I was wondering about that myself. The cool part about entanglement is that it occurs without mediation (like a cable), so I was trying to figure out what the big deal was. I guess I forgot that the entangled particles have to be moved from one place to another first and keeping photons in your pocket is tricky. Easy to get them in, hard to get them to stay.
And I'm saying the plaintiffs are twisting the State Aid rules to attack Ireland because they want a cut of revenue they are not entitled to, and this is the first step in a larger campaign to get it. Apple is just a convenient excuse.
And as I said before, the State Aid claim is, on its face, false. If Ireland's actions didn't alter Apple's competitiveness, they can't be called State Aid. They're going after a technicality, saying it is State Aid because Apple got a huge break and it's competitors didn't. Which is kind of a dirty trick, seeing that Apple's competitors aren't based out of Ireland. LG is moving from London to Germany, Microsoft is in France, and Samsung, Apple's real competition, has its operations spread across a few different EU nations (they also get breaks, nobody complains because they're spreading the money around).
Offering companies big, attractive tax breaks is common practice. Almost every nation does it, even those going after Ireland. They use various little tricks to do exactly what Ireland did, even offering breaks that they say are available to any company, but writing the qualifications in a way that target specific companies. Like and R&D credit that seems to be available to anyone, but only if they also have manufacturing facilities, and are located in a particular region, and lo and behold, only Samsung qualifies.
Not only is it not a bad idea, it's a practice that's commonplace, old, and available to any individual constituent or lobby. Lawmakers solicit and accept input from everybody and anybody. They're also lazy and tend to lack expertise, so they'll take help where they can get it.
Seeking input from impacted parties isn't just convenient for lawmakers, its damn good practice. How it turns out varies.
"Should have been"? So this is nothing more than you disagreeing with the people who have the authority to make that decision. You think Apple's taxes should be higher, the Irish people and government decided otherwise.
They decided that having Apple locate itself in Ireland would generate more revenue than not having Apple there. Even if they didn't collect any taxes on Apple's profits at all ever, they still took in more revenue than if it wasn't there. So no matter what the opportunity cost of those low taxes on its profits (still not an expenditure in any kind of accounting), they're still lower than the opportunity cost of no Apple at all.
The phrase itself is utter nonsense. Oxymoronic garbage.
There is equality and there is inequality. If people are denied equal access to the internet, and thereby denied equality in some other respect, then that's it, they are denied equality enjoyed by others. It doesn't make someone else "more equal", that's logically impossible. It doesn't make them "less equal", that's equally impossible.
How the hell did a satirical phrase invented by Orwell to illustrate the nonsensical outcomes of a broken system come to be seriously used in a headline?
When demand increases faster than supply, prices increase. That's Econ 101. Sure, it's kind of shitty to do in response to a disaster, but Uber did reverse the automated price increase in the area, which de-shittifies the situation. It still makes sense that drivers, who are generally human and humane, would need to be offered extra money to go pick up someone on the other side of the city instead of helping those who are trying to get away from an explosion.
Why not just ask for their money back? Why not settle for getting their money back? Usually, if you buy something and it doesn't work, you don't demand 25 times what you paid, you get your money back. Nor do you accept 40% of the purchase price.
Tax expenditures never include taxes that aren't levied. Before I go into a long explanation of taxes, tax law, and revenue generation, what exactly do you think is happening here and what has you so upset?
In this case, Ireland's "product" is essentially commercial real estate, which they make attractive by offering lower taxes on profits than their competitors. Their rate is half the EU average (12.5% opposed to 25%), which is quite the enticement. That is also the rate Apple is currently paying, effectively making the breaks they received in the past an introductory offer.
Now, I don't see how that is in any way unfair. Any nation could decide to undercut Ireland by setting a 10% corporate rate, or by eliminating corporate income taxes all together. Nothing is stopping them other than political will.
I also don't see how it's a subsidy, nor do I see how the plaintiffs had standing to file the suit in the first place. If other companies were being unfairly treated by the Irish tax code, why didn't they sue? Who was actually harmed? Did Apple's low taxes alter their market share? If not, there's no controversy to resolve, meaning the suit is pointless.
Keep in mind what a subsidy actually is - "a sum of money granted by the government or a public body to assist an industry or business so that the price of a commodity or service may remain low or competitive." Payroll and property taxes (for example) can have that effect by lowering a business' bottom line, but corporate income taxes, by definition, cannot have that effect. If their tax rate had any such effect, Apple's prices would have changed when they first got the breaks or when they ended and Apple's rate went up.
I honestly don't see how this case wasn't laughed out of court. The plaintiffs can say it's a subsidy, but they can't show it acted like one. The only ones who might have a legitimate complaint are other Irish companies, but they aren't suing.
The EU specifically does not have authority over tax policy.
The State Aid rules exist to prevent a country from giving businesses anti-competitive subsidies. I don't see tax breaks falling under that category as they do not impact the bottom line as subsidies would. But then this has nothing to do with Apple's competitiveness, it has to do with Ireland's. Ireland also offers plenty of breaks to plenty of companies (as do most nations), so the "special breaks" argument is not very strong. Word is that if the current decision is upheld on appeal, Ireland is going to be sued for giving similar breaks to a host of other companies, weakening the argument even further.
International corporate structuring is complex. It is entirely possible and legal for Apple to designate it's Irish offices as it's regional HQ so that it meets Ireland's requirements. Furthermore, multinationals can allocate assets and liabilities as they see fit. For one, they have a right to determine their internal structure. Second, there is no regulatory authority between nations, only within them, so there is nobody who can say otherwise.
Again, this was never about Apple, it was about Ireland out-competing the rest of the EU as a host for multinational corporations. Ireland chose to slash corporate tax rates and get their revenue from income, VAT and excise taxes, as is their right. The rest of the EU is upset because they didn't want to follow suit and it cost them the market. So, as we see so often in the tech industry, they are trying to beat their competition in the court instead of the market.
You misunderstand. Shifting profits to a low-tax country is neither illegal nor immoral. Multinational corporations exist largely in an unregulatable space. Nations can regulate their behavior and tax commerce domestically, but have no control over outgoing revenue or activities outside their borders. Governments like to complain about not being able to tax the profits of foreign companies, but at the same time would fight tooth and nail if another government tried to violate their sovereignty and tax the profits of one of their companies. Since no nation has the right to legislate what happens in another, there is nothing anyone can do about where and how multinationals are taxed.
The EU doesn't have authority over tax policy, and the charge wasn't that Apple was breaking tax laws, it was that Ireland was providing "State Aid" to Apple by giving them a ton of tax breaks. Which would have been valid if Apple used those breaks to lower the price of iPhones and drive Samsung (who gets tons of breaks in other EU nations) out of the market, but they didn't. Under Irish law, the breaks were perfectly legal. Under the EU constitution, Ireland has the right to set it's own tax policy, but the rest of the EU is sick of losing business to them, so they found an excuse to sue.
Apple paid Ireland every cent owed. They paid every other EU nation the taxes it owed them (VAT/sales, excise, employee income, etc.).
Pressure? Ireland uses it's tax rate to attract businesses. 10% of Irish workers are employed by companies that moved there for the taxes.
As for your apparent displeasure regarding the concentration of global profits, that can't be helped. It's not illegal, it's not improper, and there's nobody who can do a damn thing about it. Without a super-national government with the authority to levy and collect taxes on international corporations, to write and enforce laws for nations and multinational corporations, this will happen.
And it's perfectly fine. Apple is a rational actor operating under anarchic conditions. They're doing what's best for them, and nobody has any right to stop them, because nobody has any authority to do so. Not you, not me, not France, not the US government, not China, not NATO, not the UN, not the EU, IMF, WTO, World Bank, nobody.
Don't like it? Fine. Convince 196 nations to surrender their sovereignty to a new world government. That is the one and only way to get what you seem to want.
I agree that Apple's claims of courage are nonsense, but minimizing their tax burden isn't dirty or dishonest, it's just rational. Because the international landscape is what it is, and tax law works the way it works, what they did is perfectly legal.
Simply put, there are no international tax laws to break, and no government to set them. The international system is inherently anarchic, and there is zero willingness to take the steps necessary to alter the situation.
Define "fair share". Is there some metric for that other than "what the relevant government says it is"? Apple paid what Ireland said was their fair share, but the rest of the EU thinks its unfair that they didn't get a cut of Apple's profits. Which, in the absence of an international tax regime, they are not entitled to. Well, what they really think is unfair is that Ireland's corporate taxes are so low that multinationals site themselves there instead of other EU nations, but since the EU constitution maintains member nation's sovereignty over tax policy, they're twisting the State Aid rules in order to punish Ireland for out-competing them.
What the rest of the EU is really upset about isn't consumer facing markets, it's the market that exists between multinational corporations and nations who compete on tax rates to house said corporations. The State Aid laws exist to make sure company X in country A isn't given an unfair advantage over company Y in country B. What's happening here is that the rest of the EU is upset that they aren't getting a cut of Apple's (and other's) profits.
So the suit isn't about Apple's competitiveness, it's about Ireland's.
However it is that they are defining and calculating wilderness, is less necessarily bad? Running out of oxygen would be bad, but they aren't talking about oxygen production, just "wilderness".
Reading the article, there are plenty of claims being made, but I'm not seeing any basis for them other than the assumptions of researchers. Some, like "supporting many of the world's most politically and economically marginalized communities", seem inherently contradictory. If there are communities in these areas, they cannot be wilderness. If the people are politically and economically disadvantaged, wouldn't development be the route to correcting that?
The Earth is a wet ball of rock. Rocks can't get parasites, they aren't living organisms.
The ecosystem existing on that ball of rock comprises all life, therefore any organism is a component of the ecosystem. So, even under the "ecosystem as organism" model, no organism can be a parasite on the global ecosystem itself as that would generate a logically impossible infinite loop of self-parasitism.
Not that there can't be both, what with one point not being enough to establish a coordinate system, but it's a good starting point for an otherwise arbitrary system.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a $100,000 charitable donation. I'm not a CPA or tax lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that's a hefty write-off.
And to think, people thought that Apple would be less innovative without Steve Jobs. I guess Tim showed them!
I was wondering about that myself. The cool part about entanglement is that it occurs without mediation (like a cable), so I was trying to figure out what the big deal was. I guess I forgot that the entangled particles have to be moved from one place to another first and keeping photons in your pocket is tricky. Easy to get them in, hard to get them to stay.
And as I said before, the State Aid claim is, on its face, false. If Ireland's actions didn't alter Apple's competitiveness, they can't be called State Aid. They're going after a technicality, saying it is State Aid because Apple got a huge break and it's competitors didn't. Which is kind of a dirty trick, seeing that Apple's competitors aren't based out of Ireland. LG is moving from London to Germany, Microsoft is in France, and Samsung, Apple's real competition, has its operations spread across a few different EU nations (they also get breaks, nobody complains because they're spreading the money around).
Offering companies big, attractive tax breaks is common practice. Almost every nation does it, even those going after Ireland. They use various little tricks to do exactly what Ireland did, even offering breaks that they say are available to any company, but writing the qualifications in a way that target specific companies. Like and R&D credit that seems to be available to anyone, but only if they also have manufacturing facilities, and are located in a particular region, and lo and behold, only Samsung qualifies.
In this specific case perhaps, but in general the practice is a good one.
Seeking input from impacted parties isn't just convenient for lawmakers, its damn good practice. How it turns out varies.
They decided that having Apple locate itself in Ireland would generate more revenue than not having Apple there. Even if they didn't collect any taxes on Apple's profits at all ever, they still took in more revenue than if it wasn't there. So no matter what the opportunity cost of those low taxes on its profits (still not an expenditure in any kind of accounting), they're still lower than the opportunity cost of no Apple at all.
There is equality and there is inequality. If people are denied equal access to the internet, and thereby denied equality in some other respect, then that's it, they are denied equality enjoyed by others. It doesn't make someone else "more equal", that's logically impossible. It doesn't make them "less equal", that's equally impossible.
How the hell did a satirical phrase invented by Orwell to illustrate the nonsensical outcomes of a broken system come to be seriously used in a headline?
I tried to explain this to a number of people on other forums and got a surprising amount of pushback. Nice to have someone prove me right.
When demand increases faster than supply, prices increase. That's Econ 101. Sure, it's kind of shitty to do in response to a disaster, but Uber did reverse the automated price increase in the area, which de-shittifies the situation. It still makes sense that drivers, who are generally human and humane, would need to be offered extra money to go pick up someone on the other side of the city instead of helping those who are trying to get away from an explosion.
What's the deal?
Tax expenditures never include taxes that aren't levied. Before I go into a long explanation of taxes, tax law, and revenue generation, what exactly do you think is happening here and what has you so upset?
No no no, it connects ironically. Then it sends null strings, plays some old vinyl it doesn't actually like, and transfers the file via gopher.
Now, I don't see how that is in any way unfair. Any nation could decide to undercut Ireland by setting a 10% corporate rate, or by eliminating corporate income taxes all together. Nothing is stopping them other than political will.
I also don't see how it's a subsidy, nor do I see how the plaintiffs had standing to file the suit in the first place. If other companies were being unfairly treated by the Irish tax code, why didn't they sue? Who was actually harmed? Did Apple's low taxes alter their market share? If not, there's no controversy to resolve, meaning the suit is pointless.
Keep in mind what a subsidy actually is - "a sum of money granted by the government or a public body to assist an industry or business so that the price of a commodity or service may remain low or competitive." Payroll and property taxes (for example) can have that effect by lowering a business' bottom line, but corporate income taxes, by definition, cannot have that effect. If their tax rate had any such effect, Apple's prices would have changed when they first got the breaks or when they ended and Apple's rate went up.
I honestly don't see how this case wasn't laughed out of court. The plaintiffs can say it's a subsidy, but they can't show it acted like one. The only ones who might have a legitimate complaint are other Irish companies, but they aren't suing.
The State Aid rules exist to prevent a country from giving businesses anti-competitive subsidies. I don't see tax breaks falling under that category as they do not impact the bottom line as subsidies would. But then this has nothing to do with Apple's competitiveness, it has to do with Ireland's. Ireland also offers plenty of breaks to plenty of companies (as do most nations), so the "special breaks" argument is not very strong. Word is that if the current decision is upheld on appeal, Ireland is going to be sued for giving similar breaks to a host of other companies, weakening the argument even further.
International corporate structuring is complex. It is entirely possible and legal for Apple to designate it's Irish offices as it's regional HQ so that it meets Ireland's requirements. Furthermore, multinationals can allocate assets and liabilities as they see fit. For one, they have a right to determine their internal structure. Second, there is no regulatory authority between nations, only within them, so there is nobody who can say otherwise.
Again, this was never about Apple, it was about Ireland out-competing the rest of the EU as a host for multinational corporations. Ireland chose to slash corporate tax rates and get their revenue from income, VAT and excise taxes, as is their right. The rest of the EU is upset because they didn't want to follow suit and it cost them the market. So, as we see so often in the tech industry, they are trying to beat their competition in the court instead of the market.
HDR has been around for over a decade! Why the wait?
You misunderstand. Shifting profits to a low-tax country is neither illegal nor immoral. Multinational corporations exist largely in an unregulatable space. Nations can regulate their behavior and tax commerce domestically, but have no control over outgoing revenue or activities outside their borders. Governments like to complain about not being able to tax the profits of foreign companies, but at the same time would fight tooth and nail if another government tried to violate their sovereignty and tax the profits of one of their companies. Since no nation has the right to legislate what happens in another, there is nothing anyone can do about where and how multinationals are taxed.
Apple paid Ireland every cent owed. They paid every other EU nation the taxes it owed them (VAT/sales, excise, employee income, etc.).
And I dare you to define "fair share".
As for your apparent displeasure regarding the concentration of global profits, that can't be helped. It's not illegal, it's not improper, and there's nobody who can do a damn thing about it. Without a super-national government with the authority to levy and collect taxes on international corporations, to write and enforce laws for nations and multinational corporations, this will happen.
And it's perfectly fine. Apple is a rational actor operating under anarchic conditions. They're doing what's best for them, and nobody has any right to stop them, because nobody has any authority to do so. Not you, not me, not France, not the US government, not China, not NATO, not the UN, not the EU, IMF, WTO, World Bank, nobody.
Don't like it? Fine. Convince 196 nations to surrender their sovereignty to a new world government. That is the one and only way to get what you seem to want.
Seriously.
Simply put, there are no international tax laws to break, and no government to set them. The international system is inherently anarchic, and there is zero willingness to take the steps necessary to alter the situation.
Define "fair share". Is there some metric for that other than "what the relevant government says it is"? Apple paid what Ireland said was their fair share, but the rest of the EU thinks its unfair that they didn't get a cut of Apple's profits. Which, in the absence of an international tax regime, they are not entitled to. Well, what they really think is unfair is that Ireland's corporate taxes are so low that multinationals site themselves there instead of other EU nations, but since the EU constitution maintains member nation's sovereignty over tax policy, they're twisting the State Aid rules in order to punish Ireland for out-competing them.
So the suit isn't about Apple's competitiveness, it's about Ireland's.
Reading the article, there are plenty of claims being made, but I'm not seeing any basis for them other than the assumptions of researchers. Some, like "supporting many of the world's most politically and economically marginalized communities", seem inherently contradictory. If there are communities in these areas, they cannot be wilderness. If the people are politically and economically disadvantaged, wouldn't development be the route to correcting that?
The Earth is a wet ball of rock. Rocks can't get parasites, they aren't living organisms.
The ecosystem existing on that ball of rock comprises all life, therefore any organism is a component of the ecosystem. So, even under the "ecosystem as organism" model, no organism can be a parasite on the global ecosystem itself as that would generate a logically impossible infinite loop of self-parasitism.
Not that there can't be both, what with one point not being enough to establish a coordinate system, but it's a good starting point for an otherwise arbitrary system.