Probably. As I understand it, the test only reveals that it was 29% horse DNA, not 29% horse meat. It might be 29% horse meat, or they might, for some reason, have filled it with stuff extracted from horse carcases that has more DNA. I'm not a biologist or food scientist, but how about, say, hydrolyzed protein or collagen. AIUI, hydrolyzed protein will absorb water, giving you more weight with less meat.
AIUI, carpal tunnel problems can be caused by anything that reduces the space available in the carpal tunnel, including anything that causes any swelling there, or anything that takes up space there. So that includes diabetes, tumours, pregnancy and obesity. Here's a link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001469/ (and notice that it says that there is no good evidence that repetitive motion causes it). 'Should I use a PowerBall to try avoid/cure RSI' and 'would a PowerBall worsen/improve carpal tunnel syndrome' aren't strongly related questions (because they're different things), so personally in making that decision I'd ignore all the responses about carpal tunnel syndrome.
There should, of course, be nine circles. One for your sex life, one about money, one where you put all your rants, one for all things heretical, etc. Hmm, which one is it where everyone has to be doused in faeces? Oh, and of course Mark Zuckerberg himself will be in the centre of the ninth.
I'm not sure of the intended meaning here, but certainly corporations costs resources (because it takes people's time, physical space, etc., to do all the paperwork, accounting, shareholder meetings, filing and so on). Those costs fall on the individuals involved, some mix of customers, investors, employees and so on.
SO they shoudl also pay.
Which is the same as making individuals pay. Corporate vehicles are proxies for people. An equivalent tax on those people, if it could be calculated and devised, would be no more or less fair than the tax on the corporation. But, of course, incentives have to be considered, too, because taxes always change incentives and behaviour.
I would also tax 100% on all net over a billion dollars.
Put that money into RnD, or hire more people, or get it taxed.
Why do any of those things if you're not allowed to keep any of the benefits? It destroys the incentive structure (whilst creating an incentive to split companies in to little pieces).
What people discussion economics seem to for get, is that the only way money has value to society is if it is moving.
Money has value only as a control mechanism - because it allows coordination not otherwise possible. It's output (and leisure, and the environment, etc.) that has value. Not all movements of money have value - if we gave each other $10 all day long, moving it back and forth, no value is created. The same with taxation, welfare payments and payments for second hand goods, like most houses. And, of course, not all creation of valuable output is reflected in the movement of money.
When you pay a dollar to buy and orange, the dollar is only worth something at the moment of the transaction. In fact, it's worth exactly 1 orange. The orange gets consumed, but the dollar will be a dollar again at it's next transaction.
Yes, the value to an individual (rather than a whole society) of money is defined by what you can buy with it. As such, all prices, including salaries, are relative. And the $1 in your example forms a part of economic output measures. Money (and the markets and structures governing its movement) has to do a lot of things at once, though - coordinate production, distribute information, determine distribution and set incentives, mediate exchanges that happen over periods of time, and so on. That's one reason designing taxes (and any economic policy) is hard....you can't control distribution (fairness) separately from decision making (incentives).
All taxes ultimately fall on people. Only people consume economic output, so it's only people control over it can be taken away from to provide government services. Don't fall in to the trap of thinking that taxes on corporations are not taxes on you. Instead of looking at corporations, look at the outcome in terms of what different individuals pay in total, and look at the effect of the tax on behaviour.
The little old lady with her 200 BT shares left over from privatisation pays the same corporation tax on the profits that become her income as a wealthy investor. No tax allowances, no graduation of rates. And the wealthy investor can use corporate shells - offshore and otherwise (trivial companies can be moved more easily than people) - to manage his tax burden in a way often not available to most people. He can, in the UK, earn up to 300k in profits via a company he owns without paying any corporation tax at all, and if he can get his income that way he can avoid the national insurance (payroll tax) that most people have to pay. And, of course, in the US there's the ludicrous situation with capital gains tax rates.
Looking at behaviour, taxes on corporate profits encourage companies to over-borrow and so increase the risk of bankruptcy and the imposition of default costs on others. The returns on loan financing attract much less tax - in the UK just income tax, and so it's much more lightly taxed than earned income or dividends. It also causes economic effort to be wasted in operating tax avoidance schemes - less useful production, more lawyering and accounting. Finally, the ability to avoid taxes like these favours large corporations over smaller ones and new entrants, reducing competition.
Identifying objectively what profits are made where in a corporations with costs, assets and revenues all over the world is a next to impossible task. It's just not a number which exits. Total profit is slippery enough, allocating it to particular jurisdictions can easily turn in to a nonsense. That's one reason why we have the spectacle of Starbucks and Amazon essentially deciding for themselves how much UK tax to pay. What they pay may be obviously ludicrously low, but how, exactly, do you calculate the right number?
Given that corporation tax is pretty much the national insurance of profits instead of labour income, I think it'd be much better to move towards abolishing corporation tax and NI, and raising all that revenue through a single set of income tax rates for all kinds of income. It would save collection costs for governments and accounting costs for companies, as well as addressing the above. Countries should introduce transitional arrangements for pensioners (who paid corporation taxes as they built up their pensions and currently pay only income tax on the income they're getting from it), and should charge an income tax on dividends going to foreigners based on the corporate tax rate domestic countries pay in the foreign jurisdiction. But, in the end, I think it has to go....it's just not tenable as a way to raise tax.
Not just redundancy for the sensors, but redundancy for the person who refused to drive to work that day because he was too stressed out or unable to focus.... I suspect that sensors will be more reliable than actual people, and more likely to refuse to drive when they shouldn't.
There's an additional benefit you missed: those various people (the very old, the young, those with a wide variety of medical conditions) who aren't able to drive will no longer be cut off in those societies and places which are designed around cars.
Legal liability shouldn't in theory be too hard in the eventual case. Insurance companies already take on a huge amount of the financial risk of driving. If they can do it via drivers, then they can take on that same risk (or more likely reduced risk) by insuring the manufacturers. Then the manufacturers can sell cars that don't require insurance as long as they're on automatic. Not only are accident costs lower, but transaction costs and fraud costs will be lower, too. It's the intermediate case.....the case where driverless cars need human oversight or assistance....that's difficult. Even then it may not be so hard.
That'd mean parliament dealing with things it doesn't want to deal with. For example, judges and prosecutors have repeatedly said that parliament must deal with the issue of assisted dying, what should happen when someone goes with someone to euthenasia clinics in other countries, and so on. They're technically illegal, but prosecutors mostly don't prosecute whilst complaining that they don't want to have to be the ones making the decision. But parliament finds it quite convenient not to deal with it - all political risk and no gain. So it's never dealt with.
But it's never embarrassed the government in to bringing that issue before parliament, despite quite a lot of previous media coverage. So I can't see it working this time. Instead, the government will just ignore it. Few people really care about it that much anyway.
If it's anything like the nonsense I've seen they'll make sure there's no-one so simple as 'the person responsible'. They'll make sure the invoice has to be approved by one and sent to another, then the payment has to be approved by a third. More if they can find a reason. And they'll all pretend they don't/can't communicate, or flat out lie. The first will demand a copy of the PO, and then be on holiday or not available, then if they finally approve it the second person will deny receiving the approval. Then they'll claim it's out by $0.40, invalidating the whole process and making you start again. Etc. I'm sure every purchasing department or manager has their own little toolbox of tricks, and it doesn't seem unusual for using them to be company policy.
You could try offering discounts for early payment (better than trying to get them to pay late payment charges, which will probably just prolong the process by requiring more argument and approval, and give them an excuse to start their internal process again). I suspect you'll find they pay the early payment rate, but late.
In the end, if a company really doesn't want to pay, or not for a very long time, they won't. Not unless you can make yourself important enough to them that they take notice when you cut off their service (and they'll still bitch like hell when you do.....I've known customers build up big debts and then essentially bargain along the lines of 'we know it's causing your business problems, so we'll pay without fuss if you'll accept 80%'). There's not a lot you can do, other then either put up with it or not deal with them. Suing is choosing the second.
Why? If they're considering whether to issue a more permanent visa at the end of their course then considering their qualifications and job prospects is perfectly reasonable. But during the course? When they're paying good money to buy services from a British institution, and helping fund the British education system and promote an understanding and sympathy towards British and Western culture? Sure, some will work illegally, whether attending their course or not, but they'll still have to leave when their student visa expires. But inconveniencing and making unwelcome all of the buyers of an important British export out of a paranoia that'll catch few illegal workers....what's the point? Black economy jobs aren't exactly desirable, especially once you've paid university fees..... (which are higher for non-citizens and cover the full cost, and more). A cheap language school, maybe.....but a full blown university?
So what? If they come here, hand tens of thousands of pounds over to a UK university, fail to use the service they've bought and then leave....what's the problem? The important part is enforcing the 'leave' part, not the 'attending a university' part. Only if it's a sham university does it warrants some investigation. And it isn't.
The current government has stupidly committed itself to getting immigrant numbers down for the sake of getting the numbers down, whatever the cost, and it's forcing them in to doing it in ways that have no benefit whatsoever for anyone. Hence the attack on students, and also to some extent on marriage visas (because you get a two-for-one offer on net migration.....one immigrant not migrating in, and one UK citizen forced out).
I think the reputed problem is that there are private colleges of various kinds (usually not proper universities) who offer courses whose main appeal is the visa. Colleges like that aren't going to throw out failing students. And the solution is to look very carefully in to those colleges, not to make life difficult for students shopping the world market for accredited degree courses.
You prove it by passing the exams at the end of your course. If you fail because you didn't go to the lectures you should have gone to....well, hard luck, and get saving for your next attempt. It's a university, not a school, and you shouldn't expect to get nannied like a child.
It does seem quite bizarre, not to mention patronizing. IIRC, at my university we were entitled to attend any lectures we saw fit, whether designed for our course or not. The only time anyone might feel that they really had to turn up for lectures was for smaller lectures where their tutor happened to be the lecturer.....
The UK is a big exporter of education, and has some of the best universities in the world (unlike most of Europe). This isn't the same group as economic migrants or asylum seekers, and most will have no desire to stay. (Not counting, of course, sham colleges....which the University of Newcastle certainly isn't). Unfortunately, immigration paranoia is putting people off. It's always the best qualified and people you most want who get put off most easily, not the desperate with few options. The whole thing risks doing great harm to the UK education industry.
It's not really possible to have zero loopholes. If you make your stuff in one place, with big fixed costs, have a big data centre in another, a big contact centre in another, develop IP in yet another, and have sales everywhere.....what exactly IS your profit in geographical area x? There's no one true answer - it's very much a matter of opinion. The loophole is built in to the very idea of asking the question.
You also need to look at the full tax paid on a particular piece of profit as it becomes someone's dividend, and compare it to other forms of income. I don't know the US rules well enough to say, but in the UK quite different amounts of tax can be paid. eg, in a small business there's no corporation tax, then a special low dividend income tax rate paid by the owner when it becomes his income (10%/32.5%/42.5%). A shareholder in a big business pays corporation tax (20%/24% however rich the shareholder is), then the dividend rate of income tax. An employee pays the full rate of income tax (20%/40%/50%) plus the full rate of national insurance (12%/2% + 13.8% from the employer). A lender/bondholder/IP-owner pays the full rate of income tax only.
These differences are not just unfair - employment income is much more heavily taxed, and corporation tax takes no account of the shareholder's overall income - but also distort activity and create loopholes for those who can manipulate how they receive their income. So businessmen and contractors benefit, because they have more control over their tax affairs, but typical employees lose out. (It is, of course, the richer people who benefit most). And companies borrow more heavily than they should because that form of capital is taxed less heavily.
It's a mess. And it's an expensive mess to administer. Instead, tax authorities should tax all income the same, and not tax profits at all until they become someone's income. It's only not done for political reasons. Rich people like their tax breaks, and the general population are easily deceived in to thinking that corporate taxes are paid by the inhabitants of some mysterious other world and not by them.
Maybe it mitigates things a little, but if your developers don't have a good understanding of databases then they're never going to produce a database-based application that works well. Yes, you can tell them 'we don't trust you' and set up a nice little DBA/developer power struggle. But it's not going to stop them designing their application badly, having it break because they don't understand how concurrency and locking works or doing stuff like writing joins in their code because they don't think to/can't be bothered to talk the DBA in to adding a new stored procedure for them.
And, of course, SQL injection is not the only security risk....if you're not monitoring and mentoring (or sacking...) developers who don't know how to do things well then this won't be your only problem.
I'm sure it must have been possible for compilers to see potentially parallelizable operations for a long time. I remember watching some lectures a few years ago about that (and I'd be surprised if it hasn't been thought about decades before that, it didn't seem hard to spot it over short stretches of code). But that was with a Playstation 3 with (IIRC) essentially only one process scheduled to run at a time. What struck me then, and now, is that it could be a scheduling and optimization nightmare, especially if your compiler can only spot small scale parallelizability.
Suppose your compiler can spot and parallelize in to chunks of, say, a few hundred or thousand instructions each running in half a dozen threads. That would be fine if your OS schedule each programmer-visible thread on to several cores, giving the compiler free access to a collection of cores at a time. But if it doesn't do that.....well, a thread is quite heavyweight, think of all the stack allocation, synchronization and scheduling that has to go on. And hardware and core availability is quite variable. Maybe it's a performance improvement across two cores in one package scheduled simultaneously, but not two cores in different packages. Or with one processor but not another.
Maybe a further necessary step will be for processor to have so many cores that each programmer level thread can be scheduled on to two or more cores, giving scope for the compiler to generate parallelism as well as the developer.
Except, of course, for the 'calculate US sales taxes for your online shop as an outsourced web service' startups, which will do quite nicely. Well, until Amazon invents the new AWS Sale Tax Calculator service.
It'll last longer if you add a little fat. A teaspoon or two of butter or olive oil, for example. (And don't keep it in the fridge, but probably you know that).
Then how will the US pay for its imports? The headline is subtly wrong. The Indian IT workers aren't paid $17k, they're paid in rupees. This MATTERS.
When a US company pays for its outsourcing or its imports, it pays in foreign currency (it's supplier might do the currency exchange work and take the risk, it doesn't change the argument). That means it has to find someone with rupees who wants dollars. Why would such a person exist? Because he wants to buy US goods, invest in the US, or lend to the US. And if the importer can't find such a person, if that market doesn't balance, then that salary in rupees suddenly isn't in your headlines as $17k any more, it's more.
Notice, too, that the more the US borrows from abroad the bigger a wedge it drives between its imports and exports. China has been so willing to lend to the US for the converse reason: so it can export more than it imports and develop its industries. Start paying those debts back - whether through debt reduction or domestic saving increases - and there'll be more work in the US (but it might not feel so good, because the US will be consuming less but producing more).
Just be glad you're not in Spain, Portugal or Greece, locked in to an inappropriate currency union. They imported more than they exported for years, financed by borrowing (public in Greece, private in Spain, not sure about Portugal), and local salaries rose to match. With no currency to fall/inflate the only way to get the balance back is through wage cuts - and that's a process that's painful, uneven, unfair and slow.
Suppose you have a substantially fixed cost factory in country A, a bunch of managers being paid in country B, salesmen in countries A, B and C, a call centre helpline in country D and customers in all of those and many more. How much profit are you making in each? Oh, and all of those countries have different rules on what's tax deductible and over what period, too. You can set up a different subsidiary in each country and have them charge each other, but even if you're trying to get the 'right' answer there's an enormous amount of arbitrariness.
Even if tax rates were the same everywhere it wouldn't be easy - because different bits have to be paid to different governments, and governments naturally want to fight for their slice.
Personally, I think it makes little sense to try to divide company profits in to little boxes with countries written on them. All of those profits that are not reinvested become someone's income. Tax them then. In the UK or US that would probably mean abolishing both the special extra taxes for income from employment and the corporate taxes, and adding a compensating amount to income tax. It'd avoid a lot of collection cost, and the cost of all the ridiculous games companies play.
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There was pig DNA, too, which I'm sure has upset some of the more upsettable people around.....
Probably. As I understand it, the test only reveals that it was 29% horse DNA, not 29% horse meat. It might be 29% horse meat, or they might, for some reason, have filled it with stuff extracted from horse carcases that has more DNA. I'm not a biologist or food scientist, but how about, say, hydrolyzed protein or collagen. AIUI, hydrolyzed protein will absorb water, giving you more weight with less meat.
AIUI, carpal tunnel problems can be caused by anything that reduces the space available in the carpal tunnel, including anything that causes any swelling there, or anything that takes up space there. So that includes diabetes, tumours, pregnancy and obesity. Here's a link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001469/ (and notice that it says that there is no good evidence that repetitive motion causes it). 'Should I use a PowerBall to try avoid/cure RSI' and 'would a PowerBall worsen/improve carpal tunnel syndrome' aren't strongly related questions (because they're different things), so personally in making that decision I'd ignore all the responses about carpal tunnel syndrome.
There should, of course, be nine circles. One for your sex life, one about money, one where you put all your rants, one for all things heretical, etc. Hmm, which one is it where everyone has to be doused in faeces? Oh, and of course Mark Zuckerberg himself will be in the centre of the ninth.
Corporation also cost society money.
I'm not sure of the intended meaning here, but certainly corporations costs resources (because it takes people's time, physical space, etc., to do all the paperwork, accounting, shareholder meetings, filing and so on). Those costs fall on the individuals involved, some mix of customers, investors, employees and so on.
SO they shoudl also pay.
Which is the same as making individuals pay. Corporate vehicles are proxies for people. An equivalent tax on those people, if it could be calculated and devised, would be no more or less fair than the tax on the corporation. But, of course, incentives have to be considered, too, because taxes always change incentives and behaviour.
I would also tax 100% on all net over a billion dollars. Put that money into RnD, or hire more people, or get it taxed.
Why do any of those things if you're not allowed to keep any of the benefits? It destroys the incentive structure (whilst creating an incentive to split companies in to little pieces).
What people discussion economics seem to for get, is that the only way money has value to society is if it is moving.
Money has value only as a control mechanism - because it allows coordination not otherwise possible. It's output (and leisure, and the environment, etc.) that has value. Not all movements of money have value - if we gave each other $10 all day long, moving it back and forth, no value is created. The same with taxation, welfare payments and payments for second hand goods, like most houses. And, of course, not all creation of valuable output is reflected in the movement of money.
When you pay a dollar to buy and orange, the dollar is only worth something at the moment of the transaction. In fact, it's worth exactly 1 orange. The orange gets consumed, but the dollar will be a dollar again at it's next transaction.
Yes, the value to an individual (rather than a whole society) of money is defined by what you can buy with it. As such, all prices, including salaries, are relative. And the $1 in your example forms a part of economic output measures. Money (and the markets and structures governing its movement) has to do a lot of things at once, though - coordinate production, distribute information, determine distribution and set incentives, mediate exchanges that happen over periods of time, and so on. That's one reason designing taxes (and any economic policy) is hard....you can't control distribution (fairness) separately from decision making (incentives).
All taxes ultimately fall on people. Only people consume economic output, so it's only people control over it can be taken away from to provide government services. Don't fall in to the trap of thinking that taxes on corporations are not taxes on you. Instead of looking at corporations, look at the outcome in terms of what different individuals pay in total, and look at the effect of the tax on behaviour.
The little old lady with her 200 BT shares left over from privatisation pays the same corporation tax on the profits that become her income as a wealthy investor. No tax allowances, no graduation of rates. And the wealthy investor can use corporate shells - offshore and otherwise (trivial companies can be moved more easily than people) - to manage his tax burden in a way often not available to most people. He can, in the UK, earn up to 300k in profits via a company he owns without paying any corporation tax at all, and if he can get his income that way he can avoid the national insurance (payroll tax) that most people have to pay. And, of course, in the US there's the ludicrous situation with capital gains tax rates.
Looking at behaviour, taxes on corporate profits encourage companies to over-borrow and so increase the risk of bankruptcy and the imposition of default costs on others. The returns on loan financing attract much less tax - in the UK just income tax, and so it's much more lightly taxed than earned income or dividends. It also causes economic effort to be wasted in operating tax avoidance schemes - less useful production, more lawyering and accounting. Finally, the ability to avoid taxes like these favours large corporations over smaller ones and new entrants, reducing competition.
Identifying objectively what profits are made where in a corporations with costs, assets and revenues all over the world is a next to impossible task. It's just not a number which exits. Total profit is slippery enough, allocating it to particular jurisdictions can easily turn in to a nonsense. That's one reason why we have the spectacle of Starbucks and Amazon essentially deciding for themselves how much UK tax to pay. What they pay may be obviously ludicrously low, but how, exactly, do you calculate the right number?
Given that corporation tax is pretty much the national insurance of profits instead of labour income, I think it'd be much better to move towards abolishing corporation tax and NI, and raising all that revenue through a single set of income tax rates for all kinds of income. It would save collection costs for governments and accounting costs for companies, as well as addressing the above. Countries should introduce transitional arrangements for pensioners (who paid corporation taxes as they built up their pensions and currently pay only income tax on the income they're getting from it), and should charge an income tax on dividends going to foreigners based on the corporate tax rate domestic countries pay in the foreign jurisdiction. But, in the end, I think it has to go....it's just not tenable as a way to raise tax.
Not just redundancy for the sensors, but redundancy for the person who refused to drive to work that day because he was too stressed out or unable to focus.... I suspect that sensors will be more reliable than actual people, and more likely to refuse to drive when they shouldn't.
There's an additional benefit you missed: those various people (the very old, the young, those with a wide variety of medical conditions) who aren't able to drive will no longer be cut off in those societies and places which are designed around cars.
Legal liability shouldn't in theory be too hard in the eventual case. Insurance companies already take on a huge amount of the financial risk of driving. If they can do it via drivers, then they can take on that same risk (or more likely reduced risk) by insuring the manufacturers. Then the manufacturers can sell cars that don't require insurance as long as they're on automatic. Not only are accident costs lower, but transaction costs and fraud costs will be lower, too. It's the intermediate case.....the case where driverless cars need human oversight or assistance....that's difficult. Even then it may not be so hard.
That'd mean parliament dealing with things it doesn't want to deal with. For example, judges and prosecutors have repeatedly said that parliament must deal with the issue of assisted dying, what should happen when someone goes with someone to euthenasia clinics in other countries, and so on. They're technically illegal, but prosecutors mostly don't prosecute whilst complaining that they don't want to have to be the ones making the decision. But parliament finds it quite convenient not to deal with it - all political risk and no gain. So it's never dealt with.
But it's never embarrassed the government in to bringing that issue before parliament, despite quite a lot of previous media coverage. So I can't see it working this time. Instead, the government will just ignore it. Few people really care about it that much anyway.
If it's anything like the nonsense I've seen they'll make sure there's no-one so simple as 'the person responsible'. They'll make sure the invoice has to be approved by one and sent to another, then the payment has to be approved by a third. More if they can find a reason. And they'll all pretend they don't/can't communicate, or flat out lie. The first will demand a copy of the PO, and then be on holiday or not available, then if they finally approve it the second person will deny receiving the approval. Then they'll claim it's out by $0.40, invalidating the whole process and making you start again. Etc. I'm sure every purchasing department or manager has their own little toolbox of tricks, and it doesn't seem unusual for using them to be company policy.
You could try offering discounts for early payment (better than trying to get them to pay late payment charges, which will probably just prolong the process by requiring more argument and approval, and give them an excuse to start their internal process again). I suspect you'll find they pay the early payment rate, but late.
In the end, if a company really doesn't want to pay, or not for a very long time, they won't. Not unless you can make yourself important enough to them that they take notice when you cut off their service (and they'll still bitch like hell when you do.....I've known customers build up big debts and then essentially bargain along the lines of 'we know it's causing your business problems, so we'll pay without fuss if you'll accept 80%'). There's not a lot you can do, other then either put up with it or not deal with them. Suing is choosing the second.
Why? If they're considering whether to issue a more permanent visa at the end of their course then considering their qualifications and job prospects is perfectly reasonable. But during the course? When they're paying good money to buy services from a British institution, and helping fund the British education system and promote an understanding and sympathy towards British and Western culture? Sure, some will work illegally, whether attending their course or not, but they'll still have to leave when their student visa expires. But inconveniencing and making unwelcome all of the buyers of an important British export out of a paranoia that'll catch few illegal workers....what's the point? Black economy jobs aren't exactly desirable, especially once you've paid university fees..... (which are higher for non-citizens and cover the full cost, and more). A cheap language school, maybe.....but a full blown university?
So what? If they come here, hand tens of thousands of pounds over to a UK university, fail to use the service they've bought and then leave....what's the problem? The important part is enforcing the 'leave' part, not the 'attending a university' part. Only if it's a sham university does it warrants some investigation. And it isn't.
The current government has stupidly committed itself to getting immigrant numbers down for the sake of getting the numbers down, whatever the cost, and it's forcing them in to doing it in ways that have no benefit whatsoever for anyone. Hence the attack on students, and also to some extent on marriage visas (because you get a two-for-one offer on net migration.....one immigrant not migrating in, and one UK citizen forced out).
I think the reputed problem is that there are private colleges of various kinds (usually not proper universities) who offer courses whose main appeal is the visa. Colleges like that aren't going to throw out failing students. And the solution is to look very carefully in to those colleges, not to make life difficult for students shopping the world market for accredited degree courses.
You prove it by passing the exams at the end of your course. If you fail because you didn't go to the lectures you should have gone to....well, hard luck, and get saving for your next attempt. It's a university, not a school, and you shouldn't expect to get nannied like a child.
Newcastle University almost certainly DOESN'T have them. It's not typical in the UK.
It does seem quite bizarre, not to mention patronizing. IIRC, at my university we were entitled to attend any lectures we saw fit, whether designed for our course or not. The only time anyone might feel that they really had to turn up for lectures was for smaller lectures where their tutor happened to be the lecturer.....
The UK is a big exporter of education, and has some of the best universities in the world (unlike most of Europe). This isn't the same group as economic migrants or asylum seekers, and most will have no desire to stay. (Not counting, of course, sham colleges....which the University of Newcastle certainly isn't). Unfortunately, immigration paranoia is putting people off. It's always the best qualified and people you most want who get put off most easily, not the desperate with few options. The whole thing risks doing great harm to the UK education industry.
It's not really possible to have zero loopholes. If you make your stuff in one place, with big fixed costs, have a big data centre in another, a big contact centre in another, develop IP in yet another, and have sales everywhere.....what exactly IS your profit in geographical area x? There's no one true answer - it's very much a matter of opinion. The loophole is built in to the very idea of asking the question.
You also need to look at the full tax paid on a particular piece of profit as it becomes someone's dividend, and compare it to other forms of income. I don't know the US rules well enough to say, but in the UK quite different amounts of tax can be paid. eg, in a small business there's no corporation tax, then a special low dividend income tax rate paid by the owner when it becomes his income (10%/32.5%/42.5%). A shareholder in a big business pays corporation tax (20%/24% however rich the shareholder is), then the dividend rate of income tax. An employee pays the full rate of income tax (20%/40%/50%) plus the full rate of national insurance (12%/2% + 13.8% from the employer). A lender/bondholder/IP-owner pays the full rate of income tax only.
These differences are not just unfair - employment income is much more heavily taxed, and corporation tax takes no account of the shareholder's overall income - but also distort activity and create loopholes for those who can manipulate how they receive their income. So businessmen and contractors benefit, because they have more control over their tax affairs, but typical employees lose out. (It is, of course, the richer people who benefit most). And companies borrow more heavily than they should because that form of capital is taxed less heavily.
It's a mess. And it's an expensive mess to administer. Instead, tax authorities should tax all income the same, and not tax profits at all until they become someone's income. It's only not done for political reasons. Rich people like their tax breaks, and the general population are easily deceived in to thinking that corporate taxes are paid by the inhabitants of some mysterious other world and not by them.
Maybe it mitigates things a little, but if your developers don't have a good understanding of databases then they're never going to produce a database-based application that works well. Yes, you can tell them 'we don't trust you' and set up a nice little DBA/developer power struggle. But it's not going to stop them designing their application badly, having it break because they don't understand how concurrency and locking works or doing stuff like writing joins in their code because they don't think to/can't be bothered to talk the DBA in to adding a new stored procedure for them.
And, of course, SQL injection is not the only security risk....if you're not monitoring and mentoring (or sacking...) developers who don't know how to do things well then this won't be your only problem.
Isn't it possible to transmit data over skin? Maybe a bit slow, though.
I'm sure it must have been possible for compilers to see potentially parallelizable operations for a long time. I remember watching some lectures a few years ago about that (and I'd be surprised if it hasn't been thought about decades before that, it didn't seem hard to spot it over short stretches of code). But that was with a Playstation 3 with (IIRC) essentially only one process scheduled to run at a time. What struck me then, and now, is that it could be a scheduling and optimization nightmare, especially if your compiler can only spot small scale parallelizability.
Suppose your compiler can spot and parallelize in to chunks of, say, a few hundred or thousand instructions each running in half a dozen threads. That would be fine if your OS schedule each programmer-visible thread on to several cores, giving the compiler free access to a collection of cores at a time. But if it doesn't do that.....well, a thread is quite heavyweight, think of all the stack allocation, synchronization and scheduling that has to go on. And hardware and core availability is quite variable. Maybe it's a performance improvement across two cores in one package scheduled simultaneously, but not two cores in different packages. Or with one processor but not another.
Maybe a further necessary step will be for processor to have so many cores that each programmer level thread can be scheduled on to two or more cores, giving scope for the compiler to generate parallelism as well as the developer.
Except, of course, for the 'calculate US sales taxes for your online shop as an outsourced web service' startups, which will do quite nicely. Well, until Amazon invents the new AWS Sale Tax Calculator service.
It'll last longer if you add a little fat. A teaspoon or two of butter or olive oil, for example. (And don't keep it in the fridge, but probably you know that).
Then how will the US pay for its imports? The headline is subtly wrong. The Indian IT workers aren't paid $17k, they're paid in rupees. This MATTERS.
When a US company pays for its outsourcing or its imports, it pays in foreign currency (it's supplier might do the currency exchange work and take the risk, it doesn't change the argument). That means it has to find someone with rupees who wants dollars. Why would such a person exist? Because he wants to buy US goods, invest in the US, or lend to the US. And if the importer can't find such a person, if that market doesn't balance, then that salary in rupees suddenly isn't in your headlines as $17k any more, it's more.
Notice, too, that the more the US borrows from abroad the bigger a wedge it drives between its imports and exports. China has been so willing to lend to the US for the converse reason: so it can export more than it imports and develop its industries. Start paying those debts back - whether through debt reduction or domestic saving increases - and there'll be more work in the US (but it might not feel so good, because the US will be consuming less but producing more).
Just be glad you're not in Spain, Portugal or Greece, locked in to an inappropriate currency union. They imported more than they exported for years, financed by borrowing (public in Greece, private in Spain, not sure about Portugal), and local salaries rose to match. With no currency to fall/inflate the only way to get the balance back is through wage cuts - and that's a process that's painful, uneven, unfair and slow.
Suppose you have a substantially fixed cost factory in country A, a bunch of managers being paid in country B, salesmen in countries A, B and C, a call centre helpline in country D and customers in all of those and many more. How much profit are you making in each? Oh, and all of those countries have different rules on what's tax deductible and over what period, too. You can set up a different subsidiary in each country and have them charge each other, but even if you're trying to get the 'right' answer there's an enormous amount of arbitrariness.
Even if tax rates were the same everywhere it wouldn't be easy - because different bits have to be paid to different governments, and governments naturally want to fight for their slice.
Personally, I think it makes little sense to try to divide company profits in to little boxes with countries written on them. All of those profits that are not reinvested become someone's income. Tax them then. In the UK or US that would probably mean abolishing both the special extra taxes for income from employment and the corporate taxes, and adding a compensating amount to income tax. It'd avoid a lot of collection cost, and the cost of all the ridiculous games companies play.