What does ethics have to do with it? That's why you have a corporate identity. In my capacity as an employee of X corporation I fully support all activities of said corporation. Any activities taken while on my corporate identity are considered on company time, and you should generally have the good sense to not disparage the corporation you work for.
Theoretically lawyers, doctors and engineers may have professional ethics obligations which supercede advertising requirements, but if you're in that situation your professional society provides guidance, not/..
Right, which is the smart way to do these things. Though he had been in the entertainment business long enough that any past persona's he had may have been claimed elsewhere, or he may have been given good legal advice before making the persona, or busboy productions (jon stewarts production company) might have graciously given or sold him the rights in exchange for something.
traditional advertising weakened significantly as people shifted to a 'social' model of judging if they should buy a product. Since the early inceptions of this idea were informative rather than spammy (your friend is playing this game, your brother likes bought this car). It was like a technological word of mouth, with some tools to help spread the word. Word of mouth was always valuable, it was just cost prohibitive to plant fake word of mouth people for everything. Now of course you can use your employees to count as warm bodies for your marketing department as 'likes' for their supposedly social advertising. In some ways this isn't new, how many companies offer employee discounts for example? You want your employees to be advertisers for your products, this just makes it official.
As a result advertising shifts. If people believe celebrities, hire celebrities, if people believe 'page views' or 'total number of likes' then you find ways to generate those things. If people tend to click the first result of a google search, you're the first result or you're trying to figure out how to get there.
'Advertising' is trying to get people to know about your product and want to buy it. That changes as technologies change. Right now people still (wrongly) believe that some sort of social liking of a product means it's worth owning, so you pay for that. Sometimes you pay for fake journalists, review scores, or whatever you think people will care about.
In the case of the OP his job has asked him to perform work as part of his duties. He should make a series of corporate social accounts that are for the employee Sir_Sri_CEOofSriCorp sort of thing. And use those for all company advertising. When his (or her) employment concludes transfer that professional employee persona to the employer, as it was done on their time and is their property.
One of my friends used to work at a radio station, where she had a brand that wasn't her name. When she left the radio station they claimed (correctly) ownership of the persona she had created at that station as part of her employment there. When she left she couldn't keep the name. She now does voice acting under a similar but not the same persona. (You can dodge this by creating a company that owns the persona you use, and then the contract that hires you hires your company which retains ownership). Someone like stephen colbert manages to maintain decidedly different personal and public profiles, as an employee it doesn't have to e quite as grandiose, but it's basically the same thing.
considering the phone isn't much good without some sort of carrier arrangement.
It's slightly misleading, in that the phones are probably about 500 dollars off contract, and they're certainly not giving those away for free. But people around here should be smart enough to read beyond the first line to figure that out rather than driving to an AT&T store hoping to get their free lumia 900.
It's things like this that make me wonder if maybe dick cheney's new heart, which is uncommon for a 70 year old to get, might have been in part a security issue with the device he did have (not necessarily a problem like the one described in TFA).
He's right. In an idealistic world this is the sort of software the government should be producing themselves, so at the very least if it's done wrong there is clearly someone at fault.
But free, or open source isn't going to attract a lot of people. And how do you resolve conflicts? What if they're resolved wrong, and those interpretations of rules translate into real losses/gains for users? Tax software is mess, because tax codes are a mess, if you understand these things you are paid very handsomly to understand them, and turning around and giving away that information for free is shooting yourself, and everyone else in your profession in the foot. Tax codes are also updated yearly. That means there is a huge retention cycle and lead in period where things have to be implemented.
I wouldn't trust an open development model, because if it's not done, what do you do about it? What if something isn't done, done properly, and, importantly, done on time? It's the sort of thing that requires a firm management hand. The serious open source projects (think linux) work because a huge portion of the 'contributors' are paid professionals who have management behind them, they're just going to monetize something else. But what else is there to monetize in tax software? If there isn't something to monetize other than the software itself, and that software has to meet legal requirements, and deadlines, don't expect an open model to work all that well.
Except that in this case the government will mandate that all of the service providers switch to this new internet, no matter bad a plan that is.
With iran it will be interesting to see just how this 'whitelist' works, and what their neighbours will do. They share borders with armenia, azerbaijan, turkey, iraq, pakistan, turkmenistan, afghanistan, and they're very close to kuwait, bahrain, the emirates, saudi, and oman. Several of those are essentially in the back pocket of anti-iranian governments, so we may see some very industrious solutions to get unfettered internet into iran from any of those.
True. I'm not an MS investor so I figured they were just dumping money in the overnight bond market. 4.4% is pretty damn good. I suppose that's the difference between having 6 billion dollars and 60, when you have 60 you can have it in a lot more places than just treasuries.
It matters what they're worth to the holder. AOL may not have been able to convert those patents into revenue other than by selling the patent outright (and obviously licencing some), whereas microsoft wasn't going to sell a product without the patent covering it. In that case the patents are worth different things to different people. MS may be able to add value, charge more, or make a new product, and being microsoft they will get more sales than if AOL did it.
Account also gets messy, because microsoft has 57 billion dollars cash on hand, or, I guess, 56 now. But with the government bond market paying next to nothing they're losing ~500 million a year to inflation, which is also close to nothing, but still more than MS is getting from sitting on the cash means they're losing PPP value. They *could* pay that to investors instead (dividends basically), but then they'd lose a chunk to tax etc. Part of the 'cost' to microsoft is what else where they doing with that money, what would it be worth next quarter/year.
Right now MS is probably getting 1% return on that cash pile, if they can get 2% on these patents from AOL that's a significantly better deal for them. And if it turns out to be a bad idea they have another 56 billion dollars waiting around, just in case.
It's also assuming people are always the same. A 17 year old with an xbox can be a 19 year old terrorist with a 2 year old xbox. People change after all.
Well that's why you're hedging your bets risk wise. Donate 25 bucks or 30 bucks or whatever, if it's terrible it's not a huge loss.
The reason big studios aren't behind these things is because if it takes 10-20 million to make a game and another 20-30 to market it they can't afford to risk that kind of money on a game that's going to make 5 million in sales. The movie studios do this sort of thing with fancy accounting, much larger distributions (worldwide) double monetization (movie+ dvd) and they're big enough 'losses' in one project are really tax writeoffs for kickbacks to favoured people who were paid to develop some monstrosity, see John Carter for example.
Getting 3 or 4 million dollars in funding is hard. Getting 300k is pretty easy, your bank will regularly cough that up in a small business loan. Getting 30 or 40 million is in some ways easier, a big publisher will talk to you at that price point, and they have deep pockets and spread the risk around a lot of investors and have quality controls etc. so you can release a sword of the stars 2 clusterfuck (no offence to paradox, those guys have always been decent to deal with, but they just aren't all that big). A 15-20 person team for a couple of years is very hard to pitch as going to make a game that will successfully compete for player dollars (and time) with titles like Skyrim, SWTOR, Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Etc.. etc. etc.. They might have some novelty to them, and that can sell a few.. but there's only so much room in the market. A 100 person team for 3 or 4 years is definitely going to have something they can show at the end of it and through advertising inertia alone can make 50 or 60% return. A title that's aiming small might never get enough attention to ever sell. Wasteland 2 is interesting because they have millions in free press from Kickstarter, but don't expect a lot of other projects to make it that far.
If you aren't making a game for consoles up until very recently the big publishers didn't really want to talk to you. Lots of awesome, and successful games don't play nice with consoles. Think baldurs gate (being remade), fallout (in the original isometric style), syndicate (remade as FPS), Xcom (remade as FPS). Until Steam really got into gear the PC market was a liability. How many decent selling games are PC exclusive right now? Anno 2070 (give or take the massive DRM fiasco), Shogun 2 fall of the samurai, Crusader kings... uh...MMO's. The first 3 are all european games, aimed primarily at a european audience, MMO's are in a whole other price and risk bracket. Kickstarter seems like it's a good way to guarantee how much money you'll get and get a measure of the interest in paying for a PC game. It will probably take a while to see how donations will translate into sales, but it might be really useful as a '3 million in donations(which come out of sales largely) translates to 10 million in sales, so can we have 5 million dollars mr publisher, and you get to keep all the gravy past 10 mill in sales'. Which is a much better business pitch than '10 million dollars for a project we're not sure how many people will buy please'.
That's the sort of thing that poses a serious problem, since those voice chat services aren't necessarily as easy to eavesdrop on as say... anything on AT&T. Lots of terrorists are relatively young men, including for example the french guy who just drove around murdering people, presumably a number of the wealthier of that lot have game consoles.
Another option is just general data harvesting on potential spy, or turnable asset. You want to know who they talk to, maybe inject yourself into their friends list that sort of thing.
How does that help? Not everyone on the connection gets the e-mail, not everyone reads their e-mail, and they send out enough of those e-mails they might get flagged as spam so you'd never get it.
I didn't say this was the best plan ever. But that doesn't make it any less legitimate. They are trying to communicate information about the service they provide you over the service they provide you. That's legitimate.
The girlfriend might have been basically screwed on the deal no matter what, since as his girlfriend some of her information might have been out there anyway.
It does seem like the article in question is very perturbed by the way the police released the info though, and didn't sanitize everything, leaving reporters to do it, who may not have realized that people can be linked via their unique facebook id's in the URL string etc. I suppose that's a good argument for an addendum to the facebook legal document pile, that if you release this information, the following other information should be redacted so as to not endanger the privacy of people not covered by the existing request.
Occasionally ISPs do this legitimately as well. My ISP keeps trying to inject a message into HTTP traffic when we reach 75% of our monthly download limit. This is especially amusing when it injects into steam or the web page previews in opera (and in neither case can you accept it, and move on, so it keeps trying to inject until eventually it hits a web page you're actually viewing).
Ah, but you'll find that these companies exist in the tax-dodge countries with no more than a post-office box. No-one in their right mind would consider a PO box to be a company HQ.
um... Delaware anyone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_General_Corporation_Law)? Switzerland? Luxembourg? Legally there very much is a precedent that a companies corporate HQ can be a PO box, and you agree to that when you have border agreements.
The UK is realizing that signing up for this when the agreements can include some of the smaller countries wasn't necessarily the greatest plan, although London benefits tremendously from being a 'financial hub' which is essentially the same sort of thing. In effect the EU is creating its own legally recognized Delaware post office box companies, as opposed to a series of bilateral agreements between the various continental powers.
This *used* to be a rent amount, they changed it because students couldn't always get rent receipts, this way you get the benefit even if you don't live at home. In an of itself this change is an example of a known tax dodge, because now landlords don't have to declare rental income for students to claim it on their taxes, and the government knew full well that was why they were changing it. It's there for you to take advantage of.... It also has the benefit that you don't have to pay rent to claim it, so I could go back to school while paying a mortgage, I could live at home, live with someone who fully owns their home etc...
Ontario has a similar thing but they combine it into one line (490 dollars per month for a full time student).
And these tax credits can carry forward, but you need to have low enough income that you don't use them all up.
Switzerland because it's been doing this long before the EU came into being. Everyone knew why money was stashed there, everyone knew their tax policies, but if you agree to let people who 'live' in switzerland and work in your country you know full well what they're doing. If you let people travel to switzerland from your country you know, and have in effect agreed to it by allowing the border agreement.
I'm sorry, they renamed it the "education amount" (separate from the textbook amount). on the Tuition education and textbook amounts, the number of months in colum b or C on your t2202A's. At a federal level it is 400 dollars per month for a full time student.
Politicians write exemptions into the tax code for you to use them. That's the whole idea. I'm in canada, the government gives (/gave) me student tax credits for housing that can be carried forward. The fact that I can apply that to earnings long after I'm a student, and therefore pay no tax for potentially several years is exactly how they contructed the system to work.
The EU tradeblock is messy. But then the whole existence of and independent Luxembourg is based on the ability to act as a go between between belgium, germany and france. If you set up an agreement where companies only have to pay tax in the 'state' 'grand duchy' 'province' 'country' where they're based don't be surprised when they go to the one with the lowest tax rate for legal purposes. Switzerland and Luxembourg have benefited enormously from their position as havens between the major powers, politicians and their rich friends benefit from it by hiding money there, and so they write laws to make sure they don't get tossed in jail over it. This is the system working as intended. The UK knew full well what it was signing up for. Whether or not Amazon is actually playing by the rules, but it is perfectly legal to avoid tax by moving to switzerland and then working elsewhere no more than is allowed to retain swiss residency and tax privileges. Since corporations are merely pieces of paper this is even easier for them to stay in the right place.
Probably a specific classification of business. Rather than a seller, manufacturer etc. "order fulfillment" is a distributor, that is contracted on behalf of someone else (amazon.com?) to bundle up orders and ship them to people. They are proclaiming themselves middlemen I think. MS is in this issue in germany, that they have some european distributor who handles warehousing and shipping of Xbox products around europe.
Define "well". 170 grand cash, tax free, is like 4 -5 years salary for a PhD level researcher in south korea (who are about 20-30% lower paid than their US counterparts on a nominal, if not PPP basis).
Even by US standards 170 grand is a lot up front. Remember that they're paying someone to steal it, not paying someone to develop it. It could have been a 500 person job to develop the technology, they're just paying someone who has admin access on the files to make a copy, not even necessarily senior employees.
You would think, with 11 arrests it was a bigger job than one person, but still, 10 people who each work with 50 others can steal a LOT of valuable information.
The article even states, all of this would have been avoided if it had maintained even one connection to the grid. They had 5. Now they may have all failed at once because they were basically all the same and they weren't really redundant, but past this layer they had multiple generators at each reactor so even if the external power did fail there was something to go on.
He is sort of right, in the same way security researchers in computing systems talk about never assuming a system is secure. You need layers of defences, detection, prevention, repair, redundancy etc. But I don't think anyone disputes that, nor is there any evidence they didn't have those things. They may have implemented them badly, maliciously, but they picked a probability of failure and said 'that's good enough for the money we have'.
There are lots of theories about designing reactors that are fundamentally more safe, they won't have runaway heating for example (a by product of how uranium undergoes nuclear reactions, and how the reactors are built to deal with that). I'm not sure anyone is suggesting we should somehow not consider those designs superior in some way. But no matter what you design you can only build so much redundancy into the system. If your error tolerance is 1/10K years, then why not 1/100k years? Why not 1/1M years? With any physical thing there is a probability of something going really wrong. Suggesting otherwise is lying. You choose your risk tolerance. Ultimately the people who pay the bills have to decide what the risk is worth. If a nuclear reactor cost 100 billion dollars, and had a 1 in a billion chance of failing per year is that good enough? It could still get hit by a 1 in a billion event after all.
Slashdot Mirror
What does ethics have to do with it? That's why you have a corporate identity. In my capacity as an employee of X corporation I fully support all activities of said corporation. Any activities taken while on my corporate identity are considered on company time, and you should generally have the good sense to not disparage the corporation you work for.
Theoretically lawyers, doctors and engineers may have professional ethics obligations which supercede advertising requirements, but if you're in that situation your professional society provides guidance, not /..
Right, which is the smart way to do these things. Though he had been in the entertainment business long enough that any past persona's he had may have been claimed elsewhere, or he may have been given good legal advice before making the persona, or busboy productions (jon stewarts production company) might have graciously given or sold him the rights in exchange for something.
as an AC above you pointed out, MS is making a quite respectable 4.44% apparently.
traditional advertising weakened significantly as people shifted to a 'social' model of judging if they should buy a product. Since the early inceptions of this idea were informative rather than spammy (your friend is playing this game, your brother likes bought this car). It was like a technological word of mouth, with some tools to help spread the word. Word of mouth was always valuable, it was just cost prohibitive to plant fake word of mouth people for everything. Now of course you can use your employees to count as warm bodies for your marketing department as 'likes' for their supposedly social advertising. In some ways this isn't new, how many companies offer employee discounts for example? You want your employees to be advertisers for your products, this just makes it official.
As a result advertising shifts. If people believe celebrities, hire celebrities, if people believe 'page views' or 'total number of likes' then you find ways to generate those things. If people tend to click the first result of a google search, you're the first result or you're trying to figure out how to get there.
'Advertising' is trying to get people to know about your product and want to buy it. That changes as technologies change. Right now people still (wrongly) believe that some sort of social liking of a product means it's worth owning, so you pay for that. Sometimes you pay for fake journalists, review scores, or whatever you think people will care about.
In the case of the OP his job has asked him to perform work as part of his duties. He should make a series of corporate social accounts that are for the employee Sir_Sri_CEOofSriCorp sort of thing. And use those for all company advertising. When his (or her) employment concludes transfer that professional employee persona to the employer, as it was done on their time and is their property.
One of my friends used to work at a radio station, where she had a brand that wasn't her name. When she left the radio station they claimed (correctly) ownership of the persona she had created at that station as part of her employment there. When she left she couldn't keep the name. She now does voice acting under a similar but not the same persona. (You can dodge this by creating a company that owns the persona you use, and then the contract that hires you hires your company which retains ownership). Someone like stephen colbert manages to maintain decidedly different personal and public profiles, as an employee it doesn't have to e quite as grandiose, but it's basically the same thing.
considering the phone isn't much good without some sort of carrier arrangement.
It's slightly misleading, in that the phones are probably about 500 dollars off contract, and they're certainly not giving those away for free. But people around here should be smart enough to read beyond the first line to figure that out rather than driving to an AT&T store hoping to get their free lumia 900.
It's things like this that make me wonder if maybe dick cheney's new heart, which is uncommon for a 70 year old to get, might have been in part a security issue with the device he did have (not necessarily a problem like the one described in TFA).
He's right. In an idealistic world this is the sort of software the government should be producing themselves, so at the very least if it's done wrong there is clearly someone at fault.
But free, or open source isn't going to attract a lot of people. And how do you resolve conflicts? What if they're resolved wrong, and those interpretations of rules translate into real losses/gains for users? Tax software is mess, because tax codes are a mess, if you understand these things you are paid very handsomly to understand them, and turning around and giving away that information for free is shooting yourself, and everyone else in your profession in the foot. Tax codes are also updated yearly. That means there is a huge retention cycle and lead in period where things have to be implemented.
I wouldn't trust an open development model, because if it's not done, what do you do about it? What if something isn't done, done properly, and, importantly, done on time? It's the sort of thing that requires a firm management hand. The serious open source projects (think linux) work because a huge portion of the 'contributors' are paid professionals who have management behind them, they're just going to monetize something else. But what else is there to monetize in tax software? If there isn't something to monetize other than the software itself, and that software has to meet legal requirements, and deadlines, don't expect an open model to work all that well.
Except that in this case the government will mandate that all of the service providers switch to this new internet, no matter bad a plan that is.
With iran it will be interesting to see just how this 'whitelist' works, and what their neighbours will do. They share borders with armenia, azerbaijan, turkey, iraq, pakistan, turkmenistan, afghanistan, and they're very close to kuwait, bahrain, the emirates, saudi, and oman. Several of those are essentially in the back pocket of anti-iranian governments, so we may see some very industrious solutions to get unfettered internet into iran from any of those.
LCD manufacturing and chemicals used in batteries very much are news for nerds.
True. I'm not an MS investor so I figured they were just dumping money in the overnight bond market. 4.4% is pretty damn good. I suppose that's the difference between having 6 billion dollars and 60, when you have 60 you can have it in a lot more places than just treasuries.
It matters what they're worth to the holder. AOL may not have been able to convert those patents into revenue other than by selling the patent outright (and obviously licencing some), whereas microsoft wasn't going to sell a product without the patent covering it. In that case the patents are worth different things to different people. MS may be able to add value, charge more, or make a new product, and being microsoft they will get more sales than if AOL did it.
Account also gets messy, because microsoft has 57 billion dollars cash on hand, or, I guess, 56 now. But with the government bond market paying next to nothing they're losing ~500 million a year to inflation, which is also close to nothing, but still more than MS is getting from sitting on the cash means they're losing PPP value. They *could* pay that to investors instead (dividends basically), but then they'd lose a chunk to tax etc. Part of the 'cost' to microsoft is what else where they doing with that money, what would it be worth next quarter/year.
Right now MS is probably getting 1% return on that cash pile, if they can get 2% on these patents from AOL that's a significantly better deal for them. And if it turns out to be a bad idea they have another 56 billion dollars waiting around, just in case.
It's also assuming people are always the same. A 17 year old with an xbox can be a 19 year old terrorist with a 2 year old xbox. People change after all.
Well that's why you're hedging your bets risk wise. Donate 25 bucks or 30 bucks or whatever, if it's terrible it's not a huge loss.
The reason big studios aren't behind these things is because if it takes 10-20 million to make a game and another 20-30 to market it they can't afford to risk that kind of money on a game that's going to make 5 million in sales. The movie studios do this sort of thing with fancy accounting, much larger distributions (worldwide) double monetization (movie+ dvd) and they're big enough 'losses' in one project are really tax writeoffs for kickbacks to favoured people who were paid to develop some monstrosity, see John Carter for example.
Getting 3 or 4 million dollars in funding is hard. Getting 300k is pretty easy, your bank will regularly cough that up in a small business loan. Getting 30 or 40 million is in some ways easier, a big publisher will talk to you at that price point, and they have deep pockets and spread the risk around a lot of investors and have quality controls etc. so you can release a sword of the stars 2 clusterfuck (no offence to paradox, those guys have always been decent to deal with, but they just aren't all that big). A 15-20 person team for a couple of years is very hard to pitch as going to make a game that will successfully compete for player dollars (and time) with titles like Skyrim, SWTOR, Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Etc.. etc. etc.. They might have some novelty to them, and that can sell a few.. but there's only so much room in the market. A 100 person team for 3 or 4 years is definitely going to have something they can show at the end of it and through advertising inertia alone can make 50 or 60% return. A title that's aiming small might never get enough attention to ever sell. Wasteland 2 is interesting because they have millions in free press from Kickstarter, but don't expect a lot of other projects to make it that far.
If you aren't making a game for consoles up until very recently the big publishers didn't really want to talk to you. Lots of awesome, and successful games don't play nice with consoles. Think baldurs gate (being remade), fallout (in the original isometric style), syndicate (remade as FPS), Xcom (remade as FPS). Until Steam really got into gear the PC market was a liability. How many decent selling games are PC exclusive right now? Anno 2070 (give or take the massive DRM fiasco), Shogun 2 fall of the samurai, Crusader kings... uh...MMO's. The first 3 are all european games, aimed primarily at a european audience, MMO's are in a whole other price and risk bracket. Kickstarter seems like it's a good way to guarantee how much money you'll get and get a measure of the interest in paying for a PC game. It will probably take a while to see how donations will translate into sales, but it might be really useful as a '3 million in donations(which come out of sales largely) translates to 10 million in sales, so can we have 5 million dollars mr publisher, and you get to keep all the gravy past 10 mill in sales'. Which is a much better business pitch than '10 million dollars for a project we're not sure how many people will buy please'.
That's the sort of thing that poses a serious problem, since those voice chat services aren't necessarily as easy to eavesdrop on as say... anything on AT&T. Lots of terrorists are relatively young men, including for example the french guy who just drove around murdering people, presumably a number of the wealthier of that lot have game consoles.
Another option is just general data harvesting on potential spy, or turnable asset. You want to know who they talk to, maybe inject yourself into their friends list that sort of thing.
How does that help? Not everyone on the connection gets the e-mail, not everyone reads their e-mail, and they send out enough of those e-mails they might get flagged as spam so you'd never get it.
I didn't say this was the best plan ever. But that doesn't make it any less legitimate. They are trying to communicate information about the service they provide you over the service they provide you. That's legitimate.
Or really anyone he befriended on facebook.
The girlfriend might have been basically screwed on the deal no matter what, since as his girlfriend some of her information might have been out there anyway.
It does seem like the article in question is very perturbed by the way the police released the info though, and didn't sanitize everything, leaving reporters to do it, who may not have realized that people can be linked via their unique facebook id's in the URL string etc. I suppose that's a good argument for an addendum to the facebook legal document pile, that if you release this information, the following other information should be redacted so as to not endanger the privacy of people not covered by the existing request.
Occasionally ISPs do this legitimately as well. My ISP keeps trying to inject a message into HTTP traffic when we reach 75% of our monthly download limit. This is especially amusing when it injects into steam or the web page previews in opera (and in neither case can you accept it, and move on, so it keeps trying to inject until eventually it hits a web page you're actually viewing).
Ah, but you'll find that these companies exist in the tax-dodge countries with no more than a post-office box. No-one in their right mind would consider a PO box to be a company HQ.
um... Delaware anyone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_General_Corporation_Law)? Switzerland? Luxembourg? Legally there very much is a precedent that a companies corporate HQ can be a PO box, and you agree to that when you have border agreements.
The UK is realizing that signing up for this when the agreements can include some of the smaller countries wasn't necessarily the greatest plan, although London benefits tremendously from being a 'financial hub' which is essentially the same sort of thing. In effect the EU is creating its own legally recognized Delaware post office box companies, as opposed to a series of bilateral agreements between the various continental powers.
addendum to my previous statement.
This *used* to be a rent amount, they changed it because students couldn't always get rent receipts, this way you get the benefit even if you don't live at home. In an of itself this change is an example of a known tax dodge, because now landlords don't have to declare rental income for students to claim it on their taxes, and the government knew full well that was why they were changing it. It's there for you to take advantage of.... It also has the benefit that you don't have to pay rent to claim it, so I could go back to school while paying a mortgage, I could live at home, live with someone who fully owns their home etc...
Ontario has a similar thing but they combine it into one line (490 dollars per month for a full time student).
And these tax credits can carry forward, but you need to have low enough income that you don't use them all up.
Switzerland because it's been doing this long before the EU came into being. Everyone knew why money was stashed there, everyone knew their tax policies, but if you agree to let people who 'live' in switzerland and work in your country you know full well what they're doing. If you let people travel to switzerland from your country you know, and have in effect agreed to it by allowing the border agreement.
I'm sorry, they renamed it the "education amount" (separate from the textbook amount). on the Tuition education and textbook amounts, the number of months in colum b or C on your t2202A's. At a federal level it is 400 dollars per month for a full time student.
Politicians write exemptions into the tax code for you to use them. That's the whole idea. I'm in canada, the government gives (/gave) me student tax credits for housing that can be carried forward. The fact that I can apply that to earnings long after I'm a student, and therefore pay no tax for potentially several years is exactly how they contructed the system to work.
The EU tradeblock is messy. But then the whole existence of and independent Luxembourg is based on the ability to act as a go between between belgium, germany and france. If you set up an agreement where companies only have to pay tax in the 'state' 'grand duchy' 'province' 'country' where they're based don't be surprised when they go to the one with the lowest tax rate for legal purposes. Switzerland and Luxembourg have benefited enormously from their position as havens between the major powers, politicians and their rich friends benefit from it by hiding money there, and so they write laws to make sure they don't get tossed in jail over it. This is the system working as intended. The UK knew full well what it was signing up for. Whether or not Amazon is actually playing by the rules, but it is perfectly legal to avoid tax by moving to switzerland and then working elsewhere no more than is allowed to retain swiss residency and tax privileges. Since corporations are merely pieces of paper this is even easier for them to stay in the right place.
Probably a specific classification of business. Rather than a seller, manufacturer etc. "order fulfillment" is a distributor, that is contracted on behalf of someone else (amazon.com?) to bundle up orders and ship them to people. They are proclaiming themselves middlemen I think. MS is in this issue in germany, that they have some european distributor who handles warehousing and shipping of Xbox products around europe.
Define "well". 170 grand cash, tax free, is like 4 -5 years salary for a PhD level researcher in south korea (who are about 20-30% lower paid than their US counterparts on a nominal, if not PPP basis).
Even by US standards 170 grand is a lot up front. Remember that they're paying someone to steal it, not paying someone to develop it. It could have been a 500 person job to develop the technology, they're just paying someone who has admin access on the files to make a copy, not even necessarily senior employees.
You would think, with 11 arrests it was a bigger job than one person, but still, 10 people who each work with 50 others can steal a LOT of valuable information.
Got it in 1.
The article even states, all of this would have been avoided if it had maintained even one connection to the grid. They had 5. Now they may have all failed at once because they were basically all the same and they weren't really redundant, but past this layer they had multiple generators at each reactor so even if the external power did fail there was something to go on.
He is sort of right, in the same way security researchers in computing systems talk about never assuming a system is secure. You need layers of defences, detection, prevention, repair, redundancy etc. But I don't think anyone disputes that, nor is there any evidence they didn't have those things. They may have implemented them badly, maliciously, but they picked a probability of failure and said 'that's good enough for the money we have'.
There are lots of theories about designing reactors that are fundamentally more safe, they won't have runaway heating for example (a by product of how uranium undergoes nuclear reactions, and how the reactors are built to deal with that). I'm not sure anyone is suggesting we should somehow not consider those designs superior in some way. But no matter what you design you can only build so much redundancy into the system. If your error tolerance is 1/10K years, then why not 1/100k years? Why not 1/1M years? With any physical thing there is a probability of something going really wrong. Suggesting otherwise is lying. You choose your risk tolerance. Ultimately the people who pay the bills have to decide what the risk is worth. If a nuclear reactor cost 100 billion dollars, and had a 1 in a billion chance of failing per year is that good enough? It could still get hit by a 1 in a billion event after all.