in the equivalent Chinese search term (stupid Slashdot, no Unicode), they ~may~ be looking for information about that ... but probably not. There'd be a much higher proportion of Chinese-language results containing the term that have nothing to do with the massacre, compared to English sites (because in English, let's face it, it's one of the first things that springs into your mind when someone mentions Tiananmen). Because most Chinese ~sources~ are censored, the type of search results you get back reflects this.
So it's not necessarily active censorship, just search results (in a particular language) reflecting the predominant content (in that language) for the search term.
Not to say it's NOT active censorship ... but there's a 'innocent' answer for this as well.
Indeed. Idiots doing this kind of thing is why they ended up de facto banning laser pointers greater than 1 mW here in Australia (technically, if you had one before the ban, you can keep it, but you require a firearms licence since the pointers are now governed by the same laws that regulate weapons).
For the same reasons as it is difficult to regulate firearms in the US (constitutional rights, porous borders, inconsistent State-level laws), I suspect it would be difficult to regulate high-power laser pointers though, so yeah, not sure what you guys can do that'll actually have some effect, other than harsh enforcement...
I have one of those. I do actually like having it, for the reasons you say. Though in winter I do note it gets confused by snowbanks on the side of the road and occasionally cars in other lanes. Beep beep beeeeeeeep. Ahhhhhhh what?!
No it's about the bloody paperwork involved. It's ridiculous. Yes we may end up owing nothing to the IRS but the administrative burden is huge (or you pay someone else to do it for you).
Secondly, your example works ok for a simple tax situation (earned income from a job), but let me tell you it gets complicated when you start throwing in franked dividends (the US doesn't recognise imputation credits, so you end up getting double taxed on these). Or foreign retirement accounts (which are taxed by the host country when the money is paid IN, usually by the company NOT by you, so when the money comes out once you retire, it's not taxed by the host country but is considered fully taxable income by the IRS).
FATCA itself has nothing to do with the above examples, you're right. But it's just another layer of ridiculous complexity and unfairness to the whole treatment of expats by the IRS. It's a nightmare. A nightmare citizens of any other country do not have to worry about. Just Americans.
1. You assume that it's easy to become a citizen of another country just because you want to. They aren't handed out like candy you know. There are usually set criteria, and these may not be possible to meet.
2. Gaining NZ citizenship wouldn't affect the US citizenship, which would still exist. Renunciation of US citizenship is expensive and the IRS will STILL require you to file for up to 7 years after doing so.
3. The $90k threshold doesn't apply to all income types. Furthermore, in many countries, retirement funds pay out in a lump sum at a certain age. So you might hit 65, retire, and have a $1,000,000 income for the year. The host country doesn't tax that money, because it's already been taxed at the time it was paid IN to the account, earlier in life. The IRS doesn't give a shit about that though - it sees $1M income, it sees you didn't pay taxes to the foreign government on that income (so, no tax credit/deduction is available) and taxes you at the full marginal rate on that income (which has actually already been taxed - double taxation ahoy!) Great to see your retirement nest egg that you have to live on for the rest of your life reduced by 35% or whatever in a single hit.
It's incredibly complex, because every country's local taxation laws are different and the IRS definitions for things seem to assume all countries work the same way as the US. But it all stems from the basic fact that America, alone, taxes non-resident citizens on their world wide income. No other place does that. If they acted like every other country, none of the above would be an issue at all.
Sorry, but are you nuts?
In no other country on earth does maintaining a right to "come and go" require payment. That's the whole point of citizenship. Why should an American have to renounce that when anyone else in the opposite situation (retiring in America, but originally from somewhere else) would not have to do any such thing?
Also there are numerous situations where expat Americans are liable to pay tax to the US without making six figures. And in some cases, situations where they get double taxed on the same income by both governments. These are complex, but generally speaking are to do with retirement accounts, which may not be considered taxable income in the host country but are considered taxable by the IRS (the IRS' definition of retirement account pretty much ONLY covers American style 401(k)/Roth arrangements ... but other countries do things very differently and in some cases double taxation is unavoidable ... hooray for paying a combined ~60% tax on your retirement income!)
You're right - foreign banks cannot be COMPELLED to comply with a US law. Indeed, many of them ~cannot~ due to local privacy laws.
However, read the rest of the law and you'll see the issue. Foreign financial entities that do not comply with face a 30% withholding tax on all US-sourced income. And given that virtually every bank on earth trades in a mix of bonds and stocks from all over the planet, a fair proportion of which will be American ... the bank suffers a significant financial penalty for non-compliance.
So realistically their only options are:
1. Comply; or
2. Refuse any American customers, and force existing American customers to close their accounts (no American customers = no data to report to the IRS).
Many banks are taking option 2 in countries all over the world before this new American law kicks in. It is a royal pain in the behind for Americans overseas, most of whom are not wealthy cat-stroking tax-evading megalomaniacs, but normal people just living normal middle class lives.
Everywhere does this. It's a new US law (google 'FATCA') - all foreign banks have to report account details for Americans to the IRS, or face a 30% withholding tax imposed on any earnings the bank makes from US sources (which given the interconnectedness of global equity markets, affects pretty much any reasonable-sized bank).
Some banks comply. Most simply say "that's impossible/ridiculous/breaches local privacy laws" and simply refuse to do business with Americans. But it's not just an EU thing, it's everywhere.
It might not be "about" expats, but it hurts them. I know - my wife is a dual Australian and American citizen. She hasn't set foot on US soil in a decade but still has to declare her worldwide (i.e. Australian) income every year and file her US tax return. Not only that, she has to report the details and balances of all her bank accounts, every year. And because some of those accounts are jointly held with me (a non-US citizen), then guess what, the US has my details as well.
Now with FATCA coming in (http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Corporations/Foreign-Account-Tax-Compliance-Act-(FATCA)), the IRS is requiring foreign banks to determine which of their account holders may be American, and provide access to a record of transactions/balances for those accounts directly to the US! Needless to say, many banks are refusing to do this, either because it's administratively difficult (how are you going to figure out who is and isn't American unless you mass mail every single customer?) or because it breaches privacy laws in the relevant country. So many banks are simply refusing to deal with American customers and are requiring them to close their accounts.
No wonder record numbers of expats are renouncing their citizenship in recent years (~500 per month, last I heard). The whole concept of taxing non-resident citizens on worldwide income is ridiculous in the first place, and now these new laws just make it intolerable. It's not about us trying to avoid taxes - we pay our fair share and are not wealthy people. It's the administrative burden. Having to file so many extra returns, forms, etc, every single year, to a country you aren't resident in...
It's not 'bad' objectively, for life in general, but it's bad for us - humans. It would make tropical and subtropical areas of the world unbearable to live in (noting that the majority of the earth's population live in such areas. Heat waves would regularly plague temperate areas too. Agriculture and thus our food supply would be severely disrupted.
Similarly with the oceans - they would have been far more acidic in the dinosaur's age than they are currently. There are life forms that can thrive in those conditions ... but it's bad news for most species in the ocean today.
So yeah, it was a lush green world 100M years ago, due to the much higher temperature and abundance of CO2. A big, hot, sticky greenhouse. Great for 'life' generally, but death to us specifically. It'd be like living in a sauna.
Hmm, now I'm going to have to go check. I live in the US but have some (non-new) Australian, Singaporean and HK notes in my wallet (all polymer)...