But doesn't the fact that so very few people have managed to make it work mean that it's unworkable? What's his evidence that it works? Where are these successful entrepreneurs following "The Stallman Method"?" It's been decades; surely there should be thousands by now, right?
Very few of any tech companies manage to make any business model work- that's not just a Free Software issue.
Take operating systems. There are three big ones. There's proprietary Windows. There's proprietary-with-open-bits Mac/iOS. Then there's fully GPL Linux/Android. All three of which are backed by profit making companies. How many other companies have failed? There aren't dozens of successful proprietary OS's and a few tiny open hold outs- there's only two proprietary ones, and then a few small open ones.
Similarly, take office suites. There's Microsoft in the proprietary category. Then there's Open & Libre Office (which is backed by profit-makers like Sun/Oracle, IBM). And pretty much bugger all else. Not 100's of proprietary ones and a cheap open ripoff- just the two big players, plus an assortment of (mostly open source) others.
I thought the Supreme Court was the constitutional court in the US? It's only illegal if they say so (and they should say so if and when the constitution says so).
Innocent until proven guilty and all that. Members of the NSA will be considered organised criminals as soon as the SC says they are. And good luck holding your breath for that one.
Also while clicking around looking for that link, I saw a recommendation for indicator-cpufreq, which is in the Ubuntu repositories. Again, no experience with it personally- but it looks like just the thing.
Not as slow as all that, really. The first couple of versions were almost unusable (I used the Xubuntu desktop for a while there), but since then things have gotten a lot better. It's still not exactly slim, but it does run smooth enough- comparable to the Windows 7 desktop, at least.
For a fair comparison, you should make sure to use power management software with Linux too. Jupiter used to be the top favourite, but I believe that's fallen out of use now. I hear TLP is good, but never used it. Both tools should do what the manufacturer's Windows tool was doing- mostly ramping down the processor when under light use.
If a multi-hour Windows battery becomes a multi-minute battery in Linux, you have a serious problem that needs to be fixed. That is not normal system behaviour.
Install problems are rare these days with Linux, but they're not unheard of. I'd guess that you've got some sort of hardware driver issue if the battery is discharging as crazily as that.
My experience of battery life with Linux (mostly using full-fat, full-bloat Ubuntu) is that it has always as good or better than Windows, except on one laptop I once installed on which I had serious driver issues with, which first refused to charge the battery at all, and then (after I'd fixed that) was discharging within about an hour. Once I'd fixed it, though, it was back to normal. And one problem-filled laptop build out of many dozens isn't a bad record really.
Pretty sure Windows generally gets (sometimes substantially) better battery life than Linux.
Rubbish. The netbook I'm typing this on right now dual-boots Ubuntu (full Unity bloat version) and Windows 7 Starter. It gets (or used to get a year or so ago, when the battery was a little newer) 6.5 hours under Ubuntu, more like 4.5 under Windows.
Windows just isn't built to be light. It tries to do A LOT in the background to "improver your experience". Some of which might even work. But a lot of it will turn out to have been wasted effort ("Wow, you've indexed all the files in my Program Files folder, well done! If only I had any reason to access a single one of those files today..."). And in the meantime, you've managed to consume a full third of my battery...
You exaggerate. If you take the NYC Subway as being built in 1904 (when the first underground line was built), it is pre-dated by the London Underground, Glasgow Subway, Budapest Metro, Paris Metro, Berlin U-Bahn, and for that matter the Boston MBTA. The London Underground is also larger (by track mileage), and other systems are larger still.
If the NYC Subway has problems, it can only be due to current and ongoing underinvestment or mismanagement. You can replace the rolling stock easily whenever you like, and sprucing up a station is not a major undertaking and is something that needs to happen periodically ongoing. Anything else would be more effort, true- but who's asking for anything else?
It's exactly the same amount of effort. You know how the trains currently have doors at the end of each carriage? Imagine that the door was bigger and always open, and that there was an airtight enclosure made of flexible material around the vestibule. That's it. To detach it, you just shut the doors and fold away the enclosure material.
As for standing over the gap- you get over it. The high speed service that passed through my town runs Intercity 125 trains, which have very rudimentary articulation; they're frequently "standing-in-the-vestibule room only", and I've passed many a happy multi-hour journey whizzing along at 200 km/h with one foot in one carriage and one in another, leaning against a slightly ropey-feeling piece of rubberized canvas.
Modern trains should be much better. A few weeks ago I rode of the first time on a Class 378 on the London Overground, which is a full-sized fully articulated train, and I was seriously and genuinely impressed. I mean literally, looking down the full length of the train was a thing of actual beauty. http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2010/163/6/5/London_Overground_by_lytom.jpg
The same is true of pretty much every underground railway in the world- NY isn't special. It's very old but it isn't the oldest (or significantly older than many others), it's very large but isn't the largest, it's very busy but not the busiest.
You should see some of the structural maps for the new London CrossRail line (a full-sized UK gauge railway that tunnels East-West across the city)- it has to snake over, under and around the London Underground lines, sewers, road tunnels, other rail tunnels, underground rivers...the thing's a feet of engineering genius. The fun thing is a lot of the stuff it's building around isn't even properly charted...
If all the other subways in the world can do it, I'm sure the NYC subway can do it too. It's only engineering, afterall.
The London Underground has "dumb" automatic doors- that is, they slam close with considerable force and pay no attention to whether there are any limbs trapped in them. There are no conductors and rarely staff on the platform. Nobody ever seems to get dragged to their death. I think the doors have an "emergency release" on them for "being dragged to death" situations, but I'm not actually sure...
People are grown ups. I'm sure the inhabitants of New York, of all places, don't need to be treated like babies.
That's sort of my point. It's idiotic to say that we can never reach the bottom of the ocean- that's just an engineering problem. And while it's possible that it could be a "never" for humans travelling to other stars, never is indeed a very long time.
But history is different. Barring time travel, if evidence for something hasn't survived, there is simply no way of knowing it. There might have been a really interesting species existing somewhere once with some really fascinating features and which could tell us a lot about evolution in its relative species. But fossils only form in really specific circumstances, and even once they're formed they only survive if they're left undisturbed. What if the local geography is fossil unfriendly, and not a single member of the species has left remains to be found today? We will simply never know it existed. And I mean properly never. It is knowledge that is lost to us and cannot ever be obtained. Similarly, want to know what language was spoken by the people of stone age Britain? Tough, you can't- they didn't write it down, and there is quite literally no way for you to know. Ever.
That's what's so mysterious and fascinating about it.
That's pretty much the problem for the whole field. There are so few complete specimens (we're talking dozens, rather than hundreds) and they're generally so diverse geographically and chronologically that is becomes very difficult to say whether something was "species wide" or just individual variance. So you find a 4 foot tall skeleton on an island and you might be tempted to say "I've found a new miniature-species of human!", conveniently forgetting the fact that you only have one skeleton and dwarfism is a relatively common feature of the only human population we have a good sample of (modern us). That skeleton could have been the only 4 foot tall adult within a 100 mile and 100 year radius, and yet there's no way of telling unless you can find more specimens that agree or disagree. And those specimens may simply not exist to be found.
I've always found fields like archaeology & palaeontology particularly fascinating for this reason. It's one of the few areas of science where there will be some things that simply CANNOT be known, because no evidence has survived of it and we can't ever study the past directly. It is one of the only areas of modern study where there is a real sense of mystery that will never and can never be lifted. Every little discovery we make is like finding a single piece of a 100 million piece jigsaw- you learn something, but the balance of things not known is still colossal.
The question might be slightly more pointed to people who contribute code and other development work to the Linux ecosystem. Knowing that the hours of work you put in to improve kernel latency is what has made it possible to use Linux to accurately bombard Middle Eastern villages with cruise missiles might rankle a bit when the project you were actually working for was a protein-folding "cure Alzheimer's" super-computing project.
We can car analogy this. I don't mind using cars with internal combustion engines even though they are used by the military as well (as you said). However if I were an engineer who worked on internal combustion engines for a living and I had moral objections to working for the military, I probably wouldn't get a job for BAE systems in their department that manufactures tanks.
Unproductive immigrants are largely a myth. People who can work themselves up enough to emigrate are not usually the sort of people to shy away from work. Statistically, an immigrant is more likely to be in work than a UK native, and is likely to make greater net payments to the state (paying taxes versus using government services) than a native.
Immigration is a knee-jerk right-wing bugbear. You can argue, if you like, that they're taking our jobs. But you can't also argue that they're all work-shy scroungers. Can't both be true.
Here's what it seems to show. Between 1997 and 2008- the entire Labour term in office before the financial crash- debt dropped to 40% of GDP. This coincides with the highest increase in NHS spending in recent history. Now I'm not trying to argue a causal link- but it clearly wasn't NHS spending which caused our government debt. It spiked in 2008, which correlates with the huge government spending to nationalise and otherwise prop up financial service providers- not spending on a single other thing.
The chart goes on to show that since 2010, the debt to GDP ratio has continued to go up at a faster rate than at any time before the financial crisis. This coincides with the harshest cuts to NHS spending in recent history. So clearly cutting NHS funding hasn't made much of a difference to our government debt either.
Arguing that cutting spending on the NHS or welfare is going to make the blindest bit of difference either way is disingenuous. The only reason the Tories are cutting spending on the NHS is because they always want to cut spending on the NHS, in all circumstances. It's just their basic political modus operandi.
I can see my (NHS) doctor within 24 hours too, in usual circumstances. And on the off chance that's not possible, or I need to see a doctor today (even though it isn't emergency- let's say it's the day before I go on holiday or something) there's a walk-in GP surgery which takes people on a first-come-first serve basis and is usually available within a couple of hours without an appointment.
Last time I had a medical emergency, an ambulance picked me up within 10 minutes, whisked me through A&E without stopping, and I was operated on within a few hours. Last time I had a less serious emergency (a broken arm), I don't think I waited more than an hour total at the hospital, including all stages added together.
I'm guessing that that's just about as good a service as anyone in the world gets.
He is implying that they exposed a newspaper doing illegal hacking on the one hand, and now are a paper benefiting from someone's illegal hacking on the other.
The far more obvious way to see this is that they exposed a trusted organisation which was spying on people on the one hand, and exposed another trusted organisation that was spying on people on the other. Sounds perfectly consistent to me.
David Cameron's problem may be that he doesn't really understand what the word "hacking" represents in either of those two situations, or it is possible that his problem is that he's a self serving idiot. Possibly both.
Most of which will be employees doing important work to service Apple's presence in Ireland and surrounding countries (e.g. retail staff and support staff). They won't be going anywhere, unless Apple intends to completely abandon a profitable market in Ireland.
How many people are employed in Ireland directly to maintain the paper headquarters and tax-avoidancy regime? 10? 50? 100? Probably not enough to cry about if those jobs went to Bermuda.
Apple has allegedly avoided $44 billion in taxes. Think for a moment how much money that is. According to some very superficial googling, that would pay for a full 10% of the entire US welfare system for a year. Take my word for it, you'll be paying that bill in some other way- and in a way that far outweighs what benefit you get from your shares.
I wonder how much government spend could be covered once you add up the avoided taxes of every multinational corporation playing this game? And if the US had these tax receipts (or even a significant chunk of them), how would that effect this whole government shutdown budget ceiling issue what's currently going on?
And this particular technique, in this particular country is the one we're talking about in TFA, and the one that the responsible government is looking to close.
One can only hope that all of the other tax havens eventually follow suit- although I'm not holding my breath.
I don't want to throw away my 250 Euro super duper rain jacket but by Io , the zips on those things are not so durable and NOWHERE in the western world there is a place where they can change the zip for you. Or they'd ask 200 euros.
You're not looking hard enough. The zip broke on my nice leather jacket last year; a tailor at the local market hall fixed it for £15. They would have replaced it for £30. The jacket was maybe £200.
Similarly, I have a friend who fixes appliances who regularly fixes knackered washing machines, tumble driers and vacuum cleaners for two-figure sums. Indeed, he makes a healthy living buying "scrap" appliances and reselling them second hand after an hour or two in his workshop.
If you're throwing away your jackets and appliances and phones, you must take responsibility for it. You can fix it if you try hard enough. If you want a new jacket instead of the old one fixed then that's fine and your choice, but don't pretend that it's some grand capitalist conspiracy.
Nonsense. If you take the Cold War as being the potential for WW3, it was the nuclear MAD that prevented World War. As the parent poster pointed out, those days are over- the US army is as large (in funding terms) as the next 10 countries combined; there is no big beast to balance.
WW1 & WW2 were both caused by hostilities between powerful European countries. Unless you're implying France is just itching to invade Spain, but is only restrained by the implied threat of US military supremacy, then I don't see how that applies here. Or is it India frothing to invade Malaysia that the US is preventing? Or perhaps South Africa's eye on Zimbabwe? Indeed, on the African topic, the US's military might did nothing to prevent the Great African War (centred on the Congo), which was the deadliest war since WW2.
It's worse than that, even. WH Smith was moved to take action against its legal stock at the demand of the Daily Mail, more or less on its own. The Daily Mail is arguably the most extreme right-wing of the British press, and represents (via it's readership) a largish minority (but definitely a minority) of middle-class people who like a bit of moral outrage with their breakfast. Smiths will have taken its action to avoid losing a smallish but non-trivial portion of their customer base.
So, we have a situation where any organization which lacks scruples and represents a non-trivial number of customers can indirectly control the country through commerce.
Slashdot Mirror
Right; he says that.
But doesn't the fact that so very few people have managed to make it work mean that it's unworkable? What's his evidence that it works? Where are these successful entrepreneurs following "The Stallman Method"?" It's been decades; surely there should be thousands by now, right?
Very few of any tech companies manage to make any business model work- that's not just a Free Software issue.
Take operating systems. There are three big ones. There's proprietary Windows. There's proprietary-with-open-bits Mac/iOS. Then there's fully GPL Linux/Android. All three of which are backed by profit making companies. How many other companies have failed? There aren't dozens of successful proprietary OS's and a few tiny open hold outs- there's only two proprietary ones, and then a few small open ones.
Similarly, take office suites. There's Microsoft in the proprietary category. Then there's Open & Libre Office (which is backed by profit-makers like Sun/Oracle, IBM). And pretty much bugger all else. Not 100's of proprietary ones and a cheap open ripoff- just the two big players, plus an assortment of (mostly open source) others.
Put simply, making money in tech is hard...
If it helps, you're all anarcho-capitalists to me.
Lots of love,
a Socialist.
I thought the Supreme Court was the constitutional court in the US? It's only illegal if they say so (and they should say so if and when the constitution says so).
Innocent until proven guilty and all that. Members of the NSA will be considered organised criminals as soon as the SC says they are. And good luck holding your breath for that one.
Try hear for advice:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/285434/is-there-a-power-saving-application-similar-to-jupiter
Also while clicking around looking for that link, I saw a recommendation for indicator-cpufreq, which is in the Ubuntu repositories. Again, no experience with it personally- but it looks like just the thing.
Not as slow as all that, really. The first couple of versions were almost unusable (I used the Xubuntu desktop for a while there), but since then things have gotten a lot better. It's still not exactly slim, but it does run smooth enough- comparable to the Windows 7 desktop, at least.
For a fair comparison, you should make sure to use power management software with Linux too. Jupiter used to be the top favourite, but I believe that's fallen out of use now. I hear TLP is good, but never used it. Both tools should do what the manufacturer's Windows tool was doing- mostly ramping down the processor when under light use.
If a multi-hour Windows battery becomes a multi-minute battery in Linux, you have a serious problem that needs to be fixed. That is not normal system behaviour.
Install problems are rare these days with Linux, but they're not unheard of. I'd guess that you've got some sort of hardware driver issue if the battery is discharging as crazily as that.
My experience of battery life with Linux (mostly using full-fat, full-bloat Ubuntu) is that it has always as good or better than Windows, except on one laptop I once installed on which I had serious driver issues with, which first refused to charge the battery at all, and then (after I'd fixed that) was discharging within about an hour. Once I'd fixed it, though, it was back to normal. And one problem-filled laptop build out of many dozens isn't a bad record really.
Pretty sure Windows generally gets (sometimes substantially) better battery life than Linux.
Rubbish. The netbook I'm typing this on right now dual-boots Ubuntu (full Unity bloat version) and Windows 7 Starter. It gets (or used to get a year or so ago, when the battery was a little newer) 6.5 hours under Ubuntu, more like 4.5 under Windows.
Windows just isn't built to be light. It tries to do A LOT in the background to "improver your experience". Some of which might even work. But a lot of it will turn out to have been wasted effort ("Wow, you've indexed all the files in my Program Files folder, well done! If only I had any reason to access a single one of those files today..."). And in the meantime, you've managed to consume a full third of my battery...
You exaggerate. If you take the NYC Subway as being built in 1904 (when the first underground line was built), it is pre-dated by the London Underground, Glasgow Subway, Budapest Metro, Paris Metro, Berlin U-Bahn, and for that matter the Boston MBTA. The London Underground is also larger (by track mileage), and other systems are larger still.
If the NYC Subway has problems, it can only be due to current and ongoing underinvestment or mismanagement. You can replace the rolling stock easily whenever you like, and sprucing up a station is not a major undertaking and is something that needs to happen periodically ongoing. Anything else would be more effort, true- but who's asking for anything else?
It's exactly the same amount of effort. You know how the trains currently have doors at the end of each carriage? Imagine that the door was bigger and always open, and that there was an airtight enclosure made of flexible material around the vestibule. That's it. To detach it, you just shut the doors and fold away the enclosure material.
As for standing over the gap- you get over it. The high speed service that passed through my town runs Intercity 125 trains, which have very rudimentary articulation; they're frequently "standing-in-the-vestibule room only", and I've passed many a happy multi-hour journey whizzing along at 200 km/h with one foot in one carriage and one in another, leaning against a slightly ropey-feeling piece of rubberized canvas.
Modern trains should be much better. A few weeks ago I rode of the first time on a Class 378 on the London Overground, which is a full-sized fully articulated train, and I was seriously and genuinely impressed. I mean literally, looking down the full length of the train was a thing of actual beauty.
http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2010/163/6/5/London_Overground_by_lytom.jpg
The same is true of pretty much every underground railway in the world- NY isn't special. It's very old but it isn't the oldest (or significantly older than many others), it's very large but isn't the largest, it's very busy but not the busiest.
You should see some of the structural maps for the new London CrossRail line (a full-sized UK gauge railway that tunnels East-West across the city)- it has to snake over, under and around the London Underground lines, sewers, road tunnels, other rail tunnels, underground rivers...the thing's a feet of engineering genius. The fun thing is a lot of the stuff it's building around isn't even properly charted...
If all the other subways in the world can do it, I'm sure the NYC subway can do it too. It's only engineering, afterall.
The London Underground has "dumb" automatic doors- that is, they slam close with considerable force and pay no attention to whether there are any limbs trapped in them. There are no conductors and rarely staff on the platform. Nobody ever seems to get dragged to their death. I think the doors have an "emergency release" on them for "being dragged to death" situations, but I'm not actually sure...
People are grown ups. I'm sure the inhabitants of New York, of all places, don't need to be treated like babies.
That's sort of my point. It's idiotic to say that we can never reach the bottom of the ocean- that's just an engineering problem. And while it's possible that it could be a "never" for humans travelling to other stars, never is indeed a very long time.
But history is different. Barring time travel, if evidence for something hasn't survived, there is simply no way of knowing it. There might have been a really interesting species existing somewhere once with some really fascinating features and which could tell us a lot about evolution in its relative species. But fossils only form in really specific circumstances, and even once they're formed they only survive if they're left undisturbed. What if the local geography is fossil unfriendly, and not a single member of the species has left remains to be found today? We will simply never know it existed. And I mean properly never. It is knowledge that is lost to us and cannot ever be obtained. Similarly, want to know what language was spoken by the people of stone age Britain? Tough, you can't- they didn't write it down, and there is quite literally no way for you to know. Ever.
That's what's so mysterious and fascinating about it.
That's pretty much the problem for the whole field. There are so few complete specimens (we're talking dozens, rather than hundreds) and they're generally so diverse geographically and chronologically that is becomes very difficult to say whether something was "species wide" or just individual variance. So you find a 4 foot tall skeleton on an island and you might be tempted to say "I've found a new miniature-species of human!", conveniently forgetting the fact that you only have one skeleton and dwarfism is a relatively common feature of the only human population we have a good sample of (modern us). That skeleton could have been the only 4 foot tall adult within a 100 mile and 100 year radius, and yet there's no way of telling unless you can find more specimens that agree or disagree. And those specimens may simply not exist to be found.
I've always found fields like archaeology & palaeontology particularly fascinating for this reason. It's one of the few areas of science where there will be some things that simply CANNOT be known, because no evidence has survived of it and we can't ever study the past directly. It is one of the only areas of modern study where there is a real sense of mystery that will never and can never be lifted. Every little discovery we make is like finding a single piece of a 100 million piece jigsaw- you learn something, but the balance of things not known is still colossal.
The question might be slightly more pointed to people who contribute code and other development work to the Linux ecosystem. Knowing that the hours of work you put in to improve kernel latency is what has made it possible to use Linux to accurately bombard Middle Eastern villages with cruise missiles might rankle a bit when the project you were actually working for was a protein-folding "cure Alzheimer's" super-computing project.
We can car analogy this. I don't mind using cars with internal combustion engines even though they are used by the military as well (as you said). However if I were an engineer who worked on internal combustion engines for a living and I had moral objections to working for the military, I probably wouldn't get a job for BAE systems in their department that manufactures tanks.
You hear wrongly.
http://euobserver.com/social/121778
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/10361971/Britain-admits-it-has-no-figures-on-EU-welfare-tourist-numbers.html
Unproductive immigrants are largely a myth. People who can work themselves up enough to emigrate are not usually the sort of people to shy away from work. Statistically, an immigrant is more likely to be in work than a UK native, and is likely to make greater net payments to the state (paying taxes versus using government services) than a native.
Immigration is a knee-jerk right-wing bugbear. You can argue, if you like, that they're taking our jobs. But you can't also argue that they're all work-shy scroungers. Can't both be true.
Why ever could that be?
What do you think that graph shows?
Here's what it seems to show. Between 1997 and 2008- the entire Labour term in office before the financial crash- debt dropped to 40% of GDP. This coincides with the highest increase in NHS spending in recent history. Now I'm not trying to argue a causal link- but it clearly wasn't NHS spending which caused our government debt. It spiked in 2008, which correlates with the huge government spending to nationalise and otherwise prop up financial service providers- not spending on a single other thing.
The chart goes on to show that since 2010, the debt to GDP ratio has continued to go up at a faster rate than at any time before the financial crisis. This coincides with the harshest cuts to NHS spending in recent history. So clearly cutting NHS funding hasn't made much of a difference to our government debt either.
Arguing that cutting spending on the NHS or welfare is going to make the blindest bit of difference either way is disingenuous. The only reason the Tories are cutting spending on the NHS is because they always want to cut spending on the NHS, in all circumstances. It's just their basic political modus operandi.
I can see my (NHS) doctor within 24 hours too, in usual circumstances. And on the off chance that's not possible, or I need to see a doctor today (even though it isn't emergency- let's say it's the day before I go on holiday or something) there's a walk-in GP surgery which takes people on a first-come-first serve basis and is usually available within a couple of hours without an appointment.
Last time I had a medical emergency, an ambulance picked me up within 10 minutes, whisked me through A&E without stopping, and I was operated on within a few hours. Last time I had a less serious emergency (a broken arm), I don't think I waited more than an hour total at the hospital, including all stages added together.
I'm guessing that that's just about as good a service as anyone in the world gets.
He is implying that they exposed a newspaper doing illegal hacking on the one hand, and now are a paper benefiting from someone's illegal hacking on the other.
The far more obvious way to see this is that they exposed a trusted organisation which was spying on people on the one hand, and exposed another trusted organisation that was spying on people on the other. Sounds perfectly consistent to me.
David Cameron's problem may be that he doesn't really understand what the word "hacking" represents in either of those two situations, or it is possible that his problem is that he's a self serving idiot. Possibly both.
Most of which will be employees doing important work to service Apple's presence in Ireland and surrounding countries (e.g. retail staff and support staff). They won't be going anywhere, unless Apple intends to completely abandon a profitable market in Ireland.
How many people are employed in Ireland directly to maintain the paper headquarters and tax-avoidancy regime? 10? 50? 100? Probably not enough to cry about if those jobs went to Bermuda.
Apple has allegedly avoided $44 billion in taxes. Think for a moment how much money that is. According to some very superficial googling, that would pay for a full 10% of the entire US welfare system for a year. Take my word for it, you'll be paying that bill in some other way- and in a way that far outweighs what benefit you get from your shares.
I wonder how much government spend could be covered once you add up the avoided taxes of every multinational corporation playing this game? And if the US had these tax receipts (or even a significant chunk of them), how would that effect this whole government shutdown budget ceiling issue what's currently going on?
And this particular technique, in this particular country is the one we're talking about in TFA, and the one that the responsible government is looking to close.
One can only hope that all of the other tax havens eventually follow suit- although I'm not holding my breath.
I don't want to throw away my 250 Euro super duper rain jacket but by Io , the zips on those things are not so durable and NOWHERE in the western world there is a place where they can change the zip for you. Or they'd ask 200 euros.
You're not looking hard enough. The zip broke on my nice leather jacket last year; a tailor at the local market hall fixed it for £15. They would have replaced it for £30. The jacket was maybe £200.
Similarly, I have a friend who fixes appliances who regularly fixes knackered washing machines, tumble driers and vacuum cleaners for two-figure sums. Indeed, he makes a healthy living buying "scrap" appliances and reselling them second hand after an hour or two in his workshop.
If you're throwing away your jackets and appliances and phones, you must take responsibility for it. You can fix it if you try hard enough. If you want a new jacket instead of the old one fixed then that's fine and your choice, but don't pretend that it's some grand capitalist conspiracy.
Nonsense. If you take the Cold War as being the potential for WW3, it was the nuclear MAD that prevented World War. As the parent poster pointed out, those days are over- the US army is as large (in funding terms) as the next 10 countries combined; there is no big beast to balance.
WW1 & WW2 were both caused by hostilities between powerful European countries. Unless you're implying France is just itching to invade Spain, but is only restrained by the implied threat of US military supremacy, then I don't see how that applies here. Or is it India frothing to invade Malaysia that the US is preventing? Or perhaps South Africa's eye on Zimbabwe? Indeed, on the African topic, the US's military might did nothing to prevent the Great African War (centred on the Congo), which was the deadliest war since WW2.
It's worse than that, even. WH Smith was moved to take action against its legal stock at the demand of the Daily Mail, more or less on its own. The Daily Mail is arguably the most extreme right-wing of the British press, and represents (via it's readership) a largish minority (but definitely a minority) of middle-class people who like a bit of moral outrage with their breakfast. Smiths will have taken its action to avoid losing a smallish but non-trivial portion of their customer base.
So, we have a situation where any organization which lacks scruples and represents a non-trivial number of customers can indirectly control the country through commerce.
Scary bananas.