Tax havens work precisely by allowing corporations to determine where their revenues are generated.
In simplest form, a company might manufacture their product at almost zero profit in China, sell to a subsiduary in Ireland, have that subsiduary mark the price up and sell on to a subsituary in the US, and then the US company sell the product retail at almost no profit. This the revenue is generated in a jurisdiction with favorable tax conditions - at least on paper.
You could try to stop that by charging tax at retail or at production, where the actual economic activity takes place. It's been tried. It results in the Ireland division closing, and a new, completely independent (but owned by the same board of directors) company being founded to buy the product from China and sell to the US.
That's only the simplist way to be tax efficient. You can do a lot with branding too. Franchise operations like that: The company doing the actual selling spends most of their revenue on licensing fees for the brand, thus ensuring they make no profit which can be taxed. The profits are made by the company in Bermuda which holds the trademark rights.
Hollywood is very well known for the tax efficiency - few hollywood movies actually make a profit on paper, to the point that it's standard practice to quite a movie as 'making a revenue of $X on a budget of $Y' - because there is never any profit. This is usually done by having a distribution company or other services companies based in nice low-tax countries which the studio will deliberately buy services from at ridiculously high prices, thus driving themselves into as close to zero profit as they can get. The companies making the money are owned by the same people, of course.
Any law which cannot be enforced, no matter how good the intentions, is a bad law. At best it teaches people to have no respect for the law in general. At worst it provides corrupt police with a convenient excuse to arrest people they dislike for any reason.
There was a time when you could not drive a car without knowing how a car works. You needed to understand how to adjust fuel mix ratio with the choke, and keep an eye on engine RPM to avoid stalling, and carry out the routine maintenance of inspecting the spark plugs, topping up the battery and changing the oil.
Then cars got better. The mechanics became self-governing. The maintenance was still needed, but with less frequency. Now few drivers have any idea how their cars actually work - and for the most part, this is a good thing. The car becomes a tool by which the driver may achieve their desired goal. The cost is that, if anything does break down, the driver is quite helpless to do anything about it.
That's what happened to computers. The users no longer need to know anything at all about how the computer actually works - they can go about their work ignorant of even the most basic ideas. When something goes wrong though, they need to call upon someone skilled enough to help.
It does put them in an awkward situation, where they may be forced to choose between obeying EU law and obeying US law. Though I imagine they could play enough games with shells and subsiduaries to be able to argue in court that their US and EU cloud divisions are completely separate and confined to their own areas.
A matter of effort. Yes, a government agency could send agents to pick the locks on your door and sneak a bug into your computer while you are out, or target your specific equipment for remote hacking - but that's going to take a lot of time, manpower and expense. Are you worth it?
Actually they do. It's a lot less comprehensive than China's infamous national firewall, and less sophisticated in implimentation, but it does exist. The specifics if implementation are down to the individual ISPs, but they are required by law (since 2012) to block all sites on a blacklist maintained by the Russian government agency Roskomnadzor. Like most such systems, it is officially justified as a required measure for protecting children from harmful material, but the definition of harmful material is broad enough that a lot of sites critical of the Russian government are blocked as well. They've a particular tendency to block any material advocating for gay rights.
Before getting too harsh though, remember that most countries do have some form of national censorship system now. The US is a notable exception. The existence of a censorship infrastructure itsself is a requirement for widespread political censorship, but is not sufficient in itsself.
The Hyperloop has numerous severe engineering problems that mean it is unlikely to ever progress beyond the test track stage. Rail does work, and is a very well-established technology. Air travel does offer potential speed advantages though.
Automation can lead to quite the utopia, true - there were once predictions that the future would be a time of leisure, with a two-day work week. There is a problem with this vision though, and it is social. There is an assumption build into society at a very fundamental level that everyone should work. It's there in our economic system. It's there in government policy. It's there in social expectation. It's even incorporated into religion. Even if technology offers the possibility of a time of plenty, without corresponding social change, it could end in disaster. Picture millions starving because they cannot afford to buy food, while farmers burn their excess crop for lack of a buyer.
Remember that time Nintendo had to recall a Mario Party game because one of the ranks was "spastic?" Non-native speakers of a language can easily make a mistake like that, looking up a word without also knowing its derogatory connotations. Probably same thing here.
I really don't care about the Israeli-v-Palestinian conflict. It's a grand battle of Dicks v Assholes to me. I have noticed, though, that supporters of Israel - and sometimes even people representing the Israeli government - are very quick to shout "Antisemite! Nazi!" the moment anyone dares to criticize their beloved country, or even shows insufficient enthusiasm in supporting it.
Canada actually *did* amass an army at the US border once. In response, the US pre-emptively declared war and invaded. This resulted in the War of 1812. It's mostly forgotten now because the peace agreement which ended it included both sides ceding all captured territory, so very little was actually changed.
The first Halo game is set on a ring, but it's a much smaller one - it's a tiny little ring in orbit around a gas giant. The Ringworld ring is approximately two AU in diameter.
Blood sacrifices. Dietary laws. Circumcision. Most of the festival observances. By the time Christians were done removing those 'cultural traditions' they wasn't much left to mark the religion as Jewish in origin at all.
I do not know if "commonplace" would be accurate, but it's noteworthy that there is one reference to abortion in the bible. It's the 'ordeal of the bitter water' and consists of instructions to carry out an abortion in the event of suspected adultery. Old testament though, Numbers, so pre-Jesus.
Until his followers later tossed almost all of the Jewish aspects of the religion away as the new religion adapted to more easily fit with Roman culture.
Brutus, at great personal risk, assassinated a criminal who had seized power from the established civil government by force of arms in order to escape trial, demolished all limitations upon the power that one individual may wield, and established himself as an unrestrained and unaccountable dictator for life.
Currently Christian denominations number in the tens of thousands. All of which believe that all the other denominations have botched the gospel to some extent, and they alone have interpreted it correctly and follow it as intended.
There's no such thing as an unbiased judge - and if there were, their career would dead-end at a lower level, because SCOTUS is just too powerful for either party to forgo a chance to embed one of their own supporters within it and secure a chance to shape the law for decades to come. The current concern is not that the Republicans are politicizing the court, but that they have gotten so good at it through a combination of lucky deaths and skilled maneuvering that they may have upset the balance of power for years or decades to come. The apolitical, neutral judge has about as much basis in reality as the rational actor in economic theory.
Under US law, 'obscenity' as legally defined does not have first amendment protection. If the filter was perfect in operation (an impossibility) then it might even survive a court challenge. In reality, it'd probably be struck down for placing an undue burden on free speech due to the filter over-blocking.
Not always. They are also about controlling men's sexuality, by trying (ineffectually) to make sure they only have sex within the religiously-proscribed boundry of marriage.
If you have a plentiful energy supply, water may be recycled indefinitely. The moon is a harsh place to live, but I can see a small outpost maybe being established - not a truly independent settlement. More like a lunar ISS: A small crew, cycling up and down (Though on longer shifts, might be up there for years at a time) to carry out scientific experiments and maintain an array of astronomical equipment.
It'd still cost an insane amount though. Trillions of dollars. Far more than the ISS, and the ISS needs multinational support and funding.
Also there was a sizable technological overlap between moon mission and military technologies. If you can put a satellite into orbit, you can put communications or monitoring equipment on it - and a rocket engine fits on an ICBM just as well as a spaceship.
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Tax havens work precisely by allowing corporations to determine where their revenues are generated.
In simplest form, a company might manufacture their product at almost zero profit in China, sell to a subsiduary in Ireland, have that subsiduary mark the price up and sell on to a subsituary in the US, and then the US company sell the product retail at almost no profit. This the revenue is generated in a jurisdiction with favorable tax conditions - at least on paper.
You could try to stop that by charging tax at retail or at production, where the actual economic activity takes place. It's been tried. It results in the Ireland division closing, and a new, completely independent (but owned by the same board of directors) company being founded to buy the product from China and sell to the US.
That's only the simplist way to be tax efficient. You can do a lot with branding too. Franchise operations like that: The company doing the actual selling spends most of their revenue on licensing fees for the brand, thus ensuring they make no profit which can be taxed. The profits are made by the company in Bermuda which holds the trademark rights.
Hollywood is very well known for the tax efficiency - few hollywood movies actually make a profit on paper, to the point that it's standard practice to quite a movie as 'making a revenue of $X on a budget of $Y' - because there is never any profit. This is usually done by having a distribution company or other services companies based in nice low-tax countries which the studio will deliberately buy services from at ridiculously high prices, thus driving themselves into as close to zero profit as they can get. The companies making the money are owned by the same people, of course.
Any law which cannot be enforced, no matter how good the intentions, is a bad law. At best it teaches people to have no respect for the law in general. At worst it provides corrupt police with a convenient excuse to arrest people they dislike for any reason.
There was a time when you could not drive a car without knowing how a car works. You needed to understand how to adjust fuel mix ratio with the choke, and keep an eye on engine RPM to avoid stalling, and carry out the routine maintenance of inspecting the spark plugs, topping up the battery and changing the oil.
Then cars got better. The mechanics became self-governing. The maintenance was still needed, but with less frequency. Now few drivers have any idea how their cars actually work - and for the most part, this is a good thing. The car becomes a tool by which the driver may achieve their desired goal. The cost is that, if anything does break down, the driver is quite helpless to do anything about it.
That's what happened to computers. The users no longer need to know anything at all about how the computer actually works - they can go about their work ignorant of even the most basic ideas. When something goes wrong though, they need to call upon someone skilled enough to help.
It does put them in an awkward situation, where they may be forced to choose between obeying EU law and obeying US law. Though I imagine they could play enough games with shells and subsiduaries to be able to argue in court that their US and EU cloud divisions are completely separate and confined to their own areas.
A matter of effort. Yes, a government agency could send agents to pick the locks on your door and sneak a bug into your computer while you are out, or target your specific equipment for remote hacking - but that's going to take a lot of time, manpower and expense. Are you worth it?
Actually they do. It's a lot less comprehensive than China's infamous national firewall, and less sophisticated in implimentation, but it does exist. The specifics if implementation are down to the individual ISPs, but they are required by law (since 2012) to block all sites on a blacklist maintained by the Russian government agency Roskomnadzor. Like most such systems, it is officially justified as a required measure for protecting children from harmful material, but the definition of harmful material is broad enough that a lot of sites critical of the Russian government are blocked as well. They've a particular tendency to block any material advocating for gay rights.
Before getting too harsh though, remember that most countries do have some form of national censorship system now. The US is a notable exception. The existence of a censorship infrastructure itsself is a requirement for widespread political censorship, but is not sufficient in itsself.
The Hyperloop has numerous severe engineering problems that mean it is unlikely to ever progress beyond the test track stage. Rail does work, and is a very well-established technology. Air travel does offer potential speed advantages though.
Automation can lead to quite the utopia, true - there were once predictions that the future would be a time of leisure, with a two-day work week. There is a problem with this vision though, and it is social. There is an assumption build into society at a very fundamental level that everyone should work. It's there in our economic system. It's there in government policy. It's there in social expectation. It's even incorporated into religion. Even if technology offers the possibility of a time of plenty, without corresponding social change, it could end in disaster. Picture millions starving because they cannot afford to buy food, while farmers burn their excess crop for lack of a buyer.
Remember that time Nintendo had to recall a Mario Party game because one of the ranks was "spastic?" Non-native speakers of a language can easily make a mistake like that, looking up a word without also knowing its derogatory connotations. Probably same thing here.
I really don't care about the Israeli-v-Palestinian conflict. It's a grand battle of Dicks v Assholes to me. I have noticed, though, that supporters of Israel - and sometimes even people representing the Israeli government - are very quick to shout "Antisemite! Nazi!" the moment anyone dares to criticize their beloved country, or even shows insufficient enthusiasm in supporting it.
Canada actually *did* amass an army at the US border once. In response, the US pre-emptively declared war and invaded. This resulted in the War of 1812. It's mostly forgotten now because the peace agreement which ended it included both sides ceding all captured territory, so very little was actually changed.
The first Halo game is set on a ring, but it's a much smaller one - it's a tiny little ring in orbit around a gas giant. The Ringworld ring is approximately two AU in diameter.
I think "creepy" is something of an understatement.
Blood sacrifices. Dietary laws. Circumcision. Most of the festival observances. By the time Christians were done removing those 'cultural traditions' they wasn't much left to mark the religion as Jewish in origin at all.
I do not know if "commonplace" would be accurate, but it's noteworthy that there is one reference to abortion in the bible. It's the 'ordeal of the bitter water' and consists of instructions to carry out an abortion in the event of suspected adultery. Old testament though, Numbers, so pre-Jesus.
Until his followers later tossed almost all of the Jewish aspects of the religion away as the new religion adapted to more easily fit with Roman culture.
Brutus, at great personal risk, assassinated a criminal who had seized power from the established civil government by force of arms in order to escape trial, demolished all limitations upon the power that one individual may wield, and established himself as an unrestrained and unaccountable dictator for life.
Sic semper tyrannis.
Scientology is a religion when it is legally convenient to be a religion, and a business when it is legally convenient to be a business.
Currently Christian denominations number in the tens of thousands. All of which believe that all the other denominations have botched the gospel to some extent, and they alone have interpreted it correctly and follow it as intended.
There's no such thing as an unbiased judge - and if there were, their career would dead-end at a lower level, because SCOTUS is just too powerful for either party to forgo a chance to embed one of their own supporters within it and secure a chance to shape the law for decades to come. The current concern is not that the Republicans are politicizing the court, but that they have gotten so good at it through a combination of lucky deaths and skilled maneuvering that they may have upset the balance of power for years or decades to come. The apolitical, neutral judge has about as much basis in reality as the rational actor in economic theory.
Under US law, 'obscenity' as legally defined does not have first amendment protection. If the filter was perfect in operation (an impossibility) then it might even survive a court challenge. In reality, it'd probably be struck down for placing an undue burden on free speech due to the filter over-blocking.
Not always. They are also about controlling men's sexuality, by trying (ineffectually) to make sure they only have sex within the religiously-proscribed boundry of marriage.
Or any one of about fifty different pressure groups which include anti-pornography among their objectives.
If you have a plentiful energy supply, water may be recycled indefinitely. The moon is a harsh place to live, but I can see a small outpost maybe being established - not a truly independent settlement. More like a lunar ISS: A small crew, cycling up and down (Though on longer shifts, might be up there for years at a time) to carry out scientific experiments and maintain an array of astronomical equipment.
It'd still cost an insane amount though. Trillions of dollars. Far more than the ISS, and the ISS needs multinational support and funding.
Also there was a sizable technological overlap between moon mission and military technologies. If you can put a satellite into orbit, you can put communications or monitoring equipment on it - and a rocket engine fits on an ICBM just as well as a spaceship.