There's nothing particularly wrong with wind, but just 'wind' its hardly the solution (though they do have quite a bit, and seem to have big plans for solar, too). AIUI locally administered price controls combined with India's state coal company digging up too little coal leave electricity producers and distributors both making losses and producing too little power. They're not going to pay for sufficient infrastructure without a big chunk of extra subsidies or an increase in the price they can get. The poor economic design is going to have to be fixed first.
Thanks. That makes quite a difference, and makes the quote more of a specific allegation and less of a generalized insult.
"The underlying concept of evolution is materialism. The theory of evolution considers people's minds as a consequence of materialistic behavior, and if this is taught pupils will form incorrect understanding of the world. Pupils will end up thinking that because materials are recycled, taking lives is not committing a sin. The same can be said for abortion and selfishness."
If so, then they either misunderstand what a mind is or are worrying that teaching will not get it across appropriately (to which a cover-up is hardly an appropriate response). IMO, a human mind is a phenomenon which drops out of the operation of a human brain. A brain is not a mind. A human mind is the real target of moral rules. Moral (not legal) murder is to end a human mind outside of the exceptions to murder - not only to end the biological life of a particular individual's cells. Abortion of a an embryo which does not yet exhibit this phenomenon is not murder (this line is of course fuzzy, and most probably not a line at all but a prolonged process). The same applies to ending the life of a brain-dead patient.
There are two definitions of materialism. If you're a philosopher (or presumably a theologist) and take it to mean simply 'not dualism' then linking it to atheism is nonsense. Plenty of people who don't believe in gods have other superstitions which make them believe in spirits (such belief seems to be a bit of a default position for humans), and it wasn't so long ago that it wasn't obviously plausible that a human could drop out of the operation of a purely matter-based brain. And you don't need to be a dualist to be a theist. It's perfectly possible to believe that god will give you a new body and brain on judgement day. There's nothing remotely negative about materialism.
But ordinary English speakers will often take the other definition. They'll take it to mean 'concentrating on the accumulation of ownership of stuff rather than on social relationships, personal achievements, intellectual matters, helping people, being a good member of society and so on'. Spoken about scientists especially this is plainly ridiculous. But it's hardly beyond some people to exploit the ambiguity.
But the original was presumably in Korean. So who knows what it meant?
Logic also suggests that if someone, whether a man in the street or your bank, owes you money and, through some trickery, a third party tricks him in to giving a repayment to that third party, that he still owes you the money. He hasn't repaid you, so he still owes you. This is perhaps not the case if you're careless...if through your recklessness with your password you impose that loss on your borrower then you maybe should have to compensate him by that amount.....but it should always be the starting point.
Or, to put it another way, if your bank didn't get your mortgage payment and you said 'sorry, I gave it to some guy who said he was you and who had put your logo on his letters', do you think they'd just let it drop? So why is it different with the roles switched?
I don't think that's something which can be changed, except by changing the hardware. The starting point is this: When a COMMIT is made all changes have to be written to the write-ahead-log before a success response can be returned to the client. The WAL is written sequentially, and so if you're using ordinary disks and are sensible you give it its own set of spindles (RAID1, say). That means that between each write you have to wait for one disk rotation - you append to the log, you process the next transaction, then you have to wait for the disk to rotate to just after where you finished writing before you can write the next one. So you can do 1/15k transactions per minute with this basic setup.
You can do things to make this faster. You can write several transactions at once, and you can put slight delays in to transaction commits to wait for others to bundle them with (PostgreSQL I believe will do the first and can be configured to do the second). You can use battery backed caches in your RAID system, which will have much the same effect (and leave you limited by disk bandwidth and cache size). You can use SSDs that don't need to seek.
I can't see anything in TFA that MemSQL is supposed be doing differently here, or anything it CAN do differently. From TFA: 'The key ideas are that SQL code is translated into C++, so avoiding the need to use a slow SQL interpreter, and that the data is kept in memory, with disk read/writes taking place in the background.'. The first I'm not too sure I understand (presumably they're not turning it in to C++ and then passing it through a C++ compiler....) but maybe we can blame the journalist for that. Or maybe they've just reinvented prepared statements. The second is what databases do anyway - except, of course, for the WAL and when you're reading data which isn't in memory. Perhaps what they're doing is flushing the WAL after the commit has returned to the client - which makes the database very much not ACID, and is also something that other databases can be configured to do if you don't care about your data.
Potentially what they could do, though, is to have designed all of their data structures, algorithms, locking and so on around the assumption that everything is in memory. There are big differences in the best query plan to use when data is in memory vs on disk, and traditional databases don't necessarily make the right choices. They try, but may for instance use table scans for queries which return a large proportion of the rows in a table because sequential IO is faster, when they should be using indexes if the data is in memory. And BTrees and the way data everywhere is split in to pages is something traditional DBs do because that works well even when most of your data is on disk. So maybe that's what they've done differently that other DBs haven't already been doing.
Non resident shareholders and trusts are not liable to pay income tax, so under your scheme there would be no tax at all on companies wholly owned by non residents (like google, Facebook etc in the UK, as these are Irish resident).
Non-residents are liable to pay tax to their own governments, and corporate or trust shareholders ultimately exist to pass benefits or money on to individuals, at which point it should be taxed.
Google UK will make some amount of profit and pass it to the parent company. It isn't necessarily UK in source (they may sell advertising to non-UK buyers), and there are no doubt many games to play with transfer pricing. And then, once earnt, it goes to Google shareholders, who live all over the world. Meanwhile UK shareholders of foreign companies are paying UK tax on their dividends. Part of my motivation is that it's next to impossible to decide that this profit is UK profit, and that profit is French profit, and so next to impossible for there to be any fair or non-trivial-to-game way to divide revenue between governments.
If you want to tax Google in the UK then I suggest you instead advocate a tax on the services they provide to UK residents.
Also, as someone else also pointed out, there is the issue of capital gains on share trading (not all companies pay dividends, or even salaries)
It's not an issue. My suggestion is an equal tax rate on all types of income (but still staggered with total income), including capital gains. This equalization should remove the incentive to play (economically costly) games with the type of income you receive, and should stop firms preferring debt over equity (thus heaping more risks on to creditors).
Why tax corporate profits in the first place? Their taxed when they become someone's income.
Why tax personal income in the first place? It's taxed when it becomes a profit of some corporation.
Because tax rates on individuals can be related to their total income. Because almost all individuals a specific location, where they consume public services and vote, and so its clear which government(s) should receive it. Because not all personal income comes from corporations, or is spent buying things from corporations. Because individuals are the right people to make decisions which affect their tax liabilities (such as where they live) because they are balancing the benefits of government spending against the tax and not just considering the cost to themselves. And because all taxes ultimately fall on consumers anyway.
If corporations are legal persons, it makes perfect sense to tax them as such. There's no reason why that liability shield has to come for free.
What's the benefit to individuals from doing so? To economic output, to risks people bear, to the working lives of individuals? What's the mechanism for creating them?
If your employer or company gives you free stuff then that's part of your income, paid in kind, and must be taxed (it breaks at least UK law if you don't pay income tax on these things, unless they're legitimate expenses). Cash loans to directors become treated as the director's income after a certain time for similar reasons. Games with this are already a problem, hence those rules. I don't suggest that my proposal would eliminate all tax evasion or avoidance, but I do suggest it would help.
Most shareholders have jobs, houses, families, attachments to local areas and consumer government services which their taxes fund. They won't move simply based on somewhere else being lower tax, unlike some corporations. Moving this location decision to individuals means that this decision will be based on a balance between tax and what you get for it, among many other things....whereas when corporations make it they won't care so much about the downsides to their employees.
Raise taxes so it costs your favorite restaurant an extra $0.50 to serve a meal and guess what? It gets passed right along to you.
Nope. That depends on the elasticity of demand and supply, as well as whether there is a cartel.
It does indeed, however you can cut out all of the worrying about markets and money and analyze it a different way. There's a certain amount of output, and output can only be consumed by people (corporations do not consume, they're just an abstract social and economic tool). The government uses taxes as a mechanism to take control of a certain proportion of economic capacity in order to direct what output it produces, and in order to adjust who consumes it.
There's no way to avoid this redirection of capacity from changing direction by consumers in to direction by politics (ideally, voters collectively, but obviously the world is not ideal). The financial mechanics - who passes what on to whom - are irrelevant, in aggregate.
This process has two sides when it comes to what the economy produces (there is, of course, some considerable effect on who consumes how much). On the one had it changes production from one bunch of things to another bunch (including the production of intermediate goods like roads or commercial law which are used in the production of final goods for consumers), the result of which hopefully improves economic welfare but may not in all cases. On the other hand it changes people's decision making by altering price incentives. That may be a good or bad thing, depending on externalities, etc, but is usually a bad thing and has to be counted as a cost of the process.
So asking if tax x will be passed on to consumers is pointless. All taxes are borne by consumers in the end. The relevant questions are: how much does the process cost, in administration and distortion of decision making? how much benefit is there in trading of currently privately directed production for increased publicly directed consumption (eg, slightly smaller housing, but more roads or defence)? and how does it affect equity between individuals?
In this particular case, I think the changes would reduce the costs in the first case, have no overall effect on the second, and improve equity in many cases by reducing the difference in tax rates between individuals with similar incomes. My biggest worry would be pensioners, especially those who previously paid taxes on salaries under the previous regime, but there could be some reasonable concession there, I'm sure.
Corporations use their employees, land, suppliers and the nation's infrastructure to make, ultimately, products and services for consumers. Consumers who pay taxes. Where it results in exports, those exports should sooner or later pay for imports which again benefit that country's consumers. There are also employees who pay taxes. There is, of course, a question of allocation between governments if a company manufactures in one country, sells to a second and has all of its shareholders in a third - the second country may feel hard done by, although it can still raise taxes through sales taxes and import duties. But when it comes to multinationals allocation between governments hardly has a good connection to which country's resources are used at the moment - consider Ireland or the state of Delawere. In any case, people all over the world hold shares all over the rest of the world anyway.
Why tax corporate profits in the first place? Their taxed when they become someone's income. Wouldn't it be fairer, cost less in administration and drastically reduce the number of tax games people waste resources on playing, if corporate taxes and labour taxes were abolished, and if the tax on all kinds of income and capital gains was equalized at a level which raises the same revenue? There's been a big public argument here (the UK) over the reduction of the top rate of income tax from 50% to 45%....but most people seem to remain unaware that salary is one of the most highly taxed forms of income, and that those who can manipulate how they receive their income or can receive it through dividends, royalties or capital gains can do much more than that to reduce their tax burden.
Telecomms companies don't compete with Google, Facebook, etc. Telecomms companies compete with other telecomms companies. However, they appear to be unhappy with peering arrangements and want to switch to a sender-pays framework, which means that US companies with which they peer would have to pay them money because Google, Facebook, etc.'s US location means a lot of data being sent from the US to the EU. Also, there appears to be no proposal for a tax. Read the article carefully - it likens this arrangement to a tax and then goes on calling it one as if it were.
As far as I've been able to make out, there's no actual proposal for taxation. The source documents the article links to mention tax, but doesn't propose a tax, only that governments can tax if they want but shouldn't allow double taxation. Instead, the article appears to liken a proposed change from current peering arrangements to a telephone-style 'sender pays' arrangement to a tax, and then refers to it as a tax from then on.
two-thirds of mobile employees say they are working 50+ and 60+ hour weeks
Which means a third is working more hours while not doing a damn thing more.
Either that or a lot of people are lying about how much they work.
No, it doesn't - more productive means doing more per hour, not doing more by spending more time working. In fact, you'd expect lower productivity from people working 50+ hours, not higher, ceteris parabis. What I suspect does happen, though, is that chopping two hours of commuting out of the day makes it possible to work longer before getting the same level of productivity fall....but that really is just my guess.
But why expect share price appreciation? Expecting share price appreciation means believing that someone in the future believes the shares will be worth more. Why would they believe that? They might be foolish (or believe their own future buyer to be foolish), they might believe in an infinite chain of this, they might believe that the market price will get further and further away from its fundamental value. But that can't be sustained forever, and sometimes you'll be caught out when the bubble bursts.
I presume you're talking about current dividends. Yes, of course current dividends and expectations of appreciation will diverge for companies which are expected (or hoped) to grow, because it's not the dividend this year that matters, it's all dividends from now onwards forever. If you're talking about expectations of future dividends instead then that just demonstrates that people misvalue and misprice stocks to some degree....it doesn't actually change the fundamental value or the need for an ever-increasing chain of such foolishness which must eventually collapse.
Ownership of shares confers on you only one valuable right: the right to participate in dividends. If you don't believe a company has any prospect of declaring dividends in its lifetime then, assuming you're an ordinary person looking after your savings rather than someone with a solid plan to exploit others, stay well away. You can bet on others being more stupid than you later....but stop to remember that that's exactly what the person you're buying from believes he has found in you.
Stocks are fundamentally valuable for exactly one reason: because they entitle you to dividends.
Not strictly true. They're worth the value of the company, which includes its assets and its future earnings potential.
They can't be worth both the value of the assets and its future earnings potential because it needs to use its assets to create its future earnings. Those assets will depreciate. But, in theory, it shouldn't be worth less than the re-sale value of its assets as long as there's someone around with the capability to buy it all and realize that value. There's also the possibility of using the assets for a while and then liquidating them. Either way, the last time I had any shares or claim on a company which was liquidated the payouts made by the liquidator were still termed dividends. If you call them that then the calculations all work out fine, so I think the argument is only over terminology.
I know what everyone is saying about how the $38 share price was perfectly picked as the correct valuation of the company, but (and I am not a financial expert) what does this mean to the people who bought in on Friday? With no major share price movement they are left with a bunch of stock certificates and all their money in the hands of FB. How does this become a worthwhile investment for them? They can't expect to get money back through increased share price, so they are going to have to rely on a dividend for returns. Is there any expectation that there will be a decent dividend?
If they had no expectation of dividends - not necessarily now, but sometime in the future - then they were foolish to buy in the first place. Stocks are fundamentally valuable for exactly one reason: because they entitle you to dividends. Just as $100 risk-free per year forever is worth $1000 in a world in which interest rates never deviate from 10%, stocks are fundamentally worth a more complicated but equivalent calculation. (No-one knows the right number because the inputs to this calculation are uncertain and involve predicting the future - but everyone knows that a stock which never pays a dividend to its shareholders has a fundamental value of nothing). Yeah, you can buy worthless stock hoping that someone is going to be even more stupid in the future....but there's a limited supply of people who are stupid enough to put vast fortunes in to buying stocks which are never going to make their holders any money at all. At the very least there needs to be an argument to convince someone they'll pay dividends, even if the argument is wildly optimistic.
So, yes, they must expect that there'll be dividends one day, or at least that a lot of other people in the future will expect that. Maybe they won't expect to get them themselves, maybe they'll expect to sell to someone who expects to get them later on, but there has to be an expectation.
She's not accused of concealing information in the sense of refusing to answer questions or not spontaneously telling police everything which is going on....AIUI she's accused of removing files belonging to her employer from her employer's archive when she knew those were likely to be relevant to a police investigation. So it's more like tampering with evidence than refusing to tell the police something.
TFS is wrong, by the way. She hasn't been charged with being involved in intercepting voicemails, only with disrupting the investigation.
Not in all times and in all jurisdictions! Though I understand that current UK law 'justification' (truth) is already a complete defence without any additional requirement such as 'public interest;' and that s2 of the present Bill is merely reformulating (and renaming) rather than introducing a truth only defence. But them INAUKL, but an Australian one.
It's the model for whom? It works fine for hardware manufacturers. But how does it help content producers?
If the content producers can make money by selling hardware, why wouldn't they just give up on making the content? Or, if not, if they cross-subsidise the content from the hardware sales, how do they stop Wing-Wang-Po Industries making similar hardware more cheaply by not subsidising the content?
The only way I can think of doing it is to put encryption keys in your product, protected as best you can, so that only your devices will play your content for a few years (until someone breaks it). And if you're going to do that, you might as well charge per content-item.
Chill dude. Languages are dynamic and evolving, and "-gate" is a perfect example in English. Not unlike "-ism", "-ology", etc, it's concise, immediately recognisiable, and perfectly convey the essence and nuance of the whole situation.
And a major part of that evolution is people opposing and ridiculing new language constructs they don't like.
Languages are not laws of physics. They are more like technological standards -- when something gets used by a lot of people, it often becomes the de facto standard.
'Blah-gate' is not used by lots of people - at least, not here in the UK, nor even in these forums. It's like The Sun saying 'the police quizzed curvy Claire, 22'. It's used by journalists. It's used to sensationalize and to save space in headlines (or, in the case of The Sun, to avoid describing properly and keep the average syllable count below 1.2 to avoid their readers deciding they're too intellectual). Normal people just don't talk that way.
Aren't they supposed to recuse themselves if they have a bias, monetary interest in the issue or relation with either plaintiff or defendant? Isn't this rather basic legal practice to try and ensure impartiality?
It is, but it gets a little difficult when the potential monetary interest appears to be 'ruling one way might create more official bar-association business by encouraging more lawyers to take a course' and when the potential personal relationship appears to be 'the judge and plaintiff both worked for the bar association as different instructors for the same course'. That's what the article's claims appear to amount to.
Perhaps the best response would be 'the bar association should not be running courses' or 'the bar association should not be employing likely litigants as instructors because it creates potential personal relationships' (although it's possible the judges and outsiders on the course run different sessions and are discouraged from socializing for exactly this reason.....who knows, and without a more reasoned article and a response we won't know).
No doubt some lawyers love to shop around for the most favourable judge by choosing their courts, manipulating dates and asking judging to recuse themselves - and, of course, the pool of potential judges for certain kinds of specialist and high profile cases may be quite small. It may not be so easy as just recusing anyone with any sort of connection, however small and theoretical, especially when those connections go through the bar association.
The article's claim that they were running a commercial enterprise together and have a personal relationship appears to have been made because both of their names appear on a document detailing an official course for lawyers run by the bar association. Not only is that 'not running a commercial enterprise together' (because it was run by the bar association), but also doesn't really imply all that much in terms of personal relationship. What would you suggest, anyway? That, when the bar association runs a course on copyright, it doesn't choose a judge who handles copyright cases and instead chooses one who handles, say, medical negligence? Or that anyone who supplies services to a bar association be denied the right to use the courts? Of course, they could choose a different judge simply because they know this could be politically sensitive....but the claims of the article are ludicrously overblown.
Because, of course, he hasn't been found corrupt. Even if the summary were taken at face value it still wouldn't be corruption...'having a financial interest in the outcome', although clearly not acceptable for a judge in a case, is not the same as 'accepting an offer of money in exchange for not carrying out your duties properly'. And, as one of the links says, '“It’s not just any course they do together, it’s part of the Dutch bar association’s official training program for lawyers.”'. Corruption? Really? The only question the article appears to raise is the level of personal connection between plaintiff and judge, and even then it's rabid enough to be hard to take seriously.
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There's nothing particularly wrong with wind, but just 'wind' its hardly the solution (though they do have quite a bit, and seem to have big plans for solar, too). AIUI locally administered price controls combined with India's state coal company digging up too little coal leave electricity producers and distributors both making losses and producing too little power. They're not going to pay for sufficient infrastructure without a big chunk of extra subsidies or an increase in the price they can get. The poor economic design is going to have to be fixed first.
Thanks. That makes quite a difference, and makes the quote more of a specific allegation and less of a generalized insult.
"The underlying concept of evolution is materialism. The theory of evolution considers people's minds as a consequence of materialistic behavior, and if this is taught pupils will form incorrect understanding of the world. Pupils will end up thinking that because materials are recycled, taking lives is not committing a sin. The same can be said for abortion and selfishness."
If so, then they either misunderstand what a mind is or are worrying that teaching will not get it across appropriately (to which a cover-up is hardly an appropriate response). IMO, a human mind is a phenomenon which drops out of the operation of a human brain. A brain is not a mind. A human mind is the real target of moral rules. Moral (not legal) murder is to end a human mind outside of the exceptions to murder - not only to end the biological life of a particular individual's cells. Abortion of a an embryo which does not yet exhibit this phenomenon is not murder (this line is of course fuzzy, and most probably not a line at all but a prolonged process). The same applies to ending the life of a brain-dead patient.
There are two definitions of materialism. If you're a philosopher (or presumably a theologist) and take it to mean simply 'not dualism' then linking it to atheism is nonsense. Plenty of people who don't believe in gods have other superstitions which make them believe in spirits (such belief seems to be a bit of a default position for humans), and it wasn't so long ago that it wasn't obviously plausible that a human could drop out of the operation of a purely matter-based brain. And you don't need to be a dualist to be a theist. It's perfectly possible to believe that god will give you a new body and brain on judgement day. There's nothing remotely negative about materialism.
But ordinary English speakers will often take the other definition. They'll take it to mean 'concentrating on the accumulation of ownership of stuff rather than on social relationships, personal achievements, intellectual matters, helping people, being a good member of society and so on'. Spoken about scientists especially this is plainly ridiculous. But it's hardly beyond some people to exploit the ambiguity.
But the original was presumably in Korean. So who knows what it meant?
Logic also suggests that if someone, whether a man in the street or your bank, owes you money and, through some trickery, a third party tricks him in to giving a repayment to that third party, that he still owes you the money. He hasn't repaid you, so he still owes you. This is perhaps not the case if you're careless...if through your recklessness with your password you impose that loss on your borrower then you maybe should have to compensate him by that amount.....but it should always be the starting point.
Or, to put it another way, if your bank didn't get your mortgage payment and you said 'sorry, I gave it to some guy who said he was you and who had put your logo on his letters', do you think they'd just let it drop? So why is it different with the roles switched?
I don't think that's something which can be changed, except by changing the hardware. The starting point is this: When a COMMIT is made all changes have to be written to the write-ahead-log before a success response can be returned to the client. The WAL is written sequentially, and so if you're using ordinary disks and are sensible you give it its own set of spindles (RAID1, say). That means that between each write you have to wait for one disk rotation - you append to the log, you process the next transaction, then you have to wait for the disk to rotate to just after where you finished writing before you can write the next one. So you can do 1/15k transactions per minute with this basic setup.
You can do things to make this faster. You can write several transactions at once, and you can put slight delays in to transaction commits to wait for others to bundle them with (PostgreSQL I believe will do the first and can be configured to do the second). You can use battery backed caches in your RAID system, which will have much the same effect (and leave you limited by disk bandwidth and cache size). You can use SSDs that don't need to seek.
I can't see anything in TFA that MemSQL is supposed be doing differently here, or anything it CAN do differently. From TFA: 'The key ideas are that SQL code is translated into C++, so avoiding the need to use a slow SQL interpreter, and that the data is kept in memory, with disk read/writes taking place in the background.'. The first I'm not too sure I understand (presumably they're not turning it in to C++ and then passing it through a C++ compiler....) but maybe we can blame the journalist for that. Or maybe they've just reinvented prepared statements. The second is what databases do anyway - except, of course, for the WAL and when you're reading data which isn't in memory. Perhaps what they're doing is flushing the WAL after the commit has returned to the client - which makes the database very much not ACID, and is also something that other databases can be configured to do if you don't care about your data.
Potentially what they could do, though, is to have designed all of their data structures, algorithms, locking and so on around the assumption that everything is in memory. There are big differences in the best query plan to use when data is in memory vs on disk, and traditional databases don't necessarily make the right choices. They try, but may for instance use table scans for queries which return a large proportion of the rows in a table because sequential IO is faster, when they should be using indexes if the data is in memory. And BTrees and the way data everywhere is split in to pages is something traditional DBs do because that works well even when most of your data is on disk. So maybe that's what they've done differently that other DBs haven't already been doing.
Non resident shareholders and trusts are not liable to pay income tax, so under your scheme there would be no tax at all on companies wholly owned by non residents (like google, Facebook etc in the UK, as these are Irish resident).
Non-residents are liable to pay tax to their own governments, and corporate or trust shareholders ultimately exist to pass benefits or money on to individuals, at which point it should be taxed.
Google UK will make some amount of profit and pass it to the parent company. It isn't necessarily UK in source (they may sell advertising to non-UK buyers), and there are no doubt many games to play with transfer pricing. And then, once earnt, it goes to Google shareholders, who live all over the world. Meanwhile UK shareholders of foreign companies are paying UK tax on their dividends. Part of my motivation is that it's next to impossible to decide that this profit is UK profit, and that profit is French profit, and so next to impossible for there to be any fair or non-trivial-to-game way to divide revenue between governments.
If you want to tax Google in the UK then I suggest you instead advocate a tax on the services they provide to UK residents.
Also, as someone else also pointed out, there is the issue of capital gains on share trading (not all companies pay dividends, or even salaries)
It's not an issue. My suggestion is an equal tax rate on all types of income (but still staggered with total income), including capital gains. This equalization should remove the incentive to play (economically costly) games with the type of income you receive, and should stop firms preferring debt over equity (thus heaping more risks on to creditors).
Why tax corporate profits in the first place? Their taxed when they become someone's income.
Why tax personal income in the first place? It's taxed when it becomes a profit of some corporation.
Because tax rates on individuals can be related to their total income. Because almost all individuals a specific location, where they consume public services and vote, and so its clear which government(s) should receive it. Because not all personal income comes from corporations, or is spent buying things from corporations. Because individuals are the right people to make decisions which affect their tax liabilities (such as where they live) because they are balancing the benefits of government spending against the tax and not just considering the cost to themselves. And because all taxes ultimately fall on consumers anyway.
If corporations are legal persons, it makes perfect sense to tax them as such. There's no reason why that liability shield has to come for free.
What's the benefit to individuals from doing so? To economic output, to risks people bear, to the working lives of individuals? What's the mechanism for creating them?
If your employer or company gives you free stuff then that's part of your income, paid in kind, and must be taxed (it breaks at least UK law if you don't pay income tax on these things, unless they're legitimate expenses). Cash loans to directors become treated as the director's income after a certain time for similar reasons. Games with this are already a problem, hence those rules. I don't suggest that my proposal would eliminate all tax evasion or avoidance, but I do suggest it would help.
Most shareholders have jobs, houses, families, attachments to local areas and consumer government services which their taxes fund. They won't move simply based on somewhere else being lower tax, unlike some corporations. Moving this location decision to individuals means that this decision will be based on a balance between tax and what you get for it, among many other things....whereas when corporations make it they won't care so much about the downsides to their employees.
Raise taxes so it costs your favorite restaurant an extra $0.50 to serve a meal and guess what? It gets passed right along to you.
Nope. That depends on the elasticity of demand and supply, as well as whether there is a cartel.
It does indeed, however you can cut out all of the worrying about markets and money and analyze it a different way. There's a certain amount of output, and output can only be consumed by people (corporations do not consume, they're just an abstract social and economic tool). The government uses taxes as a mechanism to take control of a certain proportion of economic capacity in order to direct what output it produces, and in order to adjust who consumes it.
There's no way to avoid this redirection of capacity from changing direction by consumers in to direction by politics (ideally, voters collectively, but obviously the world is not ideal). The financial mechanics - who passes what on to whom - are irrelevant, in aggregate.
This process has two sides when it comes to what the economy produces (there is, of course, some considerable effect on who consumes how much). On the one had it changes production from one bunch of things to another bunch (including the production of intermediate goods like roads or commercial law which are used in the production of final goods for consumers), the result of which hopefully improves economic welfare but may not in all cases. On the other hand it changes people's decision making by altering price incentives. That may be a good or bad thing, depending on externalities, etc, but is usually a bad thing and has to be counted as a cost of the process.
So asking if tax x will be passed on to consumers is pointless. All taxes are borne by consumers in the end. The relevant questions are: how much does the process cost, in administration and distortion of decision making? how much benefit is there in trading of currently privately directed production for increased publicly directed consumption (eg, slightly smaller housing, but more roads or defence)? and how does it affect equity between individuals?
In this particular case, I think the changes would reduce the costs in the first case, have no overall effect on the second, and improve equity in many cases by reducing the difference in tax rates between individuals with similar incomes. My biggest worry would be pensioners, especially those who previously paid taxes on salaries under the previous regime, but there could be some reasonable concession there, I'm sure.
Corporations use their employees, land, suppliers and the nation's infrastructure to make, ultimately, products and services for consumers. Consumers who pay taxes. Where it results in exports, those exports should sooner or later pay for imports which again benefit that country's consumers. There are also employees who pay taxes. There is, of course, a question of allocation between governments if a company manufactures in one country, sells to a second and has all of its shareholders in a third - the second country may feel hard done by, although it can still raise taxes through sales taxes and import duties. But when it comes to multinationals allocation between governments hardly has a good connection to which country's resources are used at the moment - consider Ireland or the state of Delawere. In any case, people all over the world hold shares all over the rest of the world anyway.
Why tax corporate profits in the first place? Their taxed when they become someone's income. Wouldn't it be fairer, cost less in administration and drastically reduce the number of tax games people waste resources on playing, if corporate taxes and labour taxes were abolished, and if the tax on all kinds of income and capital gains was equalized at a level which raises the same revenue? There's been a big public argument here (the UK) over the reduction of the top rate of income tax from 50% to 45%....but most people seem to remain unaware that salary is one of the most highly taxed forms of income, and that those who can manipulate how they receive their income or can receive it through dividends, royalties or capital gains can do much more than that to reduce their tax burden.
Telecomms companies don't compete with Google, Facebook, etc. Telecomms companies compete with other telecomms companies. However, they appear to be unhappy with peering arrangements and want to switch to a sender-pays framework, which means that US companies with which they peer would have to pay them money because Google, Facebook, etc.'s US location means a lot of data being sent from the US to the EU. Also, there appears to be no proposal for a tax. Read the article carefully - it likens this arrangement to a tax and then goes on calling it one as if it were.
As far as I've been able to make out, there's no actual proposal for taxation. The source documents the article links to mention tax, but doesn't propose a tax, only that governments can tax if they want but shouldn't allow double taxation. Instead, the article appears to liken a proposed change from current peering arrangements to a telephone-style 'sender pays' arrangement to a tax, and then refers to it as a tax from then on.
a third of workers [...] were 'more productive'
two-thirds of mobile employees say they are working 50+ and 60+ hour weeks
Which means a third is working more hours while not doing a damn thing more. Either that or a lot of people are lying about how much they work.
No, it doesn't - more productive means doing more per hour, not doing more by spending more time working. In fact, you'd expect lower productivity from people working 50+ hours, not higher, ceteris parabis. What I suspect does happen, though, is that chopping two hours of commuting out of the day makes it possible to work longer before getting the same level of productivity fall....but that really is just my guess.
But why expect share price appreciation? Expecting share price appreciation means believing that someone in the future believes the shares will be worth more. Why would they believe that? They might be foolish (or believe their own future buyer to be foolish), they might believe in an infinite chain of this, they might believe that the market price will get further and further away from its fundamental value. But that can't be sustained forever, and sometimes you'll be caught out when the bubble bursts.
I presume you're talking about current dividends. Yes, of course current dividends and expectations of appreciation will diverge for companies which are expected (or hoped) to grow, because it's not the dividend this year that matters, it's all dividends from now onwards forever. If you're talking about expectations of future dividends instead then that just demonstrates that people misvalue and misprice stocks to some degree....it doesn't actually change the fundamental value or the need for an ever-increasing chain of such foolishness which must eventually collapse.
Ownership of shares confers on you only one valuable right: the right to participate in dividends. If you don't believe a company has any prospect of declaring dividends in its lifetime then, assuming you're an ordinary person looking after your savings rather than someone with a solid plan to exploit others, stay well away. You can bet on others being more stupid than you later....but stop to remember that that's exactly what the person you're buying from believes he has found in you.
Stocks are fundamentally valuable for exactly one reason: because they entitle you to dividends.
Not strictly true. They're worth the value of the company, which includes its assets and its future earnings potential.
They can't be worth both the value of the assets and its future earnings potential because it needs to use its assets to create its future earnings. Those assets will depreciate. But, in theory, it shouldn't be worth less than the re-sale value of its assets as long as there's someone around with the capability to buy it all and realize that value. There's also the possibility of using the assets for a while and then liquidating them. Either way, the last time I had any shares or claim on a company which was liquidated the payouts made by the liquidator were still termed dividends. If you call them that then the calculations all work out fine, so I think the argument is only over terminology.
I know what everyone is saying about how the $38 share price was perfectly picked as the correct valuation of the company, but (and I am not a financial expert) what does this mean to the people who bought in on Friday? With no major share price movement they are left with a bunch of stock certificates and all their money in the hands of FB. How does this become a worthwhile investment for them? They can't expect to get money back through increased share price, so they are going to have to rely on a dividend for returns. Is there any expectation that there will be a decent dividend?
If they had no expectation of dividends - not necessarily now, but sometime in the future - then they were foolish to buy in the first place. Stocks are fundamentally valuable for exactly one reason: because they entitle you to dividends. Just as $100 risk-free per year forever is worth $1000 in a world in which interest rates never deviate from 10%, stocks are fundamentally worth a more complicated but equivalent calculation. (No-one knows the right number because the inputs to this calculation are uncertain and involve predicting the future - but everyone knows that a stock which never pays a dividend to its shareholders has a fundamental value of nothing). Yeah, you can buy worthless stock hoping that someone is going to be even more stupid in the future....but there's a limited supply of people who are stupid enough to put vast fortunes in to buying stocks which are never going to make their holders any money at all. At the very least there needs to be an argument to convince someone they'll pay dividends, even if the argument is wildly optimistic.
So, yes, they must expect that there'll be dividends one day, or at least that a lot of other people in the future will expect that. Maybe they won't expect to get them themselves, maybe they'll expect to sell to someone who expects to get them later on, but there has to be an expectation.
She's not accused of concealing information in the sense of refusing to answer questions or not spontaneously telling police everything which is going on....AIUI she's accused of removing files belonging to her employer from her employer's archive when she knew those were likely to be relevant to a police investigation. So it's more like tampering with evidence than refusing to tell the police something.
TFS is wrong, by the way. She hasn't been charged with being involved in intercepting voicemails, only with disrupting the investigation.
The truth is an automatic defense against libel.
Not in all times and in all jurisdictions! Though I understand that current UK law 'justification' (truth) is already a complete defence without any additional requirement such as 'public interest;' and that s2 of the present Bill is merely reformulating (and renaming) rather than introducing a truth only defence. But them INAUKL, but an Australian one.
IAUI, there's at least one exception: the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act.
It's the model for whom? It works fine for hardware manufacturers. But how does it help content producers?
If the content producers can make money by selling hardware, why wouldn't they just give up on making the content? Or, if not, if they cross-subsidise the content from the hardware sales, how do they stop Wing-Wang-Po Industries making similar hardware more cheaply by not subsidising the content?
The only way I can think of doing it is to put encryption keys in your product, protected as best you can, so that only your devices will play your content for a few years (until someone breaks it). And if you're going to do that, you might as well charge per content-item.
Chill dude. Languages are dynamic and evolving, and "-gate" is a perfect example in English. Not unlike "-ism", "-ology", etc, it's concise, immediately recognisiable, and perfectly convey the essence and nuance of the whole situation.
And a major part of that evolution is people opposing and ridiculing new language constructs they don't like.
Languages are not laws of physics. They are more like technological standards -- when something gets used by a lot of people, it often becomes the de facto standard.
'Blah-gate' is not used by lots of people - at least, not here in the UK, nor even in these forums. It's like The Sun saying 'the police quizzed curvy Claire, 22'. It's used by journalists. It's used to sensationalize and to save space in headlines (or, in the case of The Sun, to avoid describing properly and keep the average syllable count below 1.2 to avoid their readers deciding they're too intellectual). Normal people just don't talk that way.
Aren't they supposed to recuse themselves if they have a bias, monetary interest in the issue or relation with either plaintiff or defendant? Isn't this rather basic legal practice to try and ensure impartiality?
It is, but it gets a little difficult when the potential monetary interest appears to be 'ruling one way might create more official bar-association business by encouraging more lawyers to take a course' and when the potential personal relationship appears to be 'the judge and plaintiff both worked for the bar association as different instructors for the same course'. That's what the article's claims appear to amount to.
Perhaps the best response would be 'the bar association should not be running courses' or 'the bar association should not be employing likely litigants as instructors because it creates potential personal relationships' (although it's possible the judges and outsiders on the course run different sessions and are discouraged from socializing for exactly this reason.....who knows, and without a more reasoned article and a response we won't know).
No doubt some lawyers love to shop around for the most favourable judge by choosing their courts, manipulating dates and asking judging to recuse themselves - and, of course, the pool of potential judges for certain kinds of specialist and high profile cases may be quite small. It may not be so easy as just recusing anyone with any sort of connection, however small and theoretical, especially when those connections go through the bar association.
The article's claim that they were running a commercial enterprise together and have a personal relationship appears to have been made because both of their names appear on a document detailing an official course for lawyers run by the bar association. Not only is that 'not running a commercial enterprise together' (because it was run by the bar association), but also doesn't really imply all that much in terms of personal relationship. What would you suggest, anyway? That, when the bar association runs a course on copyright, it doesn't choose a judge who handles copyright cases and instead chooses one who handles, say, medical negligence? Or that anyone who supplies services to a bar association be denied the right to use the courts? Of course, they could choose a different judge simply because they know this could be politically sensitive....but the claims of the article are ludicrously overblown.
Because, of course, he hasn't been found corrupt. Even if the summary were taken at face value it still wouldn't be corruption...'having a financial interest in the outcome', although clearly not acceptable for a judge in a case, is not the same as 'accepting an offer of money in exchange for not carrying out your duties properly'. And, as one of the links says, '“It’s not just any course they do together, it’s part of the Dutch bar association’s official training program for lawyers.”'. Corruption? Really? The only question the article appears to raise is the level of personal connection between plaintiff and judge, and even then it's rabid enough to be hard to take seriously.